Searching for a specific blog post? Try here:
Local food systems vs. global collapse - also new lambs
/Twin lambs born just a few hours before I made the video.
Many people are right now enacting some version of "stay at home" in order to mitigate the systemic risk from covid-19. In this era of just-in-time transnational movement and trade, something like a severe pandemic, or worse, is almost certainly going to occur. This is not pessimism but simply an observation on the nature and fragility of complex network systems. Global food supplies are at risk.
An alternative is to make the choice to shop with local farms and, to the extent you can, grow your own food. Local farms with local supply chains are insulated from some systemic risks. Simplifying the supply chain now means peace of mind and a relative degree of comfort when the next blow to global supply chains inevitably occurs.
"Collapse now and avoid the rush," by John Michael Greer: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-06-06/collapse-now-and-avoid-rush/
Wikipedia entry on Joseph Tainter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
Our long video on how to eat better food on a budget: https://youtu.be/RpPtFc0Gtm4
At Anchor Ranch Farm in beautiful Scio, Oregon we raise healthy, happy livestock outdoors on pasture. Visit us at anchorranchfarm.com to find out more.
Boiled Meat Dinner
/
Grey!
Tasteless!
Boring!
None of the above!
If this were called “Simmered in a Bone Broth with Multiple Layers of Flavor Dinner” nobody would remember the name, but we would all remember how good it tastes.
You can play around with variations within the theme of the basic components; here is how we made it. 4-year-old approved.
Pigs feet (cleaned and split) - or some other cartaliginous, flavorful pork cut. There might be a few small hairs left on your pigs feet: take a carmelizing torch or lighter or other flame source and burn those off.
Oxtail - or some other cartaliginous, flavorful beef cut (or perhaps mutton).
We added in beef short ribs as well.
If not using pigs feet or a lot of oxtail, consider adding chicken feet or some marrow bones. The goal is a rich, gelatinous bone broth.
For extra flavor, sear or roast the meats and bones to brown them before boiling.
Place in a large pot, cover with water, bring to a rolling boil.
Turn down the heat to a simmer, so that the water steams and bubbles are just barely coming to the surface. Skim off most of the gunk that came to the top after bringing it to a boil. There’s nothing bad about this stuff, but it forms a layer on top of the broth that interferes with proper cooking.
Keep slowly simmering and check back tomorrow and see if the meat is falling off the bones yet.
Remove the oxtail and shortribs and set aside, then carefully strain the very hot broth. Most of the pig’s feet will have fallen apart and dissolved into the broth, so feel free to pick out any larger pieces of meat that are left and then throw out the bones.
To the broth add back the short ribs, oxtail, and trotter meat, then add:
Salt to taste and whatever herbs you like
Whatever amounts you like of celery, mushrooms, pearl onions, and root vegetables (carrots, turnips, parsnips, rutabega)
and one Whole Chicken
Continue simmering until the chicken is fully cooked.
Serve by removing the meats and vegetables from the broth, then serve the broth on the side.
Preserving eggs
/WARNING: Never ever preserve farm fresh eggs. Never store eggs outside the refrigerator. You will automatically die. Nobody has ever preserved eggs before without refrigeration and lived to write detailed accounts of how to do it which you can find online.
Hypothetically speaking, in a popular computer simulation game, around this time of year our laying hens start to lay more eggs.
Like, a lot more eggs.
In the future we plan to pass some of those on to our CSA members, but we like to provide fresh eggs to our customers so we don’t like to save up eggs for weeks between CSA drops. Our farm fresh eggs do keep extremely well, in part because we never wash them until we are ready to use them, which keeps their natural protective coating on them. Our farm is a mile off the main road so we can’t really sell them at a roadside stand, and we don’t have access to any markets right now to sell our eggs.
Come summertime we always sell out of all the eggs our layers produce, so it’s nice to have a stockpile for the family so we don’t have to take them out of potential sales. Likewise at the end of the summer it’s nice to put some eggs by so that we have eggs during the winter. Our hens do still produce during the winter, but sometimes it’s not enough.
The two ways we have (in a computer simulation) tried preserving eggs have both worked, but one worked better than the other.
Freezing works really well
Freezing egg yolks is kind of difficult and makes them strange, so what we do is scramble a whole mess of uncooked eggs and then pour the mixture into muffin tins. Then we freeze them. After they are completely frozen we pop out the egg-pucks using a butter knife and store them in a zip-top bag in the freezer. Each tin holds the equivalent of about 3 eggs (depending on how big the eggs are) which, when defrosted, is the perfect size for an omelette.
This method would work better if we had a silicone muffin…not-tin, but whatever one calls a muffin tin made out of silicone. It’s a little difficult to get the frozen egg-pucks out of our metal muffin tins, and a little messy because we generally have to slightly melt the bottom by putting it on a hot stove or (carefully) turning it upside-down under hot water, and then using a butter knife to pry out the frozen eggs. Of course an ice-cube tray would work as well as a muffin tin, but egg-cubes are a less efficient use of space. And, as mentioned, the amount of scrambled egg mixture that fits in each muffin-tin cup is a good portion.
Slaked lime works also
Preserving eggs in lime-water prevents air (and thus bacteria) from getting into the shells. This is lime as in calcium hydroxide, not the fruit. You know, calcium - the same stuff the egg shell is made out of? The calcium hydroxide covers the eggs and fills in the tiny pores in the egg shell, making it completely airtight. It’s extremely important to use food-grade lime, such as is sold for making some kinds of pickles, and not lime sold at a building materials and hardware store. Eating the industrial-grade stuff would be a very bad idea. Your computer simulation game would likely end with a game over.
We mixed the food-grade calcium hydroxide with boiling water and let it cool, then carefully put the eggs into it. We filled a 2 gallon bucket with eggs and covered them completely with the limewater, then an air-tight lid. In strong concentrations calcium hydroxide causes chemical burns. One doesn’t use that strong a concentration just to preserve eggs, but it still feels weird on your skin and it may be best to wear gloves.
Then we put a lid on the bucket and left it for five months.
This method worked…but this was during the hottest part of the summer, and we don’t have a real root cellar, so while the bucket full of limewater eggs wasn’t boiling in the summer sun, it still sat at temperatures well over seventy degrees. The method did preserve the eggs: they were not rotten at all and the yolks were still nicely yellow. However, the yolks had degraded and become somewhat gelatinous in texture, and just kind of fell apart when cracked open. Had these been the only eggs we had, we would have eaten them, but since we had bags full of frozen eggs available we fed the limewater eggs to our pigs, who loved them. Stored in a cooler environment this method would have worked great, and it has the benefit of preserving the whole egg, unscrambled.
New video on Youtube
/Just some video of the sheep eating grass while I ramble on.
I was thinking that our competition really comes from the big, corporate, international “so-called-organic” grocery stores. The “free range” chicken that is $4.99 a pound after being trucked across half the country, sold with million-dollar marketing campaigns, stocked on retail shelves in storefronts with million-dollar leases, with huge management staffs, expensive but individually-underpaid retail labor, high-priced corporate attorneys, well-funded lobbyists…
In other words, fakes! All that extra overhead cost and yet they manage to sell a “free range” chicken! Of course these big business chickens are not free range in any sense that small, conscientious family farms are raising chickens.
We think the more local, sustainable farms the better. Small farmers have more flexibility to adopt sustainable practices. Smaller, local stores can sometimes stock great products at reasonable prices because they buy locally instead of shipping food around the world. And shoppers who want better, sustainably-raised food have much more influence with a local farmer or a locally-run store they can actually go visit and talk to face to face.
Eating chicken is kind of weird
/Don’t feel guilty, but…
Chicken is really cheap. Most folks eat a lot of it. We and other pastured poultry producers raise chickens using humane, healthy, natural farming practices, and we do our best to keep the cost down as much as we can, though of course raising healthy, natural chickens costs more than chickens raised in cages.
The fact that basic cage-raised, soy-fed chicken is so cheap is a prime example of how completely insane our modern food system is.
Let’s do some math. There are about 1300 calories in a whole chicken of around 4 pounds.
Alternatively, a laying hen that free ranges might lay 250 eggs a year. That’s approximately TWENTY THOUSAND CALORIES
…
We’re going to stop doing math now because it ought to be obvious that you have to be insane to kill the chicken and eat it instead of collecting the eggs. (Don’t feel bad, we’re crazy about grilled chicken in our family.)
Oh, and by the way, the chicken you are eating takes about 10 pounds of grain to get to size if it’s raised in a little cage so it can’t burn off any of those precious calories being healthy, whereas the layer hen can forage for almost everything she needs given the right environment, with some supplemental nutrition to ensure she remains healthy, such as calcium for strong egg shells. The frankenchicken broiler will never produce eggs, whereas the laying hen can still be put into a flavorful and healthy stew or soup stock after she has lived a long, happy, productive life.
So TWENTY THOUSAND calories from running around eating bugs (chemical-free pest control), or one-fifteenth of that if you feed more than twice as much in grain as you get back in meat.
A stopped clock is right sometimes
A vegetarian, no meat diet is horribly unsustainable, but much of the criticism of modern meat consumption is on target. Please enjoy your chicken dinner (we do) but don’t take it for granted. Mass market chicken prices are the result of underpaid labor, undervalued cropland, and petroleum reserves exploited without regard for future generations.
Holistic farm management
We raise meat chickens as an important partner species in our dynamic program of holistic farm management. Because broiler chickens (even the free rangy types) range less than layers, we can move them around the farm to areas where we want to add chicken manure. This lets us naturally apply fertilizer straight from the chicken to areas of the pasture that look like they need a little extra help. However, there is a limit to the number of broiler chickens we will raise in a year, because adding too much natural chicken manure fertilizer to our pastures would be counterproductive.
We also sometimes put the broilers next to our sheep or pigs to help with pest control, although the heritage layer hens tend to be better at this overall.
In a sensible food system, a nice roast chicken dinner would be a treat: perhaps something special to make with the family for a Sunday meal. That’s why we encourage our customers to make sure to use the whole bird. Save those bits and pieces of leftovers and make chicken salad or tacos the next day, and save the bones to make bone broth. Before corporate agribusiness, that’s exactly how most people ate chicken. Even though our chickens cost more than the confinement-raised birds at the supermarket, we think that eating this way actually provides better value for your money. It’s also far more sustainable.
Vegetarian diets are not sustainable
/Follow the money
There is always a lot of talk in the media about meat being unsustainable. Well-promoted books and articles profess the idea that a meatless diet uses fewer resources and is more ecologically sound than more balanced alimentation.
This is all nonsense, much of it paid for by investment funds that plan to make money selling processed “vegetable” products at a substantial markup to the real cost. Nobody ought to be forced to eat meat if they don’t want to. I didn’t eat meat or fish for seven years, and our family still abstains from meat about once a week. But it’s simply false to claim that a “vegetarian” or “vegan” diet is in any way better for the environment.
“Corporate” agriculture is not sustainable
The fact is that agribusiness is irresponsibly wasteful of natural and civic resources and harmful to the environment. Most farmers care deeply about their local ecologies and the quality of food they produce, but their hands are often tied by usurious agriculture conglomerates. A vast, monocrop field of corn or soybeans contains less species diversity than a desert or an arctic tundra. The agribusiness operations that produce these crops are strip-mining invaluable soil resources and depositing toxic chemicals into local watersheds. There is nothing sustainable about a “veggie burger”. Not only are the crop inputs farmed in a manner that destroys natural resources, but after harvest they have to be processed in a factory that uses even more chemical pollutants!
“Organic” farming is no panacea, because Federal regulations allow large scale monocrop farming with hazardous chemicals to qualify for an “organic” label. What your local, small scale, beyond-organic vegetable farmer calls “organic” and what a multinational agribusiness calls “organic” really aren’t comparable, but current regulations (heavily influenced by industry lobbyists) lump together these very different practices.
It’s true that animals raised in confinement tend to be unhealthy and that feedlots and other such operations may have problems managing the vast amounts of manure they generate in far too small a space. They’re probably unsustainable. However, that waste manure does at least have fertilizer value, which is more than you can say for the remnants of a post-harvest field of glyphosate-engineered corn.
What a “sustainable diet” really means
Grass is pretty sustainable. It even grows well in places that aren’t able to grow other things like cucumbers or potatoes. In fact, grass tends to be pretty much one of the first volunteer species to grow in a patch of bare dirt. Grass roots help keep topsoil from eroding and, year after year, the grass itself adds more organic matter and fertility to the soil. Some of the most fertile soils worldwide were formed from grass decomposing year over year.
Humans can’t eat grass, but ruminant animals can. Traditional diets all over the world have often relied on animals that can eat grass. Grass grows on ground that can’t otherwise be sustainably (or even efficiently) farmed and feeds animals that provide meat and milk. Those animals, through the very process of grazing, add nutrients to the soil that help the grass to grow even more. All with 100 percent solar energy.
If you look at a herd of ruminants in nature, it’s always surrounded by a lot of birds which eat the insects that follow the herd. Chickens and other poultry can help fill this role on sustainable farms. Hogs, goats, and other foragers roam the forests and woody edges of grazing pastures, clearing weeds and brambles that if left untended would both diminish pasture forage and choke off forest growth. The animal herds and flocks move frequently, rather than exhausting any one particular area of forage. The various forages, given time to rest, use the nutrients from animal manure and regrow in time for future grazing. This is a self-sustaining, holistic system.
“Sustainable” means something that has lasted the test of time, not a fad backed by financial speculators and corporate advertisers.
For almost all of human history, people have filled most of their nutritional needs with either meat or seafood. They ate the whole animal, including cartilage, organs, fat, and broth from the bones. Fruits and vegetables were picked and eaten fresh in season, or preserved through fermentation; not shipped halfway around the world. Farmers practiced crop rotation, not just with vegetable crops but also with animals, by allowing animals to forage in a field after harvest, or by keeping a field as fallow pasture every few years, or even perhaps unintentionally through the practice of swidden farming.
There’s a common historical myth that our ancestors ate mostly bread or porridge. This kind of mathematically impossible nonsense could only be propounded by people who don’t know how to cook, or who perhaps are being paid to promote unsubstantiated conjecture as historical fact. The fact is, as anyone knows who has done some home baking, that the amount of flour in a large loaf of bread (enough to make you feel sick if you eat the whole thing) doesn’t contain enough calories to sustain an active adult for a single day. Likewise oatmeal is a common “diet food” for a reason. It is risible to suggest that meat wasn’t widely available in the past and a common part of everyone’s diet, or that people working at hard manual labor outdoors all day were subsisting on bowls of porridge. Those who were enslaved and forced to work on such a diet developed diseases of malnutrition such as pellagra and quickly died. The ubiquity of meat in normal ancestral diets is illustrated by the prominent role given to abstaining from meat for religious reasons, which in a socioreligious context only makes sense if such abstention requires a meaningful change in diet. We can also see evidence of the widespread everyday consumption of meat in pre-modern times by looking at records of army rations, which pretty much universally consisted of roughly equal amounts of bread and meat by weight. In fact, if one simply adds up the amount of meat included in published accounts of historical daily rations, it’s obvious that claims that “today we’re eating more meat than ever before” are the ravings of the historically illiterate and arithmetically retarded.
Ignore food fads and marketing gimmicks. Eat like your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents did.
Some well-financed people have been trying to sell us the idea that the kind of holistic food system that has lasted for thousands of years is “unsustainable”, that monocrop latifundia are a historically sustainable means of agriculture (rather than strongly correlating with civilizational collapse), and that we all need to stop eating meat and purchase processed textured vegetable proteins in conveniently branded packages made palatable with chemical flavorings.
These unscrupulous frauds don’t care about you, they don’t care about the environment, and they don’t care that they’re selling a lie. All they care about is their bottom line, to which your personal buying power is inconsequential.
Your local family farmer cares about you, your health, your local community, and your local environment, because your local farmer’s success depends on your continued business — and they live here, too.
The new fad is to claim that the “sustainable” meat of the future will be made from insect protein. Just like the “veggie” scam, there is a lot of well-connected financial capital going into investing in this industry. There’s certainly nothing wrong with eating insects if you enjoy doing so, but basic math and simple common sense tells us these claims are nonsense. The insect proteins these charlatans are trying to sell are made from insects raised predominantly on conventional feed mixes, often food waste products from other food production processes. (So, “garbage”.) None of these insect species are really any more efficient than a chicken at converting feed to protein; most are less so. Since none of these corporations plans to simply serve field-caught chili-fried crickets as a snack, after producing the insects using an equivalent amount of feed as any other CAFO operation, they then have to use far more resources, including powered machinery and industrial chemicals, in order to transform the insect protein into whatever form of processed mystery glop they plan to sell it as. It’s all nonsense: rather than being a viable means of regenerative, sustainable food production, this plan is full of bugs.