Agribusiness monopolies to be scrutinized -- about time!

Dairy farms are getting hammered. Earlier this year, milk prices dipped to their lowest level since 1975 -- and we're not talking adjusted for inflation here. There's been a modest recovery recently, but the price is still hovering just over $11 per hundredweight, and it costs the average New England farm about $17 to produce it.

By way of conversion, there are about 12 gallons in a hundredweight of milk. So farmers are being paid about 92 cents per gallon and it costs about $1.42 to produce it. For several months this spring, the price was $9 per hundredweight, or just 75 cents per gallon.

There are very few ways that the cost of production can be reduced. The cost of fuel, fertilizer, imported feed, labor, taxes, insurance, and land are pretty much beyond the control of the farmer. Although he can choose to manage differently to avoid buying so much of some of those items, if you're going to produce milk on a commercial scale in the Northeast, you will have to buy or lease some of each of those items.

What this means in very real terms for dairy farmers is that they have exactly three choices. They can live off their equity -- which means emptying savings accounts, retirement plans, selling land and cattle; they can borrow against their equity, which means mortgaging land, buildings, and cattle in hopes that they'll be able to pay off the debt in better times ahead; or they can go out of business while they still have a little bit of equity left. Remember that when a business runs out of cash, it is done, and farms are businesses.

In past times of low milk prices, production in high cost areas like New England has declined, and it has shifted to low-cost areas like the Central Valley of California. When prices dipped a little bit, the small farms of the Northeast would sell cows, and the big farms (and we're talking tens of thousands of cows big) would add cows. But milking more cows when the price of milk is less than the cost of production -- even where the cost of production is very low -- is not a reasonable way forward.

Meanwhile, Dean Foods, a publicly traded milk company that controls about 70 percent of the milk market in the Northeast, recently reported a 69 percent increase in quarterly earnings and stated that the primary reason for its increase in profitability was the low farm gate price of milk. In other words, it was paying less for the material it sells, so it was making more money.

Now, I don't know how Dean Foods executives are compensated, but I'm sniffing the same sort of quarterly earnings race that brought down the banking industry. How much sense does it make for a company like Dean Foods to kill its suppliers in order to make a profit this quarter? Dean Foods is obviously playing the same game that Wall Street did -- counting on the fact that the US taxpayer is not going to allow the dairy industry to fail.

Fortunately, it looks like the USDA and Justice Department are going to get ahead of the curve and start looking at monopolistic practices in three ag industries: seed sales, beef packing, and dairy distribution. Perhaps this time, an ounce of prevention will save the taxpayers from a billion pounds of cure. Let's just hope that there are dairy farms left by the time they get it done.

Here's a story about it from National Public Radio.

RIP, Eagle-Times

Another dinosaur has found its way to the tar pits. The Claremont, NH, Eagle-Times abruptly ceased publication today, giving less than 24 hours notice to its 120 employees. The publisher said the company will file for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy protection. For those unfamiliar, Chapter 7 is the "gone and never coming back" version. The company's assets will be liquidated, and the proceeds divvied up among the creditors.

Claremont is a scrappy (some would say to strike out the initial "s") little city of about 15,000 souls, still reeling from the mass exodus of its economic mainstay, the machine tool industry, nearly a quarter century ago. It now finds itself without a daily newspaper covering its goings-on. The two nearest surviving dailies -- The Valley News based in Lebanon and the Keene Sentinel -- have never made much of an effort to cover the news there, and given the current state of newspaper finances, I suspect they aren't about to start.

It's a sad day. The Eagle-Times was the smallest daily newspaper in New Hampshire, and its demise doesn't bode well for the future of other small New England papers and the communities they serve.

Welcome, Luna

The Edgefield Farm Defense Force has a new cadet. Luna is a six-month old Maremma bitch who already knows that she is supposed to care for sheep. Here she is in a photograph taken just a day after she arrived on my place last week.

The joy of lambing

A week ago the first lambs of the year greeted me when I checked on the flock down by the Connecticut River. This is always a great time for me, and this particular ewe is a really good one.

When I arrived, she was lying down, facing away from me, her two new lambs right by her nose. Her head was up, her eyes were closed, and she was chewing her cud. I could see that the lambs were also full and dozing contentedly. A happy and proud mother. I felt unmitigated joy at the scene.

When she became aware of my presence she did something that moved my joy to yet another level. She stood quickly, but without alarming her lambs, turned toward me, and took one step foward and dropped her head into a defensive posture -- think of an offensive lineman in American football. Her lambs were now under her belly, still dozing, but if anyone was going to take those lambs, they were going to have to take her first.

Competence is such a wonderful thing to observe. Those lambs will survive because their mother knows what to do. In 15 seconds, I knew all was well, and I knew that any ewe lambs from this ewe were keepers.

Better still, they were both ewe lambs. If they have inherited half of their mother's competence, they'll just keep on making my job easier and easier for years into the future.

I can't tell you why.

People who live in soft places like LA or North Carolina sometimes ask why anyone lives in New Hampshire, where the summers are hot and humid and the winters are cold and bleak. Normally I just smile and say, "Why not?"

Every place on earth has its meteorological crosses to bear, after all. LA is a desert, and after three years of drought in California the vast efforts at irrigation and drinking water collection that prop people up are starting to collapse. North Carolina gets a lot more hurricanes than New England, and its summers are longer, hotter, and more humid than ours.

But today, as I prepare to head out the door, slog through four to seven inches of wet, sticky snow that has fallen on top of several inches of mud produced by two days of rapid thaws, I can sort of see their point. Today is not a weather day that will get lots of attention from the national media. This is the sort of weather that is really just an inconvenience to those who live in populated areas where all the roads are paved. It'll snow, it'll melt. But in the parts of New Hampshire where we still rely heavily on dirt roads, this time of year is the worst.

Mud season can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Four wheel drive and all wheel drive are helpful, to be sure, but they will not save you from being slung about by ruts, and there are times when what you really need are tracks to stay atop the road surface. Anything with wheels is doomed. Chains slip off the wheels and do no good anyway.

Adding a half foot of what we call "sugar snow," the slick, wet snot that falls this time of year, to the mix only makes it more challenging. Walking is complicated by the fact that just when you think your foot has found purchase on the earth under the snow, the mud under your foot slides, and you end up doing a sort of camel walk. Place one foot down, put your weight on it. Pull the other foot out of the mud and bring it forward. Repeat.

The cold of winter is bracing, and enjoyable to me. The crazy fecundity of springtime is wonderful. The warmth and bounty of summer fills me with joy. And of course, our fall foliage is world famous with its cool nights and brisk days. But mud season just plain sucks. Its the one part of New Hampshire's climate for which I can find no redeeming value.

But there's no denying it. I must head out into this mix of stinking mud and snotty wet snow and face my day. It'll be one of limited productivity outside, but perhaps it'll be a good day to catch up on some desk work in the afternoon.

Jack Kennedy understood ...

"The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale and pays the freight both ways."

Quoted in The Progressive Farmer March 2008 issue.

Eat red meat and save the planet? Really?

That meat production has a large carbon footprint is an article of faith among folks who keep track of these things. The problem is that the people who keep track of these things often don't know shit from shinola about farming in general, or meat production in particular.

The website of Science News recently ran a report on the effects of human diets on greenhouse gas emissions. In a nutshell, Ulf Sonesson of the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology told the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting that beef is a powerful greenhouse gas emitter, and that pork and poultry are less so, and that vegetable based proteins, such as soy, are the best for the climate.

Sonesson looks at the beef industry from a pretty standard set of assumptions: the cattle that produce our beef are fed large amounts of corn in centralized feedlots, where the feed is trucked in, large amounts of methane are produced, cattle are trucked out to slaughter, beef is frozen, trucked around the country, and stored in large industrial freezers. All of these steps of transportation, feeding, and storage require the burning of energy, which emit greenhouse gasses. The production of the corn that feeds the cattle in the feedlots also emits greenhouse gasses.

These are all very valid points, and, unfortunately, are true for the vast majority of beef that's produced in the US.

It appears that Sonneson makes some further assumptions about the production of beef, however, that are simply untrue. Primarily, that every part of the beef production cycle is like the feedlot. It's not.

The beef industry has two very distinct components: the cow-calf operations and the feeding operations. The cow-calf operations are almost entirely grass based, using pasture and range as their main source of nutrition for the cattle. Ranchers and farmers who run these operations have herds of cows that deliver calves every year, and it is these calves (minus replacement heifers) that go on to the feedlots after they are weaned. There are also several types of operations that specialize in taking calves from relatively light weaning weights to the sizes that feedlots typically take in; many of these are also grass based operations.

What difference does that make? Tons. Millions of tons, and perhaps billions, actually. Every acre of managed pasture and range absorbs greenhouse gasses. Grass based farming increases the organic matter in the soil, and this organic matter is largely carbon. The carbon comes from decaying plants, which obtained carbon by taking it out of the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, one of the most powerful greenhouse gasses. The management of cattle on pasture or range requires very little in the way of fossil fuel input. Pasture and range is generally not treated with chemical fertilizer. Low-horsepower vehicles (actual horses, in many cases) are used to check and round up cattle. Perhaps most importantly, the soil is not tilled.

When soil is exposed to the air, as it is when it is tilled for the production of grains and oilseeds, it loses carbon into the atmosphere. Native prairie soils are black; this is carbon -- those decomposing plants again. In places where prairies have been put to the plow, the soil turns brown, or a sickly anemic gray as carbon is released. Compared to the amount of carbon lost through oxidization, the emissions of tractors used to do the plowing is almost trivial.

The models that condemn beef production as an emitter of greenhouse gasses -- as far as I can tell -- do not give beef credit for the millions and millions of acres of carbon sequestering grasslands that underpin the admittedly wretched feedlot business.

While swine and poultry are much better converters of grains and oilseeds into human food than beef cattle (cattle are ruminants and not ideally suited to processing high levels of starch), they do not have any grassland components to their industry. They are essentially all feedlot, all the time, as the models incorrectly assume the beef industry is.

The normally thoughtful Epicurious ran a blog posting this week under the heading "Eat Soy, Save the Planet" based on the Science News article. The author admits to having her tongue in her cheek when she wrote it, but it is the take-away message that so many of these analyses seem to promote. I was heartened that my comment there was not a voice in the wilderness on this issue.

Soy as a source of human protein is also not without its environmental costs. Deforestation of the Amazon basin for soy production is a huge source of carbon emission. Every acre of land that produces soy is tilled, and loses carbon to oxidation. Most commercial soy production relies heavily on chemical fertilization, herbicide application, and is causing the loss of topsoil at a rate that is several orders of magnitude higher than that of the grass-based component of beef production.

As interesting as it would be to look at the carbon footprint of the beef industry as it actually is, it would be even more interesting to look at the carbon footprint of grass-fed beef that is processed and consumed within a 100-mile radius of where it is grown. I suspect that it would be a winner.

And lamb? Lamb is seldom even discussed in these analyses, because it represents such a tiny slice of our diet. But grass-fed lamb would require even less carbon than grass-fed beef, as the carcasses would require less energy to chill, and the production generally requires less machinery. In my own farming operation, I know that I am increasing organic matter in the soils that I graze -- I have soil tests to prove it. Organic matter is mostly carbon, mostly from carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere by plants. I wouldn't be surprised if an analysis of my operation showed that I am either carbon neutral, or perhaps have some carbon credits to sell.

Pastured poultry still requires some grain, and most pastured pork does as well. For the very reasons that poultry and pork are better at converting grain into meat than ruminants, they are worse at converting grasses and forbs: they don't have a rumen to break the cellulose down. While local, pasture-raised pork and poultry are wonderful, I suspect they are less carbon-friendly than red meat produced from locally-raised grass fed ruminants.

I'm hopeful that we can start to see some more nuanced carbon-footprint analyses of human diets that flow from an actual understanding of how food is produced, not from faulty assumptions. It's time for science to start catching up with reality, and perhaps offering some models for how farmers can reduce the carbon footprints of their operations.

No, I'm not lambing right now

Every now and then, as I stumble through my life, I get something right. Usually not on purpose: usually I am forced into a situation where the only remaining choice is the right one.

Such is the case with the fact that I don't lamb in January and February, as so many sheep farmers in New England do.

Many of my fellow shepherds are lambing now. Some in drafty old converted dairy barns, some in sheds built more or less for the purpose. All of them are freezing as temperatures for the past few weeks have dropped below zero F more nights than not.

Lambing in the winter is a challenge. It is fun, in its own strange way -- primarily, I think, because every lamb that survives past the critical 48-hour mark is a victory. Every ewe that delivers a lamb is handled: the new lambs are collected and the family is placed in an individual pen known as a jug for a day or two while they bond. Many lambs need to be dried off quickly, as the birth fluids can pull heat from the lamb faster than its metabolism can replace it.

If maternal nutrition is anything short of excellent, the lambs will be born weak, or fade quickly after birth. The environment must be kept fresh and dry, or you risk pneumonia in both the ewes and the lambs. Providing high-quality feed and dry bedding is incredibly expensive in New England. (Straw, commonly used for bedding for sheep, actually costs more than good quality hay here, and hay is more expensive in New England than anywhere else in the US that I have heard of.) And then, in the spring while all those fat lambs are gamboling on pasture with their dozing mothers nearby, it's time to muck out the barn (unless you were doing it weekly or so all winter. Manure must be handled, composted, spread.

In 2005 I supervised two lambings. The first was a shed lambing of 450 ewes commencing Jan. 23 and ending March 1. The second was a pasture lambing of 300 ewes commencing April 20 and ending May 22.

The winter lambing flock was brought into the shed in mid-December, shorn, and bedded on straw. They were fed round bales of high-quality balage, and a mixture of whole shelled corn and roasted whole soybeans, along with a mineral mix.

The spring lambing flock was wintered outside, fed round bales of decent quality (but not fancy) balage, and no grain.

During the pre-lambing period, I had one assistant working with me. We would spend most of the morning feeding the ewes in the shed. Chores to feed and bed the winter-lambing ewes in the shed took about seven person-hours a day for 450 ewes, which works out to about one person-minute per sheep per day.

Meanwhile the spring lambing flock needed to be checked daily, its guard dog fed, and once every five days or so, it needed new bales. The daily routine took about 30 minutes, and the weekly bale feeding took about an hour, for an average of about 40 person-minutes per day, or .13 person-minutes per ewe per day.

That's right. It took nearly 10 times as much labor to care for the shed-lambing flock as it did the pasture lambing flock.

Once lambing started in the shed, we had three full-time shepherds, plus an intern or a part-time employee working. An average lambing day required about 36 person-hours in the shed, or nearly five person-minutes per ewe per day. The spring lambing flock continues to require .13 person minutes per ewe per day, or about three percent of the labor required for the winter lambing flock.

Hay and grain consumption in the shed rose as the ewes went into high production and the lambs started to eat their creep grain. At the peak, I was putting out 1,200 pounds of grain per day in the shed. The spring lambers were still fat and sassy without any grain.

When the winter lambing ended and weather outside began to warm up, we started to turn the ewes and lambs out of the shed so that we could start to remove the bedded pack. One of the shepherds went off the payroll, and one became essentially a machine operator for four to six hours a day, digging out and stacking the winter's manure.

That left me, more or less on my own, tending to 300 ewes lambing on pasture. I was working about 10 hours a day. So about two person-minutes per day per ewe for lambing time.

When all was said and done, those 450 ewes weaned 810 lambs, and the 300 we lambed outside weaned 535 -- roughly the same number of lambs per ewe (1.8). Each of those 810 lambs from the winter had more than 3 hours of labor in it, while the lambs born out on pasture had less than 45 minutes. Winter lambing was more than three times as labor intensive as pasture lambing per weaned lamb.

The winter lambing flock also required much more machine and petroleum input, as well as more purchased feed -- roughly double the pasture lambing flock. The bottom line was that I had a cost of production of a January-born lamb of about $105 at weaning, and about $75 in a pasture-born lamb. The cost of production was 40 percent higher overall for a lamb born in the winter as one born in the spring.

Since I left that farm, winter lambing has not been an option. I don't have a barn, and lambs born in the snow when it's -10 F have little chance of survival. I've also made a strategic business decision that I don't want to hire shepherds -- even at lambing time. That means spring lambing on pasture with ewes that can birth, mother, and raise their own lambs with little or no help from me.

Spring lambing is not without its problems. I have a group of lambs right now that still need to gain some weight before they are marketable, and it's really hard to get growth on lambs at this time of year; they burn up a lot of calories just keeping warm. I need more pasture land per ewe than most winter-lambing flocks, because lambs are often marketed before they place much demand on pasture. But on balance, I think I'd rather be in here by the wood stove when it's 20 below zero and blowing, than doing a nighttime barn check and trying to warm a frozen lamb.

Sympathy for the Devil?

Yesterday, just for the briefest of moments, I felt sorry for George W. Bush.

I mean, I know he brought it all on himself, and I know he thinks history will absolve him. But imagine what it must be like to sit on the dais in front of hundreds of thousands of people live and in person, plus millions more watching on television, listening on the radio, or viewing live streams on the Internet, while your successor says, very politely, we reject you, Mr. Bush, and everything you stand for. What you have done for the past eight years represents all that is wrong with this country, and today we start to fix that. And the crowd goes wild.

And he slinks back to Crawford with this tail between his legs like the beaten cur that he is, relegated to the dung heap of history -- where, I remind myself, he deserves a particularly gooey, stinky spot -- so alone. I've even heard that his wife has taken a separate home in Dallas.

Let me make this clear: I am not saying that I think Dubya was a person of good will who was honestly doing what he thought was best for the country. I think he was a knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed moron powered by hate, fear, and all that is dark in the human soul. He was being manipulated by kingmakers who wanted to turn the US into a near dictatorship while avoiding all accountability.

And, what's worse, I think he liked it and generally agreed with the goals of fascists like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, who, if given their head, would have instituted policies that would have made Franco's Guardia Civil look like a neighborhood watch program.

But just for a second there, I thought, wow. What must it be like to have so many people dislike you so intensely? To reject what you have done in their names so completely, and to adore a man who is so clearly the anti-you while decorum requires that you stand there and behave yourself?

I guess that's proof positive of my bleeding heart. I can even feel sympathy for the monster as I rejoice in its demise.

Today it ends. Today it begins.

Our national nightmare ends today. That which began a little over eight years ago when five members of the US Supreme Court conducted a bloodless coup and placed in power a little man from Texas ends today in front of throngs of people on the National Mall. A democratically elected President will replace a man who lied to us, who showed contempt for the institutions he was pledged to defend, and who just plain screwed up at every turn. A man who tried to turn us against each other -- remember the TIPS program? -- who tried to take Orwell's game and go pro with it. A man so crooked and dishonest he made Richard M. Nixon look like a freakin' boy scout.

Two good things that have come from these last eight years: first no longer can anyone say without fear of contradiction that New Hampshire produced the worst president that ever occupied the White House (Franklin Pierce). And second, there seems to be a national consensus that we can, should, and indeed must do better. Starting today.

Actually, it started a couple of years ago at the local level. Here in New Hampshire we shed some entrenched Republicans at the Congressional level and elected a Democratic governor. We finished the job last November. If you had told me 15 years ago -- hell, even five years ago -- that New Hampshire voters would vote for a black man for president, elect a Democratic Congressional delegation, a return a Democratic governor to office, and elect solid Democratic majorities in both houses of the state Legislature, I would have thought you were smoking something. But it happened.

And last week, we saw perhaps the strongest evidence of the change that is to come. Compare the answer of Dubya's attorney general, Michael Mukasey, to that of Obama nominee Eric Holder when asked, essentially, the same question: Is waterboarding torture?

"I don't know what's involved in waterboarding," [Mukasey] told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), arguing he first needed to be "read into" the administration's program. Mukasey pledged to study the matter and said he would order a "review" after being confirmed.
(From the Huffington Post.)

ERIC HOLDER: I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.

That review that Mukasey promised never happened, but in light of Holder's statement it seems that there's perhaps not really that much of a need for a review.

Let's hope that this sort of willingness to call a spade a spade and to right the wrongs of the last eight years permeates the rest of the administration. Let's hope that the era of politics where voters made decisions based on narrowly defined self-interest, fear, and manipulation of hot-button issues is over, and that we are going to live in a society in which people look after one another, rather than spy on one another.

See ya round, Dubya. Texas is a big place with lots of brush of brush to clear. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Canadians! Be proud, eh?

What other culture could combine ice hockey and Morris dancing?



It's the Village Green Morris Men of Winnipeg dancing to the tune of Stompin' Tom Connor's song Hockey Game.

Referendum voting dates set

Sheep producers will be able to vote on the referendum regarding the continuation of the sheep checkoff, or production tax, at local Farm Service Agency offices between Feb. 2 and Feb. 27.

Those who don't know where I stand, here's the link to the previous item on this blog about it.


Here's the USDA press release.

US sheep producers: you have a chance to right a wrong

Sometime in the next few months, sheep producers across the US will have the opportunity to end the regressive sheep production tax that was imposed on us in 2002 under the checkoff program.

I am not opposed to taxation. I am opposed to foolish programs, and that's exactly what the American Lamb Board has set up with the money that is collected on every sheep that is slaughtered in the US or imported from overseas.

The checkoff program was created to increase demand for American Lamb, generically. What an odd thing, considering that we can't fill the demand for lamb with our current levels of production. But producers lined up in 2005 with visions of "Got Milk" dancing in their heads and voted (quite narrowly) to impose the tax on themselves.

You've got three years of receipts now since your last chance to review this. Has the program worked? Has it improved your bottom line? Do you see any more American lamb in the local supermarket? By any objective measure, unless you are working for the ALB or one of the ad agencies it hired, the answer is no. There is less American lamb being produced today than there was in 2005. Tax an activity and the activity will tend to decline, don't you know.

What the American sheep industry needs is not promotion, but infrastructure. We need kill plants. We need distribution channels. We need storage. We need production planners. We need shepherds. We need knowledge. The production tax addresses none of these issues, even tangentially.

How many shoppers or food service buyers are looking at the lamb on offer and making a decision about whether to buy American lamb or New Zealand product? None. Usually the NZ product is all that's available. Because in NZ, they have kill plants, distribution channels, storage, production planners, shepherds, and knowledge. They can put the product in front of the chefs and shoppers year-round. We can argue about quality, and we should, but telling people that they shouldn't buy lamb from NZ because it's low quality and then having nothing to offer them to replace it isn't a great strategy.

Even if the American Lamb Board's generic promotion campaign was wildly successful and American Lamb became a brand that consumers recognized and demanded, it still does most small producers no good. Our customers already want American Lamb -- it's what we produce. We are essentially being asked to subsidize the branding of the commodity market, which tends to drag down the image to the lowest common denominator. And folks, let's be honest. There is some right horrible American lamb out there.

In order for the referendum to pass, it must pass two thresholds. First, it must gain a majority of the votes of sheep operations. Second, it must pass based on the volume of sheep represented by the operations. If it only had to pass one way or the other, the big producers would decide the question. But it must past both ways. That means your vote counts equally whether you have two sheep or 10,000.

Inertia is a powerful force. Unless we work hard and make sure that everyone who is eligible knows the issues and votes, the production tax will stay in place. You can also expect a strong pro-tax campaign from the ALB, the American Sheep Industry Association, and the state sheep associations, which will have money and organization behind them. I hope that sheep producers reading this blog will be active, and not just vote against the tax but also talk to their sheep-producing friends and neighbors to bring this chapter to an end.

Thanks for your consideration.

'Tain't season

'Tain't foliage season anymore.
'Tain't deer season anymore (closed at sundown).
'Tain't snow machine season yet.

'Tain't light very long in a day, and 'taint easy to get your work done. And the weather, well, 'tain't pretty, and sure as shootin' 'tain't settled.

Single digits either side of zero tonight. High temps in the teens tomorrow with high winds. By Wednesday, up into the 50's with rain showers, and back into the single digits on Thursday night.

If it weren't for breeding season, this would be the worst part of the year.

Roll with me, Henry

Etta James and the Peaches' record Roll with Me, Henry was banned because it was so dirty. Well, there are a bunch of sheep on top of Cass Hill in Westmoreland singing that nasty song these days.

My new Ile de France ram, Henry, had four of them bred before he was even back to their pasture with them, and five more this morning. Henry has yellow raddle paint on his brisket so he leaves a mark on every ewe he serves.

Come April 23, we should start to see the results of Henry's efforts. I can't wait -- there's nothing like wobbly new lambs on green grass. Sure it was cold and slushy this morning, but Henry's planting the seeds of spring.

I shouldn't focus only on Henry. I have three new rams working with three different groups of ewes, but for some reason I am most excited about Henry's progeny.

Where good lambs go ...

Foreword: This essay was originally published in the Spring 2008 edition of Vermont's Local Banquet, a quarterly magazine celebrating local, sustainable food and farming. I republish it here in keeping with the season. Since it was first published, a few things have changed. Adams Farm, the slaughterhouse that I had used for years, has re-opened with a new plant and more capacity. The group of producers that I am working with has developed a few good business models and is moving closer to making some decisions about whether to move forward with another slaughterhouse, and a private concern is reportedly getting close to starting renovations on a plant that has been closed for nearly 20 years. Slaughter capacity is still tight in this part of New England, but not nearly as bad as it was in 2006 and 2007, and the trajectory is going in the right direction.

In good weather, the drive between southwestern New Hampshire and the Capital District of New York state can be breathtakingly beautiful: there’s the view from Hogback Mountain, the wind farm in Searsburg, the Bennington obelisk. But at 4 a.m. during a December snow storm, while pulling a trailer loaded with lambs over a foggy two-lane road, the drive is tedious at best and can be downright hairy.

I am a sheep producer in Westmoreland, N.H., just over the Connecticut River from Putney. When I started calling around last August for a slaughterhouse in which my lambs could be processed, the nearest USDA-approved facility that could give me a December appointment was in Altamont, N.Y., about three hours from my farm. On the phone, they told me my lambs had to be delivered at 7 a.m. on the appointed date, and if I didn’t show up on time, I’d be out of luck. I signed on, knowing that the drive would be long, but I had no other choice.
Such has been the nature of things for folks involved in the direct marketing of local meat since two of the largest slaughterhouses that serve this area burned down within six months of one another in 2006: Fresh Farms Beef in Rutland burned in July, and Adams Farm in Athol, Mass., burned in December. No people or animals were harmed in either fire, but at Adams at least one steer that was awaiting slaughter was shooed out of the burning building and never seen again. And 13 of my lamb carcasses were in the cooler awaiting cutting and wrapping when the place went up. Adams Farm is rebuilding, but permitting, financing, and insurance hassles have postponed work and the hope is now that it will re-open this fall. There is no indication that Fresh Farms Beef will rebuild.

So when we farmers started raising our animals last spring, we knew that finding slaughter capacity later in the year was going to be difficult. All the remaining slaughterhouses within a reasonable distance were putting their existing customers’ needs first, and rightly so. Thinking that five months would be plenty of lead time, I started to make calls in August. One place told me they weren’t accepting any new business, period. Another told me they were already booking dates from May 2008 on. I had been using Adams Farm exclusively to process my lambs for the past seven years, and had a good rapport with the folks there. At these other places, I was just another guy with 40 or 50 lambs to process in December. I represented work that they didn’t have time or the physical space to handle.

Not so long ago, New England had lots of little local slaughterhouses that handled the sort of business that my farm provides. Local butchers were known and respected members of the community. New Hampshire poet Maxine Kumin describes Amos, one such local butcher, in her 1992 poem, “Taking the Lambs to Market”:

a decent man who blurs the line of sight
between our conscience and our appetite.

That line of sight has been so thoroughly blurred by agribusinesses, with their massive feedlots and associated meat packers, that unless you buy your meat directly from the farmer who grows it, you probably wouldn’t know that there’s a crisis in slaughter capacity around here. Slaughterhouses are generally not featured prominently in the Chamber of Commerce’s listings of local attractions, but they are as crucial to a local food supply as farm machinery dealers, large animal veterinarians, and backyard mechanics – all of whom are getting thinner on the ground every year.

This winter’s recall of 71,500 tons of beef from an industrial-scale California slaughterhouse – the largest food recall in history – points to the importance of having relatively small, community-based facilities where there’s regular contact between the management of the plant and the farmers who raise the animals that they process. One USDA inspector who had gone from working at a mega-slaughterhouse to a local plant in Washington state told a farmer friend of mine about the difference between the two: at the factory plant, he had 40 seconds to inspect each animal, pre- and post-slaughter; at the local plant he has 40 minutes.

If the inspector has to move at that sort of outrageous pace at the industrial-scale plant, so do all the workers. Speed leads to mistakes, and when the inspector is that pressed for time, it can lead to those mistakes being missed. We consumers then pay the price in the form or E. coli outbreaks, worker injuries, inhumane treatment of animals, and the slaughter of animals that have not been properly cleared for use in the human food chain. Local slaughterhouses are subject to something even more powerful than USDA inspection: the opinions of the farmers and meat customers who want things done right and will call them on shortcomings.

Within a month of the fire at Adams Farm, a group of farmers in the Brattleboro area began meeting to determine how to expand slaughter capacity in the region. At this writing, more than 400 producers from Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York have responded to a questionnaire about the need for slaughter services. Many have identified the lack of slaughter capacity as the main factor limiting an increase in their production.

That’s certainly the case for me. I currently produce about 135 lambs for market each year. I could easily triple that with the land I currently have access to. But if I were to increase my production, the lack of local slaughtering capacity would mean that the majority of my lambs would have to be sold at a commodity auction, where the highest bidder would purchase them for a much lower price than my direct customers pay. Selling to direct customers means I can stay in business; selling to auction threatens my livelihood.

But hauling lambs six hours round-trip to the slaughterhouse a few times a year also threatens my business: I lost money on every lamb I direct marketed in 2007, in large part because of the fuel costs associated with hauling my lambs and meat to and from upstate New York three times. My customers were understanding when I increased my prices last year, but I didn’t feel I could ask them to cover the entire cost of what I hope will be a single-year problem. It has been heartening to attend meetings with fellow producers and even members of the Localvore community who not only get that there’s a problem, but who actively want to do something about it. It’s pretty easy to get a group of farmers to complain about something; getting them to agree on a problem and the best path to a solution can be a little like herding cats. But it seems the cats may want to be herded in this case. It’s frustrating to look at a project planning chart and see that the very best we can hope for is a plant that might open in 2009 or 2010 if everything goes well.

As I write this, the results of those producer surveys are being tabulated. Within a few weeks we should have a pretty good handle on exactly how much demand there is for a local slaughterhouse or even a meat processing plant (which takes meat from slaughterhouses and turns it into retail cuts). That’s the first step. Next step will be figuring out how to site, staff, and run the place, and how to raise the capital needed for such a project.

In the meantime, bear with your local farmers as we try to deal with this critical piece of the local food infrastructure. We’re working to fix it, and, with a little luck, make it better than it was before 2006.

I’m hoping that more folks will be able to put my lamb in their freezers, that I’ll be able to price my products fairly, and perhaps make a living at this sheep business. And maybe the next time I drive over Hogback, I’ll be able to enjoy the view.

Good Lord, have mercy on our souls

This is too much. People killed a human being trying to get at the cheap plastic crap in Wal*Mart on Long Island. They couldn't wait until 5:02 a.m. No. They had to be the first ones at the friggin' trough.

There's a 34-year-old man dead in Long Island. Shoppers trampled him to death. They knocked him down, ran over him and pounded him to death with their feet.

I hope the blood stains don't wash out of their sneakers anytime soon.

'Tis the friggin' season to be jolly.

Remember this: There is nothing in any Wal*Mart worth killing for. And if you work at one of these hell holes, remember this: there is even less in Wal*Mart worth dying for. If they rush the door, let them stampede. Just get out of the way.

On behalf of my fellow humans, I apologize. I am ashamed.

Xmas tenticles

Oh, ow. My hair hurts.

Xmas has now crapified Thanksgiving. Several chain retailers were open yesterday, in case the American Consumer just couldn't wait until 4 a.m. today for the "door buster" sales.

When I was riding home from our dinner at my parents' house, listening to NPR at about 6:30 p.m., they played an interview with a woman who was camped out outside some big box store so that she could be first in line when they opened the next day. Lady, everything inside that store is crap. There is nothing in there that you need. You are going to have the honor of being the first little piggy at the trough so you will have the bestest chance of getting the choice lumps out of the swill. You go, girl.

People on one of the Border collie web forums started trading tips about where to get jingle bell "srunchies" to put on their dogs' legs and collars in early November. Why you would want your dog to jingle four times for every step it takes is beyond me, and what self-respecting dog would allow such nonsense is an even more troubling question. But it seems there are enough people who want it that these things are mass produced and are now apparently widely available. I hope the dogs are ripping the scrunchies to shreds as soon as the owners' backs are turned; that we can count on dogs to restore sanity to the world.

I've heard reports that some Lowe's Home Improvement Labyrinths had XMas crap on display in late September. I saw XMas decorations on a private residence in October -- before the leaves were off the trees, before there had been a frost. Just a couple of weeks shy of a quarter year before the actual holiday.

People! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I used to love Thanksgiving, and I still do. But it is under seige by the same commercial boogerheads that have destroyed XMas, Halloween, and all the other holidays of the year. To the barricades! Defend this last bastion of non-commercialized, reverent celebration! Don't buy crap you don't need with money you don't have! At least not for one day out of the year.

All kidding and annoyance aside, please, take a moment out of your busy schedule of consumerism, contemplate what you have, give thanks for it, and pass a little bit of it on. Sure it's a day after Thanksgiving, but you were too busy filling out your advance order at Amazon dot com yesterday, so do it today.

And listen to this commentary by Willem Lange.

Honor thy meat

At this time of the year, we’re approaching harvest of the lamb crop. I don’t like to use that euphemism for slaughter, but it is becoming more and more common as civilians try to reconnect with their food supplies – an effort that I try to support with all my energy. If a little bit of euphemism is needed to blur the line of sight between the conscience and the appetite, so be it. (That clever turn of phrase is from Maxine Kumin’s poem, Taking the Lambs to Market, published in her 1992 book, Looking for Luck.)

When I started this business, most of my lamb customers were older than me. They were remembering what lamb was like when their parents or grandparents kept sheep when they were kids. While many of those folks are still with me, more and more, I’m finding that my new customers younger than me. Not just because I’m getting older, but because young families are starting to feel that they need a better connection to their food supply than an array of Styrofoam trays in the meat department at their local supermarket.

But they’re still not 100 percent comfortable with the fact that they’re eating an animal that was once alive, and buying it from someone that had a personal relationship with it. Here are some common questions from people who are negotiating this road:

Q: “How do you eat meat from animals you knew?”
A: “I don’t like to eat meat from an animal I didn’t know!”

Q: “How can you slaughter those sweet lambs?”
A: “Precisely because they are so sweet. And juicy, and nutty, and …”

Q: “Don’t you feel bad when you take them to the butcher?”
A: “No. I feel pride in a job well done. I feel thankful for the lambs, the ewes and rams that produced them, the sun and the wind and rain and minerals in the soil and all the other millions of things that have come together – yet again – to put high quality protein from happy, healthy animals in your freezer.”

What always strikes me as odd is the fact that most of these people have fewer questions about the meat displayed so tidily in the back of the supermarket than they do about my lamb. They are faced with the choice of mindlessly picking up a package of steaks at Price Chopper or thinking with me about how they want a whole lamb carcass cut up. Sure, the Price Chopper thing is easier on lots of levels – less planning, it’s ready to cook tonight – but even the ones who know the production system that produced that steak seem to be able to turn off that part of their brains long enough to get the stuff cooked and eaten.

My lambs live a very good life that ends very quickly. The feedlot steer that produced those steaks at Price Chopper probably lived a life where slaughter would be a relief of suffering rather than the quick end to a good life.

But still, in a time when people have lost touch with their food, I suppose that if it helps to talk about harvest rather than slaughter, processing rather than butchering, and schedules rather than kill dates, it’s a small price for me to pay. It’s interesting how many people who start out worried about being responsible for the death of a cute and happy lamb end up being lamb customers. You can almost see the change in their body language when they make the decision to overcome their squeamishness and place the order.

I don’t ever want to give the impression that I take slaughter lightly. When I hand over my lambs to the care and custody of the place that will end their lives, I do everything I can to ensure that the end will be quick and painless as possible and involve as little fear and stress as possible. There are good food science reasons for doing this: meat from frightened animals can be tough and taste off. But that’s not why I take the care I do. It’s because these are my lambs. They’re good sheep. They’ve done all that I’ve asked of them. There’s no way I’m going to let the last day of their lives be any worse than it has to be.

Fiddlehead, the bottle lamb

Today I've read a couple of AKDD's posts about her experiences raising bottle lambs on her excellent blog, Vet on the Edge, and it put me in mind of some of my bottle lamb experiences. I should state from the outset, I hate bottle lambs. Hate them for many reasons. First and foremost, because they represent the failure of a ewe to mother her own lamb, which usually means either that I have failed in management or she has failed in mothering. The implication of this is that one or the other of us has broken our contract. Either I have been remiss in my shepherding, or she has let me down.

The economics of bottle lambs are horrifying. Lambing is, in many ways, the end of a cycle as well as the beginning. When a newborn lamb hits the ground, I have put all the time, effort, and expense of a winter's feeding into its mother with the expectation that she will produce a lamb or two (or occasionally three) to pay for all that keep, and perhaps, return a little profit to my enterprise. In my flock, the cost of production of a newborn lamb is about $70. Over the next six to 10 months, I will continue to spend money on it -- even if the mother is raising it -- in the form of labor, supplemental feed, veterinary supplies, wear and tear on my truck, etc., etc. By the time it is ready to go to market, I will have a total cost of production of about $100 to $105, and if I'm lucky I'll get paid $125 for him.

Add two bags of milk replacer -- about $90 -- to the normal cost of producing a market lamb, and I've gone from making $25 to losing $70. In other words, I have lost my margin on three other lambs just to pay for the rearing of that one. And that is to say nothing of the fact that caring for one orphan takes more time than tending to 50 lambs being reared by their dams. During lambing, my time is a precious resource. Bottle lambs take my attention and focus away from the lambing flock, which can precipitate more problems, or let little problems turn into larger ones.

So when I came across Fiddlehead for the first time an hour or so after her birth, I was only slightly upset that she was dead. Fiddlehead was a tiny lamb, one of two born to a 12-month-old ewe lamb. Most ewes that young only have a single lamb; few will have enough milk to raise two lambs even if they are both vigorous. At that age, the dam herself is still growing, so less of her energy can be directed to reproduction and lactation than when she is fully grown. Fiddlehead's twin was full-sized and vigorous, full of colostrum and raring to go. The dam was attentive to both lambs. She was pawing and nickering at the small, lifeless heap in front of her nose. I picked her up and held her up to my ear, and, lo and behold, there was the hint of a breath sound and, yes, a heartbeat. Damn.

Now when I say tiny, I mean it. This was a lamb that could fit in the palm of one of my hands and not drape over the edges. She tipped the scale at 2 pounds, one ounce. Thirty-three ounces. She had no chance of survival. A normal newborn lamb weighs four to five times that much. She was unable to stand. I told myself the humane thing to do was put her down. I was carrying her to my truck for just that purpose, when two ladies out for a walk and enjoying the pastoral scene spotted me and my dire cargo.

"Do you think it'll survive?" one of them asked hopefully.

"Not very likely," I replied.

Fiddlehead begged to differ. She lifted her limp head, summoned what little strength she had in her under-developed lungs and bleated loudly.

"Oh! How sweet!" came the chorus from the roadside.

"Damn." I thought to myself. "So much for the quick and painless death option." Sure, I could have just taken her off and done the grim deed out of their sight. But I am a shepherd. If a lamb -- however wretched -- wants to live that bad, I try to find a way to give it every chance.

It was 48 hours before Fiddlehead could stand. Three more days before she could suck on her own. I carried her around in my jacket or shirt pocket. But once she got her feet under her, she was as full of life and obnoxious as a only bottle lamb can be, following people around and butting dogs and cats that dared get in her way.

I lost a packet on her. She never grew well. Never amounted to much. I should be angry at myself for letting those ladies guilt-trip me into making a bad economic decision. Instead, I'm glad that they helped me stay a shepherd.

But I still hate bottle lambs.