Food, Human rights and vermont farms

Many people have thought of food as being a human rights issue, yet we often have over look the quality of the food we eat consume and just focus on quantity and how it is being distributed. The most unhealthy food in the country is currently the least expensive. It is a good thing that mass produced food specifically meat can be easy to access for struggling people in this country. With this being said, it’s far harder to find meat from grass fed cows on family owned farms than it ever should be. Cows are being put in conditions where they are fed a purely corn based diet living in an intensely crowded indoor shelter where they live their entire lives and never spend time outdoors. This is not only unhealthy for the livestock  but it’s also unhealthy for the consumer. Companies use these methods because they are inexpensive and systematic ways of controlling their product.

When every cow that comes from a company is being processed in the same place and the meat is being cut in the same spot you run the risk of having a dangerous disease that was evident in one cow spread to the rest, which is incredibly dangerous to the consumers. You run a high risk in food poisoning when mass producing something as delicate as meat.       

To learn more about this subject I visited different farms in the southern vermont area and had conversations with different farmers on this subject and gathered information on the topic. There are many people that work at my school who work on farms and were able to give me various opinions on the modernisation of farms and the high demand of meat in a globalizing world. The goal of this project is to promote the consumption of meat from grass fed beef cows that come from small farms. I hope to see more people buying from local family owned farms that use humane methods to raise their cattle, this not only be helpful to the beef cows but it will also put your money towards individuals that own the farms instead of the owners of big name brands.

Just yesterday I was with my wilderness skills group, a group specifically for home schooled kids when some of us decided to take a couple minutes to look under rotting logs for salamanders. It was our lucky day because we found some of the most colorful and rare salamanders that live in Connecticut. After first finding some of the northern red backed salamanders we did a little more searching and uncovered the spotted salamander. The spotted salamander is about four inches long and has bright yellow spots to contrast is dark brown body. We kept searching and latter found a blue spotted salamander, it is short and has tiny blue spots all over its body. The week before this I found a young red spotted newt, it's bright orange body really shows against the dark colors of the leaves and dirt. I had a awesome time finding some of the local salamanders and I cant wait for the next chance I get.  

Recently I been designing a house as a home schooling project. Thanks to the help of my parents who are both architects I have drawn up a floor plan and I have recently finished drawing the house in elevation. There have been some challenges along the way, but it has been a really interesting experience. Managing to fit the rooms into the house and adjusting them can be difficult. By making one room a little bit bigger, or smaller, you then must adjust any room or part of the house next to it. It can feel like putting together a puzzle sometimes but in the end I found that I was very pleased with the outcome. After drawing my house in elevation my father helped me to change my plans to look like a modern international style house. This was the truly inspiring moment for me, I was able to adjust my house to look like my favorite style of architecture. Soon I will be learning how to draw my house on a computer using a program called sketch-up. It has been a really exiting learning experience for me.  

Here is some more music from one of my bands latest concerts.

The floor plan for a house that I am building as a home schooling project. 

Some songs my band did at a church concert. 

A classic song by the rolling stones called wild horses.