…we get a visit from Mike. Mike Campbell (Campbell’s Custom Butchering – Norwood, MO) comes out and does our butchering right here on the farm. Less stress on the animals and less stress on me trying to round up hogs and get them into a trailer. He does a great job and he’s a really nice man. The kids get to ride along in the truck and watch him. They would be heartbroken if they didn’t get to go along. Hopefully he will teach them well so when he retires, we can just have the older boys take over 
We are getting 4 hogs done today before the processor is shut down over deer season. Another 2 or 3 will get done the first week they are back open in December. They are nice and big and have been raised on all that good grass fed Jersey raw milk. I’ll have to update with weights later.
Tags: Grassfed, Natural Pork, Raw Milk
Missouri Milk Board Declares They Have No Appeal
Morningland Dairy to go to Court
©Doreen Hannes
Those following the saga of Morningland Dairy should be aware that this past week has been a relentless roller coaster ride. On the upside of the roller coaster, many have donated to the Uncheese Party to help the family farmstead business in this battle, and Joe and Denise Dixon, owners of Morningland Dairy, are humbled and grateful for the generosity and dedication those committed to preserving access to real food have shown.
On the downside, the FDA sent a rather nasty toned letter asserting that they consider Morningland cheese “to pose an acute, life-threatening hazard to health.” While not a single report or complaint of illness has been reported in the 30 year history of Morningland, the FDA states in their letter that “because of the seriousness of this situation” Morningland “should conduct inspections for 100% effectiveness at their accounts”. You could accurately translate that to “more downtime, more money out of pocket, less likelihood of recovery,” and you’d be right.
Read the rest of the article here. http://hartkeisonline.com/2010/10/25/morningland-dairy-headed-to-court/#more-7557
You can donate to Morningland Dairy using the donation banner n the right side of this website.
Tags: Missouri Raw Milk, Raw Milk
Whew….it was a long day but we did 102 birds.
I can’t wait to stuff our freezer full of those tasty chickens.
Tags: Pastured Poultry
Tomorrow will be our last chicken butchering day for the year. It will be nice to have all the chicken butchering out of the way and have a bunch of delectable pastured poultry in the freezer.
Tags: Pastured Poultry
With reluctance, we are offering up for sale a few of this years calves.
First is Lily’s heifer born 6/20/10. Lily can be registered with both the AJCA and the AMJCA&R. I have not done paperwork for several reasons… She was sired by Old World bull Munifordia’s Gamboge. The heifer calf CANNOT be registered. She was sired by my SIL’s 50% mini jersey bull who was also sired by Gamboge. So even though she cannot be registered, she is still 50% mini (100% jersey) and genetically 50% Gamboge. Lily is a very tiny cow (less than 40″ – I would have to take a tape out to be exactly sure on height) and I expect her heifer to stay quite small as well. Momma raised.
Her momma:
Matt is 6′ tall – for reference
Next…
100% Jersey POLLED bull calf born 6/13/10. He is out of our grade jersey first freshener Angel. She is also naturally polled. The calf was sired by ABS bull Jarrett. Momma raised.
His momma:
Finally…
100% Jersey bull calf born 8/20/10. He is out of our grade jersey cow Daisy and sired by Forrest Glen Avery Action, the top Select Sires Jersey sire. Daisy is a very tiny cow (less than 40″) but a huge producer for her size with excellent cream %. I expect him to stay on the small side also. He is docile but not overly friendly. Momma raised.
His momma – taken the day she calved:
Please contact me if you are interested.
Thanks,
Rachel
We had our first successful crop of sweet potatoes this year! So exciting. We had gotten a few good sweet potatoes for collecting slips from some friends of ours this March and began planting around mid-May. I had thought we had gotten them in too late but I have been proven wrong. I must admit that I did not have high hopes for them considering our harvests the past 2 years. Last year it was so wet that they were molding in the ground before they even had the chance to be harvested.
We had some monster potatoes this year…some as big as footballs! Our large family had ONE, yes just ONE, potato for dinner tonight and it fed us all! Praise God for this wonderful harvest. We will be sure to enjoy them this winter since we did not get any winter squash planted.
Tags: organic produce, sweet potatoes
Our sows farrowed again today. Even though we knew the younger one was bred first, they both decided that today was a good day.
We woke to find “Big Momma” the mother to 10 perfect little piggies. Nine were some variation of red and with white stripes and black spots. The tenth looked like his Papa…white with black spots. We used our nephew’s Gloucester Old Spot boar to breed our sows this summer.
It’s tough work being born. They have full bellies and are all tuckered out.
“Big Red” as we like to call her decided later this afternoon that it was her turn and proceeded to make herself a nest, since “Big Momma” had already chosen the prime farrowing spot.
Cedar branches, sticks, and yes, even ripped up plastic bags that have blown our of the burn barrel make for good nesting material apparently.
Finally getting down to business.
I’m so tired, I think I’ll take a nap right here on the teat. So far they all look very much like an Old Spot.
When it was all said and done, I THINK that there are 10. That was the final count I knew for sure. It was very dark at this point and the placenta had passed. I’m not sure if she had another because I could only actually see 8 even though I knew there were at least 10. They are all white with black spots and as you can see a few have very faint red patches as well.
So 20 live piggies and only 1 born dead. Pretty eventful day. They sure are cute!
Tags: Natural Pork
Morningland Dairy is a small Ozarks raw milk cheese maker. They are currently being persecuted by the FDA and Missouri Milk Board. You can read about their struggle here http://morninglanddairy.webs.com/recallinformation.htm. Some kind folks have started a cyber un-cheese party which has spread to a number of online forums like http://homesteadingtoday.com. If you would like to help out the courageous folks you can by sponsoring a pound of cheese that will be destroyed.
There are 50,000 pounds of cheese slated for destruction. This is not counting the cheese destroyed due to the recall.
Here’s how to SPONSOR A CHEESE:
The average price per pound is $5.
You can paypal a donation to
morningland@centurytel.net
Or, you can send your sponsorship checks or money orders directly to the dairy. Just let them know what the money is for, and a note of encouragement would certainly be appreciated.
Morningland Dairy
6248 County Road 2980
Mountain View, MO
65548
Now, folks, this is a PARTY, so INVITE YOUR FRIENDS, your neighbors, your mere acquaintances to join us!
Plaster the message on other boards you frequent, put it on your Facebook Status, make a YouTube video and hey! maybe it’ll go viral!
Tags: Grassfed, Missouri Raw Milk, Raw Milk
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/raw-milk-fans-are-getting-a-raw-deal/article1722070/
Karen Selick
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Sep. 24, 2010 5:00AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Sep. 24, 2010 11:54AM EDT
Queen Elizabeth drinks her milk raw. She reportedly thinks so highly of unpasteurized milk that, when her grandsons Princes William and Harry were students at Eton, she instructed herdsman Adrian Tomlinson to bottle up raw milk from her Windsor herd and deliver it to them at school.
Canadians, however, are not permitted to emulate their head of state. Raw milk cannot legally be sold in Canada, except into government-authorized “supply management” cartels, where it goes to be pasteurized. Only those who happen to own their own cow can legally consume raw milk.
A group of some 450 B.C. city-dwellers thought they had a solution. They organized Home on the Range Dairy, and jointly acquired a herd of 25 cows. They hired farmer Alice Jongerden to look after their cows – feed them, milk them, bottle the milk and make it available to its owners.
This type of livestock boarding contract has long been known to English law. In fact, there’s even a special name for it: agistment, the taking in of livestock to graze on your land in exchange for payment. Ms. Jongerden is called an agister.
But the Fraser Health Authority disapproved of the arrangement and took Ms. Jongerden to court. The real question, which no B.C. court has yet tackled, is whether she can be considered to be “selling” or “supplying” raw milk in contravention of the Milk Industry Act, when the individuals who receive it are already its owners.
Nevertheless, the B.C. Supreme Court issued an injunction this past March prohibiting Ms. Jongerden and others from “packaging and/or distributing raw milk and/or raw milk products for human consumption.” But the cows took no notice of the Supreme Court and continued to fill their udders twice a day. They had to be milked or they would soon be bellowing in pain, risking udder infections and possibly dying.
Ms. Jongerden continued milking, placing the milk in bottles clearly marked “Not for Human Consumption” and “Not for Sale.” The owners could have pasteurized it themselves if they had considered it hazardous. They could have bathed in it, used it as plant fertilizer, or fed it to their pets. Only they know what they actually did with it. Ms. Jongerden, however, was charged with contempt of court. On Sept. 14, a temporary order was made, prohibiting her from engaging in the “further production or distribution of raw milk.” She goes back to court in mid-October.
This leaves the herd owners with three unsatisfactory alternatives:
· Don’t have the cows milked at all, in which case they will suffer cruelly;
· Find a new agister who is not subject to the temporary September order, but who is willing to face his own eventual contempt charges for violating the sweeping March injunction;
· Milk the cows and dump the milk on the ground.
The situation is ridiculous. The milk is there. People have bent over backward to get it. They’re all aware the health authority thinks it’s dangerous. They still want it. But instead, it will probably be destroyed – wasted – purportedly to protect people from taking a risk they are willing to take.
Canada is out of step with the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, France, Germany and many U.S. states have programs that allow public-health authorities to certify a dairy’s output as safe for raw consumption. In France and Italy, there are vending machines dispensing raw milk to eager consumers. B.C. residents can cross the border to Washington State and buy it legally.
Moreover, an overwhelming percentage of conventional Canadian dairy farmers – quota owners who sell milk into the provincial cartels for pasteurization – drink milk raw themselves. In a recent survey of 2,185 milk producers published in Preventive Veterinary Medicine, 88.7 per cent “reported that they or their families consume unpasteurized milk from their bulk milk tanks.”
We don’t ban balloons even though some eight or nine children die annually in North America from choking on them. We don’t prohibit skiing, hockey or even parachute jumping, despite the risks of injury or death. We don’t ban seafood, ground beef, poultry or cold cuts, even though they are far more common sources of food poisoning than raw milk.
One can’t help suspecting that the fanaticism of Canadian authorities toward raw milk has more to do with protecting the supply management cartels than protecting public health.
Karen Selick is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is defending Ontario raw milk farmer Michael Schmidt on similar charges.
Tags: Missouri Raw Milk, Raw Milk
Jim Wickens
21st September 2010
With planning permission for Britain’s biggest dairy at Nocton about to be re-submitted, The Ecologist travels to California to examine intensive milk production – and finds factory farms, conflict, intimidation, pesticides, pollution and small-scale farmers driven out of business…
The children became ill, the animals are dying and I am ill…
‘You better get out of here or your gonna get your ass kicked or worse,’ the leathery-faced farmer slurred, picking his words carefully as we pulled up outside his milking parlour. It was coming to the end of our first day in the US, and despite our best efforts to persuade the farmers otherwise, it was clear that journalists are not welcome in this part of the world.
Far from the glittering lights and well trodden-tourist paths that people normally associate with California, the vast udders of America’s dairy industry run through the Central Valley, a rarely-visited arid plain that stretches down the state, wedged in between the Sierra foothills and the Californian coast.
This is the breadbasket of the USA, where almond farms, grapes and corn are carved out of the scrubby desert and grown on eye-wateringly large scales. It is also home to the largest dairies on the planet, a concentration of several hundred milk farms so vast, that in Tulare county alone, there are over 900,000 cows, producing in excess of a billion dollars worth of milk each year.
But as an Ecologist investigation carried out in conjunction with the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) has discovered, the Central Valley has also become a battleground for an unreported conflict, pitting community activists and family farmers against the might of mega dairy farms that have taken root here.
Factory or farm?
For a first-time visitor, the sight and scale of a mega dairy is overwhelming; enormous open-air sheds, mountains of feed, million-gallon pools of slurry and thousands upon thousands of listless cows. Granted access by disgruntled dairy employees, we were able to observe a mega dairy in operation. More akin to a factory production line than a farm long lines of cows could be seen stumbling over outstretched udders as they were driven back and forth to the robotic-like, rotary-milking parlours.
It is a continual daily cycle that stops only when the milk output begins to tail off, and the animals are either re-impregnated or sent off to slaughter; burnt out and discarded after only a few years of life on the factory floor. Animals in American mega dairies will never see a patch of grass in their life, and the only respite comes from shade in the dusty open-air lots where they wait between milking. Even here the animals will not get a chance to really rest; high-milk yielding cows suffer from chronic ‘negative energy balance’, where the cow uses more energy in making milk that she can physically take in by eating, losing body condition as a result.
The Holstein is the favoured breed of choice for most mega dairies, their towering bony frames contrasting wildly with bulging vein-filled udders swinging underneath them. Milk produced by them is of a lower quality with a higher pus content in the milk than that produced by other cow breeds, but what these freakishly-bred animals lack in quality, they make up for in quantity: milked three times a day and propped up with growth hormones to boost milk production, and antibiotics to stave off frequent infections, milk output in the Holstein has doubled in the last 40 years alone.
Flies and nitrates
It’s not just the animals that suffer. Tom Frantz is a retired schoolteacher and grew up in Shafter, a small town in Tulare County. ‘Until 1996, there weren’t any dairies near me, then we got the first mega dairy situated close to here, followed by several others. Within a couple of years at the local school we had two big problems that have never existed before… the school was invaded by hoards of flies, nasty biting flies, clogging the water coolers and forcing the teachers to hang fly strips in the middle of each classroom. It changed things, changed the atmosphere of the school. Then nitrates in the water showed up. The school had always used water from its own well in the past, but suddenly the nitrate level doubled, then tripled, making it unsafe to drink,’ he told The Ecologist.
Tom formed a community action group, one of a dozen that have sprung up in recent years, to try to stop more dairies from encroaching on communities. His group has sued two mega dairies to date and has successfully pressured both the school boards and the town council to put in place buffer zones, banning mega dairies from being built too close to the town. In the midst of costly legal battles however, Tom has been threatened and now lives with restraining orders in place against overly aggressive dairymen living nearby.
Mega dairies also bring an invisible threat to the Central Valley, producing high quantities of gases leading to smog and particulate pollution. According to the American Lung Association, pollution from industrial agriculture operations ‘poses a significant health threat for some of the most vulnerable people in our community. Children, adolescents, seniors, people with asthma and chronic lung diseases, people with chronic heart disease and diabetics are most at risk.’
It is no coincidence that dairy counties such as Tulare or Bakersfield have some of the highest rates of ozone and fine particulate matter in the USA, equaling and in some cases exceeding the smog-infested city of LA further South. A medical study published in 2004 found that one in very four children in these counties have asthma. ‘Mega dairies are effectively being subsidised by our lungs,’ Tom says.
Pesticides
Teresa DeAnda is a mother of seven children and full-time Central Valley Representative of Californians for Pesticide Reform. She is, by her own admission, an unlikely activist: ‘I didn’t even know what that word meant for the first few years that I did this job,’ she told The Ecologist. ‘I was always interested in reading the news about air pollution and I knew air quality was getting worse. I knew that was all bad, then I read an article that they wanted to put in a dairy of 5,000 cows in Kings county nearby and I was so upset, and I said “oh my gosh I got to go over there”.’
With the assistance of the Council for Race Poverty and the Environment, Teresa began to work full time on pesticide issues and air quality – fighting against pollution on behalf of the voiceless Hispanic populations living nearby. The more she looked into the problem, the more frustrated she became. ‘There have been studies done looking at why polluting industries move to certain areas; these industries actually look for neighbors who are Hispanic, low income, poor, of colour and are catholic,’ she says. ‘And it makes me so angry, big dairies pollute until water boards crack down on them, so then the dairies sell up and move here… where nobody complains,’ she says.
Driving along the highway, Teresa waves at countless gangs of migrant workers as they work in lines, silently packing grapes. A few miles out of town fruit fields give way to vast fields of corn and alfalfa, crops all grown to feed the cows in the mega dairies. We are en route to meet Jorge, a Salvadorian worker whose family have experienced the impact of pesticides used to grow crops for cattle. Teresa explains that Jorge is an exception to the rule, usually people here don’t want to speak out as ‘they could lose their jobs and their homes… they’re scared.’
Threats and intimidation
Jorge is scared too, he talks but not on camera, and is quick to explain why. ‘Those who are illegal immigrants are told that they are going to call immigration [officials] to get them; another threat is that they are going to send someone, if you don’t leave they will kill you,’ he says, ‘and that is not good.’
He complains bitterly about the pesticides used to grow cattle feed: ‘I used to have cows, but they all died… I had canaries they all died… I had goats, but I sold them because they were dying too; they had stomach problems and the babies were also dying…’
Jorge guides us around his smallholding. He has a few horses left, but for the most part the stables are empty, weeds sprouting from the dust. He points to the few remaining fruit trees his family planted, bare stems save for a few shriveled brown leaves at the end of each branch. “When I came here my financial situation was good and I was comfortable… it [pesticide spraying] has had a very bad impact because the children became ill, the animals are dying, I am ill,’ he says.
Not all Californian dairies are operating on such a large scale. Paul Bianci tends a small herd of Jersey cows, which spend much of the year grazing on pasture in the rolling hills of Northern California. In scale and sight, Paul’s farm resembles a British farm, and is perhaps a decent barometer of what mega dairies might mean for British farmers if they come to Britain. ‘We just can’t compete with them… they just put the little people out of business” he told us. We heard similar complaints from other small farmers we met; that economies of scale make it virtually impossible to compete with mega dairies who are milking herds of cows up to a hundred times bigger than smaller family farms, driving down milk prices and forcing family farmers to sell up.
Dairy declines
Albert Strauss, who runs a successful organic dairy, has pioneered an alternative system to provide California with a more sustainable milk supply: ‘We lose 55 of our dairies each year, and in the last 40 years in our district alone we have gone from 120 dairies to 23…so it’s a bit drastic. Mega dairies are continuing the trend away from sustainable farming, and it’s happening because mega dairies dominate because they are the biggest agricultural commodity in the USA, and when you have big dairies controlling most of the milk supply, you have a lot more political power.’
The problem isn’t just confined to California, according to the USDA statistics 33,000 dairies disappeared nationwide between 1997-2002.
Our last day in California is spent at Turlock County Fair, a mom and pop type family affair where dairy farmers from the Central valley help their children to show prize animals in front of the judges. Behind the showground, children are busy grooming the prize cows that will soon be led out into the arena, whilst parents sit and chat over beers nearby. It is a timeless scene from small–town America, but despite the friendly feel of the place, few want to talk to the journalists asking questions about mega dairies; we are met with a wall of silence, people too scared to be seen talking about the problems they face.
Finally we meet Paul Clarent, a Stetson-wearing, unapologetic mega-dairy owner, who flatly rejects the concerns of smaller farmers we had spoken with during the week: ‘You’ve got to expand to compete with the big guys.. that’s just business and that’s life, it’s not fair all the time,’ he said. As we are preparing to leave the fair an elderly farmer beckons us over away from the crowds and offers up a different reality. ‘Listen, we run a dairy and you know we will probably go out of business in the next two or three years. We are simply not big enough to compete with the big dairies… my grandparents, my parents, my wife and I did this to pass on to our kids and now it’s going to die with my daughter’s generation. It’s pretty sad,’ he said.
Tags: Grassfed, Missouri Raw Milk, Raw Milk
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