Episode-709- Listener Feedback 7-25-11
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So it is Monday, aka listener feedback day where I answer your emails sent to jack at thesurvivalpodcast.com. Today we have questions and comments on the USDA Organic program, money market accounts, managing your retirement, gun safety and more.
Join me today as we discuss…
- How is a money market account different from a savings account
- How money in a mutual fund is “managed”
- What to look for in a small property if you want to keep livestock
- The insanity of the modern lawn
- A new bias to add to normalcy bias, status quo bias
- Two suggestions for dealing with the squash vine borer
- My response to a defender of the USDA Organic program
- How not to shoot yourself and the story of someone who failed at it
- Danger for state retirement pensions
- GMO light, engineering a plant without foreign DNA
- Taking back our responsibility to feed ourselves
- How you can afford to buy local even if it cost more
Additional Resources for Today’s Show
- Members Support Brigade
- TSP Gear Shop
- Back Yard Food Production – (sponsor of the day)
- Fortress Self Defense Consultants – (sponsor of the day)
- Money Markets compared to Savings Accounts
- New BioTech Plant Technology
- Simplot, Explains Innate Technology
- The Dirt Doctor’s Advice on Squash Vine Borer Control
- Your Yard is Evil – Video Clip I Played Today
- Members Support Brigade
- Ron Hood’s Survival.com Magazine
Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK and you might hear yourself on the air.
My second cousin is a farmer (non-organic) who grows pumpkins, squashes and gourds commercially (among other things) on my mother’s land with no problem. I, on the other hand, cannot grow any curcurbit without getting the vine borers every time. He rotates land, but these fields are always close to where my garden is. I was wondering the other day if perhaps he uses some pesticide on them to ward off the borers, and therefore they have no choice but to come over to my plants to survive. Other gardeners in the area have the same experience.
BTW, in NYS at least, if you work for the city, county or State, your retirement is through the NYS Retirement system, even though each of those pensions have differences, and in many cases each of the three types have many tiers. So if NYS goes down, then all gov’t employees will be affected. Don’t know how it goes in other states.
I have stood in amazement for many years when I hear “I don’t have no responsibilities, but I know my damn rights”.
“You are responsible to those you see across the table” is what I was taught. Now my dad never said that it is your family you are responsible to, but who you see across the table, share food, break bread with.
We are inherently bound to each other by the food we share. You have told stories how your grandmother would send you around with food for this family and that one as well. We owe it to ourselves to make sure we share the best quality food possible, that is where your AgriTrue is so important. We have become commercialized in every aspect of our lives, separating us from our producers. In order to rescue ourselves we are going to have to rekindle that relationship, if I read your intentions correctly, that is the purpose of AgriTrue. Going from the small 4×4 home garden all the way up to the multiple acre farm, you are trying to make that handshake possible, bonding us back to each other and back to the land (where we should have been all along, IMHO).
Thank you
Shorty
Love the bit about lawns – they have always been my nemesis.
It would have been GREAT if you could have left a video response to this guy’s video – hint, hint.
Might be a good idea to start leaving a few more video responses to some of the vids you reference in your show (hint, hint).
Abundance!
That lawn video was great. I plan on pissing off my neighbors and upgrading my useless front lawn as soon as I can. Thank god I don’t have a HOA.
As my favorite quote goes: “be the change you seek.”
I’m glad you brought up that Mother Earth News article, because I found it really intriguing when I read it. I live on 2 acres, (which I sort-of farm) and it seems like it would take incredibly tight management to do it. Their quote for hay should have included the cost of said hay, if only to show that it’s not really that much. Round bales are about $45 delivered, and the cost of 3 or 4 easily justifies the great no-labor fertilizer that the cow provides. I love that it opens the concept for small farming for people who assume that you need 20+ acres to start. I’ve expanded my vegetable garden every year, and hope to get it up to about a half acre next year. AND have a cow as manure producer.
I hate seeing 2 acres of mowed grass, it seems like an insane waste of resources.
Link to the article is here.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/modern-homesteading/self-sufficient-homestead-zm0z11zkon.aspx
The Mother Earth News article you’re referring to comes straight out of John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. It’s a good read for would-be homesteaders, although his gardening methods are traditional row-and-hoe.
I’ll post a pic of my “front lawn” as soon as I get a chance. Lets just say it uses about 10% of the amount of water a grass lawn would take, and produces infinitely more food. I recall a few weeks ago, I was getting frustrated with how much water I was using to keep one of my beds hydrated. Then I saw various neighbors sprinklers going off on a daily basis just to keep their lawns from burning. Frustration evaporated.
My wife hates my opinion of “front lawns”. If you don’t have cows or horses or sheep or goats, you don’t need grass. I can put the money, labor, soil amendments, and water to better use, a garden! Our neighbors have beautiful lawns with no garden or ability to be self-sufficient. I have to compromise though. If momma ain’t happy, nobody is happy.
@HandAxeProMan LOL! I had an uncle who had the following opinion of lawns,
“if you can’t eat it, sell it, smoke it or feed it to something else, kill it”
I think you and he would get along quite well.
Here is my front yard (the picture isn’t in B&W, it is just washed out by the sun in the background). It is still a work in progress, but my water bill hasn’t increased noticeably since over the winter when no watering at all was going on. It saves me about $60 a month in water during the summer.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-nCopCrbdqUs/Ti8iXECF1sI/AAAAAAAABQQ/-BR2ZAGiRJg/
Enjoyed the show. I haven’t listened to enough episodes to understand Jack’s stand on climate change (I know what his opinion is, just don’t know why he has that opinion). I recently found this clip on YouTube & I’m wondering what other people think about it:
Room full of skeptics & a scientist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hCRafyV0zI
We might end up agreeing to disagree, but I enjoy hearing different points of view & how people reached their conclusion(s), one way or the other.
The best and simplest way I can summarize my thoughts on climate change is that
– if the most prosperous times of human history and pre-human history had the commonality of much higher carbon dioxide levels and higher global temperatures, and
– if man is capable of creating a real measurable impact to these levels
then it sure sounds like the eco obsessed are on the wrong side of their own argument.
The worst of the climate change hysteria isn’t the monetary nonsense with elitists (cough Gore cough) cashing in on ignorance and fear, but rather the blatant disregard for true pollution (you know the crap that actually shortens your life and reduces quality of life) that occurs while everybody obsesses over the levels of plant food that come out of my tailpipe. This is of course in addition to the massive damage that “man made climate” theories have done to the credibility of environmentalists in general.
The clip posted above addresses the points you raise.
No kidding on Al Gore. While I appreciate people who bring environmental stewardship to the mainstream (be good stewards of the Earth- not toxify the crap out of it), he’s done more to hurt the cause of said good stewardship than help. Just wish protecting our resources & cleaning up the place for our children wasn’t such a political issue.
One of the reasons people are obese is that the food has less nutritional value, therefore you eat more but get less out of it and your body has trouble breaking it down.
Quality food has more vitamins and nutrition so you will eat less of it to get enough nutrients. Which also means you will eat less of it so your costs will go down and that is where you save when buying organic.
Jack,
Sorry I’m late catching up on episodes, but I wanted to comment on your remarks that Money Market Funds are FDIC insured. You have to be careful because some are and some are not. Money Market Mutual Funds are not insured. Money market deposit accounts are FDIC insured. These have more restrictions on them you are generally limited to six transfers or withdrawals per month with no more than three transactions as checks written against the account.