When the Directors Guild of America recently presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Ridley Scott, the Hollywood banquet featured wines from Ohio’s Ravenhurst Champagne Cellars.
Shipping Ohio wines to California may seem counterintuitive, but for Ravenhurst vintner Chuck Harris, the Guild’s order acknowledged that he and his wife, Nina Busch, produce premium estate wines amid Union and Hardin counties’ farm fields near Mt. Victory. “It shows that great wine is great wine regardless of where it comes from,” he says.
The first containers Kathleen Killilea remembers planting were terra cotta window boxes with cherub embellishments. “My father lifted me over the wall of a client’s garden and handed them to me,” she recalls. Killilea’s job was to place those flower boxes she had helped to plant. She and her brothers played assistant to their dad, who started working at deMonye’s Greenhouse in Columbus when he was 13 years old and grew up to own it.
Local control is one of the defining characteristics of your electric cooperative. That control comes from a board that’s elected from the membership — member-consumers like yourself. Much of the success of the electric cooperative program is the result of effective governance by proactive, focused directors, whose primary role is to direct the CEO and the management team, assuring commitment to business success through maintenance of the highest standards of responsibility, service, and ethics.
For once, I was there “yesterday.” If you’re an angler, you know what I mean. How many times have you heard, “Well, the fish aren’t biting today, but had you been here yesterday (or last week, or last month), well…”
Putting me on the fish that magical late-summer morning a few years ago was veteran fishing guide Dave Rose. We were fishing a small river in northwest Michigan from a drift boat, casting minnow-imitation lures for king salmon (also known as Chinooks) that were migrating upstream from Lake Michigan to spawn.
Homeowners often fret about their older windows, perhaps even original to the house — maybe they let in cold drafts during the winter, or contribute to overheating in the summer. People like the look of the older windows, and replacing them with new ones is expensive. In last month’s column, we talked about replacing windows, but doing so is costly, and it could take 20 years of energy savings to recover the investment.
You can, however, make significant improvements to your existing windows without investing a large amount of money or time.
While many travelers regard Holmes County as the crux of Ohio’s Amish Country, few realize that Walnut Creek is its cradle. In 1809, Amish farmer Jonas Stutzman migrated from Pennsylvania to present-day Holmes County as the area’s first white settler. More Amish folks soon followed, putting down roots that blossomed into the world’s largest Amish-Mennonite community.
Bridgewater Dairy, a family farm in Montpelier, Ohio, has 3,000 dairy cows that produce 30,000 gallons of milk daily. They also produce an estimated 15 million gallons of manure each year.
A decade ago, Chris Weaver, Bridgewater Dairy’s chief operating officer, started turning his farm’s animal waste into something valuable — electricity — by installing an anaerobic digester.
“I wanted to manage the animals’ manure with an eye to helping the environment,” Weaver says. “I also wanted to improve the comfort of my cows. An anaerobic digester lets me do both.”
Ohio electric cooperative trustees and employees took their policy priorities to Capitol Hill in late April at the NRECA Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.
Co-op leaders from dozens of states joined Ohio’s delegation for the annual conference, which focused this year on building momentum from the successful Co-ops Vote campaign during the 2016 election.
