I Found an Old Farm Side

From back in the day when I was an ag columnist....

 What do the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age have in common, and what does that have to do with politics today?

Good question. I’m glad you asked. 

The National Museum of Denmark says of the Neolithic period, “The Neolithic period covers the era 3900-1700 BC. The hunting people in Denmark had long had contact with the farming societies in central Europe, but only around 3900 BC the hunters began to till the land and keep animals. Wooded areas were cleared, burnt and replaced with fields of arable crops. Cattle, pigs and sheep appeared as domesticated animals.”

It is also the period wherein the first primitive examples of what is called “proto-writing” were found, as humans developed simple forms of markings for communication.  

Even though early scratches on turtle shells didn’t quite match up to texting, not only did those hunters turned farmer begin to grow food instead of shooting or trapping it, they also began to drink milk from the animals they kept.

Science Daily reports that researchers have found evidence of milk protein in the mineralized dental plaque of seven people from that era who lived in what is now Great Britain.

 “Lead author of the study, Dr Sophy Charlton, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said: "The fact that we found this protein in the dental calculus of individuals from three different Neolithic sites may suggest that dairy consumption was a widespread dietary practice in the past.”

The fascinating article pointed out that the consumption of dairy products predates the genetic mutation that allowed at least some of us to be able to digest milk into adulthood. The authors theorized that either early farmers only drank small amounts of fluid milk or turned it into products, such as cheese, which have significantly reduced lactose content.

The relationship of this story to politics might seem a bit obscure. However, the animal rights movement certainly is politically motivated and they would have us believe that drinking milk from other animals is weird and unnatural. Yet we clearly started evolving our wildly successful, symbiotic relationship with milk producing mammals a very long time ago. It worked out pretty well for the survival of those milk producers...how else would they get to be kept in cozy barns, protected from wild predators, and pampered and cossetted all their lives? And how else would I get the delicious chunk of extra-sharp Cheddar I’m nibbling as I type this tale? They would probably have the cows and sheep and dairy goats go extinct and me eat some soybean concoction. I say no thanks, and the animals probably would too.

Which brings us to a somewhat more modern time, the Bronze Age. That is when our ancestors began making and using tools from bronze, which is created primarily by smelting copper with the addition of tin, and sometimes other metals. Bronze objects were harder than those made of previously available metals and thus came in pretty handy for sturdy nails and significant axe heads. The Bronze Age fell between the Stone Age, of which the Neolithic period was part, and the Iron Age, wherein humans learned to make even harder tools and weapons.

As early as the Neolithic period humans were feeding their infants and children milk from other mammals. By the time the Bronze Age rolled around it appears to have become a common practice, as evidenced by nifty little vessels from those periods unearthed by archaeologists all over Europe. The small clay pots were of a size comfortable for tiny hands and had spouts that scientists theorized would serve to supply food via suckling.An article from the Archaeology News Network showed photos of the “bottles” some of which were shaped like fanciful animals and even had legs to stand upon.

According to the article there was some skepticism as to whether the vessels were used to feed children at all or if they were used for nourishing sick people instead. Thus they analyzed the residual contents of such containers found in ancient graves of children in Bavaria. It was discovered that the bottles had contained the milk of domestic ruminants such as cows and sheep.

Nature Magazine said “This evidence of the foodstuffs that were used to either feed or wean prehistoric infants confirms the importance of milk from domesticated animals for these early communities, and provides information on the infant-feeding behaviors that were practiced by prehistoric human groups.”

Thus not only did our early relatives begin domesticating and keeping cows and other ruminants from a very early time in order to drink their milk, so did they begin feeding their offspring such materials at an early stage in their lives.


Project partner, Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury from the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Science concluded in Archaeology News, "Bringing up babies in prehistory was not an easy task. We are interested in researching cultural practices of mothering, which had profound implications for the survival of babies. It is fascinating to be able to see, for the first time, which foods these vessels contained."


It’s fascinating to me that even Stone Age humans saw value in drinking milk and used it to help their children survive the stresses of weaning and subsequent primitive life.


It’s too bad that modern privileged humans want to reinvent the wheel when it comes to nutrition. Today’s vegan movement would have us forgo our historic relationships with animals and consume only plant material instead. According to the Conversation this is leading to a trend in developed and indeed wealthy countries of chronic hidden hunger as people crave micronutrients lost by following such unnatural diets. More than one in two children in the United States is deficient in vitamin D and E, while ¼ of children lack sufficient calcium or magnesium.


Guess what time-honored beverage contains all of those elements. You know the answer of course. Dairy milk.


So simple that even the cavemen knew it. Or if not cavemen at least some really early humans.

Sounds like this Year

But it was back in 2019....

 The Farm Side: Strange objects in the sky

By Recorder News | May 23, 2019 | Local Commentary, Opinion | 

By Marianne Friers 

Sweet Sunday sitting, on the front porch with Miss Peggy, watching birds and discussing the necessity of mowing the lawn.

Maybe we will need to bring the discbine down for a couple of days and possibly the rake and baler too.

Oh, wait, it’s not just too wet to mow with the lawnmower, it’s too wet to bale. 

And besides…it would ruin the flower beds.

Off to the east of us an object rose into the sky. We had just been finding dinosaur heads in the clouds and wondering whether the bird we saw at the absolute zenith of the sky, barely visible without binoculars, was a Bald Eagle or not (later revealed to be an Osprey), when we saw the thing.

At first I thought (with a little shudder) that it was a golden helium balloon. They are lovely, but we all know they are more dangerous to wildlife than grocery bags ever imagined being. I snapped a couple of photos, because I almost always have the camera, and if I didn’t shoot it, it didn’t happen. The little point and shoot we take out birding has amazing zoom.

Peggy was unable to see the sky climbing object, so I zoomed in the back of camera view for her. To my astonishment there was fire in the balloon. Rather than a mere helium balloon, which, if you believe the pundits who write about dead sea turtles, are deadly enough in their own right, this was a fire balloon.

A sky lantern. A sky candle. Or as some call them, a Kongming lantern.

I had never seen one before. I even had to look up the name of the thing that floated ever higher over our orchard and pasture before drifting off to the southwest of us as the day’s thunderstorms rumbled past.

According to several sources these lanterns have been a customary feature of celebration and entertainment for centuries in many countries. Traditionally their structure involves various papers or fabrics and wire or bamboo hoops. A stiff collar at the bottom holds the fuel source and at least in theory keeps it away from the flammable walls. Fuel for the fire part of the deal is supplied by a small candle or waxed material.

Along with the fascination at seeing such an unlikely craft over Fultonville came a small frisson of concern. Aren’t those things dangerous?

First of all it’s flying fire. I know it’s been wet around here…see above. The grass is saturated, leaves hang like wet tissue from the trees, and every body of water is gushing or flooding or swelling with excess. However, supposing the thing landed on a roof, say maybe the roof of a barn full of hay? 

Such devices have started a number of wildfires, burned down a cell tower in North Carolina, caused car accidents, closed airports, and burned down homes and business buildings all over the world. One fire started by a sky lantern in Great Britain caused ten million dollars worth of damage to a recycling facility. The landing of the object was captured on security camera, so there was no question about the source of the inferno.

Even without the potential for fire, sharp objects in fields are clearly a problem. Wires that might be ingested by cows, whether in grass as they graze or in hay or stored forages fed by the farmer, can make them very sick or kill them.

I will never forget milking shiny, gentle, sweet Maqua-kil E Danilla one evening back in the day. She was a nice cow, a family favorite. One of those that did her job without fanfare or kicking the milker off or crowding the crew. She came faithfully to her designated stall, ate dinner, was milked and went back to pasture each day quietly and calmly.

The kids were small then and it was a school night, so as was our practice, I milked my string and took the kids home for supper and early bedtime, while the boss and his mom finished up.

Not ten minutes after we left the phone rang. Danilla was dead. She had lain down in her stall and quietly expired, just like that. The boss immediately called our veterinarian for a speedy necropsy. It was soon discovered Danilla had died of a lacerated liver caused by a piece of sharp metal that had found its way into the feed.

Although many farms, including ours, use magnets in feed delivery systems to catch the offending metal contaminants before they reach the cows, sometimes bits are missed or worse, the metal is not magnetic.

Aluminum is a nasty offender. Beverage cans of all sorts are usually made of it and are often tossed from windows into farm fields, where the soft, easily torn or cut up metal can end up in feed. One estimate claims that 5,200 cows per year die in Sweden from ingesting metal from litter. 

Sadly, many kinds of wire are made of aluminum. 

Who knows what type of metal goes into the construction of flying litter, as one article called the lanterns? I looked at a plethora of ads offering them for sale, but although some claimed to be 100% biodegradable, none had lists of materials or much in the way of details at all.

And even if they don’t contain dangerous metals, who needs flying fire anyhow?

Many countries ban the devices, as do 30 US states. Legislation is being considered here in NY as well. However, we all know just how well banning things, especially things that are fun, works.

Common sense is cheaper and more effective when practiced. Or at least I think so. Meanwhile, floaty, fiery things and dangerous objects which may be consumed by innocent beasts should probably not be sent willy-nilly over fences, fields, and farms. 

There is a bill in committee in the state legislature, which suggests simply tethering the things so they stay where they are wanted. Thanks.

 

Fultonville dairy farmer Marianne Friers is used to be a regular columnist before the Gazette bought the paper and fired her. She blogs at http://northvilledairy.blogspot.com.

Another old Farm Side

 

From December 2018.

FARM SIDE: WHAT’S THAT BIRD?

Posted by Recorder News | Dec 27, 2018 | Local Commentary, Local News, Opinion


By Marianne Friers


Over the sound of the car idling and chatter in the back seat I heard an unfamiliar call. A sort of shriek, urgent, raspy, primal. Creepy really, like something you might hear in a Tarzan movie right after the dramatic music.

Much of birding is recognizing the noises made by birds that don’t deign to show themselves to the observer. I recognize some calls but this was new. Not quite right for an owl, although they can fool you with screeches and shrieks that don’t much resemble hoots. No woodpecker of my experience ever made such a din either. Our chauffeur shut off the car and the backseat participants went silent as we listened. The calls went on and on, screams interspersed with harsh, grating bawling.

What on earth was that?

We were stopped along a small farm road in Fulton County, participating in the Johnstown circle of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. The road runs through a farm where I was milking cows when I met the boss. It was good to see sturdy grain corn still growing in the secluded fields, although I am sure the farmer would like to get it harvested and stored before the snow flies.

The CBC is the longest running citizen science project in the world. All over the Western Hemisphere teams of birders, from newest beginners to the best-trained scientists, venture out during the weeks close to Christmas to count as many species and individual birds that they can. Each count circle encompasses fifteen square miles. Each participant is a volunteer.

The count was initiated in 1900 to take the place of traditional Christmas hunts wherein birds were killed competitively just for the heck of it. Frank Chapman, an American ornithologist, suggested simply counting the birds instead and a great tradition was born.

Although we haven’t participated for all…or even most…of the 118 annual counts since, our family has been a part of the Johnstown circle for most of its 37 year history. Mom and dad used to do it. This year three of their grandkids, a grandkid-in-law and first-timer to the game, and I covered the traditional Mayfield South portion of farms, city streets, mall parking lots, and wild woods.

The road we paused along has always been one of our favorite CBC birding spots, yielding good raptors, wonderful woodpeckers, and a bounty of bluebirds over the years.


We peered eagerly through assorted binoculars hoping to somehow pick the screamer out of the tangle of golden cornfield and grey woodlot, under a watery sun. Nada. Nope. Nuttin’.

I made recordings of the noises, hoping to submit them to a Facebook group run by the American Birding Association, What’s this Bird?, but alas you can barely hear the thing over the background noises.

Then a faint memory emerged from the depths of our driver’s mind. A long, long time ago, he remembered loading hay we were buying for the cows. The bales were stored in a remote barn, far from any other buildings. While he dragged bales out of the stacks to load on the pick up and take home to the girls, the owner waited nearby. Loading hay is hard, tedious work, but ya gotta do what you gotta do. He grabbed a bale and pulled it out. Yaw! A screaming, squalling bundle of fury emerged from the stack and came at him, hollering and snarling all the while. It wanted a piece of him and wanted it bad.

And it was making the exact sound we were hearing from that bird count woodlot. He escaped safely from the enraged creature thanks to the quick actions of the owner of the hay barn. Seems the attack was not an isolated incident and they were always prepared for same.

The encounter did not turn out quite so well for the furious raccoon, but when choosing sons over wild animals I am okay with that.

Our backseat complement searched Google for raccoon sounds and there it was, our wild woodland performer — procyon lotor himself.

Why a raccoon was repeatedly screaming from the edge of a wood-rimmed cornfield will remain a mystery. The land is posted against trespassing and I didn’t exactly feel inclined for an encounter like the one in the long-ago hay barn.

Over the course of the day birders in our CBC circle accounted for 4,912 individual birds of 52 species. Overall numbers were down roughly 300 from an average year, but this was attributed to an open winter allowing birds to disperse to find food away from roads and feeders.

Our carload experienced much the same phenomenon. We often tally well over a hundred Black-capped Chickadees, but found only 25, and we had to look pretty darned hard for those. That isn’t an awful lot over the 72-plus miles of road we wandered during six-and-a-half hours of driving and walking.

If the low point of the day was being bamboozled by a ticked-off mammal, the high point was a bird spotted in a distant tree near the silos on an active dairy farm. (Farms are good for birds, don’t ya know?) The roofs of those storage structures are always a reliable source of Rock Pigeons for us to count. Evidently they are also a reliable source of nourishment for the unexpected Peregrine Falcon we found. Suddenly it became my lucky day, as not only did we find a bird that was new for me in the county, but our boy gifted me a window mount for my camera from out of his spotting scope case. He had two, and thought I needed one to take over for not-so-steady hands in such situations.

On New Year’s Day, bird counters all over the world will start anew on county lists. Every species will be a new “year” species. I hope your New Year will offer as much good fun, and that 2019 will be a much better year than ‘18, which was pretty darned dismal for agriculture. Happy New Year!

Fultonville dairy farmer Marianne Friers is a regular columnist. She blogs at northviewdiary.blogspot.com.

From December 2019

Another old Farm Side. We are looking at another incoming snow storm right now....photos are from yesterday.

Two days before the storm. At least one college had already canceled classes.

Out in the unmown horse pasture, ungrazed since Magnum died, the frozen grass was the color of a sunburned fox’s pelt, tawny, tangled, tipped with cold rolled gold, waving in the frigid wind.

The day had dawned bright and icy. Thought was given that maybe, just maybe, it might could, possibly, be time to put up plastic on the windows that are always last. Time to get the staple gun back out.

I’m always reluctant to let go of autumn, to take that long, cold, slide down to the doldrums of winter. I try to hold it back by leaving the calendar in the office set on September, but alas, that tends to fail abysmally.

I shouldn’t be so negative. Winter is actually a great time for birding. However, in winter you have to pay to play, and the season’s coin is often painful. Frozen toes, frigid fingers, frosted, fogged-over binoculars, and other uncomfortable and annoying miseries.

It appears that the pair of Red Squirrels that has taken up residence in the honey locust tree outside the back door have neither staple gun nor rolls of plastic.

However, they seem to have a large measure of rodent ingenuity. I keep a mesh turkey bag full of wool from pretty little Echo the pet sheep, hanging next to the orange board the boss made me to feed Baltimore Orioles and Grey Catbirds in summer.

It’s a delight to photograph tiny warblers tugging earnestly at single threads of natural insulation for their nests each year.

It was not quite as delightful that cold, pre-storm day, to watch the squirrels stuffing great wads into their toothy mouths to hustle up the tree looking like furry orange Santas.

On the other hand squirrels are great planters of trees, as evidenced by the black walnut tree growing where the milk house used to stand, back when the heifer barn was full of Jerseys and the land owned by someone else.

It’s half as thick as a telephone pole and nearly up to the barn roof, but we didn’t plant it. Some enterprising rodent carried a fat nut there, probably headed for the cow barn or the old hop house, where grey squirrels love to mingle. The original trees, given to me by the first author of this column and planted a decade or several ago, are north of the driveway, a goodly distance from the barnyard. I’m not sure we need a walnut tree in that exact spot, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

Then it came. Like a sheer silver sheet, spreading relentlessly horizon-to-horizon, first a few mealy dots, then more and more, until that tawny brown grass was shrouded in white and the trees hidden from view. Within an hour the accident reports started to fly. It was really slippery stuff and the cold ground made it worse.

As the weekend progressed and inches and feet of snow fell and dozens of schools closed, we spoke among ourselves of farmers facing their work in such awful weather. I am rarely glad not to be milking cows, as our life’s work was something we both loved.

However, semi-retirement looks real good when you realize that there are no frozen water lines to thaw. No tanker to get up the hill, requiring constant plowing all through the day, sometimes starting in the wee hours just after midnight if we had an early truck.

Fast forward three days, though school closings, and road closings, and accumulations well into the double digits. Blue robin’s egg sky frosted with scarves of drift flakes. Shadows a darker blue, almost denim, stretching across the old horse pasture against the cold white ground.

The roads are mostly open, but no doubt the wind will drift some of them closed again and make it almost as hard to see as it was when the snow was falling at its heaviest.


The weather pundits got it right this time and the storm was a doozy. Do we dare hope that it got it out of its system for a while and we can look forward to nicer weather? Probably not.

Because I Can

Another old Farm Side....

Moose Quest

Did someone mention Maine? If you’re a farmer, you probably thought of potatoes, Katahdin sheep, or maybe lobsters, which although not exactly farm animals, are included under the heading of farms, fisheries, and forests.

And if you are us, you thought about moose. We want to see one, and have been chasing the Adirondacks in hot pursuit for years. Thus the other day when our intrepid lad suggested that he and I go to Maine to look for moose, I figured I would learn a little
about the state’s agriculture while having a heck of a time. And that is just what we did.

We did not see any potatoes though, not so much as a single French fry in a fast food parking lot. We did, however, spot a couple of Ring-Billed Gulls perched on a lamp post
as if they were waiting for them.

Does that count?

In case you were wondering, potatoes came to the New World in two large cedar chests,
sent in 1621 to Governor Francis Wyatt of Virginia at Jamestown, by the Governor of Bermuda, Nathaniel Butler.

Potatoes are the second most popular food item in America. We each eat around 135 pounds a year, about a potato a day. I’ll bet we consume the majority of them in the same form desired by gulls too. 34% of the 46 billion pounds raised in the USA each year are consumed as frozen products, as in “Do you want fries with that?”

We saw no Katahdin sheep either, although we saw a good number of the regular, fluffy white kind. I remember the Katahdin brand of sheep from the days of attending sheepdog
trials and trying to train my own Border Collies up to some semblance of usefulness.
They are hair sheep, no need for shearing, and used largely for meat production.
Michael Piel developed them in Maine with an eye toward clearing power lines
and rights-of-way without spraying or mowing. In the sheepdog world they are sometimes bred to produce flighty, challenging, sheep that make the dogs sit up and take notice.

We saw a lot of wild country, and many pretty and prosperous looking farms. We passed streams and ponds and lakes, each filled with limpid, whiskey-colored water, sliding along all smooth, and pretty as a doe’s eyes looking out of the tangled woods.

We saw Long Tailed Ducks, which were once known as Old Squaws. I’ll bet I’m not the only birder who sees a flock and has to mentally change gears to call them by their new politically correct name either.

There were Snow Buntings too, pretty tan-and-white birds, which are a great treat for our local Audubon Christmas Bird Count some years. (However until then, the far, far north is a good place for them and their chosen weather.)

But no moose.

We saw busty mountains, draped with shawls of lacy snow, shouldering aside the clouds

that circled their majesty in the cold autumn air. I guess they like to take a higher view of things or something. Mount Washington is pretty impressive by the way and I just loved Mount Katahdin, after which the sheep are named.

Across all the New England states the oaks still clung bitterly to their leaves, releasing them a reluctant twigfull at a time. They whirled in the wind, trending up more than down,
bamboozling birders into looking for winged rarities. If I had been counting birds there would have been a lot of hash marks in the line labeled “flying oak leaves”.

We discovered that farm houses in Maine are connected to barns and outbuildings by enclosed walkways. What does that say about winters there, I wondered.

Still no moose.

So we decided we would go to Moosehead Lake. Gotta be moose there, right?

Said lake is accessed via the so-called Golden Road. The Garmin, which in our minds we referred to in slightly less kindly terms, insisted that the GR was a virtual expressway, going around the lake, and taking us out to another road.

She lied. 

The Golden Road is a logging road, built to accommodate log trucks, which are reputed to travel at high speeds, claiming the right of way over people from NY driving Camaros. (Everyone offroads in muscle cars, right?)

Thank goodness it was Saturday, when the loggers are parked for the weekend. However hunters traveling at supersonic speeds made up for any lack of logging excitement.

The GR is paved in just enough places to lure the unwary into proceeding down her rocky, muddy, pitted, potholed, lumpy, bumpy, no-guardrails-over-hundred-foot drops, and no shoulders length.

If you are crazy enough you can drive on her at speeds approaching ten or fifteen miles an hour.

Naturally we did so. 

For fifty-nine miles.

Because, through road and all.


Then came the checkpoint, manned by a dour fellow with a strong Canadian accent. Seems that after the first 59 glorious miles, the “highway” becomes a toll road.

14 bucks for the two of us to proceed….to Canada...which is where the road ends up.
(See, it is a through road, just not quite what Lady Garmin bamboozled us into believing.)

We declined the pleasures of foreign travel and turned around to drive 59 miles back to civilization.

Time to go home. On the way south we passed bogs full of Tamarack trees spreading golden skirts across watery purple dance floors. Winterberry Holly lent brilliant red candles to light the show.

Milkweed by the acre, for all the world like autumn cotton, was setting seed for next summer’s Monarchs.

What with the 75 MPH speed limit we saw a lot of roadkill too, mostly porcupines and foxes, but at one point a deer, actually suspended in a tree where it had been flung willy-nilly
by someone going faster than was wise.

No moose though.

We will be calling it MooseQuest, this strange desire to see the great even-toed ungulate
of the Northwoods.

And someday, just maybe, we will actually find one.

If you Missed the Farm Side last Week

Here is my fellow columnist's take on what happened. I thank him for doing such a fine job of saying what has been on minds here at Northview Farm. He is very eloquent.

I can honestly say I am okay with losing my job. I will miss the paycheck. It wasn't big, but it paid about one small bill a month.

However, I was writing books when it was offered to me...none of them published, alas....and maybe I will go back to that. Or maybe I will just blog here and share the photos I have so much fun taking. And it was hard to come up with a topic every single week for so very long.

That being said, I now realize that whenever I read anything I am watching for material I can use. Did the president speak to Farm Bureau? Yeah. I will read up on that. What are the animal rights people up to lately? Nothing good. People need to know. Who is hosting Sundae on the Farm? Will there even be one with the farm economy what it is? And if so what stories can I tell about their farm and family?

And so on. It's hard to stop doing that, but sometimes it's a relief too. There are a lot of email newsletters that I don't have to read any more if I don't want to. I used to put at least four or five hours into each column, and sometimes much more when some topic required deep research. 

It would have been 22 years in March.

No one bothered to tell me or the other writer that we were no longer needed. I actually wrote and submitted a column last Friday. It wasn't published so I was able to assume that I wasn't quite going to make that 22-year mark.

All in all it's been fun. I have met a lot of nice people and worked with some wonderful editors who pretty much gave me free rein.....and believe me I used every inch of it. 

If you have been a reader, thanks. If you are one one of those editors, thank you as well. You sure came up with some great headlines over the years. 

The best part of all those years, besides the cool people, was how much I learned. It is amazing how much information is out there if you are willing to dig. I read newspapers from all over the world, Great Britain, South Africa, China, Japan, and often Russia. My advice for folks looking for trends is watch Europe. So much political shenanigans and animal rights madness starts there and then migrates here like a mess of demented lemmings. 

I think I will keep on studying the wonderful world of agriculture. It is too important to ignore.                  

At it Again

I'm writing the Farm Side on Sunday, as we have a busy week ahead and no idea if there will be time on the usual days.

Normally I would share several links to news and informational stories for your perusal.

However, although I have a mess of them bookmarked for the gleaning of facts and figures, just one has enough to say to keep anyone thinking.

The real story behind Australian bush fires.

I am now reading the stories linked at the bottom of the article. What has happened and is happening on our west coast is all too similar.  

Food for Thought

Big headlines lately about tariff cuts by China, particularly for US pork....

But is US pork really US pork?

Or is it Chinese pork produced in the US by American farmers?

Will tariff cuts and diversion of resources leave our shelves bare of bacon? (Ack!!!)

Just who is being aided by these cuts as China sells pork to itself?

Read these and decide for yourself....

China cuts tariffs

Smithfield changes a few things

All about Smithfield....

Working on the first Farm Side for 2020 here......

And just for NY interest, Empire Farm Days has been sold!

An Unusual Opportunity

The Farm Side is usually behind the paper's pay wall, so if you want to read it you have to.....well.....pay....

Last week it was shared on Facebook for free, so I guess it will be okay if I share a link so you who do not get the Recorder can read it as well.

So, without further ado, here it is: Watch out for Rabies

Well butter my taters. between the time I wrote this and like ten minutes later, the pay wall was back. OK, let's try it this way. (Not that the paper isn't worth paying for or anything.)

Beware

Two Upstate NY pet dogs recently came into contact with rabid animals.
One encountered a diseased raccoon in the Herkimer area and the other a skunk
in Vernon.

I haven’t heard what happened with the former dog,
but the second one is looking at six months of quarantine
because his rabies vaccination was out of date.

Pretty much any dog that tangles with a skunk comes out on the losing end,
but this poor guy got it even worse than most.

The very same day a strong odor of skunk wafted over from the cow barn
when I was out with Finnbar, our latest Border Collie.
Fortunately he was on a leash and is up to date on his shots.

Skunks are going to be much in evidence for the next little while.
Tis the season of love for the stripey little stinkers
and they like fragrant perfume as much as the next romeo.

Rabies seems to rear its ugly head around here every year or so,
with wild animals acting as a reservoir for the disease and spreading it to pets
and livestock. It is not unusual to hear of cases in feral barn cats and even rabbits
and woodchucks have tested positive.

However, in 2017, the most recent year I could find reported, according to
New York Upstate.com, Montgomery County was fortunate
to have no diagnosed cases, although 13 animals were tested.

Oddly enough, perhaps because there are so many potential animal/human encounters
there, Westchester County had the largest number of problems with 414 animals
tested and 18 positives.

However, endemic rabies is not the only potential source for this almost-always
deadly scourge. Rabies is much more prevalent in many other countries
than it is here and the disease is sometimes inadvertently imported as well.
In fact tragically, a US soldier who was bitten by a feral dog in Afghanistan
in 2011 died of rabies upon his return home.

He had come in contact with many other people before the disease was diagnosed,
with at least 22 of them needing preventative treatment.

Thus it was with interest that I read of 200 dogs being rescued
to the US from dog meat farms in Seoul, S. Korea, by way of Toronto, Canada.
Although the practice of eating dogs is on the decline in Asia,
there are still some practitioners of this ugsome habit there.
However, it is said that even the South Korean President Moon Jae-in
adopted a shelter dog in ‘17.

The International Humane Society has claimed to be offering the former dog farmer
a computer science course that will enable him to seek alternative employment.

Don’t you wonder though, what vaccinations the imported dogs received
and what precautions were taken to protect the kind people who foster them
and the animals they encounter?

According to US Customs and Border Protection, “The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) requires that pet dogs be vaccinated against rabies
and be healthy upon arrival.  Dogs that have never been vaccinated against rabies
must be vaccinated at least 30 days before entering the United States.

Puppies must not be vaccinated against rabies before 3 months of age,
so the youngest that a puppy can be imported into the United States is
4 months of age.”

You might assume that all the dogs brought here for rescue complied
with these regulations.

However, that is not always the case. The CDC reports that the US has eliminated
canine variant rabies, which is a pretty big deal.
It means that even though dogs may transmit rabies to people,
probably due to the way we live in close proximity to them,
a dog will not get rabies from another dog.

Instead wild animals, such as the skunk and raccoon mentioned above,
transmit the disease to unvaccinated dogs.

Which brings us to some other overseas rescue dogs brought here over the past
few years.
In one case a Chihuahua rescued from the streets of Egypt probably had
falsified rabies vaccination papers and tested positive for rabies virus.

Before this happened the dog, known to the CDC as “dog A” bit several people
and then died.
It exhibited classic symptoms of the disease, irritability, aggressiveness, confusion,
and aversion to water.

Thus began an extensive investigation into how the dog got here and with
whom it had come in contact.
Turns out quite a few people were involved before it reached its final destination in
Connecticut.

From Egypt to JFK Airport to states all over the Eastern Seaboard,
people and animals were potentially exposed to this nearly always deadly disease.

The Egyptian dog was neither the only, nor even the first dog to be imported
with the disease. Infected dogs from India and Iraq were also brought here,
bringing the total number of rabid dogs imported into the US in the past 15 years to 6.
Each such importation brings with it the potential to reestablish canine
variant rabies in our own dog population, as well as to actually kill people and animals.

The CDC said, “Elimination of the canine rabies virus variant from the United States
required approximately 5 decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Imported cases present an ongoing opportunity for reestablishment of the variant
and require lengthy and costly investigations to prevent additional cases in
both humans and animals.”

Seems we should be cautious with animals that come here from other countries,
making sure that not only is their paperwork in order,
but that they are carefully observed before going into people’s homes,
and tracked afterward.

That being said, I have owned dogs with imported parents.
Those original two Border Collies, Mike and Gael, were the first generation of pups
born in the US from parents imported from Scotland, with ancestors in
England and Wales as well. I swear, even though he was whelped in Altamont,
Mike barked with a Scottish burr sometimes.

Anyhow, whether you are adopting, buying, or just enjoying your family pet,
rabies is something to be watch out for.

Writing the column is how I spend several mornings each week, as I have for 21 years now. I just sent this week's missive a few minutes ago.

Here are some links to this week's research.

EPA new WOTUS regs

How to report slaves in Washington State

More on that

Human rights for a lake

Lawsuit on the latter

I usually use many more stories than these but they are frequently repetitive so....