Seed catalogs do not just sell seeds. Often, they function as repositories of all things agricultural. Most include some sort of instructions for growing each variety of seed, and nearly all include brief descriptions for each fruit, flower or vegetable that they offer.
As my interests in seeds have drifted toward primarily heirloom varieties of produce, meaning that the seeds were developed through open pollination rather than manipulated for large scale industrial production, the catalogs selling them have gotten even more interesting. In addition to instructions, most sellers of heirloom seeds include at least some stories about the seeds themselves. I enjoy learning about the depression-era history of, say, mortgage lifter tomatoes in general, or of Halladay's Mortgage Lifter in particular. I feel the stories attached to the seeds—sometimes agriculturally focused, at other times culturally or socially so—better connect me to the long continuum of agricultural acts that comprise the bedrock of our culture.
Of seed catalogs, the D. Landreth Seed Company has the most fetching that I've come across to date. Established in 1780 in Philadelphia, Landreth's is the fifth oldest company in the United States. It's 2009-2011 catalog—which in addition to information related to ordering seeds is also filled with reproduced pages from over 150 years of Landreth's seed catalogs—is a beauty. I've spent several hours looking at images (“The grand display of D. Landreth & Sons, at the Southern Exposition in Louisville, KY, 1883,” page 14), reading nineteenth century customer satisfaction notes (“When a boy, fifty years ago, I bought your Seeds, and buy them yet,” says Abraham F. Hains, District of Columbia, 1884, page 15) and pouring over century-old planting ideas (which varieties of greens to plant—and how and when—for winter salads, page 31). As catalogs go, it's a keeper. It stays on my shelf long after its use as an ordering mechanism has passed.
One picture from the Landreth's catalog, entitled “Harvesting Onion Sets On Reedland Farm,” stands out to me for its ability to glimpse a working agricultural economy. The woodcut offers a panoramic view of the farm as its workers—all white, seemingly all mustachioed—work together in digging up, sorting and collecting onion sets into a series of bins stacked on wooden horse-drawn trailers. Although the catalog gives no date for the image, the ratio of horses to tractors in the scene (5:1 by my count) suggests that it was produced at the beginning of the 20th century when mechanized labor (tractors and such) as yet did not have a stranglehold on our national agriculture. (Mass mechanization of our agriculture began to occur between 1930 and 1945, when tractors in use increased from 920,000 to 2.4 million, according to a 2006 USDA publication.)
Though I am sure the farm life depicted in the image is idealized—the fact that it's populated entirely by white men, for example, suggests an implicit racialized and gendered order of workers on this Philadelphia farm—I was struck by the sheer numbers of workers in the landscape. Reedland farm at the time of onion set harvesting was a place bustling with human labor. To the left, workers on their knees dig up onion sets; at the picture's center two men chat and work together to dump the collected bins of sets into bigger piles; to the right, people stack and then haul the onions off to the horizon in horse-drawn trailers. All told, the picture shows over fifty men employed in the process of harvesting a product that will eventually be grown and eaten—consumed—by people like Abraham F. Hains of the District of Columbia. Food production, the image shows, is a labor intensive process.
Or at least it was. Fast forward 80 years to what that picture of agriculture might look like now. The image that comes most readily to my mind, Kevin Costner alone on a tractor plowing up a portion of his corn farm for a baseball diamond in Field of Dreams, is in many ways the direct opposite of the onion set harvest at Reedland. In place of the vibrant social activity of laboring men working together, we get a single man, broke and lonely, sitting atop his tractor.
The two images, each an artifice in its own way, nevertheless leak a certain truth. In 1900, nearly forty percent of the U.S. population, 31 million people, farmed on about 800 million acres of land; today, that number is closer to two percent of the population, or about 5.84 million of us, farming on close to 1 billion acres. If the Reedland scene is depicted as vibrant, and if by contrast a hundred years later Costner seems so damn lonely on his corn farm, it's because less people farm the land today. Twenty-five million less people, to be exact, even though the U.S. population—those who farmers are theoretically tasked with feeding—has increased by over 200 million over the past century.
The current paucity of farmers in the country has produced and reinforced a number of destructive behaviors. When 20 million less farmers are tasked with farming 200 million more acres to help feed 200 million more people, some things have got to give.
And give they have. As farm owners have come to rely less and less upon human labor, they have become dependent more and more upon other forms of labor to supplement their lost manpower. They must pay Kubota for the tractor (and its upkeep), Monsanto for the genetically modified seeds, Du Pont for the pesticides; Cargill for the technical expertise of making all of the farm's mechanized “systems” work properly. They must scale up their production and trim down the number of crops they produce, such that over the past 100 years, average farm sizes have increased by 350 acres (to 450 acres) while the number of crops produced on them have decreased from 5 crops to 1 crop per farm. All these things have costs: monetary, ecological, cultural, demographic.
They also have great labor costs. As our farming has become increasingly mechanized, it has also become increasingly depopulated. Somewhere along the line, whether by choice or necessity (and probably a little of both), farmers chose to support machines and poisons over laboring human beings by putting their dollars behind industry and technology rather than workers. An estimated 15.3 million people were unemployed in December; we've lost 25 million farmers over the past century for an industry—basic sustenance—that never experiences a downturn and that, theoretically, cannot be outsourced. We should begin to think about how to re-people our farms—not as models of efficiency (though human labor on farms has the potential to decrease farmers' economic dependence on fossil fuel burning farm machinery and ecosystem-killing pesticides), but as a great source of jobs production. We want farmers because we all must eat in this country; it is a basic and irreplaceable economic necessity and yet, as a percentage of our GDP, farming registers a minuscule 0.7% (down from 7.7% in 1930).
I have heard a lot about the need for a “green” economy, mostly from well-meaning liberal democrats. Usually what is had in mind consists of creating new energy grids and systems, investing in solar or wind, and re-fixating on super-fuel efficient cars. These are, of course, fine and needed things. But they also tend to require different sorts of outside inputs. For the most part, these things require access to exceedingly costly tuition dollars for the right to gain access into the new high tech green service economy that they are imagined to be a part of.
Perhaps a quicker, cheaper, and on the whole more effective way to “green” our economy and landscape might involve something a bit more basic and old fashioned. Why not begin employing the nation by de-mechanizing at least one industry?
Why not send the nation out into the fields?
05 February 2010
Seeding this year's garden
Although I am not a particular fan of New Year's celebrations, I do enjoy the new year. January in Lexington is when the cold really sets in and my nighttime walks get magnificently quiet: no bugs, less auto traffic, fewer pedestrians. Perhaps because January is when winter starts to take hold that it is also when I begin to peruse the seed catalogs and actively start working my imagination toward the coming year's garden.
For the past two years I have retreated to a small room built into a corner of our unfinished basement to choose my seeds and plot my immaculate (and never realized) spring and summer gardens. The room is essentially a 6'x10' area, framed in to separate it from the rest of the open basement (presumably as a grow room at some point in time). Just over half the square footage is taken up by a four foot high concrete ledge, painted white here inside the room, which runs the entire length of the two back corner walls and leaves room for about 2-3 people to comfortably stand.
The place has become my garden headquarters. The concrete ledge that brackets the inside of the room is wide enough to hold comfortably two seed trays twice over and still leave me enough space on it to lay out books and seed catalogs, write in my journal, draw sketches of hare-brained ideas, collect stacks of pilfered Cricket Press, Holler and other art posters (to later decorate the room), lay down half-drunk bottles of wine, and store a bunch of old seeds for the next year's garden. The place is my winter and spring refuge.
In what is beginning to resemble a seasonal habit, I began my return to my garden headquarters in December by locating and corralling all my packets of seed, which I had gathered at different times during last year's chaotic fall growing season and placed at different points throughout the house and my truck, and moving them downstairs. December's chore finished, in the new year last week I began to sort and catalog bits of data in my log book. As the temperature dropped into the teens at several points during the past week, I sat in the basement, beneath the dirt and under some fluorescent light, and started preparing this year's gardens.
I began with the seeds.
A look at my log book after cataloging both “field seed” (what I saved from last year's harvest) and “packet seed” (seed from last year's purchased seeds) shows that I was more more diligent about saving seed this past year. That seems hardly possible—I'm a lazy gardener, almost as a matter of principal—but the log book doesn't lie: 4 different varieties each of tomatoes and peppers, three each of beans and winter squash, and two types of watermelon. Not good, but better, and with names like big red and med pink (tomatoes), watermelon I and watermelon II (watermelons), and green, soup and bean 3 (beans), I've still got the lazy covered.
Combined with last year's packet seed, all told I've got basil, beans, summer and winter squash, eggplant, watermelon, peppers, greens, a variety of herbs, and a ridiculous 15 varieties of heirloom tomatoes that I can begin under lights in late February. (My log book tells me that last year my first batch of seeds were started February 28; I'll try a batch of peppers a little bit earlier this year.)
Subsequent nights I have spent perusing the seed catalogs, which began arriving to my door in mid-December. I normally begin by choosing a couple catalogs and circling anything that I might plausibly want. When I'm done looking through all these, I make a list of everything circled and then compare it with my own catalog of seed.
I'm pretty exuberant, so I try and make a seed budget (how much do I want to spend on seed this year?). This helps me pare down costs but also allows me to sample new seed by buying from the catalogs. This year, I'm focusing mainly on different varieties of greens, carrots, okra, cucumbers and sunflowers (4 varieties as a border for a natural labyrinth a friend grew into some uncut grass). In my early, teen-charged seed-spreading days, I spent close to $150; I'm now down to around $50, a number that does not include potatoes. (Ronniger's Potato catalog has yet to arrive, but in conjunction with some friends I will be getting boatloads of their purple and yellow and red fingerlings.)
This number is way higher than most backyard gardeners; I happen to have access to a number of outlets for my seed. I am fortunate in that, along with four friends, I rent a 12 acre place 13 miles away in Keene, KY. We have developed over several years three or so gardens where we grow potatoes, corn, winter squash, watermelons, and other things that do not require constant harvest. In addition, off Leestown Road I have developed a sizeable (for the lazy amateur gardener, anyway) plot of land at Bluegrass Community and Technical College's PeaceMeal Gardens. This produce feeds into my Free Store, which runs into the late spring and summer months when my teaching schedule relaxes considerably. (This garden will receive most of the okra and greens, two products in high demand last year.) And finally, I normally grow tomato plants from last year's seeds and give them away to any of my 5 classes of students who desire them.
Combined with my backyard garden, these side-interests make for a considerably larger seed footprint than most non-professionals. But the basics are still there: start checking out seed catalogs now. If they treat you like they treat me, even in the dead of winter—and perhaps because of the dead of winter—the catalogs will inspire the living shit out of you. They'll make you hungry, sure enough.
For the past two years I have retreated to a small room built into a corner of our unfinished basement to choose my seeds and plot my immaculate (and never realized) spring and summer gardens. The room is essentially a 6'x10' area, framed in to separate it from the rest of the open basement (presumably as a grow room at some point in time). Just over half the square footage is taken up by a four foot high concrete ledge, painted white here inside the room, which runs the entire length of the two back corner walls and leaves room for about 2-3 people to comfortably stand.
The place has become my garden headquarters. The concrete ledge that brackets the inside of the room is wide enough to hold comfortably two seed trays twice over and still leave me enough space on it to lay out books and seed catalogs, write in my journal, draw sketches of hare-brained ideas, collect stacks of pilfered Cricket Press, Holler and other art posters (to later decorate the room), lay down half-drunk bottles of wine, and store a bunch of old seeds for the next year's garden. The place is my winter and spring refuge.
In what is beginning to resemble a seasonal habit, I began my return to my garden headquarters in December by locating and corralling all my packets of seed, which I had gathered at different times during last year's chaotic fall growing season and placed at different points throughout the house and my truck, and moving them downstairs. December's chore finished, in the new year last week I began to sort and catalog bits of data in my log book. As the temperature dropped into the teens at several points during the past week, I sat in the basement, beneath the dirt and under some fluorescent light, and started preparing this year's gardens.
I began with the seeds.
A look at my log book after cataloging both “field seed” (what I saved from last year's harvest) and “packet seed” (seed from last year's purchased seeds) shows that I was more more diligent about saving seed this past year. That seems hardly possible—I'm a lazy gardener, almost as a matter of principal—but the log book doesn't lie: 4 different varieties each of tomatoes and peppers, three each of beans and winter squash, and two types of watermelon. Not good, but better, and with names like big red and med pink (tomatoes), watermelon I and watermelon II (watermelons), and green, soup and bean 3 (beans), I've still got the lazy covered.
Combined with last year's packet seed, all told I've got basil, beans, summer and winter squash, eggplant, watermelon, peppers, greens, a variety of herbs, and a ridiculous 15 varieties of heirloom tomatoes that I can begin under lights in late February. (My log book tells me that last year my first batch of seeds were started February 28; I'll try a batch of peppers a little bit earlier this year.)
Subsequent nights I have spent perusing the seed catalogs, which began arriving to my door in mid-December. I normally begin by choosing a couple catalogs and circling anything that I might plausibly want. When I'm done looking through all these, I make a list of everything circled and then compare it with my own catalog of seed.
I'm pretty exuberant, so I try and make a seed budget (how much do I want to spend on seed this year?). This helps me pare down costs but also allows me to sample new seed by buying from the catalogs. This year, I'm focusing mainly on different varieties of greens, carrots, okra, cucumbers and sunflowers (4 varieties as a border for a natural labyrinth a friend grew into some uncut grass). In my early, teen-charged seed-spreading days, I spent close to $150; I'm now down to around $50, a number that does not include potatoes. (Ronniger's Potato catalog has yet to arrive, but in conjunction with some friends I will be getting boatloads of their purple and yellow and red fingerlings.)
This number is way higher than most backyard gardeners; I happen to have access to a number of outlets for my seed. I am fortunate in that, along with four friends, I rent a 12 acre place 13 miles away in Keene, KY. We have developed over several years three or so gardens where we grow potatoes, corn, winter squash, watermelons, and other things that do not require constant harvest. In addition, off Leestown Road I have developed a sizeable (for the lazy amateur gardener, anyway) plot of land at Bluegrass Community and Technical College's PeaceMeal Gardens. This produce feeds into my Free Store, which runs into the late spring and summer months when my teaching schedule relaxes considerably. (This garden will receive most of the okra and greens, two products in high demand last year.) And finally, I normally grow tomato plants from last year's seeds and give them away to any of my 5 classes of students who desire them.
Combined with my backyard garden, these side-interests make for a considerably larger seed footprint than most non-professionals. But the basics are still there: start checking out seed catalogs now. If they treat you like they treat me, even in the dead of winter—and perhaps because of the dead of winter—the catalogs will inspire the living shit out of you. They'll make you hungry, sure enough.
North of Center end of fiscal year report: A state of our newspaper address
“The newspaper business is great—if you can keep the money out of it.”
Troy Lyle, graduate of UK journalism and NoC sports editor
Author's Note: These updates on the paper will be delivered periodically for anyone needing the push or knowledge to start up their own micro-community ventures. For those not interested, this will all come off as pretentious bullshit. If you fall into the uninterested camp, I suggest moving on to a different article.
In May of 2009, North of Center appeared in Lexington, KY, for the first time. I knew we were onto something good when I teared up while reading a draft of Beth Connors Manke's feature piece on affordable housing in Lexington. That first issue, which included Beth's piece and came in at eight pages of text and 1,000 copies, cost me a little less than $270 to produce.
The first place that I asked for permission to leave the paper at, a business on North Limestone Street, told me no. Luckily the second and third places, Alfalfa's and Sunrise Bakery, said, “Why yes of course.” Were it not for their enthusiasm and kindness, the paper might not have lasted more than a couple issues. I am easily discouraged and a poor salesman to boot.
North of Center began operation in May 2009 without a business plan, without any advertisers or other source of self-generating income, and without any hired help. It had no distributors until a couple issues ago when Don Pratt, having come across it at some point, emailed and asked out of the blue to give them away. The paper's first paid advertisement didn't come until issue 3—a $25 ad from Evenstone Landscaping—from a friend who just wanted to help see the paper work out. Our main ad guy, Jerry Moody, has no phone and is currently homeless. The paper's writers work for free around their own full and weird schedules. It was not until issue 8 that our layout person, Keith, was able to get to bed before 5:00 AM on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Even now, we habitually run to 3:00 and 4:00 AM on layout nights, sandwiching our learning of the newspaper business around our full-time day jobs. Only last week did I finally get an office in our house out of which to work.
I started North of Center for a number of reasons, but chief among them were (1) a curiosity to see if I could do it and (2) a desire to create a community-minded reading text and writing outlet for students taking my first-year writing classes at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.
As a sort of working bonus, in the summers I teach an extra class of first-year writing. As a community college teacher, the class is a blessing. After a year juggling five classes a semester, the one summer course allows me to treat the course like a seminar...and it gives me extra summertime cash to supplement my salary. Last year, I bought a canoe with some of that cash. This summer, I used the summer teaching money to pay for the first six issues of North of Center—enough to cover most all of the summer.
As it turns out, I bought one king-hell of a summer adventure: newspaper drops to the poet Eric Sutherland at the public library and to Krem the grocer at Wine+Market; early-morning chats about “the newspaper life” over coffee and donuts and cold pizza with Troy and Keith; interviewing Seedleaf and Urban Gleaning leaders about the construction of community food networks; getting my own sports beat; meeting up at Al's Bar on nights the paper came out for a group looksie over beer, jokes, and food; meeting the artist John Lackey and the author Ed McClanahan; learning about my community from the viewpoint of someone obligated to write about it.
Typical male that I am, I have a one-track mind that is ill-suited to the kind of multi-tasking long-range business planning skills I should have as editor in chief of this filthy local rag. When we started last summer, that one-track focused on seeing if the collection of every-issue writers who really make North of Center work—Beth, Keith, Troy, Michael Benton, Colleen Glenn, Nick Kidd, Andrew Battista, myself—could actually commit to putting out a biweekly paper, on schedule, with no pay at all.
Having answered that question in the affirmative, this past fall I've wanted to ensure that these same writers, when most of them went back to their everyday jobs teaching college students how to read and write, didn't go certifiably insane attempting to make biweekly deadlines for long 2000 word articles or dropping off caches of papers to places like the Lexington Art League or CD Central.
In short, this first fiscal year has been less about evaluating our fiscal viability than it has been about ensuring that the paper's most important asset, its human capital, could function well. I wanted to know, did our hobby have legs to stand on?
The way I see it, in a venture like this, there's little sense in worrying about money when you don't know if the project is worth saving to begin with, and no project can work without invested, committed human capital. We have been fortunate in that the paper lucked into a group of varied, thoughtful, committed, and above all damn good writers who hold somewhat similar notions of putting their talents on display out there in the public, for the public.
So purely in terms of human capital, the state of NoC is good. On the docket for next fiscal year, we'll have interns and potential collaborations with some university classes. People have begun to ask about things they want to see covered, which means, hopefully, that the paper should continue to move in the future toward different avenues of focus, staffed by other people like our film and culture and sports and features editors who are interested in putting forth the energy to channel their voice and to actively assist others to effectively channel theirs. People are even starting to write letters to the editor (though we'd encourage more). Our human capital, for the moment at least, seems to be moving toward stable footing.
But now we have to answer the economic question: are we economically resilient. That question thus far remains unresolved. As a paper, we have a commitment to offering our writing and insights to the community as a freely given, freely taken community good. But at some point, we have to pay the bills; at some point, I'll feel an obligation to pay our writers at least a pittance for their contributions.
But still, things are not all bad here north of the center. Though we still lose money on virtually every issue we put out, we've steadily lost less money with each issue—a record Bernanke and Summers and Geithner would be proud of. We've got some advertisers (who you should support within your own personal means) that seem like they'll be steady streams of revenue, and we're always optimistic about prospects for a couple more. At the moment, we've built up enough dough in our business account to pay for about the next six issues or so.
A six-issue horizon. It's almost as if we're right back where we started, which if I can recall at this late hour in the evening, was a wonderful and exciting place to be.
To give all of us some much-needed time off to recharge and reflect on what worked and what didn't, what we can build on and what might be best cast off, North of Center will go on vacation for the rest of December; we'll start back in mid January. Here on the Chimp, we'll continue posting our older articles.
Troy Lyle, graduate of UK journalism and NoC sports editor
Author's Note: These updates on the paper will be delivered periodically for anyone needing the push or knowledge to start up their own micro-community ventures. For those not interested, this will all come off as pretentious bullshit. If you fall into the uninterested camp, I suggest moving on to a different article.
In May of 2009, North of Center appeared in Lexington, KY, for the first time. I knew we were onto something good when I teared up while reading a draft of Beth Connors Manke's feature piece on affordable housing in Lexington. That first issue, which included Beth's piece and came in at eight pages of text and 1,000 copies, cost me a little less than $270 to produce.
The first place that I asked for permission to leave the paper at, a business on North Limestone Street, told me no. Luckily the second and third places, Alfalfa's and Sunrise Bakery, said, “Why yes of course.” Were it not for their enthusiasm and kindness, the paper might not have lasted more than a couple issues. I am easily discouraged and a poor salesman to boot.
North of Center began operation in May 2009 without a business plan, without any advertisers or other source of self-generating income, and without any hired help. It had no distributors until a couple issues ago when Don Pratt, having come across it at some point, emailed and asked out of the blue to give them away. The paper's first paid advertisement didn't come until issue 3—a $25 ad from Evenstone Landscaping—from a friend who just wanted to help see the paper work out. Our main ad guy, Jerry Moody, has no phone and is currently homeless. The paper's writers work for free around their own full and weird schedules. It was not until issue 8 that our layout person, Keith, was able to get to bed before 5:00 AM on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Even now, we habitually run to 3:00 and 4:00 AM on layout nights, sandwiching our learning of the newspaper business around our full-time day jobs. Only last week did I finally get an office in our house out of which to work.
I started North of Center for a number of reasons, but chief among them were (1) a curiosity to see if I could do it and (2) a desire to create a community-minded reading text and writing outlet for students taking my first-year writing classes at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.
As a sort of working bonus, in the summers I teach an extra class of first-year writing. As a community college teacher, the class is a blessing. After a year juggling five classes a semester, the one summer course allows me to treat the course like a seminar...and it gives me extra summertime cash to supplement my salary. Last year, I bought a canoe with some of that cash. This summer, I used the summer teaching money to pay for the first six issues of North of Center—enough to cover most all of the summer.
As it turns out, I bought one king-hell of a summer adventure: newspaper drops to the poet Eric Sutherland at the public library and to Krem the grocer at Wine+Market; early-morning chats about “the newspaper life” over coffee and donuts and cold pizza with Troy and Keith; interviewing Seedleaf and Urban Gleaning leaders about the construction of community food networks; getting my own sports beat; meeting up at Al's Bar on nights the paper came out for a group looksie over beer, jokes, and food; meeting the artist John Lackey and the author Ed McClanahan; learning about my community from the viewpoint of someone obligated to write about it.
Typical male that I am, I have a one-track mind that is ill-suited to the kind of multi-tasking long-range business planning skills I should have as editor in chief of this filthy local rag. When we started last summer, that one-track focused on seeing if the collection of every-issue writers who really make North of Center work—Beth, Keith, Troy, Michael Benton, Colleen Glenn, Nick Kidd, Andrew Battista, myself—could actually commit to putting out a biweekly paper, on schedule, with no pay at all.
Having answered that question in the affirmative, this past fall I've wanted to ensure that these same writers, when most of them went back to their everyday jobs teaching college students how to read and write, didn't go certifiably insane attempting to make biweekly deadlines for long 2000 word articles or dropping off caches of papers to places like the Lexington Art League or CD Central.
In short, this first fiscal year has been less about evaluating our fiscal viability than it has been about ensuring that the paper's most important asset, its human capital, could function well. I wanted to know, did our hobby have legs to stand on?
The way I see it, in a venture like this, there's little sense in worrying about money when you don't know if the project is worth saving to begin with, and no project can work without invested, committed human capital. We have been fortunate in that the paper lucked into a group of varied, thoughtful, committed, and above all damn good writers who hold somewhat similar notions of putting their talents on display out there in the public, for the public.
So purely in terms of human capital, the state of NoC is good. On the docket for next fiscal year, we'll have interns and potential collaborations with some university classes. People have begun to ask about things they want to see covered, which means, hopefully, that the paper should continue to move in the future toward different avenues of focus, staffed by other people like our film and culture and sports and features editors who are interested in putting forth the energy to channel their voice and to actively assist others to effectively channel theirs. People are even starting to write letters to the editor (though we'd encourage more). Our human capital, for the moment at least, seems to be moving toward stable footing.
But now we have to answer the economic question: are we economically resilient. That question thus far remains unresolved. As a paper, we have a commitment to offering our writing and insights to the community as a freely given, freely taken community good. But at some point, we have to pay the bills; at some point, I'll feel an obligation to pay our writers at least a pittance for their contributions.
But still, things are not all bad here north of the center. Though we still lose money on virtually every issue we put out, we've steadily lost less money with each issue—a record Bernanke and Summers and Geithner would be proud of. We've got some advertisers (who you should support within your own personal means) that seem like they'll be steady streams of revenue, and we're always optimistic about prospects for a couple more. At the moment, we've built up enough dough in our business account to pay for about the next six issues or so.
A six-issue horizon. It's almost as if we're right back where we started, which if I can recall at this late hour in the evening, was a wonderful and exciting place to be.
To give all of us some much-needed time off to recharge and reflect on what worked and what didn't, what we can build on and what might be best cast off, North of Center will go on vacation for the rest of December; we'll start back in mid January. Here on the Chimp, we'll continue posting our older articles.
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