Edgefield Sheep

Another spasm of self-rightousness

2010-08-23T05:49:00.000-04:00

More than 1,000 people have gotten sick over the last couple of months from eating eggs from two factory farm operations in Iowa. The foodies are falling all over themselves calling on Americans to abandon the factory-produced egg in favor of the local, free-range, pastued, organic (or whatever) egg. But let's be honest about this. We have no system to replace those 380 million eggs that have been recalled, and that represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of eggs needed in this country today.

In a utiopian world, we would all have access to good eggs. The chickens would be kept on clean pasture, scratching, making dustbaths and eating bugs, grass, and weeds and a diet of healthy whole grains. I have raised that kind of egg, and currently work on a farm that does it on a small commercial scale. I eat three such eggs every morning, and I love them.

But here are some questions that I'd like to pose to Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan. If we are going to do this egg thing right -- and I think we all pretty much agree on what right means -- where is the land and labor going to come from? The beauty of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) is that they are extremely efficient in terms of their use of land and labor. We can all agree that they do so at a trendous cost, much of which is externalized, but even setting aside the price of the end product, let's simply look at the numbers.

At the farm where I work, we produce about 200 eggs per day. During the period of time covered by the recall -- about 60 days -- we would have produced 12,000 eggs, or about .000003 of the eggs produced by the two farms covered by the recall. To replace just those eggs, our operation would have to be replicated about 32,000 times.

Here's how we do it. The hens are housed in a portable coop known as an egg mobile. It's an old, old design, popularized by Salatin and a few others. We use portable electrified netting to control the hens' ranging, and to provide protection from land-based predators. Once or twice a week, the whole setup is moved to a fresh piece of ground. Eggs are collected from nesting boxes three or four times a day. Every time they are fed, they are given fresh water. Hens are fed a hand-mixed ration that is carried to them in buckets every day. It's a wonderful system that produces great eggs.

Over the course of New Hampshire's six month growing season, when the chickens are out in the eggmobile, it requires about 10 to 15 person-hours of labor per week, plus another hour or so a day of cleaning and packing eggs. For the sake of ease, let's call it 15 hours a week. It also requires about seven acres of land each growing season.

Scale those requirements up to replace the eggs that have been recalled, and you need a land base of 224,000 acres and 480,000 person-hours of labor every week -- 12,000 full-time workers. To replace a fraction of one percent of the eggs used in this nation every week.

If we assume that labor costs $12 per hour and land costs $10,000 an acre and is amortized over 15 years, just the land and labor overhead -- not the chicken feed, the cost of the fence, the eggmobiles, the tractors to pull them, the energizers to power the fence, the hens themselves, property taxes, health insurance for those 12,000 workers, or (heaven forbid) profit -- would cost $3.88 per dozen eggs. The figure Michael Pollan offered to pay in a recent interview with the New York Times -- $8 per dozen -- might actually be a little low. Probably more like $10.

I can hear Joel Salatin now, saying that I've overestimated labor and that eggmobiles don't require exclusive use of the land -- you can run them behind cattle, sheep, goats, on hay ground, etc. I'll concede his second point. However, I'd also point out that my estimate of labor is based on having observed the system first hand in two different settings -- one in which I was a manager and one in which I was an employee, and I think it is correct. And if anything, I have underestimated the number of workers who would be required, because each operation would not require a full-time person, and the hours are not amenible to a normal work schedule. In other words, it's likely that what would actually be needed is something like 36,000 people who are willing to work 12 to 15 hours per week, or who, like me, have other duties to fill in around the egg production operation.

It is possible that if some the operations were near one another, they could realize some economies of scale by setting up an assembly line to clean and pack eggs cooperatively. But any economy of scale in that portion of the supply chain would more than be swallowed up by additional costs of distribution: it costs a hell of a lot more to get small batches of eggs from a bunch of different sources to market than it does to get one large batch there.

The very nature of producing a good egg means not producing very many of them. An eggmobile can house only so many chickens. Nearly every organization that has looked the welfare needs of poultry agrees that behavioral changes make flocks of more than 500 birds inhumane de facto. I would argue that the threshold is a bit lower than that. Imagine being at the bottom of a pecking order of 300. I remember it pretty vividly from junior high. But the difference is that hens don't give atomic wedgies. They kill, slowly.

So in our utopian egg production world, there would be a need for millions of small egg producers, all doing things right, and producing a very expenise source of protein. In the end, there is still a risk for salmonella contamination. We are all assuming that the risk is lower, but we don't really know that. I suspect that if this business model was brought to scale, we would start to see at least some of the same problems creep in. Even chickens out in the fresh air and sunshine can get salmonella. Sure, they're less likely to transmit it to their flockmates than hens caged cheek to jowl, but they do all roost together in the eggmobile at night, so there is a real transmission risk. One thing we know about salmonella -- it's very good at getting transmitted from bird to bird.

And I really have a problem with the elitism that's inherent in taking a stand that this is the only right way to produce food. What do you say to the family that simply can't afford $10 a dozen for eggs? Get better jobs? Sucks to be you? Pollan seems to think that everyone is spending $6 a cup on Starbucks and could simply redirect that money to better food, but I am here to tell you that is not the case. Sure, there are cases where folks make bad choices about how to spend their money. We've all seen the food stamp folks who buy Pepsi and sugar coated cocoa-bomb breakfast cereal rather than a bag or two of leafy greens. I would argue that if the only option they have is $10 per dozen eggs, they will buy more Pepsi and sugar coated cocoa bombs.

And, even if we could fix the problem of how expensive it is, we still have the problem of who's going to produce it and where.

There has to be a middle way. Denmark has zero salmonella in its egg supply. It has acheived this through government monitoring and depopulation of infected flocks. The program adds about one cent to the cost of a dozen eggs. I don't know, but I assume that like in most European nations, Denmark's food prices are much higher than ours to start with, but I seriously doubt that they are $10 per dozen eggs. What is different in Denmark (and most of Europe and the rest of the world, for that matter) is that farmers are used to government inpsection and intervention at the farm level. Our collegues overseas were not only astonished at the opposition to premise identification that arose here a few years ago -- they were astonished that no such system was in place.

While I agree that cheap food is killing us, I think that we also have to admit that expensive food is not the only answer. And we also have to admit that it isn't just cheap food that's killing us -- it is also our reluctance to allow officials onto farms to conduct the sort of independent oversight and farmer education that is needed to ensure good, safe food is leaving the farm gate.

Juggling as a metaphor for life?

2010-04-18T06:34:00.001-04:00

This morning while I was waiting for the milking pipeline to sanitize, I picked up a dairy trade magazine to read while I sipped my tea. This one featured a report on a conference, where the keynote address was delivered by a motivational speaker cum juggler. The photo showed him riding a unicycle while juggling a cane knife, a double-bit axe and some other sharp thing that I couldn't identify.

It was actually a pretty apt metaphor for the commercial dairy business today. Today's dairy farmer has lots of ways to get in trouble. If, and only if, he does everything exactly right and at exactly the right time, he might just avoid catching the cane knife by the blade or having the double bit axe split his skull while he's falling off the unicycle.

But to take the metaphor one step further, even the expert can't stay on the unicycle forever. The very best he can hope for is to safely catch (or drop) the sharp things while dismounting. It says a great deal about the dairy industry that such a performance would be considered motivational.

Another part of this man's talk included this pearl of wisdom: "When the ball is in your hand, throw it." He meant that you have to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves, not dilly-dally and figure you'll get around to it. In that sense, he's got a good point. But when put in practice by a person unskilled in the art of juggling, it generally leads to a lot of balls flying in random directions, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, and falling on the thrower's head.

We see this all the time in business correspondence via e-mail. Send an e-mail that asks three questions. With a certain type of person, you'll get a reply very quickly but the reply won't answer any more than one question, and frequently not even that. But it is out of the recipient's in box, and therefore no longer a problem on her end. The ball has been caught and thrown. The only thing more frustrating is to wait for a day or two and get the same sort of response.

Juggling is a fact of life these days. We all do it, and we all know what it means to have too many balls in the air. Very few of us lead the sort of lives where we can start a project, work on it until it is finished, setting aside all distractions, and then move on to the next one. But we have to realize that juggling is at its core an unsustainable and temporary practice. The greatest jugglers on earth drop things from time to time, and they all have to stop to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, if nothing else.

Learning how to juggle better is definitely an important life skill, but I think we need to start thinking about learning how not to juggle. How to give our undivided attention to that which needs it. Hold onto the ball at least long enough to figure out where to throw it, and how hard.

The next important life skill would be learning how not to need to juggle. Perhaps that is something akin to what the Buddhists would call enlightenment.

Guard dogs under threat

2010-02-13T08:15:00.002-05:00

Sensing mounting pressure to restrict or eliminate the use of livestock guardian dogs on federal grazing allotments, the American Sheep Industry has proposed a set of guidelines and best management practices for their use.

Perhaps the most high-profile case was that of a mountain biker in Colorado who was taking part in a race that went through a grazing area where sheep were protected by dogs. She had mechanical problems, was delayed, and ended up coming upon the flock of grazing sheep at dusk. She rode through the flock screaming, and was mauled by a guard dog. She and her husband attempted to sue the owner in civil court, but discovered that there was a law specifically protecting livestock guard dog owners against such suits.

However, they were able to pressure the local prosecutor into pursuing a criminal complaint against the sheep producer for owning vicious dogs. He lost and was convicted.

While I can understand and appreciate that the ASI is trying to take a pro-active stand, I believe that its proposal will do more harm than good. You can read it for yourself here. ASI is seeking input, and I believe that every sheep producer who uses livestock guardian dogs should read the document carefully and comment extensively.

Here is my commentary on the draft.

Hello Ms. Jensen,

Thank you for taking the time to read and review comments on this topic. I am a sheep producer in New England in an area where the primary threats to my sheep are Eastern coyotes (which are much more like red wolves than Western coyotes, and indeed may be hybrids) and stray domestic dogs. We also have some smaller amounts of depredation by eagles and owls.

I've raised my own sheep for 20 years, and have also worked as a hired shepherd on vegetation management projects. I've worked with livestock guardian dogs for 10 of those years, and my experience encompasses about 30 individual dogs between the dogs that I have owned personally and the dogs that I have used and cared for as part of my employment. I currently own three guard dogs.

The first question posed on the website is whether I agree that these guidelines are needed. I would answer that they are not needed, and in fact could do more harm than good. Plaintiffs attorneys will seize on them and will probably nearly always be able to find one or more areas where they could argue that a producer is not in compliance. For instance, is a dog that runs along a fence barking behaving aggressively? Some would say it is, even though there is no danger to those on the other side of the fence. Moreover, if these guidelines are adopted by the industry, all producers will be expected to adhere to them, whether they make sense on a particular operation or not.

All that said, I am not familiar with the challenges being faced by western producers on grazing allotments. If they believe these guidelines will help them, then perhaps they could be crafted and presented as best management practices for livestock guard dogs used on federal grazing allotments, and have a preamble that specifically states that these guidelines do not apply to all situations, that many sheep operations will deviate from them, and that any deviation does not necessarily constitute negligence.

Here are some other global concerns about the document:

You'll notice that I have rejected the term Livestock Protection Dog that the ASI has started to use for these animals. I gather that there is some pejorative connotation associated with the term "guard dog," but that is what I have called them for the last 10 years, and it is what every producer I know of who uses them calls them. Trying to change that smacks of phoney PR and will be seen as such as we all stumble over our tongues trying to appease some suburban sensibility.

I am also concerned that the document refers to "herding dogs" but makes no mention of the distinctive concerns and requirements of that very different type of sheepdog. By including herding dogs in the title of the document, it would appear that ASI is suggesting that a Border collie and a Maremma should be managed according to the same standards and practices. This is certainly not the case. The term "herding dogs" should be removed from the document wherever it is used.

In general, I believe that these guidelines place too many obligations on the sheep producer, and not enough on the others who seek to share federal lands. Event organizers should be required to notify producers if there is going to be a large contingent of mountain bikers, ATV riders, hikers, etc., moving through an allotment, and a system should be created to let the producer know when all is clear.

And here is a listing of point-by point comments:

Guideline: Food and water available at all times
Comment: This can be construed to mean that if a guard dog does not have 24/7 access to food, the owner is negligent, even if the dog is fed daily and is in good body condition. Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Police (who are deputized as State Police Troopers, carry sidearms, and have arrest powers) have claimed that a similar rule meant that Border collies awaiting trial runs had to have a bowl of food in their crates at all times. This is not healthy, good practice, or even sensible. If nutrition is a concern, then the standard should be body condition scoring by a qualified veterinarian.

Guideline: Sexually intact males will not be used on federal land.
Comment: This is a bad guideline for at several reasons. First is effectiveness. Canid predators are much more respectful of the territories of mated pairs than they are of unmated groups or single canines. There are going to be situations where an entire dog is needed to ensure safety of sheep against wolves in particular.

Second, it flows from the assumption that entire dogs are more aggressive than neutered dogs or bitches. While this may be generally true, it does not warrant a blanket exclusion of entire males from the range.

Third, working dogs are proven in the field. If only cut dogs are allowed to prove themselves, the future generations of guard dogs will be denied the genetic material we want and need.

Fouth, research is showing that the early spaying and neutering of dogs -- especially large breed dogs -- can be a contributing factor in the development of musculo-skeletal disorders such as hip dysplasia. Many veterinarians are now recommending that sexual altering of dogs be delayed until they are fully grown, which in the case of most guard dog breeds would mean nearly three years of age. Given that most guard dogs have a useful life of less than 10 years, this guideline would prohibit dogs from working on federal land for about a third of their lives.

Guideline: Owners should spay females unless they are used for breeding purposes.
Comment: The same objections as above. I realize that the word "should" is used, but as soon as you say something "should" be done, the assumption is that failure to do so is negligent.

Guideline: Shearing/clipping should be done to prevent matted coats and to prevent overheating in the summer.
Comment: a healthy coat will actually prevent overheating by keeping the sun off the dog's skin.

Guideline: Sheep producers should not breed guard dogs ...
Comment: Who should then? People who trot them around breed rings? There is no substitute for breeding working dogs from working stock, and if we want sheep dogs to work for sheep producers, then sheep producers must breed them.

Guideline: Dogs that show aggression towards people or other restrained (leashed) dogs will not be allowed to work ...
Comment: This is one that plaintiff's attorneys will have a field day with. "Aggressive behavior" can mean as little as barking or charging with the hackles up, even where no harm is done. All that would be needed is for one incident to be documented and the owner would be considered negligent.

Guideline: Dogs that cannot be controlled by voice commands will not be allowed to work on federal land.
Comment: Again, what constitutes control, and how much control do we really want on these dogs? They are independent thinkers who have been bred for centuries to read, react to, and mitigate threats to grazing livestock. Do we suddenly want to start breeding them away from that and towards obedience to human command? I think not. And make no mistake, we will not breed dogs that obey without losing some or all of the independence that makes them effective.

Guideline: Dogs tied up when herder is not present
Comment: I have grazed federal land for vegetation management. I used guard dogs and portable electrified netting. There were no herders present, nor could the wages of one be justified. The potential always exists for conflict between the public and guard dogs. People cross fences, fences fail, guard dogs scare a pet dog. If I had been required to tie up my guard dogs in these circumstances, I might as well not have had them on the projects.

Guideline: discussion of breed traits
Comment: I have worked with five different breeds and crosses of them. I have seen more variability among individuals than among breeds. There is no need to get into the myths and generalities of the working styles of various breeds, particularly if the breed traits are going to be used as a weapon against particular breeds and crosses. We live in a world where dogs can be put to death for no reason other than that someone thinks they look like a pit bull.

Thank you again for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Bill Fosher
Edgefield Farm
Westmoreland, NH

Saving hypothermic lambs

2010-01-06T05:41:00.001-05:00

By Bill Fosher
Copyright 2010

In winter lambing flocks, hypothermia and starvation of newborn lambs can account for nearly all of the pre-weaning death loss of lambs. It’s a serious problem that can often be avoided, if not eliminated entirely via management of the ewe flock and its environment.

However, even under the best management in the best environment, there will still be some cases of hypothermia and starvation in most winter lambing flocks. It’s important for shepherds to know how to recognize, treat, and, most importantly, learn from each case.

In most cases, the problems that lead to hypothermia are difficult to fix during lambing. They go back months to the level of nutrition in early gestation, or to barn design, or the availability of bedding. That’s why it’s important to keep records about the causes of any hypothermia cases – once lambing is over, it’s easy to put those problems out of your mind and forget to fix them for next time. Make a habit of reviewing your lambing records well before the next breeding season so that you have time to make any changes or cull any ewes to reduce problems in the next lambing.

In the meantime, you need to try to save as many cold lambs as possible. Here’s a step-by step guide to the process. The goal of this guide is to help you make sound decisions about how to treat a lamb when you’re tired, busy, and probably a little upset. All the steps are aimed at getting the lamb back with its mother as soon as possible, and are based on the assumption that the mother has adequate milk to sustain the lamb. If that is not the case, the lamb will need to be raised as an orphan.

Ideally, if a lamb needs to be removed from its mother, the dam should be left penned by herself where she cannot try to claim other lambs. If a ewe has more than one lamb, consider removing not just the chilled lamb, but all of them. The process of warming a lamb can take several hours, and during that time, a ewe may forget about one of her lambs. She will not forget about all of them. However, you must return the non-chilled lamb or lambs to the dam to suckle regularly – probably every 20 minutes to half hour.

The warming box that I refer to here is a contraption that can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be as long as it provides a constant, gentle heat to the lamb. I have rigged up hair dryers blowing into dog crates, and one pasture lambing operation that I have heard of uses insulated coolers with hot water bottles. The main thing is that you don’t want to heat the lamb directly; just keep it in a very warm environment. Heating a lamb too fast is just as lethal as leaving it cold.

Step 1. Evaluate
Determine lamb’s age: is it more or less than five hours old?
Determine lamb’s body temperature
Determine lamb’s general condition: able to stand, suck and swallow? Unable to swallow? Unable to stand?

Step 2. Act

If the lamb’s temperature is over 99 degrees F., regardless of age
Collect milk or colostrum from the mother if possible to use in feeding the lamb
feed by stomach tube
return to mother.

For lambs with temperatures lower than 99 degrees F.

More than five hours old, unable to hold up head or swallow
Give IP injection of glucose
Move to warming box
Collect milk or colostrum from the mother if possible to use in feeding the lamb
Check temperature every 20 minutes until it reaches 99 degrees F.
Feed by stomach tube
Return to mother

More than five hours old, able to hold head up and swallow
Move to warming box
Collect milk or colostrum from the mother if possible to use in feeding the lamb
Check temperature every 20 minutes until it reaches 99 degrees F.
Feed by stomach tube
Return to mother

Less than five hours old, able to hold up head and swallow
Move to warming box
Collect colostrum from the mother if possible to use in feeding the lamb
Check temperature every 20 minutes until it reaches 99 degrees F.
Feed by stomach tube
Return to mother

Step 3. Follow up
If any lamb remains weak, it may need to be kept in draft-free, gently heated environment and fed by stomach tube regularly until it is strong enough to return to its mother. If at all possible, use milk or colostrum from the lamb’s own mother for all feedings, as this will increase the likelihood that the lamb will be accepted when returned to her.

Don’t
Submerge the lamb in warm water.
Warm a lamb with low blood sugar.
Overheat a lamb

Step 4. Find the cause
Hypothermia and starvation cause a great deal of death loss and their treatment greatly increases labor requirements at lambing time. Shepherds should set a goal both for economic and animal welfare reasons to reduce hypothermia and starvation as much as possible. Each case should be noted in the lambing records of the dam, and the shepherd should attempt to pin down the cause of each case. After the crush of lambing is over, these records can be reviewed to look for patterns that might suggest management changes or culling of individual ewes.

Well-fed and -conditioned ewes can deliver and keep lambs fed and warm under fairly extreme temperatures, provided that they sheltered from wind, drafts, and moisture. Temperature alone should not a cause of lamb hypothermia-starvation in shed lambed ewes unless the air temperature is below 0 degrees F.

Some management-related causes of hypothermia-starvation in shed-lambed ewes would include:
-- poor maternal nutrition in early gestation when placental development takes place, leading to low birth weights and low milk production.
-- poor maternal nutrition in late gestation, reducing fetal development and resulting in low birth weight and weakness in newborn lambs
-- inadequate bedding; ewes lambing on wet or frozen pen floors
-- drafts at floor level
-- overcrowding of ewes leading to mismothering, grannying, or lost and wandering lambs.
-- inadequate pen construction allowing lambs to wander away from their mothers.

Some disease-related causes of hypothermia-starvation would include:
-- Ovine progressive pneumonia, which can cause reduced (or absent) colostrum.
-- Any of the several abortion diseases, leading to weak newborn lambs.
-- Mastitis, causing the ewe to refuse to allow the lambs to suckle, or past mastitis causing one or both sides of the bag to fail completely or partially.

If causes related to management and disease are ruled out, the most common cause of hypothermia and starvation in lambs is maternal inattention. Good mothering ability includes the skill of keeping track of your lambs and not allowing them to starve. In some rare cases, teat size and placement on the ewe can also be a factor. Be particularly attentive for ewes with excessively large or low teats. Sometimes there can be plenty of milk that the lambs simply can’t get to.

With attention to detail, hypothermia and starvation can be reduced to very low rates even in flocks that lamb in the dead of winter in very cold climates. In most sheep production systems, the majority of the cost of producing a finished market lamb is already spent when the lamb is born (in the form of feed and keep for the breeding flock), so saving chilled lambs is an important way to protect your investment. Preventing it from happening in the first place is even more important.

Up from the ashes?

2009-09-03T06:02:00.003-04:00

A follow up to my earlier post regarding the Eagle-Times of Claremont, NH

It would appear that publisher Harvey Hill has agreed to take a $4 million hit and allow a bid for the paper from Sample News Group in Pennsylvania to be approved by a bankruptcy court. The family-owned chain issued a statement that it hopes to have the paper back up and running by the end of the month.

Newspaper accounts make it appear that Hill is the paper's main unsecured creditor, and it appears that the sale has been approved.

If this all goes ahead as it appears to be headed, this would be an amazing outcome. The Sample News Group is taking a huge risk buying a small local newspaper -- although arguably at a huge discount -- and Hill is personally providing the lion's share of that discount by waiving his personal claim to what the paper owed him. Both are to be applauded.

Agribusiness monopolies to be scrutinized -- about time!

2009-08-20T06:24:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-10T21:08:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-18T05:49:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-02T21:23:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-03-09T08:49:00.002-04:00

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 ...

2009-03-04T19:14:00.002-05:00

"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?

2009-02-21T16:36:00.006-05:00

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

2009-01-26T07:52:00.005-05:00

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?

2009-01-21T05:27:00.004-05:00

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.

2009-01-20T07:16:00.003-05:00

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?

2009-01-08T05:44:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-02T19:07:00.003-05:00

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

2008-12-11T06:58:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-07T19:25:00.001-05:00

'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

2008-12-01T17:25:00.005-05:00

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 ...

2008-11-29T13:26:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-28T16:46:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-28T06:28:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-23T06:54:00.003-05:00

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

2008-11-13T19:29:00.006-05:00

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.

Welcome, Henry

2008-10-13T08:39:00.004-04:00

A new ram has joined the Edgefield flock. Henry is a six year old Ile de France ram, who will take the place of Buddy, my old Texel who is now shooting blanks. He came to me from Todd and Kelly Shuttleworth of Shuttleworth Farm in Westfield, Vermont. He was an even trade for one of my Coopworth rams.

A photo of me with my sheep

2008-10-10T06:07:00.005-04:00

If you ever wondered what I look like, here's a picture. It's a few years old. I've lost some weight since it was taken. I'm the one standing next to the John Deere gator, and that's my now-deceased guard dog Big Guy in the lower left-hand corner. In this image, I have just finished feeding a group of sheep on the farm I used to run in Amherst, Mass. If you look very closely, you can see Joe the Border collie in the back of the gator

Book Review: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

2008-09-15T07:27:00.002-04:00

By Bill Fosher, copyright 2008 all rights reserved.

Michael Pollan’s opening paragraph – or should I say salvo – has the power of briefly stated, commonsense advice. It’s seven words long, and I daresay they could be the most important seven words that Americans will ever read, if they take them to heart. Here they are:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

If we would all follow those three rules, our health would improve greatly. There’d be less heart disease, cancer, type II diabetes, obesity. Contrasted against the confusing landscape of government food pyramid and Mediterranean diets, with their recommendations for so many grams of this and so many servings of that per week, those three simple rules are a beacon for people trying to improve their diets.

Then Pollan spends the next 200 pages muddying the waters.

I mean that in a good way, mostly. Pollan looks at the reasons behind confusing and contradictory dietary advice that we are bombarded with every day. It’s confusing because so much money depends on the decisions people make about buying food, or the other things that we eat, which Pollan refers to as “foodlike substances.” It’s contradictory because much of what the experts are saying is so nuanced and finely crafted as to be virtually meaningless if you read the fine print. But no one does. And in some cases, it’s contradictory because what we know one year turns out to be wrong the next.

The first important thing is to understand what Pollan means when he advises us to eat food. Food is oatmeal, eggs, apples, a lamb chop, a head of lettuce. It’s in its natural form, or very close to it. Foodlike substances are packaged, highly processed items, such as Go-Gurt, the tubed, squeezable product that contains some yogurt and a lot of artificial ingredients to make it sweet and squeezable. Think toothpaste with cultures.

Pollan sharply criticizes the science of nutrionism as reductionism at its worst and most dangerous. He points out – perhaps a little more often than necessary – that these are the people who brought us trans fats in the form of margarine, which was supposed make us healthier but instead turned out to be, well, the closest thing to poison ever sold in a dairy case. He writes about the political forces behind food labeling laws and their corrupting influence on the process. Even organic certification comes in for some justified criticism.

I read In Defense of Food with the keen eye of a 46-year-old heart attack survivor who feels he is being given some very bad – or at least inappropriate – advice by the team of well-meaning dietitians, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists who are supposed to be helping me reclaim what’s left of my health. Diet is one of the main things that need to change in my life if I am to avoid a second heart attack. But the advice I was getting seemed wrong to me. It was pushing me towards more processed foods: Breads with added fiber and long, incomprehensible ingredient lists; frozen or canned vegetables; packaged meals. It wasn’t until I started to read Pollan’s book that I started to understand the two reasons for this.

First, the sort of stuff that they were recommending was basically health-enhanced versions of the stuff that most people eat. To be a little crass, they have to put the hay down where the goats can get it. The problem is that I had already moved away from most of these kinds of foodlike substances years ago, so eating Cocoa Puffs (which carry the American Heart Association’s heart-healthy logo) seemed like a real step backwards.

Second, and perhaps more insidious, was the reductionism that Pollan keeps in his crosshairs. Health professionals want cardiac patients to monitor saturated fat, sodium, total calories, carbohydrates, protein, and so forth. You can’t do that with food that doesn’t come in a package. There is no “Nutrition Facts” label on an ear of sweet corn at the farmer’s market.

In fairness, I should say that everyone who has talked to me about diet since my heart attack has said that fresh fruits and vegetables are excellent and should be a major part of the diet. However, that is about the extent of it. The next 20 or 30 minutes would be spent on how to identify the “heart-healthy” foodlike substances in the supermarket.

Pollan’s criticism of nutritionism as science is that it attempts to break foods down into component parts and to look at those parts out of context of the food that delivers them. He points out that people who eat lots of foods rich in antioxidants tend to have less cancer. Nutrition science has identified the antioxidant chemicals and put them into pills. When people take the pills, they don’t work. So, apparently, there’s something going on in kale and carrots that we don’t understand and haven’t figured out how to measure.

In retrospect, I realize that the problems with my diet lay in the fact that I had broken two of Pollan’s three rules: Not too much and mostly plants. I was, for the most part, already eating food, but I was eating too much overall, and not enough of it was plants. This last one is a particularly hard reality for me to face, as I raise food animals and enjoy sampling my work and that of other like-minded farmers. I used to joke that I love leafy green vegetables. I just want to run them through a lamb first.

This is where Pollan’s book really shines. He points out that food that is grown on healthy soil and under healthy conditions will confer health benefits on the people who consume it. It’s not magic, it’s micronutrients and fat composition. Pasture raised animals will produce food products that have higher levels of Omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleaic acids. A carrot grown in ground rich in organic matter will have all the stuff it needs to make the antioxidants that protect us from abnormal cell growth than could be the precursor to cancer. More importantly, healthy foods have all the ingredients working together; they are more than the sum of their parts, Pollan contends.

He also talks about the health of a food system: if you shake the hand of the farmer who grows your food, you don’t need a whole regulatory infrastructure to protect yourself from tainted food. Farmers who have the opportunity to sell directly to their customers suddenly get feedback about the food they produce. Pollan rightly points out that in the commodity food business, the only feedback farmers get from the market is price. In the effort to drive down production costs, they often forget that they are producing food for human consumption, not a commodity for sale on the Chicago Board of Trade.

None of this is exactly new. Wendell Barry has been saying this sort of thing for decades. But Pollan puts them in the context of a set of rules for personal behavior that fits with today’s “What can I do?” mentality, not in terms of government policies.

Unfortunately, Pollan falls into the trap of nutritionism for long stretches of his book, using the logic that gave us margarine to argue against margarine, essentially. He does confess to having done so, and claims his need to do it proves how little good information about food is available. It’s a little hard to swallow. But the advice that he gives about avoiding the chronic diseases and developing a healthy food economy are worth slogging through the deconstruction of nutritionism.

I referred to Pollan’s first paragraph as an opening salvo. In a very real sense, this book is a subversive insurgency in its simplicity and its means of providing ways for people to change their personal behavior, government and scientific advice be damned, for the better. The simple fact of the matter is that if we keep getting fatter and sicker, the medical costs associated with chronic diseases stemming from the Western diet will make the Social Security crisis look like a walk in the park. No kidding: they will bring down our economy. Not “may,” not “could very well;” they will destroy it. Normally, the idea of making the world a better place one person at a time strikes me as feel-good pap, but in the case of diet, it really does come down to changing personal behavior. The changes that Pollan recommends need to reach into the vast majority of households to have their effect on society as a whole. It’s not enough for my family to eat a healthy diet. Our community must also do so. Otherwise we will be fighting each other in the streets for insulin.

The government can and must play an important role in enabling change. How realistic is it to think that a single mother of five living in the inner city can buy a whole lamb from me at $4.50 a pound? Right now, not very. Her ability to find me and afford my product are very limited. That’s where government policy will have to play a role. It’s a series of government policies that have set up the corn belt, the dairy belt, the wheat belt, the beef belt and all the other belts, along with the commodity exchange and transportation infrastructure that underpin its longstanding cheap food policy. It’s a set of government policies – corrupted by corporate food processing and industrial agriculture lobbying power – that have allowed the makers of Mazola to place a “limited” health claim on corn oil.

It’s a question of deciding where we’re going to treat our health problems. The medical system is very good at pulling people out of the sink when they’re circling the drain. I’m living proof of that: my grandfather died of a heart attack at my age, and as recently as 20 years ago my heart attack probably would have been fatal. But that’s perhaps the most expensive way to save a life. The blockage of my left anterior descending artery has been repaired, and I’m on a drug regime that will last years – parts of it for the rest of my life. I’ve had hours of counseling and supervised exercise. I’ve missed lots of work to tend to my health crisis. I put the total cost of my heart attack at about $85,000 so far, and I’m just five months into the 40 years that I should have left. One wonders how far that $85,000 would go if it were applied to producing a healthy food supply and getting it into the places where people need it most. I bet a lot more than one person’s life could be saved.

The basic fact of the matter – and this is Pollan’s strongest point – is that nearly everything the government and science is trying to do to improve America’s diet is basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, when everyone in the wheelhouse can clearly see where the iceberg lies. We still have time to change course, but not much.

What's a pet worth?

2008-08-19T06:48:00.005-04:00

There's a couple in Vermont who will go before the state Supreme Court shortly to argue that they should be allowed to sue their veterinarians for compensation for pain and suffering relating to the death of their cats.

You can get the details here by listening to Vermont Edition.

The gist of it is that the couple's cats were being treated for hypertension using a compounded medicine that they allege was improperly made and contained a toxic dose of one of the medications. They further allege that their veterinarians failed to recognize the cats' worsening condition as symptoms of toxicity until it was too late to save them.

The couple is asking the supreme court to make law that would allow them to seek compensation for non-economic damages -- loss of society and emotional suffering -- for the loss of their cats. It should be pointed out that the facts of the case have not yet been settled. It remains for a trial court to determine whether the alleged malpractice has even taken place.

Under Vermont law -- and most other states -- the amount of money a pet owner can collect for malpractice is limited to economic damages. That is, the market value of the pet at the time of its death. Market value is defined, roughly, as the amount that someone would pay for an animal of the same age, breed, and condition as the one that was lost. In this case, the couple has dropped its claim for economic damages and is seeking only non-economic damages.

I hope the Vermont Supreme Court breaks from its tradition and restrains itself from making law. This is the court that has ordered the Legislature to pass laws allowing civil unions and equitable school funding -- both laudable actions in my opinion, but in both cases the court stuck its nose where the judicial proboscis ought not be stuck -- into the Legislature.

If pet owners are able to start collecting for pain and suffering for the loss of pets, veterinary medical malpractice rates will skyrocket, and veterinary medical care -- already a major expense for those of us who farm and keep a large number of working dogs -- will become even less affordable. A few pet owners will get some monetary compensation that will not bring back their beloved Fluffy, and oh, by the way, the trial lawyer will keep at least a third of that award.

Clearly there is a difference between a pet cat or dog and a cow or sheep. Even in the wildest definition of the value of sheep, which was seen in Vermont's BSE-infected flock, the limit was the value of the animal plus the value of the offspring that she would have produced during her lifetime. But most people would not hesitate to spend more than the pet's economic value -- in some cases several multiples of it -- on veterinary care. And more and more, those of us who allow our decisions about veterinary medical expenses enter the equation when we're deciding what course to take with our animals are considered heartless and cold -- even irresponsible.

The proper forum for the discussion about the non-economic value of pets is not the courts. It is the legislature. The right to collect non-economic damages for wrongful human deaths is established by statute, not by judicial decree. There's an old saw that tough cases make bad law, and it's never been more true than this.

Fear: the great motivator

2008-08-10T07:18:00.004-04:00

Journalist Daniel Gardner has a new book out called The Science of Fear: Why We Fear Things We Shouldn't and Put Ourselves at Greater Danger. I haven't read it, but I've heard him interviewed on a couple of NPR shows, and I find his hypothesis very interesting and his examples spot on.

For instance, in recent weeks in California there have been a couple of apparently false reports of attacks by mountain lions on hikers. One man said he was attacked in Palo Alto, but police and federal trackers could find no sign of a big cat on the man or in the area where he said the attack took place. This from the San Jose Mercury-News:

Interviewed by police to see whether he might have fabricated his account, the unidentified 50-year-old Portola Valley man "stuck with his story," said Palo Alto police Agent Dan Ryan, suggesting that "if it wasn't a mountain lion it was perhaps a dog."

Easy mistake to make. But the point is this: because this guy, who apparently had some reason to need an unassailable excuse for not being somewhere he was supposed to be, came down from the hills screaming "mountain lion," a public saftey effort that cost thousands of dollars was launched and hikers were kept out of the public park where the attack was said to have taken place.

Another rocket surgeon, this one from Orange County, fabricated a story about being "scratched" by a mother lion when he tried to pat one of her cubs. Here's the story from the LA Times.

Scratched. On the arm. Right. That's what an angry lioness will do to defend her cubs. Hookay.

First of all, let me say that the human genome would probably be better off without people who think they should play with mountain lion cubs. But, since that's apparently not what happened here, it's beside the point. Again, a massive public safety effort was launched, the park was closed, and a nearby elementary school was locked down.

(Thanks to Luisa at Lassie, Get Help for calling my attention to these two anecdotes.)

Fear of attack by other top-level predators is probably one of the most visceral fears that humans have. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! The fact that there have been just 16 cougar attacks in California in the last 118 years -- or about one person attacked every 7 and a half years out of a population of 36.5 million -- does nothing to alleviate that fear. It's programmed into us on the genetic level. When we lived as hunter-gatherers, those of us who feared lions, tigers, and bears lived to reproduce. Those of us who didn't fear them, well, there are fewer of us who can trace our ancestry to that kind of person.

But there's a multiplier effect. Human beings are social. We tell stories. We don't have to see our friends be eaten be eaten by a mountain lion to know that we should avoid them. We just have to hear a story from one of the elders of our band about someone who got eaten -- even if it happened two or three generations ago -- to know that we should avoid places where big cats rule. Societies that respected the danger of top-level predators tended to be more successful than those that didn't.

Gardner makes the point that the media has supplanted the role of the band's elders as story tellers. But because of the fact that newspapers have to publish every day, and they can't tell the same story over and over again, we get a false impression of what is dangerous. His example was child abduction by strangers.

When such an abduction takes place, it's big news. It is big news precisely because it is rare and scary. The fact that it is big news means that people talk about it. It becomes part of the tribal lore, and people alter their behavior to avoid this risk.

How do they alter their behavior? The don't let their children ride the bus to school (or heaven forbid, walk). Children are told to stay indoors. They are supervised at all times. All activities are structured, vetted, and safe. Children are told not to talk to strangers.

Now, there is no question that stranger abduction is a real danger. But all of the things that parents do to protect their children also carry risks -- risks that are much greater than the risk they are avoiding. Children are 26 times more likely to die in a car crash than they are to be abducted by a stranger. Every ride in a car carries that danger. Children are kept indoors, where they play video games and are generally inactive. Lo and behold, we have an epidemic of childhood obesity, carrying with it health risks that will substantially shorten the lives of the children who are affected. (In 30 years, it will be normal for a 30 year old to be a type II diabetic. Think about that.)

It is the nature of journalism to report the unusual: man bites dog. Sure, car crashes in which children die will get some space in the news pages. But stories about long term threats such as obesity and lack of risk judgment aren't exactly front-page, above-the-fold material.

Lack of unstructured, unsupervised play prevents children from developing the ability to evaluate risk. In pre-stranger-danger childhoods, children's ability to hurt themselves was limited primarily by their own strength and ingenuity. As children grew up and became more dangerous to themselves, they also developed the ability to assess risk and determine whether they could do something safely or not. They developed an understanding of risk as they became stronger and smarter. Nowadays, because children aren't allowed to do anything that might be dangerous, they don't understand how to take risks. So perhaps the first time they have the opportunity to do something without adult supervision is when they are 16 years old -- as strong as an adult, but without the judgment -- and we give them a driver's license, a three-ton hunk of metal with a 200-HP engine and a loud sound system. And we're surprised when they engage in risky behavior. We thought we taught them so well.

Being eaten by a mountain lion would sure screw up your day. No question about that. But for the one in 274 million chance that Californians face of meeting this grim fate, do we really need to unleash the power of the Federal Government? Do the taxes that I pay, here in New Hampshire where the very existence of cougars is doubtful, really need to support a tracker to go looking for a "rogue cat" that someone apparently made up in a fit of delusion or out of a need to explain an absence? Should we clear out the parks? Do children really need to be locked into their school? Or would we be better off sending them outside to burn off some of the deep-fried chicken fingers and chocolate milk we served them for lunch?

One of the things that I really liked about the Waldorf school my stepkids attended was that they went outside to play every day, no matter what the weather: rain, snow, biting cold. Outside play was part of the school day. They were expected to dress appropriately -- and of course mountain lion attacks weren't really a consideration in western Massachusetts. Now, I can't claim that there are no obese kids in that school, or that the socio-economic demographics of a private elementary school wouldn't tend to limit childhood obesity. (If you want to tie your brain up in knots, think on this one: in the US, the child of a poor family is more likely to be obese than the child of a wealthy one.) But it is a step in the right direction.

And that's what we need here. Baby steps back toward rational decision making. Let's hope Dan Gardner's book points a few folks in the right direction.

A model for an Internet privacy policy

2008-08-05T13:34:00.000-04:00

This from the web site of Banjo Dan and the Mid-Nite Plowboys http://www.banjodan.com

"Our privacy policy is you'll receive news tidbits only from Banjo Dan because we're not organized enough to profit from your email address in obnoxious ways. To unsubscribe, just reply to any newsletter and ask to be removed. It's not an automated process for the same reason that we won't give your email address to anyone else."

Nothing to do with sheep or anything ...

2008-07-27T21:17:00.002-04:00

Just two quotations from some of my favorite musicians.

"Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." — Steve Earle.

"I've met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don't think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table." — Townes Van Zandt.

Imagine what those two minds could have done without heroin.

The difference between quiet and silence

2008-07-06T06:44:00.004-04:00

I have a thing about noise. Human-generated, mechanical, intrusive noise can make me nuts. But that doesn't mean I like silence. What I want is quiet. As I write this, I am sitting in my house with windows and doors open, listening to the sounds of the woods around me. I hear a wood thrush, a robin, an Eastern wood pewee, rose-breasted grosbeaks, some sort of woodpecker drumming, and leaves rustling in a morning breeze. If I stepped outside, I would also hear a distant hum of wheels on Interstate 91. And in a few minutes the fridge will kick back on, and even this laptop makes some sounds in addition to my keyboard clicks. Now there's a jet flying over, way up high.

When we moved into this house three years ago, we very seldom could hear the traffic. The highway is more than a mile away, and there were thick woods between us and it. But the landowner across the road stripped out his timber, and now the noise comes right up the hill. When the wind is from the north, or when the pavement is wet, it can be loud enough that I have trouble sleeping.

Right now my sheep are pastured in a very quiet place on top of Cass Hill in Westmoreland. They are about a mile from the nearest public road, and surrounded by dense woods. Last evening I sat there after setting up a new paddock and listened to them eating, and rustling through the tall grass and weeds as they sought out prime vegetation. When they moved away from me, I started to be able to hear the wild sounds -- not all that different from what I hear at home, but without the background thrum of traffic and with a few of the birds of denser woodlands that were driven away by my neighbor's rapacious harvest of his land.

All was quiet. But it was far from silent. Silence is the absence of sound; quiet is the absence of noise.

In recent months, I have been recovering from a heart attack. Over and over, health professionals tell me that reduction of stress is going to be critical to my recovery. In my cardiac rehabilitation classes, we have had sessions where we were supposed to sit quietly, concentrate on our breathing, and relax deeply. I found it nearly impossible to do. Does anyone else remember the signs we used to see along the streets: "Quiet: Hospital Zone"? Until this spring, I hadn't spent much time in hospitals -- I went to great lengths to avoid darkening their doors, as a matter of fact. Hospitals are some of the noisiest places!

Large institutional buildings create noise even if they aren't full of people. Florescent lights buzz; ventilation systems woosh and whir; plumbing churns, gurgles, clangs, and thumps. My cardiac rehab class was in the basement of a community hospital, and our classroom was off the corridor that leads to the employee cafeteria. So there were loud conversations outside as people came and went for their coffee or meal breaks. The laundry was also nearby, so great carts of sheets and towels were wheeled by. And the elevators were directly across the hall, so there was the constant ding and sound of the doors opening. And just for good measure, every now and then, the PA system would go off:

"BING! Dr. Smith, 5832 -- Dr. Smith, 5832."

I found it next to impossible to relax with all that noise. But up on Cass Hill, I could focus on my breath and feel the day's tension melt away as I did so. Even though the sounds were erratic and some were as loud -- and perhaps louder -- than the ones that I heard at the hospital, for some reasons, they didn't intrude as much. Is it just because they weren't human-generated (although one could argue that I am responsible for any noise my sheep make) or mechanical? I think so.

Natural quiet is nearly impossible to come by these days. I have been consciously seeking it out for a number of years now, and when I can get a few minutes of it I relish it. And now, I have a valid medical reason to do it.

A more fitting tribute to Molly

2008-06-28T20:48:00.004-04:00

Molly in a training session, circa 1997

I want to celebrate her life, and her effect on me. It still hurts that she’s not there in the morning while I drink my first cup of tea, and that she’s not here right now, reminding me that it’s time to feed the dogs. I still look for her on our walks, wanting to make sure that she hasn't gotten confused and lost. But that’s my problem: compared to what she gave me this is a tiny price to pay.

A lot of people who know me and knew Molly think they understand the bond between us; a few of them do. Very few. One friend gave me a bumper sticker that said, “God help me to be the person my dog thinks I am.” She thought it represented Molly’s adoration for me.

She did adore me – and the feeling was mutual. But Molly held no illusions about me. I am exactly the person she thought I was. She knew my shortcomings, and when she could she covered them for me. When she couldn’t, she tolerated them with varying degrees of annoyance. That bumper sticker should have said, “God help me if my dog tells where I’ve hidden the bodies.”

Perhaps as important, I held no illusions about Molly. I know she wasn’t the greatest sheepdog that ever lived. I’ve probably got a more talented dog in Tweed right now, but as big as Tweed’s place in my heart is, it doesn’t compare to Molly’s. Molly was competent and workmanlike, but not really stellar. But she tried her best every time I asked her to. Who can ask anything more than that in a dog?

There are some great stories about Molly. There was the time when 500 sheep on an island vegetation management project broke out. We thought we had them all back inside the fence, and were getting ready to get home before we were going to have to run against the tide. Molly was nowhere to be found. After about 20 minutes of searching and calling, I saw some motion out in the salt marsh, and here came another packet of sheep. Molly was behind them, bringing them on a dead line for where I was calling her from. If we had left when we thought we were done, those sheep (it turned out to be 12 of them) would have been swept out by the tide or eaten by coyotes.

I had a habit of talking to Molly like she was another person. I do this with all my dogs, more or less -- I don't talk baby talk to them or change my voice very much. But Molly had a large vocabulary and paid attention to me most of the time, resulting in some interesting conversations. There’s the time when one of my stepdaughter’s boyfriends was visiting. He was sitting on the couch, and Molly was curled up on the floor in front of him. I walked into the room and casually asked, “You want to go outside and take a leak?” Imagine his relief when Molly got up and accompanied me. He thought this was some sort of bonding ritual I was expecting him take part in with me.

Molly had a beautiful sense of the pressure needed to move sheep, and she also knew how to turn it down a notch when she needed to. She could avert her eyes just enough to allow a truculent ewe to back up a step, collect her lambs, turn around, and trot off where she needed to go -- giving the ewe just enough space to leave without losing face.

There was the time when we moved a stray lamb, one backwards step at a time, down a narrow path on a cliff face, to his calling mother.

I’ve said it before, and it’s true: Molly made a shepherd out of me. She showed me doors that I wouldn’t have seen without her. Molly gets some of the credit for anything that I do right with my sheep flock or the dogs that I’m working or training.

Selfishly, I hope that my relationship with her wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime deal, but it probably was. I hope that her ghost visits me when I get lazy and reminds me to straighten up and fly right. I hope to see her in my dreams at night after a good day’s work, with the white tip of her tail – the shepherd’s lantern – leading the way down the darkening trail from some high pastures toward home, and toward rest. I hope to see her in the young dogs coming up. Most of all, I hope that I can be worthy of her memory.

She was a good dog. To paraphrase James McMurtry, she'll no more be here, but she'll never be far.

Molly, Jan. 3, 1993 - May 15, 2008

2008-05-15T20:27:00.001-04:00

I cut off my right arm this afternoon. At least that's how it feels. Molly is gone.

She'd been gone for a while, truth be told. As she had so many other times in my life, she was waiting for me to see what should have been obvious. In the past, she was waiting to help me; this time she needed my help. I wish I could have offered it more selflessly.

Rest easy, old girl. Thanks for everything.

Wolves at the door

2008-03-21T07:45:00.004-04:00

The National Wildlife Service has confirmed that the canid that killed at least 13 sheep in Shelburne, Mass., last fall was a gray wolf, and that it appears to be wild, not an escaped captive. The wolf itself was shot and killed when it returned for another meal at the farm; undigested lamb bones and wool were found in its stomach.

Biologists are puzzled by the wolf's appearance so far from any known established population. The nearest packs of gray wolves are in Quebec and Ontario. Some gray wolves are occasionally seen in Northern Maine, but they aren't believed to be established there.

Yet.

Before last fall's visitation by the young, 85-pound male, the gray wolf was thought to have been extirpated -- that is, locally extinct -- from Massachusetts since before the civil war. As far as I can learn, there have not been any further sightings of wolves in the area, but that's one of the hallmarks of wolves: you don't see them. The mere fact that this guy was seen taking sheep one day and shot and killed the next makes me wonder if he was as healthy as folks are saying. He also killed a large number of animals, eating only a few bites of each. This is also unusual behavior for a healthy wolf or even a coyote. It's more like a dog.

His appearance and confirmation is probably going to start a movement to reintroduce this top-level predator into its former range in New England. Let's hope that it isn't done as willy-nilly as it was done in the areas surrounding the Great Lakes, where wolves were "reintroduced" into places where there was no historical evidence they had ever lived, and where the only food source for them is domestic livestock. A pack of wolves preying on a flock of sheep can make a shepherd long for the days of coyotes and domestic dogs. I know of one shepherd in Minnesota who has had livestock guardian dogs killed by introduced wolves, and who has had to increase both the number and aggression of the guard dogs that she uses just to stay ahead of the wolves.

There's historical evidence that my part of New Hampshire was, in fact, home to wolves. So if there's going to be reintroduction, it will probably happen around me. I hope that the wildlife biologists have the common sense to work with livestock producers before the killing starts. They can have us working with them, or they can have us working against them. It's as simple as that, and it's entirely up to them.

Visualizing 143,000,000 pounds of ground beef

2008-02-29T08:55:00.002-05:00

When we talked earlier this week about the largest food recall in US history -- that of 143 million pounds of ground beef from Westland/Hallmark in southern California -- my focus was on the true cost of food. But here's another thing to consider. If most of this beef hadn't already been served up at fast food restaurants and school lunch programs all around the US, the task of recalling it would be monumentally expensive. A big recall has already put one processor out of business in recent months.

But anyway, let's consider the logistics of recalling 143,000,000 pounds -- or 71,500 tons -- of ground beef. A semi-trailer can carry a load of about 45,000 pounds, or 22.5 tons. If we assumed that the entire cargo of a semi was just ground beef -- that is, no packaging, pallets, etc. it would take 3,178 semis to carry the beef. A typical truck and trailer is about 70 feet long, so if you lined them up bumper to dock lock, you'd have a string of trucks a little more than 42 miles long.

Of course, the hamburger was shipped in 40 and 50-pound cartons on pallets, so figure that there'd be another 15 to 20 percent of packaging weight, and add that to the line and you start to get a line of semis about 50 miles long.

And I don't know enough about logistics and shipping to know whether ground beef in boxes on skids is a cargo that can use up a truck's weight limit before running out of space.

But we don't really need to worry about a 50-mile long string of tractor-trailers pulling up to the Westland/Hallmark plant because, after all, most of the meat that was recalled has already been eaten.

But clearly the logistics have become an issue. In an interview on Vermont Public Radio last week, the director of food service for the Ferrisburg Public Schools said she was still awaiting instructions on what to do with the cases of beef that have been sitting in her freezers on hold since Jan. 31, when the USDA first issued a warning against using the beef.

Too expensive to burn?

2008-02-28T07:13:00.005-05:00

Cargill announced yesterday that it is canceling plans to build an ethanol plant outside Topeka, Kansas. The basic reason is that corn is now to expensive to use a feed stock for ethanol production, in Cargill's estimation.

Corn closed at $5.25 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade -- and I can remember a year ago lamb feeders in the midwest saying that they couldn't afford to feed lambs corn that cost $3.50 a bushel.

So whither corn? Is the irrational exuberance out of the marketplace yet? How will the federal government meet the conflicting goals of increased ethanol use, improved land conservation practices, and cheap food? Is this just a ploy by Cargill to try to put some downward pressure on the price of corn? Cargill is, essentially, in the business of adding value to corn by making it into various products from pork to ethanol to high fructose corn syrup -- if its basic raw material is too expensive and it can dial back perceived demand just a bit, perhaps production won't trail off, but prices will?

The timing of the announcement makes one wonder about this. Nearly all the major corn production for 2008 is pretty well locked in. Seed and fertilizer has been ordered and in some cases paid for. Land has been leased, removed from CRP plans, or otherwise committed to production. And Cargill looks at its Topeka plans and says, "Eh? Maybe not." It also mentioned that it has not made any decisions about three other plants that it has on the drawing boards.

For a company like Cargill, used to controlling absolutely everything in a "vertically integrated" supply and production system, it must be maddening to not be able to precisely control the cost of corn, when so much of their business model depends on it. But perhaps, just perhaps, it has figured out a way.

Speaking of the Valdez

2008-02-27T06:05:00.003-05:00

Exxon Mobil is currently fighting a judgment against it in the Valdez case. It doesn't want to pay $2.5 billion in punitive damages. Sounds like a lot of money. But it's just shy of 9 days' earnings for them.

This is the world's smallest violin ...

Punitive damages are meant to punish and deter bad behavior, such as putting a relapsed alcoholic at the helm of a supertanker plying the waters of an extremely sensitive ecosystem. Hard to see how such chump change is going to make Exxon Mobil think twice about anything.

The further cost of cheap food

2008-02-18T21:02:00.005-05:00

The largest food recall in US history has just taken place. Officials at the Westland/Hallmark meat packing plant were recently ordered to recall 143 million pounds of ground beef, some 37 million of which were sold to the the federal school lunch program, and which, officials acknowledge, has mostly already been eaten.

The recall, which covers meat dating back to February 2006, is due to the fact that non-ambulatory cattle may have entered the food chain in violation of food safety laws. At the same time, two employees of the Southern California slaughterhouse are charged with criminal animal cruelty for the way they handled these so-called downer cows.

Say what you will about the Humane Society of the US -- they are a crooked bunch -- but they managed to get their hands on some incredibly damning video shot at the plant. It showed two workers using a forklift to shove, prod, and lift down cattle out the way. They were also captured on tape pulling down cattle around by one leg over manure-soaked concrete yards, using a shock prod repeatedly on cattle that could not stand, and turning a high-pressure hose on a down cow.

Westland/Hallmark appears to be trying to pass this off as a couple of bad employees in an otherwise good plant. In a statement on the company's website, president Steve Mendell defended his company's record on the humane treatment of animals entering the plant.

"Words cannot accurately express how shocked and horrified I was at the depictions contained on the video that was taken by an individual who worked at our facility from October 3 thru November 14, 2007," Mendell said in the statement. "We have taken swift action regarding the two employees identified on the video and have already implemented aggressive measures to ensure all employees follow our humane handling policies and procedures. We are also cooperating with the USDA investigators on the allegations of inhumane handling treatment which is a serious breech of our company’s policies and training."

Both employees were fired.

Mendell went on to defend his company's food safety compliance thus: "Finally, I proudly assure our customers that we comply with all USDA requirements, including the requirement that only ambulatory livestock may enter the harvest facility to be processed for human food. I am confident that we have met this high regulatory standard."

The reason the meat was recalled and the plant shut down was because since 2006 there has been a ban on downer cattle entering the human food chain. Apparently the animals in question in this case were cleared for slaughter by the USDA inspector on site, but at some point between that clearance and their slaughter they became non-ambulatory. The regulations require that the inspector be notified and the animal re-inspected. That didn't happen in this case.

I don't know very much about Westland/Hallmark, but it appears from the video to be a plant that specialized in what are known as cull cows -- dairy cow that are being sold for meat for one reason or another. There are more and more of this kind of cow entering the market these days because, with milk prices at record highs, dairy farms are attempting to push cattle for higher and higher levels of production. Some of the large factory dairy farms are now averaging just one lactation per cow before some major system fails and she has to be sent off as a cull.

Typically cull cows are a source of hamburger. Their milk production keeps the level of finish or fat very low in their meat, making it less desirable for steaks and roasts. In the industrial food system, this source of lean meat is desirable because it can be sold as is -- ever buy "diet lean" hamburger? -- or mixed with cheap suet to make any grade of hamburger.

But hamburger production is a high-volume, low-margin business. All the meat must be removed from those dairy cattle's bones more or less by hand. There's tremendous pressure to move product through the system. Hundreds if not thousands of cattle are slaughtered every day at a plant like the one where these atrocities took place. Downer cattle are, at the very least, a bother, and at worst, might mean that someone's quota gets missed.

Plants like the Westland/Hallmark slaughterhouse can't exist without a large supply of cattle within a reasonable shipping distance. With the concentration of dairy in the irrigated areas of Southern California, plants like this one become not only possible, but virtually a necessity. When a single dairy farm is milking thousands of cows -- even tens of thousands in some cases -- there will be a certain number that will leave the farm every day.

On the alter of cheap milk, we sacrifice cows as we push them for maximum production. When they break down, we ship them off for hamburger to a plant where, in the name of cheap hamburger, we sacrifice our humanity. It's all very carefully kept out of sight and out of mind. Neither of these businesses would be possible without the artificially environment of irrigated cropland in the arid and semi-arid regions of California -- an environment made possible by taxpayer subsidized irrigation schemes and crop programs.

So what can you do? If you don't have one already, buy a freezer. Find a local source for your meat. Talk to the farmer or rancher who raises the animals, and order a half or a quarter of a steer. Talk to them about where and how their animals are slaughtered, and how they're handled and raised. Pay a little bit more for your meat if you have to. It's a small price to pay for your humanity.

The end of cheap food?

2008-02-12T16:15:00.002-05:00

On the NPR call-in show "On Point" today, the topic was increasing
food prices. Host Tom Ashbrook had an agricultural economist on,
talking about the factors that are driving up food prices. In his
intro, Ashbrook talked about the rising theft of pigs in China,
tortilla riots in Mexico, and increased milk prices here in the US.
As possible causes, he mentioned the ethanol boom, and said - among
other things - that "farmers are sitting pretty on high prices."

Well Tom, let me give you an idea of what "sitting pretty" looks like
to this American farmer. It looks like all the small dairy farms in
my neck of the woods have been run out of business or gobbled up by
larger neighbors. Those larger neighbors are pulling in record
amounts of money for their milk this year - two years ago, the prices
were at an all time low. And despite the fact that prices are now at
historic highs, most of them aren't making very much more money than
they do when milk prices are "normal," because the cost of grain to
feed the cows, fuel to plant and harvest hay and other fodder and the
fertilizer to grow it have all skyrocketed in the last few years.

In the fall of 2004, I could buy a 21-ton tractor-trailer load of
shelled corn delivered to my farm (then located in Amherst, Mass.)
for $2,520, or $120/ton. Today, that same delivery would cost me
$4,095, or $195/ton. So in three years, the cost of corn delivered to
a farm in central New England has increased 60 percent, or 20 percent
per year at a time when the general inflation rate has been about 3
percent. Those damn Iowa farmers must be making a killing, right?

Nope. They're not the ones making it. Food and Water Watch Policy
Analyst Patrick Woodall points out these facts. "In 1980, the
farmgate price for corn was $2.70 and a new Ford Mustang cost about
$6,000. Today, the base model Mustang runs about $19,000 and corn is
selling for as much as $3.70 - meaning the price of Mustangs more
than tripled and the price of corn increased by a little more than a
third," said Woodall.

See Food and Water Watch's press release for further analysis of the lack of relationship between historical
corn prices and the prices of consumer goods, including groceries.

So who is making the money? Where's it going? What's driving the cost
of food through the roof? Well, we might consider looking at Exxon
Mobil's record year that just went into the books.

Exxon Mobil's record profits

That's right. The folks who brought you the Valdez earned a record 40
billion, 610 million dollars last year. In round figures.
$40,610,000,000. That's a net profit of $3,219.34 per second, 24
hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

To be honest, I think that pretty much ends the mystery of where our
food dollar is going. Over the years, partly because of government
planning and partly because of simple economics, the US and to a
lesser extent the world's food system has become concentrated. We
have a corn belt, which is widely known and recognized. But we also
have a dairy belt, a wheat belt, a beef belt, a sugar belt, a cotton
belt - you name, we've got a belt for it. Production of agricultural
products is concentrated in specific parts of the country where they
grow best, can be processed easily, or simply because there weren't
enough people around to object (note the concentration of beef
feedlots in the rural west).

The whole system is based on transporting commodities from where they
are grown to where they are needed - either for direct consumption or
for processing into other products.

In real terms, the farmer who grew that corn I bought in 2004 and the
one growing it today were paid about the same amount for their
efforts. After all, farm gate prices aren't what really matters: farm
profit is. The increases in cost incurred at my farm, and the
increase at the farm gate, are nearly all due to the increased cost
of energy.

Energy is expended to plow the land for the corn. Energy is expended
to fertilize the ground (commercial fertilizer is, essentially, a
petrochemical). Energy is expended to harvest, and dry the corn. Then
it's loaded into rail cars, which expend energy transporting it to
New England, where a grain company loads it into trucks and expends
energy getting it to the farm where it's loaded into my bin.

At every turn, Exxon Mobil and the other oil companies are making
record profits. No one else along the chain of custody is getting
rich, let me assure you.

So, what sitting pretty looks like to this farmer is pretty much what
it looks like to the soccer mom filling up her minivan or the road
warrior pumping gas into his SUV: shoveling dollars into the coffers
of oil companies.

What can be done? I can only really think of one thing. We have to
get used to paying what it really costs to get our food grown,
processed, and delivered to us. That might mean that suddenly the
small-scale production of grains, considered inefficient in the days
when a gallon of diesel cost less than $1, will suddenly start to
look more and more efficient. It won't make Vermont wheat any less
expensive, but perhaps it will be competitive with the $10/bu wheat
in Kansas that then has to make a 2,000 mile trip to Vermont.

It almost certainly means that there will be less and less grain-fed
meat around. Lambs, being a relatively poor converter of grain to
flesh when compared with pigs or poultry, will be one of the first
food animals to stop making a trip to the feedlot.

For the take of an industry watcher who has seldom been far off the
mark, see Stan Potratz's column. He's
predicting that more and more lambs will be marketed directly off
grass. This will take a new kind of sheep. The animals at the core of
the sheep industry have been selected as a means of adding value to
grain for so many years that they have become poor converters of
forage. Fortunately, the sheep industry has seen very little the sort
of vertical integration that has made pork and poultry production so
"efficient," so the right kinds of sheep are out there. But they are
in short supply.

Anyway, Tom Ashbook, none of us farmers are "sitting pretty" on our
high prices. If we even actually have them. We're struggling to get
by as usual, paying big money to big companies for things that we
must have in order to put food on your table.

You're welcome, by the way.

A useful beast

2008-01-21T19:16:00.000-05:00

When I arrived to do my chores today, I discovered that my lambs had grown impatient for balage, gotten out, and mixed themselves in with the ewes, whose bales were recently refreshed.

This left me with the task of separating the two groups. Initially I figured that I would go back to the barn, get out the handling gear, drag it out to the field, set it up, shed out the lambs, put them back where they belong, pack it back up, and haul it back to the barn. This is about a two-hour process -- mostly setting up and packing up and hauling back and forth.

I decided instead to have a go at shedding the lambs out of the ewes with my good dog, Tweed. Tweed's a little hot to trot, so I spent about 10 minutes getting his mind right -- just getting him to calm down, listen to me, and work with me, rather than assuming that he knew what the job was.

Shedding using a dog is very exacting, precise work. You start with all the sheep between the handler and the dog. When you get a good sized group of sheep that should be in one group at the front of the group, you call the dog in, cut them out from the rest of the group. The handler then drives the small group away while the dog holds the remaining sheep back so they don't follow. Repeat this process over and over again until all the ewes are in one group and all the lambs are in the other.

Sheep want to stay together. The attraction is like a magnet or gravity: the smaller group is drawn to the larger one, and the effect is weakened by distance. Once that first small group has been driven off far enough that it won't want to re-join the main group, you can use it to draw other small groups so you don't have to drive them as far from the main group on subsequent cuts.

The strategy is key: You want end up with the smaller of the two final groups held by the dog. If you try to drive off the smaller group, it will constantly be trying to get back to the bigger group, requiring the handler to stop manipulating the mixed group to drive them back again. In this case, there were 21 lambs and 79 ewes, so Tweed's job was to hold the lambs and let the ewes go. My job was to shift the sheep around until there were some ewes ready to leave the main group, but no lambs.

Tweed had to listen to me. There's no way that either one of us could do this job alone. His job is to hold what I tell him to hold, and let sheep run away when I tell him to. For a Border collie, letting sheep run away is one of the hardest things imaginable. For Tweed, listening to me is hard at first, but after a while it starts to make sense.

But half an hour later, we had 21 lambs in one corner of the field and 79 ewes in the other. There was one mother-daughter pair that held together until the end, and we probably spent more time getting that last lamb out of the ewe flock than the other 20 combined. We had to regather the whole flock once, when two lambs slipped past Tweed. At that point, we had made two cuts, taking about five or six ewes each time. The two lambs squeaked in with the third cut, which had 10 ewes in it. I probably just got greedy and should have taken two cuts with fewer sheep rather than one big one.

Anyway, a job that would have been a fairly odious and time consuming chore became a way to spend a bright winter's morning with my dog, in close enough contact with the sheep to really get a good eye on each and every one of them, and get a job done in a quarter of the time it would have taken otherwise.

I really must learn to trust my dogs more often.

I don't get it.

2008-01-10T12:38:00.000-05:00

So, the day after the New Hampshire primary election goes into the record books, all the politicians and pundits leave. But for some reason, there's still all this hot air blowing around. I mean in 48 hours, we have gone from snow depths of more than three feet to having patches of bare ground on south-facing slopes. All the snow is off the roof of my house.

Wednesday was so strange. Temps hit the upper 50s. My face and neck were warm, but I couldn't take my long-sleeved shirt off because my arms would get cold from all the evaporation that was coming off the snow pack.

Brooks and rivers are swollen with snow melt. Ice jam flooding is a problem in a few places. In many ways, it's just the typical January thaw. But we usually don't have this much snow when it hits.

Maybe all the Kleig lights provide the extra little bit of heat to push us past the tipping point.

One nice thing, though. My ewes are able to get at the leftover turnips and are very happy about it.

On the occasion of Molly's 15th birthday

2008-01-02T17:55:00.000-05:00

Old Molly just keeps on keeping on. She turns 105 today, if you buy the notion that one calendar year is seven dog years.

Just a few weeks ago, I thought she might not make it to this milestone. She suffered a major seizure, and had a hard time coming out of it. But come out of it she did, and bless her heart, she paces up and down "harr-ing" for her dinner every night starting about two hours before feeding time.

To a great extent, I owe the fact that I am a shepherd to this dog. I had sheep before her, but a retired meat cutter could count them on his remaining fingers, and I thought that I had all I could handle. Working them required so much effort that I couldn't imagine having more than six or eight of them. Molly opened doors for me that I didn't even know were there until she pointed them out.

You can put sheep into a pen without baiting them with grain and having two kids and a couple of neighbors running around like chickens with their heads cut off? Yeah, right!

You can walk sheep five miles through the woods, over narrow bridges, and along brushy powerlines? Cut it out!

One man can lamb out 300 ewes? Get out of town!

But with a good dog -- like Molly was in her day -- all these things are possible, and downright enjoyable.

What's hardest to believe is that this dog, my first working sheepdog, was able to show me these things. I didn't know how to get out of her way for a long time, and when I finally started to, she responded graciously -- as if she had known the answer all along but was just waiting for me to figure out the question and ask it. Not very many dogs would have stood for my incompetence and still been willing to give me so much.

It's been about three and a half years since Molly has been interested in working sheep. She's very stiff in the hindquarters, and there's something wrong with her proprioception that makes it even harder for her to walk. Stairs are a real challenge. She can't see well, can hardly hear, and since cold weather set in, she spends most of her time sacked out on the couch. Which is fine with me. She earned her rest. These are her pipe-and-slippers days, and as long as she's enjoying them, she will have them.

32 words for snow

2007-12-23T07:30:00.001-05:00

There's an old saw that some of the native people of the Arctic
tundra have lots of words for what we call snow. So do I. Most of
them have four letters and aren't suitable for use in a PG-13 space
such as this.

But over the last few weeks of this very early onset of persistent
snow cover, it has been interesting to learn again how different snow
conditions can be from storm to storm, and even how much snow can
change from morning to afternoon -- even when it's just sitting there
on the ground.

Sheep can do a certain amount of grazing though deep snow, if it's
light and fluffy and the pasture under the snow is longish and of
good nutritional value. But once the snow becomes heavy and packed
down or if the pasture is poor quality, the amount of energy they
expend getting to the feed by pawing the snow away can exceed the
amount of energy they get from eating the pasture, and they start to
lose weight.

So the first thing a shepherd notices about the snow is whether the
sheep can graze through it or not. So far, even though there's nearly
30 inches of snow on the ground, my sheep are still finding ways to
get at a few tasty morsels when they can. But the quality of the
pasture isn't adequate, so I have started to feed them stored feed --
the oat and pea balage that earlier entries have described.

That means using a tractor in the snow. When it's cold (like 10
degrees F or lower) snow is very slippery. When it's closer to
freezing, it's actually a really good surface to operate a tractor on.

The coming week is supposed to be warm and sunny, with temps above
freezing every day. I expect we'll lose a lot of snow, maybe even
most of it. I'll cry no tears. Sorry skiers.

34 Days

2007-11-20T04:47:00.000-05:00

It's almost time to start breeding the ewes for next spring's lamb crop. The rams have spent the last 321 days keeping each other company, finding things to do and eat. They're fat and spunky and aware of the short days and cool nights. They're ready for their annual month of procreation.

Most breeds of sheep are seasonal breeders. That means they will breed in the late summer, through the fall, and into the early winter. As days start to lengthen, the ewes stop ovulating and the rams lose some of their libido. The farther you are from the equator, the more pronounced this effect is and the shorter the breeding season is. What triggers the hormonal changes in seasonal sheep is a little bit confusing. It's not exactly day length, although day length plays a part. It's the rate of change in day length that does it. So as you go farther north in the Northern Hemisphere, the difference between the length of daylight on June 21 and Dec. 21 gets greater and greater, the rate of change gets faster and faster and hence the breeding season gets more and more compressed.

"So what? Who cares?" you might be tempted to ask. Shepherds do. This is one of the coolest things about sheep production -- it could almost make you believe in intelligent design if it weren't so perfectly explained by evolution. There comes a point in the breeding season where everything just lines up perfectly. Here in the mid-latitudes, seasonal ewes start to ovulate in late August. It'll just be a few to start with, say 15 percent of the flock. Seventeen days later, most of these ewes will ovulate again, and a few more will join them. As we move into October, nearly all the flock will be ovulating, but their cycles will be scattered. By the end of October, however, "the dormitory effect" will start to kick in.

The dormitory effect gets its name from the fact that, generally speaking, groups of female mammals living together will tend to synchronize their ovulation cycles. By late November, all the ewes are cycling, and they are all fertile within a day or two of one another on each cycle. If they are not bred, this will continue for several weeks, probably until early January when days start getting longer again. Then some of the ewes will stop cycling, and gradually the synchronization will start to end and by sometime in late Feburary or early March, the ewes would no longer be ovulating at all.

But in those weeks at the end of November and early December, it's possible to have so many ewes fertile at the same time that rams can breed dozens of ewes every day. I had one North Country Cheviot ram that had bred 30 ewes within his first 45 minutes of his introduction to them. This leads, 145 days later, to a lot of ewes lambing at the same time. And lo and behold, 145 days after the beginning of this peak of fertility is the onset of grass growth and the beginning of warm weather.

Shepherding a group of lambing ewes, and later, their lambs, is much much easier if all the ewes are lambing at the same time. We introduce the rams at the time of year when the most ewes are fertile at the same time, and they can breed the whole flock in two cycles, or 34 days. There's enough variation in gestation length that all the ewes don't lamb exactly 145 days later, but there's a definite peak about 10 days after lambing starts, and a valley a few days later, followed by another, smaller peak about 27 days after lambing starts, representing ewes that were not bred on the first cycle.

When lambing is brief, the nutritional needs of the flock through the winter are consistent and manageable. The lamb crop is ready to be weaned at the same time in late July or early August, and all the lambs are close enough to the same age that they can be managed in a single group from then until market.

When lambing is long and drawn out, some ewes are very close to lambing and have much higher nutritional needs than their fellow ewes bred later, who may still be months from delivery. The shepherd faces a choice of segregating sheep into different groups based on estimated lambing dates, or splitting the difference in their nutritional needs and hoping for the best. And hoping for the best is never very successful in shepherding, let me tell you.

The only way to control lambing time is to keep rams separated from the ewes for all but a carefully selected period of time. Put the rams in with the ewes in very good condition, let them breed for 34 days, and take the rams out. If you have ewes that haven't gotten bred in that time, don't keep them around. Within a few years, you'll have a flock of ewes that lambs in short order in the spring. My flock took just 18 days from the first lamb to the last in 2007.

I have four rams right now. Technically speaking, that's two and half more than I really need to breed my flock of 75 ewes. But having more rams allows me to produce distinct lines of ewes and market lambs, and ensures a little bit of genetic diversity in my flock. For 331 days of the year, these guys rest and relax, fight and feed, but for the other 34, they ensure the continuation of my flock and my sanity at lambing time.

Shepherds use a five-point scale to describe the condition of sheep. A 1 is emaciated, 5 is obese. I aim to have my rams at about 4 or even 4.5 at the beginning of breeding season. It's not uncommon for rams to lose two condition score points during breeding season, as they are too distracted to eat very much, and they're burning lots of calories herding their ewes. So eat up guys. November 30 is fast approaching, and I want you well rested and ready to party.

Verbing weirds language

2007-10-09T07:00:00.000-04:00

Gift is a noun. It is a thing that one person gives to another person. One person does not "gift" another one. Gift is not a verb. Give is a verb. If you want to give someone a book, that's fine. But do not, under any circumstances gift someone with a book. Or gift a book to him.

Thank you for your attention. That is all.

(Verbing weirds language is a direct lift from Calvin and Hobbes.

Dirt Farming continued

2007-09-30T19:21:00.000-04:00

The lambs have been on the turnips and kale for a week and are getting the hang of it as a feed source. We measured the yields today and I was pleasantly surprised. The turnips yielded 9,900 lbs of dry matter per acre (not counting bulbs!), and the kale yielded 5,700 lbs.

There seems to be more waste with the turnips. I haven't measured residue yet, so the net yield isn't known, but it appears that the turnips will have a major advantage over the kale.

Where were you when ...

2007-09-10T20:32:00.000-04:00

They say every generation has this moment. For my parents, it was where were you when you learned JFK was dead. Until six years ago, it was where were you when we landed on the moon. But Sept. 11, 2001, is a date of bifurcation that eclipses many other dates across generations.

I was pulling up to a steep embankment in Surry, where I was scheduled to move a group of 100 sheep that day. A bulletin came over NPR that a commercial airliner had crashed into one of the towers of the world trade center and burst into flame. When I got back into the truck, another bulletin said that a second plane had crashed. It was becoming apparent that this wasn't an accident.

Everyone on the East coast remembers what a beautiful clear day it was. It's almost maudlin to mention it now. But it was. It was one of those days -- even before people filled with hate flew planes into buildings -- that I took a moment to simply enjoy being alive.

Now this particular embankment that I was preparing to graze is part of a Federal flood control project. Before I finished preparing the site, the ranger's truck pulled up and informed me that all Federal facilities had been ordered into a lockdown because a plane had hit the pentagon. Another plane had crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania.

But when sheep are out of feed, you have to move them.

I stopped in at the house to see what was on TV, and watched the plane hit the second tower. Over and over again. And again. I still have nightmares sometimes with images of little specks falling from the flaming buildings, and realizing that those specks were human beings: somebody's lover, sister, father, somebody's baby. Then watching the tower fall.

But when sheep are out of feed, you have to move them.

I had an appointment with a friend who was going to help me move these sheep. Under most circumanstances, this is my favorite bit of work. The sheep go from one set of fields over a footbridge and along a snowmobile trail and power line right or way and over the top of the flood control dam. It's about five miles, and takes between 2.5 and 4 hours, depending on the fitness and cooperation of the sheep. The bridge is the hardest part.

Then I remembered that my friend had a son living in Manhattan. I expected I wouldn't see her, but she showed up.

When sheep are out of feed, you have to move them.

She was carrying her cell phone, just a little crazy about the fact that she hadn't heard from her son, but also aware that he wouldn't usually be anywhere near the World Trade Center and hoping that he hadn't made a special trip that day. And hoping that he'd be able to get a call through to her to let her know he and his were all right. Of course, the cell phone had no signal on the mountain.

We moved the sheep, and when she got home there was a message from her son that he was okay.

Over the next few days, the thing I remember the most was how quiet it was in the places where I was working -- mostly power lines two or three miles from the nearest roads and houses. No airplanes. I had a lot of time alone with my thoughts. I raged at the monsters that did this; I ached for the people who were lost and for the ones left behind. I thanked my lucky stars that none of my own ones had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I raged at the President for his inept and inarticulate response -- something I still do today -- and I wondered if there were other shoes fixing to drop.

What struck me was that in my job, which at that time was full time shepherding, I was one of the few people I knew whose job didn't more or less come to a standstill that week. Other farmers of course -- cows still need milking, and when sheep are out of feed, you have to move them. I was also one of the few that had very little access to the TV news. I usually left the house at first light and got home in the dark with just enough energy to shower and flop into bed. I probably only saw the tower fall 50 times, unlike most folks who probably saw the clip hundreds if not thousands of times during those first few days.

People have said that stupidity is the most powerful force in the universe, but I think it's hatred. If you think about the hate that started the attacks that we've come to call nine-eleven, and the changes it -- and the reciprocal, aimless hatred that it engendered, it's pretty hard to think of something more powerful.

I don't really have a point in all this. Just thoughts rattling around in my head.

Where wool comes from

2007-09-09T16:26:00.001-04:00

An amusing ad for the Los Angeles County Fair ad. I wonder how many folks in the target audience will get the joke.

Duh, Ashley, all wool comes from cows

Phase II of the dirt farming project

2007-07-30T21:12:00.000-04:00

Using a rented no-till seeder and tractor (a Case-IH 685 -- a very nice tractor with a wheel under each corner and a low center of gravity), I planted the turnips and kale on July 28. The turnips are on one side of the field, and the kale on the other, with a strip of Italian ryegrass in the middle. The ryegrass will serve to provide fiber and a more familiar source of energy while the lambs adjust to the brassicas (also known as a "runback" area -- the lambs can run back to familiar feed while learning about eating their turnips and kale).

The no-till seeder didn't do a great job. It frequently clogged up with trash from the oats and peas that were harvested earlier this month, so I had to slow down and lift the seeder out of the ground to allow it to empty out. This leaves a combination of unplanted areas and big piles of straw. The seeder wasn't equipped with coulters, which would have sliced the trash into shorter pieces that could have slipped through the seeder points.

As always, pics to follow.

Recipe for fun

2007-07-21T09:06:00.000-04:00

Ingredients:
1 Border collie puppy
1 recycle bin

Mix and serve

The final tally: 72 bales

2007-07-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

The oats and peas are cut and baled, despite a couple of equipment hiccups. Good thing too, because the monsoon seems to have moved into central New England.

I estimate that these bales weigh about 1,200 lbs. at about 50 percent DM (will be determined by feed testing later this summer, after the bales have cured). So 600 lbs DM times 72 bales equals 43,200 lbs DM stored, or about 7200 sheep/days of feed. That's enough to feed 60 ewes from January 1 through April 30. (I'm estimating consumption at 6 lbs DM per head per day; on the high side because the material is mature and stemmy and there will be significant waste).

Another measure is that it's just shy of 3300 lbs DM/acre.

Pics to follow.

Down for the count

2007-07-16T17:48:00.001-04:00

The oats and peas are finally mowed! Baling will start tomorrow.

Still standing

2007-07-13T15:04:00.000-04:00

We're still waiting for a break in the weather to get the oats and peas harvested. They're now six feet tall. The oats are getting hard, and the peas have pods. I'm getting very concerned about being able to get the brassicas planted in time.

Humiliation at the sheepdog trials

2007-07-13T15:01:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has competed at a sheepdog trial knows that it can be a humbling experience. By their very nature, sheepdog trials expose the faults of a dog and his handler: it's a pressure-cooker situation designed to seprate the excellent dogs from the pretty good dogs from the so-so dogs from the biscuit-eaters.

Even when I was going to a lot of trials, I was never a really good handler. I think of dog trials as social events with an opportunity to figure out what training I need to work on with a particular dog. For the past few years, for various reasons, I have been out of trialing, and now that time and life circumstances are allowing me a little more time for myself, I decided to dip my toes back in the water.

There was a two-day open trial at Merck Forest and Farmland Center July 7 and 8, and I entered with Tweed. The weekend served double duty as a getaway for Lynn and me. The scenery at Merck Forest is spectacular. You should go. Really. It's open for hiking, there are rustic cabins. Just go sometime.

These are Sufflok Punch draft horses. The stallion is in the foreground, and three mares that are in for service are in the background.

But anyway, on to the trial. The title of this post indicates a little bit of what happened. Humiliation. Specifially: was it humiliating that Tweed crossed over on his outrun both days (something he never does)? Yes. Was in humiliating that on Saturday he got the lowest recorded score (other than the dogs that retired or were disqualified)? Yes, in a way. Was it humiliating that on Sunday an angry ewe tried to ram Tweed, and faced with the choice of disqualifation or taking the long walk, I took the long walk? Yes it was.

But all of these on-the-field insults were minor compared to something that happened off the field. As I was standing back, watching the last few runs before I was up on Sunday, a spectator came up to me and said, "You're Jon Katz, aren't you." Note the punctuation -- she didn't ask a question, she made a statement.

If there is someone who I am not, and who I do not aspire to be, or be anything like, it is Jon Katz. I sincerely hope I am not as fat, stupid, and arrogant as he is, although I certainly realize that I harbor each of those faults to some extent. Katz is a self-appointed Border collie expert who actually doesn't know biscuits from shinola. He would never show his face at a real sheepdog trial because there'd be a serious danger that he might learn something or get punched in the nose. Or both. He has published a string of books so full of bad information about Border collies that it's hard to even know where to start criticizing the specifics of his writing. One feels like the quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli who, upon reading a paper that was so vague and misinformed that it couldn't be supported or disproved, said: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong!"

Being wrong is forgivable. Being not even wrong is not. Being mistaken for someone who is not even wrong -- well that just sucks.

Here's the high point of the weekend as far as trialing went. Tweed lining up his sheep for the pen on Saturday. He was one of just two or three dogs (out of 54 that ran) who had a perfect 10-point pen. Not surprising when you consider what Tweed and I do: we put sheep in pens. But these sheep were not interested in going into pens, and many dogs and handlers had their runs ended without getting the sheep in on Saturday -- the sheep would end up circling the pen until the handler's time ran out. So what does this mean? It means that Tweed can do well if we practice.

RAIN!

2007-07-04T19:55:00.000-04:00

A nice, gentle, steady rain is falling and is supposed to continue all night. It might be too late for the annual ryegrass I planted on Canoe Meadow, but we can always hope. This is the first measurable rainfall we've had for about three weeks here, although it has rained as little as three miles north and south of us.

I know there are parts of the world where no rain for a few weeks is normal, and other places where they wish it had only been a few weeks. I should -- and do -- count my blessings. But in those places plants, animals, and production systems are geared for dry spells. Here they are not. If we go a week without a soaking rain during the growing season, I get uneasy.

My life as a dirt farmer

2007-07-01T16:07:00.000-04:00

As an experiment this year, I rented a 13-acre field that had been used for silage corn production since Jimmy Carter was president and decided to produce two crops on it. The first crop will be harvested as silage for winter feed. It's a blend of forage oats and field peas. Once the they're harvested, I'll seed one half of the field with turnips and the other half with kale. I'll fatten lambs on these brassicas this fall and see whether there's any difference in rate of gain, forage production, and economic yield between the two. This experiment is partially funded by the USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.

I had the field plowed and disked by a local farmer. I had the fertilizer dealer blend the seed in with the fertilizer and it was spread with a bulk truck. After that, I rolled the field with a cultipacker. Here's how the field looks on July 1, 55 days after planting. I would have liked to have harvested the field at this stage for the best forage quality, but because I am at the mercy of custom operators, it's currently scheduled to be harvested on July 9. Let's hope for good weather.

The whole seeding process happened about a week later than I would have liked (again because I relied on custom operators), and as a result the seed went down into very dry soil. Cultipacking was difficult because the soil, which is very light, often rolled in front of the roller, burying the seed rather than pressing it into the soil. Where this happened, germination was thin and the plants didn't do a very good job of supressing weeds as shown in the photo on the left.

However, in places where the seed took well, the crop is thick, lush, and well over three feet tall. Weeds don't stand a chance, as shown in the photo on the right.

Here's the stage of maturity on July 1: oats have started to head out, and the field peas just starting to bloom but have not produced any pods yet.

Look out, world! Here comes Fern

2007-07-01T15:42:00.000-04:00

My friend Dee Woessner wrote a haiku called "On Starting Dogs." It's about the experience of working with a Border collie puppy and the process of taking a little ball of fluff and raising it to be an indispensible co-worker and boon companion. I'm embarking on that journey with Fern, a split-faced bitch that I got in April from Maria Amodei.

Fern is the smartest pup I've worked with in nearly 15 years, and she's a joy to be around. If she's inherited the traits that I want from her parents, she'll be a hardworking sheepdog, working directly and taking control of her sheep. It's too soon to tell if she'll live up to her pedigree -- buying a puppy is always something of a crapshoot, although we try to load the dice by choosing pups from parents with a history of producing good workers.

In these photos, taken on June 30, 2007, Fern is roughly four and a half months old. She's just starting to "see" sheep -- by which a shepherd means that she's showing interest in them and starting to show some form and purpose in her approach to them. Although she can run like the wind, Fern doesn't have the physical ability to really work sheep yet. More importantly, she doesn't have the mental capacity to handle the pressure if she's challenged by the sheep or her handler, so there's really no training going on at this point. I'm just exposing her to sheep and helping her out when things get hairy -- mostly by getting her out of her own way!

In this photo she has just noticed that the sheep are moving away from her, and she has dropped her head and tail into the classic Border collie working pose as she continues to walk up on the flock. She's not showing any interest in circling the sheep to head them yet (although she did do so a little bit today when I didn't have a camera). She is looking purposeful and probably most important and unusual at this age, thinking about what's going on.

When these two lambs realized that they had been separated from the rest of the flock, all hell broke loose -- they were calling and running. All the activity caught Fern's eye and she went into chase mode. No harm came of it -- the lambs rejoined their mothers and Fern thought she had saved the day. But this sort of situation is why it's risky to work puppies on larger groups of sheep. If she had tried to head off the lambs, they almost certainly would have gone over her which could have rattled her confidence and put off the day when she's ready to start real training.

Hey, wait a minute! This sheep smells like a dog!

On Starting Dogs
By Dee Woessner
Needing diamonds
we incubate stones
and hope

Fern is one of the nicest stones I've ever attempted to incubate.

Zeus on guard

2007-07-01T15:24:00.000-04:00

On Memorial Day weekend, my wonderful livestock guard dog Ed (shown on the right in a 2005 photograph) left his sheep, I presume to run off a coyote. Three days later he was hit by a car and killed nearly eight miles from the flock. I was bereft -- it was hard to go and check on the ewes and lambs and not have Ed greet me and give me the status report. But there was also the scary fact that my sheep were without one of their two lines of defense against predators. The electrified net fencing would work for a while, but eventually coyotes would probably find a way to defeat it unless I found a dog to replace Edward.

I put out the word through a number of Internet communities, and got a response from Kelli Fogg at Shuttleworth Farm in Westfield, Vt., that they had a dog to spare. Zeus (shown to the left in a photo taken June 30, 2007) came to me about two weeks after Ed's untimely demise, and has picked up where Ed left off without missing a beat. Zeus is much more flock-bound than Ed was -- which I am hopeful means that he will not feel the need to persue his enemies so far that he can't find his way back to safety. I'm grateful to Todd and Kelli for responding to my need with the right dog at the right time. I was also overwhelmed by the outpouring of sympathy and offers of help ranging from free puppies to extended loans of dogs that other shepherds offered me in my hour of need.

Meet the lambs

2007-07-01T14:48:00.000-04:00

Lambing at Edgefield Farm started on April 24 and ended on May 20. With the exception of a few hoggets that were intentionally bred late, the entire flock had lambed within 18 days. This was our first year with some purebred Coopworth ewes, and they've produced some decent lambs for us. This is a Coopworth ewe paying very close attention to her twins.

In addition to the Coopworths, we also bred a group of crossbred ewes to a Texel ram. We also keep a few purebred Texel ewes. Here's a Texel ewe and her lamb. Texel sheep are prized for their meaty carcasses. They're not the prettiest sheep in the field, but they're gorgeous on the grill!

Here's the whole flock heading out to graze. All these photos were taken June 30, 2007.