Moved!

As you may have noticed, we are no longer posting regularly on this blog. But don't worry! We have a new, much more ambitious project that has just begun. Follow along as we attempt to eat only food produced on our own farm. We'll be posting four times per week, and we'll try to keep things varied and interesting by using our own silly experiment as a platform to explore topics of agriculture, society and turnips. www.cairncrestfarm.com/blog/

Cowspiracy Movie Review

We no longer blog here. Because of the increased discussion around this review, I have reposted it over on my current blog. I'm happy to have a civil discussion with anyone there.

As I set out to write about the documentary Cowspiracy, two problems are obvious. The first is that, as someone who raises cows and sells their meat, I am not by any stretch objective. The second is that it’s called Cowspiracy, which makes me want to think of all the dumb cow-related puns I can (Cowspiracy is a moo-vie that makes beefy claims about a subject I have a steak in, etc.), and then to make a cup of tea while I think of more dumb cow-related puns (the film employs no hoof measures in its stampede to a reductive conclusion, and it repeatedly milks the same points in an effort to steer the conversation away from any topic that would actually encourage viewers to ruminate).

Like most people, I have a kneejerk conviction that things I believe are right for the simple reason that I believe them. When I look out my window and see the herd of cows I just moved grazing a fresh break of pasture after having someone announce over social media that my raising them is some sort of ecological catastrophe, I want to get mildly incensed, knock down a few straw men in my mind, and then dismiss it to go about my day with an extra lift in my step. But, I tell myself, it’s good to make an effort, however compromised, at critical examination of topics I have strong feelings on.

Also, other than the whole dismissal of raising any livestock thing, I agree with some critiques of the sort made in Cowspiracy. What people choose to eat does have an impact on what kind of farming is done, and some types of farming are worse for land and animals than others. All of the various organizations that advise people on how to use less water or emit less greenhouse gases or destroy less jungle are being silly or disingenuous - or cowspiratorial - if they don’t discuss the roles food choice and the resulting agricultural practices play in various environmental issues.

The difficulty in discussing these or any other topics raised by Cowspiracy is that, though it certainly takes strong stances on both, it is neither fish nor fowl. It’s at once an investigative documentary, a personal journey, and most of all an argument for a vegan lifestyle. While the film does try to make good on its title by suggesting (though not nearly proving) that prominent environmental organizations are beholden to the livestock industry, it also takes time to dismiss the possibility of responsibly harvesting any fish, to visit a backyard duck farm, to liberate a chicken, and to establish that vegan diets are healthy, all while following filmmaker/protagonist/narrator Kip Anderson’s not entirely convincing arc from concerned but uninformed citizen to empowered herbivore. Responding to a polemic that plays as fast and loose with facts as this film could easily devolve into a line by line response, which would be even more boring to read than it would be to write. Instead, I’ll focus on a few of the main topics, beginning with how cows drink, burp, fart, and most of all poop, which - not to brag - I have some experience with.

The drought that has scorched California for going on three years now makes water use an understandable priority for Anderson, since it is where the film is set and presumably where he lives. So when he finds that it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef, he is chagrined. Unfortunately, he does not explain how he arrives at this number either in the film or on the film’s website. It strikes me as a bit high, so let’s see if we can figure out where all that water goes. Assuming a steer drinks on average 1.5 gallons of water per hundred weight daily, and supposing the steer is born at 50 pounds and slaughtered at 950 after two years of steady growth to yield 350 pounds of saleable meat, his average weight would be a little more than 450 pounds over the course of his life. Putting all these numbers together gives us expected direct consumption of about 5000 gallons of water. This is at best an approximation, since growth rate is variable, water consumption depends both on the ambient temperature and the water content of forage consumed, and we actually raise our cows to 27 months. Also, for the sake of fairness, a share of the water the steer’s mother drinks during his first year should be considered in the cost of raising him. Even if we assume my numbers above are low on every count and double his lifetime consumption to 10,000 gallons, it’s safe to say some water needs to be accounted for if we’re going to get to the number quoted by Anderson, since 2,500 gallons per saleable pound would lead us to expect a lifetime consumption of 875,000 gallons, a mere 865,000 more than our high estimate.

This raises the idea of embedded water - that a cow somehow uses all the water required to raise its feed. If I do more boring math I can actually get in the neighborhood of the larger number by counting all the water that falls in the growing season on the grass that the steer eats. An acre inch of rain is about 27,000 gallons, and we generally get a decent amount. But pretending that a cow munching away on perennial pasture somehow disrupts the natural water cycle such that we need to call this a cost of production is self-evidently absurd. No water is destroyed in the making of a cow, and rain falls and grass grows whether there’s a herd there to eat it or not. However, this measure becomes meaningful in a place like California, where huge amounts of forage are grown for beef and dairy on irrigated pasture. I am still skeptical of the 2,500 gallons per pound number, but I agree that raising alfalfa on irrigated land in the desert is horrifically short-sighted. Anderson interviews Manucher Alemi and Kamyar Guivetchi at the California Department of Water Resources, and when they uncomfortably dance around why they don’t recommend reducing meat consumption, he sees a conspiracy of silence; I see state employees who don’t want to be caught on film telling Californians that they can help the drought by buying meat and cheese produced in less arid parts of the country or by finding California producers who rely on precipitation rather than irrigation to grow forage.

Methane is a more vexed question, since cows indisputably belch and fart. In the film Anderson implies that cows are the main source of methane and that reducing their numbers is the fastest way to reverse global warming. After too much time poking around in search of definitive numbers on methane emissions, I decided to use those provided on a NASA website, even though a number of reputable sources arrive at different conclusions, particularly concerning the amount of methane released by wetlands, listed at 22% in the data I am quoting. By these numbers, ruminant livestock directly account for 16% of global methane emissions, and the (mis)management of all livestock manure accounts for another 5%. Human sewage treatment is 5%, biomass burning is 8%, fossil fuels production is 19%, and, surprisingly, rice cultivation is 12%. Various other manmade and natural sources fill out the remainder. While 21% of total methane is certainly significant, the idea that the elimination of livestock would clearly lead to a reversal of global warming trends is both an overstatement and an oversimplification, without getting into matters of methane’s half-life relative to carbon’s.

Here’s another way to look at it. There are about 88 million beef cows in America and just over 9 million dairy cows. In 1800 there were 60 million buffalo, and though the film claims that grassfed beef is more damaging than feedlot beef, I’m confident those buffalo weren’t routinely wandering into CAFOs in an effort to reduce their methane emissions. But I doubt Anderson would accept a target of 60 million grassfed cows as ecologically sustainable, even though keeping them on pasture, besides making them healthier and happier, would mostly eliminate the 5% of methane emission that are a result of manure fermenting in lagoons and piles.

The film fails to address, misrepresents, or glosses over any number of interesting points. At the backyard duck farm Anderson does some math and decides that it has a 100 to 1 feed to meat ratio, which is so obviously impossible that it suggests he simply doesn’t consider the roughly 500 eggs the duck likely produced during its life to be food. He says that 45% of the earth’s land is used for livestock production, even though the best information I can find puts the global total at about 40% for all agriculture. He dismisses any discussion of Allan Savory’s claims about managed grazing both improving degraded land and sequestering carbon by getting off a pithy line about the silliness of using livestock to reverse damage caused by livestock and an expression of horror at the range management practices Savory endorsed in the 1950’s. He doesn’t acknowledge that Savory himself is outspoken about the mistakes he made as a younger man and that in part due to them he now advises land managers to constantly evaluate every practice against its eventual goal. He’s outraged that the BLM rounds up wild horses and burros to make way for cattle, despite the fact that all three are European imports. He blames livestock production for the continued existence of hunger but doesn’t discuss the surplus of calories already produced or the systemic factors that prevent food from going where it is most needed.

But, at least to my mind, he shows the least nuance when discussing poop. He tells us that 16,000 pounds of manure are produced every second in the U.S., enough to cover a number of major cities as well as several states, a statistic that I would find more interesting if he mentioned the depth of the coating. Later he says livestock produce 130 times the excrement of humans, without the benefit of waste treatment. He implies that his revulsion at this is natural and correct, which makes me feel a little weird, since one of my goals is to have an even layer of poop spread over my pasture land every grazing season. Historically, animal manure has been recognized as the very best fertilizer, and many of the early efforts to improve rather than degrade land both in America and England revolved around managing it. Manure only becomes a problem rather than something to celebrate when it piles up unused outside of factory pig and chicken operations or stews in anaerobic lagoons. When an appropriate number of animals are kept on an appropriate amount of land and managed with attention to both, their activities - there feet and hooves, their grazing, pecking, scratching and rooting, and most of all their manure - sustain, renew and even improve the ground that feeds them.

The great weakness of Cowspiracy, other than its title, is its single minded determination to prove that veganism is the only reasonable approach to feeding people, a proof it pursues without regard for facts or nuance. That’s not to say it’s worthless, for there are ideas for several good films within it. I would love to watch a truly investigative examination of any links between the industrial agriculture sector and large environmental non-profits, rather than one that infers connections from the vague responses of uncomfortable PR people. A devastating documentary could be made about the insanity of beef and dairy production in California, and I am all for consumers voting against them and other parts of the industrial food system with their dietary choices. I even think a fair examination of the ways small farms are not inherently better for land and livestock would be wonderful. Instead of any of these there is a failed effort to prove that one lifestyle choice can solve every environmental and agricultural problem.

This failure is not just a result of misleading and erroneous data, but even more so of superficiality. Though I watched carefully and took copious notes, I do not have a clear idea what Anderson’s vegan world would look like. Would excess land be converted to wilderness? Should the hills and fields of my farm return to forest and scrub like so much of the nearby land that used to be grass? Why is a monoculture of wheat preferable to a polyculture of pasture? Should we humans be connected to and reliant on the land around us and should these connections take different forms in response to local conditions? Yesterday, while out hunting turkey, I came across the remains of a deer, one of ten or so my brother and I have found this year. All of them starved or froze to death in the clutches of last winter. Now they are piles of mossy bones marking where living things curled up and never stood again. Why is this preferable to raising cows as I do, particularly when there’s room here for both?

I am willing to say that true wilderness and unmanaged land have intrinsic value. I think of the sense of awe a still forest raises in me or the way a rough-legged hawk hanging in the air on a stark, white morning pushes all thought from my mind, and I know that the trees and birds and animals going about their lives have value even when I am in no way the beneficiary of them. I recognize that this claim is metaphysical rather than utilitarian, and it is critical to how I understand my role in the world, because I think farmed land shares this inherent worth. To borrow a thought from Wendell Berry, the land stretching out from the Adirondacks is deserving of the same reverence as the mountains themselves. The destructiveness of so many modern agricultural practices rests on a view of livestock as exclusively means to an end, rather than as beings in a world, intricate beyond our comprehension, to which we also belong.

I have a difficult time articulating this view, and I doubt I could make a good documentary about it, particularly since even made up statistics don’t have much to say about such matters. But to be meaningful, any discussion of agriculture and eating needs to engage with questions of our values and the specific forms those values should take. Cowspiracy provides a facile solution, dressed up with shoddy numbers, and in its effort to push a predetermined agenda it doesn’t begin to answer the questions a person should ask when deciding what to eat.

-Garth

As a final note to anyone interested in a comprehensive treatment of all these and other matters, the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie is incredible. Don’t let the dippy cover fool you. As an even final-er final note, I’ll mention that he indirectly gives a detailed answer to Anderson’s closing question to Michael Pollan about how much meat and dairy per person a truly sustainable agricultural system could provide. Fairlie arrives at just over 83 pounds of total meat each year, with dairy consumption at current levels. This is for the UK, and with the lower population to arable land ratio in America, they would likely be a bit higher here.

Summer's Old News

This is a blog post I wrote months ago and never hit 'publish' on. Oh summer. How you overwhelm me. Here is the updated version of yesterday's news.

Edmund and Garth devoted a lot of time this summer to prepping the North half of our flat land for a fence. They spent weeks thinning this tree line and dealing with the abundance of wood and roughage that resulted.

The Soil and Water folks in our county have a post pounder they rent out at a price well below all of their competitors that we took advantage of. The engine stopped 5 minutes into the project, but two guys from their office came out and fixed it within an hour of our call. What service!

Aside from fencing the flats, we have taken on a new species - pigs! I heard Edmund and Garth remarking about how relieved they were to finally have enough experience under their belts to take on a new animal and not encounter too many surprises in the process of managing them. They are doing what we planned, and so far it's working. Well, for the most part. Heritage Tamworths, we now know, like to root a little more than they like to graze, so we have inadvertently begun using them to renovate our pasture in areas thick with thistles and burdock. In the future we plan to find a breed that will graze like a cow. We have our sights set on Old Spot and Large Black. We'll see. Right now the pigs are gaining well on a diet of whey and pasture. Edmund has been grinding burdock and mixing it with a little grain to give them a taste for it, as well as dipping thistles into fat to sweeten them up. I've seen them nibbling at the lower leaves.

And the heritage turkeys are coming up in the world. The toms are just beginning to fan out and strut. Watching something the size of soccer ball strut is very endearing.

There is so much more to tell, but I will save it for another day. 

- Alanna

Bryn Athyn Bounty Saturday 16th: special cup offer!

On August 16th, we will be selling our meat at Bryn Athyn Bounty Market in Bryn Athyn, PA.  We are really excited to provide our customers with healthy, delicious, humane grass-fed beef.  This Saturday, we have something really special to offer in addition to our beef: handmade porcelain cups thrown by Normandy Alden and decorated with cobalt lines drawing by Alanna Rose. Our farm, these cups, this vision we have for our land and animals at Cairncrest Farm is truly a collaboration. These cups will be $50 at our table on Saturday, but FREE if you pre-order 100 lbs of meat or more. Email cairncrestfarm@gmail.com for information about pre-ordering. We are looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!

-Normandy

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So Many New Faces

There are a few new faces around here. I heard that a grass based stocker operation near us (stockers are weaned beef cows that are sold to people who want more animals when the grass is abundant) had a number of steers available at a price below what people were paying at the auction. I thought it would be interesting to compare our new Kerry/Angus crosses with these pure-bred Angus cows through a growing season or two. After looking at their age and weight charts we decided on these two because they were middle of the road. One of them has a Simmental for a great-great grandfather, so even though he is Angus from every other side, he still wound up with a white face like his ancestor.

These steers were weighed before they mounted the trailer on their way to us. We don't have a cattle scale (yet), so the other perk of them coming was getting to guess the weights of our own animals of a similar age based on their numbers.

The other new faces are our brand new calves out of the robust Mr. Winchester (pictured in the background below). In fact, Garth walked in as I was writing this to tell me Vona just calved. These are the first crosses to be born here. It's hard to say how they differ in apperance with our pure bred Kerrys when we don't have any pure bred calves to compare them to, but their features will grow starker as they mature. 

We are naming the heifer calves after counties in New York. There's a different scheme here every year.

The biggest surprise was that a cow we didn't think was bred gave birth to a heifer calf. Sibley, who was herself the accidental product of an evening rendevous with her own father, had been small from the start and very slow growing. We attributed that to her onerously inbred genetics. She was the size of last years calves even though she had 8 or so months on them, and so we slated her for the slaughter house and fed her with the young stock over the winter. Low and behold, she too had gotten in with Mr. Winchester without our supervision and now we have a cow we didn't expect to. Not too shabby. It also changes Sibley's future here, at least in the short term. We are eager to see if her calf expresses unbridled hybrid vigor, coming from the combination of such a limited gene pool with a much broader and unfamiliar line. 

The season began badly, but thankfully it wasn't a foreshadowing of things to come. Garth saw something strange hanging from the back of Acorn one evening. She wasn't having any contractions and the herd was not displaying the same anxious excitement that usually accompanies a birth. Garth took a photo and we called the vet. We sent him the image and he called us right back. He thought it looked like an unhealthy placenta and that we should go out and look for a dead calf. Garth scaled the pasture and finally found a dead heifer calf over the hill. Acorn was having trouble cleaning so we gave her some Caulophyllum in her water (a homeopathic remedy that is meant to encourage uterine contractions) and perhaps that helped. She seems fine now. 

And now a great mystery has come to my attention. Garth tells me minutes ago that Butternut, last year's calf born here on 4/8/13, just gave birth to what looks like another heifer calf. That means that she was bred at 4 months old while she was still nursing under her own mother. We had been told that was impossible. What are the fertility gods doing around here? Her calf is up and nursing. This worries me though. We didn't separate the bull from the very young stock last year for the reason I mentioned above (it's not meant to be possible) and so what if all these babies have babies on us? Do they think it's some kind of animal farm over here? Oh my. I don't know what we are in for.  

- Alanna

Thaw On

Although the world was white again on the morning of April first with a fresh inch on every surface, the sky was just playing us the fool. The thaw is officially ON.

Look, they are barely wearing coats.

The well water to the farm house has greater allegiances with the stream than it does with our comfort or preference. As the stream goes, so goes the well. When the stream is churning brown, we pour tea colored baths. Cleaning the toilet doesn't offer the same satisfaction when dark water stares back at you. Judging from my view out the window, it should be clearing up soon.

And water isn't the only thing clearing out. We've seen several living examples that 'spring cleaning' is no cultural artifice. Everyone and everything has something to do away with this time of year. Garth mentioned to me a week or so ago that the field mice had simultaneously decided it was time to clean house. They broke through the icy crust and neatly piled the winter's poop at the snow's edge. Evacuation en masse. Hole after hole in the snow, each with it's own waste at the door. Even the soil is heaving unwanted contents up for the taking - bones, rocks, detritus, a civil war era medicine bottle. I joined the crowd by giving several ill-fitting shirts away. 

The full inscription reads: DR. WISTAR'S BALSAM OF WILD CHERRY, PHILADA 

Birds are making faint noises in the early morning now, too. I heard them a month ago on one occasion and then they fell silent as the last wave of cold nights swept in. But now two Robins are bouncing off the ground in a tryst with hoards of grackles looking on, covering the bare trees like leaves.

Maple sap is only just running. Mud creeps in between the cows' 'toes.' Bare earth lies everywhere. Spring, you have kept us waiting.

-Alanna

Polar Vortex Returns

We, like many of you, felt the Polar Vortex lift off for a few days, only to return again in earnest. But the cold brings with it several benefits that you in the city or suburbs can't appreciate. The first is that freezing temperatures discourage the hatching of flies. We had only five consecutive days when the thermometer read above freezing - 43 being the highest it soared - and the effect on the latent in-house fly population was immediate. I decided to kill and then count the fly carcasses from just one average size window in this house (although I must admit it is in the running for most productive) and the results were unsavory. After just three warm days I had confirmation of more than 162 flies dead and stopped counting. That is just one window downstairs. We are not even talking about my upstairs studio. I get all crunchy inside, killing so many flies and witnessing the futility of my actions. I know there will be 50 more to contend with the next time I look. Arden, on the other hand, has just become sensitive to the miracle that flies are. She likes to reach and touch them as they walk up the living room window, and in a sharp twist of character I find myself assisting her - holding her up to see them, gently nudging them towards her open fingers. At least someone's enjoying them.

The few days of sustained warmth had other obvious effects here, namely the thaw en masse of vast amounts of accumulated snowfall. I was nursing Arden on the couch in the late afternoon when I heard something shift - a subtle elevation in white noise - and I looked behind me just in time to see this begin.

The stream had inches of ice on its surface which had been covered by around 18 inches of snow. I presume the wind helped this along by blowing more into the hollow of the stream bed. On one of the warmest days we sustained heavy rains and Garth and I were waiting to see what would come of it. We got our answer in the above image. An ice dam somewhere upstream must have cracked under the pressure and sent this dark and frothing 'frosty' hurling. I have never seen such a thing. It kept up for around an hour.



This is the aftermath. You can see where the water plowed the edges of the stream's snow bank.



And thankfully now the Polar Vortex has returned, which is no surprise to you, reading this, as you are, in your blanket and hat. It left long enough to give us a taste of what's to come, and I'd be lying if I said we didn't like it. But the upside is that the flies are less enthusiastic (although still coming by the handful daily). At the very least you now have proof that we don't spray for flies or use other insecticides, apart from our own hands.

Lastly, I am grateful that Garth takes Arden to do the afternoon chores, regardless of the Vortex's whereabouts. She doesn't complain, and if it is really blowing we do keep her in. 

- Alanna

Deep Freeze: Farmhouse Fallout

This morning Garth and I were up early, as is customary these days - 4:30 or so - and I noticed that the pressure from the tap was low on both the hot and the cold. Nothing in the house was running, like a toilet or shower, that would have caused that. It has been VERY cold here for weeks and we don't have much snow cover, so Garth suspected that the buried line from the well to the pressure tank had frozen. He switched the well pump off at the breaker so that the motor wouldn't die trying to pull water that it couldn't have, and put a heater on in the basement. 

There had been ground hog invasion down there during the late summer. They dug under the porch and hollowed out an area of the foundation, pushing a lot of new rocks and dirt up around the pressure tank. One of the upsides of summer is that there is no reason to go to the basement. We wouldn't have known they had burrowed in if they hadn't also happened upon a decade old empty bag of dogfood and begun making a raucous. My mother-in-law, Dorothy, first heard it - a loud plastic rustle, too loud to be a mouse or even a large rat. I later saw the red bag lurch to the base of the stairs making the same telltale sound. Groundhog, surely. Garth bravely went to investigate and found the basement as I described it. Their having exposed the pipe from the well to the pressure tank had no doubt contributed to the freeze. Garth and I considered the pros and the cons of our situation over the next few hours.

Con - The well pipe is frozen. We don't know if that heater will solve it.

Pro - At least we have a stream where we can fetch water.

Con - There is 4 inches of ice over the surface.

Pro - We have an axe, a few buckets, and Garth is a strapping and motivated man.

Con - It's -12 out.

Pro - Yeah, but now we will really be pioneers!

Con - It's still -12 out. 

Pro - We have a Berkey water filter, so drinking stream water will be A-okay. 

Con - I am cloth diapering and this is going to get messier than it already is.

Pro - It's meant to get up to 34 here in four days.

Con - That's four days away and it might not be warm enough to thaw the water line. 

This went on. 

I went outside to get more wood as the light crept into the cobalt world. There were turkeys gobbling and hens clucking in the distance. What? Why now? Two deer were standing and looking at me on the porch from Don's field. That's when I heard Garth say, 'Did you hear that!?' from the basement. It's bad when you can discern your husband's voice from the basement while you stand on the front porch. This farm house wasn't insulated well now, was it? The turkeys' calls were consuming the silence, and so I had to step inside to hear more from Garth. He had flipped the breaker again and the hydrogen peroxide pump spontaneously began cycling. The hand-dug, 15' well for the farmhouse is sulfurous and pumping hydrogen peroxide into the pressure tank dissipates the odor. It works some of the time. Anyway, this meant we had water flowing from the well again. The heat had worked its magic!

I've had moments when I've wished everything in my life were different, and today it was so nice when everything remained the same. 

Just think; if those ground hogs hadn't excavated that pipe, we couldn't have delivered the heat where it was most needed. We'll thank them later. Maybe I'll buy some new dog food and hurl it down the stairs. 

I still don't know why those turkeys were talking so loudly. I guess sometimes it's just as well not to know what the animals are up to. 

- Alanna

Farming Futures

So, this is about as much of the farm as I see on a day to day basis: Arden in the foreground with Garth heading out to do chores as the backdrop. I can't complain. It was -17 degrees out this morning and Garth gives me a full report when he stops in again to deliver an egg or two, or an armload of wood. And it's more of the farm than either Ed or Normandy get to see lately. They are spending their last winter away, as Normandy will complete her masters degree in ceramics come Spring. Thankfully, their absence is primarily physical. Edmund seems to be constantly thinking of the farm and the next season specifically. Hardly a day passes without an e-mail or three from Edmund on various farm related topics. And what's stranger still is that his thoughts track with Garth's in real time. I sent Ed an e-mail asking if Garth had shared his latest idea for using excess whey, (which was mixing in barn lime to neutralize the it and then applying that to our pastures as fertilizer) and Ed's response was that he was about to send us the very same idea. So the farm evolves, despite our limited man power at the moment. There is water running beneath the frozen surface of the stream, so to speak.

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And where does that take us? Who knows, but here are a few of our ideas.

We loved raising heritage turkeys on pasture last year, and judging from the feedback we got from those of you who bought one or two of them, the results were good too. Wonderful even! We are aiming to do roughly the same thing this year. Our heritage turkeys (probably Standard Bronze again), will be given free range on pasture and offered organic grains. The only difference in our management of them from last year is that this year we intend to raise pigs (PIGS!) and our feeding system for them might benefit the turkeys in one way or another. We hope to source whey to feed our pastured pigs as an energy source. Whey is a waste product from butter and cheese making and there is still a lot of nutrition to be had in there, but it's mostly lactose in a probiotic slurry. The grass and other forages they'll eat will provide them with protein and fiber primarily, and they'll need some carbohydrate to balance that all out. If we do find a reliable whey source, there is a chance the turkeys will get to pick through the solids at the bottom of the tank, if they are interested. I imagine we may also seek out un-sellable vegetables and other food waste from local organic growers to offer our pigs, and we'll inevitably produce a fair amount of that ourselves with the reliable abundance of our growing season. 


At any rate, this is all to say that we would like to offer you heritage turkeys raised in this manner at the price/pound we did last year ($9.00 delivered, $8.00 locally) and may even get to reduce the price further if our feed costs come in well below what they were. (Last year grain prices were hugely inflated because of the previous year's widespread drought and dire corn yield. Story has it, the world saw an unprecedented bumper crop this last summer, and perhaps we will see the effects of that in the marketplace this year. That is yet to be seen.) We will raise as many turkeys as there are buyers, and will place an order for poults with these numbers in mind soon. If you would like a turkey from us, or have questions about any part of the process, please send us an email:

cairncrestfarm@gmail.com

I let the cat out of the bag earlier by saying we were intending to raise pigs this summer. If you are interested in buying our pork, you can also send the farm an e-mail at the address above and we will put you on our list to receive updates about the products we have on offer as the time approaches. I am sure you will get to read about the pitfalls and successes here on our blog as the events unfold. 

This spring we will see the first grass-fed Angus/Kerry crosses out of our new bull, Mr. Winchester. It will be a few years before we arrive at a verdict on them (better than purebred Kerry alone?) but it will be fun to see how they behave on pasture. We will be sending a few steers at some point this summer, so again, please e-mail the farm if you would like updates on the availability of our beef and are not on the list already.  

Thank you for your ongoing support and your enthusiasm for what we produce. We were so happy to deliver actual goods to you last year. Garth said he finally felt like a farmer, rather than someone who obsessively moves cows around as a hobby. We excited to have more to offer this year. 

Spread the word. Spread the love! We're farming!

-Alanna

Thanksgiving Delivery

This is just a reminder that we will be delivering our heritage turkeys to Bryn Athyn on Tuesday, the 26th, along with our 100% grass-fed and finished beef. We have a fair amount of ground beef still unspoken for, but only a few individual cuts left. If you haven't yet ordered any and would like to please send an e-mail to cairncrestfarm@gmail.com. We will respond to your personally with all the details you'll need. Cheers!

-Alanna

Dry Aging

There is one other significant difference between our beef and the stuff available in groceries.  It is not exclusive to grass-feeding as it has to do with post slaughter treatment of the carcass.  Traditionally beef carcasses were chilled and then "dry aged"  for 14 to 21 days (sometimes even longer) between slaughter and butchering.  The butcher we use to process our cattle still does this as it results in a superior final product. Aging gives naturally present enzymes time to work on muscle tissue and develop flavors to their fullest.  It also dehydrates the meat which means we sell more meat and less water per pound of meat.  The large meat packers moved away from aging during the 1960s because most consumers didn't complain or shift their buying habits when they bought more water, while the extra water weight in each cut contributed to the packers' bottom line. This is true across all cuts, but is most readily apparent in a side-by-side ground meat cook-off. A pound of Cairncrest beef will release less water into the frying pan than a comparable package from the local grocery. Next time you cook ground meat from a store take note how much water comes out.

In the interest of science here is my try at demonstrating it.  I cooked the same amount of meat from ourown steer and a package from the grocery store.

Here is a photo of the two meats prior to cooking. Guess which is which. (I did adjust the color balance a little bit in this photo because I struggled to get the light to cooperate while cooking dinner. But I did my best to get the shades of meat true to reality.)

I did a poor job of photographing the liquid that come off, but as you can see the grocery meat released more liquid. I'm actually surprised there wasn't more of a difference, but what is shown represents approximately one ounce out of a one pound package so ~ around 5%, which is in line with what I've read occurs in a two week aging.

I didn't take a picture of the cooked meat because the color discrepancy was much less dramatic and probably wouldn't have shown up on a computer screen, though it was still apparent in person.

I found both the flavor and texture of our beef to be more enjoyable.

-Edmund

Grass-fed and Finished

This week we get to go to the fun stuff.

I arrived early enough to catch them in bed! One year old steer in the foreground.  This year's calf, a cow, and our bull, Mr. Winchester in are in the back.

Grass-fed meat is all the rage right now, and for good reason.  I read recently the grass-fed segment of the beef market is booming while the rest of the beef market stagnates.  The authors of the article attribute the consumer popularity of grass-fed to concerns about the wholesomeness of the meat fed in big feedlots, as well as for animal welfare and the environment.  I believe in my heart of hearts that grass-fed meat can be the best on all fronts - healthy meat, contented animals, and more fertile soils.  But as with grain finishing, just because something can be a certain way doesn't mean it is that way all the time.

The term grass-fed encompasses a huge spread of management intensivities.  Some producers put a perimeter fence around a piece of land and turn the herd loose.  Some producers have a few large paddocks they slowly rotate the their cattle through every few months.  Others, like us, use both perimeter and portable electric fencing to allocate a small amount of pasture at a time and then move the herd onto fresh grass every day or so (see photos below).  Daily moving allows adequate rest periods for the grass to recover between grazing events, thus the more palatable species of plants are not munched to death by hovering grazers.  It promotes taller and healthier pasture plants that can tap deeper nutrients in the sub-soil.  It supposedly sequesters carbon into the soil as organic matter much faster than say forests or ungrazed grass.  It keeps the herd clear of its own waste until enough time has elapsed for the manure to reincorporate into the soil.  It reduces erosion since the grass sward is denser and more vigorous, and there is no plowing for the finishing feeds.  It reduces the need for fossil fuels since growing grain requires a lot of diesel for tractors, combines, and trucks for hauling the harvest.

Frequent (more than once per week) moves generally allow for a higher average plane of nutrition in the paddocks the herd has access to every day.  Better nutrition allows cattle to express their genes fully and those that are suitable for grass finishing come to the fore.  Good genes under good management makes for exceptional meat.  Good genes under lax management e.g. turning the herd loose for the entire year in a single large pasture, does not.  Cattle unsuited to grass production will never grow great beef, even under the best management regime.  Management can help the marginally suitable animal achieve full health, and therefore be reasonably tasty on the table.

The take away lesson here is this - the term "grass-fed" does not guarantee a great steak.  In fact, there are plenty of average and even sub-par grass-fed products chasing the price premium it offers.  The best tasting is always grass-fed though, and when one factors in the social, environmental, and animal welfare components of grass vs grain it becomes a no brainer.

Grass farm pastures should not look like golf course fairways.  If they do the animals and the pasture are not going to express their full potential.  Depending on the time of year and most recent cut, hayfields can have a fairly uniform even appearance.

It is hard to judge distances in the photo, but this first image shows one day's worth of grazing.  Look closely and you can see white pigtail posts on both sides of the picture.  This is early morning and I've just moved the cattle into their fresh "break" of grass.  To the left of the herd you can see the effect that 24 hours of animal impact has on a patch of pasture.

The camera flattens the topography.  Here I'm looking up a moderately steep hill toward the cattle.

Getting closer, and a better look at the portable electric fence used to contain the cattle.

Here is another image of impact. We're looking at the ground in the area the animals just finished. Note the mat of grass pushed against the soil, this protects from erosion and feeds worms and microbes.

Here is pasture after roughly a week of regrowth.  That shaggy look is a good thing when it comes to pasture.

Finally, don't forget water.  We buried a line in this pasture and use gravity to pull water where we need it.  That's a 40 gallon plastic tank that is light enough for one person to move easily.

That's it for this week.  I have a little more to say about beef, but I'm going to wrap up in the next week or two.

-Edmund

Grain Finishing

Last week we went through a sort of general overview of a steer's life.  This week we go into a little more detail about finishing on grain.

Grain finishing rations for steers are mostly corn and beans, but they include all kinds of other stuff too. I've seen footage of a feedlot mixing waste candy, wrappers and all, into a wagon to feed.  Until the mad-cow scare of the 90s it was legal to feed protein sources from slaughterhouses.  In some places it is still common to put chickenhouse waste (chicken poop) into cattle rations because the rumen bugs can use the nitrogen in it to make proteins.  Nevermind that a cow would never eat chickenshit given a choice in the matter, or the fact that it can impart a fecal smell to the carcass itself.  The bovine digestive system is a beautiful thing, designed to process large amounts of low quality feed into parts and pieces of life.  It is easily overwhelmed by concentrated sources of calories like corn and bean meal.  An out of whack digestive system pushes problems into the rest of the organism and they get really fat really quickly.  They're fed antibiotics and other growth promotants to push their growth rate up ever higher.  Most receive an ear implant of hormones to goose their growth beyond the pale.  All these things would be fatal in short order for even the most rugged steer, but the cattle go to slaughter before the wear and tear of pharmacology, unhygenic living conditions, and an unatural diet can exact their ultimate toll.

Most consumers only ever meet their meat on the dinner plate.  So what does grain finishing this way do to the final product?  It makes for a higher percentage of soft meat (this is the one desirable outcome of this style of finishing).  Standing around waiting to be fed doesn't promote connective tissue development the way walking a hill in search of a tasty bite of grass does.  This allows some cuts of a grain finished steer to be softer on average than a properly finished grass-fed beefer.  I'm thinking specifically of round and sirloin tip steaks...  But the classic steak cuts from the rib and loin should be tender, no matter the production model.  If they're not, something is out of whack.  Grain finishing changes the fat profile in the meat.   Grain finishing allows for slaughter at a younger age as we discussed previously.  I believe there is a rough correlation between age at slaughter and flavor.  All other things being equal younger animals are milder in the flavor department.  And many people are now used to bland beef because that's all they've ever been exposed to.  Grain based rations also dampen the flavor compared to the diverse diet of self-fed cow.  Our pasture has at least 70 species of plants, and the cattle eat most of them.  On a mixed ration cattle get all their sustenance from just a few plant seeds, and the majority of it is corn.

Most grain finishing occurs on huge, huge feed lots in the mid-west.  These massive manure factories foist their odors and water contamination on all the neighbors within several miles, but just because most operations move with disregard for the social and environmental externalities they impose on their communities doesn't mean grain finishing must be that way.  There are smaller organic feedlots that do a much better job of keeping their animals healthy and clean.  And there are many small farms like ours that have a beef herd and sell meat directly to consumers after finishing the cattle on grain themselves.  So if you prefer the flavor and texture of grain finished beef, it is possible to find farmers who do it as well as it can be done.

Next week we get to the fun stuff that really makes us different - grass finishing.

We don't feed our cattle any grain so I can't show a picture of it, but since photos are fun here's one with some cows and two calves from this year.

-Edmund