Authentic Food

Author, inventor and organic farming guru, Eliot Coleman, has come up with a new food label - "Authentic Food." Pyewacket, of the Seasonal Cook blog, wrote about this yesterday.

Here is the opening paragraph of Eliot's article, originally printed in Mother Earth News:

The label "organic" has lost the fluidity it used to hold for the growers more concerned with quality than the bottom line, and consumers more concerned with nutrition than a static set of standards for labeling. "Authentic" is meant to be the flexible term "organic" once was. It identifies fresh foods produced by local growers who want to focus on what they are doing, instead of what they aren't doing. (The word authentic derives from the Greek authentes: one who does things for him or herself.) The standards for a term like this shouldn't be set in stone, but here are the ones I like to focus on:

He goes on to list standards that take into account not only organic production but also sustainability.

There has been a lot of talk lately, in the blogosphere and other places, about organic farming and sustainable farming and the dichotomy that sometimes exists between the two. The Cornucopia Institute has ranked certified-organic dairies and found that some of the largest "industrial-organic" farms are operating to the letter of the law rather than the spirit. I guess we all should have known that would happen when the USDA got involved in setting the standards. Big agribusiness wants some of that "increasing" organic pie. Scratch that - they want to own the whole darn thing.

Authentic Food - the future label of traditional organic?

tags: authentic food, eliot coleman, organic, farm, sustainable

Fencing

Yesterday, I posted that I needed to put up some temporary fencing to block lambs from falling into the creek. This photo shows better what I'm talking about. This netting is electrified with over 10,000 volts. It will help train the lambs to electric fencing at a young age.

Some of our neighbors who raise sheep are surprised that our perimeter fence contains them. It is a 5-strand electric fence with 14 gauge aluminum wire under hand tension. Every wire is energized. The total perimeter is approximately 1/2 mile so the total for 5 wires is 2.5 miles (4 km?). The spacing from the ground up in inches is: 7, 14, 21, 31, 42. I've written before that the bottom wire is energized through an energy-limiter, also called a flood-gate controller. The fence crosses the creek twice and there is a flood-gate made from galvanized jack chain at both crossings.

Internal pasture subdivisions are made with 2 hot polywires at approximately 14 and 22 inches. I tried to get away with only one wire but it didn't work out. The ewes jumped over or ducked under at every height I tried.

I think the key to containing sheep with electric fencing is having a powerful charger and good training. The netting works great for training. It teaches the animals to repsect whatever fence they come across. The charger we use is a digital charger from Kencove. It is a 4 joule and puts out over 11,000 volts when there are no shorts. In the summer, the charge may get down to 6,000 volts when grass grows up and touches the bottom two wires.

Chicks Ordered

I ordered 50 straight run White Plymouth Rocks from our local hatchery, Eagle Nest Poultry, in Oceola, Ohio. We'll pick them up on Thursday, April 13th. I wanted to get them sooner but was afraid it would be too cold to brood them in one of the outbuildings. In the past we've raised hybrid broilers but this year decided to do one more thing to distance ourselves from industrial ag. We'll keep the pullets for layers and butcher the cockerels. These White Rocks will take longer to grow and won't have as much white meat but they should all be able to stand on their own two feet by the time they are ready for butchering.

Tomorrow I will put up a section of electrified sheep netting to confine the ewes to a smaller paddock and block access to the creek in preparation for lambing. Today I got together my lambing kit - 7% iodine for navel dipping, castrator, OB gloves and lube for assisting with births. The stomach tube and syringes are ready as well. As always, we pray we won't need them.

I've never castrated our ram lambs before. Icelandics are very seasonal breeders so we've always just butchered the intact ram lambs in September before the rut begins. The meat from these rams is fantastic but they typically only weigh about 75 lbs (34 kg) at 5 months old. They are cut as "roasting lambs" - 2 leg roasts, back roast, rib rack roast, 2 shoulder roasts, and ground meat. We want to keep them a little longer this year so they will grow a little larger and give us more cutting options. We have such a low stocking rate on our pasture that if I time mowing just right, there should be available grazing until Christmas, barring unusually early heavy snows.

weather today: 31°F/44°F overcast

tags: chicken, pullet, cockerel, White Rock, sheep netting, lamb

Land Ownership and Subsidies

I don't intend for this post to be too much of a political rant - we'll see how I do when we get to the end...

I picked up a copy of Hobby Farms magazine at the library this week. It's the November/December 2005 issue and has an article entitled "Once Upon A Time" by Rick Gush. The article is about the history of small farms. Here is a quote:

Early thugs who wandered among the small farmers discovered that instead of killing small farmers and taking their foodstuffs, they could more cleverly extort regular payments in exchange for the right of small farmers not to be attacked. As generations of thugs used the payments from multiple small farmers to accumulate wealth, they also accumulated the power that made the "right" to collect extortive payments hereditary. As regional identities were born, the extorted payments from small farmers formed the basis of wealth that allowed landowners, nobles, kings and conquerors to rise to power.

This pattern of powerful men deriving their sustenance and their power from the payments of many small farmers is still the basic social phenomenon upon which world societies and politics operate. The ebb and flow of this extortion has measured tha passage of time over the history of small farms. The power that was Rome was originally possible because of the productive farming activities of thousands of small farmers. But by the end of the Roman era, small farmers were practically non-existent in Italy and food was produced principally on huge corporate farms that used millions of slaves captured in military combat.

There are so many parallels to modern times here that it's hard to know where to begin. Our "noblemen" are still taking their "tribute" and using it against us. Here's just one example:

In 2002 (most recent data I could find online), the federal government owned 1.15 billion pounds of nonfat dry milk. My calculator doesn't have enough digits to calculate how much whole wet milk this equates to but it's a lot. A while ago on a friend's blog, a factory farmer (I'm sure she considers hers a "family farm") proudly commented that her farm produced 2 million pounds of milk last year. Given the surplus, this begs the question, "why?!?" This factory farm produced 2 million pounds of milk that nobody wanted to buy and our government, through a middleman, paid them enough money to do the same damned thing again this year.

Meanwhile the Ohio Department of Ag is harassing real family farmers who have sold shares in their cow herds to people who desparately want to drink their own healthy milk. This is insanity and the only cure I can think of is for more and more people to opt out of industrial agriculture. I must admit to being guilty of not engaging politicians and public officials as I should be. As a crunchy con, I find that I have little in common with any mainstream politician. A libertarian once wrote something to the effect that America has two parties - the evil party and the stupid party. Sounds about right to me...

7 Days and Counting...

...to baby lambs. Next Thursday, March 30th, will be 144 days since we put our rams and ewes together. This average gestation period is a few days shorter than more modern breeds of sheep. According to ISBONA, the average is 142-144 days.

You can see here that Coconut is "showing." The udders on all the ewes are bagging up. I can't wait to post photos of baby lambs!

weather today: 27°F/45°F cloudy, sprinkles this afternoon

tags: ewe, lamb, Icelandic, ISBONA

Equinox Update From Liberty Farm

Today was the Vernal Equinox - the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere and here at Liberty Farm our ewes are starting to prepare for their coming lambs. The earliest we expect to see babies is March 30th. The ewes are starting to bag up and their mineral intake has increased.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that ewes (at least Icelandic ewes) need increased selenium in the final four weeks of gestation to avoid prolapses and other late pregnancy problems. They're also taking in more copper which will help avoid the rise in the shedding of worm eggs. Sometime this week I should get out the microscope and fecal test all the ewes to see what kind of worm load they are carrying. By the time the lambs come I hope to have them on a section of the pasture that they've never been on, i.e. "clean pasture."

In other news, I frost-seeded part of the pasture last weekend. We had 10# of Birdsfoot Trefoil and 5# of Alfalfa seed that I bought a couple years ago to use for cover crops in the garden but never used. It wasn't enough to go very far but it will be interesting to see if we find either of these plants.

In yet more news, Jennifer finally visited a fairly new organic grocery, Trinity Farms Market in Bellville, Ohio. They sell beef from Trinity Farms, pork from Curly Tail Farm and dairy from Hartzler Dairy. (Curly Tail is also where we buy our organic chicken feed). She was pleasantly surprised to find that the meat and dairy products were not only organic but locally produced as well. It was nice to find this source while we wait until we have beef of our own. If anyone reading this in Ohio or surrounding states has 2 or 3 naturally raised feeder cattle for sale, or knows anyone who does, please let me know. We want to raise smaller framed British breeds, i.e. Angus or Herefords. I hope not to have to buy at auction.

weather today: 28°F/35°F overcast

My Weekend Project

This is a photo of the old greenhouse here at Liberty Farm. My project this weekend was cleaning up the inside. With so much other work to do in the 8 months we've lived here, the inside of the greenhouse has been more or less abandoned for well over a year. There were weeds growing inside up to the height of the top row of windows.

When we moved here, the back room, which is about 1/3 of the width of the building, was mostly open as the walls had fallen in. We reinforced the framing and sided it with T1-11. This was winter housing for our layer flock.

Unfortunately, the side facing us in the photo faces east and is only about 25 feet (8 m) from the side of the house so it only gets direct sunlight for a couple hours a day. The south side (left in the photo) is glazed as well. I would like to build a lean-to on this side with a 30-degree pitched roof and glaze it all with double-wall polycarbonate. We could have a nice little bed for growing winter greens for fresh salads all winter.

On an unrelated note, I don't know if Blogger was having problems yesterday evening or if it was just me. I was unable to post. Of course, out here in the sticks with our old copper we can only connect at 26.4 kbps on dial-up. There is no cable or DSL. The only high speed option is satellite which costs beaucoup bucks for equipment purchase and installation - not to mention about three times more for the monthly service than we pay now. We may bite the bullet and install it this summer.

weather today: 24°F/41°F sunny, breezy

SGF and Organic Certification

I had planned to write a post about electric fencing today but I didn't get outside before dark to take photos so I'll save that for another day. Today I want to write some more from the March issue of the Stockman Grass Farmer. Specifically, the letters to the editor on page 33-34. The answer to this question was something I wasn't aware of. Here is the question and answer:

Dear SGF:
Could you please tell me how the Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio and the CLA content of milk from cows fed organic hay and alfalfa along with a small amount of silage might compare to that of milk from pastured cows? My family has finally located a reliable source of clean raw milk, but while we are very impressed by the cleanliness of the dairy and the owner's clear love of his animals, the cows are never pastured.

Omega 3 fatty acids are extremely volatile and dissipate quickly once the living forage is cut and dried for hay. For a high omega-3 dairy product, the cows must direct-graze green, living forage. As a result, many consumers in the winter are buying frozen milk made in the green season instead of winter milk made from hay and silage.

Another argument for seasonal production on nature's schedule.

Also, SGF reports that they are working on improving their website and hope "to form communities of interest for sub-niche producers of such rarities as seasonal 100% grass dairies, no-grain pork production and Certified Organic grassfed beef and lamb." Sounds like a good resource.

This brings to mind something else I've been thinking about lately which is organic certification. We purchased this farm in June of 2005 so we would not be eligible for organic labeling until June of 2008 due to the three year transition rule. The question in my mind is whether we want to have anything to do with this considering the USDA monopoly on what constitutes "organic." We may never cross the $5000 sales threshhold requiring certification. Under this amount, farm produce can be labeled "organic" but not "certified organic." According to my reading of the law, however, if a farm labels its produce "organic" the USDA has the right to send a G-man to inspect the farm and all its records. Given this Orwellian aspect of the law, I think we'll pass and do what so many others have done - let our customers certify us. Or, as Joel Salatin says, go "beyond organic."

weather Wednesday: 26°F/42°F partly sunny
weather today: 24°F/45°F mostly cloudy

tags: omega-3, omega-6, CLA, raw milk, hay, pasture, graze, organic, USDA

Mad Cow in Alabama

Get ready for USDA bureaucrats and legislators to start yelling louder than ever about the need for National Animal ID after the discovery BSE (mad-cow disease) in a cow in Alabama this week. As if this draconian policy will have any effect whatsoever on preventing disease. The solution for ending this disease is simple: get the cattle out of the feedlots and on grass!!! Don't expect to hear this simple bit of wisdom from anybody in government or big agribusiness, though. They would never say anything that might give away the blatant stupidity of U.S. farm policy.

If you read any news stories about this, you are likely to read that the USDA began prohibiting the feeding of ground-up ruminant animals to other ruminant animals in 1997. This is true, however it is legal to feed ground-up ruminant parts to chickens and then feed the ground-up chicken parts to ruminants. Furthermore, the primary ingredient in the milk replacer that is fed to dairy calves is cattle blood protein. Are you disgusted yet? [source]

On a related note, the March issue of the Stockman Grass Farmer reports that "Tyson Foods Inc and Certified Angus Beef have teamed up...[in] a new line of Certified Angus Brand natural beef." The black Angus cattle will be fed in "special 'natural' feedlots." Folks, there is nothing natural whatsoever about feedlots! To give credit where credit is due, however, the cattle will never have received antibiotics or hormones and will eat "a 100 percent diet of 'grass and grain'". This far exceeds the USDA regs for "natural beef." But, again, there is nothing natural about ruminant animals eating grain. The entire concept stems from the American push for bigger, faster and more profitable.

I realize there is a lot of negativity in this post and even a few exclamation points. I'll try to make my next post about something positive.

weather today: 28°F/33°F cloudy, windy, snow flurries

tags: USDA, animal ID, BSE, mad cow, cattle, feedlot, grass, agribusiness, farm policy

Weather and Gardening

We've been having warm, wet weather lately. Today it got to up to 69 degrees (F). We're supposed to have high winds and possible thunderstorms tonight and the temperature is going to drop into the low 30s with a high tomorrow only in the high 30s.

If you've been here before, you might have noticed my new profile photo on the right. I shed some winter fur when the weather turned warm. Hopefully this spring and summer I'll be able to shed about 25 pounds of winter fat.

I planted lots of seeds Saturday and today - onions, celery, red and white cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach and lettuce. I really like the lettuce mixes offered by Cook's Garden. This year I ordered the spring mix, summer mix, winter & fall mix, romaine mix and butterhead mix. With a little planning we can harvest a huge vartiety of lettuce almost year round. I also ordered some hardy greens from Johnny's for the first time this year - corn salad, kale, claytonia and minutina. We've never eaten these greens before but I really want to get away from winter supermarket lettuce. Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman is an inspiring book on this subject.

weather today: 51°F/69°F rainy

tags: garden, lettuce, winter greens, four-season harvest, Eliot Coleman

12 Years Ago Today...

...I married my wonderful wife, Jennifer. Friday night we went out to celebrate at the local Mexican restaurant with the best margaritas. Readers of this blog know that I believe in local food and drink but some things - Mexican Tequila and Irish Whiskey, for example - really should be left to the experts, right? Seriously, though, these have been twelve great years. May God grant Jennifer the grace to keep me around for many more.

We've had some minor flooding in the area today after a thunderstorm last night and rain this morning. We got about 2" (5 cm) of rain. The lower photo is my neighbor's pasture across the road. The upper photo is the stream that comes down and cuts through our pasture. I've built a flood gate here where the electric fence crosses the stream. It is made of galvanized jack chain hanging from the lowest fence wire. The bottom wire is energized through an energy limiter, also called a flood-gate controller. It automatically cuts power to the bottom wire when the stream rises or when grass grows over the bottom wire. This keeps the fence from shorting to ground.

weather today: 54°F/65°F rainy
tags: flood, pasture, stream, flood gate, energy limiter, electric fence

ODA Gestapo, Gardening and Etc.

Two blogs I like to read, Boulder Belt Farm and Favorite Apron, recently had posts about Ohio dairy farmers being terrorized and entrapped by the Ohio Department of Agriculture. Some of these situations involve farmers who have sold cow/herd shares. Under these arrangements, farmers sell a share of an individual cow or herd to a family who then receives milk from the share of the cow(s) they own. The farmer charges a fee for boarding and taking care of the cow(s). The ODA is now telling the citizens of Ohio that we can't drink raw milk from cows that we own! Yes, these are the same SOBs who are going to be administering the National Animal ID System if it is implemented. Have a look at wantmilk.org for more info.

We'll be starting lots of garden seeds this weekend. Some things could have been started already for early planting with some protection but in general we're on schedule except the onion seeds should definitely have been started already. I think we'll be OK, though. Something new we're trying this year is celery. I love celery - raw and in soups. Supposedly, it's difficult to grow but I recall reading an article in Countryside years ago about growing it. Accompanying the article was a photo of a wheelbarrow load of harvested celery.

When we sheared the sheep last Saturday we moved the two rams to another barn. In hindsight, we should have done this sooner. I've noticed that the ewes are calmer and they've been eating more minerals. We're trying to keep them as calm and happy as possible for the last month of gestation and feeding Birth-Ease herbal supplement.

I received my copies of Healthy Sheep Naturally all the way from NSW, Australia. Because the difference in cost was minimal between shipping one book or two, I decided to order two and have offered one of them for sale here.

weather Wednesday: 24°F/42°F
weather today: 42°F/59°F rain

tags: Ohio, agriculture, ODA, gestapo, milk, garden, seeds, celery, sheep, ewe, ram, healthy sheep naturally

The Food We Raise (and Eat!)

I received the March/April issue of Sheep! magazine this week and, as always, there's lots of good stuff to be found between the covers. The following quotes are from the "Scribblings" column by editor, Nathan Griffith:

"...in the last 20 years pet food companies discovered they could make big profits selling U.S. lamb as dog food. It's probably safe to say that in America there are fewer people who eat lamb than who feed it to their dogs."

"Some sheep growers whine to me now and then about how 'I can't afford to eat lamb.' That's bosh of course, and in the course of conversation the real reason usually comes out: They and/or their kids usually don't eat lamb, because they refuse to find and grow breeds whose taste appeals to them.

Like most growers, they select for:

Bigger cuts

Fast growth rates

Twinning

Show ring fancy

That's good, but very few ever select for specific meat flavor. They say, 'no auction ever paid me a premium based on flavor'... Auctions held dominance for over 50 years, while demand slid. The public has now lost five-sixths of its per capita appetite for lamb - due almost entirely to unreliable flavor. Taste is the consumer's first criterion, but it's the trait most ignored by the sheep biz."

These "Scribblings" are always good food for thought for me. Here at Liberty Farm, we raise food that we are passionate about eating ourselves and if we can produce enough to sell some to other families, that's wonderful. I know farmers...er, I mean, agribusinesspeople, who grow hundreds of bushels of wheat. They sell it for a couple bucks a bushel then go to Kroger and buy bread. That mindset just doesn't make sense to me.

weather today: 17°F/41°F sunny

tags: sheep, lamb, food, flavor, agribusiness, wheat

Following Up

Yesterday, I posted a photo of our ram, Luther, just after he was shorn. Here is the best photo of him I could find in full fleece. He must be kinda camera shy because I looked through all the photos I have of the flock and he's always standing behind another sheep. Icelandics are dual-coated. The outer coat is called the tog and the inner coat is called the thel.

On Thursday, I posted something about H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. The House of Representatives did not act on the legislation but left it as unfinished business. With 226 co-sponsors it seems almost sure to pass but there still may be time to call your representative.


Here is a photo of my three year-old son, Nick, and I post-shearing. My seven year-old daughter, Katie, took the picture.

weather today: 13°F/42°F overcast

Shearing Day

Today was shearing day, as planned. Of course having just recovered from the flu I now feel like crap from the exertion. The job needed to be done, though. Halfway through the third sheep, the switch on my shearer broke. We started calling neighbors and found a machine we could borrow. (Thanks be to God for Peg!) I got home with it and when I hit the switch nothing happened. It turns out the last person who borrowed it cut halfway through the cord so I had to do a hasty electrical repair. Then we got down to business.

I don't know the correct shearing technique so we sheared them while tied as pictured in the photo. My plan was for my wife to take pictures of the process but she ended up working at holding the sheep. Besides, I don't really have a process. I shear according to how the sheep is facing when it decides to stand still. One of the neighbors whom we had called previously about borrowing a shearer stopped by after receiving our message and told me he would teach me how to shear like a pro. Hopefully we'll be able to work that out when September rolls around. Better yet, maybe we'll just hire a pro. Sigh...I always say that when the memory of the shearing experience is still fresh in my mind but I'm always rarin' to give it another try when the time comes again.

I am pictured holding the fleece from the ram lamb pictured. That is the most complete fleece I've ever removed from a sheep. When we looked at the photo, my wife said, "you really don't know how bad your barn looks until you see a photo of it." We need to do some painting this summer - inside and out.

weather Friday: 21°F/30°F
weather today: 11°F/35°F sunny

tags: sheep, ram, shear, fleece, barn

Food Uniformity

This awful flu that has ravaged the rest of my family has finally sunk its claws into me. I Just showered and am feeling remotely human for the time being but based on the experience of the rest of my family, the fever will probably be back before it's gone completely. On the bright side, I should be back in the game in time for the scheduled sheep shearing on Saturday.

The U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. If enacted, federal law would prohibit states from requiring labelling on food that is not required by the FDA (e.g. GE/GMO foods). Just the name of the bill alone scares the hell out of me - National Uniformity for Food - ugh!

Weather Tuesday: 13°F/39°F
Weather Wednesday: 23°F/44°F
Weather today: high around 40°F last night at midnight - down to 30°F right now at 1:45 pm

Tags: flu, HR 4167, GMO, food uniformity