Yesterday I heard Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures Farm and President of the Grassfeed Cattle Association on a talk show about trade and tariffs. His farm/ranch is in Bluffton, GA about 130 miles from Macon. There is a gift show and restaurant associated with it. He employs over 100 people. They raise cattle, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, guinea hens, and organic vegetables. They have an abattoir and slaughtered 35 head of cattle a day—a relatively large operation.
I suggest the office staff use our day off to go and see this, so we did.
We left this morning at 9:30 and arrived at the White Oaks Pastures general store at a few minutes before 1:00. I bought Sister Chadwick some Georgia-produced olive oil that she's been craving and we went on to the restaurant about two miles south of the general store. (Oh, at the general store they had cow and goat skulls for $150 and $125, respectfully.)
We had lunch at the restaurant. It's was good. Most of us had hamburgers made with meat produced about 100 yards away at the abattoir. I suggest their website if your interested in organic farming: https://www.whiteoakpastures.com/
We noticed that the Kolomoki Mounds State Park is located a couple of miles south of the restaurant so we went.
These mounds were constructed from about 350 AD to 550 AD and are some of the oldest mounds in North America. What most impressed me was the ceramic figurines. To my eye, they compare favorably with any ceramic found in the Western Hemisphere.
We climbed what is called the Temple Mound. Its base is about the size of a football field. Here are a couple of pictures with the Rangers and Lawtons, the other office couples. The last picture is a view from the top with a small mound across what is thought to be a plaza. There was a gopher tortoise in his hole on top of the mound—quite a climb for a 8-inch turtle:
On the way back, we stopped at a Dairy Queen and a member of the Warner Robins 1 Ward spoke to us and offered a nickel tour of the town of Byron so we took him up. Bro. Mark Rhoden showed us the Boy Scout camp, an old military installation from the cold war, where two deputies were killed by the father of a deputy in another county, pecan orchards and a lot of other stuff while narrating the history and people of Byron, GA.
All in all, a good day. And I got a great picture of Nephila clavipes near the Temple Mound:
