FIRST, the big news. If you have ever tried to make a comment in response to these blog posts you may have found yourself locked out. MY APOLOGIES! Apparently, because of a glitch with my webhost folks, there was a firewall in place. From this point forward you CAN make comments. Again, my apologies. I'll do my best to respond in a timely manner.
Here's the second bit of commentary. Those of you that are just getting to know us here at Clawfoot Farm, need to know something. At Clawfoot, we raise laying hens for eggs, a few lambs for personal use and we raise almonds. That's right... Almonds. In the Sacramento Valley we are considered fairly small producers, but we do have about 1500 trees, and on occasion we produce around 20,000 pounds annually. We don't have our own shakers, sweepers, or tractor... so we share crop. That means another individual takes care of the trees for a share of the profit. Anyway and sadly, because we are small and lack the equipment, we do use herbicides to control weeds. I would love to go organic, but that's a discussion for another day. At least the livestock is on range or fenced pasture and as natural as possible. My point is this, years ago I decided if nothing else, we would not only recycle our few empty pesticide containers.... BUT, we would help other growers to do the same!
At that point, which was just under 10 years ago I set up a program in two California counties to recycle those plastic products. I'm sure you won't believe this .... but since then we have collected and recycled over 600,000 pounds of pesticide containers. Our next recycling event is Monday (7/16/2018). Growers must triple rinse the containers and apply the rinsate to their sprayer for use. The rinsed containers are then brought to our recycling center and are chipped into small pieces by a contractor. The chips are bagged and sold for products like plastic pipe or pallets. Legally no chips can be used for new container production or any product that might result in the plastic ending up back in the food chain.
I just wanted to share that with my subscribers and encourage you all to recycle. Because of the long life of plastic, we must reuse or recycle whenever we can. Please use reusable containers whenever possible, and don't buy bottled water. I know the new buzz word is "sustainable", but step one is recycling. California and many other states have a return policy for beverage containers so do your part. I have a separate website for recycling which is badly in need of an update, but tax deductible donations can be sent to the address at that site, which is: www,greenplanetplastics.org.
Feel free to comment on most any topic, except politics. Your comments will now go through and I look forward to a dialog. Please share this website with your friends and have a great day.