People in my family are pretty private, so I doubt I could ever get any of them to make a video promoting their farm.  But if you wonder what the farm where we get our pork and milk and a lot of other food from is like, here’s a family farm that’s a lot like it.  Same breed of cows, and even the Oliver tractor looks familiar.  Same problem, too, of trying to make a living when the farmer’s share of the consumer’s dollar keeps shrinking.  We’ve even talked about making cheese, but as you can probably tell by the video, that’s not a simple or cheap endeavor, especially with all the regulations these days.

They’ve got a really nice website too: Laurel Valley Creamery.

From Grass to Cheese: The Nolan Family Farm from Milk Products on Vimeo.

Imagine that the seat belt law were expanded tomorrow.  Imagine that it not only required you to wear a seat belt, but each of your seat belts had to be marked with a number and that number registered with a government agency.  Each time a seat belt left your property, you would have to notify that government agency when it left, where it went, and for how long.  You would also have to record every other person who used that seat belt.  All this would be recorded in a master database, so that any time a seat belt failed to save someone in an accident, it could be traced back to everyone who ever used it or owned it, to try to determine what went wrong.

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