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Jim Dunlop: Gulf War Vet, Meat Farmer

cliff — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:01:16 +0000

In this interview, Jim Dunlop and his wife Rebecca Thistlethwaite talk about their life raising hogs and chickens in Central California and the lessons they’ve learned. It’s not all fun and glory – it’s hard work and you need not apply for an internship with them unless you’re willing to work at least as hard as the owners. With over 5 years under his belt as a professional farmer, Jim has made plenty of mistakes and learned many lessons. This is part one of a two part interview.

First Army’s training for Afghanistan now includes agribusiness

cliff — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:52:58 +0000

It’s not all about fighting in a mostly rural theatre where the natives are stuggling just to survive off of what they can grow. The Army has come to recognize that success can only be attained if soldiers are also helping citizen farmers support themselves.

In an article in Army Times that describes other changes in training for the First, we find the following:

One unique mission that recently was added to First Army’s training repertoire is preparing agribusiness development teams for deployments to Afghanistan.

The training program for the ADTs so far has been ad hoc because the mission is relatively new, said Maj. Gen. Mick Bednarek, commanding general of First Army’s Division East. But the training continues to evolve and become more refined as more teams are formed, and trainers are pulling together experts from the deploying team and its home state to help them address issues such as economics, agriculture, farming, soil and energy generation, he said.

When Col. John Smith, commander of Division East’s 158th Infantry Brigade, got the mission to train the Indiana Guard’s ADT, he raised his eyebrows, scratched his head and went to work developing a plan to combine war fighting with farming’s many complexities.

“I’m a boy from the city. I just thought it was a bunch of guys that were going to go out there and teach the Afghan farmers how to grow crops,” said Smith, who also trained ADTs from Texas and Tennessee.

Smith and his staff pulled together all the information they could about the first agribusiness teams to deploy to Afghanistan, enlisted the expertise of agricultural scientists at Indiana’s Purdue University and began to replicate Afghan farm land at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center near Camp Atterbury, Ind.

“There isn’t any manual, there isn’t any guidance of how to train agribusiness development teams,” Bednarek said. “What we did … is figure it out, put the concepts on paper, form them and then physically make it happen and execute it well above the standard that anybody ever expected.”

Rural health care and the returning veterans

cliff — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:45:38 +0000

Given the widespread suffering from post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injuries among veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, the VA is just getting up to speed on adequate treatment. Yet many veterans return home to rural areas where there are no VA hospitals or doctors. Where are they supposed to find the right kind of care?

This article published in Rural Health Advocate presents the need for rural health care workers to learn how to treat these afflictions.

What should happen? Rural providers must acquaint themselves with the symptom complexes of PTSD and TBI. Clinics, hospitals, and private practice providers should investigate TriCare, the insurance provided to National Guard members. Open lines of communication to VA facilities are a must. Finally, and most importantly, health care providers should take each patient’s military service history in order to identify at risk men and women and help the returnee back into the rural community with appropriate care.