News
Westerner Park’s Urban Farm Festival A Big Success!
On Sunday, August 20, our first Urban Farm Festival was held at Westerner Park. The goal of the Festival, presented by Peavey Mart, was to educate and encourage people to bring aspects of farm living into their urban homes. This was achieved through a trade show style set-up featuring exhibitors, compromised of local producers selling homemade or home-grown products. Admission was free for anyone wanting to attend, thanks to the generous support of our sponsors.
There were also free workshops for attendees to participate in, led by local people with experience in the subject matter. Workshops offered included: Urban Chickens, Hobby Bee Keeping, Canning, and Gardening Basics (sponsored by Peavey Mart) and Is Your Home Healthy? (sponsored by Health Canada). The Festival, which fell in line with Alberta Open Farm Days, also offered a petting zoo for children and adults to experience animals up close.
“Opening our doors and allowing people to experience aspects of the farm life that they can bring into their own homes was a way that Westerner Park could share their agriculture roots with the community,” says Christina Sturgeon, Agriculture Event Sales & Production Coordinator, Westerner Park. “We want people to know where their food is coming from and understand the benefits of growing your own or supporting local vendors by buying their natural, homemade and home-grown products.”
In order to better understand how growing one’s own garden can be easy and sustainable, Westerner Park employees, with the help of Steel Pony Farms, planted our own Urban Farm near the racetrack on Westerner Park property in May. These small gardens were grown inside cedar boxes called wicking beds, which collect rainwater and feed the plants from the bottom up as they require hydration. This limits the frequency that the beds need to be watered by hand, and could eliminate it altogether depending on the amount of rainfall the area receives. The planting of the Urban Farm was supported by Red Deer County.
Westerner Park also collected donations from TJ’s Market Garden to donate back to our community through the Mustard Seed and Red Deer Food Bank. A total of 230lbs of produce was donated.
Sunday evening, 60 people gathered in the Holiday Inn Chalet for the “Taste of Home” Long Table Dinner, prepared by Chef Emmanuel of the Boulevard Restaurant & Lounge. The meal consisted of mostly locally sourced organic ingredients, including donations from local producers Rock Ridge Dairy, James Ramsey, Flying Cross Ranch, and the Little Ice Cream & Soda Shoppe. A highlight of the evening was watching Chef demonstrate how to make his honey berry flambe topped with vanilla bean ice cream.
Hosted by Trevor Stoyko from CRUZ 100.7, the event was well received by those in attendance with many looking forward to next year’s event.
With the first Urban Farm Festival and Long Table Dinner being a success, our staff at Westerner Park are already planning how to make next year’s festivities bigger. “We want to grow the agricultural community within Red Deer and Red Deer County’s urban setting and have people be more aware of where they are getting their food and other products. That is our ultimate goal,” says Sturgeon.
For a full list of sponsors, or information about other events happening at Westerner Park, please visit westernerpark.ca.
Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg rocked the world of information with the news that Facebook, Instagram, and his other Meta properties would no longer use third party fact checking groups to censor information. As the week wraps up, Zuckerberg sits down for an extended conversation with Joe Rogan. For anyone interested in the world of information, this is a must see / listen.
From the Joe Rogan Experience
Mark Zuckerberg is the chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc., the company behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Meta Quest, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Orion augmented reality glasses, and other digital platforms, devices, and services.
Daily Caller
‘Embarrassingly Wrong’: Corporate Media’s Talking Heads Confess Their Biggest Blunders Of 2024
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Owen Klinsky
From MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to businessman and television personality Mark Cuban, a slew of media leaders divulged what they got wrong this past year in a Semafor article published Monday.
Media missteps included NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein underestimating the impact of inflation on politics, Fox News anchor Dana Perino incorrectly predicting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would get engaged and CNBC financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin not putting “DOGE and the pairing of Elon [Musk] and Vivek [Ramaswamy]” on his 2024 Bingo card, according to the piece. Despite the variety of answers, one topic — Joe Biden’s lack of mental acuity — seemed to sit at the top of the list for many respondents.
“Like many others, I was completely, utterly, totally, embarrassingly wrong about [President Joe] Biden’s lack of mental competence,” progressive British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan told Semafor.
Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential election in July following a disastrous June debate performance in which he appeared to lose his train of thought several times and stated he “beat Medicare.” Prior to the decision to exit the race, the White House made various efforts to mask the effects of his age, with the president wearing sneakers rather than dress shoes and taking shorter steps up Air Force One.
The White House actively denied claims Biden’s mental health was declining, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre characterizing a video of the President wandering away from world leaders at the G7 Summit as a “cheap fake” and claiming it was orchestrated by Republicans. Much of the corporate media supported the White House’s effort, with panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe describing a June article from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that detailed the president’s declining mental health as “outrageous,” and CNN’s Bakari Sellers suggesting in July, well after the debate, that there was no reason to believe Biden could not serve for another four years.
Other examples of the media downplaying concerns over Biden’s mental acuity include The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushing to the president’s defense after co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said Biden could have a “senior moment” on stage prior to the debate and MSNBC analyst Mike Barnicle describing members of the Democratic Party as cruel in July for trying to oust the president from the 2024 race.
More recently, former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza apologized in a YouTube video posted in December for waiting too long to investigate concerns that Biden’s mental acuity was deteriorating, admitting that as a journalist he should have “pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being.”
American talk show host Brian Lehrer made a similar apology in his response to Semafor: “Many callers to my show said Joe Biden was in no shape to run for re-election. I mostly dismissed it as ageism. Then I watched the debate.”
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