Surprise In The Mailbox
Fridays on the farm are special. With the road bi-secting the county road, Friday is the day we see more than the usual log trucks and commuters. The road is typically busier with those people who are able to get out and about for the weekends and Friday is their attempt to get a jump on the days off. Campers and trailers loaded with off-road toys can be seen regularly.
Fridays are also the day we get The Capital Press newspaper, this is the local news source for Washington, California, Idaho (and California when the important stuff oozes over the border). When I went out to the mailbox this Friday, the picture on the front of the newspaper had me stop to read while right there along the county road.
It was a picture of a bunch of cows with their heads stuck into a manger and they were chowing on garden vegetables. It did not look like the salad or bowl of cooked spaghetti squash like we would have on our dinning room table. This was a truckload of all kinds of veggies in whole form. It looked like full heads of cabbage, peppers, squash, huge carrots, celery and red chard. A nice mix that my critters would enjoy, but they would never be able to break into a winter squash and it, I wondered how they fixed that problem for these cows so I began reading. Of course, nothing was mentioned about the picture on the front page, so I continued onto page 9).
The story was all about milk alternatives, almond milk being the theme of the writing. The picture? It was put into the story to show that the ‘real’ milk producers eat veggies, I think. They really just needed to get a few cows onto the front page and it really did not matter the context. The dominant picture of the front page did grab my interest, but the story didn’t fulfill my questions. It was continued on page 9 and I had to juggle the rest of the mail along with the classified ad part of the newspaper to get to the continuation while still standing along the road.
On page 9, I saw a dairy farmer with a little calf pictured, but still no relationship to the story other than she was eventually going to be a milk producer some day. I got to the end of the story and still had no answers about the cattle feed when I realized the manger was positioned on a cement slab and that all the farmer would have to do is drive over the pile of veggies to break them open and create smaller pieces. The cows would then tear into the pile with gusto. The vegetables would be cleaned up and the critters would be full.
Once I got to the house and settled at the computer. I looked the story up on line. There they had the story but without the cool pic of that got me reading in the first place. It didn’t have the dairy farmer on page 9 either. So I won’t be able to show you!
Sometimes the story is just that, a story. We still have to find the meanings and connections no matter what the pictures say or don’t say.
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Susan – That same picture caught my eye, too with all the vegetables. I didn’t put together the difficulty the cows would have eating them whole, but then I don’t spend the time you do cutting apples and pears up for them. The article was written by Sierra Dawn McClain, my favorite writer for the Capital Press. She draws me into her articles with good descriptions and kind of a story telling manner. I think she may have gone overboard with the picture, however.
It was just disappointing to see great pictures but really nothing to do with the story.