Paying attention to animals

Animals don't think and process information just exactly like we do, nor do they react like we do to various sorts of stimuli. This may seem self evident to many of my readers but it gets us into trouble with farm animals in two different ways.

The first happens when we attribute human reactions to animals. We ALL do this at least to some degree and enough of us do it often enough that there is a term for it...anthropomorphism. Maybe we urge our dog in because it's cold or wet or both outside, and we get frustrated because Fido doesn't want to listen to us. He's comfortable under the conditions at hand and maybe he's enjoying playing in the mud. The same thing befalls us when we deal with farm animals and horses. Melissa and I joke that we've spent a hundred thousand dollars on run in sheds to appease horse owners. This must be correct because the only time we ever see the (damn!) horses in them is on perfect days like today....75 degrees and partly sunny. With a very few exceptions, when it's raining and 35 it seems to us that they are ALL outside grazing, whether or not they have blankets or rainsheets on.

The second happens when we fail to adequately take into account an animals reaction to certain situations. I'll pick on myself and my family and use the example of loading cattle onto an enclosed truck or trailer for reasons of transport. For years the accustomed way to do this was to pen cattle up tight (often difficult to achieve on short notice) in a corral or catch pen they had rarely if ever been before, back the truck up, open the truck/trailer door and force the whole bunch on with raised voices and sticks. We never did use prods, but they are liberally used on some farms. At best this method led to terrified and irrational animals which led to frayed human nerves and short human tempers. It also leads to severely damaged catch pens, cattle and loading facilites because stressed cows sometimes go bonkers and when a creature weighing 1500 lbs goes bonkers, mister you've got trouble on your hands.

At some point, somebody in the family got angry and frustrated enough with this methodology to come up with a better way to get this job done. With a little foresight and planning, it's very possible to eliminate 95 percent of the trouble from moving cows. Today, I feed every cow destined to leave this place some sort of treat in the nearest corral every day for months before the anticpated departure. We make very clear to our human help that anyone who raises their voice or tries to move cows with force gets a one way trip home and will never work on this place again. We park the trailer (with the door wired open) in the loading chute weeks before we move cattle to get them used to it AND we feed the cattle IN the loading chute as well as in the trailer to get them comfortable with it. Guess what ? By paying attention to, acknowledging and overcoming their fears, today I can pen up and load a trailer full of calves by myself in a few minutes. Nobody gets hurt and the animals aren't stressed. My goal is to have half the cattle on the trailer chewing their cud, and while I don't always achieve this result, I've managed to achieve this level of comfort before.

Barn Interior, Tool Revelation

I've spent this week working away at finishing out the interior of the new barn down in Lynnville. I took the picture below about an hour ago, There is a fifth stall to the right of the picture that isn't visible but it's at the same stage as the rest of them.

Early next week I hope to get concrete poured in the storage area, the wash rack and the (large) feed room so I can frame in the walls and get them insulated well before cool weather arrives. I hope the electric co-op will be ready to string poles etc. so we can have some lights, plugs, and maybe an internet connection so that Melissa isn't solely responsible for communicating with clients each and every day.

I've built, fixed and renovated a lot of stuff in my life including multiple large buildings and multiple thousands of feet of board fence. Until last week, I drove each and every nail in every building project I've ever done with a hammer and an awful lot of muscle power. About a week ago, my father-in-law (bless him) went to Home Depot and when he came home he presented me with a Paslode nail gun and a couple of thousand nails. My infatuation was instant, deep and prolonged. I'd sleep with the thing if I could figure out how. Yes, seriously. I will never be without one again.

Off the top of my head, other shop tools I very much like include:

BIG air compressors that have the capacity to handle any air tool

Every air tool ever made, but especially air sockets and wrenches. Seriously.

Plasma welders

Stihl chain saws. I have a collection. Love 'em, every one.

Chop saws and grinders - They beat hacksaws and files all day long

Really good miter saw, table saw and Skil-saw.

Pipe wrenches - in a pinch, I can undo nearly anything with a pipe wrench

A really good, sharp little hand saw

Floor jacks with high tonnage capacity. I own three right now and I use them constantly

I'm missing a lot of stuff, but this is a pretty good start.

What tools do you consider absolutely essential in your life ?

If I can select some Melissa approved hinges tomorrow morning, we'll have five fully functional stalls at the new farm (one is out of the picture). Considering the barn interior was a bare dirt floor on Monday morning, and considering that I am the carpenter, I'd say this is progress.

Organic Animal Agriculture

A few years ago Melissa and I looked very seriously at going down the organic road with our beef operation. Ultimately, we didn't do it, and in the remainder of this post, I'll attempt to explain why we didn't.

However, before I get to that, maybe first I need to back up a step and explain *why* we were looking at it in the first place. Obviously, the most important step in thinking organic is having a core of fundamental beliefs that is congruent with what the organic agriculture movement is trying to achieve. On the surface at least, so far, so good. I am fully with them on long term, proactive controls, soil building, happy animals, and cyclical production models and methodologies. In many respects, organic agriculture is not incongruent with what we're doing with our beef animals right now. The thought was that if we could get certified it might give us another story to tell and the additional oversight might be be a selling point for some of our customers.

Unfortunately, when I started digging deeper there began to accrue some negatives to offset the positives. Here is a short list, along with some of my thoughts.

Farming is my business and my living rather than my hobby, so going organic is, for me, primarily a business decision. It's been my experience that it's seldom a good idea to knowingly make a business decision that takes you backwards financially, because if you're like me you will unknowingly make enough bad business decisions to sink a battleship all by yourself ! We ran a lot of math on going organic and we found that it was a wash with what we were currently doing from a financial standpoint. In this case, what I saw was a whole bunch of work and time to go through the certification process to win the use of a sales tool that would accrue this farm (at best) limited financial gain.

About this time, I began to look closely at some of the practices that were encouraged and discouraged by the certifying agencies with regards to stockmanship. It didn't take very long to find things that were massively incongruent with my beliefs; enough so that even if the money had been really right I couldn't have gone forward with with the certification process.

I guess I'm kind of wierd but I actually *like* the animals that live with me here on this farm. I want to give them every chance to live their lives as healthy and happy as possible, and if they get sick I want to treat them with the best and most efficacious treatment to get them back to a state of wellness as quickly as possible. Sometimes, the best treatment for sick animals involves using antibiotics. When it does it's my opinion that dosing them correctly and treating disease early is a lot more effective for the individual (and for the herd) than waiting and using them as a treatment of last resort.

Treating sick animals is no fun, either for the animals in question or for us. We take a lot of preventative steps to avoid the need to treat sick animals in the first place, either with or without antibiotics. One of the most important steps we take involves administering regular vaccinations against endemic diseases.

Both vaccinations and using antibiotics as first line controls in certain disease situations fly in the face of organic agriculture standards today. That's okay. It takes all kinds to make the world go around and if everybody were like me it'd be a pretty boring place. That said, I believe my protocols do as right as possible by the animals on this farm, and at the end of the day the most important thing has to be liking the face that looks at you in the mirror every morning.

I Deserve it

It's this writers opinion that the three words that make up the title of this post have got more people in more trouble over time than any other three word combination except maybe, "Hey, watch this !"

Of course there are different kinds of trouble; what I'm going to talk about for the remainder of this post is the financial kind. Readily available credit, rent to own, interest only mortgages and "easy" payment plans have seemingly subsumed the idea that except in rare instances, one may better put off until tomorrow that which could be financed today. Most of the things one can buy and finance today are depreciating assets. As many people have learned during this recession, even home values can depreciate. For this reason, home equity lines of credit aren't usually a good idea, because where are you going to live when real estate prices drop (!) and you suddenly owe more than your home is worth.

Even famous financial analysts talk today about "good" debt vs. "bad" debt; the idea being that good debt will either appreciate in value and/or earn more money than it costs to finance it whereas bad debt just accrues costs with no hope of salvation. The truth is that *any* kind of debt is a gamble; even the safest forms of debt can backfire on occasion.

I'm guilty of thinking, "I deserve it" myself. As most of you know, Melissa and I are building out our new farm right now. With the exception of a little bit of mortgage debt, we owe no money on any of the improvements we've made, and we have no plans to accrue more debt by making improvements before we can do it with cash. Of course, having animals on two farms with one of them under near continual construction, combined with running old, fully depreciated equipment and vehicles adds a whole other level of inconvenience to our daily lives, and I've thought many times about how "convenient" it would be to just go ahead and borrow enough to finish it out, with maybe enough for a cab tractor, some new equipment, and a nice new car to spare. It'd work too. I'd look like a genius so long as our growth curve remained in it's current allometric state and nothing went seriously wrong in the interim. Unfortunately, I know very well that growth curves seldom remain allometric for very long. I also know that having things go wrong is very much a part of life.

This post was spurred on by a friends' untimely and very surprising farm auction notice, which was waiting for me in the mailbox today. It hit me pretty hard when I got it, and when I saw who'se equipment and real estate was for sale, I knew I needed to drive over pretty quick and have a visit with him. I did just that shortly before supper time tonight. It's not my business to know the circumstances behind his sale, and I didn't ask, but I do know that whatever happened, I'm sad about it. I hope I'll see him on a tractor again soon; next time in better circumstances than he currently finds himself in right now. Years ago, my grandad said that he'd rather have good neighbours than more land. Amen to that.

Apparantly, Vegetables have rights too.

For as much rhetoric as corporate ag spews about producing the cleanest, safest and most abundant food supply in the world, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that they don't take any sort of criticism challenging this position very well at all. In fact, corporate lobbyists have successfully introduced food libel laws in 13 states in this country. (Thankfully, at this writing, Tennessee isn't one of them.)

As I understand it, what this means is that if you make a show out of talking and writing bad things about commodities that agribusiness produces in the states that have these laws on the books, and you don't have sound science to back up your musings, it's a whole lot easier for them to sue you for libel, and, I surmise, win their suit. At least in theory, if I said that eating chicken raised by corporation X made me sick due to the hormones in it, I could get sued. So much for that dratted constitution and all those soldiers that died protecting our rights; darned freedom of speech and expression and all. Big brother has spoken and he says eat it and don't complain. If you dare raise your voice, at least in any of 13 states with laws like this on the books, you shall be silenced, one way or another. At the end of the day, it's all about the money, it's all about control, and it's all about being scared to death that someone will come along and take the money and control away.

Most farmers that sell directly to the public have no fear of their consumer's criticism, mostly because we have good reputations and good products and we protect both very diligently. If someone doesn't like my food, or the farming practices under which it was grown, or the service I provide while selling it, I think they ought to be able to say so. Knowing that they CAN say so, I am going to be extra careful not to give them any reason to do so, and I believe this is as it should be. From what I read, I surmise that some sectors of corporate ag don't see it this way AT ALL.

A couple of my blog readers commented that most consumers don't want to know how their food is produced. I fully agree with that thought. More than that, I believe a large fraction of consumers don't *care* how their food is produced, so long as it's there. That's their right and that's fine with me. Some folks won't be told that you get what you pay for and it's as true of food products as it is anything else. Let 'em go buy "cheap", crappy, industrially raised, irradiated, hormone laced junk food and never ask any questions about how it might have got in that plastic container on the shelf in their local supermarket.

Me ? I'm going to the garden to pick me a tomato. ;)

The CAFO Reader

I'm reading a book right now called The CAFO Reader. It's a compendium of essays about CAFO agriculture and the alternatives that exist to it. For those not in the know, CAFO stands for concentrated animal feeding unit, and, at least in the US, this usually means some sort of large scale industrial agribusiness.

For the most part, reading the essays in the book is literally like listening to myself talk or reading what I write here on this blog. It's scary how often I and the essayist in question use the same phraseology to describe certain key situations. About the only part of the book I have read so far that I disagree with is that some of the authors get very hung up on size. As I have mentioned before, I don't believe that large is always a bad thing; the biggest dairy in the state of Tennessee is also among the best managed; indeed it's run by a personal friend of mine. More often than not, it is the mindset of the farmer, rather than the size of his farm that creates the problem. When the farmer is of an agrarian mindset, size doesn't necessarily preclude a high degree of expertise in farming. Things tend to be well run and everything stays in relative balance. When the farmer is of an industrial mindset, woe be to the animals, the workers, and the neighbourhood, because all of them are going to pay a price over time. It's like every part of their brains not concerned with growing some commodity bigger, faster and cheaper has atrophied itself into nothing.

I'm just getting started on reading the solutions part of the book right now. It comes as no surprise to me that some of the essayists in this part of the book are featured heavily on my bookcase. Like me, many of the authors seem to believe there will exist two or more parellel systems of production for a long while yet, barring some unseen pivotal change. Industrial ag will continue to produce "cheap" food for the masses, while well run regional and local producers will continue to direct market a series of differentiated products targeted toward higher end consumers.

One of the most glaring differences between industrial farms and what I and other direct marketers do is the level of transparency we provide our customers. Perhaps more than anything else we do, this is what consumers are happy to pay for, and for some reason, this seems to be the hardest thing for industrial ag organizations to offer up. Several essayists touch on this, but I think there is perhaps room for more exploration of this topic.

However the book winds up, at the end of the day there are only two decisions I can really control. The first is what goes on right here at home. After having experienced and participated in both commodity ag and enhanced value, direct market ag, I have made my bed firmly in the "value added" camp. The second involves where my purchased food dollars go. Alone, neither one makes a hill of beans worth of difference to the system. But when we start making real choices together on a larger scale, I believe we CAN have food production systems that feature healthy farms and prosperous rural communities instead of what we have now.

Getting There !

When they aren't grazing quietly, you'll find the horses literally arrayed in a semi-circle around the building watching the crazy humans run like mad while moving all over the exterior of the building like ants! Looks like the horses are going to have to find something else to do after tomorrow ! All we lack on the exterior is doors and shutters; both easily remedied. Now to tackle the INTERIOR ! :)