Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

Neb. Senator moves to exempt ranchers from EPA rules
Meatingplace.com by Janie Gabbett on 4/20/2009
Last July, the EPA notified USDA that it was considering including greenhouse gases in its definition of air pollutants. If the EPA definition of air pollutants includes methane, USDA estimated that any agricultural operation of more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle, 200 hogs or 500 acres of corn would be subject to emission fees.

Antibiotics May Be Banned In Livestock Feed
Ag Industry Opposes Idea
KCRA.com - 5:30 am PDT April 20, 2009
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- One of the state Senate's leaders wants to ensure that cattle, poultry and pigs raised in California aren't routinely given antibiotics, a practice consumer advocates say can lead to the development of drug-resistant bacteria

Dairy Downer: Milk Floods Cause Farmers to Drown
the Green A-Team, Green Air Media
Like so many commodity crops such as corn and soybeans, milk prices have plummeted because there’s just too much of it and not enough demand....Dr. Samuel Simon, dairy farmer and founder of Hudson Valley Fresh says: "Milk is a global entity because it can be dried into a powder.  It costs $20.50 to make 100 lbs of milk.  If you’re getting $11 for it, there’s only so long you can survive without going bankrupt."

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack says farmers face several challenges
USA TODAY by Sue Kirchhoff
March 15, 2009
Q: What is the USDA strategy?
A: We're buying butter, we're buying non-fat dry milk … 207 million pounds of (dairy), which is a lot...

Q: What will you do with dairy purchases?
A: What we are going to do … for the most part is to get them into the school lunch program and get them into the food banks.

Biogas distribution network approved
Dairy Herd news source  |  Thursday, November 20, 2008

The first biogas distribution network in the nation has been approved in Kern County California. This project will link up nine farms to generate electricity for California homes. The project is headed up by BioEnergy Solutions in Bakersfield, Calif. Construction will begin in early 2009.

Three of the nine farms have already agreed to supply biogas to the network:  C&R Vanderham Dairy, Whiteside Dairy and Vermeer and Goedhart Dairy. The combined herd of 6,500-cows is expected to produce 615,000 cubic feet of natural gas a day, enough to generate power for 3,000 California homes.

Extension, Leopold Center work to improve livestock agriculture, By Virginia Zantow — Daily Staff Writer | Sunday, September 21, 2008 9:53 PM CDT

Iowa State’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture is working together with ISU Extension on a new, $60,000-per-year initiative called the Grass-Based Livestock Working Group, which will take an in-depth look at grass, grazing and forages in Iowa agriculture.

by Melissa Waldron Lehner

When I arrived at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary on a hot summer afternoon, I was greeted by Albie the three-legged goat. Not just a three-legged goat, but a three legged goat with a prosthetic. Now you don’t see that very often.

Nor is it likely that you would see a goat named Olivia who has cancer but is merrily eating all the food off your plate, or a 1,000 lb hog named Andrew who got his bacon saved, just barely rescued from a slaughterhouse. Then there is Elvis, who was supposed to be someone’s Veal Scallopini but instead is a fully grown steer living out his days eating daisies and alfalfa.

No, these are not animals you would normally see. They could have been something you may have eaten, but seeing them fully grown, romping in fields and being loved by people as much as they would their own children is a rare sight indeed.
 
It’s not tight fitting cages or hormones that these animals get at the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary, but rather, thanks to founders Jenny Brown and Doug Abel, love, food and shelter. With a slight resemblance to the The Island of Misfit Toy’s from Rankin/Bass’s 1964 stop motion animation classic, Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer, this heavenly 20 acre farm in Woodstock, New York exists just to give a home to neglected or abused farm animals. Whether they are goats found in a basement full of feces or geese collected from an abandoned parking lot covered in glass or, a poor goat like Albie, running pell-mell through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the trusses that once bound him trailing behind, this Sanctuary takes ‘em all.

Albie arrived at their Sanctuary in terrible shape -- having escaped most likely from one of the 100 live-kill markets in the NYC area. Soon Woodstock volunteers were picking him up and bringing him back to the farm where he was nurtured back to health. Except for the leg. “We just couldn’t save it, we tried everything,” says Jenny, in her slight Kentucky drawl. “So now he has a prosthetic, just like me.” Jenny shows me her leg. She too has a prosthetic leg – one she’s had a long time, after losing the original to cancer as a child. And like mother, like child, she had a special prosthetic made for the goat -- by her own doctor.

I stood looking at the chickens, a flock of white “broilers” who had been rescued from a Brooklyn religious ceremony and mentioned how I’d like to start an egg business someday. Jenny’s eyebrows furrowed and her dimples disappeared. “Now why’d you want to do a thing like that?”

Needless to say, Jenny is a vegan, as are all the people who work at this farm. Not only do they not eat meat, but no fish, no dairy and certainly no eggs. No fun?
Jenny stopped eating red meat at the age of 18 and then at 20 gave up fish as well. The egg sandwiches ended a few years after that. That was the hardest thing to do she said.

“I used to love egg sandwiches. Loved ‘em.”

I had to ask – what’s wrong with eating eggs? “Oh don’t get me started. Do you really want to know?” She looked at me squarely in the eye. I thought that maybe, really I didn’t.

Before founding this farm sanctuary with her husband Doug Abel, Jenny went undercover as a videographer for PETA and then for Farm Sanctuary, where she ended up doing an internship. Farm Sanctuary is a non-profit whose goal is to expose and stop the cruel practices of the food animal industry. Jenny said she was horrified by what she discovered when she went undercover at the egg hatcheries.

“If you scratch the surface of these egg hatcheries you will find a lot of disgusting practices. Do you have any idea what they do to those young chicks? Before they can ship out the girls, they have to determine the sex of the chicken when they are very young, which is in itself a very violating, violent thing to do. Then they keep the girls, and discard the boys. These hatcheries have no use for boys. So they grind them up while they are still alive, or they get dumped into garbage or suffocated. Some are even used as packaging material when the girls are shipped out in boxes. AND, these 1-3 day old chickens are shipped without food or water for over 72 hours. These little sentient beings are shipped in boxes like stemware.”

I asked Jenny if she thought there were any farms that treated animals fairly, that if they met a certain standard, would eating their meat be acceptable? Her answer: absolutely not.

When I initially emailed her about coming out to her farm to interview her, I got a firm reply when I asked her to speak on the issue of sustainability and livestock:

"To be clear about what we do and what our message is in general - we do not condone animal agriculture in any form. We fundamentally do not think that we as a society need to consume animal products and no matter how "sustainable" the practice is...lives are taken for something as trivial as the pleasure of one's palette. We adhere to a strict vegan lifestyle and encourage others to do the same--at least those who truly care about animals."

I had also made the mistake of mentioning the Animal Welfare Institute, a non profit which monitors the treatment of animals and seeks “to reduce the sum total of pain and fear inflicted on animals by humans.” They have initiated the first new food seal called Animal Welfare Approved, that works with family farms like Niman Ranch to set the highest standards for the humane treatment of farm animals. I asked her what she thought about their work, thinking she would be appreciative of their efforts. She was not.

She wrote back: "We are not Welfarists, we are Abolitionists. AWI and the Niman Ranch people make my skin crawl. I stood up at a conference and told them so."

She continued in a later email: "There is no such thing as “humane farming” because the animals always have their young torn from them to be sold or slaughtered, dairy animals are always forced to have more young and produce more milk than they would normally if left to their own devices, and "humane slaughter" is an oxymoron. "humanely" raised animals still end up at the same filthy, terrifying, nightmarish slaughterhouses where they are often boiled alive or dismembered while they are still conscious due to the speed of the lines. So, it's not my way of thinking. It's a documented fact. They are all essentially murdered--their lives taken prematurely from them because we have a taste for their flesh and mammary secretions.”

So while watching her help Albie into his prosthetic leg, I asked Jenny if she had any moments when she truly missed eating meat. “We all need to move away from a meat and dairy diet, that’s just what we have to do. It’s unhealthy, for us and for the planet. The colon cancer rate for vegetarians is so much lower. Look at me,” she stood up and showed herself off like Vanna White. “I am 37 years old and I think I look pretty good. And it’s all due to a plant based diet.”

Her farm animals sure must be happy to hear that.

Help Woodstock Animal Farm Sanctuary complete their Animal Rehab Center!

More on this issue:
A Few More Inconvenient Truths, Kathy Freston, Huffington Post, Feb 2, 2007
A Farm Boy Reflects, Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, July 31, 2008
Chicken Run, Julia Olmstead, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2008

HERRING IS IN, FARMED SALMON IS OUT

With the price of gas climbing ever higher and global warming doom approaching, people are searching for alternative energy, fuel and transportation sources – but what about food? Experts say our current food supply system is responsible for 1/3 of global greenhouse emissions – so what to eat? LISTEN to WNYC's radio host Leonard Lopate, Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, and Rick Moonen, author of Fish Without a Doubt: The Cook's Essential Companion talk about making the right choices at the fish counter.

sketch ©Linda Silvestri
http://sketchedout.wordpress.com/2007/11/

How many people can say they’ve been to Swine School? Not many, I figured, which is why I wanted to be one of the lucky few. A few weeks back, I had my opportunity to attend a two day conference on all things swine at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. The conference was sponsored in part by the Animal Welfare Institute [AWI], and Diane Halverson, their Farm Animal Policy Specialist, was one of the speakers, along with Paul Willis, one of the founders of Niman Ranch and long time supporter of AWI. I was a late straggler to the class and found myself chasing after 2 hay trucks full of people headed to the woods, parking in front of a pack of hogs happily snuffling through leaves under the trees. A bit out of breath, and only partially focused on Paul Willis who was holding a baby pig upside down, it took me a minute to figure out that I had arrived just in time for the castration. “This is not as bad as you might think it is,” says Willis, and showed people how to insert his finger under the tiny balls of the pig, lift them up and then…snip! “One, two, three, that’s how long it takes.” As unremarkable a process as Paul says it is, it was not unremarkable for the mother sow who lunged immediately out of her shelter to protect her baby, still hanging upside down and squealing his lungs out. A 500 pound sow charging at Paul and the Stone Barns folks was a sight to see indeed. All tits were flying, pounds of flesh jiggling, and a terrific battle cry ignited the air. She was pissed. But as fast as the fury came, so it went. Craig held up what looked like a huge giant plastic cutting board to block her path and it was if someone turned off the lights. The sow stopped in her tracks, a bit confused at first, but then went peacefully back to foraging. Once on the ground, the piglet scampered off to find his mom and nurse.

 Paul insists the process is basically a painless procedure and no pain killers are necessary. “People complain about this, I know,” says Paul. “People that don’t raise animals have this anthropomorphic attitude, like how would I like to be castrated? But it’s not like that.” Most male pigs are castrated, Paul says, mainly because boar meat is not popular in this country. “It has a strong taint or odor to it that most people don’t like.”

 Paul is a 4th generation hog farmer with over 900 acres of land in Iowa, and his desire to revitalize sustainable hog farming practices led to his relationship with Bill Niman and the beginning of the Niman Ranch network in 1995, which now boasts over 600 American farmers and ranchers today, and also connected him to Diane Halverson and the Animal Welfare Institute. Knowing of the disgusting methods that industrial commercial farms normally practice, Paul wanted to start something different. Paul says “the more that I could distance myself from commodity pigs, to me that was good.”

 Paul saw Diane stand up to the hog farmers during a march in Unionville, Missouri, at one of the world’s largest pig factories. “Here’s this little lady that stands up and says well what about the animals? I thought that was great." Paul wanted AWI’s approval and upon seeing his farm, Diane gave it to him. “We were so impressed with his attitude towards his animals and the way his animals lived.” Working in a spirit of cooperation, Paul and Diane set about refining the husbandry standards for raising pigs and soon, Niman Ranch became the industry standard.

 In one of her many articles, Diane describes the treatment of hogs at Paul’s farm, that “…unlike the crated sows on factory farms, the sows in the Niman Ranch program have freedom of movement, allowing them to fulfill their instinctive desire to build a nest when they are about to give birth. Unlike the factory farm pigs housed on concrete slats over manure pits, Niman Ranch pigs are raised on pasture or in barns with bedding where they can live in accord with their natures, rooting for food, playing and socializing.”

 Working together for years, Paul and Diane have created the Animal Welfare Approved seal, something that marketing departments of sustainable farms can incorporate to identify themselves as having animals that have been approved by AWI. The seal came out in 2006 and is gaining wide-ranging acceptance. Their new website, animalwelfareapproved.org, will be launched any day now.

 Paul knows the factory farms are worried. “What I see is the industry is going to come out with some copy cat thing without any real basis behind what they are doing. It’s always about painting a pretty picture on a dirty business. Smithfield will not get this seal of approval, ever. I think it will be something that as customers learn about this it will be one more thing that will turn attention to the difference in how your food is raised and where it comes from.”

"Here’s the beauty of the Animal Welfare Institute: their demands for husbandry standards, whether assuring the animal’s access to the outdoors, or securing proper bedding for sows, or the hundreds of other important things they watch out for, don’t just raise living standards and make for happier animals – they make for more delicious food. The Animal Welfare Approved seal is a seal of humanity and a promise for good flavor.”

- Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City and at Stone Barns, Pocantico Hills

GOT WOODS?

The Swine School at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture was more informative than you would think. With experts from around the country, topics ranged from what to feed your pigs to get the best flavor to how to make sausage to how to sustainably manage herds of hogs. And if you are the owner of a lot of land covered in woods, you are really in luck. Chuck Talbott, owner of Black Oak Hollow Farm in Frazier's Bottom, West Virginia, and Director of Sustainable Integrated Systems transforming agriculture [SISta] can tell you just what to do with your property: raise hogs. That's right, pigs prefer woods, don't you know. Stone Barns knows it and every one of their Berkshire pigs roots around their wooded acreage, eating things like chestnuts and acorns which provide the meat with a good amount of vitamin e,  not to mention, flavor. Talbott, with the help of Peter Kaminsky, author of PIG PERFECT, can tell you how to cultivate healthy yet sublime tasting pork.

You couldn't miss Jeanne Carver of Imperial Stock Ranch at the SARE conference. Pulling her cart through the hotel hallways, she was always surrounded by folks, showing off her beautiful garments made from the yarn and lambskins that originate from her and her husband Dan's 30,000-acre Central Oregon ranch. As markets for lamb and wool declined in the late '90s, the Carvers wanted to secure their 140-year sheep raising heritage and decided to launch their own product line. Working with a handful of local artisans, they have available knitted hats and scarves, their Shepherdess felted purse and even wooly chaps. Don't be sheepish. Check 'em out.