Wherefore & Why:

by Peter Johnson

Sometimes, we encounter people who are so overlyassured of their knowledge of all things, that they can be overly so—or as a lady friend once said, 'overweening'---she was an English major, as opposed to an English Major. (overweening • \oh-ver-WEE-ning\ • adjective. 1: arrogant, presumptuous 2: immoderate, exaggerated. At times, more humility and less hubris can go a long way towards making us all better people.

To achieve my goal,--'To Help Make North Gremlins Less 'Over-Weenies',--I have compiled the following:

Useless Trivia: A dime has 118 ridges, a crocodile can't stick out its tongue, a dragonfly has a 24-hour lifespan and a goldfish's memory is all of 3 seconds.

Now cats! Well, there's an interesting critter: cats have 32 muscles in their ears. That's right, 32! Two and two-thirds dozen muscles to NOT use when you call. That many times. it will act like it can't hear you when you are trying to get it back into the house late at night. The same number of genes to make up their disinterested, people-ignoring nature. Are cats overweening by nature?

And still with the Animal Kingdom, snails can sleep for three years. Just a small point here: how do you tell if it is alive, let alone sleeping? They don't really dash about at the best of times. Next, if you are being consumed by a shark, you can take some solace in the fact that it is the only fish that can blink both of its eyes. How about the eyes of an ostrich? They are bigger than its brain—it has a relatively small head, so it's brain is not enormous. Is your brain getting bigger?

Gangsters Anyone?

According to Al Capone's business cards, he was a furniture salesman. He grew up in Brooklyn, and had only a middle-school education. He had a scar on his face...thus the nickname. He got it in a fight, in a brothel of all places. Isn't fighting in a brothel kind of counter-productive?

Mr. Capone found Chicago weather to be too cold, so he set up shop in Florida. Does this sound like someone else who loves being in the news? Scarface—Al, was eventually convicted, not of being a crook, but of income tax evasion. Again, the parallels are eerie... uncanny ..strange. (okay, enough with the synonyms).

Words at Your Fingertips, Spelling & Language: There is a dearth words in English that rhyme with: 'month', 'orange', 'silver' and 'purple' (to correct this, my mother made up 'burple'-she defined it as the colour of a hiccup). On your key-

Outgoing Board chair values volunteerism

grown to know WDMH and Dundas Manor well.

board, the longest word that can be typed using only the left-hand keys is 'stewardesses'; with the right hand?

'Lollipop'---sweet!

Random Stuff: Our eyes are always the same size throughout our lives, whereas our ears and nose continue to grow. Babies are born without kneecaps. (I thought I was trapped inside a woman's body... then I was born.) You can't keep your eyes open when you sneeze. 'Dreamt' is the only word in this language ending in 'mt'. Leonardo da Vinci, who invented almost everything, also took care of scissors...which has no singular form, by the way: like trousers, stairs, clothes, goods, belongings, earnings—to name a few.

That completes my list of useless, pointless factoids. I look forward to hearing from the appropriate member of council regarding my nomination as “Nominal Nurturing Citizen of the Year for Networking with North Grenvillans to Overcome Over-weenie-ness”.

I am not being facetious when I say that I will humbly hang the award in a prominent location...next to my well-thumbed Oxford English Dictionary. Be well Weenies.

Rolling lane closures in Winchester

submitted by Township of ND

From May 15th until September 1st there will be rolling lane closures on SDG 3/Main Street in Winchester during the day and at night to facilitate the new sewer main construction.

Work is anticipated to be conducted from 7:00am5:00pm Monday to Friday. Construction will be from 12048 SDG 3 (just west of Joel Steele Community Centre) to just east of the intersection of St. Lawrence Street and Main Street.

The lane closures will be 100-200 metres in length at any given time and will moved along the road as the construction progresses. A flag person and/or automated lights will be controlling the flow of traffic.

submitted by Jane Adams

Chris Chevalier is leaving the helm as Chair of the WDMH Foundation Board of Directors, but her love of volunteering will continue. In fact, it has been part of her life since she was a candy striper at the Montreal General Hospital as a teenager.

Chris joined the Foundation Board in 2017 and became Chair in 2022. At the time, she noted: “I am so very honoured and pleased to have been elected as Chair. Over the past five years, I have

I look forward to continuing my work with this incredible team - to help grow our community of donors and to work together to help ensure that WDMH is the very best hospital, and that Dundas Manor is the very best long-term-care home, to be found anywhere!”

During her tenure, Chris has done just that. While the pandemic changed many of the Foundation’s fundraising plans, the team didn’t miss a beat. “We’ve been blessed to have a group of volunteers who work together toward a common goal. And it’s been terrific working with Kristen and the Foundation team. I give them all the credit.”

Chris says the Foundation’s success speaks to the credibility of Win- chester District Memorial Hospital. “It’s a really good hospital and it’s where I go for medical care,” she adds.

Looking forward, Chris will now have more time to devote to other interests. She is involved with a legal aid clinic called ACTO or Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. She also volunteers with two animal support organizations – Critter Cabs and Freedom Drivers – helping to relocate rescue animals. While it’s mostly dogs and cats, Chris has also transported pigs and roosters!

Best wishes and thank you Chris!

“May your walls know joy; May every room hold laughter and every window open to great possibility”

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Fertilizer - Seed - Crop Protection

Tie-stalls banned?

couraged” to go the free-stall route, a trend that “aligns with research on consumer/ public viewpoints and the long-term social sustainability of the industry.”

“Do I think a free-stall is better?” asked Chestervillearea dairy farmer Andrew DeJong, who operates a 40head robotic free-stall herd with his father. “Not necessarily. I do prefer it myself, but I think as an industry we need to move in the direction that the consumer wants. Ultimately the consumer is going to heavily influence what we have to do because they are the customers.”

The DeJong farm was a tie-stall operation until six years ago, and the farmer said he had no regrets about switching to free-stall.

The cows benefit from having food and water right in front of them, and are pastured from May until the end of October. “And then they come in, and it’s amazing, the older cows, they know their stalls, they go in the barn, and pick out their stall.”

Her son, Rob, is a “cow person” and wouldn’t have it any other way, but she conceded that if the operation were ever to expand, it would likely go free-stall.

Depends on who you talk to on the committee that made the rules

by Nelson Zandbergen

Courtesy of Farmers Forum

Just don’t call it a ban on new tie-stall dairy barns: The recently updated National Dairy Code requires that all newly built dairy barns “must allow daily, untethered freedom of movement and social interactions year-round.” That will be the rule as of April 1, 2024.

The Dairy Farmers of Canada insists a tie-stall barn can be constructed to meet the new standard in the latest Code of Practice For the Care and Handling of Dairy Cattle. “Nowhere in the code does it state that tie-stall barns are banned,” the DFC said in a statement by email.

“It is very possible to construct a new tie-stall barn with the ability for cows to have daily access to loose housing for some part of the day (pen, pasture, dry lot, etc),” the DFC said.

The Dairy Farmers of Ontario took the same position, asserting in a statement that a tie-stall barn could “meet the requirement” of a newly built barn.

But Humane Canada, which had a representative on the 18-person committee that developed the new Code, sees it differently.

“Once the code comes into effect … no new tie-stall barns can be built and all newly-built barns must allow for daily, year-round freedom of movement and social interactions,” Humane Canada spokesperson Kristina ing that cows be untethered daily in all new barns, Ontario dairy consultant Jack Rodenburg said it struck him as leaving no wiggle room to accommodate a new tiestall barn.

Brinston-area dairy farmer Anna Smail said that tie-stall barns have their advantages, including “individual cow comfort and cow care.”

The biggest disadvantage, Smail said, is the extra labour needed to run a tie-stall herd and difficulty finding hired help. “If you have a tie-stall, you have to be there 24/7 or you have to put someone there, and if you’re the only one on the farm, there’s no relief.” farms. According to the DFO’s 2022 stats, 54 % of producers are tie-stall versus 46 % free-stall. However, it’s believed the majority of dairy cattle in the Province are milked in a free-stall environment today because those operators tend to run larger herds than their tiestall counterparts.

Ban or no ban, the new Code also states that farmers building new barns are “en-

Smail, who farms with her husband and son in a tiestall setup, said they can tell right away if a cow is having a health problem, “and we can look after it right away. We hardly ever have a cow down that needs a special call for the vet.”

Her neighbour, dairy farmer John Westervelt, suggested that squeezing tie-stall operators out of the industry would make it that much harder for new dairy farmers to enter the field.

“It’s one more detriment for a beginner to overcome,” said Westervelt, whose own farm features a robotic freestall barn, after many years as a tie-stall operation.

Koehn

Merchant told Farmers Forum by email.

Merchant added that the code’s stipulations for new barns “cannot be met by tiestall barns.”

When asked for his take on the key sentence mandat-

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Existing tie-stalls will be allowed to continue operating without alterations and subject to a new but less onerous untethered rule that comes into effect on April 1, 2027. These existing tie-stall operators’ cows will then have to be let loose at some point between calvings, such as between milkings in the summer or having them on a bedding pack or similar loose-housing area once dried off. Both practices are common, and Rodenburg estimated that less than 10 % of existing tie-stall farms keep all of their adult animals tied up in stalls all the time.

Tie-stall operators still comprise the bare majority of Ontario’s 3,273 dairy

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