Join Our Uncheese Party
Life is too busy to blog but I thought this was important in case you still visit.
For years we mail ordered raw milk cheese from Morningland Dairy. They are a small family farm in Missouri making wonderful cheeses.
The government is now after them. You can read all about it here:
FDA shuts down Morningland Dairy on undocumented test
To keep these folks afloat and help them fight our overreaching, dare I say evil government, you can sponsor a pound of cheese in an “Uncheese Party” of sorts. You can do this here:
The Uncheese Party
As Captain Reynolds would say, “Do it NOW!”
Thank you and God bless!
The Government Does It Again!
I’m on a roll this week. The government is using some heavy handed tactics to thwart small business. This time it is against a 7 year old selling lemonade!
Read all about it here.
Guess she’s cutting into the big business of carbonated corn syrup drinks. And those health inspectors have to justify their existence too. Wouldn’t want to lose their nice, fat cat government jobs. How did mankind every manage to survive with out them?
That’s right! MORE Government Harassment of Small Farms
This just in from Walter and NoNAIS:
The Bureaucrats Come Calling….
Recounted by Doreen HannesAfter more than five years of full time fighting and agitating for food freedom and the complete abandonment of NAIS or NAIS like things, I finally received a visit from compliance officers. What officers, you ask? They were Missouri Department of Agriculture Compliance Investigators, John Jordan and Joe Stropp.
They came past “No Trespassing” signs, had no paperwork to show me, ie. no written complaint. They were just ‘investigating’ a report that I was engaged in selling meat and poultry products. Well, even though I am not involved in selling meat, it is certainly something I am a strong advocate for, and I told them so. They said, “Do you know there are some exemptions you can apply for to sell poultry directly?”
Eeegads. I thought, “I don’t want an ‘exemption’ because that grants you authority over me anyway.” but I didn’t bother to get into that as I was a little cranky. To the agents, I said, “As you can see, we don’t have enough poultry to be selling to anyone.”John tried to be engaging, but since I was just eating breakfast at 11:30 after milking my neighbor’s cows so they could have a vacation, I wasn’t feeling too chatty, nor too appreciative of them coming on our property with only business cards and a ‘rumor’.
He tried to talk to me about our dog. I wasn’t interested. He said, “I notice you have dairy goats, do you milk them?” I just looked at him with a certain level of incredulity in my eyes, and asked “Who reported that I was selling meat and poultry products?”
Of course, being good government agents, they can’t give out that information. It could be someone within the department itself. Who knows who it is? Evidently nobody cares. For agency types, it appears that it’s fun to justify continued employment by going onto people’s property to investigate unsubstantiated anonymous rumors with no basis in fact or need of any fact. The philosophy they appear to follow could be stated like this, “Heck, if we have ‘reason to believe’, like you have chickens or a cow or a goat, you can get a visit from us! We’re nice guys, and we are really mindful of our public booty…I mean duty.” Great use of taxpayer money, don’t you think?
John said something like ‘we’re simply given a list of things to do and not making the decisions”, but they had to investigate reports of activity that might violate regulations. I told him, “We grow our own meat, and as you can see, we don’t have enough chickens to engage in selling them, but even if we did, it would be direct trade and you don’t have authority over that.” And thus ensued the only interesting conversation we had… the ever so enlightening conversation regarding commerce.
John told me that “commerce is whenever you sell something”. Then I explained to him that wasn’t right, commerce is when you bring in a third party, and gave the example of taking calves to a sale barn as fulfilling the requirements of commerce, but if I sold calves to my neighbor, that wasn’t commerce. Joe said, “I think that’s right. It’s private treaty or something.” Then John told me it all depended upon the definitions, and I said, “Yes, and the definition of commerce includes the involvement of a third party.” I think that aggravated John as he then asked, “Is there anything else we don’t know that you’d like to tell us?”, to which I replied, “I don’t know what you don’t know.”
They then said, “Well if you’re not selling meat then I guess we’ll get on with our day,” and I said good bye to the compliance officers.
Since I am who I am, I have a few thoughts on this. The first one is, in the past couple of weeks I have received several phone calls asking for fresh goat milk. I stopped selling goat milk when I became terrifically engaged in the National Animal Identification System fight. It was just not worth the potential hassle for the little bit I sold. However, every time the Milk Board is about to do a sting, I receive requests from far away for goat milk. Within a few months people are receiving mailed notices of fines or cease and desist letters in the mail. So, I would expect some activity in the near future on fresh milk in Missouri. Based on the visit today, we should begin to expect visits to any food activist who grows anything agencies might decide they can extrapolate authority over.
And I hadn’t even been able to get into the shower when they showed up. Poor guys, got to see evidence of work on a very hot August morning….I wasn’t even hospitable to them. Shame on me, I let them stand in the sun.
[Remmber folks, what you say can and will be used against you by the government in a court of law. Be very, very careful talking with any government officials that show up at your door, especially those impolite enough to trespass. -WJ]
Don’t know about you but I get hopping mad about these sorts of things.
More Heavy Handed Government Attacks on Raw Milk
From our friend, George, in Southern California…
And the video of the actual raid in progress (note the guns drawn) along with an interview with the coordinator of the raw food club…
Are you outraged yet?
Clabber Bleu Cheese
A new-to-me site with some excellent cheese making information can be found here. I’m particularly interested in the lactic based bleu cheese as well as other lactic (non-rennet) cheeses as they can be made with no purchased ingredients.
Hat tip to Linuxboy for linking this great site from his Cheese Forum profile!
How Lois Ran Away: The Story of Our First Family Milk Cow
This is a re-post of an article I wrote at Homestead Blogger’s Front Porch a few years ago. An updated note: we have found that having a family cow has enabled us to improve our poor land far more rapidly than we ever could without one. Lois has, in fact, made us far more independent. Now on to the story….
We had been purchasing milk from other families for a while. And as these things go, we really wanted to have enough to make butter and cheese as well as have milk to drink. So we started looking for a cow of our own. Now if you have never looked for one, finding a family cow can be a little difficult.
One day, my husband called from work and said we were going to look at a cow…and right around the corner, too! That cow looked poorly, but another in the same herd caught our eye. We jumped at the chance to buy her, knowing only that the cattle farmer had purchased her from the stock barn and she was in calf and due in a month or so.
Now, we had no fence and no barn. Not even a place to milk her. It was a cold and rainy March. The next day, my husband borrowed a fence charger, purchased a roll of smooth wire, some insulators, and fence posts. We began fencing our ¾ acre pasture with a single hot wire as fast as we could.
When Jerry, the cattle farmer, brought Lois to us the fence was not quite completed. Jerry suggested putting her in the garden as it had a good, stout fence. So we unloaded Lois into our 50’x 50’ recently tilled garden while we put the finishing touches on our electric gate. It rained all night with poor Lois in that muddy garden!
The next day, Lois wouldn’t come near us. The mailman, having pulled in to deliver a package, suggested feeding her grain in a bucket on my lap so she would become accustomed to me. This I did. And within 24 hours, she came to me, albeit tentatively, for her grain.
In a couple of days, the fence was complete and all we had to do was lead her the 25 feet from the garden gate to the fence gate and into her little pasture. She came sans halter so with a bucket of grain, I began enticing her to follow. This she did, until she saw the posts on either side of the gate. Then she turned tail, ran around the far side of the house, and into the woods along the road. Here she proceeded to tramp rapidly through the woods and across the next two neighbors’ front lawns, my husband trailing behind her doing what he could to keep her out of the road. Have you every seen a cow with an udder run? Here she met with an old barbed wire fence and her westward trek to find “her herd” was redirected.
The neighbors (a veritable clan) rushed to help and Lois was eventually rounded into a dark, rarely cleaned horse stall in an old shack of a barn. One of the fellows asked my husband if he could just lead her home, after all, they were only 300 yards away from home. So my husband said “sure” and the poor, trusting fellow led Lois out of the barn into the corral only to have her take off, dragging him by the short lead along the ground. He let go and the cow charged a horse, innocently standing by. The horse backed up to the barbed wire fence, and then flipped over the fence, pulling a 360 in the air, landing feet down on the other side. Miraculously, the horse was uninjured. They caught Lois again and this time locked her up for the night.
Now my thoughts as lay awake in my bed, while Lois slept in the neighbor’s barn, were many and varied:
“What were we thinking?!”
“How will we ever get near this cow?!”
“Is her calf o.k.?”
“What if we can’t milk her?”
Jerry, the cattle farmer, came the next morning, loaded her up and brought her back to us. So, we got her home and into the new fenced pasture. She did have an uneventful birth and gave us our soon-to-be-second milk cow, Ginger. She let me halter her and lead her around the lawn to graze without a fuss. And yes, we were able to milk her. Today she walks right into her stanchion for milking and licks me like I am part of the herd. She is content in her home. And she gives us over 4 gallons a day in milk.
Lois enjoying her new barn.
What is my point in telling you this? Sometimes you just have to go for it. You can give your cow a great home without having everything in place at the start. You don’t have to have acres of fenced pastures or high quality forage. You don’t have to start with a barn. You don’t even need a stanchion for milking….just a place to tie your cow, at least to start.
As author Johann Grohman says in her book Keeping A Family Cow, “An over-arching truth about the cow is that she drives the domestic or small farm economy. By living on a constantly renewing resource, grass, she is able to support not just herself and her calf, but your pig and your chickens and still provide milk for the house….She thus vaults the domestic or farm economy into a self sustaining mode.”
So why wait? Go for it. Get that family milk cow you’ve been wanting all these years! It will give you incentive to get that barn built before next winter and improve your land and health too!
How Factory Farming Destroys the Economy
Who knew farmers (corn, feed lot, farm cooperatives) were using risky financial vehicles to stay afloat! That’s right. Documented right here in this article from the Wall Street Journal. It was the government, during the last Great Depression, that ruined the small family farm through bad policy and created the need for farmers to borrow money!
But a fully integrated, multi-purpose/product farm can thrive, even when the government is hostile to it. Support your local family farms. And encourage your congressmen & senators to support the repeal of all those heinous farm & food laws that prevent small farmers from making a real, decent living, debt free!
It’s Alive!
Our bodies are filled with all sorts of beneficial living micro organisms.
So says a gastroenterologist in Minnesota. This article from The New York Times Science section documents the healing of a digestively damaged woman with fecal material from her husband. How much did that cost? Yikes!
Did it ever occur to this doctor and his patient, that eating REAL foods like fermented sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha, and pepperoni might have cured her, at a fraction of the cost without the risk of contamination from another person’s fecal material?
All Things Fermented
I recently purchased a copy of Jane Grigson’s Charcuterie and it is becoming clearer to me each day that EVERYTHING people ate, traditionally, was fermented. Vegetables, milk products, meats, breads, and drinks of all varieties were fermented because there was no other way to preserve them. These foods didn’t last for years. They had to be consumed regularly and usually, within a year or so. There were, of course, exceptions. Wine and ham, to name a few. Even red meats like beef were dry aged, a process that uses fermentation to flavor and tenderize meat. Pepperoni, salami, and lists of other sausages were eaten raw after being fermented, dried, and sometimes smoked. The old country hams were salted down (much like sauerkraut) and basically fermented!
Modern Food Processing Kills
Today, beef is slaughter, packaged, and allowed to “wet age” in a plastic wrapped package on its way to the store. The naturally beneficial micro-organisms never have a chance to do the job of wiping out harmful bacteria. Same thing with pasteurized milk, which naturally sours to protect itself from pathogens. Ditto for canned vegetables, a desirable outcome being the destruction of enzymes! We are decimating an entire micro world designed by a benevolent creator to protect and nourish us!
Save the Microbes!
Forget save the whales. It is all those lovely little microbial creatures that seem to need saving! And by doing so, we save ourselves. I think I’ll start a new campaign:
Save the Microbes: Eat Fermented Foods!
Enough of my rantings. I’ve got a Fermented Foods Class to teach today! Saving microbes, one person at a time. Hat tip to Pop for the original NYT article.
