A new trend–women going back to some cottage industry roots and raising chickens at home. In These Times has an article cataloging prominent feminist writers who have commented on the phenomenon.  Jezebel, for some reason, chose to highlight Katha Pollitt’s negative nancy view. 

First, what’s with the random dig at homeschooling?  Second, I think it’s kinda cool, women raising chickens and gardening.  In fact, Brenton’s wife, Beth, in addition to raising four small kids and probably a million other things I don’t know about, is doing this.  She probably has about 12 pasture-rotated chickens that she raises for eggs, mostly for her family but she’s just started sending some with the farm interns to market.  I’m continually impressed by Beth.  My most recent encounter with her genius happened just yesterday, actually…

Let me set the stage:  There is a resident pea hen that roams around Johnson’s Backyard Garden.  She’s been there at least since I started interning, back in November, and I’m not sure how long before that.  The crew at the farm has dubbed her Rosie.  She basically just hangs around the barn, mostly, making the odd honking noise that pea hens make, that I can’t believe comes out of an animal.  We’re so used to her by now, we see her as one of the gang.

Yesterday I was walking out to the field when I noticed Rosie was in a little cage with a group of chicks.  I’ve never seen Rosie caged before, so I was way confused.  I walked back to the barn and asked Brenton.

“Oh, Beth is trying to make Rosie mother the new baby chickens she just got.  Rosie was sitting on a clutch of eggs that weren’t fertilized, so Beth took the eggs and replaced them with the chicks to make her think they were her babies.  It’s working, too.  For over a week, Rosie has been keeping them warm and protecting them, and the chicks are following her around.”

And I said, “WHAT?”  Who thinks to do that?  There was Rosie, sitting with about 8 baby guinea hens and 1 baby rooster.  I started snapping pictures.  When I asked Beth what the cage was all about, she said it was extra protection for the chicks from predators.  She said she felt bad for Rosie because it was the third time she had been sitting on eggs, but there was no peacock around to come fertilize them.  Pea hen with no chicks.  Baby guinea hens (and 1 rooster) with no mother.  A good arrangement for everyone.

When I was snapping pictures, Beth lifted the cage and let the chicks follow their mother pea hen around a bit.  Pretty brilliant.

And so, all I want to say is that I’ve seen enough misogyny in farming without other women joining in on it.  Let us persuade our wild pea hens to raise baby chickens in peace, please.  Give the articles a read.  I’d love other opinions.  Is it giving up some independence for women to turn to farming or, I guess more specifically, homesteading?

For the past few years, New York State has been fighting hard to combat Climate Change. In the absence of a national effort, we’ve made great strides, partnering with nine other northeastern states on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the nation’s first cap & trade program for carbon dioxide (which to-date has raised more than $200 million for New York State), working to craft a detailed Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050, and pursuing a number of renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives.

If we’re serious about dealing with Climate Change, that’s a big, big mistake.

Climate Change is an all hands on deck crisis – and we need action at the national, state, local and individual level. Not only are additional state efforts essential to meeting our national emissions reduction targets, they have tangible positive benefits – like creating good jobs and reducing energy bills. They also provide an opportunity to test new approaches that may benefit the entire nation.

The bottom line is, no one government entity can deal with the tremendous challenge of Climate Change alone. No matter how strong the federal program, states and localities should continue to be empowered to develop new approaches to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

If Washington is serious about dealing with Climate Change, it should allow us to keep doing what we’re doing.

Pete Grannis

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Libous and his staff at the Senate Republican Campaign Committee recently commissioned their own poll, which Libous had hoped would dissuade Ball from running.   In response, Ball’s allies commissioned an internal poll which presents a very unlikely scenario – one in which Ball defeats his closest opponent by over forty points in the Republican primary.  Now Skelos, Libous, and Republican leaders in the 40^th Senate district must decide if they trust the McLaughlin and Associates poll touted by Assemblyman Ball.  Any student of American politics knows that internal polls are notoriously unreliable, and that they are very often biased in favor of the campaign that pays for them.  This particular poll should be taken with an especially large grain of salt, considering that Greg Ball funneled money from a private charity into his Assembly campaign, paid a man to stand outside a former opponents office in a chicken costume, recently lied to his own donors, built his reputation on race baiting and fear mongering, and has demonstrated that he will stoop to any level to win an election.

An anonymous source close to the BallMonitor provides some insight into McLaughlin and Associates, the firm hired to conduct the poll in question:

A number of years ago I worked for Diversified Research, which is basically a call center in Irvington. Most of what they do is place the actual calls for Republican pollsters, and a huge part of their business came from McLaughlin and Associates. Diversified Research shared a building with Art Finkelstein, the notorious political consultant behind Al D’Amato and people like that. I never saw Finkelstein while I was there but I overheard the bosses talking about him and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some connection. The polls we conducted, whether for McLaughlin or some other firm, usually seemed skewed to produce a certain result. It would be a stretch to call what they did push-polling, but Zogby and Rasmussen probably would have cringed.