The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

4 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, December 1, 2010 OPINION Continued from pg 2 When burning one ton of carbon (garbage), it produces 3.67 tons of CO2, and scrubbers don't collect CO2, or we'd actually have more waste than we began with! How does incineration lend itself to reducing the CO2 in our atmosphere? All the other problems associated with burning garbage are well known, but if you're not part of the solution, you must be part of the problem! I can't believe someone hasn't delved further into the issue of why Roger Anderson is such a proponent of an incinerator that's reported to cost upwards of $150,000,000 to build and $11,000,000 to operate annually. One thing proponents of incineration know: often, where there's smoke, there's fire! Rob MacDonald Newtonville Meanwhile Back on the Ridge by David Craig Years differ widely from one to the next. A friend who has been dead for 30 years, used to try to cheer me up by telling of the year with no summer. It was 1919 or 1920 and there was frost every month of the year. They had just finished threshing and watching the mill go down the land and his dad said, "Tom, please go up and shut that barn door. I'm afraid the wind will get in and blow the grain away." They had one or two loads of hay only and the cattle and horses got through the winter eating straw and turnips. In my short time on this planet and in this area, I have never seen a year like 2010. To begin with, it was a fairly mild winter and a dry spring with three or four weeks of beautiful planting weather. All summer we had heat and moisture. For those people who live mainly for the weekends, every one was a treasure this year. From the farm point of view, everything grew. Farmers are mainly pessimists. If crops look good, they will explain that they could still get army worms or blight, or not enough rain to fill the oats, or a wet harvest, or a glut and the prices will be poor, or the sky could fall. This year none of this happened. I saw my neighbour cut a little field of alfalfa for the fourth time and it still has lots of top on it to go into the winter. Fall wheat, barley, canola and soybeans all are of record yield and unheard of prices. Corn is the big crop. Farmers like to grow corn. The yield from two or three BACK AT THE RIDGE see page 7