Shopping for Beef

The boss and the kids went shopping yesterday and brought this guy home. He is a milking shorthorn from a nice herd near here. We like shorthorn beef better than anything else we have grown, although ours were always half Holstein.

As you can see he is well armed

Meat Made us Human

Or at least the habit of eating it along with cooking our food helped us grow larger and more complex brains.

More Evidence that Eating Meat is Good for Us

With a H/T to Chuck Jolley, who posted the link on Facebook

Taste for meat aided human evolution.

There's a Full Moon Over Tulsa

I hope that it's shining on you....."

Well, actually it's a waxing gibbous and it's raining and it's NY, but I still love the song. Sold a couple of cows yesterday, very painfully, as one was Alan's old show cow, Bayberry, who has been a fixture here since he was thirteen. We let him choose when or if. She was nearly two years in milk and we just could not get her bred no matter what we tried. She was getting mean and beating up on the other cows.....

It was hard, but so is the economy. The cows that stay behind have to eat and be cared for and every input has tripled in price over the past few years We used to use $200 a ton as the top price we would pay for premium grain. Hah! Them days are gone.

Would be nice to just have kept her forever, but we couldn't. At least beef prices are indeed as crazy-high as word on the street has been saying. A lot of farmers were selling as the line of trucks stretched all around the auction barn and down the road. Reminds me of the stories I was hearing of sale barns down in the drought area a couple of months ago.

Thanks to drought in Texas, and Oklahoma a severe shortage of feed, problems in several South American countries etc. beef may turn out to be in short supply in a bit.

Any road, we are keeping our bull calves and steering them. We are going to be real short of feed ourselves, but for dairy farmers we raise pretty good beef. We are thinking we will sell a bit, retail, USDA inspected, cryovacced, real good stuff. We have in the past and folks have liked it real well.

Got a steer ready to go right now. Anybody interested?

The Christmas Tree Tax

Was in fact not a tax and was never intended to be one. It was a checkoff program. Checkoffs are producer funded and driven generic advertising programs intended to increase sales of various farm products. Christmas tree growers wanted to get on board with this concept to help real trees maintain their market share against artificial ones. Here is a pretty good story about it.

Such programs are common among various commodities. Here is a bit on the soybean checkoff which explains some parts of the concept.

There is a beef checkoff...a buck a head for every cow or calf sold for beef in the nation. Beef, it's whats for dinner, is an example of the resulting advertising campaigns.

There have been times when that beef checkoff has really ticked me off. Say when calves are bringing five bucks and out of that you pay the checkoff and commission and get nothing back at all. However, all those new cuts of beef you see, flat iron, etc....developed and promoted with beef checkoff dollars, in the interests of making beef more appealing. Plus lots of recipes and other programs are thusly funded.

There is a dairy check off too. Fifteen cents per hundred pounds for every bit of milk that leaves a dairy farm. We do not get to pass that along to consumers either, because our price is set by government formula, which does not take it into account. If it is in any way a tax, it is a tax on us, not on the folks who drink our product.

It has also irritated me on occasion, such as when it spent our money to help the EPA fund air quality studies on dairies. Seemed dumb at the time and seems even dumber now. However it also funds the wonderful Dairy Princess program and partners with grocery stores to better display our products, schools to convince students to drink it, and restaurants to use in new offerings to keep folks using it in drinks and as cheese on burgers. Here is a link to the local "chapter".

All three of the Northview crew served as dairy ambassadors on various Dairy Princess courts. They learned a great deal and spent a lot of time at various public affairs meeting consumers face to face and explaining about the value of dairy products in the diet. It was good for them and good for the industry. And it put faces on farmers in a very real and personal way for thousands of non-farm customers.

I have been appalled over the past couple of days by the sheer ignorance of some pundits on the topic of the Christmas tree checkoff. They are to be excused for not understanding the whole checkoff concept when the furor began. They are not to be excused for not doing their homework before they sounded off. I give them an F in research.

I am kind of on the fence on the whole checkoff concept though. It makes for splashy advertising and in the case of the dairy and beef checkoffs has come up with some really popular campaigns. However, it has pretty much been proven that such generic advertising has very little benefit for individual farmers and when it gets down to the nitty gritty that is who is paying for it.

Our first thought was

A mix of red and black Angus too...but what are they crossed with that gives them those dangly things on their chests?

They feed baleage from the wagons....just put that pic in to show you how many they have although they have a lot more than are in the photo.

Thanks everyone!

West Comes East

The kids stumbled upon a large and prosperous looking beef farm a couple of hours from here. Saturday they took me to see.

Miles of fences, hundreds of animals, an impressive array of feeder wagons. All you knowledgeable ranchers out there, what on earth are these cow? And what are those things? Dairy farmers everywhere want to know.

Good Post on Beef Production

Not Beef

Black Duck

From Jeffro

Jeffro explains all about growing beef from calf to feedlot

Local Meat Harvesting Facility on NPR

HT to Chuck Jolley on Facebook for this story about the meat lab at SUNY Cobleskill. Alan took some classes there, which made our venison processing efforts much smoother. He learned a lot about cutting meat from Director Eric Shelley and worked in the room pictured in the article.

Sold on Milking Shorthorns

If you've been reading here a while you know about Checkerboard Magnum's Promise, a milking shorthorn bull we bought to breed heifers for calving ease a few years back. We had used Angus, Hereford, Jersey etc. and had complaints about all. Mostly temperament but calving ease on the Herefords was no better than Holstein bulls. We don't have access to the kind of genetics you find on ranches....

I had hoped to sell some matched steers for oxen, an option which has not materialized. However, we were astonished at how typey the shorty calves are. I think that is partly that we were very lucky in the bull we got, but they are just so correct and sharp that you can't stop looking at them. Dense, strong bone, lots of dairy character and tough as nails. A little bit of attitude in every one of them, but it is not meanness, but a strong will to prosper.

We raised one shorty steer and the processor we took him to ruined the meat so we didn't get to find out how we liked it. Then this week we finally got a shorthorn beef back from a reputable place. When the boss picked it up our man said it was the best we ever brought in. I took that with a grain of salt, as he is quite the salesman....but....

It is! The ground beef is very lean like we like it, but tender and succulent....so good. And last night Becky broiled us some steaks. Flashback to Missouri where we ate at a really nice steak house. They have a lot better beef out there where they grow it and this was like that. Fork tender, juicy, very flavorful. I am delighted, partly that we have a freezer full and partly that we have a heifer all raised up that we can process at any time, plus two more steers of various ages. After a long winter of venison, goose, chicken and vegetables I am such a happy little camper.