Unity Farm Journal - First Week of June 2014

As Spring begins to transform into Summer, everything on the farm is a sea of green.

As Paul Simon wrote in 1973 

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's
a sunny day

All of the guinea fowl are in crazed Summer mating mode, with males chasing females all over the property and communal nests appearing in the forest, with clusters of 30-40 eggs.   On some nights a “designated layer” sits on the nest and sometimes does not survive the prowling foxes, coyotes and fisher cats.    We lost one guinea this week, so we’re down to 27.

I’ve lined all our trails and pastures with bird houses.   Since we cleared 2 acres for the orchard, large numbers of tree swallows and barn swallows have arrived.   As I walk the dogs in the large meadow, tree swallows peek out of their nesting boxes at me.   A mated pair of barn swallows  has created a nest in the rafters of barn.

Every day we’re harvesting vegetables from the hoop house and dinner includes fresh Unity Farm kale, spinach,lettuces, peas, and garlic, pictured below.

With all the growth of late spring, we've had to mow the orchard and meadows.  Now that I'm mowing 5 acres, I've had to retire the push mower and use an exMark commercial mower.   The orchard is a 20 degree hill so mowing takes a lot of upper body strength.   I use a brush cutter around the blueberries and apple trees then use the mower to trim the 2 feet of clover to 4 inches high.   I've tried to save as much clover as possible since the bees are beginning to harvest clover nectar for our  light, fragrant spring honey.

Trail maintenance continues and I completed the mulching of the Orchard Trail and portion of the Marsh trail.    My work was very timely since Kathy walked the trails with a local historian this week, pointing out the Revolutionary War era hand dug well, the Sherborn Powder House, and the grave of James Bullard, the powder house keeper, all of which are part of Unity Farm.

We pulled another ton of fallen poplar out of the forest and are busy inoculating logs with mushroom spawn.   We have a few visitors from California at the farm this weekend and I'll recruit them into mushroom permaculture.

Finally, we’re continuing our honey extraction.  This weekend we will spin the honey from an additional 22 frames - likely getting another 10-11 quarts of late season honey from last Fall.

Every night the sounds of Unity Farm become more Summer-like with crickets, bull frogs, and the gobble of wild turkeys climbing to their roosts in the tall pine trees.   Next week, I’ll post the sounds of approaching Summer from Unity Farm.

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AMA, Doctor Allies Push CVS Rivals To End Tobacco Sales

The American Medical Association and allied physician groups this week are exacting added pressure on pharmacies and others that sell health products to join CVS’ move to cease peddling cigarettes and other tobacco products. Earlier this year, CVS grabbed international kudos that included acclaim from the White House for the giant pharmacy chain’s decision to stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products in all of its more than 7,600 stores by October 1, according to its parent company, CVS/Caremark (CVS). Public health advocates said CVS’ move was particularly notable given its drugstores would be sacrificing $2 billion in annual sales for public health and future growth. Now, the largest doctor group in the U.S. and affiliated state and national medical societies are voicing a more unified chorus against retail sales of tobacco products at the AMA’s annual policy-making House of Delegates meeting that runs through Tuesday in Chicago. Several doctor groups said Sunday that they want the AMA to push pharmacies and “providers of health services and products” to stop-selling cigarettes and tobacco products or work to pressure them to limit sales of such products. An AMA reference committee Sunday considered two resolutions urging the organization to step up the pressure on pharmacies and other retailers. The American College of Cardiology, for example, said even limiting tobacco has led to its reduced use. “We urge retailers that sell health related products to follow the example set by CVS Caremark CVS +0.38% and discontinue the sale of all tobacco products,” said Dr. L. Samuel Wann, an AMA delegate representing the American College of Cardiology. “Selling both prescription medicines and cigarettes in the same store is hypocritical. Large pharmacy chains that continue to sell cigarettes appear irresponsible to society. The ACC supports all possible action to reduce tobacco access and use, especially when it comes to our nation’s youth.” The resolutions before the AMA didn’t name retailers specifically. CVS rivals Wal-Mart (WMT) and Walgreen WAG -0.75% (WAG) continue to sell tobacco products. The AMA reference committee ultimately reaffirmed the organization’s existing policy which opposes “the sale of tobacco at any facility where health services are provided.” The AMA’s annual House of Delegates’ meeting serves as more of a bully pulpit for health issues than anything. “The power of the AMA is in its role as a single umbrella organization that covers all physicians, across specialty, geography, practice type or career stage,” Dr. Robert Wah, the incoming AMA president, said in a statement at the meeting’s open. “We have the ability to convene all the parties that need to come to the table to work on solutions to the challenges physicians face today. It’s the bringing together of different perspectives that makes the organization stronger.” Wondering how Obamacare will affect public health? The Forbes eBook Inside Obamacare: The Fix For America’s Ailing Health Care System answers that question and more. Available now at Amazon and Apple. Marlboro Cigarettes Marlboro Cigarettes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Too-Clean Homes May Encourage Child Allergies, Asthma: Study

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, June 6, 2014 (HealthDay News) — Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but a home that’s too clean can leave a newborn child vulnerable to allergies and asthma later in life, a new study reports.

Infants are much less likely to suffer from allergies or wheezing if they are exposed to household bacteria and allergens from rodents, roaches and cats during their first year of life, the study found.

The results stunned researchers, who had been following up on earlier studies that found an increased risk of asthma among inner-city dwellers exposed to high levels of roach, mouse and pet droppings and allergens.

“What we found was somewhat surprising and somewhat contradictory to our original predictions,” said study co-author Dr. Robert Wood, chief of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore. “It turned out to be completely opposite — the more of those three allergens you were exposed to, the less likely you were to go on to have wheezing or allergy.”

About 41 percent of allergy-free and wheeze-free children in the study grew up in homes that were rich with allergens and bacteria. By contrast, only 8 percent of children who suffered from both allergy and wheezing had been exposed to these substances in their first year of life.

The findings support the “hygiene hypothesis,” which holds that children in overly clean houses are more apt to suffer allergies because their bodies don’t have the opportunity to develop appropriate responses to allergens, said Dr. Todd Mahr, an allergist-immunologist in La Crosse, Wis., and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Section on Allergy & Immunology.

Prior research has shown that children who grow up on farms have lower allergy and asthma rates, possibly due to their regular exposure to bacteria and microbes, the researchers noted in background material.

“The environment appears to play a role, and if you have too clean of an environment the child’s immune system is not going to be stimulated,” Mahr explained.

As many as half of all 3-year-olds in the United States suffer from wheezing illnesses, and recurrent wheezing and allergies are considered a risk factor for asthma in later life, researchers said. According to the American Lung Association, asthma remains one of the most common pediatric illnesses, affecting about 7 million American children.

The new study involved 467 inner-city newborns from Baltimore, Boston, New York and St. Louis. Doctors enrolled the babies in the study while they were still in the womb, and have been tracking their health since birth, Wood said.

Investigators visited the infants’ homes to measure the levels and types of allergens. They also collected dust in about a quarter of the homes and analyzed its bacterial content.

They found that infants who grew up in homes with mouse and cat dander and cockroach droppings in the first year of life had lower rates of wheezing at age 3, compared with children not exposed to the allergens.

Wheezing was three times as common among children who grew up without exposure to such allergens, affecting 51 percent of children in “clean” homes compared with 17 percent of children who spent their first year of life in houses where all three allergens were present.

Household bacteria also played a role, and infants in homes with a greater variety of bacteria were less likely to develop allergies and wheezing by age 3.

Children free of wheezing and allergies at age 3 had grown up with the highest levels of household allergens and were the most likely to live in houses with the richest array of bacterial species, researchers found.

“The combination of both — having the allergen exposure and the bacterial exposure — appeared to be the most protective,” Wood said.

Both Wood and Mahr cautioned that these findings need to be verified, and that parents shouldn’t make any household decisions based on them.

For example, parents shouldn’t adopt a dog or cat assuming that its presence will help immunize their kids against allergies and asthma, Wood said. At the same time, they shouldn’t ditch their family pet, either.

“We would not take any of this as information we could use to give advice,” Wood said. “Please don’t get an intentional cockroach infestation in your house. There’s no reason to think that would help.”

There are a number of other factors that could influence the likelihood that an inner-city kid will develop asthma, including tobacco smoke, high levels of household stress, or even exposure to the same sort of potentially beneficial allergens too late in life, past their first birthday, Wood said.

“This is by no means a simple story,” he said. “There could be a lot of factors going on.”

Mahr said the findings could someday lead to treatments that would help infants build up resistance to allergies. “I can see someone coming up with a spray. You’d spray the crib that the kid sleeps in every so often, and let the kid crawl around in it,” he said.

More information

Find out more about indoor allergens at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

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