Farm

Orb's path to the finish line in the second leg of the Triple Crown remains uncrowded. Normandy Invasion, the fourth-place finisher in the Kentucky Derby, dropped from contention for Saturday's 138th running of the Preakness on Sunday. Trainer Chad Brown and owner Rick Porter decided to stick with their original plan and point the horse toward prestigous races for 3-year-olds later in the summer. That leaves Orb, the colt co-owned by Baltimore County resident Stuart Janney III and Ogden Mills "Dinny" Pipps' stable, with only seven confirmed challengers at this point.

Nicole Stall boarded the first plane to Maryland she could catch when she heard of Benjamin Boniface's death last June. She was there to grieve the death of a boy she had known since his birth. But also to work. In the days after the 20-year-old's death in an early-morning car accident on the farm, she went to the barns where she had fallen in love with horses as a teenager. “I was completely out of it,” said William K. Boniface, known to most as Billy. “She just went out to the stallion barn, kept it running.

Bob Baffert strode into the Preakness stakes barn Friday morning, shouting toward Orb's trainer Shug McGaughey loud enough so all could hear. "OK, Shug, I'm here to take away that media spotlight for you," he said. Baffert, indeed, is one of the few people in the sport who could have swiped some of the attention from McGaughey and his heavily favored colt this week . Baffert has won the Preakness five times, and on three occasions he's moved on to Belmont with a chance at the Triple Crown.

"Despicable, unconstitutional, ridiculous, immature, idiotic, and mendacious. " And that's just how Tennessee newspapers characterized the state's "ag-gag" bill now awaiting Gov. Bill Haslam's signature. "Ag-gag" bills criminalize whistleblowing that exposes animal abuses, unsafe working conditions, and environmental problems on factory farms. Instead of encouraging whistleblowing and preventing these violations, ag-gag laws ensure that consumers and regulatory authorities are kept in the dark.

Dear Mr. Azrael, We are renting a basement apartment on a horse farm in Baltimore County. The farm has recently been bought and, for various reasons, cannot be subdivided. There is an old, burned-down house on the property. The landlord has expressed an interest in giving us a ground rent on the area around the burned-down house if we would be interested in tearing it down and rebuilding a house on the spot. Various people have advised us that ground rents are common in Baltimore and the fact that we would not own the ground should not stop us if we want to build/rebuild the house.

Most people are aware that college football and basketball players are a major part of the professional farm system for those sports. To allow athletes to participate on a college team without being enrolled full-time academically would create multiple unforeseen problems, in my opinion. I realize there are some semi-pro football teams, but I think it would be better to develop a farm system to enable high school graduates who cannot qualify academically or simply want to enhance their athletic abilities by participating in a professional program that would hone their skills and provide a modest income.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said one of his aims during the legislative session that starts this week is to trim Maryland's estate tax where it applies to the inheritance of family farms. Miller, a Calvert County Democrat, said that too often the heirs to family farms are forced to sell property for development because they can't afford the estate taxes. He said he'd like to get rid of the tax entirely when a parcel stays in farming and in the family but recapture the revenue if the inherited property if ever sold off for development.

Fire officials say a blaze has destroyed several apartments at a congressman's farm in Frederick. The blaze at U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett's farm was reported about 2:05 p.m. Thursday. Frederick County Emergency Services spokesman Michael Dmuchowski says a few residents of the apartments suffered minor injuries, but none was taken to the hospital. Dmuchowski says 14 apartments were affected in a converted barn and silo. Numerous residents were displaced. Bartlett's spokeswoman says the congressman was in Washington when the fire broke out. The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

An early morning fire at a Harford County farm sent one firefighter to the hospital with heat-related injuries and completely destroyed a large garage. Firefighters from the Joppa and Abingdon companies responded at 6:15 a.m. to the two-alarm fire in the 400 block of Darlington Road, in the Darlington community, near Susquehanna State Park. It took about 35 minutes to bring the fire under control. The single-story, six-bay garage and its contents are a total loss, fire officials said.

After a lifetime in Maryland, my husband and I have come to the conclusion to put our farm on the market. Due to the burden of new regulations and the financial burden of higher taxes, we can no longer afford to live in this state. While lawmakers in Annapolis struggle to pay for their excessive spending while furthering their own political agendas, we are the ones being penalized. Whether it be higher taxes on gasoline, higher costs to citizens in order to facilitate illegal immigration, speed-camera rip-offs or new fines and penalties for lawful firearms ownership, we are watching our income dwindle.

Like the proverbial "wolf in sheep's clothing," a Texas energy company is promoting a massive Eastern Shore wind farm as an environmentally friendly "green" project ("Eastern Shore wind project confronts eagles, Navy," April 29). In reality, this project will kill large numbers of birds, such as bald eagles and ospreys, which are attracted to the lights necessary for aircraft safety at night. Why do our politicians fall for these projects that are supposed to improve the economy?

College junior Steve Moirano has no children of his own, but he played the proud parent Saturday as a pair of foals debuted to a crowd of onlookers at the University of Maryland campus farm. "What was it like?" Brandon Hurn, a sophomore chemical engineering student, asked Moirano, referring to a mare known as Amazin'. "Were you there?" "I actually pulled the foals out," answered Moirano, an animal sciences major planning to go into veterinary medicine. He and a few classmates were on hand to show off the foals - the first born on the farm in 30 years - and answer questions at Maryland Day, the university's annual campuswide showcase.

CBS '60 Minutes' will feature a report Sunday night on Rosie Napravnik, the 25-year-old jockey who will be the only female riding in the Kentucky Derby. But there's a backstage story to the report that features another 25-year-old woman, Michelle Boniface St. John, who grew up on the Bonita farm in Darlington, who helped produce the '60 Minutes' piece. St. John, the daughter of Kevin C. and Chris Boniface, of the famous Maryland horse racing and training family, has been working at CBS News for the last four years.

Maryland regulators have approved a 24-turbine "wind farm" project to be built near Frostburg, the third land-based project in the state. The Maryland Public Service Commission gave the OK on Wednesday to Synergics Wind Energy, an Annapolis company that has a 20-turbine project near the West Virginia border. When it proposed the new project, the company said it hoped to begin building in April and finish by the end of the year. Synergics could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Editor: Since its inception in 1970, Earth Day has led to enormous growth in understanding the consequences we face if we do not take care of our natural resources. It has led to more action to protect our planet's land, water, air, wildlife and human beings, and it has strengthened farmers' and ranchers' already strong commitment to being good environmental stewards. Farmers observe Earth Day every day. Where asphalt and pavement turn to gravel and dirt, you will find men and women rising early, greeting the day and working the earth.

When hearth and home - together with a growing family and an onsite family business - are at the center of day-to-day living, a small and dated one-story farmhouse in Ellicott City begins to burst at the seams. To keep their extended family under one roof while preserving the one-bathroom house built in 1954, the Harbin and Taylor families found the only solution was to build additions. "My mom and uncle were raised on the original farm down the road," Kim Harbin Taylor said. "That house was on 18 acres, and they farmed an additional 44, raising sweet corn and tomatoes.

Editor's note: Songwriter Carly Simon has written several children's books, including these verses about a magical farm that comes alive with music at midnight. One night in July We woke to hoots and howls -- It sounded nothing like a nightingale Nothing like an owl. We looked out the window And the sea was very calm But the joint was jumping On our Martha's Vineyard farm. Just when you'd expect Every living thing to doze Vegetables and flowers Were putting on their clothes.

Officials have suspended a program that provided inmate labor for a Howard County horse rescue farm, after complaints from neighbors and parents of young volunteers who said they weren't notified that prisoners would be at the site. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services rolled out the program at the Days End Farm Horse Rescue last week. But just days later, officials were apologizing for how the initiative was handled. "I was definitely against it. Nobody knew about it," said Tammy Mirabile, who lives with her husband and four children, ages 2 to 11, less than a mile from the farm on Woodbine Road and learned about the initiative through a newspaper account last weekend.

Although by all accounts the Maryland legislature had a very productive session, legislators fell short in protecting the land that most sustains us - our farmland. While we applaud the successful defense of open space funding overall, for the second year in a row, both the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Fund and the Rural Legacy Program were slashed. This year they lost a combined $8.7 million. The trend and timing of these cuts is alarming. In addition to providing a host of benefits, starting with our food, farmland is central to meeting the Chesapeake Bay restoration goals to which Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay states and the District of Columbia have committed.

On April 2, a hearing was held at the Baltimore City Zoning Board to determine whether the zoning authority would grant conditional use for a gas station to a new, mega-Royal Farms store. This would operate 24/7 with at least 12 gas pumps at the intersection of Harford, Glenmore, Grindon and Old Harford Roads in Hamilton.  All Northeast community associations voted against this development with hundreds of outraged citizens turning out to voice their opposition at meetings over the course of many months.  This development is suitable for an interstate or busy highway, not a residential neighborhood of old homes which has been struggling, slowly but with some tenuous success, to revive itself as a viable community with small, locally owned businesses lining Harford Road, including an independent gas station and several great restaurants.  The intersection is a traffic nightmare, well-known to the city, which is now going to spend $400,000 of taxpayer money to create a new traffic pattern on behalf of the privately owned Royal Farms.