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.