Fitting in Exercise

Farmers' newest chore: Fitting in exercise

Not to be snarky at commercial ag, but that is one advantage of being a small, grass-based business. We still pretty much do things the way we did fifty years ago, so we stay physical and in good shape. I just listen to an iPod while checking fence is the biggest difference. 

Farmersize

It’s good to eat healthy, but to be healthy, you also have to move. Humans were designed to walk and bend and move around a lot, which is why some have said we’re running the latest software on a paleolithic hard drive. Our bodies are designed to be used, and when we don’t use them, they grow soft and flabby on us.

So I would like to bring you FARMERSIZE! That’s right, for the price of cows, you can get fit, ache and whine and throw your hips out of alignment.

First, you take a hungry group of grass-fed cows. Next, you push it to the next level by either being pregnant or pushing a baby in a stroller through places strollers were never designed to go. As an added cardio option, you’ll be bombarded by mosquitoes and have to fend them off as well. Don’t forget the workout itself, push through the woods, rolling out wire, pounding posts with a twenty-pound driver, then double back, fighting flimsy steel rods into the ground. Don’t lose those insulators! Every time a deer runs through your fence and pops one of those suckers off, you lose six cents. And at Barclay Farms we are too frugal to let deer get away with crap like that. So you’ll be spending lots of time feeding the mosquitoes while searching for insulators.

While you unroll wire with one hand, you’ll be pushing the baby through mud with the other. Don’t stop now! It’s also the baby’s naptime, so now he’s really tired. You’ll feel the burn as you rush between swatting mosquitoes off him and pulling dryer sheets out of his sticky grasp and sinking posts in along that final stretch of woods.

FARMERSIZE is free, because, let’s face it, who would pay to do this shit? So get ready to get as tired as you’ve ever been in your life and receive no thanks from the livestock for doing so. Get ready to FARMERSIZE!!

From WikiCommons

She's a Lady

Old McDonald Might Be A Lady: More Women Take Up Farming

Amazingly, my dad thought this statistic was awesome and seemed genuinely affronted that  after all the work my grandmother did, going gungho beside my grandpa all those years, wasn't counted as a farmer. Gram, for her part, just smiled and looked vaguely amused.

Farm Free or Die!

Okay, so I just really like this title. But the article brings up some important issues that small farmers face as well. Brings to mind the old adage to mind about milk your cow and keep your teeth together. Also, "just keep shoveling" seems appropriate.

Farm Free Or Die! Maine Towns Rebel Against Food Rules by Maria Godoy

*And I made up the adage about the cow and teeth.

Feeding the World

While I'm a perennial fan of sustainable agriculture, one of the major considerations with it is how do you feed people on a global scale with smaller sustainable farms? Industrial ag has its problems but it can feed mass amounts of humanity. The final product and environmental effects might be suspect, but it seems both methods could learn something from one another. Anyway, more thought-provoking information on food.

How do you feed nine billion people?

Feeding the World While Protecting the Planet

A Lesson in Home Butchering

Last week my second to last cow finally calved. Ironically, she’s also the mother to the cow (10U) who has had a special needs calf, both of whom have been living in the barn for the past two months. 10U has a nice set of horns on her, rare in my herd, and has been high-headed since birth. She had her first calf this year and he came down with navel ill almost immediately and we’ve been messing with him ever since. (Jason and I were in bed one night going, “I’ve never seen that much puss.” So yeah, calvie was pretty gross.)

So the day Pammy calved, Dad and I decided little Shrek (10U’s calf) needed to be put down. We’d sold all our beef for the year and didn’t have any for our freezer, and since the cow kept charging Dad after he hand fed her ear corn for over sixty days, we decided a first-calve heifer would make a decent addition to the freezer for the winter. We didn’t have the extra money to have her butchered, since Christmas is coming, so, since it was deer season and the guys have honed their skills with butchering, we decided to butcher the cow ourselves. (Well Tom Bemrose and I decided, but that’s another story.)

Dad shot the cow and she bled out. Then we chained her back legs to the tractor bucket and drug her around to the west side of the barn. By this time, Jeff and Tom showed up after hunting all morning and not seeing a damn thing, and stayed to help. They’d done plenty of deer, so the thickness of the cowhide surprised them, but once we got the hide peeled back over her ass end, the weight of it drug it down her sides and we got to the head. Once there, we cut to the joint in her neck closest to the skull and kept paring until the joint showed. I was holding the cow’s head by the horns, rocking it back and forth so Jeff could sever the joint and when it went, it all went, hide, head and all, right to the ground.

We stopped to have a beer and study the situation.

Dad lowered the cow down and Tom carefully slit the belly, being careful not to puncture the intestines and drown us all in cow-gut stench. The intestines came out good, but Jeff and I had to hang Tom by his ankles so he could cut the esophagus out, dipping far down into her rib cage.

By then, all that was left to do was hanging the cow in the barn rafters and let her cure. A beef has to hang for fourteen days before cutting. We got her up without a hitch.

Last night on the way home I was listening to Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, another book that’s been on my reading list for some time. He talks about the feelings involved with killing the living thing that is to be your supper. I get asked about that a lot actually, doesn’t it bother you to eat the thing you’ve raised? The answer: no. I give my animals the best life I can. Many of my cows have been with me 8-12 years (which is longer than most of my romantic relationships all put together, which is neither here nor there). We expect the steers to end up on our plates and a cow is given every chance to have a successful place in the herd. If a cow is sour, like 10U, she only gets so many strikes, then it’s off to the stockyards or the freezer. I feel bad that we have to cull cows at all. If it was up to me, I’d keep every one of them. But that’s not the relationship people have developed with domestic livestock over the last millennia. It’s easier, I think, in a lot of ways to know the animal you eat. You’re there from day one, from inception, you see the quality of life they’ve had and give them as good and clean a death as possible. You’re able to treat the carcass with respect.

Butchering 10U could not have gone any better and I feel no moral pangs about it because I know the kind of life, and death, she had. When people are removed from the day to day life of animals, it’s easier to feel bad for them, to turn to vegetarian lifestyles, and condemn people who raise livestock for meat. I don’t agree with industrial style feedlots and the cows at work, in a confinement dairy, just about make me weep, but when animals are raised on grass and are allowed to have a strong herd unit, as nature intended, there’s nothing to feel sorry for. In fact, there’s a reverence that comes with harvesting your own food, allowing one to feel that much more connected to the food going into one’s mouth. There’s also the fact that butchering is such a big project that it takes several people to do it, so the social connection is there as well. In a digital, consumer, industrial world, connectivity, in person, is becoming the most important thing of all. And how much more basic can you get than getting together to butcher, swap stories, and remember the basics of being human?

P.S.

I didn’t want to post the pics here in case there’s some squeamish readers, but pics are on my Facebook.

Pastured Poultry

Here's a template for making the farm make money, the age old debate between my dad and I on how to do it.  


http://www.ibiblio.org/farming-connection/grazing/nypa/nypa9.htm

Winter Milking

Milking cattle in winter is a unique experience. All the metal and steel suck the cold in until its almost colder in the barns than out, even with the canvases rolled down on the outside of the barns to keep the wind inside to a minimum. I usually milk nights, so with the darkness outside, the barn is a shining beacon in a white, or black, winter landscape.

The sand steams when you go out to bring cows into the catch pen and subsequently into the parlor. When it’s very cold, when you look back towards the parlor from the far side of the barn, all the group of cows between you and the parlor, a fog settles in from all the steam off the sand, warmed from the cows’ bodies, and their breath converges so it’s almost impossible to see the milk house. Scraping gets challenging when the ground finally freezes hard, but until then the manure is sloppy, like pushing a half-melted chocolate milkshake, or rolling chocolate chunk ice cream if its colder. When the muck hits the white snow, it slops all over and the white is spoiled.

The milk lines inside are like blood vessels. They carry white life-giving fluid through metal veins. It heats the hoses enough to keep them pliable, but barely enough to warm your hands. We wear two pairs of rubber gloves and stick our hands in the flanks of the cows to warm them, much to the cows’ chagrin. Maybe it’s our course jokes about feelin’ up udders that makes them cranky.

It’s cold enough to make your teeth and knees ache. Or maybe it’s how all the metal and cement draw the cold, suck it in, and breathe out with it. When we wash down at the end of the shift, all the heat vanishes from the milk lines. Fingers are stiff and fumble on the milkers, chilled by the metal and rubber. The cold is like an entity, burning through wet clothes and heavy boots, stealing presence of mind and hope for dawn. Teeth chattering, you walk to your car.

Resources for Farmers - And a Passion for Grassin'

So we’ve talked the last few days about grazing and why graze. I’d like to tilt the viewfinder a little today and give farmers out there some resources for grazing. Here’s one I found right off this morning that looks pretty fun, full of how-tos and fencing. http://www.ibiblio.org/farming-connection/grazing/home.htm. That one looks to mostly cater to beef, but a useful poultry resource for us has been http://www.attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/poultry/. Purdue also has some great info on grazing and pasture management http://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/forages/rotational/index.html.

So hopefully that’s enough to get you started. I’ve got tons more resources, of course, but that’s enough to wade through for now, I think. One thing about it, it’s never hard to sell farmers on the benefits of grass. I think most of us would rather see our animals out on pasture more than anything else. The problem is that’s not where the demand of the market is. The demand is for cheaply raised meat that grows quickly and that’s exactly what the public has gotten, full of antibiotics and hormones. But, that is what they asked for.

Last I heard, less than 2% of the population is involved with food production in America, with fewer young people getting involved as the years go by. And when you think about it, why should they get involved? There’s little money and long hours involved with farming, passion for grassin’ or not. The key now is niche markets and educating the public on where their food comes from. I’m continually amazed at how many people my own age have never even been up close to a horse, let alone a cow. They have no clue about grass-fed versus grain-fed and no incentive to care. But food is the basis of everything. Without food, there’s no room for civilization. Farmers are integral to everything. I mean, how many people, realistically, can feed themselves without a grocery store? So there’s the incentive to learn about where your food comes from: no store, no eat. Scary. So my advice to aspiring and current farmers? Business planning.

I’ve mentioned Annie’s Project on the blog before, but for those who didn’t catch that post, it’s a nationwide class held to educate women in agriculture about opportunities and management in agriculture. For it, I picked up a lot of information on how to manage and build your farm on paper. This aspect of ag is actually a post or two all in itself so I’ll leave off today with a few starting resources on ag business and pick up tomorrow discussing the importance of business planning and how it can benefit your ag business.

http://www.michigan.gov/mda/0,1607,7-125-1568_2388---,00.html Haven’t explored this one yet, but does look to have some useful info.

The best site for farmers interested in business planning is https://www.msu.edu/~steind/. Dennis Stein is part of Michigan State University’s Extension Service and a great personality.

Here’s a link for beginning farmers and looks great for people just thinking about adding farming to their repertoire. After all, the reason most small businesses fail is poor planning. http://beginningfarmers.org/farm-business-planning/

Sorry for the tangent today, folks, but I get excited about ag and all its facets. I’ll try to be more focused tomorrow and more interesting to those who yawn their way through my rhapsodies over turf grass. Cheers.