Friday, February 10, 2012

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AgriCulture: The Off-Label Uses of Basil

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:

One of the minor mysteries that nagged at me while living in Turkey years ago was the pots of dwarf bush basil I saw on the sills of the village cottage windows along the Aegean coast. The mystery was that I never saw basil used in any way in Turkish cuisine, nor did I ever hear much mention of it.  Turkish cookery is so herb oriented with its heavy use of mint, dill, oregano, and rosemary that the absence of basil seemed strange. 

To me, it is very odd, given that Italy and Turkey are both Mediterranean countries, sharing so much culturally and climate-wise, that, while basil plays such a prominent role in Italian cuisine, it is virtually absent from Ottoman/Turkish cookery. Even odder, given that Turkish and Greek cultures were so intermingled for centuries, is that basil seems to be so much a part of Greek myth and folk belief while in Turkey it seems relegated, seemingly bereft of all associations, to village window sills.

I was thinking of this last month while potting the dwarf bush basil plants, labeled “Greek Basil,” I had started in the greenhouse in the late spring. This variety of basil is the one with the tiny leaves that mounds so beautifully if its end leaves are constantly pinched (thus both creating a little topiary and providing a convenient kitchen source for brightening up salads and other dishes).

I had similarly potted this variety, or one like it, about eight years ago after returning from Turkey with a tiny packet of miniscule black seeds, wild basil, which I eagerly planted with great success. But for some reason I had let the practice lapse (probably because I did not act soon enough collecting the seeds). The seeds were a gift from Erkan, the owner/captain of the yacht I usually charter for my trips. I had been in Bodrum, on the lower Aegean, making charter arrangements and was invited up into the surrounding hills to see the tiny subsistence level farm Erkan had grown up on.

I remember sitting outside his family’s farm cottage enjoying the fantastic view. Through a large cleft in the mountains, the turquoise waters of the Aegean sparkled, except where three barren cone-shaped islands, ancient mountain tops, poked through, barely rising out of the sea.  As I sat mesmerized, looking at this strangely primitive scene, Erkan asked me if I would like some of the basil seeds his father had foraged recently on the mountainside.

I knew that the Turkish peasantry still foraged a great deal, particularly in the spring. I had recently seen peasants carrying baskets overflowing with some kind of greenery, which, upon inspection, turned out to be wild marguerites. On further inquiry, I learned that the villagers sautéed them as a spring vegetable. This was a dish I had never seen in Turkish restaurants or in urban Turkish homes.

I also knew that the Turkish countryside was rich with herbs. In my first months of living in Izmir, Turkey, in the early sixties,  I remember having made out a list of vegetables and herbs I wanted our school buyer to get us from the market. He laughed when he saw rosemary, oregano, bay leaves, and thyme on the list and said “Oh, we don’t need to buy those. I can pick them for you in the fields.”  And he did. Subsequent hikes through the countryside revealed paths redolent with herbs, especially thyme, rosemary, and oregano but not basil.  However, in Bodrum, possibly because it was once primarily Greek-populated and the climate is right, basil seems to have naturalized.

Once I had Erkan’s gift seeds in hand, it seemed an opportune time to solve a few mysteries; for one, the purpose of the tiny pots of basil on cottage window ledges and, secondly, its absence from Turkish cuisine

“For deodorizing the rooms, and sometimes we use it,” Erkan glibly replied in such a way as to say “End of subject.” And this answer satisfied me for a time but, gradually, it occurred to me that in this part of the world everything was so fraught with meaning and symbol that this could not be the entire explanation.

I had learned from attending several Turkish funerals, for instance, that the bunch of rosemary dropped on the filled grave, the water poured on it, and the smashing of the ceramic water pot signified death and resurrection. And I had learned at the underwater archaeology museum in Bodrum from the centuries-old wrecks preserved there that a sprig of rosemary in ancient times traditionally hung from the mast or the roof of the ship’s cabin. And I became aware thereafter that even today in the yachts and small boats of the region, rosemary predictably can be found hanging somewhere. Obviously it was an ancient custom, rosemary functioning as some kind of protective talisman.

Are the pots of basil in the windows in Turkey there for reasons other than deodorizing the rooms? I assume they must be since there are so many rituals and beliefs associated with basil worldwide. In India, where it is generally believed basil originated, the herb is placed in the mouth of the dying to ensure that they reach God. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks believed it would open the gates of heaven. And it is known from an examination of mummies that Egyptians used basil in the embalming process.

In European lore there seems to be good basil and bad basil. In some, basil is the symbol of Satan, and some Greek beliefs associate basil with hatred. On the good side, it is believed that basil was found around Christ’s tomb after the resurrection, hence its use in holy water, and its presence beneath altars in most branches of Orthodox Christianity.

On a more romantic level, in Portugal a pot of dwarf bush basil is traditionally presented, along with a poem and pompom, to a sweetheart on the religious holidays of Saint John and Saint Anthony. A friends tells me that in Sicily, a pot of dwarf basil on the windowsill is the sign of a house of prostitution—they seem to have one-upped the young swains in Portugal. In eastern Turkey, a brothel is signaled more subtly, with the glow of a lighted cigarette in a dark window. Slowly, in stages, the glow moves towards the window becoming brighter and brighter, ending with a puff of smoke before withdrawing gradually in stages, leaving blackness. Very mysterious; almost hypnotic. Too dark for potted basil, I guess.  And definitely too dark to see the lady.

So where, I wonder, is the basil lore of the Turks?  One possible clue: Our name for the plant “basil” apparently derives from Greek. There are two theories regarding the derivation of the word; one is that it derives from the word “basileus,” above, meaning “king” or “royal”, another, that it comes from the word “basilisk,” the half-lizard/half-dragon monster of mythology, right, known for its fatal piercing stare and equally fatal breath. In popular Greek lore, the medicinal application of basil leaf was believed to protect one from the stare, breath, and even bite of the basilisk.

Is it possible that the pot of basil on the window ledges of cottages along the Aegean hark back to this protective function, guarding the vulnerability of an open window? Possibly, since nowhere else in Anatolia do Greek and Turkish cultures fuse so closely as along the Aegean. But, then, I may never know, as I have yet to meet a Turk who would speak to me about basil. —Peter Davies
 
For the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.  AgriCulture fans who would like to continue receiving Peter Davies’ and Mark Scherzer’s essays, may sign up for their weekly e-mail at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/23/11 at 08:02 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Leading a Lamb to Assisted Living

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes: 
 
Since I wrote about the dilemma of what to do with an increasingly frail elderly ewe a few months ago, a number of people have asked me “What happened to Marina?”  We debated her fate at length. Peter convinced me that she and her twin sister, Mira, and the two other elderly ewes, Brigid and Kybele*, who arrived here together 10 years ago, would have a terrible winter ahead.  He worried that because they were increasingly unable to keep up with the herd, they would be prime candidates to be torn up by coyotes.  I reluctantly agreed it was time for them to go, and we arranged to send them off to slaughter—there’s a market for older animals as dog food. 

I’m thrilled to report, however, that at the last minute Peter called around and instead found a home for all four of them at a wonderful institution, the Catskill Animal Sanctuary in Saugerties.  We took them last Monday, and it seems it will be a fine home for them, run by delightful, caring folks who did not have the doctrinaire,“farmer as enemy” attitude I feared.  Instead of becoming dog food, these two sets of devoted sisters are now happily retired to assisted living in the farm animal version of DelRay Beach. [*Kybele’s first lambing resulted in twins, one of which she rejected because of insufficient milk.  The author, above with the rejected twin Orhan, whom he and his partner bottle-fed and castrated to be the herd wether.  Orhan now leads the herd.]

The reason I had concerns about our reception was a certain anti-farm zealotry that sometimes comes across from those associated with farm animal sanctuaries.  I got a sense of this antipathy just a couple of weeks ago, when Peter (right) told me about Joe Donahue’s interview on WAMC radio with Jenny Brown, of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary.  In the interview, she recounted the saga of Kayli the cow. Kayli recently escaped while awaiting slaughter at a Halal slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania. Her cause was adopted by local animal rights activists; she was pardoned by Pennsylvania’s governor, and finally brought to the Sanctuary in Woodstock to live out her days as a celebrity cow.

It all sounded quite heartwarming—who would not root for a cow escaping death?—but Peter suggested to me that there was a certain anti-agricultural subtext.  I listened to the interview, in which Ms. Brown sounded quite reasonable.  I then turned to the Sanctuary’s website.  There “the subtext” was in bold relief, essays ostensibly about factory farming, but which paint with such a broad brush, they could be used to condemn all livestock raising.

True believers concern me.  I admire their passion and commitment, but always worry that their allegiance to a particular vision of an ideal world might make things in the real real world in which we live worse. This has certainly seemed true of late with the rigid ideological zealots of the Tea Party in Congress. The Woodstock Sanctuary has an admirable mission of saving abused and neglected farm animals, but, from what I can discern from its website, it is also guided by a rigid ideology that rests on some unexamined assumptions and damaging misinformation about farm life.  The effect of the misinformation is to set up opposition between two groups—small, humanely-run farms and farm animal sanctuaries—that ought to be allies in a shared effort to see that farm animals are well cared for.

Let’s start with the unexamined assumptions.  The story of Kayli, like many of the essays on the website, rests on the assumption that saving farm animals from slaughter promotes happier lives for them.  The story does not confront an uncomfortable underlying truth: the only reason people support farm animals—provide food, shelter, and attention—is because they serve human needs. If Kayli had not been raised for food, she probably never would have lived at all.

Indeed, over thousands of years of selective breeding, livestock have been essentially created by man to serve as human food or fiber sources.  The creatures we’ve created rely on us, not only for their sustenance, but also for protection. If allowed to roam free and reproduce naturally, it is likely that, in short order, they would face extinction. Domesticated livestock do not have the resources or genetic imprint to live on their own.  They would be easy prey for predators.

The evil the Sanctuary says it is trying to address is inhumane, unhealthy and environmentally unsound factory farming.  The Sanctuary tells us that agriculture has changed: our picture of the small family farm, with contented animals grazing out in pasture, is at least fifty years out of date, and the factory farming that has largely replaced it is full of unspeakable horror.  I couldn’t agree more.  But the Sanctuary’s remedy is to stop eating meat, poultry and eggs altogether, and even to stop using wool. There is no mention of the obvious alternative of encouraging the movement so evident in our region of raising livestock in a humane and sustainable way.  If the Woodstock Sanctuary approach prevailed, the only place you would find farm animals would be at the Sanctuary and like institutions, or on the estates of the rich folks who keep them as pets.  Ironically, achieving that goal would jeopardize the continued existence of the very animals that are the objects of the Sanctuary’s work.

Believing that all farm animals will enjoy natural, happy lives if only we stop raising them for food or fiber is kind of like believing that cutting taxes for wealthy people creates jobs—it’s essentially a religious conviction lacking empirical support.  When, to support its arguments, the Woodstock website offers facts beyond those about the horrors of factory farming, many of those facts seem to have been created to justify their ideology rather than their ideology growing out of the facts.

Consider these passages from their section on what’s wrong with using wool:

WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: “Supposedly, shearing a sheep is a humane practice because the sheep would otherwise be burdened with kilograms of excess wool. This, of course, is a myth. Sheep grow enough wool to cover, insulate and protect themselves. It is only through human involvement that the wool grows faster because it is constantly being sheared off. Sheep are sheared each spring, after lambing, just before they would naturally shed their winter coats.”

Actually, the human effect on the growth of wool on sheep is the result of eight thousand years of selective breeding.  Beginning with Ovis Orientalis, a hairy goat-like wild animal, man bred domesticated animals to produce far more fibers than the animals themselves needed, in order to serve human needs.  Shearing removes this excess fiber.  Anyone involved in raising sheep knows that without shearing their wool grows longer and thicker and becomes matted—a big source of discomfort once hot weather arrives. The matted wool around the anus can become caked with manure, creating a breeding ground for maggots and flies.  Further, sheep do not naturally shed their winter coats.  This we know from the few times we have been late getting our shearing done or when we’ve decided not to shear the new lambs born in the spring. 

WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: “Timing is considered critical. Shearing too late means loss of wool. In the rush, many sheep die from exposure after premature shearing.”

Give me a break.  I’ve never seen or even heard of this happening on farms like ours. Our twice a year shearing is timed to give the sheep relief from summer heat (the spring shearing) and to give them time to grow back a nice coat for winter (the fall shearing). Judging from the challenges of scheduling our expert shearer, Bruce McCord, everyone else is on pretty much the same schedule.  Our shearing is about as threatening to the sheep as a haircut would be to a human.

WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: “Every single year, hundreds of lambs die before the age of 8 weeks from exposure or starvation. Many mature sheep die every year from disease, lack of shelter, and neglect.”

Out of the millions of lambs born each year world wide, “hundreds” or “many” die? The vague numbers themselves (asserted without any citation to scientific literature) should give you an idea of just how serious an issue this is.  Most breeders we know of create warm, sheltered environments similar to our birthing pens in the barn for sheep to have their lambs, and buy milk substitute to bottle feed the lambs if their mothers are unable to nurse them. Some breeders even make tiny garments for their newborn lambs to keep them warm. If you want a sense of the environment that sheep on small scale farms enjoy, go to the sheep barns at the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival in October.

No birth (sheep or human) is risk free, but you can be sure that livestock keepers, for whom the sheep have value, take measures to avoid risk. Sheep are quite hardy and can give birth successfully even outside in January blizzards, but if you want to see a big increase in deaths from exposure among the more vulnerable lambs, stop raising sheep agriculturally and let them roam wild.

WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: “Many people do not know that the sheep farming industry involves abuse, pain and suffering. The animals are often treated inhumanely and are made to undergo severe amounts of pain and brutality. Lambs’ ears are punched, their tails cut off and the males castrated all without anesthesia within the first few weeks of their lives.”

Is punching lambs’ ears (that is, piercing ears for identity tags) painful abuse? Tell that to the millions of men and women who elect to pierce their ears, noses, lips and nipples, solely for cosmetic reasons. As to the admittedly less comfortable issue of castration, there’s a balancing of cost (including the minimal pain to the animal if done right) and benefit, as I discussed a couple of weeks ago in this space. You can make up your own mind, but in doing so, keep in mind that humane societies and animal shelters, which are not raising animals for either food or fiber, generally require neutering of both males and females before they release animals for adoption. Is the SPCA then guilty of abuse? There are many good reasons for limiting reproduction.

WOODSTOCK WEBSITE: “While animals such as egg-laying hens, dairy cows and wool-bearing sheep are not immediately killed to procure their salable products, they suffer tremendously for years prior to their ultimate and unavoidable slaughter.”

As to whether keeping of sheep generally leads to lives of pain and abuse, I am sure the operators of the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary, and the readers of this blog, could readily find dozens of farms to visit within less than an hour’s drive of home where suffering is simply not part of the picture.  I believe that, in our region, farms that make humane treatment of their livestock a priority far outnumber factory farms. If the evil is factory farming, then an attack on all livestock farms and all use of meat and fiber is far too broad a remedy.

Folks are certainly entitled to believe that the ultimate slaughter of animals for food is distasteful or immoral; being vegetarian or vegan on that ground is, to my mind, a readily defensible philosophy. But what is not defensible is justifying that philosophy by speading misinformation that implies that raising animals for meat or fiber necessarily involves pain or abuse.  Failing to adequately draw the distinction between factory farming and humane farming implicitly vilifies the many people of good faith who live with farm animals and care deeply about their welfare even as they choose to continue the very human practice of eating meat. 

As the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy has argued for years, without a market for meat, most farm animal breeds would become extinct, resulting in the loss of our agricultural heritage.  If raising farm animals is restricted to the few farm animal sanctuaries that have room for a breeding pair or two, these breeds will not be preserved.  If the Woodstock Sanctuary were to succeed in its goal of “saving” all farm animals from their fate, it would ultimately be dooming cows like Kayli to extinction. —Mark Scherzer
 
For the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/15/11 at 04:32 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Turns Out the Philanderer Also Farms, In a Way

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine Andrew Goldman revisited Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, whose political career and marriage went down in flames when it came to light that he was having an affair with an Argentinian “soul mate.” Since Turkana Farms’ Mark Scherzer and Peter Davies are taking a week’s break from blogging, we thought it timely to revisit Davies July 1, 2009 commentary on the matter. As we pointed out then, it’s not every farming blogger who can do what Davies, a Yale-educated former English professor and dramaturg, has done:  a deep reading of Sanford’s e-mails that expose a far more alarming character flaw than mere philandering.

Some of you may have read Governor Sanford’s e-mails for their salacious content.  We, on the other hand, read them for what they have to say about modern agriculture.  We are all familiar with American Gothic, but South Carolina Governor Sanford in one of his e-mails to his lady in Argentina sent last July inadvertently defines what we might call,  “Modern American Bucolic,” He wrote:
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“Got back an hour ago to civilization and am now in Columbia after what was for me a glorious break from reality down at the farm. No phones ringing and tangible evidence of a day’s labors. Though I have started every day by 6, this morning woke at 4:30, I guess since my body knew it was the last day, and I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up.”

That his farm experience consists of running an excavator says something about him and possibly about what we have come to see as farming in today’s industrialized America.  It all sounds much like George W. Bush’s favorite ranch chore, “clearing brush.”  Clearing brush for what?  Excavating for what? But it gets better. Sanford continues:

“To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds - and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt.”

Country music playing, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine and…. “tranquility!?”  How, one wonders, does tranquility break through the din?  How on earth, one might ask, is he alive to the dawning of the morning light, driving as he is with his headlights on?  It reads to me like a modern advertising script selling big vehicles with all the accouterments by invoking imagery from once authentic Romantic ideals.  Undoubtedly, the country music (heard, no doubt, through head phones) is faux, the windows are rolled up (to keep in the air conditioning),  the hands on the steering wheel of a big roaring excavator are manicured.  But somewhere in his trendy head the faint intimation, a vague sense, that one should, when in a landscape of “trees and marsh,” experience the tranquility of nature.  Perhaps his distorted experience with nature mirrors the confusion of his moral and ethical standards. A family man, a devout Christian, a moral majority type,  an outspoken critic of Clinton’s sexual antics—but also someone who, as it turns out, admits to dalliances over a twenty year period, and who is finally Tartuffe-like discovered to be having a passionate affair with his Argentine soul-mate.

But I digress. The image of him on his excavator with his headlights on also called to my mind our strangely unmechanized farm. Our lack of a tractor has caused consternation from several quarters. We have, for instance, had a farm laborer candidate refuse to work for us because we had no tractor. We have had the sons from a neighboring farm stop, barely veiling their condescension, to comment derisively on seeing us out working with a hoe and shovel.  And we have had people come up to us at local social events to say satirically, “So, you are the Luddites.”

While we are certainly not Luddites, I must admit that somewhere in my mind is a contrast between the fields and plots of traditional Anatolian Turkey (which I visit often), filled with bands of peasants planting, weeding, and hoeing, and the typical people-less American farm scene.  On returning from a stay in Turkey I am always struck by the sterility of most American farms, where tractors and other farm vehicles move endlessly up and down row after row of soybeans or corn. Farming in America is no longer a hands on operation, not even in instances where it still could be.

As we have found, the pressures to mechanize are great and the prejudice against actually doing handwork very strong to the point that much of what could be better and more cheaply done by hand must instead be done to the roar of a motor. This is not to say that there are not plenty of instances in which the use of a tractor at Turkana Farms is crucial. On that score we are quite pragmatic.

When we need brush hogging done for instance, which involves hours of driving up and down the fields mowing the pastures, we call on near by neighbors with tractors who are always eager to make some extra money.  And if we need 900-pound round bales moved or to have our massive compost pile turned, we, likewise, can call on our neighbor’s services. But on a day-to-day basis, we, along with our two farm helpers, manage with hand tools and garden carts to care for our forty acres and a menagerie of livestock. And, in this way, we do experience a good measure of tranquility—real, not faux, tranquility—and in every kind of light (except headlights) can fully appreciate the beauties of the natural world we seek to tame.

Turkish Whole Fava Bean Pods in Olive Oil

For 1 lb. favas:

1/3 to ½ cup of olive oil in a cast iron skillet or heavy enameled pot with a tight-fitting cover
Heat on a medium flame
Add a couple of cloves of garlic, and once they have softened, add the fava bean pods.  Toss in the oil to fully coat
Turn heat to low, cover tightly and cook, stirring once or twice, for 10 to 15 minutes, until pods begin to turn a little yellow
Then add boiling water to cover, the juice of one lemon, a tablespoon of sugar, salt and pepper to taste. Simmer uncovered on low flame for about 1 to 1 ½  hours, until beans are soft and liquid turns to a syrupy consistency
Allow to cool; serve at room temperature, garnished with chopped dill. 

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/09/11 at 01:28 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Blue Ribbon Okra, Plus Recipes

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:

One of our best kept secrets is that our farm, Turkana Farms, won first prize, a beautiful blue ribbon with gold letters reading “First Premium,” for our okra entry at the Columbia County Fair a few years ago. The ribbon is proudly displayed on the wall of the farm office.  An even better kept secret (until now): we were the only farm that entered okra in the competition. So we must admit that our pride in our blue ribbon has been severely compromised.

One thing the experience taught us is that not many people in this region are familiar with okra. The public’s reaction to our plate of artistically arranged okra in Columbia County’s New Faces of Agriculture booth was, “What is that?” This response corroborated what we had learned a number of years ago when we tried selling our vegetables at the Saturday Hudson Farmer’s Market. When our okra began producing, we were certain that, with the large African American population in Hudson, we would have to meet a big demand. But this was not to be since, apparently, after living up here for generations and buying their food at the standard supermarkets, Hudson’s African Americans no longer remember or value this signature food of the South. Only Hudson’s small Bengali community recognized our okra and purchased it.

It was not until my early twenties that I was introduced to okra. And this was by my then mother-in-law-to-be, May Johnson. Although she was born and spent her early childhood in Scotland, she had absorbed a Southern-oriented cuisine growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana.

She sliced the okra pods crosswise into thin disks and sauteed them in oil with a little chopped onion until the okra was crisp and nutty in flavor. I liked it.  It was a fortuitous introduction as, within a few years, I found myself living in Turkey, where okra, known as “bamya,” occupies an important niche in its cuisine.  And I received yet another infusion of enthusiasm for okra when I subsequently moved to New Orleans, the land of gumbo. As a result of all of these wonderful introductions, okra has become a favorite in my summer diet.
 
Wikepedia tells us that okra (Abelmoschus esculentus Moench) is a flowering plant in the mallow family. There is some controversy about this, but it is also believed to be related to such species as cotton, cacao, and hibiscus. Its leaf structure vaguely resembles that of marijuana, apparently getting at least one grower in trouble with the law. However, Mark, who knows more about these things than I , doesn’t think the two leaves would be easy to confuse.  In our region, we are lucky to get okra to grow knee high but in much hotter Texas it apparently can grow to 8 or 10 feet.

Okra is also known in English-speaking countries as lady’s fingers or gumbo.”Lady’s fingers” must have been a euphemism, as it is my opinion that a more phallic term would be more appropriate.  In India, its Hindi name is “bhindi or “bhendi”, terms you have undoubtedly seen on Indian restaurant menus.

Okra is cultivated for its edible, green seed pods, which are picked at an immature stage. If not picked soon enough, they become woody and inedible, usable only in powdered form as a thickener in Creole cooking. Its hibiscus-like yellow or white flower with bright red centers is a strangely delicate flower for such an otherwise coarse-looking plant. The flowering plant, however, is considered so decorative that it is sometimes included in perennial gardens.  Okra requires very hot weather, and is, therefore, in this region, a marginal crop, since it will not thrive during a cool summer. Once the temperature goes below 50 degrees it stops growing, and the leaves begin to brown, curl, and drop off. We had that experience a number of times when we first started growing okra. Significantly, it is easier to grow okra here now than it was ten years ago—another sign of global warming.

There is some dispute about the origins of okra, since it is now cultivated in tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate regions worldwide, but it is generally believed that okra originated in West Africa. In corroboration of this, our word “okra” appears to be cognate with “Okuru and ila” in two languages, Igbo and Yaruba, spoken in Nigeria.

The spread of okra, at least in the places I know, seems to be associated with slavery. Historically, the cultures of the American South, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arabic world all included slavery as an important institution, and imported huge numbers of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.  It is known that slaves often carried with them into captivity seeds, including okra seeds. It is no accident, therefore, that okra is very much a signature food in these former slave holding regions.

Okra, according to surviving records, was being grown in Brazil by 1658. It is thought that by the early eighteenth century okra had been introduced to southeastern United States. It is known that by 1748 it was grown as far north as Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson, our most agriculturally attuned president, noted that it was well established in Virginia by 1781. [Page from Jefferson’s farm book, left, headed “Note of the Negroes Taken, 1783.”]

One thing those uninitiated to the joys of okra seem to know is that it is “slimy”. True, it is mucilaginous, resulting in the characteristic “goo” or “slime” when the seed pods are cooked in a certain way such as in gumbos, stews, and soups, where it acts as an ideal thickener.

But apart from these well known uses, it can be cooked in a way that minimizes its mucilaginous characteristics. Some of the ways include stir frying it with acidic ingredients such as citrus, tomatoes, and vinegar; or sprinkling it with a few drops of lemon juice; or cooking the whole pods very quickly leaving them al dente; or, as mother-in-law May taught me, slicing the pods into thin discs and sautéing them.  A popular preparation in the Deep South is to bread okra pods and deep fry them. Okra is also, as I found in my travels, quite tasty when pickled, a dish popular in Arab and Turkish regions.

For those nutrition-minded readers, you should know that okra is a rich source of many nutrients, including fiber, vitamin B6 and folic acid. And because of its mucilaginous characteristic, it has many beneficial effects on the intestinal tract, in particular, preventing and treating constipation.

Rather than end on this odd note, may I, dear reader, offer you a few recipes:

A Southern Okra Recipe with Cornmeal

10 pods okra, sliced in ¼ inch pieces
1 egg beaten
1 cup cornmeal
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
½ cup vegetable oil

1. In a small bowl, soak okra discs in egg for 5 to 10 minutes

2. In a medium bowl combine the cornmeal, salt, and pepper

3. Heat oil in a large skillet over a medium high heat.

4. Dredge okra in the cornmeal mixture coating evenly.

5. Carefully place okra in hot oil; stir continuously. Reduce heat to medium when okra first starts to brown and cook till golden

7. Drain on paper towels

An Easy Indian Recipe for Okra

3 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion chopped
1 pound sliced fresh okra
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½  teaspoon ground ginger
½  teaspoon ground coriander
¼ teaspoon ground black pepper
salt to taste

1. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat

2. Add the onion and cook till tender

3. Stir in the okra and season with cumin, ginger, coriander, pepper, and salt, and stir for a few minutes

4. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cover the pan. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally until the okra is tender.

My Own Variation on Sauteed Okra

¼ cup of olive oil
A dozen or so okra pods cut into ¼ inch discs spread out on a paper towel
½ small onion chopped
1 clove of garlic chopped
1 cup of chopped tomatoes
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon of ground black pepper
juice of half a lemon

1. Heat a heavy skillet with the olive oil over medium/high heat. When hot add onions and sauté till soft, adding garlic towards the end

2. Turn up heat; add the okra discs and brown on both sides

3. Add chopped tomatoes and stir turning the heat down once the tomato sauce is hot. Salt and pepper to taste.
Cover the pan and allow to simmer till okra is tender (or if you prefer al dente)

4. Move to serving bowl and add lemon juice.  Serve hot or at room temperature with lemon slices on the side.

—Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/30/11 at 10:02 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Pleasure Principle

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes: 
 

On this extremely hot afternoon smack in the middle of a short (we hope) heat wave, I am very thankful not to be living in the Midwest, where the extremely hot afternoon would have been preceded by a month of similarly awful hot afternoons and followed (if forecasts are accurate) by a seeming eternity of awful hot afternoons.  For us, the heat brings to the fore one of the farm responsibilities we haven’t had to pay much attention to most of the summer:  Since the early days of spring, the animals have managed to make themselves comfortable without tremendous effort on our part.  These days, they need our help.

Until the other day, I did not know that there is a science of animal comfort:  “hedonic ethology”.  The New York Times Science section this week had a report by Katherine Bouton on a new book on this topic, The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure by Jonathan Balcombe.  I have not yet read the book, but The Times assures us it is not merely an album of cutesy photos of piglets tumbling in play, macaques sunning themselves together on rocks, and giraffes nuzzling with their young.  It has a serious accompanying text, in which it is argued quite logically that animals’ ability to feel pain, which everyone would acknowledge, must naturally imply an inverse ability to experience pleasure.  That ability reinforces our growing understanding that animals are fully sentient beings and that we, therefore, have an ethical responsibility to treat them well in order to increase their pleasure. Not that we act entirely without self interest here.  As Balcombe points out, happier animals have better survival and reproductive success.

We are pretty sure that we’ll increase the animals’ pleasure these days if we give them ways to avoid the heat of the sun. Our cows need no help on this score since they have discovered the coolest, breeziest spots themselves, one of them just across the fence from the cool, breezy spot where we most like to sit in the back yard.  The cows know how to find comfort.  But the sheep are less resourceful about shade.  They don’t seem to understand that trees will supply relief on super hot days;  the only shady spot they crave seems to be the barn.  Most of the summer, we try to exclude them from the barn except for brief visits for grain treats.  But when the heat is this excessive we accede to their wish for indoor time on the cool shaded concrete floor of the barn.  We reconcile ourselves to having to muck out the mess they leave in the barn when the weather cools down a bit.

Like us, in this heat the animals also need to be frequently and amply hydrated,  This means refilling water tanks for all the animals two or even three times a day.  Even when water containers appear to have plenty of water, we’ve got to test the temperature and often dump and refill them with cold water, as the animals are just as unenthusiastic about drinking hot water as we might be.

There is always the danger that we extrapolate too much from human experience in determining what will make animals happier and more comfortable.  Observing them closely is the only way to really learn their preferences.  Some of our observations almost rise to the level of the scientific method, perhaps making us hedonic ethologists. Three weeks ago, for example, I thought we were able through observation to establish a clear hierarchy of bovine pleasures.  We were finally trading our beloved bull, Tommy, for a new one, with a different blood line, from Herondale Farm.  (We had initially scheduled the trade for late May but Jeremy Peele, Herondale’s owner, thought we had better postpone until July when he was ready to place his bulls with the cows for breeding.  Introducing a new face to the bull pen without the distraction of cows in heat to breed, he suspected, would lead to fighting.)

In order to avoid conflict and make for a smooth exchange when Jerry arrived with the new bull, we wanted to confine Tommy to the paddock.  I figured apples, which cows love, would be the way to draw him in.  I went up to Tommy, who was standing in the shade nearby, with a bucket of apple slices.  He was, as I predicted, quite happy to eat them from my hand.  At least while he was standing in the shade.  But he was not, it turned out, willing to follow me out into the hot sun of the paddock just to get more slices.  Shade trumped food.  What to do?

When Jerry, practiced stockman that he is, arrived, he immediately fixed on a solution.  He asked whether we had any cows in heat.  We knew we did as our youngest cow and Tommy had been bellowing across the fence at each other for days.  At Jerry’s suggestion, Peter moved that cow into an adjoining paddock near the barn where Tommy could see her.  And when she appeared there, Tommy was out of the shade and into the paddock, where we wanted him, in a flash.  On that hot summer Sunday, we executed what seemed to me to be a perfectly controlled scientific experiment, in which two stimuli competed with a third, and clearly established a hierarchy of urges.  Shade may have trumped food, but both were completely eclipsed by the power of sexual desire.  Peter has questioned the validity of my experiment’s design and conclusion, saying that it could just have been that Tommy sensed a trap when I tried to lead him with apples, a trap he did not sense when he saw the cow.  But I’d like to think of that observation as my coming of age as a hedonic ethologist.

According to the Times, Balcome also suggests that animals may experience their own unique pleasures, types of pleasure inaccessible to humans.  Maybe so. As we’ve learned, some animals have special needs and special mechanisms for making themselves comfortable.  Pigs have no pores and hence cannot sweat.  Their best mechanism for cooling down is to dig a hole in a wet spot, a wallow, and lie in it.  Hence the expression, “Happy as a pig in mud”.  In this heat, even our marshy back field where the pigs spend the summer has been drying up, so every morning, we dutifully run a hose to five or six of their favorite wallows to create the mud for them, giving them a most welcome shower in the process if they’re around when we’re doing it.  Carmen and Miranda used to love such showers so much they went into hilarious pirouettes to get the full effect.

But should this pleasure of the wallow really be reserved to pigs alone?  Lacking air conditioning, and closely observing the pigs’ pleasure,  I’m contemplating that we might enjoy having a mud wallow of our own.  If the heat keeps up more than another day, this is going to the top of my Project List, so that we, too, can be happy as pigs in mud. —Mark Scherzer
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/24/11 at 05:23 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Great Release

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes: 
 

This is the week of the great release. Our 100 or so heritage turkey poults finally, after more than two months of confinement, have reached a size that they no longer can be carried off by the red tailed hawks and other predators. So we opened the hatch to the outside and most of them (the brave ones) rushed out excitedly for their first experience of sunlight and wind, and reveled in their freedom to forage for themselves. They found their new world to be a spacious compound grown up with waist high oats and weeds,  which, in not much more than a month, they will graze as bare as the Gobi Desert.

By the second day, the stay-at-homes and cautious ones had also joined the others outside. The liquid gurgling sound they made as they moved amongst the oats and weeds said everything about their pleasure. From now till Thanksgiving, they will spend every day on pasture, only to be driven into their sleeping porch at nightfall to protect them from predators. Discovering 19 of them one morning several years ago scattered about the compound, bloody and headless, ended their nights sleeping in the apple trees. It was a horned owl that did the deed, we think.

Our Toulouse goslings were next to be released. In the almost military order that is characteristic of the breed, they waddled, under my wand’s direction, in a tight gabbling phalanx down the block-long turkey compound to the lower pasture.and with just a few movements of my wand, they obediently marched into their new hut, where they will be closed in every night.

By the second day they were making cautious forays out into the pasture to graze. .But they have not yet worked up the courage to wander as far as the little pond under the willow. Turkeys typically rush in where angels fear to tread. But not geese.

Our shy, yellow ducklings next followed in the exodus from the brooder houses. But with their rather hysterical nature, there was no prospect of walking them in an orderly way to their new world. Instead they were gathered in a large garden cart, covered with a sheet and trundled to their portable pen, where they will safely overnight. We learned quite a few years ago that ducks could not survive outdoors at night, as each morning we had the depressing experience of discovering yet another missing or maimed duck. For us the expression “like a sitting duck” took on new resonance.

On the second day we left the portable duck pen door ajar, and soon most (but not all of them) mustered the courage to venture out to graze in the fenced area between the turkey compound and the vegetable garden. We are trying another breed this year, the Muscovy, actually a type of duck most people are familiar with. Unfortunately we could not convert our customers into accepting the smaller, leaner French Rouen duck despite our eloquent explanations and the French recipes we supplied. This new, improved breed of Muscovy will, we have been assured by our hatchery, reach a much larger size and in a shorter period of time.

In the next few days our fifty meat chickens, the French Freedom Rangers, will also be released, leaving their brooder boxes to take up residence on pasture, sleeping at night in their portable pen for safety.  We are leaving the Cornish/cross chickens we have grown in the past behind for the Freedom Rangers, which are a relatively new French breed, pasture grazers that produce, we think, a better tasting chicken. Last year we raised an equal number of each breed, and we invited our customers to sample both and give us their responses. On the basis of those responses and our own tastings, as well as some research into fat and nutrient content, we have voted this year to move entirely into Freedom Rangers even though they take considerably longer to reach market size.

Would that things ran this smoothly with the vegetable garden and berry bushes. A particularly brutal winter seems to have considerably reduced the berry crops this year. Strawberries were sparse and small and rather malformed. And the birds and chipmunks seem to have gotten most of them. The raspberries are also producing a pathetically sparse crop; hopefully on the next flowering we will be lucky. The gooseberries and black currants (partly because of the winter and Mark’s radical pruning) likewise have produced very little. Only the blackberries, it seems, are going to live up to their potential. We are thankful we planted the hardy Illini breed.

Our vegetable garden struggles along, enduring days and days of rain and high humidity and precious little sun. Rain seems to come these days only in deluges, and the sun, when it does appear, is scorching. Thunder storms and winds have become increasingly violent. And there has been the constant threat of hailstorms and even tornadoes. These extremes of weather are not conducive to growing crops.

But while plants like tomatoes (which are again threatened by tomato blight), and corn (which so far has looked rather stunted) have not been thriving, spinach and lettuce have. And, surprisingly, as we discovered as we took up our garlic this weekend, we have produced the most beautiful and bountiful crop yet. But so far this is one of the few bright spots.

The news we have been getting from other farmers supports our impression that, indeed we are experiencing the effects of climate change. Perhaps only a know-nothing faction of the Republicans can believe that this is not happening. But with matters having to do with climate, we should not be in the realm of religion (which is a matter of faith and belief) but rather science (which is a matter of empirical observation).

It is hard for me to imagine that farmers can remain Republicans for long when they see what they are experiencing so directly and intensely on a daily basis adamantly denied.
—Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/16/11 at 01:22 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Why We (Um)...Castrate

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes: 
 
If you want to know what empathy is, follow the expression on a young man’s face as he assists at a piglet’s castration.  Last Sunday I watched bemusedly as Tony, below, who is helping us part time this summer, darted a glance quickly down at the tiny piglet whose leg he was holding, widened his eyes, winced in almost visceral pain, and then intently stared off into distant space, mouth contorted, while the surgery proceeded.  That was for the first piglet.  For the second one, he never shifted his gaze downward at all.
 
Even though we assemble three people to assist the vet (probably a bit overstaffed), castration day is always something of an ordeal.  It starts with catching the piglets.  I am the designated catcher, a task that varies in difficulty, depending on where the sow and her litter are housed.  If they are in the pen we have set up for this purpose, I simply have to deposit food in the corner we have created with a low fence.  The piglets enter through an opening in the fence too small for their mother to follow, and once they are in, I block the opening, locking them into the corner, then simply reach in and pick them up.  Last week, however, they were in one of the other pens lacking this feature, along with their mother, Jane (cousin to Eyre).  I had to climb into the pen,  fending off Jane. then use a large fisherman’s net to catch the scampering piglets, jumping out, with Jane in close pursuit.  One of the piglets escaped the net, forcing me to corner him again.  In a castration session a few years ago, one I was fortunate to have missed, a young kid we had hired to do the deed found himself backed up against the pen fence as the enraged sow charged him.  According to Peter, the poor guy, obviously powered by a surge of adrenaline, escaped by doing a backflip over the fence.
 
As piglets are caught and lifted from the ground, they emit loud squeals and unearthly shrieks, but once they are securely in my arms, they generally quiet down,  and my role in the castration becomes perhaps the least traumatic.  I clasp the back of the piglet to my chest, so he is facing away from me, my hands holding his front legs.  I murmur soothing words into his ears.  I can’t really see what’s going on below.  Meanwhile, Peter and an assistant face me, each holding one of the piglet’s hind legs away from the groin area.  They have a front row view as Elaine, our trusty, cool-headed vet, makes incisions and quickly yanks out the testicles. She is quite practiced at this, and it’s usually over in a matter of a minute or two.
 
During the operation itself, the piglets usually seem unaffected by pain and don’t seem to have much awareness of what’s going on.  And the minute you put them back down in the pen with their mothers, they return to nursing and running around as if nothing has happened.  Their relative equanimity about the process does not do away with the trauma for the human witnesses, however. We men, particularly, seem to feel the pain on behalf of the poor little piglets.  We don’t relish castration days.
 
So why do we do it?  The first reason that comes to mind is control of the testosterone level on the farm.  Intact males are aggressive, challenge each other and their owners, and create chaos when intent on breeding or establishing their pecking order.  We see the power of the sexual urge and male hormones every day. If we are to keep the peace and exercise reasonable control over the breeding schedule, we must carefully control the number and placement of intact males
 
But this is not the whole story behind castration.  There is yet another, even more compelling reason for this unsavory task—the flavor of the meat.  There seems to be near universal consensus in America today that meat from sexually mature intact males just doesn’t taste very good, especially as they get older.  Farmers I’ve spoken to say that male hormones makes the meat of all large livestock, including cattle and sheep, unpalatable,  but the distaste seems particularly strong where pigs are concerned.
 
Does the meat from mature intact males really taste different?  Our experience with the slaughter of a ram years ago suggested it did, but we haven’t made a scientific study of the question.  Others have.  I found a University of Wyoming study, for example, comparing palatability of intact rams with wethers.  They determined that the meat of wethers was generally more tender than that of young intact rams, though the flavor was similar.  But, they found, as rams age and became heavier, their meat also developes a marked “staggy” or ammonia-like odor.  This is not to most Americans’ taste, and I’m not sure if it is to anyone’s.
 
We do have customers who like somewhat older lambs, for their stronger flavor.  Our Uzbeki customers even like adult sheep up to 3 or 4 years old.  And of course the English and Australians have long loved their mutton.  But we have not yet found any customers clamoring for meat from intact males of any of our livestock.  I’ve seen wild boar on some menus, and found it quite tasty, but I assume that what is being served is either very young intact boars or simply feral female pigs.
 
If leaving the piglets intact did not make them unsaleable, we might well figure out ways to avoid the surgical castration.  Thankfully, when we turn our little bull calves into steers and little rams into wethers, no surgery is required.  Unlike pigs, these animals have hanging scrotums that can be removed by placing a band around them, above their testicles, that cuts the blood flow so the scrotum gradually atrophies and falls off.  I’ve been learning to do a reasonably good job of this myself, at least on the lambs, obviating the need for surgery.  But for the piglets, there is no alternative.
 
So why do we engage in this barbaric-appearing practice?  My friend George, disturbed that we might be doing this just for a minimal improvement in flavor, asked only half in jest, “What’s the next Turkana taste test? ‘Bovine Waterboarding: Added Flavor, or Just a Waste of Time?’  or ‘The Rack: Prior to the Kill, or Only in the Oven?’ ”  But it’s really the difference between enjoying flavorful and tender meat or ingesting something that tastes like ammonia.  Now that you realize its value, let us know if you’d like to volunteer to assist at the next castration.
—Mark Scherzer
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/09/11 at 07:59 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture:  The Farm and I

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes: 
 

Ah being a “farmer!” But, what’s in a name, as they say?  My first memory of the term is from baby nursery rhymes: 

“The farmer in the dell

The farmer in the dell

Hi ho the derry o.

The farmer in the dell”

And, of course:

“Old McDonald had a farm

Eey aye eey aye oh…”

But this one I found a bit wearing. Anyway, for a child, rhymes are all sound and rhythm and repetition. And not meaning.

Strangely, enough even in my early childhood, farming was not associated in my mind with food, even though as children we often rambled from our urban neighborhood in Cardiff, Wales out to a nearby farm to play. It was wartime Britain and food, as far as we were concerned, came from the British government’s food ration book.  For us, a farm was a place we went to romp in the pastures and wade in the stream. The closest these forays came to food was eating wild blackberries and gathering what we thought were wild mushrooms, which the adults in the family immediately discarded..

Once in this country, in Hinsdale, Illinois, I found myself, the only non-German, in Zion Lutheran School, enrolled there by my stepfather’s family, the Seesemans. Gradually I realized that many of my schoolmates were from German American farm families. And I found myself playing baseball in pastures hazardous with cow patties; and watching with horror and fascination an oversexed bull bashing through a barn wall; or munching on cracklings as the gory fall pig slaughter took place. And I reluctantly made family visits to distant relatives of my stepfather’s clan who lived on farms, which to my shock and dismay, had no plumbing but instead smelly out houses and outdoor hand pumps and buckets.

I was also learning to see farming in another way.  Next to the ubiquitous insult, “you spastic,” being called a “farmer” in the 1940’s and 50’s (as in “Oh, you farmer!”) was one of the worst and most constant put downs amongst my classmates.  in the Midwest of the time, being a farmer and, in fact, all things having to do with farms were decidedly not in fashion.. It would be decades before pie cabinets, pickle crocks, antique farm implements, and such would become fashionable, sought-after accoutrements.  At that time, they was mere farm trash.  America was then leaving its farm past behind. And fast.

Strangely enough, it was not till the 1970’s in the post-hippie Berkshires that, for me, the issue of farming came up again. To my surprise I found myself dubbed a kind of virtual farmer. In Great Barrington, just off Alford Road, I somehow fell in with, for a time, a coven of aging hippies occupying a huge, decaying stable building. The grizzled, bearded patriarch of the group, Jerry, I think his name was, somehow fancied himself a theatre writer.

Apparently on the basis of my theatre work at the Ark at nearby Simon’s Rock, Jerry had fixed on me as the lead for his musical version of, of all things,  Orwell’s Animal Farm. To my surprise, without auditioning I was cast as Farmer Brown and handed a script .

Somehow I did not feel like I was central casting’s idea of Farmer Brown. I still sometimes imagine how it all might have turned out, for, after a time with very little actual work done on the project, it vanished into an aromatic mist of Mary Jane, and never came to be.  And I was left a Farmer Brown manqué.

And now, of all things, I find myself an actual farmer—or a hobby farmer, or a gentleman farmer, depending on who you talk to.  I now realize that, although my stint as Farmer Brown was all too brief, it did prepare me for one thing: pigs. As you may recall, it is the pigs in Orwell’s classic who are most resentful of Farmer Brown. It is they who foment revolution amongst the other livestock, and it is they who ultimately become rulers of the farm once Farmer Brown has been disposed of.  And it is they who coined that wonderful revolutionary slogan: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Now with my nine years of hands-on experience with pigs, I believe Orwell got it exactly right. Pigs truly are the enemy within—or as we would call them today “terrorists.” Some of you undoubtedly recall the hell the late Carmen and Miranda put us through a year or so ago, both immortalized in my poem Two Pigs Who Like to Samba (reprinted here). Only Farmer Brown suffered more than we have from pigs.

 
As I sat at table last night munching on one of their succulent pork chops, the scenes of havoc and chaos they created passed once again before my eyes, almost spoiling my appetite. But then after a few glasses of wine and coffee and dessert,  I, in a brighter frame of mind, began nostalgically thinking back to the farmer in the dell and all the other incarnations of farming that I have passed through my imagination as I—and farms—have experienced constant and unending change. —Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/01/11 at 12:45 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Antibiotics, You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

  AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes: 

Lately I’ve been afflicted with the uncomfortable feeling that my fate is in the hands of other people. Last week it seemed almost all of those people were in Albany.

Such is the scope of our state capitol’s sway over my life that I’ve become an avid reader of the Albany Times Union Capitol Confidential blog.  While the Legislature was still in session, I was checking every couple of hours to see if they had made decisions that could determine where I will live in New York City (they extended and strengthened rent stabilization), how our domestic life might be organized (they authorized same sex marriage), how and at what price I will buy my health insurance (they left town without creating an effective State Health Care Exchange), and how I conduct my health-oriented legal practice (they made good changes in health insurance appeal rules).  All of these issues affect my life but were totally out of my control.

It is, therefore,  a considerable comfort to have the farm.  A big part of my life (Peter would say it’s far too big a part) is what I eat.  Producing the majority of my food supply gives me a modicum of feeling of control over that part, at least.

Since the food available in stores and the food we grow on the farm looks very much the same, it is good to have the occasional reminder of why that control is so important.  One reminder came in an email Peter received and passed on to me this week from a progressive on-line group, CREDO Action, asking us to actively support legislation banning routine use of antibiotics as an additive to animal feed.

Industrial agriculture generally uses antibiotics both as a prophylactic against disease and as a growth enhancer.  The need to prevent disease is, in part, a function of how the animals are raised.  If cattle are closely confined in feed lots, eating a diet of grain that their rumens were not designed to digest, and are standing in their own feces, or if poultry are raised cheek-by-jowl in indoor sheds breathing manure-laden dust, fast-spreading disease is a constant risk.  The need to enhance growth is a response to the high cost of feed and overhead. Bringing the animals to market faster reduces costs, thus enhancing the corporate bottom line. Sure, the immature animals don’t have the same flavor as slow grown older animals, but industry banks on consumers not being able to discern the difference in the quality of the meat. We often wonder if they are right.

Widespread subclinical antibiotic use is not solely an industrial farming practice.  Many small farms and hobby farms routinely buy commercial feed mixes that also contain antibiotics.  For certain types of non-organic feed, it is hard to find “non-medicated” varieties.  Non-medical antibiotic use, in fact, is widespread.  For all we read about overuse of antibiotics in humans, in this country, it is the livestock that ingest 70% of all antibiotics sold.

So what’s the problem?  Why not use the miracles of modern science to advance efficiency and augment food production?  One reason is that widespread use of antibiotics, accelerates the pace at which these drugs come in contact with the microbes they are intended to attack, thus also accelerating the pace at which those microbes develop resistance to those medicines. The result is an increase in diseases and infections that are antibiotic resistant, such as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a staph bacterium), which is now a major killer in the United States, and the antibiotic resistant strain of e-coli that killed many dozens of people in Germany just weeks ago.

A second problem is an increasing body of evidence that antibiotic residues in the meats we eat have adverse human health effects.  A short abstract I read in Veterinary World summarized the mechanisms by which antibiotics enhance growth in animals. It also detailed how the residues left in meat are toxic for humans, potentially causing harm to the liver, kidneys, and bone marrow, while raising the risk of cancer as well as reproductive and autoimmune disorders.

What are we doing to ourselves?

There is certainly a place for antibiotics.  Under medical supervision, we use them for sick or wounded animals.  But if livestock are raised in a healthy, uncrowded environment,  the incidence of sickness is greatly reduced.  We haven’t needed to administer antibiotics to our poultry in years.

I can just imagine you thinking that this is all well and good but we can’t all be farmers and control what the animals we eat are eating.  While that’s certainly true, a lot more of us can gain some control over our food supply by checking out small scale local farms, examining their practices, and patronizing those that eschew routine antibiotic use in their feed.  That’s a step toward the consumer seizing control.

But we can’t stop there.  Even if we, as individuals, manage to avoid all the antibiotic contaminated food on earth, we live in a larger society, and what others do affects us: The antibiotic-resistant microbe that develops in a feed-lot steer can reproduce and spread, and its progeny will be no less antibiotic-resistant when they infect us, even if we eat nothing but grass-fed beef.

CREDO is right.  We need much broader controls on antibiotic use in animal feed.  That, however, requires legislative action.  And so, I will continue to read Capitol Confidential and wait. —Mark Scherzer
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/27/11 at 06:59 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: A Tail of Two Cultures

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes: 
 
That’s right, “tail” not “tale.” Our sheeps’ tails have gotten caught in a collision of cultures. As some of you may know, we breed karakul, a desert sheep originating in the Karagol region of Turkmenistan. What is unusual about them is that instead of the standard sheep tail, this breed has a large fatty mass where the tail should begin, sometimes weighing several pounds; a more standard ropelike tail extends down from that. This fatty upper tail apparently acts metabolically in a similar way to the camel’s hump, that is, as a reserve food source in times of drought—a handy appendage for a desert dweller.
 
To our slaughter house and some USDA inspectors, this fatty tail seems to be regarded as some kind of abnormality or strange aberration. Despite our requests to save it, the slaughterers usually throw it away, or the inspectors sometimes order them to be discarded on the grounds that they are not sanitary. But, one might argue, a cow’s tail hangs just as close to the anus as a sheep’s does, and still finds its way to the meat market as “ox-tail.” Likewise pigs’ tails hang around the same unpleasant aperture, and even they find their way to some markets. But in our part of America, apparently, not sheeps’ tails.
 
By contrast, for the Uzbekis now living in Queens, the karakul sheep’s tail is a highly prized commodity, so much so that some of them are now googling “Karakul” and finding us, we, apparently, being the only listed source for the tails in the region. Yes, I tell them: we have karakul sheep, and they do have the fatty tails but for reasons difficult to understand we are not usually enabled to sell them.
 
So what is this Uzbeki passion for tails all about? In Uzbekistan, as in other parts of Central Asia, the karakul tail, when rendered, is the major source of cooking oil and, as such, imparts a distinctive flavor to Uzbeki cuisine.  For added flavor, lumps of it are typically alternated on the skewer with meat kebabs, and, in some cases, lumps of the fat are used as the kebabs themselves. For an Uzbeki, cooking without the karakul tail is tantamount to someone from the Mediterranean world being deprived of olive oil. Or someone from the deep South being deprived of lard. Our Uzbekis in Queens are craving something very central to their diet.
 
And why, you may wonder have the Uzbekis settled on this strange choice of cooking oil?  In a largely Muslim land (with a large Jewish minority), lard, obviously, is not an option. And the Uzbeki climate does not permit olive trees. Further, for a population heavily pastoral, the availability of these tails for cooking oil is obvious. For a pastoralist, the sheep is not just a source for meat and wearing apparel but also for milk, butter, yoghurt, and, yes, cooking oil.
 
Our latest culture clash came last week when I went to pick up the lamb from the five karakul we sent off for slaughter recently. A few days before pick up, I received a phone call from a Mr. K, an Uzbeki living in Queens, who was obviously craving the tastes of his homeland. He was very excited to hear that I would be getting karakul lamb and wanted a whole one, but, in particular it was the tail he wanted. I said we had requested, once again, that the slaughter house save the tails, but warned him we had been having trouble getting them in the past. Not long after, I received a call from yet another Queens Uzbeki also requesting karakul tails.
 
But we were all to be disappointed. Once again, I discovered that the tails had been discarded. Mr. K, therefore, declined to buy the lamb. Without the tail he was decidedly not interested. But, as a measure of his passion for karakul, he has arranged to arrive at 7 a.m. Saturday morning with knives and a large sheet of plastic, and will choose his own sheep to slaughter it on the premises. Where there is a will, there is a way, as they say.
 
I am not sure I want to be so close to the terrible act, but I can appreciate it when someone is willing to go to such lengths to find the food he loves.
—Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/20/11 at 09:28 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Pretty Weeds, Friend or Foe?

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes: 
 
It is still late Spring, though the recent stretches of extreme heat and the explosion of vegetation read more like mid summer. In the late afternoon sunlight, the pasture is topped with a foamy white mantle as a prolific plant with tiny white flowers enters a period of vigorous bloom.
 
While from a distance, it’s quite pretty, my walks across the pasture convince me that this plant is not a benign presence. Its long vine-y stems, sparsely populated with occasional clusters of leaves, create dense mats that seem to shade out and kill all the grasses and other plants beneath it. What’s worse, while the cows and sheep both seem to crave variety in their grazing, neither seems to like this plant at all. Where it is dense, the intertwined grass is uneaten. The apparent beauty of the pasture may not be appealing at all to our resident ruminants.
 
We can’t address the problem without first understanding it. We thought, based on appearances, that this might be bird’s foot trefoil, because part of the leaf and stem configuration could be taken for a bird’s foot. Except on further investigation, bird’s foot trefoil is apparently much coveted by cattle, and it blooms yellow. Casting about in on-line descriptions and depictions of weeds, I’ve decided it must be either chickweed or webstraw (aka goosegrass). Visually, it seems closer to webstraw (galium aparine, photo above), but it lacks the stickiness mentioned in descriptions of that plant. If anyone reading this knows otherwise, I’d love to hear about it.
 
Some descriptions of both chickweed and goosegrass claim that their leaves are edible, and some claim that chickweed is to the taste of various animals. To me this invader, whatever it is, seems to lack redeeming features. I’ve decided it requires eradication if we are to continue to provide our ruminants with high-quality forage and our customers with the resultant high-quality meat.
 
Thus comes the question of how to eradicate. Lots of agricultural extension websites recommend Roundup as a relatively benign herbicide without long lasting residue, but even that level of herbicide is more than we want our animals to ingest. Other authorities claim that manual removal is preferable, but warn that failure to remove the entire root can accelerate the weed’s spread. The prospect of weeding more than 20 acres of pasture by hand is simply not feasible, however. So, for now, I am following a routine, taking a few moments to pull a hefty armful of weeds at each feeding of the sheep.  I pull out about a five-by-five foot area in the badly affected zones, and feed it to the chickens. The chickens don’t show nearly the same enthusiasm for this as for some of the other weeds, whose names I have yet to learn, that they clearly consider treats. Turkey poults, luckily, are quite enthusiastic, and Peter suspects the goslings will be too. But I like the idea of finding a positive use for a damaging pest, and I intend to pursue at least this incremental strategy methodically.
 
I am far less ruthless about rooting out other weeds in other contexts. In the vegetable garden, I almost always give dill a free pass. It is amazingly prolific, and self-seeds with abandon. I now understand why they call it dill weed. But it is easy to dry for year round use. At this point in the season I also am quite indulgent of purslane and lamb’s quarters. In a couple of weeks, the purslane will provide us with a vitamin-C rich, succulent side dish, mixed with yoghurt, garlic and salt in the Turkish style. Right now is the perfect time to be picking lamb’s quarters. Chopped and lightly sauteed or wilted as greens, they are rich in oxalic acid. I make big batches and freeze most of it for winter. It freezes far better than spinach. That works out fine because we are enjoying eating our way through the abundance of fresh spinach that’s coming in right now.
 
Peter is often irritated by my protective stance toward purslane and lamb’s quarters, especially when he sees them overwhelming the planted vegetables. But I can sense an even more difficult discussion looming about how to deal with the crowd-out effects of a much larger member of the plant kingdom. The year we moved into the farm, one of our new neighbors gave us several black walnut seedlings he had started. These trees are valued for the quality of their wood and nuts, as well as their stately presence in the landscape. We understood vaguely that black walnuts had some mechanism to poison the soil against competing growth, but knew very little about how that worked. Peter assumed it was the nut shells, operating the way sunflower seed hulls do.
 
Now we’re learning. Two of the black walnuts we planted were interspersed with a row of currant bushes back near our woodpile. They all coexisted peacefully, even flourished, for the last nine years. Suddenly, about three weeks ago, Peter asked me if I had noticed that several of the currant bushes had died. In my usual absorbed fog, I had not noticed. Having pruned them all a few weeks before bud break, I had seen nothing unusual. But sure enough, six or eight bushes had failed to leaf out. And it was surely no coincidence that they were the bushes in close proximity to those two black walnut trees, which are now about 15-20 feet high. Doing some belated research, I now learned that juglone, the substance emitted by the tree, is particularly lethal for several varieties of berry bush, as well as for potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers and eggplant. The substance is emitted from the tree’s roots. It is also found in the leaves, which if left on the ground will leach juglone onto the surface soil. The poisoning effect can extend up to 50 feet from the tree’s drip line.
 
Now we have a real problem. As these two black walnuts grow, I expect that their drip lines will likely extend to within 30 feet or less of our vegetable garden. I trust that the appearance of the poison effect this year demonstrates that the trees are maturing and may start blessing us with crops of walnuts, but now we must make a decision. Are they in effect predator weeds that need to be eradicated for the sake of the vegetable garden or are they major assets we’ll have to work around? Let the debate begin. —Mark Scherzer
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/11/11 at 07:09 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Perspective Shifts from Picturesque to Practical

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:

Having a farm does change the way one sees animals. I can remember in my pre-farm academic days in the early 70’s living on Phyllis Curtin’s estate in the middle of Forrest Shaw’s dairy farm in Great Barrington. The only way in or out was a one-lane unpaved track through the Shaw pastures to Alford Road. My kids affectionately called the track “Lumpy Lane.” We shared Lumpy Lane with Forrest’s 150 Holstein dairy cows, who daily trooped along it either coming from or going to the barn at milking time.

In those days, I saw the cows in two ways: first, as picturesque adornments on the landscape; and, secondly, as bothersome impediments preventing me from getting back and forth quickly between my carriage house and Simon’s Rock. I quickly learned that trying to motor through the cows was a big mistake since it risked having them rear up and plant their hooves squarely on top of the car. Mr. Shaw’s cowherd very quickly put me right on this issue by kindly explaining that it was better and safer to come to a full stop and patiently wait for them to pass.

I guess I also found the cows a constant source of amusement, particularly when one beautiful spring morning, I was aroused from my bed at dawn by all kinds of strange trampling and lowing noises coming from the lawn below. To my amazement, I found myself looking down on a good part of Forrest’s herd of cows, which, apparently, having smelled the intoxicating lush, green grass of Phyllis’ lawn, had bolted down Lumpy Lane (leaving the cowherd scrambling behind), loped into the estate drive, and, in joyful appreciation of their lucky windfall, began madly cavorting on the grass, kicking up their heals, and leaping into the air with joy. It was like a scene out of the mythological past—a sort of Eureka Europa.

Now a common cowherd myself, I look at cows from quite a different point of view. Tommy, our bull, is, on the one hand, a magnificent-looking animal but on the other hand, I see him as a manmade creature, which, through centuries of selective breeding, has been transformed into the ideal progenitor of the kind of cows that will satisfy man’s mercantile and culinary needs.

How manmade? Tommy has a proportionally small head and very short legs given the bulk of his body. Indeed, his meaty, muscular body forms roughly a large rectangle standing on four short supports. This, if one thinks about it, is odd, since herd animals, which cows are, typically defend themselves by fleeing. For such a defense long legs would be an advantage and short ones a decided disadvantage. Obviously, mankind has, over the centuries, had ideas very different from nature’s when it comes to cows.

So, why the small head and short legs? If one looks at the animal from the vantage point of the slaughterhouse, the head and legs are the least productive and hence least useful parts of the animal. With the exception of the tongue and shanks, there is little from these parts of a cow that finds its way to the supermarket meat aisle.  The source of the roasts, steaks, ribs, and ground meat is the bulky, rectangular body. So,  in their body conformation, Tommy and his progeny are the cow reduced to its most edible parts.

In the transformation of the cow from a wild herd animal to a farmyard herd animal,  meat productivity was obviously a major consideration. This concern has not only shaped the cow as we know it, but also continues to play a role when choosing a beef cattle breed—a small-boned as opposed to large-boned breed.  Maximum meat productivity is achieved if the animal has a high meat to bone ratio. Thus, in beef operations, the relatively small-boned Black Angus,  with its higher meat-to-bone ratio, is favored over a large-boned Simmental (below).

While my way of seeing a cow has greatly altered in the last ten years, it can in no way compare with the discerning eyes of someone who has spent his entire life dealing with them. Julius Reuchel, writing in Grass Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef, describes what he sees as the ideal bull: “…wide shoulders, a deep chest, thick curly dark hair on the face and chest, thick skin, a wide jaw, and a big gut….and a well fleshed, muscular rump…”  He goes on in greater detail but this is enough to suggest the wealth of detail my image of the bull still lacks. I became aware of this when Mark and I recently visited Herondale Farm to choose our new bull.  In trying to evaluate the three bulls we were considering there, I realized that my image of a bull is still little more than a roughly drawn, hazy outline. —Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/07/11 at 06:16 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Instead of Roasting, They’re Grilling

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes:

I am much relieved that Saturday before last we dodged another bullet at Turkana Farms. Just after 5:59 p.m., I interrupted chores to yell into the house to Peter that only 45 seconds remained until the end of the world.He offered to quickly baptize me so that I could be called to Jesus at the time of the “taking up.” He assured me that we could thus be together for eternity. I rashly declined his offer.

I wasn’t sure I was making the right decision. I am generally myself a prophet of doom, and there was ample evidence that the end might indeed be nigh.The news has been filled with stories of nuclear Japan, Mississippi floods, a devastating tornado in Missouri and renewed volcanic eruptions in Iceland, not to mention political instability from Pakistan through the Arab world to Africa.

On the farm itself, we have been gloomily mired in the mud of an incessantly rainy May. Saturday night saw the horrific murder of Stumpy, our three year old footless guinea fowl whose comical clomping around the yard was always a source of cheer.The aviary where we had in past springs and summers kept our guinea fowl in protective custody (to save them from predators and our leeks and tomatoes from the guinea fowl) had collapsed in February under the weight of winter’s accumulated snow. We had just gotten around to scheduling its reconstruction, but not soon enough to save Stumpy from a fox hunting to feed her young. When I went out to do the chores Sunday morning, I could see just a few clumps of feathers, gray polka-dotted with pearl, where Stumpy had retired for the night.

My gloom and doom were counterbalanced to some degree by the life on the farm that continues to burgeon anew.Two more lambs, black ewelings with long ears, were born last Friday and Saturday, respectively, to a couple of our youngest ewes. Sunday afternoon it appeared that Eyre, one of our sows, whose cousin Jane had given birth to her first litter about six weeks earlier, was in labor. By Tuesday, five tiny black piglets were visible running around in the doorway of Eyre’s farrowing hut.

When six o’clock last Saturday came and went, and the world seemed not to have changed one whit, I had to acknowledge the error of my forebodings, as I have often had to in the past. I began to recognize that the sun would likely rise again.That It might even finally pierce through those damned, incessant rain clouds in time for Memorial Day weekend.

Memorial Day is when we at Turkana affirm our faith in the future by hauling out all those tomato, eggplant, pepper, okra, bean, squash and cucumber plants we started in the greenhouse and giving them the burst of growth that comes with real sun, real rain, and real room to grow roots. It’s the time that we obliterate the hard barriers between indoors and out, exchanging storm windows for screens, moving the rattan furnishings back to the screened porch, and when we begin to eat all our breakfasts, lunches and dinners outside again.

Most of all, it’s the time when our kitchen is reduced to something more like a mere pantry, an adjunct to the charcoal grill (outside) that for several months becomes our hearth, the center of our culinary life. Memorial Day is the beginning of that time when the barbecue again reigns supreme. We will delight one night this weekend in the intense flavor of grilled guinea fowl marinated in lemon juice and black pepper, an adaptation of Marcella Hazan’s chicken recipe, served with sautéed lambs quarters, a leek and potato vinaigrette with our overwintered leeks, and a salad of mixed young greens. Followed by rhubarb custard pie; it will be a grand company meal for a long time friend. And after a hard day of planting in the vegetable garden on Monday we’ll restore our strength with hearty grilled grass fed beef burgers (from our own British White cattle) topped with a local cheese.Yes, summer grilling and eating season is here.

Gloomsayers like me need something to look forward to. I like to think that the advent of real summer supplies that for me. The sun will rise again.The doom and gloom— banished for now.

But uh oh, have I heard rumors that the tomato blight will return this summer? And will that mean a repeat of our tomato-less 2009? Peter assures me that I may, indeed, be right. I am optimistic not only that the sun will keep on rising, but also that the world will never stop supplying me with things to worry about. —Mark Scherzer
 
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/30/11 at 10:17 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Animal Farm

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:
 
It is the time of the big change-over at Turkana Farms. Last week our veteran prize ram, Suleyman the Magnificent left for his new home at Pine Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where he will rule over a new harem of karakul sheep, and be cared for by a very kind, knowledgeable “shepherdess,” Karen Moss. It is from Karen that over ten years ago we bought our first ewes: Marina (Mark’s beloved), Myra, Brigit, and Kybele (my beloved). And it is from them that our herd descends.  So, by sending our herd’s current progenitor to Pine Hill Farms,  we have, in a sense, come full circle.
 
Like Suleyman, our gentle bull Tommy (above) has come to the end of his tenure at the farm since, if he remains he would be breeding with his daughters. So we have worked out an even trade with Jerry Peele at Herondale Farm (right) in Ancram, whereby we exchange Tommy for Trojan, a registered bull from another line. Trojan is also a smaller bull, better for our purposes, meaning that our heifers will, literally, have less to bear. For Tommy, unfortunately, it means separation from his cows and calves, to whom he is extremely devoted.  But, on the positive side, he is returning to the farm where he was born. So once again, we come full circle.
 
On a sadder note, yesterday five of our lambs, four castrated rams and one barren ewe, were loaded onto our pick up, and I drove them to a nearby slaughter house for “processing.” On a brighter note, this weekend another half dozen lambs, this time all ewes, will be driven off to join a karakul herd in the Catskills, two of them in trade for our new ram. On our return trip, we will be carrying our new ram, a very fancy one from New Zealand, who will introduce all kinds of new genes to our herd. We cross our fingers that he will be as peaceable as Suleyman.
 
While a necessary aspect of farming, all of this buying and selling of creatures and the dislocations and separations that result have the unfortunate effect of bringing to my mind the horrible institution of slavery. If in the paragraphs above, we transposed humans for animals, all of these sales, barters, dislocations, and separations I have described would, of course, take on a very different cast. As a result of the experience of farming, I now understand the full horrors of slavery in a way I never have before.
 
I also have flashes of this as one-by-one, a matter of days after they are born, we castrate the ramlings. A sheep herd of our size requires only one ram—indeed, having more than one will only lead to trouble and a certain amount of danger to us. While castration was never really a practice in the American version of slavery, it was a major feature of slavery in other parts of the world—the Ottoman Empire being the one I am most familiar with. There the harems of the palaces and the homes of the grandees required a steady supply of eunuchs to serve as servants and guards. And so as I hold the ramlings still as Mark maneuvers the elastic bands over their scrotums, cutting off the blood supply (resulting ultimately in the atrophying of their testicles), I have a certain historical flash of recognition.
 
Obviously, we are not simple beings living in transparent situations. Instead, I realize, we are immensely compartmentalized and compromised.  The demands of a farm economy necessitate that we think and act in certain ways (some of which go against our nature) to ensure that inbreeding is avoided, that the herds not be allowed to grow in numbers beyond what the pastures can support and our feed budget allows, and that a certain farm income be taken in to provide the hay, grains, and veterinarian care that the humane raising of livestock requires.
 

Annually, non-productive animals must be sacrificed to ensure the necessary resources for the productive animals. Annually, a certain percentage of the productive animals must be sacrificed to ensure the well-being of the rest, ourselves included.
 
The dilemma is that our care for the well-being of our livestock exists within this larger framework of necessity. We know from the beginning that our livestock can never be allowed to live out the full course of their lives, so we can only, in recompense, endeavor to make their abbreviated lives as fully happy and natural as possible. —Peter Davies
 
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/25/11 at 08:05 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Life and Death Decisions

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes:

Spring mud is still with us.  The mud in front of the barn is proving a challenge for our oldest ewes, especially Marina, an eleven year old favorite of mine whom Peter sometimes refers to as “The Queen”  because of her regal bearing and beautiful white top knot.  Marina is one of our four “matriarchs”, the original members of the flock, and she has bonded closely enough with me Peter also sometimes calls her my girlfriend.

These days, at grain treat time, as the rest of the flock charges into the barn, Marina slogs through the mud one painstaking footstep at a time, before hesitating at the barn threshold, deciding whether it’s worth the effort to jump in.  All too often, her grain treat is hand fed, after the others have already devoured the contents of the feed bowls.

The image of Marina’s struggle is much in my mind as, for the third time since January, I find myself writing about the farm from the uncomfortable distance of Florida.  My journey here was impelled by yet one more in a series of medical setbacks for my father, Felix, who in a few short months has endured two small amputations, a femoral bypass, kidney failure and now a fall, a broken hip, and hip replacement.

Just before I flew down, Felix told me by telephone that he would rather die than experience the pain he was then having.  His desire seemed eminently reasonable to me, as I feel certain I would prefer death to a life in pain, restricted from eating the foods I like, unable because of blindness, deafness and the inability to walk to engage in the activities that make life worthwhile for me.  I dread the indignity of dependency, even if it is wrapped in a euphemistic nicety like “assisted living.”  I would abhor spending three mornings a week hooked up to a dialysis machine.  I admire people who derive meaning and joy from lives with even greater restrictions, but that’s not me. I flew down to Florida fully expecting to be saying my final good-bye. 

Upon my arrival I was relieved to find Felix, ever the resilient survivor, already back in his normal, feisty, assertive mode, flirting inappropriately with the physical therapist, suggesting we sneak him out of the health center for pizza or Indian food, and generally demanding that he receive the top notch service he believes he is paying for.  When the speech therapist yelled into his hearing aid that she needed to evaluate his language and cognitive capacity, he devilishly responded to her in French.  When she told him she couldn’t understand what he was saying, he switched to German and then to Spanish before letting her do her job in English.  Typical Felix.

Delighted as I am that his will to live seems to have revived and my visit requires no difficult decisions,  it is impossible in these circumstances to avoid contemplating the morbid question of when one has lived enough,  and who gets to decide.  Oddly, it helps to think about these issues not just as a personal matter but because I know that when I return to the farm this weekend I will face a similar set of decisions regarding Marina.  Peter recently asked a fellow Karakul breeder, who really loves her sheep, what she does with her aged ewes.  While visiting our farm she looked at Marina and told him that she thought it appropriate, when a ewe reached Marina’s stage in life, to shoot her and bury her.

I felt great discomfort at this suggestion. I must recognize, as Peter keeps reminding me, that our sheep are not pets or members of the family.  The purpose of our raising livestock is their economic contribution to the farm.  We keep ewes principally to produce new lambs, something Marina has not done for the last three years.  The farm simply could not sustain itself if it nurtured all its livestock to their natural deaths.  But Marina has given us many good years of her productive life, and because she responds personally to me, considering her fate has become a more personal, familial kind of decision.

As a consequence, I have been asking myself some of the same kinds of questions about Marina that I found myself considering in responding to my father.  How much function has she lost?  How much of life’s pleasures are still available to her?  She can still see, hear, and eat.  She walks, but slowly, stiffly and with some difficultly.  I think back to my mother’s mother, who lived to over 100, and to our dear Sag Harbor neighbor, Winifred Thayer, who lived almost as long.  Neither ever suffered severe illness.  Both lived relatively independently until near the end, and both were well loved and cared for.  I suspect that Marina’s life might be the sheep equivalent of theirs, not a life that should be too hastily brought to a close.

But then, as Peter keeps reminding me, I must recognize the profound differences between Marina and a human being.  My father, as a human being, must be the master of his own fate.  What matters is how he feels about the loss of his functions, and whether for him the pleasures he continues to derive from life exceed the pain.  By the terms of our social contract, his current economic utility to others is not an issue, as he made that contribution during his many years of work, and paid in advance, so to speak, for all the medical benefits he is now receiving.  Now, the only utility to others he must consider is the emotional connection he has with his companion, Roz, and his family and friends.  And I’d like to think that if he determines that the pain of the next torturous medical procedure will exceed the benefit he is likely to derive from it, we will support him in his decision not to submit to it.

My father can also articulate his desires, though relying on a person’s statements on such issues is not without challenge. Yesterday, as I sat outside the physical therapy room waiting for Felix to emerge, I watched one of the therapists lift a none-too-happy looking woman out of her wheelchair and ask her to try walking to her room.  She took five or six tiny steps holding on to her walker, then sat down in exhaustion.  The therapist lifted her up again and she shuffled a few more steps as she reminded the therapist, “I write down on every single document ‘do not resuscitate’, but they keep giving me medicine to get me better.”  I could not tell whether she was being ironic or was seriously hoping for death.  The therapist replied, “I think you’re doing remarkably well, Mrs. E___, for 101.”  I was momentarily surprised, but no more enlightened.  Her age seemed to make both the ironic and the literal interpretations of her comment equally plausible.

Farm animals do not control their own fates.  They have been bred and raised for our use.  The functions that matter are those that serve the farm and their owners. 

And farm animals cannot clearly articulate their desires.  If we were to ask Marina whether her life is still worth living, what would she say?  Is the stiff pain of her arthritis and her struggle through the mud counterbalanced by the joys of munching spring grass and soaking up the sun?  Would she fear the potential pain of a coyote attack and being eaten alive, now that she’s the slowest and most vulnerable member of the flock, more than the momentary pain of a bullet to the head?  If she were able to answer, would the answer be ironic or sincere?

The difficulty I’m having with Marina’s fate may be a useful lesson on the dangers inherent in blurring the line between livestock and pet. We try to maintain this line in all kinds of ways, including avoiding naming animals we know are destined to go to market.  It’s harder to avoid developing relationships with breeding stock who may be with us for 10 or more years, but I’m now beginning to recognize that here, too, the line must be drawn.  I know that our needs and priorities as farmers must ultimately prevail, but I’m still committed to making our decision with some sensitivity to Marina’s best interests as well.  It will be a difficult one.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/17/11 at 08:38 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Kybele Gets Her Dream House

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:

It has been well over ten years now since we restored our then collapsing barn into a working sheep barn. And we had almost forgotten the arduous process we went through to bring it up to its current state.  However, the memories all came flooding back when we recently came across an interview in that popular local farm journal, RuralCreativity. To our mutual astonishment, the subject of the interview was one of our matriarchal ewes, Kybele. How she managed to get an interview and who conducted it remain a mystery to this day. Here follows the article:

KYBELE GETS HER DREAM HOUSE
RuralCreativity arrived one early spring day at Turkana Farms and found Ewe Kybele out on pasture savoring dandelions. “How I love to forage,” she enthused, “so fresh, so local, so sustainable.”  She was all too eager to talk about herself, to “chew the cud” as she jokingly referred to it.  And ceremoniously plumped herself down on a tuffet, a golden dandelion dangling from her lip. “I, as you probably know, descend from an old Karakul family in Central Asia, but I was born Kybele de Moss-Hill-Farm in Pennsylvania, where my sire, Samson, and dam, Sadie, took up residence on pasture some years ago. But a little bird told me about the glories of the Hudson Valley and how chic it is, yet still delightfully country-like, and I just had to be here!”

Interviewer: “And how did you make your way to the Hudson Valley?”
Kybele: “Well, to make a long story short: in my county fair days (ah, such times we had!) I somehow met up with my first love, Ryan, the head ram at Turkana Farms, a serendipitous encounter which gave me my big chance. So here I am,” she said, as she struggled to a standing position, flounced up her fleece, ba-a-ed softly, and looked off lovingly at the purple outline of the distant Catskills. “Sadly, my Ryan has been long gone, but it has been wonderful these past years with Dudley, Kraal, Murat, and now, dear Suleyman.”

Interviewer: “And this wonderful abode. So charming. Tell me about it.”
Kybele: “Yes, isn’t it though! So rustic but yet with a certain sophistication. A je ne sais ba-a-a-h.  Actually, I must confess, my first residence here was only a modest sheep fold on the front lawn of the main house. A darling place.  It was so down home, and left a very small environmental footprint, which was important to me in those days, so I was satisfied with it.  I was, that is, until all my darling lambs started coming, and a jungle of sumac trees was cleared behind the main house, revealing to me for the first time the sight of the old tumble down red barn on the hill. So divinely quaint.  I just fell in love with it and somehow felt it had so many possibilities. And those Catskill views! To die for! But what a wreck—all tipped to one side ready to roll over, the doors and windows virtually gone, and its roof ridge sagging like a hammock.”

Interviewer: “And how on earth did it get from that derelict state to this beauty!”
Kybele: “Again serendipidity! I lucked into a marvelous architect/designer. I am not finished with him yet so, naughty me, I am going to keep his identity hush hush. Well, together we saw the project through. I at first wanted something very modern and chic but still retaining that Columbia County rustic country look. Yes, rustic and stylishly modern! He said he thought it was an interesting concept but argued for going for an honest restoration rather than a make-over. And bit by bit, over many glasses of local, artisanal, organic grass juice, he won me over. Once the foundation was rebuilt, the sills replaced, and the building made foursquare again we were ready to, so to speak, roll up our sleeves.”

“The concrete floor bothered me and I suggested Mexican tile. But he countered that honest concrete would be best and pointed out that with all the droppings I and my family and guests were likely to deposit on it, the floor would be obscured anyway. As it has turned out, he was right. For the same reason rugs and carpeting were out.”

“I did get my way on the large manger—something I find a must for my big dinner parties, and he designed, especially for me, a classic one in a wood that nicely relates to the antique boards and beams of the barn itself. And for those intimate and daily dining experiences between dinner parties, he came up with these cunning little stalls with attached plastic feed bowls in wonderful primary colors, just the grace note to liven up the tableau of muted woods. Despite my pleas, he stated categorically that wallpaper was definitely out. Even in the hayloft cum sleeping loft. And no curtains either. ‘Spare and bare,’ he called it.”

“Our biggest clash was over the kitchen, which he insisted was not necessary since I never cook, and for that matter never eat cooked food. I argued that there were plenty of instances in the Hudson Valley of people who never cook but have beautiful kitchens, that it was probably more than anything else a status symbol, and, therefore, I wanted it. But he was not to be moved, which on the positive side saved a lot of money. And, if you will excuse the expression: ‘That ain’t hay!’”

“Despite my pleas, exterior window shutters were not permitted. And I had to give up my choice of taupe and cinnamon for the exterior color scheme. An old fashioned barn red, he argued, was definitely what the barn begged for. As he put it, ‘When painted red, the barn becomes comfortably integral to the rural scene not an exclamation against it.’ Such a way with words he has.”

“These halcyon days when I am noodling about on pasture munching contentedly on the lovely spring grass, I often gaze up at this barn that has at last become a home.  My home. And fondly remember the close collaboration that brought it all to fruition. While it is true that we did not always agree conceptually, I feel nevertheless that somehow the final vision was actually mine—which somehow he drew from my secret places. But while this project is finished our collaboration is not, as we are now putting our heads together to transform my former sheep fold into a quaint little guest cottage.”

And that ends this shameful article. But it doesn’t close the book for Mark and me since we have a few choice words to say to Kybele about this duplicitous grandstanding on her part – claiming all the credit at our expense.  Kybele, now that the cat is out of the bag, has of late become rather hard to find.  Invariably at feeding time she seems always to be grazing at the very far end of the Old Saw Mill pasture, a small fluffy blob set against the acres of green.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/11/11 at 08:44 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Awaiting the Impending Storm

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Peter writes:

There is a strange silence, an ominous stillness. It is around eight o’clock Thursday morning but instead of a steady brightening the morning continues to darken, the sky taking on a sinister dark gray hue. The air is heavy and moist and does not stir. Missing is the usual sound of birds, all of which have disappeared. We have been warned by the National Weather Service of the imminent approach of violent thunderstorms, sixty mile an hour winds, large hail, and—the unthinkable—the possibility of tornadoes. It is from the same weather system that has just devastated the South, with much loss of life, moving our way.  It is the livestock that I am worrying about. Kay, a near neighbor, has just phoned to warn me of the impending arrival of the storm, which she has heard is heading directly for us.

From my vantage point, an upstairs bedroom window, I notice that the sheep, usually out on pasture at this time crowded around their manger or lounging about on the grass nearby awaiting their morning grain treat, are nowhere to be seen. Clearly, they have taken refuge in the barn. They have done this before. They were, most of them, born in the barn or very close to it and spent their first days in its birthing pens bonding with their mothers. It is in the barn that they get their grain treats and where they shelter from the winter weather and heavy rains. The barn represents for them, at some level, safety and comfort. It is the center of their world.

What the barn means to them became clear to me several years ago when one beautiful spring afternoon our barn, to my horror, erupted into flames. The smell of the smoke and the sight of the flames terrified the sheep even though they had never seen fire before, and they could, therefore, not really know what fire is. Instinct, not experience, told them fire was a danger. So on seeing the flames and smelling the smoke, they behaved very sheep-like and rushed into the barn, their refuge. Even when the Germantown fire department crew forcibly ejected them from the burning barn, they returned twice more trying to get in, and finally had to be aggressively driven off.  In their frantic state they apparently could not conceive of any other place of safety. It is my hope today that our sheep are right this time in choosing the barn as their refuge from the impending storm.

I move to another window that looks out over the cow pasture, fully expecting to see it empty, the cattle having moved to safety in the cowshed. But, no, there they are scattered about the field, most of them lying down, brilliant white forms against the lush green. I thought that with their recently born calves they would have moved to shelter.  But no, I come to realize, the cowshed is quite a different thing for them, serving only as a temporary refuge from the severest winter weather. It is not where they were born; cows prefer instead a secure spot on pasture, and it is not the place where they are fed. The cowshed, unlike the sheep barn, is not the center of their world. Probably, I conjecture, they will, when the winds build up, take shelter in a nearby low gully, their usual refuge from strong winds.

It is not so much for the livestock that we already have, however, as for the livestock whose arrival is imminent that I am most concerned. It is the morning I am expecting the arrival of the day old turkey poults, the start of our Thanksgiving turkey flock.  Despite the imminent storm, and the various things I should be doing in preparation,  I am staying close to the phone expecting the call from the post office requesting me to come to pick up the boxes containing our birds: 120 heritage turkey poults that have come all the way from Iowa.

Should we get the full brunt of the storm, will I be able, I wonder, to drive to the post office to get them? And if I do will I be able if we have torrential rain to get them from the house safe and dry up to their brooders in the hayloft of the barn? And if I manage that, will the electricity still be working to power the heat lamps that keep the brooder pens heated to the requisite 90 degrees? And if our power has been knocked out, will I be able to get the generator set up and connected as a fall back? Turkey poults are incredibly sensitive to cold and wet and much more vulnerable than goslings, ducklings, and chicks. In the best of conditions the poult mortality rate is high.

As the morning goes on, the deadline for the arrival of the storm is pushed back several times, and for a while things begin to brighten, and then to go darker once again. And then the phone rings and it is, as expected, the post office with the announcement I have been waiting for, and I make the trip to Germantown driving in a light rain. But as I carry the cardboard boxes filled with cheeping poults up to the barn, the rain begins to intensify. Once in the barn and up to the hayloft, we (our farm helper, Darlene, and I) gingerly begin decanting the poults from their tiny box compartments into their heated brooder.  Outside, the heavens suddenly open, and a torrent of rain beats down on the metal roof, the loud drumming occasionally punctuated by claps of distant thunder. Being just beneath a metal roof we are glad the thunder is distant. We count loudly as we decant.

They are all there: 40 Bourbon Reds, 40 Spanish Blacks, and 40 Holland Whites. And not missing a beat, they begin their eternal slumber party—tiny, animated fluff balls bopping about, pecking everything in sight, exploring the perimeter of their brooder, quaffing their first water and pecking up their first grain as if they had been doing it forever, oblivious to the passing storm, which fortunately for us all, turned out to be nothing much at all.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/04/11 at 07:53 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Father Time Rules the Roost

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week,  Mark writes:

“The clock is ticking,” my father said recently with respect to an impending major birthday.  As if I didn’t know.  His comment should have clued me in to why I am always so aware of what time it is, no matter what activity I’m absorbed in.  Well, maybe not no matter what. Weeding in the garden does put me into a sort of Zen state, surprising me when it turns out the afternoon has passed me by.  But as a general rule, I’m a time-driven creature.

What I’ve assumed to be personal idiosyncracy turns out not to be one at all.  An article in this week’s New Yorker described some of the work of David Eagleman, Ph.D, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studies “brain time” and other neurological phenomena.  Eagleman describes time not as a flowing river, with second following after second, minute after minute, at a uniform rate, but as a human sensation, a matter of perception, in which time slows down in some circumstances (extreme danger and near death experiences) and jumps forward in spurts in others.  His theory is that we all have internal clocks constantly ticking within our brains, trying to coordinate all our other sensory inputs into a coherent story of reality.  Different people have clocks that run at different rates, it seems.  He postulates, moreover, that animals too mark time, though at rates which vary markedly according to species and size.  His favorite joke is about a turtle reporting having been mugged by three snails.  When asked for details, the turtle replied “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.” 

Thinking of time as an inner sense certainly accords with my experience.  My having a clicking inner clock helps explain why it’s so hard for me to oversleep and why I don’t generally need an alarm to get me up at a particular time.  For some reason, Peter has on occasion found it acceptable to nudge me in the middle of the night out of my sleep in order to ask me what time it is. My typical response is to guess the time, then fumble for my watch, and happily report that I guessed pretty close.  I doubt such an extreme time consciousness is a universal human trait, but that inner clock must be lurking in everyone at some level.

The idea that we and our animals live on different clocks in the same world also struck me as perceptive, again reflecting our experience.  Our larger animals’ lives seem to proceed at a pace that a New Yorker like me would have to call “deliberate”.  And when I am in my Manhattan “application of organization to achieve rapid results” mode and they are in their “deliberate” mode we don’t mesh well. You can’t move fast around the sheep or cows without causing grave upset.  Perhaps the old stereotype of farmers who move slowly in all their activities has a great deal to do with their having to move slowly around the animals to avoid that upset, and essentially synchronizing with their livestock’s needs, their clock.

I checked out Eagleman’s website, and found even his popular science essays too dense to absorb on first reading.  But from the New Yorker article I gleaned that one of his areas of study is a sort of synchronization that has to happen between humans who might have slightly different clocks. I would say that is pretty likely the case, because I think there’s some way in which the animals and I are communicating our respective clocks and synchronizing to each other as well.  On summer evenings, if we have a social engagement requiring us to leave at a particular time, I am often tempted to try to hurry the process of moving the animals into their night quarters.  But I’ve learned that even before I’ve started the process the turkeys, for example, seem to sense my urgency, and actively resist it.  The turkeys cooperate only if the pace they sense is the normal one—their pace. 

Our unconscious communication is not only about matters of pacing. One year, when we were displaying our turkeys at the County Fair, Peter had to round up some birds of a particular breed that had been banded (certified salmonella-free). We had three varieties, but he had already captured the necessary Bourbon Red and Naragansett. He only needed to nab the Royal Palms. He approached the flock of turkeys, but the Royal Palms (and only the Royal Palms) disappeared. The whole group of them were eventually discovered clustered together under cover of shrubbery adjacent to the sheep pen. Meanwhile, the other two breeds, the Bourbon Reds and Naragansetts, wandered about unconcerned.  Somehow the Royal Palms knew what he was looking for.  Similarly, when it’s time to trim the sheep’s hooves, and I am choosing the next ewe to do from among the milling group in the barn, they always seem to sense which one I have my eye on. The object of my hunt will generally start moving frantically away, while many of the others calmly stand watching, letting me pass. Once I’ve actually caught the ewe and manouevered her backwards into the sort of reclining chair where we immobilize them on their backs in order to trim their hooves, a converse sort of communication happens.  That is, they sense when I am not concentrating, and as soon as my attention wanders (say, from holding them in the position we want them) they immediately take advantage. This must be the sort of psychic communication that passes between hunter and prey.

It seems remarkable, even science fiction-like, that there could be this kind of silent inter-species communication, but while I at one time might have laughed off Eagleman’s theories as the product of an overactive imagination, I now do not doubt the reality of the phenomenon of silent synchronization he postulates.  It seems I remember reading about synchronized group menstrual cycles in both animals and humans, and these sorts of communication seem to fit in that mold.

This all makes me wonder whether the animals, too, have awareness of milestones like birthdays, schedules, time to get up, and the value of time.  Is there a difference between sensing time in units or simply as a continuing flow?  Something about farming initially seemed to me to be an escape from the tyranny of the ticking clock of time.  Little did I suspect that it would instead introduce me to hundreds of different, if thankfully slower, clocks.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/27/11 at 12:34 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Birth of a White Calf - Holy Cow!

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes:

 

On Tuesday morning while making the morning chore rounds with our farm helper,  Darlene, I commented to her as we stepped into the sheep barn on the constant mooing of Donita, the matriarch of our British White cow herd. This mellifluous lowing had been going on periodically for several days, a sign that she was nearing her birthing time. However, despite her udder having expanded over the past few days to what seemed the bursting point (her engorged nipples standing out at odd angles) there was still no calf. Not even the beginning signs of labor. There she stood, about thirty feet away, as still as a statue, looking in that stolid, cowy way in our direction.

We were surprised, therefore, upon emerging from the barn less than twenty minutes later to find her standing quietly, assiduously licking the blood and fluids from her dazed calf, her placenta hanging like a bright red streamer from her vulva. We had missed the actual birth by minutes. But were not so late as to miss the strange aura cast by this scene.

Whether this aura was created by her massive size,  her marble-like whiteness, or the intense placidity she emanated, or a combination of all of these, it is hard to say. But the impression created, I realized, was quite different from that, say, of a ewe giving birth—by comparison a gentle, hushed, intimate affair.  And it set me to thinking of the real and mythical reputation cows have enjoyed in so many cultures; ancient Greece, India, the Zulus, and the Celtic world come immediately to mind. Seeing Donita hovering over the calf, rotating her huge body slowly to bring her udder over its head (the calf meanwhile feebly struggling to get to its feet), I felt myself a witness to something very elemental, something almost mystical.

In the Celtic world, where I started my life, it is not just cows but in particular white cows that have figured prominently in mythology. The tales, legends, and superstitions of Wales and Ireland, in particular, frequently focus on the white cow. This mythology of the white cow is also very much a feature of Scandinavia, where the breeds that have come down to us as the White Park (the horned white cow) and the British White (the polled white cow)  probably originated. It is generally believed that the polled white cow was brought to the British Isles by Vikings around the Ninth Century.

There are tales in Welsh and Irish folklore in which the milk of white cows heals the wounds of warriors, or acts as an antidote to poisonous arrows; and there is the tale of the “seven white kine”  that produce enough milk to satisfy “the men of the whole world”; and the even stranger tale of the “300 livers of white kine” that when spread on a plain inundated with snow magically clear it—to name a few.  One very characteristic myth is that of the “Magical Welsh White Cow”, a legend related in Carmarthenshire and recorded in the Welsh Sacred Book:

“In times of old there was a band of elfin ladies who used to haunt the neighborhood of Llyn Barfog, a lake among the hills just back of Aberdovey. It was their habit to make their appearance at dusk clad all in green, accompanied by their milk-white hounds. Besides their hounds, the green ladies of Llyn Barfog were peculiar in the possession of droves of beautiful milk-white kine called Gwarthe y Llyn, or “kine of the lake”.

One day an old farmer who lived near Dyssyrnant, had the good luck to catch one of these mystic cows, which had fallen in love with the cattle of his herd. From that day the farmer’s fortune was made. Such calves, such milk, such butter, and cheese, as came from the milk-white cow never had been seen in Wales before, nor ever will be seen again. The fame of of Fuwch Gyfeiliorn (which was what they called the cow) spread through the country round.

The farmer who had been poor, became rich; the owner of vast herds, like the patriarchs of old. But one day he took it into his silly noddle that the elfin cow was getting old, and that he had better fatten her for the market. His nefarious purpose thrived amazingly. Never, since beef steaks were invented was seen such a fat cow as this cow grew to be.

The killing day came, and the neighbours arrived from all about to witness the taking-off of this monstrously fat beast. The farmer had already counted up the gains from the sale of her, and the butcher had bared his right arm. The cow was tethered, regardless of her mournful lowing and her pleading eyes; the butcher raised his bludgeon and struck fair and hard between the eyes; when lo! A shriek resounded through the air awakening the echoes of the hills, as the butcher’s bludgeon went through the goblin head of the elfin cow, and knocked over nine adjoining men, while the butcher went frantically whirling around trying to catch hold of something permanent. Then the astonished assemblage beheld a green lady standing on a crag high up over the lake, and crying with a loud voice:

Come yellow Anvil, stray horns
Speckled one of the lake
And of the hornless Dodlin,
Arise, come home.

Whereupon not only did the elfin cow arise and go home, but all her progeny to the third and fourth generations went home with her, disappearing in the air over the hill tops and returning nevermore. Only one cow remained of all the farmer’s herd, and she had turned from milky white to raven black. Whereupon the farmer in despair drowned himself in the lake of the green ladies, and the black cow became the progenitor of the existing race of Welsh black cattle

That a legend about white cattle should explain the origins of a breed of black cattle is a characteristically odd twist of the Welsh mind.  But apart from that, the strange tale captures the exalted place the white cow has occupied in the imagination of the Welsh people. This Welshman still patiently awaits the day when he through his “mystic” white cows will one day become “…rich… like the “patriarchs of old”. “ It’s not bloody likely!” as they would say in Wales. Ah well then, but on the positive side, the green lady of the lake has yet to appear hovering above Turkana Farms to shout out her terrible summons each time we with our “silly noddles”  decide to send one of our “elfin cows” off to market.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/20/11 at 09:33 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Sure Signs of Spring on the Farm

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:

Luckily, the hours of daylight are getting more abundant, because the season of “not enough hours in the day” has exploded upon us.

Along with the crocus, aconite, snowdrops and now daffodils, we are seeing scallions, garlic, chives, horseradish, rhubarb and Japanese butterburr emerging from the ground. Overwintered leeks, parsnips and (maybe) carrots are being reborn, signaling that it’s already past time to get the vegetable garden under way in earnest.  Mostly, it’s a matter of planting flats in the greenhouse where the peas, three kinds of cabbage and cauliflower have already germinated and fava beans have been planted. Carrots, beets and spinach need to get planted outside this weekend.

We’ve already placed our order for turkey poults to arrive, as usual, the last week of April.  That means it’s also time to start preparing the hayloft of the barn, fixing the chicken wire that keeps them in their brooder pens and keeps predators out, cleaning the feeders and waterers, putting down paper and peat moss, and hanging the heat lamps.  I savor March and April for the temporary respite from our stratospheric electricity bills.  This winter, keeping water unfrozen for all the animals and boosting the heat in the greenhouse seems to have tripled our normal bill.  When we put all the lamps on to warm all the newly arrived turkey poults, guinea keets,  goslings, chicks, and ducklings in May for the weeks until they feather out, I expect we will get “Welcome Back” cards from our friends at National Grid.

Meanwhile, it is a job just to keep track of all the animals being born in every corner of the farm.  The last two years, our mother daughter pair of British White cows, Donita and Roxie, calved a week apart, first mother, then daughter.  This year, daughter Roxie calved first, last Wednesday (another heifer calf).  Now Donita, from the growing dimensions of her udder, is about to follow suit.  We wonder whether the switch signifies a shift in dominance as the younger cow comes into full vigorous maturity and the mother enters her golden years.  They function like a family, but I’d prefer if Donita, the more docile and friendly of the two, were to continue to set the tone.

One of our two new Ossabaw sows, Jane, farrowed on Sunday. Will Eyre be next, we hope? She’s not letting the piglets out of the hut yet, so we’re not even sure of how many there are, but so far have been disappointed to see only three. In any event, it’s time to start arranging to castrate any males among them.

And just when we thought we were done with lambing, our youngest breeding age ewe gave birth Tuesday to the 22nd lamb of the season, and one of the older ewes we thought had taken a pass this year looks ready as well.  Suleyman’s proficiency as a breeding ram has been confirmed once again.  For those of you wondering about his fate, Peter has found a new role for him as premier ram at a farm in Pennsylvania.  Actually, it is the same one from which we got our original four ewes (Marina, Brigit, Mira and Kybele)—all of whom have been with us since 2001.  And so we come full circle.

We’ve been trimming the hooves of as many sheep each weekend as I have the strength to wrestle into the hammock where we immobilize them, and Peter has the endurance to contort himself on a low stool to do the trimming. Peter jokes after doing the fourth hoof that he’s glad we’re not raising centipedes.  But now we have to add banding the scrotum of the latest new ramling to our to-do list, just ahead of photographing and getting our registration records in order.

For all this busy-ness with new life, however, my top priority these April weekends is completing the trimming of the berry bushes and fruit trees before bud break, and obliterating all traces of the black knot, which has decimated our plum trees.  This is, perhaps, the only part of our life in which Peter finds me too thorough about completing a job.  He told me last weekend that he thought I had cut too much out of the gooseberries.  It’s true that in a couple of cases I took what appeared to be a complex bush and reduced it to two or three young stalks. But our gooseberry yield last year was disappointing and I don’t think it was just the dryness; I want to encourage new young growth.  I take as my Bible the excellent Backyard Berry Book by Stella Otto, which has a section on each berry and its pruning rules, different enough from each other that I have to re-read the pertinent sections of the book to refresh myself before each pruning session. In the case of gooseberries, it instructs that they are produced on the young gray shoots and that the dark, woody stems with multiple branches that are four or more years old should come out.

I’ve finished all the raspberries, the main patch of blackberries (above), and most of the gooseberries, while Peter has been pruning roses and distributing compost to the bushes.  The daunting job of doing the currants still awaits.  There is something intensely satisfying about reducing a messy tangle of branches to a select few strong stalks, and something remarkable to me about the idea that by reducing the number of branches one increases the yield and size of the berries.  I guess it’s just another manifestation of how the life force that is expressed every spring emerges into the world so insistently and in so many different ways.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/13/11 at 08:23 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: A Japanese Farm & Garden Legacy in Florida

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:

Like so many of my graying peers, I have part time parent care duties these days.  Fortunately, my father has a girlfriend and two children besides me to take on the bulk of the responsibilities, and he is able to afford to live in a comfortable environment that accommodates his various disabilities.  Unfortunately for me, that environment is in the retirement world of Delray Beach,  Florida, where I found myself once again a few weeks ago.

Taking a break from Dad one afternoon, I decided to check out the nearby Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, for which I had seen a big directional sign on the way home from the airport. Visiting an institution dedicated to preserving Japanese culture seemed a fitting activity in a week still dominated by news of the disastrous damage done by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor breakdown in Northeastern Honshu, Japan.

The contemplative mood inspired by the succession of gardens in various historical Japanese styles was reinforced, for me, by an exhibit in a small pavilion explaining the history of the Morikami.  On display were blowups of excited local newspaper articles of 1904 and 1905, proclaiming the arrival of a colony of Japanese farmers, recruited by Jo Sakai, scion of a Samurai family who had just earned a business degree at New York University.  These farmers planned to cultivate what would be new products for Florida, at a time before tourism and the retirement industry, when agriculture was virtually the only “industry.” They called their colony Yamato, an ancient name for Japan.
The news articles made clear that, much as modern Americans marvel at the technical proficiency of the Japanese, our predecessors viewed them as horticultural wizards.  Although there may well have been some in the local population who harbored racist resentments when the newcomers arrived, the tone of the articles was one of warm welcome to these farmers who were seen as able to “revolutionize” agriculture and develop the local economy.

As it turned out, the horticultural prowess of the Yamato colony farmers availed them little in the perennially trial and error business of agriculture.  Clearing and cultivating the root encrusted, and (to my eyes) swampy virgin Florida land was incredibly arduous. They started by growing pineapples, only to find themselves hit by blight and then undercut by growers from Cuba.  They tried to produce silk, but the mulberry trees, leaves of which are the sole diet of silk worms, did not thrive.

They eventually turned to winter vegetable production for northern markets, taking advantage of a train stop in their community from which they could ship the produce.  But their earnings were disappointing and they had to contend with growing anti-Asian prejudice that became prominent in the decade after the Yamato’s founding.

In the first great Florida land boom of the 1920s, most of the 35 or so remaining members of the community sold their land at handsome prices and left. George Sukeji Morikami, who grew local crops and became a major fruit and vegetable wholesaler, ended up as the last remaining member of the colony, living reclusively in a trailer on his property.  In the mid 1970s, Morikami, then in his 80s, donated his land to Palm Beach County to create a park memorializing the Yamato Colony.

The Yamato story has an eerie echo in a contemporary story I heard while in Florida on NPR’s Marketplace.  A few years ago, Iowa State University recruited five Dutch families to come to Iowa and help revolutionize the dairy industry there by revitalizing family farms.  Similar programs were established in other Midwestern states. The Dutch were chosen for recruitment because they were known for their industriousness as dairy farmers. The recruits sold their farms in Holland and invested in bigger, new facilities in Iowa.

Their timing was most unfortunate.  They were squeezed from both sides – by a drop in the price their milk fetched to levels not seen since the 1920s, and simultaneously with a dramatic increase in the cost of the grains they used to feed their cattle.  The help in getting established they had been promised by Iowa State never materialized.  In contrast to the Yamato Colony members’ fate, they were unfortunately not able to sell their land at a substantial profit.  Some lost their entire life savings and two of the five have filed for bankruptcy.  Overall, twenty Dutch farm families from the Midwest have returned to Holland, in the words of Marketplace, “ashamed, heartbroken and penniless.”

Most people who farm, like us, hedge their bets. Our joke is that it takes a law firm, a kilim gallery and a travel business to support a farm.  These occupations help maintain stability between the peaks and troughs endemic to agriculture.  The stories of these farmers who committed everything to their ventures expecting to prosper, but whose high levels of skill and commitment were no match for the powerful forces of the market and nature, are a useful reminder of why it is such a good idea to proceed with caution.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/06/11 at 08:13 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Putting Our Animals to Work

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes:

As Mark and I have learned more and more about what livestock require to flourish and (awful though it may sound) taste good, we have become increasingly aware that it is not simply what animals are fed, but also what they do that makes the difference in flavor and texture. So we have been working on various ways to get our critters to exercise more, and we are anticipating some very good results. Only time will tell.
 
We learned some time ago that, despite their reputation, turkeys are actually quite teachable. So we have worked up around a hundred small treadmills in the hayloft and rigged them up with a corn dispenser that drops corn kernels just ahead of the turkeys’ next step on the mill.  Carl, one of our part time farm helpers, is quite mechanically adept and figured it all out.
 
Mark and I then spent many hours and a lot of patience training the turkeys to get onto the treadmill, and the corn did the rest. Although, I must admit, turkeys do have a short attention span, something that sorely tried our patience. Mark had to be restrained from shouting at them several times.  The Spanish Blacks, we noticed, seem to be faster learners than the Narragansetts. And the Bourbon Reds the real dumbos of the flock.
 
Once we had a hundred or so turkeys   doing a special kind of Turkey trot (and enjoying it apparently from the googley noises they were making ), we determined this was just too much energy to let go to waste, so we had Carl hook the treadmills to a generator, and now our barn water pump and electricity are turkey powered. We at Turkana Farms are beginning to feel technologically quite avant garde.  But the downside is that it only works during daylight hours since turkeys go to bed, as they say, with the chickens. Anyway this turkey power is turning out to be a real energy bonanza. And I think we are anticipating very tasty turkeys for Thanksgiving.
 
Getting our lambs to run and exercise more was our next big objective. We knew we could get them to run if we really scared them by shouting loudly, or waving a big piece of fabric, or shooting off a gun, but decided such an approach was not really humane. We also feared that this kind of stress might spoil their flavor.
 
So instead we put our heads together and designed a kind of running maze on the model of a teeny weeny golf course:  with curvy tracks, little up and down hills, hurdles to jump, streams to leap and turnstiles to go through, the picturesque route punctuated with little grain dispensers, which, of course function as the bait that drives them on. The sight of twenty- some little black lambs frisking through our track running, jumping, and leaping is, indeed, a wonderful sight to behold. We are beginning to wonder if it might attract paying spectators.
 
The other day, as we saw the turnstile spinning wildly during one of their runs it occurred to us (actually me) that we have yet one more possible source of free electricity, this time for our electric fencing. While it is comforting to feel that we are saving on energy, we really can’t wait to taste the lamb.
 
As we turned to dealing with our rather shiftless beef cows we were a bit stymied. After all if I weighed between 800 and 1800 pounds I probably wouldn’t want to move around much either. But we could not see excluding them from our new farm regimen. After all, what would their beef taste like? If it were a choice between just plain grass fed beef and really buffed grass fed beef wouldn’t our customers choose the latter?
 
So I did some thinking and I remembered something from my childhood that made a light bulb go on:
 
                                                      Hey diddle diddle,
                                                      The cat on a fiddle
                                                      The cow jumped over the Moon…
 
Yes that was it…”jumping”.  I put that thought together with my knowledge of the cows’ passion for apples. And so we set to work erecting a series of hurdles the length of the back pasture, like they do in track meets, and Carl invented a device that dropped apples on the opposite side of the hurdle as the cows approached, whereupon they jumped over the hurdle, triggering an apple drop on the opposite side of the next hurdle, and then the next, and the next, and so on, and so on—all the way across the pasture. And back again. I thought that was enough for one session, not wanting to bring on heart attacks It was exhilarating, to say the least, watching at least five thousand pounds of beef   flying through the air. Mark speculated that with the muscle tone they were going to get we could probably label our product “Kobe beef”.
 
With the turkeys trotting away on their treadmills in the hay loft, the lambs frisking madly around their miniature track, and the cows leaping hurdles the length of the pasture, you probably think we have enough going on at Turkana Farms. But given our success thus far, we felt ready to tackle what we fully realized was our most insurmountable problem—how to get our pigs to exercise. As they apparently see it, if there is food, water, hay,  and fresh bedding straw at hand “Why bother?”
 
Carol Clement of Heather Ridge Farms, across the river, shared with us her method for getting pigs to roll over—she tickles and rubs their bellies. Using this technique, we thought we could maybe get them to do a few body rolls and maybe even a somersault but no matter how much we tickled and rubbed their bellies they just lolled back and squirmed and squealed with delight.
 
What, I pondered, would pigs move heaven and earth to get to? And then it came to me:  a “mud wallow”! On a warm, sunny day there is nothing they want to get to more. So between their pig pen and the wallow we had Carl build a step ladder with very big steps leading to a platform at the top and a steep slide leading down to the wallow.  The slide, as we set it up, is the only way the pigs can get to down their wallow.
 
Sure enough on the first warm day, Jane and Eyre, our two sows, Vernon, the boar, and Monroe and Marilyn our two piglets began to ascend the steep steps, laboring and lumbering all the way.  As they paused and sniffed the air with their upturned snouts, poised to make their maiden slides, we stood close by, near the bottom of the slide,  cheering as they made their descent..  Whoops! Merde! Apparently we were too close!
 
After we had showered and changed our clothes, we met to review our mistakes: for one, not standing too close to the wallow next time, and, for Mark,  remembering to keep his mouth closed.
 
While the experiment was a little hard on our farm wardrobe, the pigs have really warmed to the idea. And like little kids at a playground slide, they can’t get enough of climbing to the top of the steps, and whizzing to the bottom. Chalk up another success—fully exercised pork—for Turkana Farms!
 
Mark has become so excited by these triumphs that he has come up with the idea of bringing up his Pilates teacher, Anthony Phillips, from the City to devise posture-appropriate regimens for our geese and ducks.  But my advice to him so far has been to: “Save it for APRIL FOOL’S day.”

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/30/11 at 12:06 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Verdict from the Turkana Test Kitchen

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:

When Peter wrote last week about the nutritional advantages of heritage breeds of chicken, I could see he was inexorably leading to a conclusion that we should adjust our own chicken production away from the fast-growing Cornish crosses that had been our mainstay and toward a more slow-growing variety, a shift we had already begun by raising a batch of Freedom Rangers last summer.  That shift seems a reasonable and responsible one to me in theory, but I had the gnawing feeling that we still hadn’t fully done our homework. If we were going to give up the ease, speed, and efficiency of raising the Cornish crosses, shouldn’t we be sure we would not be sacrificing the flavor and texture that had made these birds so popular with us and our customers?

To be sure, we had heard back from some folks who had bought some of each, and their reactions seemed to be similar to our impression.  Most said they could not discern a significant difference between the two birds. But those reports and our impressions were not based on simultaneous tasting of both. We had planned to do a side by side taste test comparing Cornish cross with the Freedom Ranger, and suggested to our customers that they also do it.  But we had never gotten around to it ourselves.  So last weekend I suggested we finally cross that “ t”.  I love suggesting menus, knowing that it is generally Peter who will do the cooking. But he readily agreed.

It was not hard to decide how to prepare the birds. We needed to use a recipe that would not overwhelm the flavor of the bird with the flavors of sauces or other ingredients. To that end, we agreed on the simple roast chicken recipe in the Chez Panisse cookbook that really lets the bird’s own flavor shine through.  I selected two chickens, one of each variety, relatively close in weight. Peter prepared them exactly the same way and roasted them side by side.

We made it a Turkana Farms meal, with our own potatoes mashed with the last of our celeriac and our own fresh brussels sprouts from last year’s garden.  The stalks that were standing erect last fall had their sprouts demolished by freezing weather, but those that were bent over close to the ground and got blanketed with snow early offered up sweetly intact green sprouts once the snow melted away.

And what did the side by side comparison show us? The first difference that was readily apparent was body conformation.  Where the Cornish Cross (top photo, right of the plate) was rounded—you might call it the chicken equivalent of butterball—the Freedom Ranger (top photo left) was more elongated.  Where the skin and flesh of the Cornish Cross were yellow and white, those of the Freedom Ranger were redder and pinker. The skin of the Cornish cross was tightly stretched on its body, the Freedom Ranger’s hung looser. And though the Cornish cross was about a half pound heavier than the Freedom Ranger, its legs were shorter (bottom photo, right leg bone), sticking out almost sideways from the torso, as opposed to the nearly perpendicular angle of the longer legs of the Freedom Ranger.  We could easily recall how this conformation was reflected in the way the two birds moved—the waddle of the Cornish cross as opposed to the firm upright stride of the Freedom Ranger. This body conformation obviously has a lot to do with the mobility, or lack thereof, of the two breeds.

Our test was conducted by each of us taking portions comprised of two drumsticks, one from each bird, plus a few slices of breast meat from each.  And here I must digress slightly. I heard Joe Donohue conduct a radio interview on WAMC a few weeks ago with the author of a new book on euphemisms.  The author told the story of Winston Churchill when he was a dinner guest of some well bred society family in the American South.  At table, he politely asked that someone pass him some of the ”chicken breast.” His hostess equally politely informed him that it was not their way to speak of the chicken’s body parts, but that they preferred the term “white meat.” The following day Churchill, who apparently could not resist the opportunity to puncture the hyper-propriety of his Southern hostess, sent a lovely corsage to her with a gracious thank you note suggesting that she pin the corsage on her “white meat.”

All right already. Enough with the jokes. You really want to know how they tasted. Was there a discernible difference? Peter and I agreed, to my surprise, but not his, that there was a difference, a subtle one. It’s not a difference you would be likely to notice if you weren’t eating them side by side or in such a simple recipe, but it was definitely apparent in our test. The Cornish Cross had the crisper skin but the Freedom Ranger had a grainier texture. Peter and I agreed the Freedom Ranger had a different flavor. Peter called it a “more complex flavor.”  I described it as just more flavor, but as I reflect on it I would have to agree with him that “complexity” is a good term—as if there were layers of chicken flavor as compared to the simpler flavor of the Cornish Cross. Of course, there was no way in a taste test that we could tell differences in nutritional value.  For that we have to rely on the studies Peter excerpted last week.  But it seems safe to assume that the slower growing chicken that did more grazing, that is the Freedom Ranger, probably had a higher proportion of omega 3 fatty acids and lower overall fat content per serving. 

I would not denigrate the Cornish Cross. I’ve delighted in eating the ample leftovers all week, and their quick growth gets them to market size faster and, we think, at less cost.  But I am relieved and pleased that when we switch to raising slower growing, grazing-oriented chickens—be they the modern, French-developed Freedom Ranger breed or, if we can obtain them, actual heritage breed meat chickens—we will not be sacrificing, but rather enhancing, both taste and nutritional value.  And from our point of view, we will be enhancing the “raising experience” as well, since the actively grazing Freedom Rangers had far more entertaining personalities and, as a result, enhance the farm environment.

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Posted by Rural Intelligence on 03/22/11 at 06:05 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Chicken is Not What It Used to Be

AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes:

“A rose is a rose is a rose”, Gertrude Stein (left) once famously said. If she were alive today she would not, however, be able to say: “A chicken is a chicken is a chicken.”  Sadly, there are chickens and then there are chickens.

When we first started raising chickens (both egg and meat), it was our assumption that if we avoided commercial grain mixes in favor of locally fresh ground grains, gave our birds access to the outdoors and the foraging and exercise that resulted, and avoided the use of antibiotics and growth enhancers that we would be returning chicken to being chicken. Apparently, it’s not that simple.

A recent article published in the journal Public Health Nutrition  (summarized in the latest American Livestock Breeds Conservancy News)  discussed the results of a study by London Metropolitan University on the nutritional content of chickens past and present. Basing their study on samples of broiler chickens collected from supermarkets and farm shops throughout Southeast and Midwest England, they searched for a representative sample of what the average U.K. consumer buys in the way of chicken. Not surprisingly, they discovered that 90% of the chicken eaten in the U.K. comes from the industrial system, where chickens are reared in uniform conditions based on supermarket demands. I think that similar results would be found in this country.

Gathering samples and comparing what they found with what they unearthed researching records going back to the 1870’s, the researchers did a number of comparisons of nutritional content. Overall, the study determined that eating the same serving weight of chicken today compared to 30 years ago means you eat 100 more calories and three to eight times less omega 3-fatty acids. We all know what the extra calories mean, but what is less well known are the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, which include promoting heart health, lowering triglycerides and increasing the right kind of cholesterol in the blood stream. It is also posited by some that the decline in dietary omega-3 fatty acids is one factor in the rise in mental illness.

More specifically, the fat calorie content of broiler chicken, the researchers discovered, has increased to about four times that of protein—in other words the consumer is getting many more calories from fat than protein.  Chicken now has 100 more calories and fourfold calorie fat to protein ratio as compared to three decades ago. According to 1870 records, standard chicken portions had about 118 total calories. By 2004,  the amount of calories in the same size serving had climbed to 271.  Additionally, Omega-3 fatty acid has decreased significantly, replaced by linoleic acid (also known as omega-6 fatty acid). Chicken eggs, it should be pointed out, used to be one of the primary land based sources of omega-3 fatty acids.

The researchers determined four primary reasons for the rise in the fat content of domestic poultry:
•The practice of confining livestock to enclosures beginning in the 18th century.
•The selective breeding of those that gained weight the fastest.
•The development of high-energy food and growth promoters.
•The restriction and denial of exercise, resulting from keeping animals in an enclosed space with food permanently available.

Some of the factors have to do with the manner in which poultry has been raised, but some also have to do with the nature of the birds themselves, which brings us to heritage breeds—the breeds that dominated American farmyards prior to World War II. These older breeds, compared to the modern breeds that now dominate the market are slow growing, naturally mating, and have a long productive outdoor life

When we first began committing ourselves to heritage breeds it was primarily because of a desire to help preserve valuable livestock breeds from extinction, and to protect the available gene pool. Only gradually, through our experience with heritage turkey breeds over the past ten years, did we begin to appreciate that another major value of these breeds was in the superior flavor and texture of the meat.  Now we are beginning to realize that there is also a superior nutritional value in heritage breeds. This past year, a team at Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in Lindsbor, Kansas worked with Kansas State University to determine if there are nutritional benefits that come from heritage breed chickens. Accordingly, five different heritage breeds of chickens and three non heritage breeds labeled: ‘Store Brand”, “Company A”, and “Company B” were studied and compared for their nutritional content. The chart they produced, which I’ve partially reproduced here speaks for itself:

The results in calorie and fat content corroborate the findings of the British study. While the British study is an historical one and the Kansas study is focused on chicken breeds, the two mesh in that the further back in time one goes, the more one is dealing with heritage breeds raised in the conditions these breeds demand. Both studies highlight, one indirectly and the other directly, the nutritional value of the heritage bird versus the industrial bird.
As we are realizing at Turkana Farms, reversing the changes in poultry production that have been evolving for over a century is not easy. And worse, as some of our customers point out, it is not cheap.

Apparently, producing chickens cheaply enough and in such large quantities that it is now an every day meal (I can remember when it was chicken every Sunday) has been accomplished at the cost not only of flavor and texture but also at the serious cost of nutritional deficiencies. Sadly, reversing the industrial mode of chicken raising means returning to a much more expensive bird. The question to be answered is how much of the American public is willing or able to get over consuming huge portions of cheap food in favor of, perhaps,  a more modest portion of superior food with high nutritional value. When, we might ask, will a chicken be a chicken be a $chicken$?

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/16/11 at 11:48 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Eggs, a Great Source of Irony

  AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:

A story in The New York Times on February 19 about Maine’s Own Organic (MOO) Milk illustrated the difficulty of breaking even doing small scale agriculture.  It described MOO Milk’s effort to market slow-pasteurized organic milk to a geographically limited market as a cautionary tale demonstrating that “true grit, a laudable philosophy and a hot trend aren’t enough to create a viable business.”  As one of the cooperative’s participating farmers, Aaron Bell, aptly summarized it, “Our boat is made of duct tape and we’ve almost sunk a couple of times, but we’re paddling along.”  The problem, the article pointed out, is that selling milk is an extremely low margin business.  When margins are that low, the only way one can make money is with high volumes, meaning that small scale producers are inevitably doomed to struggle.

What’s true of milk is no less true of eggs, we’ve discovered.  The economics of egg production, which occupies a small niche of our farm business, are easy to plot and follow, and they similarly reveal how difficult it is to overcome a small margin of profit without high volume production.  I’ll (excuse the expression) lay it all out for you.

You’ve all heard of Tax Freedom Day, the mythical day some time in April when you stop working for the Government and start working for yourself.  Well, we on the farm have what I’d like to think of as Chickenfeed Freedom Day, when the chickens produce enough eggs each day to pay for their feed rather than us having to buy it for them.  Chickenfeed Freedom Day, in my judgment, is imminent.

How do I know this?  In a typical week, I go to our local feed supplier, V.R. Saulpaugh in Livingston, and buy three bags of their “lay mash” for a total of $27, and one bag of cracked corn for $7.  That’s $34 total.  Strictly speaking, it’s not solely for the chickens.  Our two obnoxious Chinese watch geese (still available for free to anyone who wants guard animals), the crippled duck who lives in our greenhouse, our four barnyard guinea fowl and the peacock and pea hen all partake of this fare.  But there are ancillary chicken costs—the oyster shells we feed them to keep their eggshells hard, the electricity cost of heating their watering towers in the winter, the amortized cost of the 25 new chicks we buy each year to keep production going—that roughly bring us back up to the $34 mark. The grain costs go down in the summer when the chickens are grazing the yard and eating the cartloads of weeds we bring them from the vegetable garden, but then we have to figure in the labor costs for tasks like cleaning and repairing the coop, so we’re still, I’d say, hovering around the weekly cost of $34.  Needless to say, this calculus values our time feeding, tending young chicks, collecting and washing eggs, and the like at $0. So be it.

We have to bring in $34 a week to break even.  At $3 a dozen, that means selling 11 1/2 dozen eggs a week, or roughly 20 eggs a day.  Right now, the chickens are producing that number only occasionally; the typical daily harvest is closer to 18.  But experience tells us that as the days lengthen egg production snowballs into an avalanche, and for the next six months or so the chickens will again be collectively earning their keep.  When they’re laying three dozen or more a day, assuming our market buys our full production, we can make (hold on to your hats) up to about $30 or more a week in profit. Of course, we snatch a dozen and a half or so eggs to eat ourselves each week, so we need to produce 13 dozen to have positive cash flow, but you get the picture. Over the course of the year, as long as we replenish our stock of layers each spring, we end up slightly in the black.

I can see the lightbulbs going on.  You are all smiling to yourselves and wondering why you have passed up this lucrative egg business opportunity for so long.  Indeed, you might be imagining ways you could change the balance more in your favor if you were the farmer.  In order to reduce the feed cost, you might cull the old chickens who lay at best only one egg every few weeks, and generate more positive cash flow by selling them as soup chickens or starts for spaghetti sauce base.  You might have raised your egg prices on January 1, when the Saulpaughs raised their feed prices.  You might seek cheaper feed of dubious origin, which explains to some extent how American agriculture got into its current mess to begin with.  You might increase the number of laying hens to raise production a bit.

Or, if you were really interested in making money at farming, you would probably get out of the small scale egg business altogether.  This is certainly the solution advocated by my father, Felix, whose bemusement at my egg selling stems in part from recalling that when I was born he was making his living, such as it was, with an egg sales route.  His true passion at the time was playing semi-professional soccer in the Maccabee League, so egg sales had to supply him with his real income.  Uttering those two concepts, “egg sales” and “real income”, in the same breath still strikes him as laughable.  But the real absurdity, in his mind, is all the years he worked so hard thereafter in the textile trade for his family’s benefit, to, among other things, foot the entire bill for my fancy Yale law degree, so that I, too, could sell eggs.

When I sell eggs to my neighbors here at the farm and downtown in New York, I give a little nod of thanks to Felix.  When you enjoy our eggs, you might thank Felix as well. —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Rural Intelligence on 03/09/11 at 10:01 AM • Permalink

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