As my title indicates, we can't believe that it is the end of August and we're still over 100 degrees. The nights are cool, though, so we take solace in that! It does make me think about the projected effects of climate change, and the general consensus of the effect of climate change on nighttime temperatures: moving them higher, and making it such that we don't have as much of a break from the daytime heat. Ugh.
I've been doing some reading, lately, about rural parts of the nation - and the world - and how our communities' response to it will be different from those in urban communities. What I come across time and time again is concern and consideration for third-world agriculture (yes, it seems that ONLY agriculture is associated with rural economies... meh. Topic for another day.), but a dismissal of US-based agriculture and, thus, rural economies. The general consensus, it seems, from people who study these things professionally (and, I would venture, most often do NOT live in a rural setting!), is that the rural United States will adapt with government subsidies, national price supports, and a slow move of production economies to other parts of the country. It seems that the plan is to simply abandon those economies - and thus those communities - that get too hot, too dry, and otherwise unsuitable for growing food. This is an economic question, certainly, but it is also a socio-cultural question: are we so happy with our current system that we are actually planning to continue to move billions of pounds of food across thousands of miles to get it to the final consumer? Are we satisfied that the answer is to dissolve locally-developed cultures and socio-economic structures in the human equivalent of a mass-market, homogeneous, quantity-first Costco? Is there not a more adaptive, efficient, respectful, and sustainable system available to us? I think the answer is "yes", but acknowledge that it will require a wholesale re-think of our current food economy and the policies that support it, as well as our rural cultures and how they adapt to a changing climate - social and geophysical!
In the meantime, however - and on a lighter note! - some farm inhabitants aren't minding the heat... and are even thriving!
We found this little lady last week, under a brown-eyed susan, with four new babies:
Our newest brood of surprise chicks: it looks as though they posed! The three you can see, here, are Mottled Java chicks, and the fourth one is hiding behind the feeder, and is an Ameraucana.
And this bed of winter squash didn't get the memo that it's supposed to be a single bed: it's taking over at least two others, and working on the flower bed over the fence!
Three types of winter squash that seem to be loving this heat!
And, of course, our beloved summer queens, who just can't help but make you feel good when you look at them!
All the same, we hope it's over, soon. It's this time of year that I start craving woven wool pants, slow-cooked meat stews, and apple everything. Enjoy these last few weeks of summer!