PLAINFIELD, Vt. (AP) -- The MacLaren brothers are third-generation dairy farmers, but they will likely be the last in their family. After working all their lives on the hillside farm in Vermont that their grandfather bought in 1939, rising to milk cows at 3 a.m., even in blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, they decided to call it quits, auctioning off their roughly 200 cows and equipment ranging from stalls and hoof trimmers to tractors and steel pails. The sale marked the end of the last dairy farm in Plainfield - a small town that once had several dozen - and the 14th dairy farm to go out of business in Vermont this year. A few small dairies have opened, but overall, the number of farms continues ... Continue reading →
AP's labs site allows us to test new reporting ideas. If you have feedback, please reach out to us on the social networks above or email labs-stream@ap.org. Continue reading →
AP's labs site allows us to test new reporting ideas. If you have feedback, please reach out to us on the social networks above or email labs-stream@ap.org. Continue reading →
AP's labs site allows us to test new reporting ideas. If you have feedback, please reach out to us on the social networks above or email labs-stream@ap.org. Continue reading →
BUFFALO, Texas (AP) -- The dark suit and tie that Joe Gutheinz wore set him apart from other customers inside an eatery between Houston and Texas where the usual attire is jeans and cowboy hats. An appetite for down-home cooking wasn't what brought the former NASA investigator to the Pitt Grill recently. He was on a quest to identify and maybe recover some of the rarest treasure brought to Earth and then lost: moon rocks. "We're educating the states and countries of the world about how much they're worth on the black market and we need to increase the security in museums and need to put them back on display," Gutheinz said. The rock samples were collected by the dozen American astronauts who walked on ... Continue reading →
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - Customers are tossing back more beer this spring than last at Drinks Inc. on Main Street in Mohall, and it has a lot to do with the barley farmers are once again planting in the fields around the town of about 1,000 people.A year ago, many tractors and seeders in northwest North Dakota sat idle as snowmelt, heavy rains and overflowing rivers swamped fields and roads. A record number of acres went unplanted, putting a strain on farmers' wallets. That carried over to small-town businesses that depend largely on farmers' spending for their livelihoods.It was an unexpected downturn in a state spotted with oil fields and an influx of so many well-paid workers there aren't enough hotels or homes to house ... Continue reading →
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- A committed "locavore," Robin McDermott once struggled to stock her kitchen with food grown within 100 miles of her Vermont home. She once drove 70 miles to buy beans and ordered a bulk shipment of oats from the neighboring Canadian province of Quebec. Six years later, she doesn't travel far: She can buy chickens at the farmers market, local farms grow a wider range of produce, and her grocery store stocks meat, cheese and even flour produced in the area. A bakery in a nearby town sells bread made from Vermont grains, and she's found a place to buy locally made sunflower oil. Nationwide, small farms, farmers markets and specialty food makers are popping up and thriving as more people seek ... Continue reading →
With spring in full swing, gardeners across the country have been gearing up for the planting season, pulling out the hose and unearthing shovels and trowels.And while every experienced gardener knows that hoses and tools can trip up the unsuspecting lawnmower, there is evidence that they may pose risks to consumers as well.Last week the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that reviews consumer products, released a study at the Web site HealthyStuff.org on potentially hazardous chemicals in gardening tools.The group tested nearly 200 gardening products, including hoses, gloves, kneeling pads and tools, for lead, cadmium, bromine, chlorine, phthalates and bisphenol A. Over all, they found that two-thirds of the products tested contained levels of one or more chemicals in ... Continue reading →
To encourage omnivores to do some of the same hard thinking that vegetarians and vegans have done, I invited them to make, in 600 words or fewer, the strongest ethical case for the meat they eat. And to judge those arguments I gathered some of the strongest ethical critics of meat, or at least of the way we consume it — Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Andrew Light, Michael Pollan and Peter Singer. Immediately, incensed blog posts, e-mails, radio broadcasts and tweets started appearing. Carnivores condemned the contest as antimeat propaganda. Vegans condemned the contest as pro-meat propaganda. Yet others said that I was trying to impose a single moral code; they were matched by those who said I was abetting moral anarchy. People dismissed ... Continue reading →
