It’s possible that ancient Egyptian farmers noticed something different about their soil or crops if any flyaway gypsum dust landed on their fields along the Nile River. After all, their people used gypsum to finish the Pyramids. Perhaps these farmers noticed that after enough of the fine white mineral powder drifted over their soil for a while, it seemed more loamy. Or that crops seemed healthier and more prolific. Or that their fields didn’t stand with water for as long following heavy rains. Modern waste drywall may do the same.

What Union County Biodiesel is – sandwiched between Andy Sprague’s farmhouse and his nearly 4,000 acres of corn and soybeans – is a functional on-farm plant which converts soybean oil into biodiesel. From its inception in late 2004, Sprague intended the facility as a demonstration of perhaps the ultimate in future value-added farming.

You’re an upper Tennessee tobacco farmer. You don‘t grow but a few acres, and the IRS would never mistake you for Bill Gates, but you make enough on top of your regular job or farming with leaf to give the family presents at Christmas and to finance their weekly jaunts to the movies.

Out of trench coat, Muse Watson satisfies that principal requirement of every great character actor; namely, the ability to inspire people to snap their fingers, point and rub their chins and swear, “I know I know you from somewhere! Just a minute … it’s on the tip of my tongue …”

Nora Roberts loyalists can likely recite the story of her ascension to publishing prominence by now: She took a job as a legal secretary out of high school and was so bad at it that, as she’s fond of saying, “I would’ve fired me.” Luckily, being a wife and mother was more successful, but cabin fever one winter drove her to start scribbling story ideas to pass the time.