Yearly Archives: 2012

Valdosta Farm Days returns Saturday 21 April 2012

Returning for its second year, Valdosta Farm Days starts this Saturday:

When: 9AM-1PM Saturday 21 April 2012
Where: Historic Lowndes County Courthouse,
100 East Central Avenue,
Valdosta, Georgia

There’s a list of vendors on VFD’s web page. See also their facebook page.

Support local agriculture and buy direct from area farmers while shopping at Downtown Valdosta Farm Days.

The market presents producers from the surrounding areas of Lowndes County offering fresh fruit, vegetables and so much more.

Come for the freshness and stay for the fun at Downtown Valdosta Farm Days!

At the market, you’ll find locally-grown, locally-raised, locally-produced fruits and vegetables, plants, herbs, meats, farm-fresh eggs and dairy products, baked and prepared foods, snacks, and coffee. You’ll also find a variety of artisan and natural value-added products including products made from recycled goods, birdhouses, handmade soaps and body products, candles, gift baskets, and honey products.

Oh, look! Potatoes from Okra Paradise Farms! OPF won’t actually have those there this weekend (they only just bloomed last week), but stay tuned for later Valdosta Farm Days!

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Groundwater levels: red

In case anybody thinks the recent rains have done away with the drought in Georgia, take a look at this USGS map of groundwater levels today:

USGS Active Groundwater Network map 18 April 2012
Legend for USGS Active Groundwater Network map 18 April 2012

South Georgia, all red and orange. Here’s more detail.

It’s also worth remembering that while our Floridan Aquifer does recharge somewhat, that much of its water has been there since the last ice age. So if we keep mining water at a rapid rate, the aquifer will keep falling.

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How many little birds are there?

It’s kind of hard to tell with the low light, the fuzzy cell phone video, and especially with them crawling over each other. You can hear them, though!

Here’s the video:


How many little birds are there?
Video by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 14 April 2012.

Probably house wrens. Nesting under the eaves of the farm workshop.

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Greed is Good for Poisoning the Food Supply?

For many years big agro has treated the world’s health as an economic externality, a problem for somebody else that did not affect its own bottom line. That is starting to change, most recently in Argentina.

Anthony Gucciardi wrote for NaturalSociety 11 April 2012, Explosive: Monsanto ‘Knowingly Poisoned Workers’ Causing Devastating Birth Defects,

In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.

This would be the same Monsanto that was convicted of chemical poisoning in France.

But this is once again far away in a small country of which we know nothing, right? Wrong:

The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”

Still, it must be some obscure poison only sold in the third world, right?

Wrong:

The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.

That would be the same Roundup that farmers use around here all the time, without protective equipment. The Roundup we already knew was Continue reading →

Pine beetles, Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 April 2012

Brown Dog and Yellow Dog in some red pine needles:


John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Lowndes County, Georgia, 11 April 2012.
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms.

And the reason why they’re red:

Continue reading →

“A-lap-a-WHAT?” by Diane Shearer @ Weekend for Rivers by Georgia River Network 31 March 2012

At Georgia River Network’s Weekend for Rivers, 31 March 2012, Diane Shearer presented “A-lap-a-WHAT?” About, you guessed it, the Alapaha River. She grew up in Alapaha, Georgia, and recently returned to find the source of its eponymous river and to trace its path.

Here’s a slideshow of my pictures of her presenting her pictures. I think she’s going to post her slides somewhere soon.


Pictures by John S. Quarterman.

According to her conference bio:

Diane is a retired public school teacher and writer. She is a member of Atlanta Audubon, Georgia Ornithological Society, Georgia Sierra Club’s Smart Energy Committee, and serves on the board of directors for the Initiative to Protect Jekyll Island. Her first attempt at expressing her love for the Alapha River was a column she wrote for Facing South in the early 1980’s called “In Praise of Rivers.”

Here’s a map of the Alapaha River watershed in green (blue is the Little River Watershed, wrapped inside the cyan Withlacoochee River watershed).

The Alapaha River is 190 miles long. It rises in southeastern Dooly County, Georgia and flows generally southeast along and through Crisp, Wilcox, Turner, Ben Hill, Irwin, Tift, Berrien, Atkinson, Lanier, Lowndes and Echols Counties in Georgia and Hamilton County in Florida. Along its course it passes the towns of Alapaha, Willacoochee and Statenville. The river flows into the Suwannee about 10 miles southwest of Jasper, Florida.

U.S. EPA has a bit more about the Alapaha.

There’s a Withlacoochee Riverkeeper forming about the watersheds of the Alapaha, Willacoochee, Little, Withlacoochee, and Alapahoochee Rivers. If you’re interested, ask to join the facebook group or contact me, river at quarterman.org.

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Drying Out South Georgia Wetlands in Dirty Dozen by Georgia Water Coalition

We’re on Georgia Water Coalition’s Dirty Dozen 2011: as 9. South Georgia Wetlands: Four Decades of Ditches Dry Out South Georgia Wetlands:

Since the 1970s, state and federal regulatory agencies have allowed the destruction of more than 200,000 acres of highly critical wetlands throughout South Georgia to increase timber production and agricultural yields and usher in residential and commercial development. These wetlands that captured water and slowly released it to streams no longer perform that important function. The result has been increased floods when it rains and record low flows when it doesn’t….

Flooding? Like the 700 year flood in Lowndes County 3 years ago today?

What’s a wetland, anyway?

the greatest concentration of wetlands is in the Coastal Plain of South Georgia. Though these forested foodplains and wetlands may not seem directly linked to our rivers and streams, they play an important role in holding water during rain events and dispensing it during dry periods. The sponges and kidneys of our state, they mitigate major floods, lessen the impacts of drought, and clean the water that passes through them, while regulating the amount of freshwater entering Georgia’s coastal estuaries where commercially important seafood find critical habitat. Additionally, these wetlands provide important habitat for waterfowl and other wildlife.

So what’s the problem?

In an effort to convert these wild lands into
Continue reading →

Elsie Quarterman with Wayne Morgan’s Satilla River photography book

Elsie and the river book:


Elsie Quarterman with Wayne Morgan’s Satilla River photography book
Nashville, Tennessee, 1 April 2012. Picture by John S. Quarterman.

At 100 101 years and four months, Vanderbilt Emerita Prof. of Plant Ecology Elsie Quarterman sat up to see these pictures. Later she started paging through it to see some of them again.

Wayne Morgan has taken thousands of photographs of the Satilla River, especially in Brantley County.

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Growing in the Garden

Potatoes red and white, peas, onions, turnips, collards, and radishes!

Here’s a playlist:


Growing in the Garden
Gretchen Quarterman explains it all for you, assisted by Brown Dog and Yellow Dog.
Videos by John. S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 27 March 2012.

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