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New on the scene….
….well new to me anyway. Tammi Jonas is an Australian farmer (cattle and pigs) who departed vegetarianism several years ago to become not only an omnivore but a butchers. And not incidentally, an advocate for “natural” farming. Ms Jonas recently attended a pork producers meeting in Australia and found her worst fears confirmed. Pigs are a big business with the dirty work done by little farmers but the ground rules dictated by Big Ag and Big Pharma. The situation is exactly the same here in the States. Big Pharma, Big Food… who really controls the pig industry?
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The cost of confinement….
….is generally discussed in terms of cost/benefit ratios. What is it worth to keep an animal confined to a pen, indoors…sometimes even immobilized…in order to put cheap meat on your table? (Forget, for the moment, that it is mostly unhealthy meat.) In the abstract, a few may understand that the animal is paying a terrible price but it’s not often we have its testimony. Here’s a young bull that was kept tethered for “only” a few months because bulls are “hard to handle” and he’ll be dead soon anyway. http://www.dailyliked.net/chained-bull-set-free/ At Thistle Hill, we have two bull pastures….generally about 10 bulls in each….living together peacefully….perfectly safe to handle.
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Beware “settled science”….
….I do try to stay away from politics here…there’s enough everywhere else. But with the increasing dogmatism (okay, fascism) in academia today it seems clear a lot of people are going to get hurt in the name of “settled science”. All thought and speech really is being regulated now among the “educated”….and the rest of us will soon be caught in the net. Our concentration here is on food…and nutrition. And this article raises the question of how many people have been killed by “settled science”. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
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The Christmas Tree bill….
….perhaps the greatest wrongs committed in Washington are discovered too-late in what is known as the Christmas Tree bill. That’s when all the pet projects of all the corrupt lawmakers are loaded onto a “must-pass” bill to keep the government running. It comes up for a vote—all the bad stuff hidden among the required stuff—at the last minute before the politicians head home for the holidays. This year, the Christmas Tree bill was that Omnibus spending bill rammed through by Speaker Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi. Let’s say you’re a lawmaker and you have a bank in your district that wants to confiscate the savings of widows and orphans. Well, you put…
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Alright, this is political….
….I try to keep this blog away from politics but, reading between the lines, you can certainly tell I believe “that government is best which governs least”. And particularly when it comes to the food we eat. Yes, even the safety of the food we eat is not well-served by big government…not the federal government…or the EU…or the UN. And not by Democrats or Republicans, either! The agenda of big government is mass production because it is simplest to control. And the money is there in large-enough amounts to enable world-class graft and corruption. World-class politicians need world-class perks. And Big Government decided long ago on a political agenda that was…
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Behind the scenes…..
….many, though probably not most, consumers of grass fed beef know the right questions to ask a farmer to be sure they’re getting the “real thing”. The problem is most consumers don’t know their farmer, which is why we think buying “local” is just as important as buying “grass fed”. Simply put: a good deal of what passes for grass fed is really finished on grain, and that destroys all the benefits of a pure, natural product. But the farmer is only half the story. The butcher has just as much to do with the quality and purity of the meat you buy. That’s why we surveyed a number of…
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The perfect storm….
An old CBS News colleague, Bill Kurtis, is a mover-and-shaker in grass fed beef circles….his Tall Grass Beef company marketing nationally. But Bill thinks those of us operating at a smaller scale better not be making any big, and particularly long-range, plans. Guest Blog August 2014 By Bill Kurtis Dry Age Beef and the grass-fed dilemma I much admire Tom Johnston’s Meatingplace “Dry Age Beef” series on the state of the beef business in America. I would add yet another segment that as a grass-fed beef rancher and distributor is just as dark. The perfect storm of drought, historic market prices and food safety pressures that have hit us…
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Mama…don’t let your kids grow up….
….to be farmers. It’s still a no-win game despite all the publicity about the Locavore movement, farm-to-fork, food hubs, CSAs. “blah-blah” stuff. The dirty little secret is the Big Guys are killing us….and they’re the ones getting the subsidies and grants that enable them to further squash the idealists. The New York Times had the story this past weekend. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/dont-let-your-children-grow-up-to-be-farmers.html?_r=1 Thanks to Dr. Sue Beal for the link.
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On pork….
….we took guests this weekend to a nearby farm store. As fellow pig breeders, I thought they would be interested in another approach to marketing pork. We’d tasted the sausage before and appreciated the flavor but without endorsing the management technique of using regular genetically-modified grain, plus day-old bread from a bakery (not only GM flour but other unknowns including chemical preservatives and flavoring) and finally “scraps”. Still this is the typical way most farmers raise their pigs in the local ag community and it’s certainly better than the industrial pork that makes up the sausage you buy at the store or eat in restaurants. Here’s an excerpt from the “River…
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Talk about a “giant step for mankind”….
the largest grain producing company in the world is changing course….and converting to grass fed beef! They put a pencil to it and decided industrial ag just isn’t sustainable (as we’ve been saying”. http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/23531 Thanks to Dr. Sue Beal for the link.