The Daily Bread

There is a staple in almost every household that just isn't thought about much - bread.  Every week requires a few loaves for the constant peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or the toast with peanut butter supply that my children insist upon.  A piece of toast and cup of tea has helped soothe many an upset stomach over the years, and rarebit would just be so much cheese sauce on a plate without it.

When I was in high school, I had a German exchange partner and one of the things that she found most unusual in the United States was the "soft bread" - it mystified her.  Only after I spent four months in Germany did I fully understand why.  They buy their bread from a local baker typically several times a week and it is a very dense, rich, crusty bread.  We would take sandwiches to school because they didn't serve school lunches there, and it would consist of dry bread and liverwurst.  At first I truly thought I was going to starve to death, but I sometimes now find myself thinking back longingly on those sandwiches because, as it turned out, they were really good and largely due to the bread.

I have always liked making yeast breads and made quite a few loaves during my early days on the farm, but I have to give credit to my husband as being the main "bread maker" of the house.  He took over this job with gusto a few years ago and we haven't seen pre-sliced bread in quite some time now. My husband remarked the other day that we have been eating home made bread for so long that we no longer say, "homemade bread"....it's just "bread".  This homemade bread making started with my daughter's diagnosis of celiac disease.  Suddenly, bread was the enemy - unsafe for her consumption and we had to find an alternative.  There are several gluten free breads that are commercially produced now, but I haven't found any of them that are very tasty, so my husband set out to find a recipe that would work for her and taste good enough for her to want to eat every day at school, because everything (and I do mean everything) in a public school cafeteria has wheat in it one way or another.  He also took on the challenge of making wheat bread for the rest of the family as well. 

On average, there are between two and four loaves of bread consumed by the "wheat eaters" in the house in a given week depending upon the meals we make.  My daughter and I (since I also started to eat gluten free in solidarity with her and found that my allergies and several other chronic health issues completely disappeared as well)...we eat about one or two loaves between us during the week.  That can add up to a lot of bread.

Now.....here's a test....how do you make a loaf of yeast bread?

This is something that for countless generations was just known.  People (typically the women) made bread all the time....daily.  It was probably such a reflex action that I would imagine they would knead the bread in their sleep if they had to, and yet today there are not too many people that would really have the first idea of where to start to make a loaf of bread.  Not that it is imperative that people make all their own bread, but it is usually a good idea to know what should be in it.  Reading a bread label shouldn't take an advanced degree in chemistry.

The other day while riding in the car with one of my daughters, she happened to mention something about a friend eating Wonder bread.  I looked at her and smiled and asked, "You know why it is called 'Wonder' bread'?"  My daughter knows me well enough to know that I was not about to say anything favorable about this highly processed and mostly fake food and said in answer, "because we 'wonder' what is in it?"  To which I could only smile and nod.

The Basics:
Warm water 
Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Oil
Flour

Anything additional and you start making "fancy" breads.  Add some whole wheat flour and make "whole wheat bread", add oatmeal and raisins and you will have "oatmeal, raisin bread"   Bread dough is a very forgiving substance, but it does help if the basics are down.  Knowing how to proof the yeast, for instance - some bread makers swear by it, others, well....we fly by the seat of our pants.  Knowing how and why bread 'rises' or better yet, knowing how to catch and use free-living yeast from the air to make bread is a State Fair trip in the making for any kid.   Bread machines are nice, but really don't provide anything extra that you don't already have on hand.  They do, however, take out the fun parts of bread making that include punching down the dough and kneading it.  One day, while in an especially bad mood, I worked out some aggression on the innocent lump of dough that had been nicely rising.  My son happened by and remarked, "Mom, remind me never to make you mad, okay?"  Making bread can, in some ways, be very therapeutic.

The best part, by far, is how baking bread makes the house smell.  Walking into a house with bread baking in the oven is quite possibly one of the most soothing smells in the world.  Warm bread....the very thought of it can comfort the sorest of souls.

The difficult part, for most people, is finding the time to make bread.  It has to be mixed and kneaded, then it has to rise for one or two hours, then it gets kneaded again and shaped, then rises a second time for another hour, then baked. This can seem like an extensive process for a single loaf of bread, but when thought of in segments it becomes less odious - mix, knead....play a game of Life with the kids....knead, shape.....go for a run or do chores outside....bake while starting dinner.....then enjoy warm bread with dinner.  All together the time spent actually making the bread is about 30 minutes and the time that it has to sit and rise is more of a guideline rather than a set amount of time - if the game of Life goes on for two hours, that's okay because the dough will keep.  As it turns out, Gluten Free bread is actually easier in the sense that it only has to rise once and then be cooked.  There have been instances at this house where we will have three loaves of bread and two pizza crusts all rising at the same time - we almost need a flow chart to figure out which ones go in the oven when.


With the majority of the bread being now made by my husband, I haven't had to think of it often, but periodically I am left in the care of his dough as it is rising while he does a few odd jobs for neighbors in the area or runs one kid or another here or there for band or sports practice.  This is an honor that I do not take lightly, but I do have a tendency to handle my own bread dough a little differently - every baker does, I think.  It becomes more of an art form than food after a while, and we all have our certain way of making sure that it rises as well as it can, doesn't have air holes and stays soft despite being forgotten about by whatever errant child forgets to put it away after carving off a slice. My bread art comes in the form of pizza crust that is made every Sunday evening to be shared while watching whatever family movie we agree upon - our only meal to be eaten while perched in front of the television, but it has become something of a family tradition.  Regardless of who makes it, as an art form, bread in all its many forms is perhaps the tastiest.

Making Do With Nothing New

We have a reputation amongst our acquaintances as being "the last stop before the landfill".  I am not sure, sometimes, whether to think of this as a compliment or an insult.....depending upon the stuff, I guess it could be either one.  I grew up in a family that was heavily influenced by The Great Depression  - stories of living without, re-using, re-purposing, re-making - one of my grandmother's favorite sayings was, "waste not, want not" and she was famous for turning almost anything into something else....my personal favorite was using old plastic grocery bags to crochet them into baskets.  After Armageddon, these things will still be around.  

What amazes me the most about all this "stuff" is just how much of it there is, and this is the stuff that people don't want. 

Clearly, my standards are rather low, but taken in another way....I am very easy to please.   I am eternally grateful for any and all clothes that show up for kids because with 5 of them (and all of them true "farm kids"), clothes go by fast.  Miscellaneous wood is another one that is very handy to have people drop off....you just never know when you will need to build a shed or put together a project that may require odd pieces of wood or when people will drop by for an impromptu bon fire.

 The worst part is that we start to take on a "pack rat" mentality and have to periodically jettison some of the excess cargo that builds up.  The biggest times that we have had to do this, of course, is when moving from place to place.  We moved so much for a while that we had it down to a science.  "Three moves equals a burn" was a common phrase in our house, and we were pared down to only the necessities.  Needless to say, when you move to a farm with excess out buildings, the stuff starts to pile up in a big way.  My mother always threatened that, when she moved off their farm, that she was just going to lock the door and light the match.  Having recently moved my parents off their farm.....this would have been a good idea. 

We have been in this place now for almost nine years which means that there is roughly nine layers of stuff that has built up in many of our sheds.  One shed in particular has been a key storage shed - the Quonset hut.  When we first moved out here it was a storage shed for my sister's stuff, then it got utilized as the catch all garden shed, then my father stored his Lexan panels in there for his acoustic engineering business, and then one end of the shed was commandeered for an animal shelter to house Hazel, Lambie and the occasional wayward chicken.   Now, in a grand attempt to make do, we are turning the Quonset hut into a green house using some of the left over Lexan panels that have been sitting in there for three years.

One side of the shed faces due south so the plan to remove the corrugated metal panels from that side and replace them with the Lexan panels seems like a straight forward one....at least to me.  However, as pointed out several times by my architect husband....it is never quite as simple as that.  The metal panels came off easy enough and are currently being stored in the Quonset hut and idiotically moved from one end of the building to the other when we need to get them out of the way.  Hate to throw them out though....they could be used for something else. (See how this gets going.) The metal ribs have been painted from their original deep rust to a shiny black and now we are at the stage of attempting to figure out how to put the panels on.  In theory, this isn't too hard, but in reality....these things are really heavy and have to be lifted twelve feet into the air.  I have images of going out to find Keith squashed under one of these panels like a bug under a cover slip on a microscope slide.  At present, we have two in place and six more to go.

Using, re-using, recycling, and making do are wonderful skills to have.  It kept my creative grandmother busy until she was almost ninety years old, and it has undoubtedly saved us thousands of dollars while simultaneously saving tons of stuff from the landfill.  At some point, I have a sense that our society's "throw away" mentality is going to come back to haunt us.  The "Wal Mart" mentality, as I call it...."Oh, but everything is so inexpensive at Wal Mart!  How can you not shop there?"  Easy.....When so many jobs have been shipped overseas and almost everything you buy now comes with a sticker that says, "Made in China" on it, because in China they are willing to work for $2 per 12 hour day so the cost of production and, therefore, the cost of the product ends up being cheaper than any American company could produce it.....and then companies like Wal Mart sell mass quantities of a product for a while, become that product's main purchaser and then they demand that their price for the product be set even lower, so now that company has to produce its good for even less money and the people in China work 14 hour days for $1.50.....that's why I don't shop at Wal Mart....or Kmart.....or Target if I can help it.

 I really have nothing against products made in China, they make the products that Americans either don't want to make, or American companies don't want to have to pay so much to have made. However, I try to keep my purchases as close to home as I can.  It isn't easy, but once in a while you find a company that still produces a product in America.  They aren't inexpensive, that much is for sure, but they are paying American workers wages that support the local economy and they are very often socially conscious companies that make the effort to produce a quality product while simultaneously creating jobs.  Imagine what our country would be like if these companies were the ones that we shopped at instead of the Wal Marts?   America has essentially become the land of the service industry - manufacturing has become a thing of the past for many, which is unfortunate.  Not everyone is cut out for service industries and I sometimes wonder what will happen when China decides that it is tired of supplying us with our plastic Happy Meals toys and 50 inch television screens? Will we have any idea how to produce stuff for ourselves? And will anyone be able to afford it?  When I can't find an American product, I buy second hand if possible - yes, it probably came from China, but it is sold not once, but twice (or more) by local sales people.

Believe it or not, there are times that I think back to the stories that my grandparents told me about the Depression and not having so much stuff, and I am somewhat envious.  A time when people were all working together to exist in whatever capacity they could, using what they had on hand, relying on neighbors for help when needed.  As much of a struggle as those times were, I never once heard a story from either set of grandparents that was necessarily sad. They were stories of dances and playing cards with friends and sitting on fenders of their cars in the middle of town on Saturday nights talking to each other while all the kids ran around and played kick the can.  Crazy stories of jobs that my grandpa did to make ends meet - like moving houses or driving a load of pigs to market when the truck tipped over and all the pigs got out.  Now what are our stories?  "Went to work, came home, ate something in front of the t.v. and then went to bed."  ....talk about the great depression.  

I think there is a movement afoot - slow but starting to grow - of people that are starting to realize some of this as well, that sometimes less is more, being creative and ingenuitive gives more a sense of accomplishment than being rich does, and sometimes talking and having dinner with neighbors rather than watching the latest episode on t.v. leads to memories shared.   Maybe it is due to "The Great Recession" that we are in right now, in which people just don't have the funds to replace or buy things, but I like to imagine that maybe....just maybe, we are waking up to the idea that want  and need  really are two different things and sometimes, when the wants can't be had, it allows a little space for something else to come in instead - creativity, interaction, memories made.  Maybe that is what my grandmother really meant,  "Waste not. Want not."

A Good Pair of Boots

Winter somehow seems to have missed us entirely this year.  By writing that line I am secretly hoping to jinx us into receiving a horrendous snow storm that drops a foot of snow on us and takes until April to disappear, because I really have kind of missed having the down time that winter typically brings.  My "weather worries" are deepening with each changing season - the buds are too early on the trees, the ground never froze for more than a week at a time, I have weeds that have continued to quietly grow in the garden all year, and I never had enough time to get the indoor projects completed before spring is knocking at the door.  I am trying to keep track of the appropriate time to start planting stuff in the garden because the temptation is strong to start placing seeds in the ground given the warmer weather....it could be a very long season indeed.

So, to pass the time and quietly prepare the garden, I haul fertilizer....also known as "manure" by most, unless you are covered in it and up to your knees in it....then it simply becomes "shit".

There are very few things that you really need in life on the farm, but a good pair of shit-kickin' boots are definitely one of them.  I don't usually swear, but if you can't say "shit" when you are actually up to your knees in shit, then where else can it legitimately be used? 

The ideal shit-kickin' boots have to be:

Tall:  Because this stuff is deep and only gets deeper as the spring rains come on (if they ever do).

Waterproof:  Because most of what you are tromping through is often largely made of water or the rain has added to the moisture level.

Lightweight:  Because it gets really heavy when you have half an acre of mud on your boots.

Sometimes it helps if the boots have steel toes because animals can be really heavy, and it is also nice if they are big enough that you can fit a large pair of warm socks in them when the weather is cold, but both of these cut down on being lightweight, so it is a bit of a trade off.

Personally, I am very attached to my boots.  They are worn year round and start to mold directly to my feet after a while.  My tan lines in the summer will often extend from the bottom of my shorts to my knees where the tops of my boots are.  When I dislocated my ankle a few years ago I had on a pair of boots - I really would rather have had them simply pull the boot off my horribly dislocated foot, then cut it off, but they weren't brave enough to try.  I am not sure what was more painful - the foot, or watching them cut one of my favorite boots off. 

Some people come home from work and put on their slippers....I come home from work and put on my boots.

In The Company Of Solitude

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”

~Paul Tillich

I grew up as a farm girl.  Not so much in the sense that we raised a lot of animals and it really wasn't a "working" farm by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely in the country without the sound of a busy street nearby or street lights to light up the night.  I remember several times growing up when I would have friends over for the night and they would find themselves  freaked out by the lack of noise in the middle of a dark Minnesota night. 

Then I moved to the city to go to school and lived their for five years before being able to escape once again to a very tiny country farmhouse in the absolute middle of no where.  Unfortunately, I was entirely too busy finishing school to really enjoy that stay.  After school was finished, it was back to living in town as we started to raise our kids and pay off school loans.  A total of nine years of living in the thick of things - street lights, 24 hour stores a few blocks away, sirens going off, neighbors coming home late, dogs barking at all hours.....you sort of take it all in and block it all out at the same time. 

Finally, the move here.  Almost a mile to our nearest neighbor, no streetlights, no cars going by, no sirens, only quiet.  At night, only stars for as far as the imagination cares to fly out into the universe.  I very distinctly remember a moment a few days after moving out here when I stood on the front stoop holding our baby daughter in my arms and watching my two older children, then ages 5 and 3 run down the hill at breakneck pace, their short stubby legs going as fast as they could. I looked down at the baby in my arms for only a second and suddenly my two older children had disappeared from sight.  I felt my heart stop in that moment of sheer, pure panic that can only come to a mother whose children are suddenly no where to be found. All the typical thoughts of kidnapping, attacks by wild dogs, and falling in old wells raced through my brain.  It, thankfully, was only a moment before I realized that the only reason I couldn't find them was because the short apple tree had called to them to climb her leafy, apple heavy branches and they were just up in the first crook of the tree, happily hidden beneath all her leaves.  It was at that moment that I realized I had become "city-fied" and had become like one of my freaked out friends that felt both terribly exposed and totally alone all at the same time.  

Living on a farm takes a little getting used to, but thankfully, nature is a very patient teacher.

Instead of the street lights to light your way, nature shows you a magnificent sky on a clear winter night that takes your breath away.  You realize that, if you had to you could also navigate by the stars as so many other people have had to do for thousands of years because Polaris is always where it should be.  Suddenly the constellations and the stories behind them become worth knowing as they provide a sort of comfort while outside at night.  The moon's large smiling face becomes a dear friend's that you enjoy seeing every 28 days and time measures out from full moon to full moon when your very blood seems to rise more with the tide of it.  In the summer the fireflies light up the early evening and make the world appear as a shimmering diamond, and generally are used as a sign to the kids that it is time to head in for the night....right after they have caught (and released) a few of them.

Instead of the convenience stores and sirens you have your garden and your farm dog.  At first these seem woefully inadequate to the task at hand, but then after working in the garden all day you are really too tired to notice the dog keeping the masked bandit raccoons away.

Instead of sirens and noisy neighbors,  there is the chirping of industrious birds whose whole conversation lets you know the moment spring arrives because of the cacophony outside the window.  The frogs chime in at night with their low "bur -up, burr-up"  which roughly translates to "this mud is fine!"  The crickets keep track of time and the temperature as the summer heats up.  All these sounds are infinitely more agreeable than those of crowded humanity....unless, of course, one of the aforementioned crickets finds his way into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

Instead of many houses, there is only the one - yours.  This house is old, it has its secrets and protects its past well, but that doesn't mean that it isn't open to the warmth and life of a new family.  There are, after all, always more secrets to protect- like the time capsule that we put together with our story and our current information and tucked it away in a wall that we built. I have always had a thing for old houses.  They seem so wise somehow, they have seen so much and stood storms that have driven lesser houses into the ground, but they are alive and take some getting used to.  The floor boards that creek and squeak as you walk across them and always seem so much louder in the middle of the night , the door hinges that haven't seen any grease in decades and let you know just who is coming and going whether it is an angry teenager or a seven pound cat.  There is often a shifting of the entire frame of the house when the wind is strong enough, or when the pressure drops suddenly just before a big storm.  The basement breathes with its rock wall lungs.....cool, moist air breathed in during the summer and warm, dry air exhaled during the winter, and in between her many rock spaces she houses any number of very small neighbors that I have come to not only respect, but admire in many ways as they are extremely efficient in keeping many other creepy crawlies away.

The longer I have been here, the more I revel in the quiet and the solitude.  I would rather spend a day communing with the bees in my garden then most people I know.  I have come to count the animals and insects around me as my nearest neighbors and suddenly my world is very full indeed of beings to talk with when the need arises, and the best part is that they don't immediately consider me an idiot for expressing my views, whatever they may be.

I believe that, for many people, it is more of a comfort to live in town and have a network of humanity close at hand, but it often masks how much we really do rely on nature and the world around us to survive.  There really isn't any less nature in town - there are still all the same microbes in the soil, the same insects in the air, and many of the same animals that scurry around the neighborhoods at night, but it is easier to put that out of the mind in a town or city.  My daughter has often admitted to being afraid of the dark - more precisely - afraid of going outside after dark - which, for most kids is understandable.  The dark, for me, has become such a part of what I know that even the shadowy shapes that I see moving along beside me now are nothing much to be feared....especially when they answer to the name of Vincent, Tink and Frank - a few of the farm's cats.  And as to the occasional raccoon and possum that happen to stumble onto the same path- as I have explained to my daughter- they are as much afraid of us as we are of them.


Nature speaks quietly but if we allow ourselves to hear it, to work with it, and to understand that we are also a part of it....suddenly we are no longer alone in our solitude, but surrounded by friends that are all entwined in the wonder and travail of the earth.

Little Miss Muffet

"Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey....."

I have known this nursery rhyme since I was tiny. Being the arachnophobic kid I was, however, I never really gave a thought to what "curds and whey" really were - I was much more concerned about the eight legged beastie that came to sit beside her.  I always assumed that curds and whey were some gloopy thing that kids back then ate - kind of like oatmeal.

I have since come to realize a few things....spiders are not that frightening, and curds and whey are really kind of cool.  The former has taken me many, many years to learn and the latter happened a few weeks back while experimenting in the kitchen.

We have a very young milk cow on our farm, Hazel.  She is too young yet to breed and milk, but in preparation for that, I have started doing a little experimentation with milk in all of its many forms. 

Milk
Cream
Butter
Butter Milk
Cheese
Yogurt
Whey
Ice Cream

If you would have asked me a few weeks ago to list all the different forms of milk this list would have been much shorter.  Milk was always just milk, in my mind.  You pick it up in the dairy section of the grocery and then you walk around and get all the other things individually wrapped and packaged. What a weird sort of disconnect.

Both of my parents grew up on farms in South Dakota and milked cows - my dad tells many crazy tails of milking the cow and then simply straining out the dirt before drinking it, and shaking a quart jar with cream in it that would then become butter faster than a wink.  I was curious just how much of this might be true and I wanted to experiment a little before I completely committed to the apparent insanity that is milking.

Finding a good source of milk that has not been ultra-pasteurized can be one of the most challenging things, but with a little work, a source was procured and a gallon jug of "milk" obtained.  Let me explain something here - milk, in its pure form, will contain a certain amount of butter fat based upon what type of cow it is.  This particular milk came from a Jersey which has one of the highest percentages of butter fat.  What that means is that given a day of sitting in a cold fridge, the milk and the cream (aka butter fat) start to separate naturally on their own. 

My first experiment was the "butter in a quart jar" story that my dad had repeated many times.  I pulled all the cream off the top and put it into a quart jar.  Then looked up the directions for making butter - one of the first steps is to let it age and warm.  This seemed to go against every principle of "good milk technique" but given that it was only 2 cups of cream, I wasn't going to sweat it if it went bad.  Actually, one of the recipes said that soured cream actually makes butter quicker than sweet cream.  So.....it sat on the counter all day and got warm.   After my husband had picked it up several times throughout the day and looked at it and then looked quizzically at me as if to say, "are you sure about this?"  I decided to give it a try.  Chilled a different quart jar for 30 minutes in the freezer and then poured in the cream and started shaking.  This is one of those things that I wish I could slow the reaction down somehow and actually see what is taking place on a molecular level, but it quietly and quickly shifted from cream, to thick cream that sticks to the glass, to whipped cream that barely sloshes from side to side...and then, with 15 more shakes of the jar and as though I had said, "Hocus Pocus!" ....into butter.  Bright yellow, beautiful butter.  

The butter was in the jar along with a liquid - butter milk.  Butter milk is what you get in the production of cream into butter and it went into a different jar to be saved and used in making pancakes the next morning.  The butter was an incredible color - many of the recipes said something about adding yellow food coloring if it was too pale, but given that the cows are grass fed, there was clearly enough beta carotene in this butter to make it a lovely yellow color....no artificial anything added.  I kneaded it with a fork to "wring out" all the excess buttermilk and then washed it in cold water to rinse any remaining butter milk out of it.  A little salt, a little more kneading it with a fork and from 2 cups of cream I obtained half a pound of butter.

The next gallon of milk led to the cheese experiment.  We had recently been down to Kalona and were perusing a few new stores when I happened upon a box of do it yourself cheese making equipment.  Citric acid, salt and rennet enough for 30 batches of mozzarella cheese.  At our house, the mozzarella cheese gets used by the pound, so this sounded like a great place to start.

Here again, it felt like some amount of magic that took place - a gallon of milk mixed with a little citric acid and then heated to 90 degrees.  Add a little rennet, which is essentially something that is produced in the stomachs of most baby animals that allows them to make a curd from the milk that they drink.  Most of the rennet available today is produced through other means. There are other vegetable/plant sources and some genetically modified bacterias and fungi that have been "built" to make rennet.    At any rate, I used the rennet that came with the cheese making supplies, a small amount of which was dissolved in cool water and then added to the warmed milk.  Five minutes later, I had a pot full of cheese curd.

 This was cut into smaller curds and then stirred and warmed to 110 degrees.  Another two minutes of stirring with it off the heat and it was ready to stretch.  The curd that is formed is warmed to approximately 135 degrees and then stretched like taffy to lengthen the proteins in the cheese.

Add a little salt and herbs, then shape into a brick .....Hocus Pocus....cheese!   The left over whey, which is very high in proteins, gets used when we make bread or pizza crusts and works very well.  Milk is very much like the pig - you can use everything but the oink of the pig - there isn't really anything wasted from milk either. 

Milk has to be one of the most versatile foods.  I know there is much discussion about why we, adult people, continue to drink milk from an animal.  The only thing that drinks milk typically are babies, but we, as a species, have adapted it in many ways - made it more complex and tasty, made it more solid so that it can be added to recipes and melted, grown cultures in it that help with intestinal health.  Milk has evolved with us and when broken down into it component parts of fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and trace minerals, milk really is quite an amazing food.  When you think about the fact that an animal, by eating grasses that are completely undigestable for us, turns those grasses into a liquid that can be formed into so many different foods....very cool indeed.

My latest experiment with milk has been to make yogurt which is essentially a very soft cheese.  This is perhaps the easiest thing of all.  One quart of milk and three tablespoons of plain organic yogurt - mix well and let sit somewhere warm for at least 12 hours. (Mine stayed in a slightly warm oven).  Strain off the whey and then flavor with whatever you want - fruit, vanilla, etc.  This yogurt, unlike all the ones that you will find in the stores, doesn't have any sugar added so initially will take some getting used to or will necessitate putting some sugar or honey into the mix to sweeten it just a bit.  I would love to say that I know how tasty it is, but my husband ate it all before I had a chance to taste any.  If only a spider could have frightened him away.

Going Around the Bend

"The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine, or the slowest form of poison."

- Dr. Ann Wigmore, ND

It has been pointed out to us several times lately that we (meaning my husband and I)  have "gone round the bend" a little with regards to food.  Some come out and say it simply, "You guys are nuts!", others (like my mother) are more subtle, "Oh, it was nice to go visit your sister, we could talk about food....she even goes to Sam's Club" to which I give a small, involuntary shiver of horror and then smile and nod politely.

I don't deny that we have drastically changed how we live in the last 8 years and we actually are aware of how unusual we must come across to people.  We sometimes go out at night to the local bar and eat nachos and drink cheap beer and discuss how stilted we have become about our food while playing a few games of pool, but here's the hard part....once you know the truth about food and what you eat, how do you put the blinders back on and go back? 

Our progression into "craziness" went something like this:

• Watching one of your children become sicker and sicker wondering what was going on!
• Child diagnosed with a genetic disease that causes her body to react to gluten.
• Realizing that gluten is in just about everything.
• Freaking out in grocery store over what to feed your two -year-old that won't end up poisoning her.
• Learning to read labels.
• Wondering what exactly carrageenan, carnauba wax, and soy lecithin actually are.
• Finding out what they are.
• Applying Occam's razor to the food concept and realizing that, in general, the simpler foods are the better they tend to be for you.
• Finding a source of these "simple" foods.
• Realizing that it is cheaper and a ton more fun to raise/grow/process/store them ourselves.
• Raising/growing/processing said food.
• Watching as your friends, neighbors and relatives all think that we have slipped off the deep end.

The luxury, (and I do realize what a luxury it is) is that we have time.  We have had a lot of time.  Time to read, to research, to analyze, to try stuff out, to grow food, to process food.....it uses a lot of time.  We have, by some small miracle that I haven't quite figured out yet, set ourselves up to get by on only one income from one outside job.  In today's society, that is no easy feat.  To some extent it is because we really don't want anything - no cable TV, no high tech gadgets, no brand new cars, no foreign holidays, no new clothes, nada.  We do without and, personally, I am totally cool with that.  Less overhead equals less income needed to support it.  "Simplify, simplify, simplify"....Thoreau was on to something there.  So our entire source of entertainment comes strictly from living and raising our kids in the best way that we can.  One way to look at it is that I have learned to garden, can food, raise chickens, spin thread and knit due to sheer boredom, but the irony is that I am not bored....ever.  Maybe it is a mindset that we have fallen into that we actually love what we are doing all the time, instead of constantly working at a job that we hate so that we can go out and have fun later.

In my mind it comes down to the fact that every man, woman, and child on this planet has 24 hours in each day in which to do something.  For the great majority of us, what we do during those 24 hours is not likely to be earth shattering or life changing to the population at large, but what we can do for ourselves and our family can have a very large and lasting impact.  Thinking back to the jobs that I have held - waitress, food service worker, lab technician, animal caretaker, veterinarian - none of those.....none.....have meant as much to me as taking care of my kids and family.  I am never happier then when I am home, either working in the garden with the kids raising food, or cleaning a barn taking care of animals that I know will help to feed us. There is a very direct relationship between these activities and the lives we lead.  Working at a job, for me, is an indirect relationship - still very helpful and necessary, but not nearly as fulfilling.  It is a very basic desire - to provide for oneself and family. 

 

Another reason we have jumped off the deep end with regard to food....it's political.  Eating a meal, feeding your family, buying groceries - those things are political statements whether you want them to be or not.  Where your fork goes, so goes your money.  Buy your food locally and your money goes locally.  Local money, creates local jobs.  Local jobs help to maintain local infrastructure.  If you understand the food market - from how the food is grown, picked, processed, inspected, shipped, stacked and purchased - then you have a pretty good handle on how messed up the system actually is. All too many of our kids (and adults) think that the food just magically appears in the grocery store without any thought to the deep and twisted roads that food must take to reach those shelves.  For instance, if you don't like big capitalistic businesses, then don't buy things containing high fructose corn syrup or soy because most of the corn and soy in the country is planted, grown and chemically sprayed by Monsanto and other big Ag corporations.  If you don't like illegal immigrants then don't buy produce that has been harvested by immigration workers.  If you don't like government agencies then don't buy meat that has been inspected by the USDA.  If you don't like pollution then don't buy groceries that have been shipped thousands of miles so that you can have a nice ripe strawberry in December.  Hard to know what to buy now isn't it?  All over the board there with political problems and no one party is to blame.  We have simply chosen to cut out the middle man entirely and just raise our own or buy it as locally as we can from people we know.

So yes, we have 'gone round the bend' and will probably continue to do so until such time as the population at large realizes what a screwed up mess the food system is and actually takes steps to change it.  My guess is that when the food system changes, so will the medical system because people will suddenly realize what they have been doing to themselves for so long.   In the meantime, fair warning for any friends and relatives that come to the door for dinner, you may be asked to eat such things as organic, homegrown potato soup with onions grown in the garden outside and cheese that was produced in my kitchen.  I know it is a hardship when you really crave Sam's Club frozen fish sticks, but we do what we can to please, and I promise you won't leave hungry.

"A bend in the road is not the end of the road...

unless you fail to make the turn." ~ Unknown

Mr Pig Goes A Courtin'

Spring is starting to roll slowly around.  The sun is peaking up over the horizon a little earlier and staying up a little later every night.  There are many times when the weather has been warm enough lately to even smell the warmth of the earth, but the biggest signs that lets us know that Spring is on its way is that love is in the air.  Valentine's day isn't just for the humans of the world....our pig gets to have her love affair as well.  Granted, her pool of eligible bachelors was somewhat smaller than she might like, but then a kept pig can't be choosy.

For the last four years, we have purchased baby piglets to raise and then eat, but in the last two we have thought about saving the gilt (that's the female) and have her bred so we could farrow and raise our own piglets.  Last year's gilt was fine except for one small thing....she liked the taste of chicken a little too much and whittled away our chicken flock significantly with her ravenous habits. 

Mr Pig

But this year's gilt?  She was taught at a young age by the local rooster, Dominique (which is both his name and his breed....we aren't very creative with names for the animals that we might one day have to stew in a pot..."Bob-noodle soup" turned us off to that practice).  Anyway, Dominique taught her not to mess with the two footed and feathered crowd.  She happily allows chickens (and cats) to partake of her bounty of cracked corn and kitchen scraps without so much as a proprietary grunt.  In short, she is a really nice pig.  And so, she was nominated to stay and hopefully pass on not only her beautiful chops, but also her winning attitude to a herd of small screaling piglets. 

The question, however, was where to find the boy?  Technically, we would most like a Large Black - this is a particular breed that is easier to raise on pasture since they don't rut it up quite as much, but we weren't  into spending the prices being asked for a purebred boar, not to mention that you have to be able to house them and feed them - no small task to be undertaken when they can reach approximately 700 pounds. We found a rather nice one that was due to go to market unless they could find him a home, but he was already full grown, exceptionally large and more than we were up to paying once again.  Craigslist has any number of fun and interesting items for sale....including pigs, and we contemplated these options, but none of them stuck out as suitable matches for our pig. Our breakthrough came with finally taking the time to meet some of the neighbors. 



First encounter



My husband had been told about a farmer just north of us that had cows and pigs and sheep - doing basically what we are doing, but on a much larger scale.  It had been suggested that we stop up and see him some time and finally, one chilly December day, we made the trip of six miles and found a resource for bottle/bucket calves, milking advice and .....you guessed it, a boar.  All too often we forget to look around and tap into local resources.  We get caught up with the idea that we are the "lunatic farmers" of the neighborhood amidst an ocean of "conventional farmers" and we forget that there are, in fact, more and more of the us lunatics out there all the time - small family farms that are starting to make a small but significant difference in how food is raised.  But we need to work together and depend on each other - just like farmers did in the past.  All too often now, conventional farmers are out there on their own - big fields, big equipment, big risk.  The competition to produce more and more soy and corn has led to isolation and a general lack of public interest in farming in general.  Ask any non-farming person if they would want to farm and most of the time the answer is "No - I don't have the first idea how to do that!"  Conventional farming is daunting - even for the farmers that do it, and unless you are born into a family that farms, it isn't likely to be something that you would want to jump into.   But small farms, such as ours, are do-able.  With a little time and sweat equity we have been slowly turning this old homestead back into a productive farm.  One adage that I have stuck to when it comes to trying new things is, "Learn by doing" - you can read all the books on a subject you want, but until you are up to your elbows in it, it doesn't sink in.  So we were up to our elbows with a gilt that needed a boyfriend and, in this case, all it took was making a neighborhood connection to provide us with the answer.  The Rent-a-Boar.

A purebred Berkshire boar with proven quality...essentially meaning that he has been with a pen of sows and proceeded to get them all 'with pig' as the case might be.  Originally, the plan was to take Miss Pig for a visit up to the other farm and let her hang with the rest of the pigs, but Bill (the farmer) was a little worried that his sows might beat her up, so it was decided that Mr. Pig should come hang out in Shangri-La at our house.

Any time that you mix two 350 pound animals together there is a certain amount of blind faith that goes along with it because you realize that if they really don't like each other, there isn't anything that you will be able to do to stop the ensuing battle until the smoke clears.  We didn't need to worry with Miss Pig, she was smitten almost immediately and we are fairly convinced that he was taken with her as well. 

If you ever hear a person say that an animal doesn't have feelings, do me a favor -first, kick them in the shins and then direct them to this post.  Our Miss Pig had been without her pig friends since about late September when we took them to market.  The first few days had been difficult and she had mopped around without her buddies, but her gregarious nature and love of food brought her around fairly quickly.  On Sunday, however...when Mr Pig showed up....suffice it to say that it was love at first sight.  If you have never seen a happy pig with her new friend smile....you really should.

The Loneliest Appliance

We have a very lonely appliance in our house, it really doesn't see much use any more other than for the odd emergency and as a nice flat place to set things.  It has been relegated to the same useful level as the iron and the hair dryer - almost completely unnecessary.  Instead, it has been replaced by string....well, clothesline, to be more exact, and clothespins. The dryer has been laid off and is looking at permanent unemployment.

I originally set out trying to figure out just how much energy and money  this might save us - it isn't too tough of an equation really (how many kilowatts a drier uses) x (price per kilowatt hour) x (number of hours of use per week), in other words, information that can be readily found on the manual and electric bill.  But then it came to me that it doesn't really matter if it saves me 5 cents or $500, it is simply the right thing to do.  Convenient? - no, not really.  Good for the world in general?- Absolutely!  Last I checked, sunlight and air were both free, and any coal that I can save from being mined, hauled and burned for my mere convenience....so much the better.   It does definitely take more time to hang out clothes and it can get to be a little dicey when it is cold outside, but even below freezing, hanging clothes out to dry works.

I have heard any number of stories for why people don't want to hang out clothes. My favorites are the stories I hear from people that live in a housing development that won't allow clothes lines because they are unsightly.  Unsightly!  Clean clothes, bedding, towels and yes....God forbid.....underwear!  Seriously, have we become so prudish that we don't like the sight of clothes that everyone wears?  Or is it that we are so focused on appearances that we wouldn't want our neighbors to know that we actually have to wash our clothes rather than just constantly buying new?   Personally, I love seeing clothes on the line.  It shows a certain amount of dedication, thriftiness, cleanliness and care.  The other day, while driving around the Amish farms, I saw a place where they had rigged up a pulley line that stretched from the house to the silo - that clothes was flapping in the breeze 20 feet in the air!

Hanging clothes out can also be a rather meditative task.  It doesn't take a lot of skill - although if you have to fit three loads of laundry on a line that typically can only hold two, it takes a little planning.  I find myself talking with the cats that come to see what I am doing, or planning what to plant in my flower beds, or watching deer cross the field north of our house, or watching the birds chirp and flit around and, before I realize it, all the clothes are hung up and drying nicely in the sun.

"But", you say,.... and I totally get this because I have a hard time with this also..."it is just so convenient to go from the washer to the dryer - I mean, they are right there next to each other!  Hanging them out will involve a basket, clothes pins and hauling them to the line and then hanging them up and then taking them down again.....ugh!"  I know, it can seem like just too much.  This is where I invoke Nike's ad campaign...."Just do it!"  The hardest part of any job is starting it.  Once the ball is rolling, it is really very easy and surprisingly enjoyable.  I often realize that my family is one in about 100 that actually hang clothes out, but I like to imagine a day when it becomes the standard rather than the exception, and when you think about it, it was the standard less than 70 years ago.  That was the way that clothes got dry....period!  In fact, I still have some clothes pins that were my grandmother's and I will often think of her when I reach into the bag and pull out one of the pink ones that she used to have and it is something of a comfort, in a weird way, that we are sharing some of life's tasks - I try to imagine what the world was like when she was hanging out her clothes - that alone makes the time fly.

The other thing that people will say is, "I just don't have the room for a clothes line."  They live in an apartment, or have some other living arrangement that inhibits them from having a line, and to this I say, "Be creative"  I really don't like hanging clothes up outside when it is frigid - I like my fingers too much to freeze them off.  So, in order to appease the clothesline god of the house (my husband) and save my fingers, I rigged up a clothesline in the basement of the house.  I tied up a few stray pieces of line between the stairs and my treadmill (those things can be good for more than just running) and viola' - dry clothes and no frozen fingers.  It also worked out well that the wood burning stove is in the basement, so the warm air being given off by that helped to dry the clothes in record time.  The point of it is, clotheslines don't need to take up a lot of room and they can be taken down easily.  There are also wooden clothes drying racks that dry an amazing amount of clothes in a very small space - these are especially handy for socks and undies...or in the case of my kids playing outside in the winter....mittens.

Just out of curiosity, I did run some numbers to see what it costs us to dry our clothes. The US has roughly 115,000,000 households that all have laundry to wash.   Using some average dryer specifications of 5kW per load, and an average energy bill of $0.10/kWh we come up with 5kW x $0.10 x 115,000,000 million households = $57,5000,000 for one load of laundry per household per week. Granted, that isn't really all that much per household, but it does start to add up.

I went a little further and checked into how much coal it takes to produce 1 kWh and there were ranges cited from 0.8 pound per kWh to 2.1 pounds per kWh. I averaged the amounts cited and came up with 1.3 pounds of coal per kWh. Assuming that a dryer uses approximately 5 kW, that ends up being about 6.5 pounds of coal for each dryer load of clothes. Now, when you figure in the number of households....we are talking 747,500,000 pounds of coal per week for each household to dry one load of clothes. Even if only 1 out of 10 households dries their clothes per week, we are still talking about 74,750,000 pounds of coal! 

I couldn't even picture that much coal unless it was in a rail car that I see fly by me while stopped at a railroad crossing.  Figuring that rail cars can carry roughly 244,300 pounds of coal (and that was the largest capacity I could find) - that is roughly 305 railroad cars full of coal for one tenth of the households just to dry their clothes once weekly.  Please, someone tell me I figured these numbers wrong, because that is really kind of disturbing.  Now, when I see a coal trains, I think of it more in the number of dryer loads.....dryer loads that could be free - free of energy cost and pollution.

 It is hard, sometimes, to feel like we make any difference at all just being one person trying to do something good for the environment, but if we all do small things and we all encourage others to do small things....it starts to make a difference.  And maybe, if we are very lucky, there will be housing developments eventually that won't allow dryers and will insist upon there being only clothes lines instead.

A Case of the Hives

I have something of a bull-headed streak. Probably stems from being born in the year of the ox, but if I get something in my mind that I would like to do, or imagine myself doing, it tends to eventually happen.  That is just the way that I have always been and likely always will be- sometimes to my benefit, sometimes to my detriment, and very often to the consternation of my husband, but at least I am consistent.  I see things in my head that just seem right and if I feel strongly enough about them, then Fate seem to help me out on many occasions - such is the case of the hives.

Over a year ago I mentioned that it would be nice to get some bee hives and start collecting honey.  We looked at trying to find some used hives from people that were getting out of it, but they are somewhat hard to come by.  We checked into ordering some from a catalog, but it just never quite seemed to be the right time for it, they were too expensive, or both....we shuffled our feet.

Then I mentioned it to one of my friends at work who also happens to be a mail carrier.  Let me digress here for just a minute and say, if you ever need to know something about the neighborhood that you live in.....ask a mail carrier!  I am constantly amazed at the amount of information that they carry around in their brains that has been accumulated from years of delivering mail to the same houses.  I once had a stray dog show up and managed to find his home simply by asking the mail carrier.  After describing the dog to him he said, "oh yeah! That's Toby. He lives at such and so address.  Noticed he wasn't there today to bark at me when I dropped off the mail.  The owner won't be home though until sometime after 6 pm because he works in town."  Then, thirty minutes after talking to the mail man, someone drives up to get the dog because the mail man had called the owner and the owner had sent his cousin out to retrieve the dog.  Wow!  Seriously, we should make better use of these people and pay them more for their abilities.  Anyway, I happened to mention to my co-worker/mail carrier that we were looking for bee hives to get us started.  She paused for a minute and then said, "You know, I think Hans used to have bees out at his place.  I have delivered supplies to him in the past."  And from there, as all good grapevines go, I tracked down the person to contact about Hans's used bee hives.

Contacted......No response.

Tried again......No response.

And then, Fate stepped in, as it often does.  Hans had been rather ill for quite some time and then rather suddenly passed away.  As always happens when people pass away, there is the process of sorting out all the stuff of their life and deciding what to do with it.  Someone in the group remembered that I had been looking for bee hives and called my office. 

But I was on vacation and out of range to be called.

My very astute assistant, however, knew that I was looking for hives and made the deal for me, and picked them up herself. The hives, beekeeping suits, a smoker, a honey centrifuge, and enough books to keep me happily busy all winter long.

And so, we have hives - two full hives to be exact and all the accoutrements  They will need a little cleaning and fixing here and there, but they are hives none-the-less.  Next up.....bees.

 Most of the texts on the subject recommend getting to know the local bee keepers, so I hopped on the Internet to see what I could find.  Eastern Iowa Beekeepers Association proved local and rich in information.  Shot off an e-mail to the person in charge and within an hour or so was notified that the following day they were due to have one of their meetings.  They only have four meetings per year - one for each of the seasons - and a day or two later and I would have missed it entirely.  Again, Fate seemed to step in and see me through.

I am not one to like going to meetings, especially meetings in which I know absolutely no one, but I felt compelled to tackle this one. When Fate had handed me so much all ready it seemed like a snub to not make the effort at going to the meeting.  I came in slightly late and sat in the back of the meeting room.  There were approximately 30 people there, most of whom were somewhere in their late 60s.  The main topic of conversation was to highlight some of the findings that had been discussed at the state wide bee keepers convention that had taken place in November.  Many of their facts were somewhat worrisome.....There used to be 6 million bee keepers in the U.S and now it is down to roughly 2 million.  Well over half of all the honey in the U.S. is imported from oversees.  Over half of the hives in the U.S.  have been dying over the winter- unable to produce enough honey to support themselves.  Many bee keepers are not even able to collect honey from the hives because the bees are having a hard time making enough.  Colony Collapse Disorder is all too prevalent and no one, as yet, has a good handle on why.  It wasn't encouraging information, and I found myself sitting there thinking that maybe this is a little more than I might be up for this spring. 

One of the first things that I asked a few people was, "where do you get your bees" and several of them gave me different names of companies that sell Queens and a few pounds of bees.  One bee keeper swore by a company out of Texas that he buys bees from every year, and then it dawned on me to ask why he had to buy bees all the time.  He was having about 70% die off each year, and I thought 'well, if these bees are so great why are they dying off?'.....on to the next person.

Finally, I worked my way forward in the crowd to talk to Floyd - he had been one of the speakers that had gone to the convention and had given much of the information on what had been discussed and some of his own tips for helping hives to make it through the winter.  A quiet, soft spoken man, probably more comfortable in the company of bees than he is around people, but he was happy enough to answer my questions.  I knew that maybe, once again, Fate had thrown the right person into my path when I asked him the standard question, "where do you buy your bees" and he looked a me with a slight smile and said, " I haven't bought bees in over 9 years.  I have nucs (short for nucleus) that I raise up"  So, of course my second question was, "Do you ever sell those nucs?"  to which his response was "Yeah.  I will have 30 of them to sell come this spring."

My psyche, at this point, heaved a huge sigh of relief - here was a person who knew what he was doing and apparently did it well since he had several dozens of bee hives all over the county and in my local area.  In fact, he suspected that I was probably driving right by several of them on a daily basis.  Fate has a funny way of eventually making things happen.  I like to think that if I am open to Fate and the possibilities that come with it, and then bull-headed enough to stick it out, my plans eventually come to fruition in most cases- not always, but I have found that even failing miserably at something has always served to teach me something as well.  You never know just when Fate will reach out a hand and help you along, however, it is my belief that most people are simply to scared to grab hold and run with it.  I very much agree with the Serendipity sentiment that "life is not merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences...But rather, its a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan....that if we are to live life in harmony with the universe, we must all possess a powerful faith in what the ancients used to call "fatum", what we currently refer to as destiny."
Floyd and I talked a little more about various start up tips and then I asked him when he starts checking his hives in the spring...."First week in April.  Give me a call and you can tag along."

Tag along I will.  See you in April, Floyd.

An Open Letter to My Alma Mater

Dear Iowa State College of Veterinary Medicine,

 Thank you for the sound education you gave me regarding anatomy, physiology, bacteriology, dermatology, pharmacology, internal medicine, surgery, histopathology and any number of other 'ologies' that I am sure I have forgotten more of than I ever imagined I would learn.  I am, however, most unhappy with the status of education of production animal medicine. The thing that always sparks me off in this regard is typically a comment or article in the quarterly published Gentle Doctor magazine that I receive since I am supposed to be a happy alumna of the college. This month, it was one of the bullet points in the Dean's Letter p.3 (#4 to be exact)
     

 "Establishment of the Swine Medicine Education Center, a collaborative effort that provides unmatched access to a modern production system that includes 90,000 sows and nearly two million pigs and complements our swine, beef and dairy summer programs, and our rejuvenated food animal field services unit." [emphasis is my own] 

You are supposed to be perceived as the "leader in production medicine" also known as "food animal medicine" or to those lay people that may be reading this, "meat".  You are a land grant college in the very middle of the American Heartland, dedicated to the science an innovation involved in feeding the masses, and yet the system is terribly broken and you are all busy trying to fix the system using more of the same technology that broke it in the first place.  

 Stop.  Look around you. 

The world is slowly waking up to the food that they eat and what it is doing to us.  This is clearly evidenced by books like The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan and movies such as Food Inc.  You may have not read or watched them yourselves, but you should.  The research being expressed by these people is sound and, what's more important, makes good sense.  You taught me to look at research objectively and I have....theirs is better than yours.  It shouldn't take more antibiotics to grow our meat, it shouldn't take chemicals to sterilize our food, it shouldn't take people dying from food borne illnesses for you to wake up and realize that maybe nature might have a better way. 

Is it because the large pharmaceutical companies won't pump millions into the coffers that you so desperately need to keep going?  Is it because big businesses like Monsanto, Cargill and Pfizer will leave you high and dry if you actually do what is right and study the differences between organically grown, sustainably managed, pasture fed animals and the high stress, GMO corn-eating, pseudo-food animals that are currently being produced by IBP and Tyson?   For shame.

Well, just so we are clear, this is one veterinarian that you trained that will not be contributing to your college unless it is to train the next generation of veterinarians to think for themselves and wake up to what is happening to our animals.  We take an oath at the completion of our vet school education, an oath to protect the welfare of the animals we treat, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves and yet here we are locking them up in confinement operations that are clearly NOT in their best interest.  I would like to see any one of you live one day in a space confined such that you couldn't all lay down at the same time and there was so much fecal material in the air around you that it was difficult to breathe.  Or maybe you should all be housed over your own excrement for a while and in such a noisy environment that you can't sleep unless you are completely exhausted.  We have all heard what stress does to our own systems and yet we expect our animals - those that will give their lives so that we may eat - to endure such conditions so that our clients can make the most money per unit.  We have lost track of the fact that those units are, in fact, animals.  Veterinarians should be leaders in this area....we know better and yet we are following - following the big Ag money.   Being led along by our noses in the hopes that we, too, might make a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of all those that we are supposed to be minding the welfare of - the animals and, as a result of that, the people that eat them.

Take a stand.  Will it mean money lost? Probably! Will it mean healthier animals and people? Absolutely! And the people that are waking up to this monstrosity will flock to your doors and beg to learn what you can teach them, or beg for the services of the veterinarians that you graduate.  Be the leader again, please, so that I can once again feel pride at calling you my Alma mater rather than cringing when someone points out that, once again, there is a food recall or thousands of eggs that have been contaminated and the only option is to simply throw more antibiotics or more federal regulations at them. 

We need small farmers in Iowa - not corporate giants.  Iowa is a dying state.  Most of these students that you are teaching right now will likely flee these borders like so many rats from a sinking ship. Wonder why there are a dwindling number of food animal veterinarians? I don't. With corporate giants running the show, how many vets do they really need? There are more large production units and more CAFOs in Iowa than in several of the surrounding states, there is more transgenic corn and soybeans grown here than almost anywhere else.  We need to diversify. 



My own role in this has been to conduct some of my own experiments. Once again you taught me to pay attention and keep records and for this, I thank you.  I can honestly say that there is a clear, distinguishable difference between the eggs that are raised in confined "caged batteries of birds" vs those from my flock of free range hens. I also raise a few pigs, a dairy cow and we buy all our beef from a local farmer that raises them on pasture.  The differences in our food quality and thus our health are substantial. And by supporting local farmers I am helping to ensure that small town Iowa actually has a chance to survive.

I realize that I will very likely not be high on the list to win any of the prestigious awards distributed to the "good soldiers" of the veterinary profession, but it is my honest belief that if you don't periodically stir the pot, all the scum rises to the top. I feel it is my obligation, as outlined by the oath, to continue the improvement of my professional knowledge and competence and so I put this challenge to you as directly as possible.....Lead, don't cave into big agriculture corporations that threaten to undermine this profession and ruin the trust that the populace has previously had in the veterinary community.  Lead, find a better way, a more humane way, a more sustainable way to raise the food that we need to live on.  Lead, so that others will actually want to follow. 

The Darkest Day

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_102.html

We are quickly approaching that time of year again.  And, no, I don't mean the time of year that involves elves in red suits, flying reindeer, nativity scenes, bell ringers or carols.  I mean the time of year when the terra firma that we stand on every single day is angled as far away from the sun (or toward it if you are below the equator) as it will be for the entire year.  The day is as dark as it will be for this year's race around the sun. 

Every day, whether we think of it or not, we are cruising through space at a fairly consistent pace of roughly 67,062 miles per hour, not to mention that the Earth itself is rotating at the same time at roughly 1100 miles per hour (this, of course, depends upon your particular latitude, but for middle America, it is roughly 1100 miles per hour).  Taking those two speeds and revolutions into consideration suddenly makes even the wildest rides at the amusement park seem like child's play.

Now, add in the fact that it has all been going on for approximately 4.5 billion years without significant change or alterations and I find myself standing outside at night looking at the stars with  my mouth agape in complete amazement.  The concept of time is completely lost on humans.  We have no grasp of what billions of years means.  One year?.... yeah, that's understandable.  Ten years?....well, most of us can look back that far and, ironically most of the time we say something like, "Wow! Where did all that time go?"  or "If only I knew then what I know now."  Fifty years? ....We see marriages that have lasted that long and, if you are like me, you say "I wonder how they did it?"  A hundred years?.....This is about the level that humans can reasonably be expected to comprehend on a personal level.  Beyond this point, it becomes antiquity, mystery, mythical.  We may know stories and have a few artifacts, but we really have absolutely no physical idea of how life was several hundreds of years ago much less 4 billion.  I would even hazard to say that the average person, if tossed back in time a few hundred years, would not have the first clue about how to survive using only their wits and the tools afforded them by the Earth itself.  The learning curve in the wild is pretty ruthless.

We, as humans, have lost touch with the Earth.  Oh, we use it daily - we drag coal and oil out of its depths and we haul the fish from its sea and crowd cows, chickens and pigs into insanely small spaces and force the Earth to grow crops that we then rob for our own uses.  We get the Earth to do our bidding and then we all happily go home to our houses, warmed during these cold, dark months with all the oil and coal, turn on our televisions to yet another ridiculous reality show, eat our overly processed, artificially raised food, and then go to bed so we can do it all again the next day. 

Pretty depressing, isn't it?  Sorry about that.  And, to be fair, there are more and more people doing what they can to help the cause, but many days it seems woefully ineffective.

I battle with this "woefully ineffective" thing myself.....all the time.  Sometimes I chalk it up to seasonal effective disorder, but mainly it is just do to the world in general.  Regardless of my mental state, I try to remember that this change in the seasons is a good thing.  Winter is a time for reflection and hibernation which seems to eventually eliminate the depression and readies a person for spring.  I find I can read and digest more books in the winter months than any other time of year. 

One especially good one that I have been working my way through is Folks, This Ain't Normal  by Joel Salatin.  If anyone thinks that I am hard core about living on a farm sustainably, Joel puts me to shame.  I honestly wish I could convince everyone to read this book because he not only understands and talks about farming sustainably, but he does it and proves that it can work on a larger scale.  Much of his emphasis is on treating the earth with respect and being creative in how we solve problems such as energy, food production, water conservation and housing.  There are a few New Year's resolutions that are forming based on this book alone. 

Another book that I am reading is The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor.  I have been reading a few bee books, but upon opening this one and reading, "The thrill and fascination that filled me then as I watched large swarms stream into hives has never weakened....It follows exactly the pattern established millions of years ago...We see only a small part of the surface of things.  The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence."  In short, he had me at 'hello'.

I realize that my choice of writers has a lot to do with the level of connectedness that they feel - not just to the subject that they are talking about, but to the earth as a whole.  Emma Restall Orr wrote:  "Perceiving the world as a web of connectedness helps us to overcome the feelings of separation that hold us back and cloud our vision. This connection with all life increases our sense of responsibility for every move, every attitude, allowing us to see clearly that each soul does indeed make a difference to the whole.”  

Those "feelings of separation" are one of the problems with today's society. People no longer feel connected.....to anything.  Ironically, despite e-mail and twitter and facebook, we are all much more disconnected from each other and from nature.  It really isn't natural to sit in front of a computer screen all day and remotely learn about things happening somewhere else when our world - the only one that we will be able to actually touch and physically interact with - lives outside of our house.  

People live for connection with the world around them - eye contact, hugs, relationships.  Without it we are only so much protoplasm walking around without aim or purpose.  It costs nothing to pay attention to other living beings that share this Earth as well- animals, trees, insects - and often these connections prove to be sometimes deeper and more profound than our human ones.  So, as the earth rounds the corner yet again and makes its way back into the hours of daylight, my hope for everyone this year is this.... May you find a connection with some part of the earth around you - be it a roof top garden somewhere in the city, a farmer at a local market, a stray cat that adopts you, the bees in an apiary, the moon coursing through the night sky, or your neighbor next door.  Make this year count because you just never know......maybe the Mayans were right.