published Dec. 2/2008: Farm Smells

Farms smell. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Depends what your mind set is. But it's natural.... Unless they're using sludge which is more like industrial and/or human sewage which sounds a bit risky to me. Don't blame the cows and other livestock for that one. Hey, manure happens.
If you want to keep building your condos and dream homes etc. near farms, deal with it. Just like I do when I have to drive by a farm during fertilizer season. But hey, I just driving by, I'm not stupid enough to set up my tent next to a farm field. Let's show some zoning sense here, people.

published March 5/08: Ontarion Beef Subsidy

The image is based on the famous painting "American Gothic". I thought it would be a good image to represent the feelings of some beef farmers who are getting (probably) too little, too late. I just changed it to "Ontario" Gothic.

Published Cartoons: Dec.21, '07 ...Outstanding Canadian Young Farmers Award

As I was getting this ready to post, I thought of the old joke... "I'm out standing in my field." Oh, yeah.... what field is that?" "The one out behind my house."
Anyway, seriously, congrats to the Koelens for winning this national award. Thank god some people are still interested in pursuing the farming career and that they're not biochemists working in some bioengineering factory somewhere in Toronto, New York, or Hong Kong.
If the image looks familiar, and you're old enough, yes, I borrowed an image from the old cartoon series "The Jestsons" and just played around with it a little.

From the Vault: Nov. 07... The alternative Faces of Farming calendar

As you may have already seen, I had a cartoon published Nov. 30 about "The Faces of Farming" calendar that featured one of our area's farmers for one of the months. If you haven't seen it, it's elsewhere on this blog. In that cartoon, I featured a disappointed bull. So for this cartoon, it occurred to me that if you change one letter in "faces" you get something that farm animals (and my cats) are very good at. I hope you are not offended. This is high end potty humour, I think.

Published Cartoons: Nov. 27, '07 ... Sludge

It seems to me that the sun's getting brighter and some farms are smelling worse. Thinning ozone accounts for a brighter sun... but what's making some farms stink at record levels? Perhaps it's the sludge, which according to the newspaper article is made up of lots of stuff, including human and medical waste. Nice, eh?

Published in November: The Faces of Farming

There was a real calendar put out and one of the months featured a photo of a prominent, youngish, area farmer. The photos in the calendar are pictures that apparently would be found sexy by women farmers... or city dwellers, too, I imagine (based on the reaction by my wife to the photo that was in the newspaper article). Thankfully, the calendar is not hanging anywhere in our house. But maybe someday there will be a "Faces of Cartooning" calendar. Now that could be pretty funny.

Published Cartoons: Nov. 15, '07 : Farm Produce Registration

Published Cartoons: Oct. 26, '07 : Protecting Herds from Predators

This is one of a number of my cartoons where the influence Gary Larson (Remember "The Far Side"?) has had on me.
The issue here was that farmers were worried that if they didn't have firearms their cattle, or whatever type of animals they were raising, were being, or would be, threatened by predators.

Published Cartoons: Oct. 23, '07: Jim Boynton Tribute

This is another of the ones I like to do that pays tribute to some noteworthy people in this area. The only thing I wish to point out is that if you hadn't read the original newspaper article in The Owen Sound Sun Times and/or you didn't know Mr. Boynton, each of the flags represents an organization he was a key member or leader of at some point.