Making Farming a Reality in Rose Bud, Arkansas

I met Steve Grappe ten years ago in St. Louis when I was attending a Lightroom course he was teaching. Back then, Steve was an excellent photographer who eventually became my photography mentor. He taught many other people too. He was the center of vibrant photography community. I quickly learned that Steve was an indefatigable man with an expansive skillset and nonstop creativity. A few years ago Steve left St. Louis to reconnect with Kelly, his prom date from many years earlier when they attended high school together in Arkansas. They were married in May 2018. He took a day gig as a car mechanic and she continued her job as a telecom executive. They settled down and lived happily ever after. The End.

Actually, that's not quite the end of the story. A few months later, they bought a dilapidated old farm in Rose Bud, Arkansas. It was actually much worse than dilapidated. I think Steve said he bought it for a bag of acorns. They worked around the clock to fix up the place and this took an enormous amount of sweat equity. Steve and Kelly were helped considerably in this project by Kelly's teenage daughter, Grace.

Steve and Kelly were still most definitely not farmers, but at about this same time they decided they needed to learn how to run a farm, so they attended one of the best farm schools available: Youtube. They also asked lots of questions and listened to others in the business. They jumped right in and brought in some livestock, including chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and pigs. They named their special place "Forevermost Farms," a name based upon a syrupy romantic encounter that I don't have time for right now. All of that was such long time ago . . . To recap, Steve and Kelly got married all the way back in May of 2018. They then bought a run-down farm, turned it into a really cool place where some of the animals wear clothes and sometimes sing in little animal quartets. Steve and Kelly went to YouTube University in order to learn how to humanely and organically raise these eccentric critters. Their work has become their passion and I now realize that they were just getting started.

Fast forword: In the past couple weeks, Steve and Kelly said goodbye to their latest batch of 3,000 chickens that they raised over the past few months. They also recently said goodbye to 300 turkeys, 60 pigs and, if I'm remembering correctly, a partridge in a pear tree. Most recently, they announced that one of their dogs is pregnant, which will provide them with more dogs to help them raise their livestock. Things are always happening at Forevermost.

The above numbers boggle my mind, but I've visited Steve and Kelly and I've seen their beautiful place. I've seen many of their animals and I know that many of those animals have both personalities and names. Steve has also become an expert in the mating habits of their animals. He carefully (some would say voyeuristically) observes the animals to see who is doing what to whom. Beware. If you ask Steve a question about animal sex, he will speak to you much more directly than your parents ever did when they gave you the "sex talk."

As Forevermost Farms has become a reality, I've seen a special glow in the eyes of Steve and Kelly. They have accomplished something I would have thought impossible until I saw it with my own eyes, especially in that short time frame, and it was all done on a limited budget. But guess what? My two wonderful upbeat hard-working friends have now most definitely become farmers.

If you'd like to know more about the story of Forevermost Farms, you are invited to follow Steve and Kelly on Facebook or at the Forevermost Farms Website. Please do visit their website so that you can take in some of this celebration that has become their lives.

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Anecdotes v Statistics

When do a handful of anecdotal events observed in a complex system prove millions of unseen events? Almost never. Our vast time-tested literature on statistics must guide our extrapolations in these situations and anyone suggesting otherwise should be ignored. These were my thoughts as I read this Tweet by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. In a comment to this Tweet, Scott mentions these specific problem areas: "Tail ratios, normal distribution, statistical significance, probability, hypothesis testing . . ."

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People Who Refuse to Read What J. K. Rowling Writes about People Who are Transgender Hate Her for her Writings.

This Tweet and others by John Cleese on transgender issues are eye-opening and raise an important point. This can be confirmed quickly by cruising Twitter. Numerous people refuse to read what J. K. Rowling writes about people who are transgender, yet they hate her for what she supposedly said. This is even more distressing than the large number of people who read only headlines before responding to posts or sharing the entire article. "59 percent of all links shared on social networks aren’t actually clicked on at all, implying the majority of article shares aren’t based on actual reading." I've seen it repeatedly on Twitter that Woke Folk claim that Rowling has said things that she never said.  Tweets by or about Abigail Shrier draw hate from the same crowd (and from large media outlets), most of whom claim that she is "anti trans," when 1) there is no evidence of this and 2) Shrier's book, Irreversible Damage, focuses only on teenagers who are undergoing surgery and hormone treatment based upon self-diagnosis and without the benefit of any counseling in an attempt to change their gender. 

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