Rural Freedom
More Snow Clearing! Just Another Snow Day!
Carhartt’s mandatory vaccine policy receives major backlash
Last week, the Supreme Court announced a decision that large companies do not have to enforce the vaccination-or-testing requirement proposed by the Biden Administration. However, the decision is ultimately left up to the employer whether or not to continue the vaccine requirement. And that has put Carhartt in a tight spot with its customer base. Carhartt has come under fire from its more conservative consumers after it decided to keep the vaccine mandate in place for its roughly 3,000 U.S.-based employees.
This week, #BoycottCarhartt started trending on Twitter after the announcement from Carhartt’s CEO Mark Valade. In an email sent it to workers a day after the Supreme Court’s decision, Valade emphasizes workplace safety.
“We put workplace safety at the very top of our priority list and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling doesn’t impact that core value. We, and the medical community, continue to believe vaccines are necessary to ensure a safe working environment for every associate and even perhaps their households,” the message said.
Building the Homestead I Can, Not the One I Want 🚜 🏘 🐮
Building the Homestead I Can, Not the One I Want 🚜 🏘 🐮
Often when I go out and visit my parents place, I spend some time walking around the yard. My parents are in their mid-70s, and I am realistic and realizing that they may not be able to live independently forever and will pass at some point. I’ll miss them terribly, but I also see a lot of potential in their five acres should I end up taking over their homestead.
Both me and my sister will have a 50 percent claim on the land, most likely. I doubt my sister, who is raising her family in suburban Saratoga County will have much interest in moving back out in country. But I certainly do. I think I am in the position that I could buy out her share of the homestead, paid for in cash, and then only have to pay taxes and utilities going forward.
I look around and think about what I could do with the land. It’s only 5 acres, there is a lot of junk on it, and a lot of it is has been reverting back to woods in recent years. There are neighbors within 500 feet of the most of the land, so probably the opportunities to do a lot of shooting on it are limited, and I have to be careful what I do with fires out back, not burning anything too noxious that produces a lot of smoke, especially with the state’s burning ban. But also, because it’s not neighborly to fumigate your neighbors with smoldering plastic garbage. But there is still a lot of possibility on this land.
Meat goats could do a lot to help clean up the land. Not only are goats relatively small, easy to transport, slaughter and turn into meat, they are browsers and would be perfect for cleaning up the land of brambles and turning land covered with trash species into meat. Portable electric fence means I could move them around to various portions of the land, but they also have a barnyard with stalls for keeping them in the winter. They have a barn and chicken coop, that could be restored for raising chickens and rabbits – a source of meat and eggs.
Eventually, it would be great to run some feeder pigs – piglets bought and raised to weight. This is a move involved adventure, not sure if I could process them on site, so that might involve having to borrow a cattle trailer to get them processed. There are big feed bills involved with having pigs — were talking a few tons of feed for having a couple of hogs — but pigs turn feed into manure which becomes incredibly rich soil for growing other crops.
And maybe cows! But not my own, I am not sure I have skills or even enough land to get started with cattle right away. But a few years back, my neighbors approached my parents about using some of their land to graze cattle. My parents declined, as they had concerns about the noise and smell of having cows so close to their bedroom. But I think it would be an excellent way to help restore that field, fertilize it with manure, eat up the grass and maybe get some home-grown beef out of the process.
I would also like to restore their little pond behind the old well. Certainly chopping down the big junk trees, getting goats back there to clean up the brush and trash species would help. But I’m sure it’s also mucked and probably would need some help from a backhoe after all these years. Maybe it could be enlarged too. There is a good water supply there — it’s fed by a spring that runs out of the shallow well — although the ground around it remains kind of mucky. But it could be cleaned up for sure with a backhoe, maybe a small rental backhoe like on the a tractor.
For having fires, there is all of cinder blocks around the backyard from a demolition and construction project when they replaced their attached garage. I bet these cinder blocks — with the addition possibility of some firebrick would make for an awesome fire pit / incinerator for recreational fires, burning brush and other burnable debris like paper and light-weight plastics that doesn’t make a not of lot of noxious smoke. With a high chimney, it could have a good draw, helping to burn things with minimal smoke that could smell bad and annoy neighbors.
5 acres is nice, but my parents house is not exactly my dream homestead — the house is much too big, too poorly insulated, uses too much energy, and the neighbors are much too close. I want to eventually own more acreage, farther away from neighbors, so I can shoot my guns, have big fires, burn trash and debris without causing nuance. Where I can have more large livestock, cows, make hay and timber, have a simple off-grid property. But if this is the hand I’m dealt, it’s something I can work on for a few years before I upgrade.
The Purple Paint Law
The Purple Paint Law
Many states – West Virginia and Pennsylvania have implemented purple paint laws that allow landowners to paint trees purple to indicate private property, replacing the Posted No Trespassing signs which used to require that the property owner be listed to ask permission to access or hunt or contact them about other concerns about their land.
The idea is that people can nowadays find landowners either by the county websites with their interactive GIS browsers, via their ArcGIS REST Services or various apps such as OxHunt. No need to list the landowner on the sign – traditionally posted signs were pretty expensive to post in a legal number, a few bucks a sign which can really add up if you are posting more than a few acres. Purple paint in contrast is cheap.
The DEC has been marking their property borders with yellow blazes for some time now to supplement their state land signs. Paint means you can cover a lot more area for cheap. Does purple paint mean that more land owned by private owners will be closed off from public use or does it just reinforce existing posted signs?
Honestly I think the solution should be a hybrid model. Maybe their should be some relaxation on the distance of posted signs with the use of purple paint but I think traditional posted signs with landowner contact information posted at major access points like corner posts, driveways, or road borders. Online databases are good but no trespassing signs are more effective and I think landowner information should be listed near the entrances.
SIMPLE LIVING. One Man’s Perspective on Life and Dream Fulfillment.
I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪
I often find myself deeply conflicted by my semi-working class upbringing 👪
I am the child of two college educated parents, but they were homesteaders, and I grew up in a very working class rural neighborhood – and my parents had very working class jobs at the Center for Disability Services.
Having college educated parents that grew up in the suburbs always put me in a different social class then most of the more working class folks who parents graduated high school if even that. My parents had a professional mindset that really wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the hillbillies who lived in trailers down the street.
I was and still am super jealous of them. They always had four wheelers, lots of guns, and livestock. Pigs and cattle. Big bonfires. I’m well aware of what pig manure smells like or for that the distinctively pungent smell of kerosene used to keep their mobile homes warm in the winter – besides the woodstoves they had jerry rigged up. To say nothing of those slurry trucks from Stanton’s Dairy in Coeymans that would traverse the road a few times a year to fertilize the field up the road.
But at the same time, I found it difficult to find connections with them as they were so culturally different in their upbringings and beliefs – the hillbilly way of looking at the world was so foreign to the world I knew with post graduate educated parents. At the same time, despite my college education and professional career I find it difficult to connect with the more professional and educated types with my redneck and small town upbringing.
I want to go back to the country and not just for a weekend trip. Do real hillbilly shit, although I know damn well it will take money, as I don’t have the skills or even the grit and family connections to make it alone in the country. Now I don’t want to live in a fancy house – I’d rather have livestock and junk in my front yard and a garbage burner out back – I just know how important having money is to survive out in the country when you lack so much else that true country boys and girls have to survive and make a life off the land.