Raising calves: Pictures of a factory farm.

Faithful minions hav listened to me rant about the power of the milk processing lobby.

Now the big chicken factories are coming after small pasture-based flocks like mine.

Obviously, low-density, healthy flocks living on clean grass are much more likely to become vectors for disease than the big boys’ birds which are housed in lots of 100,000 with a square foot per bird, debeaked to stop crowding-induced cannibalism that live in their own manure.

You know, I think that on this issue, I just might have to be civilly disobedient.

Breakin’ the law! Breakin’ the law! Breakin the law!

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader advises you to go and visit the Berlin Botanical Gardens to witness the multiple blooming of their Titan Arum specimen. Well… Go if you are in the Berlin area at least.

As long-time readers know, the Titan Arum is the offical flower of Naked Villainy, your Maximum Leader, and the Mike World Order (MWO). Know for the stench of rotting flesh it emits when blooming, this tropical flower is also pretty phallic.

See?

Carry on.

Well, we’ve bred Bonnie for the third time.

I hadn’t ordered any new semen from Norway, so had to go with what my AI guy had in the tank, which was all Holstein or Angus. I went with O-Bee Manfred Justice, one of the storied bulls of the Holstein breed.

I think I have put my finger on why she hasn’t caught yet - Bonnie is a bit on the thin side - as a grass-based dairyman, I have to watch for her “milking off her back” (also called “will to milk) - when Cows produce large amounts of milk despite not getting a lot of grain - they actually draw down their body fat. I’m going to supplement her with some corn until she gets condition back.

If she doesn’t catch this time I’ll spend the next couple of months fattening her back up and then breed for a February calf.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on the news wires that Oakland, California, has a goose problem. Well… According to the article the geese wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t poop so much. The people living around this large lake in Oakland are overrun with Canada Geese. Thousands of them. And each bird makes a pound of poop a day. They have tons of poop every day going into their lake, their lawns, their water. Poop is everywhere.

And this concerns the good residents of Oakland. They want to be good neighbours to the geese. But they can’t. Too much poop. They hire dogs to chase the birds away. But they come back. They don’t want to run afoul of international treaties that protect migratory birds. Such action might result in retaliatory airstrikes from the Bush Administration. So what are the poor people of Oakland to do?

Well… They need to get the Governator on the line and ask him to got to Washington and get the White House and Congress moving on some needed reform of the Migratory Bird Treaties. We need to stop protecting the Canada Goose. They are all over the place. Once we allow more hunting of Canada Geese, we do some serious cooking of goose. Have you ever had a cooked goose? Damn they are tasty. Your Maximum Leader commends to you this recipe for roast goose. This is close to one your Maximum Leader has used in the past. And remember to save the fat your goose gives off in cooking. That stuff can be used to cook and flavour all sorts of other tasties.

All this talk of roast goose is making your Maximum Leader quite hungry…

Carry on.

I believe the Norweigan bull semen I ordered for Bonnie (the house cow) was mishandled during shipping.

That is all.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over on Jeff’s site amusing himself… ahem… Well, your Maximum Leader was over at Beautiful Atrocities when he clicked through onto a link to the Babalu blog. Then he read the article and clicked through again to the MSNBC site.

What could have merited all that clicking?

The mini-vaca. Yes boys, girls, and minions everywhere. The mini-cow. Go. Read. Return. Pretty cool huh?

Just remember, your Maximum Leader told you about it before the Smallholder brought it up… BTW, Smallholder is probably still sitting alone in his barn being shocked (shocked!) that Texas judges could be fooled into thinking that redistricting isn’t a political process and its outcome isn’t always aimed at minimizing the influence of the opposition and creating safe seats. Silly judges… Politics is for crooks and Trix are for kids.

Carry on.

Here is the grea story of a sixteen year old with her own dairy business. She is a small farmer (ONE cow), raises the cow humanely on pasture, and amrkets directly to consumers. You go, girl!

On a daily basis, readers flock to Naked Villainy hoping that your humble Smallholder will post another entry in his continuing series on the art of cattle breeding.

It has recently come to my attention that all of my work in finding a perfect mate for Bonnie has been in vain. The existing characteristics of the father don’t matter:

Like Galileo, I have been stubbornly resisting the literal truth of the Bible. Luckily, William Bennetta has performed the role of the Inquisition and set me straight:

“The central doctrine of biblical genetics is that the colors and patterns shown by animals are determined by what the animals’ parents happen to see while they are mating. This notion is set forth in chapter 30 of the Book of Genesis, in a tale about the patriarch Jacob. First, Jacob makes a deal by which he will get, as his wages, all the brown sheep and all the spotted or speckled goats that may be born into flocks owned by Laban. Then he undertakes to ensure that Laban’s strongest animals will produce an abundance of brown, spotted or speckled offspring:

And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chestnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.
And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled and spotted.

And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban’s cattle.

And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the ods.

But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in; so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.

In promoting biblical genetics as a substitute for scientific genetics, fundamentalists could note that biblical genetics offers big advantages. First, it is cozy: Even if it doesn’t agree with what we see in nature, it agrees with a sort of ignorant intuition. Next, biblical genetics is simple: It involves no mathematics, and it require us to master only three unfamiliar terms — pilled, strakes and ringstraked. Best of all, it is easy to apply. Individuals schooled in biblical genetics would not have to analyze pedigrees, conduct tedious selective-breeding projects, search for the mechanisms of inherited diseases, or learn delicate genetic-engineering techniques. They would just have to set up some properly pilled rods.

To persons who imagine that they can learn about nature by rejecting evidence and reason in favor of ancient tribal tales, biblical genetics will certainly look like great stuff. I commend it to the fundamentalists’ attention. “

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader read something in the Post that was interesting. Here is the link:

$75,000 in Bull Semen Stolen.

One should ask the Smallholder, “What were you doing and where were you Sunday night?”

Bonnie the Smallholder’s House Cow is “caught” but she’ll need to be “caught” again before too long.

Carry on.

Prior to yesterday, I missed my last three shots with the rifle - missing two groundhogs and a dog. Since I generally hit everything I aim at (I have a nice scope - it is not that I’m sniper material), I was beginning to suspect that I had jiggered the sights.

Yesterday I caught a standing groundhog at 150 yards - dead center in the chest, blew out his backbone. So, while I was proud of the shot, it means that I was just screwing up somehow on the last three.

The dog I can understand - I was so pissed that the neighbors had let him into my pasture again that I was breathing hard andprobably let the breathing jerk up the aiming point. But I shouldn’t have missed the bloody groundhogs.

Now this, my friends, is a sport.

Perhaps Sweet Seasons Farm should start growing uber-pumpkins. I particularly like the idea of turning one into a boat.

Farmers in Virginia are receiving emergency disaster relief because of the drought.

Look, it has been dry.

Real dry.

My pastures are short and I’m feeding hay.

I will only break even this year.

But you won’t see me with my hand out asking for tax money.

Why should you all pay higher taxes because my business was not diversified enough to make a profit during entirely predictable periods of dry weather?

Should we also give money to fuel oil companies during unusually warm winters?

How about giving money to lemonade stands during cold snaps?

For a bunch of people who are supposedly rugged indiviodualists, my fellow farmers sure are a bunch of welfare queens.

I’m just sayin’.

To quote Dennis,

“This is what I’m on about!”

The Washington Post had this article about the way big farms resist facing the true costs of their industrial agriculture model. They want the public to pay the external cost for their economies of scale.

Some excerpts:

This summer, the state Air Resources Board ruled that any existing farm with more than 1,000 milk cows had to apply for a permit on the grounds that dairies — which release volatile organic compounds and ammonia — rank as major polluters. Volatile organic compounds create smog when combined with nitrogen oxide, while ammonia reacts with that smog to form fine-particle pollution.

Tom Mendes’s family has been dairy farming in California’s Central Valley for three generations, ever since his grandfather arrived from Portugal. But Mendes has told his 19-year-old son not to follow him into what he calls a dying way of life.

Smallholder note: Perhaps the Mendes family should consider grass-based dairying. There are many families making a living with a lot less land and fraction of the cows. Without polluting or externalizing other costs to their neighbors.

Residents have formed a citizens’ group to fight large dairy producers. Tom Frantz, a Shafter native who heads the Association of Irritated Residents, said area farms are “like a factory in your midst.”

In the Washington area, farms account for more than 30 percent of the pollutants that cause “dead zones” in the Chesapeake Bay — where algae blooms deplete the oxygen, and fish and crabs cannot breathe. Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania have all tried to make farmers reduce the amount of fertilizer and manure washing off their fields.

God forbid that the polluters be stopped from passing on their pollution to the commons!

Large-scale livestock farms have mushroomed in recent decades — 5 percent of U.S. farms now account for 54 percent of beef and dairy cattle, according to the Agriculture Department — presenting a new challenge to regulators. Environmental Protection Agency officials began investigating the massive operations in the mid-1990s after nearby residents complained of respiratory and eye problems.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, assailed the pact as an industry giveaway. Aloma Dew, a Sierra Club organizer in Kentucky who monitors poultry farms, said: “It’s not just a stink that’s coming out of these farms. It’s a real health threat.”

The Maximum Leader posted a link to an excellent essay concluding that, while Democrats are delusional, Republican politicians are liars. If Bush really believed in the market, he would accept the fact that the internalization of costs is neccessary for an efficient economy. He would support the entrepreneurial little guy and not the largest 5% of farms. He has continued subsidy programs that DO NOT help small farms - instead dooming them by continuing the public subsidization of the “get big” mentality that keeps farm prices “low” (See my previous post), reducing the amount of money that small farmers can earn from their smaller production. Good golly, but it makes me want to be a Libertarian!

Repeat after me:

Subsidies and environmental exemptions do NOT save the family farm. They force the public to pay for an inefficient economic model: factory farms.

If you get the government out, sanity will return to the agricultural market place and farmers with a will to survive will.

The most common defense of factory farming is that it produces cheap food.

I call bullshit on that.

Your 1.09/lb chicken breasts do not actually cost 1.09/lb.

Adam Smith talked about how the invisible hand of personal interest would lead to the most efficient production of goods and the common weal of a society.

People, supposedly rationally, would vote with their dollars, therefore allowing the wisdom of crowds to more efficiently allocate production that those moronic central planners.

Well, the rationality of consumers is an open question. A question tellingly answered by the existence of advertising firms.

Assume for a moment that consumers are rational - will this still result in a society in which the rational forces of the market serve the common weal?

Only if external costs are incorportated (internalized?) into the prices we see for goods on the shelves.

For example, if a factory dumps cyanide byproducts into a stream, the resulting environmental degradation, deaths, cancer, clean-up, lost production in other affected areas, and generally reduced quality of life for the domiciles of downstream dwellers are not reflected on the package price. So the consumer says “Wow! Hairspray for only $1 a can! Awesome! I’ll take 20!” The consumer gets a cheap product and the manufacturer gets a quick profit. But the consumer loses and the society as a whole suffers.

If the costs of the clean-up were incorportated into the price by requiring the company to avoid the spill or mitigate its effects, maybe the can of hairspray would cost $2. If consumers still buy it, it is now safe to say that hairspray production is efficient. But if the hairspray cannot be made without polluting for less than $20/can, perhaps that money is better spent elsewhere.

Even if the consumer is aware of the environmental cost, the consumer is going to pay that cost in higher taxes and shorter life expectancy whether or not they personally benefit from the cheap hairspray. So they might as well buy the cheap hairspray and look good in their little cheap consumer casket. This is called the “tragedy of the commons.”

Believers in the power of the invisible hand ought to insist on the internalization of costs. Big factory farms extrnal costs all over the place.

The cost of that cheap chicken is e-coli-rich effluent, erosion, higher gas prices, and pollution. The expitation of the workers in the polutry plants (read “Fast Food Nation”) also leads to other external costs. In Harrisonburg, the city had to spend $42,000,000 on a new high school because the immigration encouraged by unskilled poultry processing jobs has led to an influx of children who have many special (read: expensive) needs, whether they are ESL, Special Ed, or disciplinary costs. The city has also seen a huge increase in crime as a result of the new urban underclass that has developed. I don’t know how you would put a dollar sign on it, but the all-encompassing stench of confined chicken and turkey houses sits like a sick miasma over the city. How much have the residents of Harrisonburg sacrificed in property values in order to have cheap chicken?

My small farm can’t necessarily compete in quantity with the big boys. But if the big boys were not being subsidized by the rest of society, my environmentally friendly beef would be cheaper.

Plus, it just tastes better.