Welcoming Hazel

Our little farm has added a new resident!

Hazel

We were tooling around Kalona collecting our yearly pig supply from an Amish farmer we know, "One-armed Marvin" - as though being an Amish farmer isn't difficult enough already, he does it all with one arm- we asked if he had any connections to someone who might have a heifer calf for sale and he recommended his neighbor whose cow had just dropped the first calf of the season on his dairy farm.

Her crazy calf antics and exuberance in taking the bottle have brightened our days and hearing her high pitched "Moo" from the corner of our barn makes us smile every time. My daughter is mastering the fine art of teaching a calf to lead - I explained that she had better start now while Hazel is still only 85 pounds because when she is several hundred pounds it will be a lot more challenging. Right now they are pretty evenly matched.

Can't say that buying a cow was ever on the radar, but now I find myself plotting and planning three years down the line when we could potentially have milk, butter and cheese all produced here on the farm.

I know the jury is forever out on the whole "raw milk" issue, but if examined logically it makes sense to drink raw milk rather than highly processed milk. Processed milk has had many of the good benefits destroyed in the pasteurization process which, assuming milk is contaminated, is a good thing. The main reason that milk was originally pasteurized was to eliminate most of the "bad bugs" that can live in milk - brucellosis, tuberculosis, listeria, e-coli, etc. But with the advent of testing, culling and vaccinating many of these diseases are becoming much less common. Not to say that it isn't a risk, but in general drinking raw milk is not quite as dangerous as most of the USDA would have a person believe.

Once again, it is because we are maintaining dairy cattle in less than ideal habitats, we force them to eat grain to maximize their milk output with complete disregard for the fact that they are herbivores that were designed to eat grass - eating processed food just isn't in their genetic vocabulary and it leads to health problems that then require even more medications to correct. A healthy cow out on clean pasture eating grass - it is a good bet that the milk she produces will be excellent. Having two parents and four grandparents that all grew up drinking raw milk is also a good indication that it can be done without the threat of instant death from listeriosis.

Eating processed food isn't in our genetic vocabulary either for that matter. We - like most species of animals - were designed to eat things.... and by things, I mean just about anything that our ancestors were able to scrape up. Humans are omnivores - plants and animals. This puts us in the same category as dogs, possums, raccoons, and pigs to name just a few. Yes, that's right....we are made of essentially the same parts and components as those dirty animals, but somehow we have come to the conclusion that if it isn't "sterile" we humans shouldn't be eating it.

The gastrointestinal system was designed to tackle bacteria of all sorts. Our stomach contains acids that are in the pH realm of 1 - that is highly acidic and this allows us to kill off most of the pathogens. Those that aren't killed off there go through to the intestine where the pancreatic enzymes change the pH to a more basic level of 8. All throughout the intestinal system there are ways that the body has worked out the most efficient system of getting nutrients from a food while simultaneously restricting the passage of bacteria and other germs - there are "tight junctions" in the small intestine to keep larger particles (like bacteria) from crossing over, there are lymph nodes that send out the warrior white blood cells when a threat is perceived, there are smooth muscles to help keep things moving through. All-in-all, a very complex system and yet we waste most of it because we insist on eating only "clean" food.

Our systems like to do what they were originally designed to do - it keeps them healthier and happier. There has been some discussion that diseases such as Crohn's disease comes about because the body's immune system has nothing better to do than to attack itself and, in some cases they have found that if they infest people with swine whipworms (an intestinal parasite of pigs) people with Crohn's have gone into remission -the immune system now has something better to work on other than itself. Our gastrointestinal and immune systems were established to handle unclean food and typically working with nature, rather than against it, is a good way to go.

There really is no 5 second rule at our house, nor do we use "anti-bacterial" stuff if we can help it. We are becoming a species that is entirely too clean and then we wonder at the increased incidence of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. All of those are signs of an over active immune system that is out looking for something to attack. Like a bored child, if the immune system doesn't have something constructive to work on, it will cause problems.

Polio is a good example of how being a little "dirty" can pay off. Polio was a disease that would often attack the clean, well kept children...why?....because they could afford to stay "clean". Increased sanitation led to a decrease in natural exposure to polio and then when the infection did occur it was more likely to lead to the paralytic form. The grubby kids in the dirt were more likely to be protected due to small doses of natural exposure.

Now that isn't to say that it doesn't pay to wash food and wash hands, but I don't think it is necessary to make everything sterile. I think about it this way: We are so germaphobic, we use anti-bacterial soap on just about everything these days, but if you read the label and see that it supposedly kills 99.9% of bacteria that leaves 0.1% bacteria behind with a clear field upon which to grow and thrive. And these aren't the weak bugs - these are the tough ones and now they are everywhere! I hate to break it to people, but there are bacteria and fungi everywhere all the time - and they are supposed to be there. They are commensal organisms and, in some ways, protect us from the other "bad" bugs by simply holding their turf and limiting the space upon which the pathogenic organisms can thrive.

I have digressed a long way from the fun and excitement of new baby calf, Hazel, but her residence here on the farm is a starting point from which we can further launch into self sustainability and getting back to a more natural way of doing things. Milk - unpasteurized, unhomoginized , unprocessed. Of course I am putting the cart slightly before the horse on this one - she has to grow up for a few years and then be successfully bred before we will see any milk, but a person can dream. And either way - a calf is a very nice way to start a cow.