Woodstock CT Café

Excerpts taken from http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/28921

The combination of the bad economy and the federally mandated price system for milk has placed many Connecticut dairy farms in precarious financial positions. Although the Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to vote today on a bill that may give farmers financial support, some are skeptical that the milk bailout will succeed.

The federal government has mandated the price of milk since the 1930s, when surplus and soaring prices caused many farmers to go out of business. That mandate still exists today. National milk prices are set by trading done by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The problem, many state dairy farmers have said, is that those prices are set based on farms in the Midwest — which are often larger-scale, cheaper operations — and do not take into account the higher production costs in New England.

In the past two years, over 50 dairy farms have gone out of business in Connecticut — a quarter of the total number of then-operating farms. The Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact, which set the wholesale price of milk to keep regional dairy farmers afloat, dissolved in 2001, and efforts to recreate it have been unsuccessful. In January, the wholesale price dropped from $20 per hundredweight to $11.30, meaning that farmers have been selling their milk for $1.00 per gallon, even though their average cost is $1.90.

The price drop has prompted vocal criticism from many state dairy farmers, who are proposing that the state institute a “safety net” to help local farmers when the market price gets too low.
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BYOB** – Boats, that is. Canoe or kayak on Roseland Lake. By state law, life jackets are required. Or, for one day only, relive the past and rent a boat at Roseland Park courtesy of the Nahaco Park Commission. A limited supply of kayaks and paddle boats will be available to rent at $5/half hour. Contact Tony at nahaco@aol.com to reserve your time. Read the rest of this entry »

Many northeastern CT towns are ignoring the advice by DBrownie to close the borders, restrict travel, and institute bans, advisories and alerts on pork and certain people.

On Wednesday, Homeland Security spokesperson, Marge Gundersson, was heavily pressed in Town Hall hearings to ignore DBrownie’s advice and close the borders with Thompson, Putnam, Pomfret, Eastford, Union and Massachusetts. Marge defended her decision not to do so, saying it “would be a very, very heavy cost for what fluologists tell us would be marginal benefit.”

First Selectman, Abe Firewalker, defended it too, telling a citizen that it would be “akin to closing the barn door after the cows and pigs were out.”

Experts at Day Kimbal Hospital on the global movement of flu say Gundersson and Firewalker are right. The world, they say, must bow to the inevitable: closing borders would not only fail to stop an airborne virus, but would also cause economic collapse and possibly add to the death rate.

“But it’s wrong to think we’re throwing up our hands and saying ‘Let ’er rip and let’s hope for the best,’ ” said Dr. Leroy Weselicker, director of global migration and quarantine at Day Kimbal Hospital. “This has all been in the country-wide pandemic flu plan since 2007.”

Closing borders is dangerous because many goods needed in a pandemic are made and sold outside Woodstock, said Dr. Jonas Feelgood, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at Day Kimbal Hospital, including most masks, gowns and gloves, electrical circuits for ventilators and communications gear, and pharmaceutical drugs and the raw materials to make them (for example, most suppliers of shikimic acid, the base ingredient in the antiviral drug Tamiflu, are in China).

“You cut those off and you cripple our health care system,” he said. “Our global just-in-time economy means we are dependent on others.” Much of our food is from other towns and states like the veggies from Morse Farm. “A Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain bar has ingredients from nine countries in it,” Feelgood noted. Read the rest of this entry »

Symantec and Cisco Ironport recommend immediate deletion of email messages  with  these subject lines (see: http://blogs.usatoday.com/technologylive/2009/04/scam-swine-flu-emails-steal-data.html )
– Swine influenza frequently asked questions.pdf
– Swine flu worldwide
– Swine flu in the USA
– US swine flue fears
– First US Sine flue victims
– Swine flu in Hollywood
– Salma Hayek caught swine flu
– Madonna caught swine flu
– US swine flu statistics
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– Will swine flu attack USA?
– US swine flu fears