SUSTAINABLE FARMING TALKS TO SUSTAINABLE ADDICTION

Sustainable Addiction doesn’t listen to anyone but their Jones.

You know you’ve got a hard charging audience like Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms when you write a post about them, send them the link, post it on Facebook with tags, and you end up with the biggest hitting post of the year.

And it’s only August.

Sustainable farming is a topic with lots of readers, lots of interest. Here’s a link to other links about Polyface Farms and Joel Salatin on BoomerPDX.

The idea of rotating animals based on available grass using portable electric fences, with other animals coming behind as sort of janitors, draws a lot of eyes.

It makes me happy to find my eyes drawn there, too.

Joel Salatin made BoomerPDX’s Hall of Fame for being a beacon of hope and clean food in an increasingly dirty world.

While the post titled “POLYFACE FARMS, POLYFACE BOOMER JOEL SALATIN” helped bring BoomerPDX to its third biggest hit month in history, another more troubling post keeps collecting readers.

It’s the opposite of sustainable lifestyle, the opposite of clean living and fresh air.

Instead, “BLACK TAR HEROIN, SAM QUINONES, AND DREAMLAND” is a book review on a topic that kills gently once you get to the overdose nap, but violently if you get caught in the early delivery plan.

Esquire magazine has a good history right here.

Having two posts land near the top of my daily MOST READ list is more than coincidence. These are searched for topics, google search, now google news and google trending.

One of the connections between sustainable farming and sustainable addiction is the field of play.

Sustainable farming is a real field.

Acres and acres of real field, with a crop of real grass, real animals, and real work over and over. It’s not mechanized farming at its core.

Addiction is more like being farmed, like being the field, millions and millions of fields drug dealers farm.

In addiction life you move toward death, but the dealers do all they can to slow the slide. Dead addicts make for bad customers. There’s no return sales after that, so keep that field breathing. If they’re breathing, they’re using.

Where the right farming practice produces life enhancing nutrition and sets an example for others to follow, addiction is a spiral heading to the grave. Do addicts care about nutrition? Only if their Jones says so.

Some countries see addiction as a disease, not a last stop for dead men walking, and work to help addicts fit in society somewhere besides prison. Or the morgue.

A new cut of heroin is making that decision for the addicts. Instead of the same old, same old, spike it and like it, addicts are getting heroin cut with fentanyl, rated 30 to 50 times as strong as heroin.

From cbsnews.com:

Overdose deaths are highest in West Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Kentucky and Ohio. In 2013, there were 84 fentanyl-and-heroin-related deaths in Ohio, but a year later there were 503.

If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, resources are available. Visit one of the links below:

• American Addiction Centers
• National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
• National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA)
  • SAMHSA National Help Hotline: 1-800-662-HELP
• Wicked Sober
• HOPES: Unified Voices For Change

If fentanyl isn’t scary enough, if Angel Dust didn’t frighten you, will an elephant tranquilizer called Carfentanil? Read all about it on CNN.

Baby Boomers, more than any other generation, know dope when they see it. One Vietnam Vet said he and his friends were injecting IV speed before they left for the jungles and heroin when they came back.

Those seem like innocent times in the face of elephant tranquilizer cut heroin today.

From opb.org:

A powerful drug that’s normally used to tranquilize elephants is being blamed for a record spike in drug overdoses in the Midwest. Officials in Ohio have declared a public health emergency and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says communities everywhere should be on alert for carfentanil.

The synthetic opioid is 100 times more potent than fentanyl, the prescription painkiller that led to the death earlier this year of the pop star Prince. Fentanyl itself can be up to 50 times more deadly than heroin.

Sustainable farming works.

The idea is to restore abused, mineral drained, land to nutrient rich, full functioning farmland.

Sustainable addiction just turned the corner on a short cut to death.

No one suggests rounding up addicts tired of their Jones, their withdrawal symptoms, their lifestyle, their connection, and asking if they’d like to volunteer for a sustainable farming project.

Besides, who would take it on?

Bill Gates has a full plate.

Helping farmers improve their yields requires a comprehensive approach that includes the use of seeds that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flooding; information from trusted local sources about more productive farming techniques and technologies; greater access to markets; and government policies that serve the interests of farming families.

Bill Gates, meet Joel Salatin.

Warren Buffett, a trustee in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, knows something about the farm. Coming from Nebraska, he ought to.

From marketwatch.com:

Anyone can learn a lot from two small investments he made around two decades ago. The first is a 40-acre farm 50 miles north of Omaha that he bought for $280,000, much less than what a failed bank had lent against that farm years previously. What did he know about the farm? It had no downside and potentially substantial upside, though with the occasional bad crop.

”Now, 28 years later, the farm has tripled its earnings and is worth five times or more what I paid,” says the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, who admits he knows nothing about farming.

This sounds like an easy introduction?

Warren Buffett, meet Joel Salatin. He knows lots about farming.

Imagine these three getting together after some baby boomer Portland blogger fans send them links to a post that suggests an over-the-top project like turning addicts into sustainable farmers instead of obituary notices.

Does the written word have enough power to change lives?