VoteKansas.org

Use the comments of this post during this month if you have things you would like to bring to people’s attention and are not sure where else to post them. I’ll make a new Bulletin Board each month for free posting.

Have at it, communicate and keep up the good fight!

Cheers,

-WalterJ

This week we’ve gotten a bunch of publicity which has driven our Kickstarting the Butcher Shop project to over 93% funded. Check out the new Cartoon Info-Graphic by our son and daughter Ben & Hope.

If you haven’t been to visit it yet, go to http://smf.me where you can see a video of our farm, photos and description of our project. You can get great rewards including our pastured pork, bacon, hot dogs, sausage, T-shirts, ivory tusks and more.

Please back our project, even if only for a little bit. Help make the butcher shop at Sugar Mountain Farm a reality. We’re almost there!

Thank you!

-Walter

Score one for the family farm:

Under pressure from farming advocates in rural communities, and following a report by The Daily Caller, the Obama administration withdrew a proposed rule Thursday that would have applied child labor laws to family farms.

Critics complained that the regulation would have drastically changed the extent to which children could work on farms owned by family members. The U.S. Department of Labor cited public outcry as the reason for withdrawing the rule.
-DailyCaller.com

Be ever vigilant. Once the government gets their nose under the tent they rarely retreat. Rather they tend to force themselves more and more into control of our private lives. Government’s eyes should be looking outward, not inward at citizens lives.

Apparently there has been a little glitch recently and all comments were getting marked as spam. Fortunately someone emailed me and I found the problem. Those comments are now unspammed and hopefully the problem is fixed. Sorry about that!

Perhaps you’ve heard about this sort of thing. The government, for your own good, is going to require you to buy certain things. No, I’m not talking about the Health Care Mandate. In Wisconsin they have a NAIS Mandate. Mandatory premiss registration, animal ID, etc. But, they are so generous. They’ll allow you to write off 25% of the forced costs from your tax burden.

Gee… So it still is going to cost you 75%. Since it is a government mandate it will be over priced because the vendors have a lock on the market. You know how these things go. Using some rough numbers, what should have cost $10 per animal is going to cost $20 but you’ll be able to deduct $5 making it so you’re only paying 50% more than you would have not spent had you been willing to spend it if it wasn’t a mandate. Confused?

But it is a mandate and you wouldn’t be paying it at all except that it is a mandate. So now you’re out $15 per animals. Oh, and did you know, surely you did as a farmer, that you’re only making or losing $5 a head? So now, with the government mandate, for your own good, you stand to lose $20 per animal instead of losing $5 per head.

Oh, one last detail, if you don’t get any profit then you don’t get to deduct that 25% of the cost of the mandated program which means you’re losing another $5 per animal for a total of $25 each. Oh, well, I guess you’ll just have to make it up in volume.

Remember: government is here to help you.

Among the bills [Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker] will be signing is SB396, which authorizes the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture to hire an independent agent to administer the livestock premises registration program and create an income and franchise tax credit for producers to cover their costs of radio frequency identification tags.

Under the bill, an income and franchise tax credit for 25 percent of the amount that a taxpayer paid in the taxable year for radio frequency identification tags for the taxpayer’s livestock located in this state and 25 percent of the amount that a taxpayer paid in the taxable year for equipment used in this state to read radio frequency identification tags on livestock. If the amount of the credit exceeds a taxpayer’s tax liability, the taxpayer does not receive a refund, but, instead, may carry forward the amount of any unused credit to subsequent taxable years.
-Wisconsin Ag Connection

Whit Carter has just pushed us up over the $10,000 funding level at our Kickstart the Butcher Shop project! That means we’re 40% funded at the one week mark! Congrats to Whit who unknowingly won a T-shirt! What other prize levels do I have in mind you might ask… Special numbers, round numbers, spiky numbers, prime numbers… Ah, the possibilities!

Thanks to everyone who has helped get us there. Ben is working on a new cartoon info-graphic to go with these breath taking heights as the graph soars higher.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, a photographer from the local Times Argus newspaper was here to get pictures for a story they’re running. We had great weather and the pigs were posing out in the pasture for him. Yes, we actually have some green grass starting to show up! Wah-hooie! Or as the pigs are saying, Grunt!

Go check out our project and see the video of our farm and ongoing construction of our butcher shop. Back our project and you can get great rewards from swag like T-shirts to genuine pastured pig ivory tusks (some huge ones!) to the really good stuff: meat such as sausage samplers and Pick of the Pig!

Use the comments of this post during this month if you have things you would like to bring to people’s attention and are not sure where else to post them. I’ll make a new Bulletin Board each month for free posting.

Have at it, communicate and keep up the good fight!

Cheers,

-WalterJ

Do you know what Kickstarter is? Check out the post on my farm blog about:

Kickstarter.com - The Butcher Shop Project

Here’s the direct link and here’s a short link to pass around:

http://smf.me/k

We are doing a Kickstarter project to help raise money as we go into the final stretch of construction for our family’s on-farm butcher shop. This will let us start cutting meat here at our farm. I appreciate any and all backing you can do and just as importantly spreading the word about our project. The more people that know the better!

Cheers,

-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm

Government nonsense is blooming in Michigan:

Michigan DNR Going Hog Wild
By Pete Kennedy, Esq. | March 15, 2012

In a brazen power grab threatening the livelihood of hundreds of small farmers, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is using the state Invasive Species Act to expand its jurisdiction beyond hunting and fishing to farming operations. On April 1, 2012 an Invasive Species Order (ISO) that DNR issued in December 2010 prohibiting the possession of a number of different types breeds of swine will go into effect.

The order allows DNR to seize and destroy heritage breeds of pigs that farmers are raising; and DNR will not compensate farmers whose pigs are destroyed. In the logic of the department, “Indemnification in [Michigan] statute is for livestock and invasive species are not livestock, and are therefore, not eligible for indemnification.”
-Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

Aye, it’s crazy, unscientific and a blatant trampling on the Constitutional rights. But, it’s easy to understand. It is all about greed and cutting out the competition. What is particularly, almost, amusing is that Big Ag feels threatened enough to have pushed for this.

You might not thing this is related to NAIS but it is. Corporate America, and the World, is trying to take down everyone by taking control. With Monstersanto this involves them using their big lawyers to attack innocent farmers and get settlements because the farmers can’t afford to fight for their rights in court. Chick-fil-a is doing this to Eat More Kale. Don’t let the big bad corp’s take over the world. Fight back by eating more kale! Or at least by backing the exposition of greed that this defiant dude is filming. Check out this Kickstarter project.

What is Kickstarter you may ask? It’s a great way of backing projects you believe in. Kickstarter is a way of raising funds to do interesting things. A means of bringing together people to make stuff happen. Kickstarting a project gives funds to produce something, if, and only if, the project is fully funded by backers like you. You can donate a dollar, $25, $100 or all the way up to $10,000. Give what you feel comfortable giving to the projects you want to support.