Chris and Katie chimed in on the Grains post of last week, talking about the challenges of small scale grain growing, which are significant to say the least.

Chris also linked to a great article by Anthony Boutard on the new blog Grains and Pulses, listing their trials and tribulations over the years of growing grains for the small market.

And finally, Throwback has some interesting posts about how grain prices have and are affecting their operation. Here she discusses their phaseout of laying hens for the same reasons as ours, and here discusses the feed price increases since last fall for their broilers.

SpringNewsletter

His key point...

In an economy ruled by interest on “pretend” money, as I call it, about every ten years there has to be a shakeup to bring the dreamers of riches, floating around in their bubbles, back down to earth again

Even if the weather holds in the midwest this year, food prices will continue to head up, and high-grain foods, like feedlot beef, chicken, and pork will lead the climb. Farmers...time to look for alternate feed sources for your grain eaters.

If you're interested in Gene's book, it's available for free from the Steve Solomon's Soil and Health Library.

Update: Bucking the trend towards inflated food prices, I should mention that we've lowered our beef prices. Some production efficiencies, notably our new fences, allows us to do more with less time commitment...

I know she'll do a great job of leading, and most importantly, of delegating :)

We kept back a quarter of last fall's heifer for ourselves, and were very happy with it. The steaks needed to be cooked with care, but the roasts were excellent and there was an abundance of ground beef. Mmmm.....grassfed burgers.

Mossback Pot Roast

1 pot roast, or other roast, with most fat trimmed off
Separate roast into multiple large sections if necessary to better fit in the pot
1 package fresh mushrooms, washed, dried and quartered
1 large onion, chopped
1/2 package pearl onions (frozen), or the local cooking onion of your choice
3-4 carrots, chopped on the bias
~2 cups beef broth or water
5-7 cloves garlic, minced
~1/2 C hoisin sauce
spices - thyme, oregano
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
optional: swiss chard, with stems chopped like the onions,
and leaves chopped or torn into ~2 inch pieces.

In a large pot, saute onions, carrots, mushrooms, and chard stems on medium heat until onions just start to soften.

Add garlic, cook ~30 seconds.

Remove all veggies from pan, and add some olive oil to the pot (remove excess moisture first if necessary to avoid splattering oil).

Heat the oil, and add the roast. Brown ~5 minutes, turning a couple of times to for even browning.

Add cooked vegetables, plus spices and salt and pepper to taste.

Add water or broth - it should come up to the level of the top of the meat, or just slightly below.

Increase heat to high and bring to a boil.

Quickly reduce heat to low, add hoisin sauce and pearl onion, and stir.

Simmer on low for about 1-2 hours, until meat is very tender.

Add chard greens about 10-15 minutes before you turn off the heat.

Serve with rice and salad... yum!

They seem to be pretty heavy on CA and Northeastern farmers; they have no idea of the epicenter of the farmer revolution that they're missing here in OR.....

Greenhorns website
Drop them some change to see how it ends

The 3/4 acre sacrifice area...note a small amount of mud to the left, and lots of bedding and high ground for happy steers. Click for bigger

One of the livestock management aspects that I'm particularly proud of is the winter treatment of our steers. In our wet Oregon climate, winter can be a pretty challenging time; we can't let them graze all winter, since their heavy bodies will cause compaction of wet clay soil. This necessitates a "sacrifice area, " which is an area we allow to get beaten up and compacted, in order to increase grass health on the other 95+% of the farm.

We designed our barn to open onto the best drained soil on the property. While some shallow mud occurs at the entrance, there's plenty of room for the steers to hang out on firm ground.

Not having our animals in deep muck is not just an ethical concern, but a financial and environmental one as well. Animals who have to live in mud get sick more often, gain weight slower, and are generally less content. Not only would that cost us, and ultimately our customers, but it increases the energy footprint of our operation. A poorly producing pasture requires us to buy in more hay to supplement them...while we like our hay producer, there's no reason to give them money when we can grow the product ourself.

When you think about it, having to spend the entire winter in shin-high mud would probably darken your mood a bit, as well.

Further, that mud often has to drain somewhere...if there's not a large enough buffer from a waterway, sediment and manure can end up polluting our streams, which goes against my part time volunteer work.

This is the time of year that good management really begins to pay off. Our animals aren't hock-deep in muck, are healthy and growing well, our unsacrificed pastures are starting to wake up for the season, and we don't have a mudpit by the barn running mucky water into our creeks. The triple bottom line in action

Oregon LNG and Palomar are two energy companies that are taking advantage of a ruling by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that cuts out local input into the siting of these facilities. Welcome to democracy.

There's a host of reasons that this is a bad idea for our area....I won't go into all of them, but briefly, Oregon's natural gas consumption is declining, pipelines are an undefendable terrorist magnet, and I watched Syriana.

Instead, here's some personal experience with these issues. In 1999, a few months after we moved from Bellingham, WA, the Olympic Pipeline failed in the midst of beautiful Whatcom Falls park. 3 people were killed and thousands of gallons of fuel dumped into a spectacular salmon stream. Sadly enough, the kids playing with fireworks probably saved a lot of lives by igniting the spill, since the creek flows through town, a block from where we used to live.

The farm I got my start at, Cloud Mountain Farm, outside of Bellingham, has its own drama with that same pipeline. A couple of years back, the pipeline that cuts through their farm was due for replacement, which was a huge, dirty, invasive, obnoxious, disruptive process. When the owners told the pipeline company how their soil needed to be treated, they were given bland assurances that they've done this lots of times, and "you'll never know we were there."

You know how this one ends, right?

New pipe is in, all the workers are gone, and lo and behold, the soil that is covering their pipeline is thick, sticky clay subsoil. The topsoil that Tom had been shepherding for 30+ years is probably buried 6' underground, and he's left with soil that won't grow anything without a lot of work and inputs.

If you want to get involved, check out Oregon First, No LNG, or for a bit of a horrorshow, check out the map of the proposed OregonLNG pipeline (Palomar is keeping a low profile, and not putting anything on the web...)

Updates: There's more comments on this from my crosspost at Kos, where some other energy types weight in. Also, the governor weighed in over the weekend with some great thoughts on the subject, and Sal posts some commentary on that

Thanks!

Some blurbs from it:

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The vision behind organic agriculture is one in which care for the environment and health are central, and farmers get a fair deal for their efforts. But organic agriculture is also becoming serious business – with marketing tools, like certification, occupying more and more space and influence. ...

The big multinational corporations that dominate the food trade and retail markets have changed their view of organics as the markets for organic foods have grown over the last decade or so. They no longer see them as a threat to be destroyed but as a growing market to be conquered. Even the seed corporations have started to change their tune. In recent years, a growing chorus of voices from within the seed industry has been proposing a bargain that can be summed up as: “We’ll supply you with the organic seeds if you guarantee us a market by making it mandatory for organic farmers to use our seeds.”

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The EU is farther along in the process than the US is, to the point where planting saved seed will not be certifiable as organic, unless that seed was grown on a certified organic farm. Kindof takes the fun out of those casual seed swaps, doesn't it?

The folks at Bifurcated Carrots have a better rundown than I would give, particularly since they've got skin in the game, being in the European seed trade themselves.

(via Agricultural biodiversity)

A nugget...

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K Street: How in the world could America double the acreage of corn used to produce ethanol?

Tehran: The idea comes from your strange organic-food people, the ones who are so crazy about small farms and local food production and memorized "The Omnivore's Dilemma." (And what do you call those shoes, Birkenstocks?) They're starting to point out that America has another 20 million acres' worth of corn that's grown to feed cattle -- and to argue that you'd be better off using that corn for ethanol instead. They say that if you take a cow that God designed to eat grass and stuff it with corn instead, all it does is coat your American arteries with cholesterol.

(via Bakewell Ruminations)

Researchers have finished their analysis of the situation, and the pigs are busted. Not too surprising, given that they found 4.6 beasts per square kilometer in the vicinity of the spinach farm....that's a lot of bacon.

Missing from their analysis is the tendency of pigs to relish eating cow poop...that many pigs, in close proximity to cattle ranches, and you've got a problem that may well be unsolvable, so long as the local cattle harbor the nasty strain of E Coli.

I'd stay away from California bagged greens, if I were you.

(via Agricultural Biodiversity and Mike)

The recent issue of Fortune has a great article running down the growth of Brazil's soy industry. Brazil is being very smart about building their industry; not only are they clustering farms, processing plants (for food, fuel, and chemicals), and animal feed operations, but they have spent the last few years designing and branding their product to capture Europe's and the US's high-end consumers, who want non-GMO soy. Big commodity handlers in the US have always said that differentiating a low-value product like soy isn't worth it, so the market looked elsewhere to meet the demand.

Towards the end is the telling paragraph....

[The US industry's lack of response to the situation] condemns the U.S. to the role of "supplier of last resort - the high-cost, low-grade producer you buy from when you can't buy the good stuff you want. That's not a good position to be in."

Despite record prices for grains of all types, it's not a good time to be a soy farmer.

We have never pursued certification; our business model stresses personal customer relationships, and forgoes retail and restaurant outlets. Thus, the customer always knows the farmer, and hopefully, feels comfortable asking whatever questions they like about our management (Seriously, everyone....don't be shy. Ask the questions! ). But, there is definitely a place for certification programs...it's the responsibility of the customer to know what they want, and how to get it, to ensure that the food they feed their family is of the quality that they desire.

Unfortunately, a rather heavy-handed entry by the federal government is looking to change that. The farmer-run label Certified Naturally Grown is in danger of being rendered null by federal action.

Read the plight of Sugar Mountain Farm, and if you're suitably outraged, head over to the USDA site and ready the federal registry information and leave a comment.

A couple of things stand out as being a problem with the standard. Denying pig farmers the right to feed their hogs milk and milk products flies in the face of a thousand+ years of porcine husbandry, not to mention the pigs' historical starring role as farm garbage disposals / recyclers. The favorite food of our pigs was the cull eggs from our laying operation (hard boiled, for protein stabilization purposes). That would not be Naturally Grown, under the standard.

Most odious to me, however, is the fact that there is no provision for the animals being outdoors in the standard. So, as long as they're not eating eggs, they can stand in muck inside a barn all year, and be labelled Naturally Grown.