On Friday, March 3, 2017 at 3:56:08 PM UTC-5, dpb wrote:
On 03/03/2017 12:55 PM, wrote:
On Friday, March 3, 2017 at 1:29:39 PM UTC-5, dpb wrote:
...

I subscribed for 20(?) yr but didn't renew it when quit the consulting
gig; replaced all those journals with the ag equivalents after returning
to the family farm...any more, that's about or maybe more advanced than
what NASA's doing...

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_National Hog Farmer_ is well-regarded.g Then there's "Pork -- Be
Inspired." But that's about eating them...


The latter is what they're for.. But, no piggies here; outside just
having a couple for own use it's either "all-in" or "out" as the
middle-sized guy simply can't compete with Seaboard and their ilk any
longer unless, perhaps, one were near a major metro area where could do
the cosmopolitan thing with the want to know where came from crowd but
just not enough numbers of people out here for that kind of thing to work..

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It's funny you should bring that up, because I was just thinking today about my grandfather's tiny farm -- entirely within the city limits of Vineland, NJ -- which was mostly a decorative tree nursery for landscaping rich peoples' property but where he also raised chickens, Jenny Lind cantaloupes and some other specialty fruits and vegetables exclusively for the premium restaurant trade in New York and Philadelphia. The cantaloupes were wrapped individually in salt hay and packed into oak barrels (this was the '20s and '30s), then rushed to express trains going to New York and Philly.

The Whole Foods customers would have been a great market for him. Fortunately, the fancy restaurants were all he could handle from his little acreage, and they kept going right through the Depression.

--
Ed Huntress