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Amen! :)

Americans are waking up to the threats arrayed against them by those who claim they will protect them, especially regarding food production and processing. Direct relationships between farmers and customers will restore communities, profits, and human health, cutting out the middle-man corporate profiteers and processors. It is the City Mice who are dependent on the Country Mice for their lives, not the other way around. COVID has revealed this, but also inflation, globalism, fake histrionic climate prophecies, and rising rates of infertility, cancer and other toxic-food-induced illnesses.

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I agree. I know it well, since it's very beginning, and have canoed past it. But is out of the sight and mind of the suburbanites in New Jersey who discarded their waste there. :) You are correct it threatens the watershed. It also can only grow just so big before a new one must be started -- and probably not in New Jersey. The crisis may be cited in Coventry, but it affects us all.....

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We bought our first Vermont home in 1983. Had a surface spring, next to a stream, at the base of a wooded hill. Delicious water.

I often lifted the spring lid, expecting to find some poor drowned creature adding a special aftertaste to our drinkage. Never did, I'm happy to say.

I few times, I repaired the footer valve on the output line deep in the spring. I'd use a 3" pump to drain the spring, so I could stand inside to do the repair (once in January). I was surprised it took so long to pump it out... Because I was draining the local water table, not just the water within the spring. A lesson for me in hydraulics. The extent of our water source was huge.

One day I hiked 100 yards up the stream bed to the hilltop, and found one of those immense farmer's dumps. It was a working farm, so lots of fresh goodies next to mysterious old-timely farm implements. At the origin of my drinking water!

We all survived it.

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The Stoddard farm was fed by such a spring. We used to pry open the lift and peek in -- I remember once there was a sizable brook trout in there -- who knows who dropped it in. My grandmother left the water running all winter to keep it freezing. To take baths in the clawfoot tub, Grammie would boil that water on her wood cookstove (all she ever used until her retirement in her 60s) and carry it into the bathroom. I remember her also pouring boiling water into the tub after we were in, to rewarm it. Above their well, some distance in the woods (where the water originated) was a strewn pile of junk we used to pick around. Years later I asked her about it, and she explained that was from Grandpa's Prohibition-Era still. I asked "Did he ever make any money off it?" to which she quickly responded "No, he always drank it all before it was ready." I also heard a story recently about how the farm workers had stored a quantity of beer in the spring box for haying, and to hide it from Grandpa. They got the hay in but Grandpa hadn't shown up. They looked everywhere, and finally found him -- passed out at the spring, all the beer gone. There were also Old Duke bottled all over the property -- gallon jugs, drained by Milburn.

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A bottle in the barn was (is?) a Vermont tradition. The winters are cold!

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Hi That mountain of garbage is in my backyard! Often it smells and it is noisy.

It is not out of sight or mind. This is a dangerous place for a landfill just a few feet from the river, that runs in the lake and the low lands all touching South Bay. The whole lake Memphrémagog is in danger. Who ever thought this is a good place for this!

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Imagine the magnitude of the problem when discarded gas stoves, gas cars, propane tanks, non-electric farm vehicles, public transport vehicles, etc. sink into the landscape. The regime careth not.

Will we see a return to the ways of the past? I wish. Convenience has come at a high cost. Progress has resulted in regress.

As to farmers? I would be willing to form coalitions to support our local farmers. In the coming days, their worth will be realized.

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