Making hay was more than a figure of speech last week at the New Holland auction house in Pennsylvania last week, where a ton of top quality hay bales were going for upwards of $400, up about 20% from last year.
For members of the Lancaster settlement, a term used to describe the Amish population that settled here in 1760, the price of hay was only part of the discussion: the price of horses, donkeys and milk were also topics of conversation and, as it has been for year or more, a potentially deadly outbreak of measles.
In the most recent count, 1,398 cases had been detected, according to the Pennsylvania department of health. Since 1 August, 150,000 doses of MMR vaccine had been administered, with more than 50,000 given in October alone…