A few weeks ago i came across and article about the top 25 things disappearing for America, the first one on the list was the American Farm.

Top 25 things vanishing from America: #1 -- The family farm
Sarah GilbertJul 20th 2008 at 11:00AM

This series explores aspects of America that may soon be just a memory -- some to be missed, some gladly left behind. From the least impactful to the most, here are 25 bits of vanishing America.My mother grew up on her family's dairy farm in central Oregon, and when she was a child she was in 4-H -- just like all the kids in her town. I've always admired her way with the "home arts" (she makes a mean jar of cucumber relish, and her embroidery festoons quilts for all my boys) so when I saw her 4-H ribbons I assumed that big purple one must have been for brownies, or jam. "Oh, that was for the pig I raised," she said matter-of-factly.In 1950, it wasn't at all unusual for a bookish little girl like my mother to get a purple ribbon in pig husbandry; after all, our educational system is still organized around the principle that children need to get out to help tend the crops and raise the baby animals in the summers. But, since the 1930s, the number of family farms has been declining rapidly. According to the USDA, 5,382,162 farms dotted the nation in 1950, but this number had declined to 2,121,107 by the 2003 farm census (data from the 2007 census hasn't yet been published). Ninety-one percent of the U.S. farms are small family farms, but the percentage of crop value produced by these farms is only 27%. Large-scale family farms (those with over $250,000 in annual sales) represented most of the farm value produced, but it's worth noting that commercial farms make up just 1.7% of the total but 14% of the value.The plight of the family farm has been much mourned, with many best-selling authors quoting the Farm Aid statistic that 330 farmers leave their land every week. But all is not lost; the decline in family farms has slowed since the 1970s, and due to the aforementioned bestselling authors and changing priorities of many consumers, the small family farm may very well change the tide.That tide will have to change fast. Due to the great development boom of the 90s and early years of the millennium, and commercial agricultural practices (think: chemical fertilizers and pesticides, poor crop rotations and intensive irrigation), much land is being lost to farmers -- 3,000 acres are lost to development each day according to EPA data. A bank can foreclose on a whole subdivision, but it can't turn the land back into carrots, potatoes and lettuces.

http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2008/07/20/top-25-things-vanishing-from-america-1-the-family-farm/
Virginia, W.Va. farmland growing in value August 10, 2008 - 2:23pm
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Government statistics show farmland in Virginia is worth more than agricultural land in surrounding states.
The average agricultural acre in Virginia is valued at $5,900. The next highest in the region is North Carolina at $4,800 per acre. West Virginia is last in the region at $2,700, but it posted the biggest increase last year -- 8 percent.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service says Virginia's farm real estate grew 3.5 percent last year. Nationally, farm real estate averaged a record $2,350 per acre, up 8.8 percent from a year earlier.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=1457087

Oil and gold prices drop as hopes rise for Georgia truce By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 9:27am BST 12/08/2008
Oil prices have fallen to their lowest level since early May and gold had one of its biggest ever one-day falls as fears dissipated that the war between Russia and Georgia would cause serious economic damage.
Amid hopes that the two sides may negotiate a ceasefire, the crude price dropped $1.87 to $111.46 in late trading, having risen sharply in the morning. On a dramatic day in the commodities markets, gold prices also tumbled sharply.
The precious metal dropped $35.28 by late trading to $821.32 an ounce, with traders predicting that it could drop beneath $800 in the coming weeks. Despite holding up well for most of the day, the gold price dropped suddenly in the late afternoon after it breached technical support levels.
The falls in commodities continue the trend of recent weeks, with values dropping sharply amid suspicions that the global economic downturn will be more painful and protracted than expected, and against the backdrop of a strengthening dollar. Crude prices were propelled higher in early trading as investors worried that fighting in Georgia could threaten the key oil pipeline from Azerbaijan.
However, by late afternoon, with Western economies calling on Russia to accept an immediate ceasefire, crude prices dropped back and Russian equities, which previously plumbed the lowest level for nearly two years, rebounded. The benchmark Russian share indexes - the rouble-denominated MICEX and dollar-denominated RTS - rallied to close up 3.9pc and 1.1pc respectively.
"After [Russian president] Medvedev said the operation was finished, the market turned around and went up," a trader at a major Russian bank said.
Georgian conflict could lead to some investors pulling out of Russia
President Dmitry Medvedev said that military operations in the breakaway Georgian state of South Ossetia were nearly over and the central bank intervened to support the Russian currency.
Experts also insisted that Russia's economic fundamentals remain solid, with any weakness unlikely to last much longer than the conflict itself.
"Given Russia's overwhelming military advantage, we would expect any potential combat to be short-lived, with the two sides back at the negotiation table in a matter of days or weeks," said analysts from Dresdner Kleinwort.
"Such a scenario would imply only limited impact on Russia's fiscal outlook, suggesting that any potential rouble and spread weakness in the short term could provide an attractive entry point."
The rouble had its steepest fall against the dollar in 8½ years, dropping to an intra-day low of 30.10 against a central bank-monitored dollar-euro basket used to manage currency fluctuations. Intervention by the central bank helped stem the slide. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/12/cnruss112.xml

Ford exec says company can weather downturn August 12, 2008 - 10:33pm
By TOM KRISHER AP Auto Writer
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) - Despite the headwinds of a slumping U.S. economy, tight credit, high gasoline prices and declining home values, Ford Motor Co.'s top American executive said he is confident the company has enough cash to weather losses and make a profit again.
But Mark Fields, Ford's president of the Americas, told reporters at a dinner Tuesday night that there will be a lag time before the company can start making profits on the small cars U.S. drivers are now craving.
And although sales of pickup trucks, Ford's old profit center, are starting to improve as gas prices moderate, Fields said the company isn't banking on that. Instead the company is planning to make money on new global models it will bring to the U.S. from Europe starting in 2010, he said.
"We continue to evaluate our liquidity and our alternatives to improve the balance sheet," Fields said. "We'll continue to look at that to make sure that we have adequate liquidity to successfully implement this very significant kind of transformation."
When asked if Ford has the money to cover losses until it starts making money again, Fields said: "That is our intent, but also I don't want to walk away from the fact that there's lots of variables hitting this business every day," he said. "Our role is to make sure that we're as flexible as we can be to kind of take those things coming at us, both the good and the bad." http://www.wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=1458684

Japan's economy shrinks in second quarter August 12, 2008 - 8:50pm
TOKYO (AP) - Japan's GDP contracted in the second quarter as the world's second largest economy succumbed to high oil prices and the prospects of a global slowdown.
Japan's gross domestic product, or the total value of the nation's goods and services, in the April-June period shrank at an annual pace of 2.4 percent, a sharp downturn from 4.0 percent growth registered in the first quarter, the Cabinet Office said Wednesday.
The last time GDP turned negative was in April-June 2007.
On a quarterly basis, GDP contracted 0.6 percent from a 0.8 percent increase in the January-March period.
The data provided further evidence that Japan has ended its six-year expansion, and may now be perilously close to a recession.
Private consumption, which accounts for more than half of real GDP, dropped 0.5 percent from the previous quarter.
Two main drivers of Japan's six-year economic recovery _ business investment and exports _ also weakened as expected.
Private-sector investment in factories and equipment fell 0.2 percent, while overall exports of goods and services slid 2.3 percent. http://www.wtop.com/?nid=111&sid=590986

Mad cows (and livid lambs)
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/08/2008
Marauding elephants, aggressive sea lions, snap-happy crocodiles... As animal attacks on humans reach frightening levels, scientists are beginning to understand exactly what the beasts are thinking. And it's not good. Will Storr reports
In a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified children will tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter how much their mother scolds them; there's no way they're going to bed down there. Not after what happened. They can still remember that night, of course - being picked up by their mother, and how hard she covered their mouths with her hands to stop them screaming. They can remember the other sounds, too.The elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one, a vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him round the side of the house and killed him.
Elephants haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in India and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over them. And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part because it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted that the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten, evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists that it has earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'.
It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada are alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions, cougars, foxes and wolves. Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's been a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting that, 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average of the previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed assaults and killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist, 'almost never attack people'. In Uganda, they have started killing children by biting off their limbs then disembowelling them.
There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of dingo killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries from cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent. In Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog bites in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-increasing numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard specialist, to comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims. In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters, 'It's a very weird situation.'

The numbers are disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in behaviour are especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the biologist Dr Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas where shark attacks used to happen every three or four decades, they are now taking place at least once a year - has suggested that sharks are switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee Fitzhugh has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In San Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to comment, 'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time, gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're using weapons against us.
It's easy to see why some suspect revenge. The theory that the animals of the three elements are conspiring against us gained popularity in 2006, when the Australian television presenter Steve Irwin was speared through the heart by a stingray off the north Queensland coast. In the aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was used in news reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing happened to James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike Irwin, he didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started wondering. Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating on the Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and fatally struck her in the face.Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane. But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad barbarities could indeed be a motive.
All over Africa, India and parts of south-east Asia, elephants have started attacking humans in unprecedented numbers. Not just killing - they're rampaging through villages and stomping crops, terrorising local populations in any way they can. 'What's happening today is extraordinary,' Dr Gay Bradshaw, a world authority on elephants, told reporters in 2006. 'Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-existence, there is now hostility and violence.' Bradshaw is the director of the Kerulos Centre for Animal Psychology and Trauma Recovery, in Oregon. 'When you see reports of elephants running into crops or attacking people, they're highly stressed,' she tells me. 'And there are multiple stressors - violence, lack of food, lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.'

Eric Nerhus was swallowed up to the waist by a shark
Bradshaw describes the elephants as being 'under siege' from the locals. But the violence against humans has increased so suddenly, and reached such levels, that these traditional factors aren't thought to be sufficient to explain it. Bradshaw and her colleagues now think that there's been a massive, pan-species psychological collapse throughout the world's pachyderms. In essence, we're witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching their families being slaughtered.
'You could make a parallel between elephants and people who are undergoing genocide and war,' Bradshaw says. 'They've gone through massive killings and many have sustained culls or severe poaching, so they've witnessed the violence and they're traumatised. It's critical to understand that when you have an experience at a young age, or through adolescence or even as an adult, it enters into the brain. In other cases, the normal rearing process is disrupted or conducted by distressed parents, so you're creating individuals who are mentally challenged.'
Such claims might be dismissed as so much Disneyfied anthropomorphism if Bradshaw did not have the observational, psychological and neuroscientific evidence to back them up. And, she says, it might not be just in elephants that this critical point has been breached. 'I think we're well past the critical point,' she says. 'Well past. People are starting to notice these atypical behaviours in an array of species.'
Of the question of elephant revenge, though, she is more cautious. 'Put yourself in an elephant's shoes. What's it like living in Africa or Asia when you're surrounded by an active threat, not just to you but to your family? Let's take, for example, one of the things that's happening in Africa. Females are starting to charge lorries. Why? It's hard to understand the motive. Perhaps she's traumatised. Perhaps it's pre-emptive - they may have a gun. It may be self?defence. And other times it may well be revenge. It's not that I don't think elephants have the capacity.' Dr Marc Bekoff, a leading ethologist, agrees. 'We need to be careful when using that sort of language,' he says. 'But I don't think there's any doubt that, in certain situations, animals show revenge.'
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At first he thought it was a dream; that shuffling, that banging that bulged out of the darkness around him. By the time Michael Fitzgerald had roused himself and put on his slippers, he decided it was burglars. They were in the garage. He crept forward, readying himself for what awaited behind the electric door that was slowly, noisily rising. He peered in. It was a badger. Just a badger! He'd never seen one so close before. The badger looked up, then slowly, calmly walked up to him. 'Pam!' he called to his wife. 'Get a camera!' Two minutes later, blood from his arm was spattered over his front door.
'It was some kind of hell,' Fitzgerald, from Evesham, told the BBC, in 2003. 'His razor-blade teeth were around my arm.' Even after he had shaken if off, it gave chase, biting his legs and arms. 'I never envisaged I would be seeing my own insides,' he said. The badger then embarked on an 18-hour rampage around the town. Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly, out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that, right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking, unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many mainstream scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals, the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not inserting into animals something they don't have.'

A man is mauled by a bear in Kashmir, India
Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we have a heart, they have a heart.'
But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.
Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says. 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or something along those lines, where in reality it's about maintaining social rank.'
But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds. 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'
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Even stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became friends and played together.'
And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.
And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week, before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones. 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was once attached to them.'
Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'
British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows, meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for years.
Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald. 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions which send different messages. And when you combine the tail position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'
And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road. Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'

A lioness gnaws on a man’s body at Kiev zoo in 2006
Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism by calling the monkeys angry? 'Let the philosophers debate that if they want to,' says Bekoff. 'We've got too many other things we need to deal with without worrying about whether we're being anthropomorphic.'
If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002, scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example, fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death. Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been discovered that they're fond of infanticide.
The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam, last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources. You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and the world's largest terrestrial animal.'
Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos, have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.
'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says. 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression and produce hair-trigger responses.'
When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous state. It's not hard to see how McGreevy's dingo theory could be applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds annexed.
Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh, of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend time observing a strange creature before they decide how to classify it.'
Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're basically harmless and possibly tasty.
Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation. Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the early 1970s to more than 70,000.
What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth. According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're turning on us. A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they attacking us more?
'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their restraint. Why aren't they picking up guns?'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/10/sv_animals.xml

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