No phone, no 'Net, big news

Except for the subject of the news story that happened while we were without outside communication, that about describes the weekend. (Our phone went out Friday during a teeny, tiny storm that was barely noticeable. The phone company didn't exactly fall all over themselves getting it fixed...although I am wildly grateful to the phone man who finally came out -on Sunday no less- and got it done.)

I was able to weather the lack of access to the outside world, (other than TV, which is worse than nothing), until the big story broke in a crawl across the MSNBC news show the boss was watching. The discovery of a new case of foot and mouth disease in Great Britain is huge and sorrowful news for farmers there and for agriculture around the world. The dreaded disease of ruminants is so incredibly contagious that it is recommended that people who visit farms abroad where there are outbreaks avoid visiting farms at home for some time. This is because they can transmit the disease via clothing, footwear and even possibly carry it in their lungs. It spreads through contact. Birds cart the virus from farm to farm. It even moves on the wind. Tires. People. Wild animals, pets, almost anything can bring it to the doorstep of a previously healthy farm.


I hope this outbreak is contained before it causes the kind of economic damage and heartbreak that the one in 2001 caused. Thousands of animals were killed, even working border collies from farms that had to kill their cows and sheep. The farmers simply couldn't afford to feed dogs that no longer had jobs. That outbreak was caused by a pig farmer feeding improperly cooked food waste from an airline that had visited an infected country. Officials are hard at work tracing the source of this one. My heart goes out to British farmers who must be worried beyond belief right now.


***Update....after jumping online to write this, I started reading through my favorite blogs and found that Sarpy Sam has several detailed posts on the topic. If it turns out that the virus did indeed "escape" from a government laboratory, the story takes on an even more horrific aspect.

Hmmmm

I wonder how many of these are walking around on earth today. Not cute little Holstein heifer calves, there are millions of them. Not daughters of Alan's show cow, Bayberry, there are two of those. Not granddaughters of of sweet Balsam, two of those too.

Nope, this calf has another interesting aspect, rather an amazing one in fact. This baby is an own daughter of the Hostein bull, Whirlhill Kingpin. Alan had trouble getting Bay bred last year. She was sick when she freshened and never got as vigorous as we would have liked. I think she had hardware disease and some issues with scarring from that. Anyhow, in desperation, the last chance breeding before we had to sell her, he chose Kingpin. For some reason we have nearly always gotten a calf when we used him. This time was no exception and the heifer was a nice bonus. The unusual part of the whole affair is that Kingpin was born in 1959. He was a popular bull in the sixties and early seventies. He has been dead a very long time. However, thanks to the wonders of liquid nitrogen and artificial insemination he has a brand new daughter right here in 2007. Now if Alan will just come up with a name for her, other than Ballistic Buffalo, which is his most recent, but unacceptable to both mom and the Holstein Association choice.

***(Suggestions for good names that begin with "B" would be most appreciated at this point.)

A suitable reaction to Michael Vick

Check this out if you would rather have stinky pond scum for a neighbor than someone like Michael Vick.

Ethnol and food prices

Here is an interesting article on the effect (or non-effect, depending on where you are standing) of ethanol production on food prices. I don't pretend to know what the truth is on most parts of the issue, but I think high corn prices have to impact dairy food prices. The story is much more complicated than that though. High grain prices, along with high everything else prices, contribute to farmers leaving the industry, which leads to more competition for the milk that is left. A year ago at this time we were paying $192 a ton for grain for the cows (before discounts). Now we are paying $259 for the same amount of grain. High grain costs also lead to surviving farmers feeding less of it, which lowers production and milk supply. As we speak, two farm families from this county (good friends of ours) have either sold the cows or scheduled the sale. These are folks who want to farm but can't because they got shellacked last year by bad weather and low milk prices while costs went up, in part due to ethanol production. This year milk prices are higher, but everything from corn to cotter pins costs more too. Everyone is playing catch up and not everyone can quite make it.Of course increasing exports matter too, as does increased demand.


Last year at this time we grossed between $13 and 14 per hundredweight of milk before deductions, (farmers pay to have a truck haul their milk to the plant, pay co-op dues, lab fees, state and national check off fees and any number of other deductions out of their milk check, so what you see is very much not what you get.) This year we are grossing nearly $21 per hundredweight. However, along with the increase in grain prices, partly driven by corn, fuel has nearly doubled. It takes a lot of that to grow food for over a hundred animals. . Despite careful management of natural fertilizers in growing our crops, when the milk leaves the farm so do nutrients from the farm, decreasing what is in the soil. Commercial fertilizer helps to replace that loss and to produce food for the cows. Fertilizer has more than doubled in price. We used to think we were getting nailed when we spent three or four thousand dollars in direct crop expense, (that is fertilizer, seed, and weed control). This year we are at almost eight thousand and will end up spending more than that. How much of the increase in fertilizer cost is fueled by increased demand for increased corn acreage for ethanol and how much by increased costs for fossil fuels? I can’t prove much either way, but both no doubt contribute.

Milk at the store around here was well under three bucks a gallon last year. Now even with a frequent buyer program it is over five dollars in some markets. Farmers going out of business because of high costs certainly curtails the milk supply, increasing demand and prices. Corn for grain is only one of those costs, but it is an important one. If ethanol production is part of the reason for grain price increases, it is part of the reason for higher food costs. Here is more on the matter.

The final word

On the organic vs conventional debate. Of course it won't really be the final word, but this is the best written and most comprehensive article I have seen on the subject. It is long, but well worth the time it takes to read it, as Jackie Anver obviously knows of what she speaks. I wish I could write as well.

Here are a couple of excerpts from her column.

Organic milk certainly is not fresher than regular milk. Regular milk is pasteurized and has a shelf life of about 20 days. Organic milk is ultrapasteurized, a process that is more forgiving of poor quality milk, and that increases the shelf life of milk to about 90 days. Some of the Horizon organic milk boxes I've seen at Costco have expiration dates in 2008! There is a powerful incentive for retailers to put the ultrapasteurized organic milk on the shelf just before the expiration date, so consumers will think the organic milk is as fresh as the regular milk. After all, consumers are paying twice as much for the organic product.

Socially conscious consumers have a right to know that "organic" doesn't mean what it did 20 years ago. According to the Oct. 16, 2006, cover story in Business Week, when you eat Stonyfield Farms yogurt, you are often consuming dried organic milk flown all the way from New Zealand and reconstituted here in the U.S. The apple puree used to sweeten the yogurt sometimes comes from Turkey, and the strawberries from China. Importation of organic products raises troubling questions about food safety, labor standards, and the fossil fuels burned in the transportation of these foods.

I personally will not buy organic produce or food, because I feel that stores are deliberately misleading and overcharging me for something that is at least no different and at worst inferior, to regular, plain old, food. I have gone home without potatoes when our local Price Chopper had only organic on the shelf.

E-Train

Last year I took photographed a heifer I particularly liked, Frieland Andy ETrain. E is a daughter of the bull Golden Oaks Andy-ET out of a Citation R Maple daughter I bred from my Trixie family. Trixie was the heifer the boss bought me for Christmas way back when we were dating. She turned out to be a wonderful investment, giving us four daughters and one son that we kept (plus bulls that we sold) and starting a powerful cow family for us.

The bull we kept was Frieland Patriot, (as he was born on the Fourth of July), a Paclamar Bootmaker son. He only sired three daughters as we don't use homebred bulls much, but one of those, Beretta, was the dam of Beausoleil, mother of Bama Breeze, and one of the nicest cows I have ever owned.


E is a grown up milk cow now, and although Andy didn't turn out to be much of a sire of good udders, hers is fairly decent. I think that stems partly because Trixie was rated excellent on her mammary system and Citation R Maple didn't do too badly in that regard either, although now, long after his death, he is minus over 2000 pounds of milk.

Anyhow, here are some pics of E as a working girl.

Can lightning strick twice.....

....in the same place? Of course we all know that it can and does...after all, what do lightning rods do but encourage it to do so? But here is a poor guy who was personally (and painfully) struck twice, 27 years apart. Here is what to do if you are in a car, bus, or a vehicle with a ROPS and encounter a nearby storm.

Cammo and carrots

No frogs this summer! Normally as soon as the garden pond is up and running half a dozen show up to claim super-select bug guzzling spots and stay til fall. They soon ignore us completely and go about the serious business of slurping up mosquitoes and errant grasshoppers in contented oblivion. Some even accept handouts. In return for cheap entertainment we take the biggest garter snakes down below the bike path when we find them seeking frog leg lunches. (It is amazing how far we have to cart them before they stop coming back. They put homing pigeons to shame.) However, there have been no frogs this year....it has been too dry. Even up in the field potholes herpetiles have been rare as hen's teeth. Alan found one little green frog which he put in the garden pond a few weeks ago, but that is all.

The game of who can spot the hidden frogs (they have great cammo) loses some of its glamor when there is only one teeny-tiny frog (and an import at that). Then it rained most of our week at camp. It rained almost every day since too (putting a hellacious crimp in the hay baling I can tell you). Rainrainrain...thunderthundercrashinglightningstillmorerain. The driveway is a washout, barely passable by my SUV, (which I find I really NEED this year). It is too wet to pick zucchini. Or peas or beans. Too wet to weed. Too wet to mow the grass (which is growing again). It is no longer dry to say the least.


Yesterday Alan and I stopped by the pond for a game of find the frog. We hadn't seen even the little import in days. Simultaneously we spotted one....at least a foot a part! There were two! Then a third one plopped under a lily pad and frog-stroked for the bottom. Normally we get big, fat frogs; these were barely two inches long. (It makes spotting them even more of a challenge.) Wonder if the weather has anything to do with the small size or if it is just coincidence that we only have little ones this year. Doesn't matter. The pond, which is especially pretty this summer, is once again a fun place to visit.

We grew carrots in half a fifteen gallon barrel this summer. Our soil is so dense that normally you couldn't pull a halfway decent carrot without breaking it, (if you could even grow it in the first place), but a barrel makes it easy. (We grow lettuce, tomatoes and squash in them too.) Half a fifteen gallon barrel is the perfect depth. A mix of sand and compost equals perfect earth. The stuff we wash the pipeline with comes in such barrels and we only get three bucks if we redeem them so the price is right. They are easy to wash and just the right size for a wimpy old lady like me to drag around. Incidentally I have about six more out there in which the guys need to bore drainage holes pretty soon if I am going to have time to grow more carrots before winter.


I pulled this one for salad the other night and was astonished by the color though. Somehow I forgot all about planting Rainbow Carrot mix this year. Yellow is nice, now I can't wait for a purple one.

Where the buffalo roam

Wouldn't it be nice if Congress, animal rights activists and assorted other folks who don't feed the world were even half as concerned about the people whose cattle were slaughtered willy-nilly because of disease spread by government animals as they are about the bison? This is a new arrangement will let the bison wander ever farther outside the park, where they act as a reservoir for brucellosis in Montana.

From Rep. Denny Rehberg, "Let's not start throwing funds in on a federal level because of some guy from New York who's not familiar with the situation," said Rehberg's spokesman Bridger Pierce.

I guess I am one of those dummies from New York, (not that I don't agree with Rehberg,) but I will be darned if I see any sense in giving diseased animals more lee way. If you take some time to read some of the articles , you will probably be as mad as I am about how cheap the government was in compensating the ranchers and then turning around to force them to pay capital gains tax on what they gained by being forced to sell their cows for much less than they were worth. Bah!

So do they take a vote or what?

This summer the milk cows have been using two pastures, one up the hill, one down and around. Given the choice they seem to like up the hill better, but we can direct them either way just by changing the gates. However, for about three weeks now they have had their choice..both gates are open. Invariably they have gone up the hill, which turns out to be handier for the guys, who put their feeder wagons full of chopped oatlage and field peas there.

The night before last they all sort of drifted down toward the other pasture gate. They hung around down there a while, then changed their collective mind and went back up the hill.

Yesterday morning they did almost the same thing again. However, they just stayed by the gate looking indecisive and we went to breakfast wondering which way they would go.
When we returned, they had clearly gone down the hill and around the back to the old pasture. They came in full of milk and happy as larks.

Today it was back up the hill as if they had never heard of the downhill pasture.

So why did they all do that? It wasn't that Heather, the usual lead cow, took them, because she was lying on the bridge ignoring the whole affair. Nobody drove them. They just went.
Puzzling.

Oh, wow, what cows!

I chanced upon a wonderful site while whiling away a little time before milking this morning. Denise Rich paints fantastic cows..... dairy, beef, and even rodeo bulls. I completely lost track of what I was doing while I browsed through her paintings.

Lucky shot

The view from the outhouse

Should it finally materialize (off topic, but what the heck)

I will immediately listen to the singing on this video....all at once and without waiting a week for it to load. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs, (which the guys watch and which I can't seem to avoid watching even though I am really trying to read the latest JA Jance) is the only person I have ever heard sing the National Anthem without straining for a single, solitary note. All the way through, beautiful and painless. I could listen all day. Way to go, Mike.

Getting high speed Internet

Is not all that easy. I signed up the day we left for camp. I clearly and repeatedly informed the young telemarketing/pest gent who sold me the package that I would be away and no one else here deals with that stuff. He assured me that there would be no problem with that. Oddly enough the company's representatives were still frantic that they couldn't contact me instantly. However, along with high speed we also will receive some other services, including voice mail. Guess where they sent the phone calls about getting everything set up? Guess who had no way to access the new mailbox? So--o-o-o-o-o.....guess who spent an unconscionable length of time on the phone with someone with whom communication was challenging trying to get 'er done? Maybe I don't speak clearly. Maybe they don't. I dunno. I hope this gets better as we go along rather than worse. It is only a little more expensive than the tangled conglomeration of stuff that we use for phone and net now, but I am getting worried that it is going to be a lot more challenging to work with. Oh, well....

Congratulations

To the Red Scot at Adventures in Ruralia (and his wife and family, of course) on the birth of their first child. His son was born on the 4th of July and will share his special day with not only our great nation, but with me as well. I can say from experience that the Fourth is a wonderful birthday. Imagine a lifetime of imagining that all those fireworks are for you!

Things that make you say hmmm

Corn affects the weather......

Strange to be back

It is so odd to be home. I was kind of a park rat for so many years...Adirondack Park that is and it is easy to slip back into that world.

"Today the Park is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined."

Grandma and Grandpa Lachmayer had a camp there, not on a lake, but we had fun just the same. We stayed there darned near every summer weekend of my childhood. (I was hell on frogs.... needing to get a closer look at every single one I could find.) The special scent of moldy canvas can take me back to sleeping in a leaky tent and living on macaroni salad and hot dogs in an instant.

Then I lived in the park off and on as an adult. And camped in the park. Hiked the park. Canoed the park. Stayed in lean tos. Fished. Picked berries. Watched birds. Tried to garden....(a fascinating pastime with the short, short summers up there). It was another life than this one, as far removed from the high pressure of farming as keeping a diary is from working for the New York Times. Every year our visit to Peck's Lake turns me back into a person of simple wants and needs and few responsibilities for one short week. Then we come home and I morph back into farm wife, parent, writer, bookkeeper, and put on all the other hats I wear. It is like stepping out of one life, taking a trip back in time, then moving forward again. Weird but worth it I guess

Three mornings......More of why we love Peck's Lake

Home again, home again