U.S. Farm Bureau Declares War on Sustainable Food

[seedcorn]

We are blessed because the privately owned grocery store 10 minutes away from us gets ALL of the their meat from the Amish locker--I talked to the butcher to confirm this. We do other business with members of an Amish community an hour away from us and I SEE how they keep their livestock--ALL grass fed, ALL pastured.
Very rarely is any of the meat tough, it is also priced about the same as in C-U. The pork and beef steaks are particularly tender.

There was a recent article in "Hobby Farms" about black pigs, and how they are well-suited for pasturing because they don't sunburn. I understand that they are an endangered breed, but used to be quite numerous.

So they grass feed their finishing hogs? Their hogs are outside & fed no antibiotics? Guaranteed that your amish are a whole lot cleaner than their Indiana brethern.

Yes non-white hogs are better for outside. They are not an endangered species, it's just commercial herds use white for a variety of reasons.

Outside hogs will have a tremendous more amount of fat on them as modern hogs would freeze outside, no fat.

If the meat is tender, guaranteed they are being fed grain. Grass fed are a lot slower to market and much less fat (fat makes for tender meat).

For acorn fed hogs, you must be referring to 1860, little before my time.

 

[Rosalind]

Not THAT long ago. Pigs were raised on acorns in Appalachia right up through WWII.

WRT Indiana Amish vs. other Amish groups...Yeah, I agree--the "hard core" Old Order folks I grew up with in PA are indeed a lot stricter and fussier about hygiene on their farms than some of the Ohioan and Indiana Amish I've met. Sorry, just my observation. If you visited my PA cousin's farm, you would never know she had pigs until you came right up inside the barn and saw them, it was that clean. No flies, smelled like hay and grass. Went to an Ohio farmer's place where they were selling veggies and whatnot from a stand, and good heavens, you know they had pigs from half a mile away. Nasty. I suspect that like other farms, it's all to do with how much your neighbors and customers can actually see for themselves: PA farms tend to be close to each other, not very large (only a few hundred acres), fields and barns close to the road as the barn doubles as a market stand in season. If you were stinking up the place, your neighbors would give you a hard time about it, people would never buy from you, you wouldn't be able to compete with the other farms' market stands. If your neighbors are a long ways away and there's only one farmer's market for miles around, there's no incentive other than $$$ to keep it clean, and the antibiotics are a lot cheaper.

Tender meat does not necessarily come from grain feeding--that's a myth. Yes, they do take longer to finish, but if you think grain feed or high fat is a requirement for tender meat, you come on over to my place and I will fix you a venison roast so tender you can cut it with a spoon. Yum! I've had commercially grain-raised pork chops that were so tough you could have used them as hockey pucks, too, with so much fat I had to cut chunks of it off to get at the meat. Bacon-wrapping bits of lean steak and so forth for "tenderness" is actually more like encasing it in foil to keep the juices (and free glutamine, a main component of the meat flavor) from evaporating during cooking. That's why braising works, really--you're cooking in a pan with a lid, tightly covered, to prevent evaporation. Grass-fed tastes better to me, but then again I've seen the process of making chicken nuggets and am unsure why anyone would bother. Spend lots of money, time and energy to make the nastiest extruded protein chunks on earth that are truly indistinguishable from tofu, or spend hardly any money to make a lovely BBQ chicken? I'll take the BBQ, thanks.

 

[seedcorn]

Cooking style does make a difference on the meat tenderness but if you want a grilled steak, don't give me grass fed as it'll be toughter than leather. Cook it right and even an old stewing hen is tender, but don't try and pan fry them.

Pork doesn't marble. Cattle do.

I now understand better where some of you are coming from. I'll leave the conversation as I don't want to go back to 40's ag & the general public won't pay for it, sorry.

Give me my electric, health insurance, cars, TV, internet, etc. As a man I'd already be dead if I lived a "normal" life span during that time. So much for the 'good 'ol days.....

For giggles....you do realize WWII was almost 70 years ago?

 

[Rosalind]

For giggles....you do realize WWII was almost 70 years ago?

Hush yer mouth you whippersnapper!

You can have my TV. Nothin' on it but foolishness, violence and bad news anyhow.

 

[wifezilla]

I'll leave the conversation as I don't want to go back to 40's ag & the general public won't pay for it, sorry.

You don't have to get a time machine and go back to the 40's. You CAN, however, acknowledge what was working well in the past and combine it will current knowledge for the best of both worlds.

I hate to keep using Joel Saltin as an example, but he is just one of many farmers that show you don't have to use CAFO's to make a living selling meat.

 

[seedcorn]

I'll leave the conversation as I don't want to go back to 40's ag & the general public won't pay for it, sorry.

You don't have to get a time machine and go back to the 40's. You CAN, however, acknowledge what was working well in the past and combine it will current knowledge for the best of both worlds.

I hate to keep using Joel Saltin as an example, but he is just one of many farmers that show you don't have to use CAFO's to make a living selling meat.

Call me a liar because I'm back but I can't let this statement go because it typifies arguments w/no knowledge.

My folks were raised in the 30-40's and my Dad was raised in the deep south on poverty. No it didn't work and you can acknowledge that it didn't as people went hungry all the time. Hunger was as prevalent in USA as it is now in 3rd world countries. It's only since the 70's that people have more food than we know what to do with it. Guess what happened, modern ag started taking over and raised enough food that ALL people could eat, not just the elitest.

As long as the Saltin's of the world can get you guys to buy his drivel (books, pay for speaking engagements, articles, etc), he'll be rich and live his elitest life. Most of us poor schmucks have to live in reality. I can show you many examples of people who live w/NO electricity, phones, internet, health insurance, modern medicine, hospitals, cars, indoor plumbing, just like the 40's, so is that how you live??? I know you don't but hey, you think the 40's were great, get back to that lifestyle, there's NO REASON not to. Leave your town house, go buy 80 acres, grow all your own food the way you want it, nothing is stopping you except you'll have to give up a lot of things you have now.

Yes, I do garden, eat out of my own garden, I do think it's better than what I can buy in store. Most of my family, friends do not garden and buy out of the store. I do not think any less of them or put them down for financing the food industry. Nor do I want to tear it down so that I can make them see things my way.

 

[wifezilla]

I can show you many examples of people who live w/NO electricity, phones, internet, health insurance, modern medicine, hospitals, cars, indoor plumbing, just like the 40's, so is that how you live???

If you had a valid argument you would not have to twist my words or misrepresent my point now, would you?

 

[Rosalind]

seedcorn, here is what I worry about, the sort of thing that keeps me and DH up at night: You know a LOT of modern ag is dependent on cheap oil. Oil to run the tractors, oil to make the fertilizers, oil to make the pesticide. Lotsa oil. Cheap oil tends to come from insane despots where terrorists are their #2 export, like Saudi Arabia.

There are other sources of oil, but even the petroleum company experts say it will take a few decades to build the specialized refineries required to process the different types of oil (heavy sour & tar sand oil is more difficult to process than light sweet). Converting coal to diesel is possible, but it's going to take a loooooong time to build enough commercial-scale refineries that can do that process in order to re-supply what we use today. And it is dirty, it produces a lot of mercury waste (the mercury is mostly, but not completely redistilled), and as many West Virginian towns can tell you, the slurry and slag that results from extraction is hazardous in its own right--creates mudslides, poisons the water. You can throw all the money you want at building specialized refineries, but it doesn't magically make them faster to build.

Politically, can we afford to hand over increasing amounts of money to states that are known to create, foster and supply terrorists? Is it wise to allow such complete control of the US economy to rest in the hands of a monarchy that is, arguably, off its rocker? All they have to do to reduce us to developing-world status is to jack the prices, which they can do arbitrarily whenever they feel like it. Which they have done in the recent past, more than once, and they don't much care who is in the White House when they do it.

The only reason they don't do it now is because they're a bit busy feuding with the Russian Mafia's plan to build a NG pipeline. The day that China (who now has most of our nice middle-class jobs) decides to outbid us as OPEC's #1 customer, is the day our modern food system cracks.

It's not that I want that to happen, I realize lots of people would end up starving. It's that I worry that it WILL happen, regardless of what you or I want.

 

[wifezilla]

A lack of diversity in production methods, food strains, animal genetics, etc... makes us all very very vulnerable.

If people want to buy from big agra...go for it. But we keep having people insist that the big agra way is the only way. When we only have 1 way to produce things, all it takes is one virus strain, one blight, one bad season, and we are all screwed.

 

[boggybranch]

It's foolish to have all your eggs in one basket.