we're bringing dairy back

I thought I'd share the links I had found recently with the help of google and the beginning women farmer's yahoo group should anyone else be hunting for obscure diary supplies or old/new ideas.

http://www.microdairysystems.com/
-out of south royalton VT. has 40 and 50 gallon bulk tanks and other good stuff.

http://www.smalldairy.com/
- a wealth of information, links and classified section.

http://www.microdairydesigns.com/
- their website seems like it is still a work in progress, but offers small scale pasteurizers.

http://www.hambydairysupply.com/
-if you find a pail milker at the salvage yard and need new gaskets for it, this is the place to go. also has lots of other neat stuff.

barn cats say hello

he sees you when you're sleeping. he knows when you're awake. he knows if you leave your milk room doors open!!!

This week the milk inspector came. The milk inspector is someone employed by the state to inspect all dairy farms twice a year and make sure that we're not doing anything too egregious. As you might imagine, he is not the most popular of characters. In fact, for a while I didn't even know his name, I knew him only by the unfortunate but descriptive epithets used by the people at my old job to refer to him.

Now don't get me wrong, I think he is a good guy who does his best at a difficult job. But it gets my panties in a twist to have someone walk around the farm and find shit to criticize. But I smile and nod and agree that I will find out what the meat withold is for some obscure Chinese herbal medicine stashed in the back of the vet cabinet and thank the department of ag that he won't be back for another six months.

My uncle told me a story that sums up most dairy farmers' opinions of their milk inspectors:
When my uncle met his girlfriend's (the woman who i have known as my aunt for my whole life) dairy farming father for the first time, he addressed him as Mr. So-and-So. My uncle says his future father-in-law looked him right in the eye and said "Son, call me by my first name. Only one person calls me Mr. So-and-so and it's the milk inspector."

santa brought me a new vocabulary word

i was listening to says you in the barn sunday night. a quiz game that they play each week is one where the host gives a strange word and one team gives several definitions, one of which is correct and the other team must guess what is the true meaning.

last night the word was jibb, which turned out to mean "to milk a cow out completely." i think they should use the word in a sentence or at least say where they found these words because it was hard to know how to use the word in context. but google books seems to suggest the word "jibbings" was in some sort of usage in scotland, meaning the last, richest milk.

i wanted to try out google's ngram viewer with this but i found out that jibb is an alternate spelling of jib - the part of a ship, and is also something bad (i can't quite determine what) that a horse can do, and, more recently, it refers to a trick done on a snowboard.

here's a sentence that i think is correct:
the light on top of our milking machines flashes when the cow is giving her jibbings.

Praise Him for His Grace and Favor to our fathers in distress

A few years ago I read a passage from a book by Gene Lodgson that was a nice description of livestock in a barn which concluded with the idea that the place was so pleasant that, naturally, god would choose it as the spot for his son to be born. I thought I would find it again and type it out here for Christmas. But I can't remember what book it was in or where I read it so that will have to wait for another year.

Here is a Christmas story by Willem Lange, a writer from New Hampshire. It is very farmy and very New Englandy, so I thought it would go well here. http://www.vpr.net/episode/30488/

inflammatory mediators that cause hypersecretion

This entry contains elaborate descriptions of poop and pooping.

On Wednesday one of the cows had the shits and a runny nose and the next day a few more did and then a few more the next until by Saturday I was convinced they were all going to die in an ebola like puddle of their own body fluids. After my anxious phone call vet came and said it was probably just winter dysentery and that it was highly unlikely that anyone was going to die. I talked to a few other more seasoned less panic prone farmers who said that their cows get this (perhaps not so severely) every winter and get over it in a week. The Merk Veterinary Manual will tell you all about it. It's basically super contagious diarrhea with cough thing that cows who have to stay in a barn for the winter are pretty likely to get.

After my fears were assuaged, the situation became amazingly comic in a way that I, (and my candy ass digestive tract) having spent some time living in south east Asia, could fully identify with. I had no idea an animal could project it's own fecal matter a distance that would be measured in yards without using their arms. If the cows coughed while they were shitting, they could hit cows on the other side of the barn. Normally cows will lift their tails before they go to the bathroom, but sometimes the need to poo seemed to come on too fast and the stream would hit the back of their tail and splatter in all directions. I tried to stay out of the way of most of it and being on my guard spared me from a few direct hits. The barn cats retreated out into the cold and snow rather than be forced witness (and perhaps clean themselves off from) the mayhem. I milked last night with a rain coat on. But when I got home and looked in the mirror while I was brushing my teeth, I immediately had to stop and wash my face. twice.

morning milking haiku

cows were so filthy
what are they doing at night?
milking takes for ever

cows can't use the phone.

I told Shannon this story and she thought it was funny and that I should post it here.

The farm I work on gets a lot of visitors. The owners have built an amazing cheese aging complex at the farm and people come from all over America and Europe to see it. It really is pretty cool. But these cellars are not visible from the road. The thing that is visible from the road is the barn. So, if someone has not ever been to the farm before, he or she is most likely to stop at the first place they come to - the barn. I frequently direct people to the cellars while I'm at work. Sometimes people are also interested in the cows. We have Ayrshires, a not entirely rare breed of cattle but certainly more unusual than the standard Holstein or Jersey.

One of the first days I was ever at work by myself a man walked confidently in the barn, introduced himself and said he was here to see Zoe. He seemed like he knew what was going on, so I led him over to Zoe, who was happily eating her afternoon grain ration.

He looked at me funny and said slowly "I'm here to see Zoe."
"This is Zoe." I said, pointing to the name tag above her stall.
"I talked to her on the phone."
"Oh .... uh .... oh the phone?" I said sheepishly. Then I realized that I didn't really know the names of everyone who worked at the cellars yet and I wondered if there was someone there named Zoe.
"Yes, on the phone."
"I bet she is over at the office, then," I said and directed him over to the cellars.

amish paradise

A while ago I came upon a paper out of Ohio State in the Journal of Extension about making enterprise budgets for Amish Farms. I didn't have a chance to read when I found it, so I saved it to my desktop to read later. Later turned out to be yesterday.

Many extension offices put out enterprise budgets. They are basically the average costs and returns for growing some particular crop. It takes Z man hours to grow an acre of corn. It costs X to grow an acre of corn. The return on that acre will be Y - or whatever. But, as you might imagine, Amish farmers using different equipment on a much smaller scale have fairly different enterprise budgets.

The whole paper is here: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:aH1xwLCyEOsJ:sustainableag.osu.edu/education/documents/AmishFarmEconomicssep05_000.doc+amish+farm+economics&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjqzukd3tiVzyT-Swrvfz1Rp0NkruGV9l16PmpJOa7BKp7Rzr9p-kv2UK8t3Nq67f8q0DtUoQlFkVNifBnyGDtcQ6_Ffu84rn6dkSYFeLSsQWVu3MdYkV8dusMwxfGMIyTlthWL&sig=AHIEtbRAukyue3wnlAVNGqzuB_kDe9W-Nw and is a great read. The paper notes that the returns on 100 horse powered acres of corn, hay and small grains are significantly higher than those same crops produced in a conventional manner. Also, the paper recognizes that while horses went out of vogue about 100 years ago with the rest of the country, Amish farms are one of the fastest growing sectors of the agricultural industry and that the Amish continue to establish new farms at a time when more and more farms are going under.

bacteria attack

Cows shit. They shit a lot. And piss. They piss fountains. And the idea that people have come to enjoy consuming a product from a cow which is harvested not 18 inches from the end of her digestive tract makes you think that god may enjoy a good joke (either that or he's a vegan). Keeping bacteria out of milk and off the cow in general is the major battle fought by dairy farmers.

Pasteurization has allowed farmers to circumvent way too much of this battle. If your milk is getting nuked at 160 or 180 or whatever degrees, not too much bacteria - harmful or otherwise - is gonna survive. But if you work on a farm where the milk is sold raw (unpasteurized) or made into raw milk cheese (unpasteurized milk is used to make the cheese), you have to be really really clean.

Our farm makes a few different raw milk cheeses, so we are incredibly careful when we milk. We clean every speck of sawdust or shit or dirt off her teats before milking as well as sanitizing with iodine before and afterwards. We also scrape down their stalls and rebed them with fresh dry bedding 4 times a day in addition to a few spot checks. When the milk is tested the coliform count is usually less than 10 (10 bacteria per milliliter).

But inspite of all our hard work, germs persist and pop up at the most unfortunate moments. Yesterday's make (the unripened cheese) had coliform contamination. In just 18 hours the cheese had blown up with holes and looked like a sponge when you cut it open. 1700 pounds of milk, 2500 dollars worth of cheese, was good only to feed to the pigs. Coliform bacteria is all over the place but the most likely place, the place filled with 50 large animals that shit prodigiously, is the barn. I cleaned it extra well and milked extra carefully yesterday. We will see how todays make goes. If the contamination persists, we will have to start hunting for potential spots of funk - inside milking machines, the milk pipeline or the cheesemaking plant that might be the source of our problem.

Another bad thing that sometimes happens is that bacteria get inside a cow's teat and give her an infection. The two main kinds of bacteria that do this are staph bacteria and strep bacteria - (coliform bacteria can also get inside a cow's teat but that's more rare). Most infections either clear up on their own or are treated with an antibiotic. But there is one kind of bacteria Staph Aureus that can't be killed. Once a cow has it there are basically only two options, to ship the cow (off to be made into hamburger) or to try and kill the quarter (teat). This is one of the most brutal things I have done to an animal that was not meant to kill it. You simply put 1/4 cup of bleach in a big syringe and shoot it in the quarter. And then you do it again the next day and again the next until all the milk producing tissue (and the bacteria hanging out there too) in that quarter are dead. As you might imagine, the cow gets wise to what's gonna happen after the first dose and is capable of putting up one hell of a fight.

Last week we found out that one of the cows had Staph A. Rather than risk infecting other animals or having the painful treatment not be successful, we decided to ship her. It is sad to watch an invisible thing that does not even make the animal visibly sick bring about her demise. But perhaps this is the fate of those at the top of the food chain, to be in constant battle with those at the bottom.

even a stopped clock is right twice a day

So, on Monday the Senate passed s 510 with the Tester amendment. *shrug* I guess that's the best that could have been hoped for.

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser have a few good things to say about the legislation in the New York Times.
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/opinion/29schlosser.html

edit: i could read it for free last night but this morning they want me to have an account .... i'm not sure what the deal is there.
edit edit: i have just arrived in 2010! accounts for the nyt are free, you just have to make one.

wealth wasn't made in a day, boys

You may or may not know that I think Laura Ingalls Wilder and the life she portrayed in her Little House books are pretty cool. Well, the pig killing and prairie loving are cool; the parts where your mom says "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" and your dad dresses up in black face and participates in a minstrel show makes my pinko commie heart queasy. But that discussion is probably for my other blog "using my white privilege for it's intended purpose."

Anyway, for those not in the know, in her 50's and 60's Wilder wrote 7 books about her girlhood. The series ends with her marriage to Almanzo Wilder, the hot farmer with the bomb horses, and they life happily ever after.
Sort of.
Actually the first years of the Wilders' marriage are filled with tragedies including (but not limited to) their house burning down, their baby dying, and getting typhoid which left Almanzo partially paralyzed. Bright eyed youngsters can read about their Job-like battle in an 8th book "The First Four Years," which will harsh their mellow more than the beginning of "By the Shores of Silver Lake" which tells the story of her dog dying and her sister going blind. Laura started writing "The First Four Years", but then never finished it because of Almanzo's death. After Laura's death her daughter Rose had the manuscript and then after Rose's death, her executor found the papers and published them in their rough form.
If you didn't get the idea yet, the book is sort of a major downer. But at the end is a happy scene with Almanzo going to the barn to do chores and singing a verse from a song:

You may talk of the mines of Australia,
They're loaded with gold, without doubt.
But there's plenty of gold on the farm, boys,
If only you'll shovel it out.

I always really liked it and wondered how the rest of the song went. The other day I googled it and found all the lyrics (which follow) and the sheet music: go library of congress. There is a (not very good) video on youtube of a group singing the song and there are several (much better) versions on iTunes.

I think Almanzo would be happy the song is still being sung.

STAY ON THE FARM

Come, boys, I will tell you a story;
Come here, I will whisper it low.
Are you thinking of leaving the homestead?
Don't be in a hurry to go.
For the city has many attractions,
But think of the vices and sins.
Though once in the vortex of fashion,
How soon the course downward begins!

Chorus:

Don't be in a hurry to go,
Don't be in a hurry to go.
If you're thinking of leaving the homestead,
Don't be in a hurry to go.

You may talk of the mines of Australia,
They're loaded with gold, without doubt.
But there's plenty of gold on the farm, boys,
If only you'll shovel it out.
The mercantile life is a hazard;
The goods are first high and then low.
Better trust the old farm a while longer.
Don't be in a hurry to go.

The wild, busy west has inducements,
And so has the busiest mart,
But wealth wasn't made in a day, boys;
Don't be in a hurry to start.
The bankers and brokers are wealthy;
They bring in their thousands or so.
But think of the frauds and deceptions;
Don't be in a hurry to go.

So, the farm is the safest and surest;
The orchards are loaded today.
You're King of the Air on the mountain,
And monarch of all you survey.
Better risk the old farm a while longer,
Though the profits come in rather slow.
Remember, you've nothing to lose, boys,
Don't be in a hurry to go.

Late 19th Century song found in a turn-of-the-century Grange song book.

the miracle of death

i came into the barn this afternoon to find willy had aborted her calf. the poor little thing the size of one of the barn cats lay in the gutter in a pool of blood, pink and white and cream colored. looking like a kids drawing of a calf - all the parts there, but the proportions skewed. i thanked the calf for coming to our farm and covered it up with hay before sending it on it's way out to the manure pit.

willy lay in her spot, chewing her cud, seemingly undisturbed by the event. she probably even felt better, having expelled the masses of dead and dying tissue from her body. but i knew what this most likely meant for willy: a trip on the beef truck.

a cow that aborts her calf is not a cow to keep. She may have other problems causing her to abort that will only become evident later, it may be difficult for her to become pregnant again and she will certainly cause the farm to lose money because of her extended dry (non-lactating) period. On a farm that happens to not have many replacement animals, she might get a second chance, but we have 5 heifers about the calve waiting outside still for a spot in the barn. Better to ship her. "Out of sight, out of mind" as our old vet used to say.

But a cow is not the same as a printer or a motor or a widget. A cow is a living thing. (Maybe on a huge farm with a thousand cows it is easier to think of them as a commodity, but I went to a huge farm once and the farmer found his favorite cow to show me, a cow without a name, only a number, and still scratched her behind the ears and let her lick his hand.) You were probably there when this cow was born as a calf, fed her from a bottle, got her through her first lactation, took care of her when she was sick, brushed her and talked to her and fed her every day. She is also large and warm and reasonably affectionate. To send her off to be made into Campbell's beef stew because her body did what it had to do seems unfortunate, to me. Yet, that is what happens to most spent dairy animals.

Them's the breaks. Monetarily and realistically speaking, every animal on a farm cannot be kept. That's why they're farm animals and not pets. And the miracle of death is just as natural as it's much touted counterpart. It is something that must simply be accepted.

Still, I wish that every animal could live out their whole life on the farm where the farmer and the consumer could know that they had an existence that was as pleasant and natural as possible. This could include on farm slaughtering of bull calves and cows no longer suitable for milking. Then the products from these animals could be processed by local processors and marketed directly to people in the area as food for people, animals or as compost (http://www.youtube.com/HighfieldsComposting). I wish that these animals and their bodies were respected as the vessels of life that they are, even in their passing.

wanted: size 6 left boot

I want to make a website called rubberbootswap.com. I always get a hole in my left boot first. I don't know if it's from how I walk or bend down or what, but I end up either wearing a holey boot until the right one finally gives out or getting a new pair when the right boot is still fine. but on rubberbootswap.com, those single boots could go to people who need them!

i wonder how much it would cost to ship a rubber boot?

So we'll wait for it to come around on the guitar, here.

On Thanksgiving, Libra had her calf. We usually try to give the calves names that have to do with the moms' names. That way the families are easy to remember. We have Cakes, her daughter Pies, and Pies' daughter Brioche. Gem had Ruby and Jewel. Gizmo had Izmo who had Zmo who had Mo (really). I guess Gemini or Virgo would be a good name for Libra's heifer, but I think we should name her Alice.

whose barn? run's barn!

In the winter-time we clip the cows' udders and their flanks (like shaving your head) so they are less likely to be dirty. I am really compelled to try and shave "RUN DMC" on one of the cows.

why i won't have any kids

This is from a website where people can submit funny stuff that happens at their job.


http://worklols.com/post/896126262/theres-a-cow-in-my-kitchen

This would be cute, if the cow was housebroken. Can you housebreak cows?

ahh ... the miracle of life

One thing about the barn at the farm is that it doesn't have a maternity stall. This is usually not a problem as the cows mostly calve outside where it's always clean and where they can totally abide by their bovine instincts. But in the winter, they have to have their calves while they are tied up in the barn.

Yesterday, Nutty finally decided to have her baby. She had been holding her tail up all during morning milking and by the time i was done cleaning the barn her waterbag had burst and two little perfect white feet where poking out.

I always feel that birth, inspite of the fact that most living things got here this way, is an odd and amazing thing for me to watch. While I was doing my other work I observed as the feet went out and in with a little more coming out each time. Two steps forward and one step back is mostly how calves get born. Then the nose started to come out. Then you could see the eyes. This is particularly bizarre since the eyes look around sometimes from behind their protective membrane covering and you can tell that baby is thinking "what the fuck is this?". Like a human baby, after the whole head comes out the rest is usually pretty easy.

Nutty gave birth standing up and the 3 foot drop always seems a bit cruel to me. But it does knock any fluids from the calf's mouth and lungs preventing pneumonia and allowing them to breath. Outside, this would be when they mom turns around and starts cleaning off her baby. But the mom is hooked in her stall so this was when Ivy tries to, as gently as possible, lift a slippery, flopping, wet, squirming, 70 pound baby cow up over the lip of the stall and up to the cow's head so she can clean it off.

Use your knees, not your back.

By the time I came back from lunch 30 minutes later the calf was standing up and looking for a drink and Nutty was grunting contentedly at her baby. I like that part.

a followup

perhaps you'll remember that i wrote about the veal calves i was raising back in April.
(http://britchen.blogspot.com/2010/04/making-call.html). We'll they've both gone on to greener pastures and everyone who has eaten some rose veal reports that it is succulent and delicious.

some of the perks

I'm not too into getting up at 4am to go to work. It's a little bit of a drag. But some mornings, I get to the farm and the stars are so bright and so numerous and the sky is so black, but the trees still stand silhouetted at the edge of the fields. The moon hangs like a tiny sliver of fingernail near the horizon. And I think ... how many other people are up at 4:30 enjoying this?

more fun than shooting wolves with sarah palin

Once the dust has settled tomorrow and you're not ready to start speculating on whether or not the Democratic party should pick someone other than Obama to run in 2012, head over to Lettuce Link and start limbering up for the other big legislative event of 2012 - The Farm Bill!

http://lettucelink.blogspot.com/2010/10/detangling-farm-bill-very-short-very.html

good news for people who love bad news

It's election season, a time of year when people (and now corporations and unions, thanks supreme court!) shell out hundreds and thousands of dollars to influence the way you choose the largely ineffectual elites who will represent the lobbyists' interests in our state and national capitols. It's also a time of bitter divisions along party lines. But here is a chance for the left and the right to unite under an idea that seems important to both sides of the political spectrum: the right to choose what food one eats without excess interference by the government.
Morningland Dairy in the Ozarks of Missouri is being ordered by the feds to destroy 50,000 pounds of cheese. The reason for this is that a sample of their cheese tested positive for listeria months after it had left their farm and gone to a store in California.
The FDA is unwilling to comply with the law requiring the producer of a product that is discovered to be tainted to be given a sample on which to conduct their own testing. Tests taken at the farm have all come back negative for listeria. The farm has offered to test every batch of cheese leaving the farm, but to no avail. The farm has been told that they have no legal recourse and no ability to appeal and that they should busy themselves with destroying 8 months of work. They were forced to dump their milk for 5 weeks and now are only allowed to sell it to a wholesaler (probably at a loss or close to it). This farm has been making cheese for 30 years and has never had a complaint of illness.
After my experiences at a farm in Connecticut, I have become pretty suspect of the FDA and their testing procedures and am really more likely to believe that a witch hunt is going down on these poor hardworking people.
Their website is http://morninglanddairy.webs.com/
and you can read about their fight against the FDA's orders here (and make a donation if you see fit) http://uncheeseparty.wordpress.com
Many of the people leaving comments seem to be fairly right leaning - reporting that they have notified Glenn Beck and Anderson Cooper of the situation at the farm. But it's nice to know that at least there is something people can come together about. In the interest of balance, I wrote to Amy Goodman to let her know what's going on.

down but not out

Almost a year ago the McAllister barn burnt down in a very horrible fire. All the cows were inside and most perished in the blaze. The site smoked for days afterwards because of all the hay in the hayloft and the place stank when you drove by.

The few times I've gone by this summer there were some heifers hanging out in the green pasture next to the blackened spot where the barn was. Then today I saw that a new concrete foundation had been poured and there was a stack of roof trusses stacked in the barnyard.

Alone in my car, I cheered.

cow pus, it does a body good.

So, there is some discussion in America right now about lowering the somatic cell limit. (Somatic cell count - SCC - is a count of how many white blood cells are in a milliliter of milk. A count of less than 200,000 is thought to indicate a healthy cow, although counts can be quite low - 10-50,000. Counts higher than 250,000 probably indicate that there is probably some sort of infection going on.) The current limit is 750,000 which is, like, really fucking high, in my opinion. If your tank of milk is averaging that you have some serious mastitis going on in multiple animals. 750,000 is the American limit because science has concluded that this is highest amount of cow pus that humans can safely consume with no chance of ill effects.

In Europe the limit is 400,000 and now those socialist bastards have the gall to want to require that any milk products the US exports to Europe meet that standard. Don't they remember we saved them from the Nazis? Now the US dairy industry is considering the idea of lowering the US limit to 400,000 to comply with the European policy. This is causing some farmers and dairy pundits (is there even such a thing?) to flip out and say that farms are going to go out of business because they can't meet the 400,000 limit.

I don't know how people figure this stuff out, but some studies say that at 400,000 12% of the quarters (teats) on a farm are infected with mastitis. 750,000 is more like 25%. The idea that 25% of your cows quarters are infected doesn't speak well for a farm's cleanliness, monitoring or treatment procedures (again, in my opinion). Keep in mind that if a cow has a really bad case of mastitis, the milk will be withheld from the tank. So these numbers don't even count cows that are deemed "sick".

While I don't like to think about farms going out of business because of this (and really, you get lots of help from the department of ag and chances to fix this sort of problem - it's not like you have one high count and the state comes and takes your license away) i have the question the quality of work being done and the quality of life for cows at farms with cell count problems.

Another issue related to cell count is production and profit. A sick animal is not going to make as much milk as a healthy one. The amount is quite a bit - something like between 6-10% of potential production is lost as an cow' s SCC starts to get above 300,000. Treating a sick animals costs money - the sicker they are the more it costs. If your farm ships to a larger processing facility, there is often a premium paid for low SCC milk.

I think the US should definitely drop the limit to 400,000. It encourages better farming practices, makes cows more efficient and allows for US dairy exports to Europe.

This is a good article from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with more specific health and economic information about somatic cell counts.

If this sort of thing really trips your trigger, you can google "milk production scc" or "400000 scc europe" and read all sorts of articles about it.

old and new

my co-worker's wife had a baby a few months ago. i like hearing about her and sometimes, my co-worker or his wife will bring her by for a visit. he told me about being amazed by looking at her hands that were so soft and new. "it's like my hands are made of something completely different than hers" he said. and i know what he means. my fingers are a topographic map of cris-crossed ravines and fissures. there are hard islands of callous that rise up out of my palms. the edges of my fingernails seem to be perpetually stained with black crud. nicks and cuts and tears pepper them everywhere. when she holds my rough stained finger in her tiny perfect ones, it is like they are made out of two opposite substances.

living the dream

If you work in town ... "you'd have an easy life, in some ways. You wouldn't be out in all kinds of weather. Cold winter nights, you could lie snug, in bed and not worry about young stock freezing. Rain or shine, wind or snow, you'd be under shelter. You'd be shut up, inside walls. Likely you'd always have plenty to eat and wear and money in the bank.

"That's the truth and we must be fair about it. But there's the other side too. You'd have to depend on other folks in town. Everything you got, you'd get from other folks.

"A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please and no man can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent on a farm"

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote that in her book about her husband's childhood on an upstate New York farm in the 1860's. I like to think it is still a little bit true.

how we almost burt the barn down, but didn't

Two weeks ago I came out from the milk house and found the barn full of smoke. Most of the cows were outside and I quickly freed the ones being kept in that day and chased them out of the barn. By the time I had done this, the smoke was gone. Someone from the cheese plant had seen the smoke and come over to see what was going on. We searched around for a while before we found what had burnt up - a transformer box that controls the pulsation on the milking system. The wires had caught fire inside the box and burnt themselves out once the fuse tripped. The dairy supply place came and replaced the box saying the other one must have had some dirt and dust and moisture (all things present in a barn) that led to the burn out. Sigh of relief from all involved ....
Until last weekend, when I went to milk the cows and the pulsation didn't work. And the dairy supply company came and said the box they put in last time must have been no good and put in a new one which worked fine ...
Until Friday when my co-worker, Nate, went to milk and there was no pulsation. Okay ... something is getting strange now. On Monday we were definitely gonna have to call the electrician and have this stuff looked at - at least because the dairy supply place was running out of transformer boxes.
But then yesterday I was on my way to get the tractor and I thought *sniff* "yuck ... it smells like burning plastic .... oh fuck!" Indeed, the box was on fire, again. And again we dodged the bullet of catching the barn on fire mostly because god looks out for fools and little children and dairy farmers. Well obviously it couldn't wait until Monday and we called to have the electrician and the dairy repair people come out and figure out what was going on.

They searched and they searched and finally, when they were looking for something else, they found a section of the milk pipe that had a little smear of soot on it. Then they realized what was happening. (In a pipeline milking system there is the stainless steel pipe that the milk goes through and then a plastic pipe that the vacuum goes through right next to each other. There are little ports on each pipe to plug the milking machines into.) In this one spot in the barn the wires that control the pulsation went in between the milk pipe and the vacuum pipe. When the wash cycle ran (which makes the pipes jiggle) the wires were getting pinched. Eventually they got pinched enough that they plastic stripped off of them and then they got pinched again, completed the circuit and blew out the transformer - sometimes with fire and sometimes just with a big jolt of electricity. This happened 4 times before we finally figured out what was going on.

The creamery's owners came in the afternoon to get the whole story. I told them that the repair people had been there for 5 hours. (on an emergency weekend call)
That was probably expensive. he said
But less expensive than a new barn i said
yeah ... but still scary. you need a medal for bravery. he said
what i really need is a valium. i said

on not reinventing the wheel or ... i wonder how they did that?

The local library here has an excellent book called "Barn Plans and Outbuidings" by Algrove Publishing. The cover says it was originally printed in 1889. It has a whole stack of plans for barns that existed on farms in the US at that time. It also sometimes tells a little about the farm and how much the structure cost to build (in 1889). The most extravagant barn in the book cost 1500 dollars. There are also all sorts of engravings and plans for building things like ice houses, creameries, temporary cattle shelters (like when you move to Kansas and have to find somewhere to put your cows that first winter) and corn cribs.
I love to look at the pictures and see how people managed things before electricity, even if I do work on a farm with a state of the art cheese aging facility.

back in the saddle

It has been a little bit crazy the last three months. But I have a shrink, so, you don't need to hear too much about that. Suffice to say, I rehomed my ox, moved away from the farm I lived on in the country to a house in town, and got a job at Jasper Hill Farm.

I am the assistant herd manager. This means I milk and take care of the cows as well as work to assure their health and well being. It is the first "for realz" farming job I've had. I have had some internships and produced some of my own food (eggs, veggies, syrup) for sale; but now, when shit breaks, it's up to me to figure out what to do about it. When the cell counts in the milk come back high or low, it's my ass that gets questioned or praised. When a mastitic heifer kicks like a bastard as I try to get the last of the bacteria filled milk out of her swollen and sore udder, I have to grit my teeth and take the hits because ain't no body else gonna do it.

I love it. I took this job because I wanted to see if I had what it took to have my own dairy farm and if I could milk cows in a way that produced milk I would feel confident selling to people as raw (eventhough that's not what we do here). Can I work a 16 hour day and then get up at 4am and do it again? When shit breaks, can I trouble shoot or figure out who to call? Do I like being around cows all day (almost) every day? ... The answer is a tentative "yes".

It is also a good inbetween step from working in an assisting role, to doing it alone. The herd manager here is a great guy with alot to teach me. We each get 2 days off a week, which is quite excellent for one's sanity, I think. We also get paid a fair and livable wage.

This is one of the farms profiled in the book The Town That Food Saved. The book questioned whether or not a town could really benefit from a farm that produces cheese so expensive and unusual that some people who live there would have a hard time affording it or being willing to try it. But I think a place that makes jobs, tries hard to produce a high quality product that is healthy for the people who eat it and the animals who make it and offers good experience for future independent farmers can definitely benefit from such an operation, and I am glad to be part of it.

why do the chickens cross the road?

I got some more chickens. They were free on craigslist, so how could I say no? They are two years old, which is middleaged for a chicken, but certainly still productive. I got them mostly because the chickens that I did have developed a propensity for suicide that would rival Shakespearean protagonists or samurai warriors. They kept running into the road in front for cars. No really. I think I had one get run over each year for the last 3 years and then this year ... I dunno if they made some sort of suicide pact or what but I had 7 get smooshed between April and June. I would find their crumpled little bodies in the ditch and just feel so bad.
I don't know why they do this. They, I shit you not, wait in the ditch until a car comes by and then run out into the road. I dunno if the cars freak them out and they run out into the road or if they are just sick and twisted little fuckers. I even had one do it to me while I was driving home one day. I didn't hurt her because I was about to turn into the driveway and was going about 3 miles an hour but I certainly bounced her off my bumper.

So, rather than try to control their impulses, I decided to just get some more.

And, knock on wood, their appearance seems to have kept the other original chickens out of the road. However, they lay eggs everywhere. Nowhere is too unusual to not be perfect place for these chickens to lay. They came from a very nice family in Montpelier who had a little yard for them and a cute little house with nest boxes, so, again, I cannot fathom the chicken psychology behind this behaviour.

They lay eggs on the floor of the chicken coop, (tame) just any old place on the ground outside the coop, under the porch (awkward to retrieve), under the chicken coop (more awkward to retrieve), under tarps, in trash cans, in boxes, and sometimes even in the nest boxes. And then, when I find one of their spots, it becomes instantly unappealing and they go on to find a better spot. But they do keep the other chickens out of the road, so I guess I can deal with having an Easter egg hunt every day.

right on schedule.

the corn is knee high

guest lecture

Where I live in Vermont, there are still some rock walls. These are old and falling down in places, but back in the day, they were what fenced in much of the livestock kept around here. I always wondered if they were very good at keeping the animals in. For one thing, they are not particularly tall and for another, it seems like a determined cow and a less determined sheep or goat could just clamber right over it.

Well, as I was cruising the archives over at Sweet Juniper, a blog well worth your time, I found a series of posts about the author's time on an Irish farm in the late 90's. (I too worked on an Irish farm for a while but it was not nearly so amusing as this account. Maybe sometime I will tell you about watering a secret stash of my boss' pot plants while the members of Sinn Fein were knocking at the door, though.) Along with many other hilarious memories, he gives you the lowdown on the joys and sorrows of fencing with rocks. Also, if you get to the part about pulling the calf and wonder "is it like that?" The answer is, "yes, it's exactly like that."

part 1
part 2: "In which Dutch conquers the Irish countryside riding on the shoulders of a gentleman who has just consumed 23 pints of Guinness"
part 3: in which Saint Patrick causes Dutch to betray his own countryman for twenty quid
part 4: In which Dutch finds himself elbow deep in bovine vagina under a full moon

serve your country food

Would you like to be a migrant farm worker? Now's your chance to work in the hot sun doing back breaking repetitive labor for hours on end on a farm that is not yours. You'll probably get paid by the pound or the piece, so learn to work fast cuz there's no retirement fund. You (and your children too if they come along) can come in contact with the dangerous pesticides that are used to keep our food cheap and beautiful. But then again, since you're an American, you won't get to go back to your home country when you're old and sick and have free health care. But maybe some pinko commie country in Latin America will take you in if you tell them you were a farm worker.

In response to the latest backlash against undocumented workers (some of which is taking place in Vermont as well) the UFW (United Farm Workers - a farm worker's union) has launched a campaign called "Take Our Jobs" inviting legal American citizens to become farm workers.

here's the website: takeourjobs.org

A representative from the UFW is also scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report on July 8th, so check it out if you're into that stuff.

just like blade runner

After Lou-weeze refused to cooperate in my dreams of fluffy baby chicks peeking out from a proud mother hen, I decided to hatch some the way god and Philip K Dick intended, in a machine.

Judy had an incubator that she used to hatch chicks every year in her 4th grade classroom. It looks like a styrofoam cooler with a heating element stuck to the top. I felt skeptical that it might work, especially after we found the heating coil broken and super glued it back together. But I put 18 eggs in it anyway and turned them by hand three times a day, every day for 17 days. The instruction sheet that came with the incubator said to stop turning the eggs on the 18th day and that on the 21st day they should hatch.

Yesterday after work, I was home having a snack when I heard
"PEEP!"
I looked at Peter. "It sounds like there's a bird in here," he said.
"peep PEEP!"

BABY CHICKENS!

I ran over to the incubator and opened it (which, by the way, I later read not to do because it screws up the humidity) and saw that one of the eggs had a crack in it!
I immediately went on the internet and learned that it can take up to 24 hours for a baby chicken to make its way out of the egg. All evening we heard peep peep PEEP!!! PEEP! as the chicken tried to get out. If you peeped at the incubator it would peep back at you. The cat took to sitting on the machine, his motives probably not all together altruistic, but awfully cute anyways.

Last night at 2:30 Peter woke me up. "It sounds like there is alot of rattling going on down there." I sleepily went down stairs and shined the flashlight through the little window. There was a tiny chicken staggering around inside! I cheered it on and went back to sleep.

This morning there were 2 more! They were mostly dry so I moved them to the brooder I had ready in the other room. Peter called me this morning at work with the news that 3 more had hatched and there were 2 more working on it.

If I thought getting chickens in the mail was fun, hatching them is even better. They are even more cute and disoriented at birth than they are when they're 2 days old. They stagger around, taking 2 steps and then flopping over flat on their stomachs to sleep for 3 minutes before jumping up again. It's totally hilarious and adorable.

Welcome to our farm, chickens!

i used my very best community college photoshop skills to fix the red tint the heat light gives the pictures, but they still aren't very good. However, I feel like I've given them a sci-fi cast that goes along with being birthed from the womb of a Styrofoam box full of wires.

if you liked a mosh pit, you'll love this

I think cows must like summer. Days spent roaming the pasture, looking for just the perfect place to eat. Nights spent quietly resting in the barn. Not too hot and not too cold. They just look happier. But the height of summer for farmers … that’s different. Haying makes summer an extra busy time. Any day that’s sunny must be seized. The old adage “Make hay while the sun shines” doesn’t exist for nothing. There are only a few short months to collect and store all the food that will feed the cows through the long cold winter. While the cows relax in the grass, everyone with two legs must work harder faster and longer than any other time of the year.

This sometimes causes other, more standard chores to slip a little bit … or sometimes a lot. First this task and then that one are sacrificed on the altar of grass preservation. While we have been haying, I had been feeding the calves and heifers in the barn. But then I had to work later at the store a few nights so someone else was doing it, someone else who already had many other things to do. By the time I got back to the barn to check up, things had gone from busy to chaotic to comical.

As soon as I walked in the door I was calf (human calves not cow calves) deep in shit. I had almost come to the barn with my sneakers on, but thankfully I stopped to grab my boots. Somehow all the boards that form a walk way over the gutter had been removed and that left a 18 inch deep trough of poo with the gutter cleaner waiting patiently at the bottom to do its job. I am over almost any squeamishness involving mammalian bodily fluids, but to be suddenly pitched into a moat of fecal matter I realized the hurculean task that was going to await me.

After returning to the milk house to hose off and re enter the barn with care, I saw the pigs were loose. I hate pigs. Until I was 25, I had always imagined them to be pensive and thoughtful like Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. But infact, they are huge and freakish, with human eyes and bizarre muscley neckless bodies. They have sharp teeth and another group of pigs on our farm once got loose in the night and plucked 3 turkeys off the perch where they slept and ate them. We realized what had happened the next day when white turkey feathers appeared in the pigs’ excrement. While my brother in law’s kids chase them around happily and my husband regales me with happy tales of his childhood that include a pig that would let him ride it around, I remain creeped out. There is a reason that the one thing Jews and Muslims can agree on is the taboo on pork.

Due to the loose swine, all of my other chores were done with an eye on the pigs, to make sure they didn’t come too close to me. If they did, I shook a large screwdriver at them and they returned to rooting around in one of the calf pens.

I gave everyone hay and grain and cleaned their pens out. I put down fresh shavings and ran the gutter cleaner a little bit. Then, I turned my attention to the baby calves. Due to a chronic lack of space in the barn, the newborn (and usually not so newborn) calves hang out for a while in the large center aisle of the barn that serves as manger in the literal and biblical sense of the word. As I mentioned before, things had slipped a bit and there were now seven calves resting gamboling and mooing for dinner in the manger. I fed the ones that would drink from a pail while holding back the ones that didn’t yet understand the concept and would do nothing but get in the way and kick the pail over. Then I fed the ones that needed a bottle, holding the older ones, who would only get over excited at the thought of a bottle and butt you hard in places that would cause you to wish for veal for dinner. This whole trick is not for the faint of heart and is, I believe, akin to keeping 20 ping pong balls underwater at the same time except the ping pong balls are sentient, mobile and weigh between 50 and 150 pounds.

Everyone was starting to chill out and lay down with full bellies when I realized that there were only 6 calves. I thought back … yes 4 buckets and milk and 2 bottles … that’s only 6. I looked around in all the bigger calf pens, in the pig pen, still empty of pigs and calves. I went outside and looked for little calf prints in the driveway.

Last winter, a cow who was loose in the barn in order to find a spot to have her own baby lay down on a different sleeping calf, crushing her to death. This is the disadvantage of running things a bit looser than you would really like had you the time resources and energy. I had cried a lot when I found the calf and still felt quite bad about it.

It is unusual to have a calf that likes to go off on her own, but it does happen. She could be hiding out anywhere in the tall grass and if she got a little ways from the barn with no cows to protect her, coyotes could find her at night.

But as I was thinking about where she might be, I heard a scuffling and a struggled little “meeeeh!” The missing calf had returned and was in the midst of squeezing through the gate which I had left open just enough for a person or a calf to get through. She looked as though she had swallowed a basketball. She waddled over to the manger and lay down. Peter was behind her. “She was in the free stall eating off the cows, the little bastard.”

With the arrival of my final baby, my work was done. Peter put the pigs back in their pen while I “helped” by chasing them with my screwdriver. Then he went to mow for the next day and I went home to take a nap before bed.

the great reskilling

so ... how did people teach their cows to take picketing? I have two little calves that I have been picketing for 3 days and I go find them every 4 or 5 hours to untangle their sorry asses. Do they just eventually get the hang of it?

tis the season

my haiku for spring

fence posts straight, wire tight
green grass clean cows munching browsing drowsing
dandelions taste sweet

Dying Breed

The barn at a dairy farm in town burnt down this morning. I heard the sirens go through while I was at work and my husband, Peter, called me to tell me it wasn't us, in case people were talking. Tonight we learned that, although it happened mid morning, 160 cows died in the fire. Maybe they were inside because it was so hot out today. I put my cows in their barn too this morning, so they would not have to suffer in the hot sun.

One thing about cows is, if they panic, they want to go back to the barn. If they're in a panic, they won't want to leave the barn. Horses are the same way, I believe. Even if the barn is on fire, they don't want to leave. Another farm a little ways away from here had a barn fire last fall, and in the end, the poor farmer shot his cows at the last minute so they wouldn't have to burn to death. After this happened, I felt very worried about having to shoot cows; but Peter suggested that, should we be so unfortunate, we could make a big hole in the side of the barn with the tractor. This seemed to soothe me at the time.

"Shit," said Peter, "I would die in the fire before I let cows burn to death."

"Shut up," I said. "What kind of sense does that make. We couldn't rebuild without you."

This seemed much worse than the thought of shooting cows.

I can think of many things I like about dairy farming. Seeing the cows eating grass or lazing contentedly in the pasture. Drinking cream off the top of the milk jug. The moment at the end of the evening when every udder is empty and every mouth is full and every bed is clean. The satisfaction of a hard day's work completed.

But for Peter, farming really seems like a life time of endless toil. A job well done can be acknowledged, but quick enough another one will take its place. I have heard him curse a cow for a minor infraction in a way that would make a sailor blush and seen him beat a heifer with a metal pipe so badly I worried he would damage her spine. The end of chores for the day is only a reminder that the whole routine must be completed again in 12 hours. Farming is in many ways a thankless job, and Peter seems to know each one by name.

There is a piece of pride, I think, in keeping what your great great grandparents began going, in carring on the farm when so many have folded. But to say that you would die saving the animals that you curse body and soul on a daily basis ... I don't know what to think about that. Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

"I guess you can't say what you can do unless you were there," he conceded after a while. "But it sucks that there's only 2 farms left in town."

required reading

My husband's grandma gave me a book to look at. Is is from a man who used to live in our town. He has since passed away and his son is 85 years old, so I suspect he got it shortly after the time of it's publication in 1895. It's called "ABC of Agriculture." The book says it's written for people who would like to go into farming as adults.


Would we discourage those who, in mature years, would adopt some form of agriculture for the remainder of their lives? Assuredly not, for it is to aid such that this "Abc of Agriculture" is proposed, not more to point out what should be done, than to show what should be avoided.

"With what did you manure that field?" was asked of a young farmer by one who noticed a promising crop. "With brains sir!" was the reply, meaning that had had given thought to the crop and treated it accordingly. Nowhere are "brains" more needed than on the farm.

True that.

And how about this one:

It is the object of the thoughtful husbandman to get paying crops, to have the land either getting better and more fertile. or at least not losing in productive power.

Chemical fertilizers and over tilling are disparaged against here.

And in closing:
The book talks about the farmer being judicious and careful in the feeding of his animals and that when some care and thought are taken, the result will be much better for the animal ... The reason for this is found in a better adjustment of the ration, regularity in feeding and watering, warmth and cleanliness. In ten years it may make all the difference between a poor farmer and a rich one. (This is really the XYZ of agriculture.)

A very interesting thing is that in the back of the book are the other books sold by this publisher. There are probably 40 different titles back there. "The New Onion Culture" "The American Standard of Perfection" (a book about poultry breeding that is still published today) "Keeping One Cow" "Forest Planting" "Batty's Practical Taxidermy and Home Decoration" and "The Ice Crop" ("For all interested in ice houses, cold storage, and the handling and use of ice in any way, including many receipes for iced dishes and beverages.") I figured 120 years ago, people just learned this stuff from their parents or from other people in their towns. But here is a whole set of volumes on learning these skills from books.

ox school: taking care of business

So, I've got this steer, Lucky. He's pretty good, but really I would like him to be great, especially now that he is getting big. I want him to be well enough behaved that other people could drive him and so that I can ride him. So, there are some bad habits that need to be eradicated. Number one is his trying to crowd me off to the side while I'm walking with him. I think it's a dominance thing. Someone gave me a good tip last summer on how to deal with this sort of thing that I finally got around to trying out - tape a nail to the bottom of your goad. If he starts to crowd just hold the nail out and let him crowd right into it.

Really, in one walk, problem solved. If only all issues were so easily resolved.

proletariat revolts?

so ... i think my beehive has a problem ... i think either there is no queen or the queen has a problem that is making her lay only male eggs. i, and my mentor from the Vermont Beekeeper's Association, are working on this; however, in the meantime, i do like this picture.

getting their graze on

I think I've gotten the solar fence charger working and my cows are out having some grass.

Here's some pictures:

it's what's for dinner

As a teenager, soon after I came to the realization that Jesus would not be returning before I was old enough to vote, I started to think about things other than the impending Armageddon. One of the things I began to think about was food and where it comes from. We had a garden and I knew that milk came from cows and all the basic stuff, but I had never really ruminated on the finer points of how the world was fed before. Now, this is a question that you can really spend an entire career thinking about (see Pollan, Michael), but I think the first thing that comes naturally to many American teenagers is the question of where meat comes from. I think this is because one thing certain American teenagers become attuned to easily (and rightfully so) is a sense of fairness and justice. And if you have developed a concern for fairness and justice, once you realize where most meat comes from, you are fucking outraged and become a vegetarian. I did. You might even take it a step further and realize that even milk and eggs usually result in the suffering of animals and always in their eventual death and become a vegan. The production of inexpensive meat also results in the suffering of many many people who have to work in horrible feed-lot operations and slaughter facilities, or, worse yet, must go hungry or thirsty because land is being used to grow grain or give water to animals while they suffer.

And so, for 10 years, I didn’t eat meat. In the course of those years I found out more about ethically raised animal products and about different kinds of farm land – kinds that were good for raising plant protein (like beans) and kinds that were better at raising grass for animals to graze and then give us milk and meat. I thought about things like the fact that agrarian cultures had almost always had animals, which were viewed as valuable companions and valuable resources. Also, anyone raising crops will need fertilizer and if you’re not going to buy chemical fertilizers and if you’re not going to live close enough to the ocean to use seaweed, you’re gonna want some shit.

Then, I came to work on a farm, a farm with animals. I realized that if I wanted my animals to have a natural, pleasant and productive life, I also needed to be able to give them a swift death and to not let their bodies go to waste after their spirits had left them.

So I found someone to show me how to butcher a rooster. I wondered if I could do it. I had never killed anything bigger than a large spider. I don’t think I ever even ran over a mouse or a squirrel with my car. But I thanked the rooster for it’s life and took the rooster’s head in one hand and the knife in the other (its tied upsidedown) and cut its head off. (The person who showed me also showed me how to slit the bird’s throat, but if it were me, I’d rather someone cut my head off than slit my throat any day.) With the aid of a scalder and a plucker he went from something you would see in the pasture to something you would see in the oven in 10 minutes.

Even something a small as a rooster can feed you for several meals. The meat, of course, can be prepared any number of different ways. The fat can be rendered into a spread for bread or cooking called schmaltz. http://www.sadiesalome.com/recipes/schmaltz.html The heart and liver are okay as well. Sad to say, I can’t bring myself to eat the gizzard, but some people love them. I gave it to my cat. The bones can be made into stock for soups or stews. And all the bits that you can’t eat can be composted into fertilizer for the land.

I hope the rooster knows how much he was appreciated for everything he brought to the farm in his life and in his death.

about farm subsidies

I got this from the fabulous irresistible fleet of bicycles blog:

Incase you were wondering how much money each state gets in farm subsidies and how much the biggest farms get here it is, baby, with a graph to go along with it.

http://farm.ewg.org/

I've never heard of any of the top farms on the Vermont subsidy list.

in the news

My horoscope this week was agriculturally related:
Taurus: Among the ancient Anglo-Saxons, the month of May was called "Thrimilce." The word referred to the fact that cows were so productive at this time of year that they could be milked three times a day. I thought of that as I studied your current astrological data, Taurus. During this year's Thrimilce, you are almost impossibly fertile and abundantly creative. My advice is to give generously, but not to the point of exhaustion: the equivalent of three times a day, but not four.


Also, I heard on the news about the Ice Saints, St. Mamertus, St. Pancras and St. Savertius, whose feast days fall on May 11th, 12th and 13th respectively. They are called the ice saints because apparently, it is common in Europe to have a cold snap during mid May (especially these 3 days). It has been particularly chilly the last few mornings here as well (although mercifully we haven't had any snow), so we are celebrating ice saints here in Vermont as well.

I saw one of the honeybees on a dandelion.

Exponential is a good term for spring.
Things start slow and sloping: tilling on a sunny warm day. Then prune the raspberries. Maybe another day you go check out the electric fence and see how it’s faring after the winter, admire the sprigs of green grass poking through. Wooh, start those seedlings, get them going, make sure you have the potatoes to plant, chickens are really laying a lot so wash the eggs, gosh, the grass is getting long now, did you ever get back to working on the fence? And the syrup, how is it selling, do we need to make more sugar? is the stand ready for the tourists who are starting to come? What!!! the baby chickens arecoming nextweek? Fuckhaveyoufixedthefencethere’snomorehay!!! and the peas need their trellis! Now you’re at the point of the curve where the amount of work starts to spike straight up. Descartes and your 9th grade algebra teacher would be proud.

But still, I like spring. I like finding all the little perennials returning. It seems amazing that anything domesticated survives in the ground over the course of the winter. I like when it starts to smell like growing in stead of always smelling like cold. I like watching the cows freak out over spring grass after a winter of hay. It’s a good time of year.

This post contains rather graphic descriptions of A.I. cow breeding. Not for those with delicate sensebilities.

The artificial insemination of a cow seems like such a bizarre impossible idea to me. I wonder who originally thought it up. (Although, just recently I learned that people artificially inseminate honey bees ... so perhaps my ideas of what is improbable needs looked into). The breeder gets a frozen straw with a milliliter of frozen jizz in it out of a tank of liquid nitrogen. It is thawed and inserted into this long thin metal tube with a plunger at the end. Then, the breeder reaches into the rectum of the cow and, pressing against the large intestine, pushes down and grabs the cow's cervix. Next, he or she inserts the tube into the cows vagina, through her cervix, and into the spot right at the beginning of the uterus, where the breeder depresses the plunger and releases the semen.

After a rather horrifying but not permanently disabling incident with our bull, I decided that I should learn how to breed cows. Last year, my husband and I went to cow breeding school. After two days of classes and 3 or 4 practice runs at home, I decided that Peter was much better at it than I was. For one thing, a Holstein is big. Sometimes I would be on my tip toes armpit deep in cow ass and still not be able to reach the cervix. Also, my hands are small. If I could get a hold of the cervix, it would sometimes slip out of my hand. This is very frustrating when you have spent the last 12 minutes searching for this elusive little organ. After I had bred a cow my left arm was exhausted from fighting against the strong muscles of the cow's digestive tract. My arm would involuntary shake and twitch for an hour afterward and be sore the whole day.

Peter discovered that he is much better at this than I am. He's quicker (which is better for the semen and I imagine also for the cow although they don't really seem to mind as much as you might expect), taller, has longer arms, bigger hands and is stronger in general. The teachers at the course called him a natural and at the farm he has bred many cows that settled (got pregnant). I think there is some joke to be made here but I'm not sure what it is.

This is not to say that smaller people can't breed cows. A co-worker of mine told me that her mother was one of the first female inseminators to work in Massachusetts (This was about 40 years ago). I think that if I had a lot of practice, I could probably get the hang of it. But it's not on the top of my list of things to do right now. Fortunately, we live in a state that still has lots of dairy farms, so there are professional artificial inseminators who come to your farm to "service" (that is really what they call it) your cows. Once they are at the cow, it takes them about 45 seconds. (again ... a chance for a joke?) They must have the forearms of professional walnut crushers. It costs $8 for them to come to the farm and then between 10-30 dollars for the semen. Not totally romantic for the cow, but better than getting your ribs cracked, in my opinion.

I figured this would be a good thing to write about because this month I'm getting my heifers bred for the first time. Since the bull we have right now is the sire of these heifers, I had to do it AI. So this morning I called the inseminator and asked him to come tomorrow to breed Cricket to a jersey bull with high butterfat (That means his daughters have a better chance for producing milk with higher butter fat content). Much like royalty sitting around hoping the queen will conceive, I'll wait to see if she settles.

Okay, here's a cow breeding joke:

The farmer told her husband that the inseminator was coming that morning. She had to go do some errands, so she asked him to go to the barn with the inseminator to show him which cow needed to be bred. To help her husband remember which cow it was, the farmer stuck a nail in the board above the cow's stall. When the inseminator came, the farmer's husband went to the barn and led the inseminator right to the cow. The inseminator was getting ready and said, "what's the nail for?" And the husband said "I'd guess to hang your pants on."

destroy this farm or the terrorists win

There is a farm in Vermont at the Canadian border. The government would like to take 10.5 acres of the farm by eminent domain to improve the border crossing that is already at the edge of the farm. The improvement would be paid for by 7 million dollars of stimulus package money. Naturally, the Rainville family who has farmed there since the 30s is fighting this seizure. They say that to lose the acreage would put them under and cause their farm to close.

Here are a few stories about the topic for interested parties.

from the 7 Days (local indie paper) last summer http://www.7dvt.com/2009crossing-line

from the Burlington Free Press 2 days ago http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20100427/NEWS02/100426011/Morses-Line-land-dispute-simmers

snow storm update

Just as the grass was getting long enough for a little here and there grazing, we got a giant snowstorm. Tuesday and Wednesday we got 20 inches of snow. Half of it has melted today under 50 degrees and sunny skies and the rest will probably go tomorrow as it is supposed to be even warmer.

I wanted to catch people up on my projects:

1) Lou-weeze - The broody hen - is still broody, but unfortunately, not interested on sitting on eggs as much as she is in sitting in her favourite nest box. Any attempt to move her to a more brooding friendly environment are met with a few days of compliance and then ... she abandons the nest and returns to her favourite nest box. One thing that happened when she was first broody was that the other chickens would love to get in the box with her and lay eggs in there. But now, as she has been broody for almost a month, the fervor for Lou-weeze's box has subsided in the flock. I might just let her sit on a few eggs in her own box and take the chicks as soon as they hatch and raise them myself.

2) bees - The bees seem to be settling in okay. On Satruday, I'll check them again to make sure they have enough food and that the queen is starting to lay eggs. I still haven't totally figured out how to keep my smoker going for more than 10 minutes (which I need on account of my novice bumbling) but the bees are very patient and I haven't been stung yet.

3) Cows - can't wait to go outside and eat grass.

The box they came in said: "honeybees - the back bone of agriculture"

My bees came today!!! I tried to have everything ready for them - hive assembled, equipment ready, food made (because there are no flowers here yet, I made them some sugar syrup in chamomile tea to tide them over). But when I went to hive them .... I dunno. Maybe they were pissed off or hungry or hot or something but it did not go like the video I watched at beeweaver.com. I took the lid off and a lot of bees came right out. By a lot, I mean like a zillion. They didn't wait to be poured on queen or anything. The got all over everything. The hive, the food can, the knife i used to open the box, me! and the frames I had taken out of the hive. I kept brushing them off the queen cage so I could take the plug out but they kept right back on landing on her. Eventually, and with the right loving intention that the biodynamic bee keepeing book says bees like, I just brushed as many off as I could and put the box in the hive and put the hive back together and got out of there. I hope not too many got squished. When I got to the other side of the garden I brushed the bees that were still on the equipment onto the grass.

I'll go back in 2 days and see how its going for them.

cheap thrills

Oh my god, Becky. Have you been to a salvage yard? I never had until today. I went looking for some wheels for an ox cart I am helping to build. There is literally tons of awesome stuff! I found a set of wheels, a set of gears good for attaching to something you want to make ground driven (a piece of machinery that is powered by having its tires turn across the ground rather than by an engine or by a tractor) and a whole bunch of parts for a bucket milker. I'm not really a bucket milker expert, but it looked like everything metal was there and since it was stainless steel, it all looked great. There were even a few pulsators (which you're not supposed to ever get wet but were unfortunately sitting in 3 inches of water. ) I am now on the internet looking to make sure that I can still buy the hoses and inflations for such things. They are not the most modern pieces of dairy equipment, but you can certainly still buy versions that are new. I wonder if its really possible to get a pail milker for ten cents a pound?

on the ephimeral nature of human existence

The only constant is change. People imagine the shift from swampland to national capitol in Washington DC and know that a forest once stood where Portland Oregon is now. We see the Mayan pyramids in the jungle and know that a huge civilization once flourished around them. But farmland changes too.

Agriculture, by its definition, is the disruption of the natural environment. When the John Deere tractor or even the single ox returns to the barn for good, the land quickly begins shrugging off all the hours, days and years of human labor that kept it in its farm-able condition. It is amazing how quickly it returns to its preferred state. Land on our farm that was pasture only 50 years ago is a soft wood forest with trees 60 feet tall. Our town has a granite train trestle located in trees so dense you thought it was built by the Romans, but really it is only 150 years old.

There is a piece of land near ours that used to be a farm. Then it was sold and sold and sold again. It is now owned by someone (a nosy person can find out who at the town clerk's office) who pays the taxes but has never made an appearance in anyone's recent memory. I imagine a road ran by it at some point, but the trees have long since taken it back. In fact, the only way to access this land today is to go by foot across another person's property.

On this farm there was .... a sugar house. I can't really say how old it was. It might have seen the hay day of prohibition when people found it was way more fun to make moonshine out of sap than syrup. Its hard to say. By the time I saw it it was little more than a mound of moss covered rotting boards. But in between the boards milling and their decomposition, two things happened.

One was that someone put a cast iron laundry sink in the sugar house. It has an enormous backsplash but its only about 7 inches deep. 1931 is stamped on the back. I googled around trying to find another one like this on the internet but I had no such luck.

The other was that a couple of back to the landers in the late 60's lived in this sugar house. I don't know if they were sent up here from the city by their parents to keep them out of trouble or if they wanted to be like Thoreau and find their own Walden - what better place than Walden VT, but the old timers around here remember them. They didn't stay very long the old timers said. (You'd have to be a pretty fucking dedicated transcendentalist to want to want to live in a sugar house in the middle of winter when it's -40 degrees out). But they stayed long enough to have a baby in that sugar house in the winter. I guess everything went okay and everyone found out about it when the dad walked down the road to find someone with a phone he could use to call a doctor after it was all over. That child is older than me now and the sink that the blood was cleaned up in is now in my basement.

Peter and I took advantage of the snow last weekend to grab a sled and hike out to the remains of the sugarhouse. We brought a crowbar too but we didn't need it. The small amount of wood that was covering the sink fell away in our hands. Then we dragged it back to the main road to load in the back of the truck. I don't think what we did was too much like stealing, and I figured the sink would be happy being on a farm again. Maybe someday someone will come and pluck it from the remains of our house and wonder what all it has seen.

The only constant is change, but cast iron is fairly constant as well.

kick us when we're down

Proving once again that while the congress cannot decide whether or not everyone should have access to heath care or if gay people are as big a threat to our nation as terrorists, fucking over small farmers is something everyone can agree on. S. 510 The Food Safety Modernization Act will hit the senate floor shortly and is expected to pass with bipartisan support. Obama, in his effort to turn the country socialist, is expected to sign it without incident.

This is a bill that will make it virtually illegal for small farmers to sell to stores, create expensive licensing requirements and complex time consuming paperwork. It also makes it more difficult to have a diversified (farms that grow crops and raise animals) farm because of the germs in poop. The purpose of this bill is (as the name says) to make the national food system safer, but really, it is only making it harder for small farmers to compete with enormous agribusiness facilities.

Here are two good breakdowns of the bill's problems.
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/03/libertarian-farmers-push-back-against-s510/
http://www.westonaprice.org/Urgent-Action-Alert-on-Senate-Food-Safety-Bill.html

I would encourage concerned groups to write to the FDA (a link to the FDA below) (it is probably too late to contact your senators, but you can do that too). Tell them that"

1) Small Farms (grossing less than 750,000) should not be required to become GAP (good agricultural practices) certified, because the high costs and time commitment could put them out of business.

2) Small farms are not high risk operations

3) Small farms who sell food to restaurants and wholesale and directly to consumers should not be considered a food facility

4) Small farms are careful stewards of the land

Write the FDA by May 24, 2010

1. Go to www.Regulations.gov
2. Under "keyword or ID" enter FDA-2010-N-0085-0001
3. At bottom, in the far right of the screen under Actions, click on "Submit a Comment."
4. Fill out the requested information and type your comment into the field provided.
5. Press "Submit"

But don't worry, my fellow Americans, whether the bill passes or not, you will still have access to your government approved GMO corn Doritos and farm bill subsidized twinkies.

everything i want to do is illegal

I have spent a lot of time this last week figuring out what is legal and what is not in terms of meat production. It turns out that even after 2 calls to the department of agriculture, I was planning to do several illegal things with my veal calves:
1) have them slaughtered at a federally inspected slaughterhouse when the inspector wasn't there.
2) use a label that had not been approved by the USDA
3) sell people half animals that were slaughtered on my farm.

All no-nos. The guy I needed to be talking to be talking to from the get go's back got better and was able to call me and straighten me out. I got things sorted now and I think everything is on the up and up but it just goes to show that the complicated web of meat regulations is, well, complicated.

making the call

Earlier this week we had two enormous bull calves. Since the farm only gets paid about 3 dollars for a bull calf shipped to market, I decided that I would buy these ones and they would be my first veal calves. I have had the idea to try and raise pastured veal for a few years now, I even wrote a SARE grant proposal which I didn't get. But it seems like people are expressing much more interest in tender tasty calf than they are into happy hippy raw milk, so I am going ahead with the project, grant funding or not.

So after I snuggled them and pet them and fed them their mother's milk for the very first time, I went in the house and made the appointment to have them killed. You see, there is a shortage of slaughter facilities in Vermont. There are only 5 federally inspected facilities that do cows, so if you drag your feet getting your spot in the fall, no osso bucco for you.

Really, no osso bucco to sell to anyone else. There are some very good laws regarding butchering here - if you can sell the animal to someone while it is alive (or two someones if each wants half) you may have a licensed person come to your farm, kill the animal and then have it taken to a state inspected facility for it to be cut and wrapped (or the person can do it all themselves if they are so inclined). However, if you would like to sell your meat packaged at a store or to a restaurant, you need to have it killed and cut up at a federally inspected facility. A federally inspected facility has a list of requirements a mile long not the least of which being a federal inspector on the premises at all times when killing and butchering is taking place. The need for sanitary responsible slaughter houses that cater to small scale meat producers is a hot topic, as you might imagine.

I called one place that was booked up until January. However, I did find a place that seemed nice. It was run by a husband and wife team. They said they wanted the animals there by 7pm the night before so that they would have adequate water and rest before their unfortunate morning. I felt very weird after I made the appointment. These calves will have a much nicer life, brief as it is, than any bull calf sold at the auction (whose lives are much much briefer). However, to keep from getting too attached, I named them Parmesean and Scallopini.

And of course, if you'd like to pre-order any veal, please get in touch.

broody update

She's still sitting on them!!!!

So we only have 20 more days of keeping our fingers crossed before they hatch. That would be April 23 or 24th. Go chicken!

broody

Modern chickens, like many modern farm animals, are the result of generations of selective breeding so complex and specialized that would make Mendel’s habit spin. Holstein cows are capable of making 200 pounds of milk a day. A cow in Africa that closely resembles wild cattle will make 2-4 pounds. Leghorn hens (the ones who lay the white eggs you see in the store) lay an egg almost every day for 2 years. Wild chickens don’t do this. They, like other wild birds, breed, lay some eggs and then hatch them. They do this once or twice a year. Most egg laying breeds of chicken (oh, have I mentioned that we’ve selectively bred different kinds of chickens for meat and egg production) don’t even possess the instinct to sit on eggs and hatch them. They lay more eggs that way. But, while I like a fried egg as much as the next person with a normal cholesterol level, I still think it’s a little bizarre that we’ve selectively bred animals that cannot reproduce without human help (how Jurassic Park is that shit?).

Yet, in spite of this careful breeding, sometimes a chicken will decide that she wants to hatch some eggs. This is called “going broody”. A broody chicken will stop laying eggs and start sitting on some. She stays on the nest almost all the time taking care of them, making sure they’re warm, turning them, getting pissed at you if you try to take them away. Then, after 21 days, the eggs hatch and she takes care of the chicks. Ahh, the miracle of life.

But, in my experience (and the internet’s too if you google “broody hen”), it’s not very easy to get a broody chicken to get all the way to the chick part of that little story. Last year I had a hen go broody and I figured I’d just leave her in the nest with her eggs and Mother Nature would take her course and I’d have baby chickens. NOT. She was okay for a few days and then some other chickens got in the nest with her and laid more eggs in with the ones she had and I tried to pick them out and then mark the originals. But then a few more days later she started eating the eggs and making a mess in the nest. Gah. So I took away the eggs and started taking her out of the nest box every time I saw her in there. She got over her broodyness.

Now she’s broody again and I am better prepared. I made her a little house of her own so she wouldn’t be disturbed by other hens, gave her some eggs and put her in it, but she didn’t like it and and started walking around looking pissed instead of sitting on her eggs. So I put her back with the other chickens. Then I tried the same thing at night – still no luck.

Today I tried something different. I put a box filled with straw inside the nest box in the main house she really liked. Then tonight, I took the whole box, the eggs and the chicken together to the little broody house. Minimal disturbance! She didn’t jump right up looking mad first thing, so my fingers are still crossed. We’ll see what she’s doing in the morning. I hope I can coax a natural instinct out of my chicken!

more farming news I never heard of:

In the 1997 many African American farmers sued the USDA for being denied loans needed to run their farms based on their race. The USDA admitted to this and agreed to pay these farmers millions of dollars. But, the money supposed to be paid to some late applying farmers this year has never been funded by congress before they left for their recess. This is quite sad as it further promotes the idea that farming is not an important occupation, when in fact it is the job that feeds the country.

Here's the story from NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125311885&ft=1&f=1001

4th quarter comeback

While the sugaring season was not everything it could have been and we certainly will not meet our goal of 150 quarts, these last few days have been great. The trees have been giving lots of sap (thanks trees!) and we've been boiling quite a bit of excellent light (well, light for us, which is medium) syrup as well as getting some nice b-grade syrup for sugar. Now we get to look forward to next year when we have a sap line going right to the sugar house so Peter will not have to break his back gathering sap on the tractor.

Just in Time for Cesar Chavez Day (March 31)

In case you were wondering if there are any hard feelings remaining between big agribusiness in California and the United Farm Workers, here is an article from "The Packer" (an e newsletter I get because I am a produce manager, but which doesn't really apply to my job) which describes Cesar Chavez, famous pacifist, UFW's founder and long time leader, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom as an "obsessive autocrat" and the UFW as a "bit player" in labor relations. *snort*

http://thepacker.com/Labor-disputes-could-harken-back-to-times-of-Cesar-Chavez/Article.aspx?oid=1026071&tid=&fid=PACKER-TOP-STORIES

Also:
Best new place to lay an egg du jour - between the tractor seat and the gear shift on the old New Holland. I found it when we got on the tractor to go collect sap.

the town that food saved

Ben Hewitt’s book “The Town that Food Saved” is on the shelves at the local bookstore and I stopped in for a little after work read the other day. It was pretty surreal to read about people I know, whose toilet paper I’ve rung up at the store, whose kids I’ve seen have melt downs at pot lucks in a non-fiction book. The book is good. While the author is on the side of the successful “agri-preneurs”, he still asks questions about the true sustainability of boutique cheese that’s mostly shipped off to NYC. If the last thing you read about farming was “The Omnivore’s Delimma” (which doesn’t ask these kind of questions) or “Everything I Want to Do is Illegal” (which asks different questions) then this book follows nicely.

But, see, I got over complaining about poseurs when I was 19 … okay, maybe I was 20. The whole, “they were better before they were famous,” “so and so has been doing X for years before and still does it better,” and “they’re selling out" arguments just sound so frustrating to me. I feel like there is something in the human condition that makes us poo-poo the success of others especially in a small town where not much else is going on.

To look at it from a strictly mercenary point of view, these businesses bring jobs that are hard to outsource (unlike some local businesses – Burton Snowboards, I’m looking at you) and well paying (I interviewed to be one of the milkers at Jasper Hill and they were paying more than I make at the store by a few dollars an hour) and tax revenue that homesteads and subdivisions do not.

Also, I feel like the argument that some of this stuff is getting shipped out of state is not really to the point as well. When Hardwick was mining granite where do you think most of it went? Out of state. Most of Vermont’s fluid milk goes out of state as well. Hell, I bet most people can’t even say what state the gallon of milk in their fridge came from but they’ll get their panties in a twist over the idea of someone selling potatoes in Boston quicker than you can say rBGH free. There are many many small farmers in Vermont who sell all of their produce in New England. Some of them sell it all in Vermont.

One of the best points, in my opinion, was made by Stephen (whose last name I can’t spell and can’t seem to find on the website), the chef at Claire’s. He said that there are 12 dollar entrees at Claire’s and 12 dollar entrees at the Village Diner across the street “And the last time I checked, that was still the same amount of money.” And it is. I have talked to people who tell me they can’t buy organic food because it’s too expensive. Well, it’s true that you will be hard pressed to find a gallon of organic milk for 2.99, but I have seen a lot of organic produce at our store that is priced much lower than the exact same item at the big grocery store in town (salad mix comes to mind 3.50 vs 5.50). This is because we can buy from our supplier in larger quantities and also because (I suspect) our mark up is different.

“Yes,” I feel like I say again and again, “not everyone can afford $20/lb cheese,” but I do feel that a majority of Americans do have some discretionary income that they spend on what it is they feel is important. Where are our priorities? How many homes in American have cable TV? How many kids have cell phones? Is it more important to have money to spend on new clothes, cigarettes, on soda that costs 1.99/pint or a sustainable food system? What is going to serve us best in the long run? That, I think, is the most important question people writing about the slow food movement can help people ask themselves.

skidder trail

Today I didn't see a single logging truck go by the store. Surely, this is the end of winter. All last week and the week before trucks full and empty rumbled down main street. I felt like I got to know them: the red one, the black one, the purple one with "Miss Tracy" airbrushed in gold on the side. (My friend told me it belongs to a guy named Tracy. What would Freud say about that?)

I haven't seen my friends who cut timber in weeks. They have all been as busy as the drivers getting out all the loads they can before the ground thaws to mud and slime and forces you to take a break. In Vermont, most logging takes place in the winter when the ground is frozen and (traditionally) there isn't much else to do. Back in the day, farms milked, hayed and spread manure like crazy all summer and fall, dried the cows off in the winter and cut trees while the ground was frozen solid and covered with slippery protective snow. Then, during the spring thaw, they made syrup before starting all over again.

When I lived in California, most of the logging was done on a massive scale. Entire hillsides were denuded by equipment that would dwarf any skidder I've seen around here. Trucks would go down main street loaded with hard wood logs as wide as I am tall. I didn't have any friends who cut timber. I had friends who spiked it.

But logging as the people I know do it - thoughtfully and thankfully and carefully seems a worthy endeavor. My friend made me realize there is even something good to be said for a skidder trail, although it looks a bit ghastly as well towards the end of its working life. "A horse logging trail disappears shortly after you're done using it, but a skidder trail lets two people walk side by side through the woods."

yawn

How do farmers stay awake past 9:30 at night? I think it's quite difficult.

flashback

When I was in highschool and knew next to nothing about agriculture except that if you planted seeds in the ground they would grow and that cows were mammals, I went as an exchange student to Germany. My host family lived in a similar small townish sort of place like where I lived in the States, but one time, we went hiking in the Alps for the weekend. We went to this famous park with a huge lake and hiked up the side of this mountain all day long. In the afternoon, we came to the small Alpine cabin where my host mom's friend spent the summer with his cow.

We were excited to learn when we got there that said cow was about to have a baby. All evening while we chatted and had dinner the cow labored. The sun went down, and in this cabin and barn there was no electricity, so by the light of the kerosene lamp we watched Dieter check on his cow. He realized that the cow was having problems and after much feeling and looking with a flashlight, I remember this guy deciding to give the cow a cesearian section. I remember him cutting her open - between her vagina and her udder - the blood shining in the lamp light and I remember the calf coming out and laying on the straw.

I know now that this memory can totally not be true. For one thing, while a cow can have a c-section, the cow is cut open on the left side not between the vagina and the boobs like one would cut a human woman. Also, some guy in a hut with no electricity would not preform surgery on a cow. The cow needs to be numbed or sedated or, I dunno, have 10 guys sit on her. More than likely he would cut the calf up inside the cow and take it out in pieces - gross but much much safer for the cow. I wonder now what really happened. Did he reach inside the cow with both arms and turn the calf so it could be born? This would account for the blood. Did he cut it up and my memory has made the calf born alive? I'm not sure, but this very lucid experience leads me to question the capacity of the human memory. I wonder how many other people have had the similar experience of a vivid memory etched in their mind that they know or later discover is almost certainly false.

In case you were wondering here are pictures of a c-section on a cow:
http://www.acvs.org/AnimalOwners/HealthConditions/FoodAnimalTopics/CesareanSection/