The Maximum Leader’s link to the Louisiana small farmers who began marketing their own milk is a good example of what farmers ought to be doing.

Farmers have had a problem - ever since tobacco prices fell in the Eighteenth century - of trying to compensate for falling prices by increasing production.

I’ll pause while you recall your high school economics course.

The process continues today with the “get big or get out” mentality of most mainstream farmers. These are the same folks who, with farms encompassing square miles of land, cry that they need government subsidies.

But those two Lousiana farmers said, “Screw this! We’ll stay small but become profitable by cutting out the price-setting middleman.” Milk processors are a damned oppresive pseudo-monopoly. Three firms control 90% of the milk processing in the United States and they purposefully keep milk prices down. Farmers today get the same amount for their milk that they got in 1970 yet the price of milk keeps rising. Most farmers react by buying more cows, producing more milk, and selling to the same collectives at the same 1970 price.

But those Louisiana farmers said, let’s just pasteurize the milk ourselves and find our own customers. Milk processors are giving abour 22 cents per pound - around 16 cents once trucking and advertising contributions are subtracted. That’s about $1.20 a gallon gross milk check. Start subtracting the cost of feeding the cows, raising replacements, and equipment loans, it is not a winning proposition.

But if you pasture feed your cows, stay small, avoid building gargantuan kilometer-long barns and multi-million dollar manure lagoons, you still get $1.20 per gallon. Sure, you’ll actually produce less milk without grain supplements, but your healthier cows will last longer, you can sell more heifers to the “sheep” farmers who get “big” (and bankrupt), and you won’t have the debt to service. You’ll make more b producing less. If you are smart like the Louisiana farmers and find your own market, you can jump your price to $3.00 or more per gallon (I would get $6 in Albemarle). That is a winning proposition.

Kudos to the enlightened state of Lousiana (who thought I’d ever write that phrase!) which has allowed agripreneurs to seize the market for themselves and make small farms profitable. Virginia’s requirements for a pasteurization system are so huge as to be an impenatrable barrier to entry for the small farmer. One farm in Timberville, Virginia did borrow a couple of million dollars to set up an approved pasteurization facility. They pulled in money hand over fist - but couldn’t keep up with the banknote (though they also seemed to suffer from the “get big” syndrome). I wonder who that barrier to entry protects? Could it be the consumer? Or the politically connected milk processors?

Government regulation that squelches intitiative, consumer options, and favors powerful business over the little guy makes me want to join the Libertarian party.

At any rate, I was saddened to see that the potential sustainability of two small Lousiana dairy farms has been compromised by poor inter-familial relationships. Can’t we all just get along?

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will pass along this sad story of two small farmers (father and son) torn apart by the recent Hurricanes.

Very sad indeed.

Carry on.

The AI Tech came yesterday.

With any luck, Bonnie is “caught.”

We’ll know in 22 days.

Cross your fingers.

For all of the Naked Villainy readers who visit our site every day, eagerly anticipating a cow insemination post, this one is for you!

Bonnie’s suitor’s semen has arrived all the way from Norway: Svarstad

I will breed her this year with a Norweigen Red Bull.

My goal is to get a heifer that has thrifty grazing genetics, hardiness, heterosis, longer teats, high fertility, and the potential to throw meaty calves.

Unlike the American dairy system that has used the factory model to turn cows from solar-driven grass eating machines into petroleum-driven (tractor-based forage harvesting) grain bins, many other nations have developed more profitable, sustainable small dairy systems based on intensive grazing. New Zealand’s system is the best known, but the Scandinavians are no slouches at grass-based dairying.

The Norweigen Red breed is a hardy one, devloped to graze the cold hilly upcountry. When I combine that with Bonnie’s Scottish ancestry, I ought to get a tough, healthy cow.

Most dairy cows, particularly Holsteins, are massively inbred. The advent of artificial insemination has allowed for rapid genetic progress in the creation of giant, short-lived cows that can turn grain into milk at astounding rates. However, since good bulls can sire thousands of offspring and new bulls are selected from the progeny of the previous good bulls, the genetic base has become narrow indeed - to the point that the inbreeding has seriously affected traits like fertility. One reason I chose the Ayrshire was because, of the dairy breeds, it had suffered comparatively less pressure genetic pressure - the suped-up Holsteins quickly pushed the minor breeds to the fringes on factory farms where size and ability to process grain were all. But even the Ayrshire’s genetic base is narrower then it ought to be. Heterosis is the biological principle in which crossbred offspring typically see major trait gains as the result of the efficacy or reducing inbreeding. Unfortunately, the heterosis is only valuable if you keep switching in outcrosses so it is not generally used with Holsteins because the offspring would be smaller and smaller as the more minor breeds played into a continuing rotation. Holstein milk production is so far above that of other breeds that even with heterosis, the next generation would have less milk production than the parent. For example, imagine a Holstein averaging 30,000 lbs/milk/lactation. Breed her to a good Holstein bull and you might get a heifer throwing 32,000 lbs. If you bred her to a Jersey bull with a PTA for milk in the 20,000 lb range, the resulting crossbed would throw around 25,000 based on averages. (It wouldn’t be right in the middle because there are other factors involved, but it works for our example). The heterosis affect might add a 10% gain - so the crossbred cow, while healthier, would only be expected to throw 27,500 lbs. The 4,500 pound difference would mean an extra $900 of milk per year. Even if the crossbred heifer has fewer health problems, greater longevity, less mastitis, and is thriftier (uses less food per unit of milk profuced), the gap might only close to $200/year. That inbred purebred differential gain of $200/year in the annual bottom line is a crucial improvement when you average that over hundreds of cows and have to pay a multi-million dollar bank not that you took out to build your free stall barn and manure lagoon.

Squeezing the last dollar out of production isn’t the goal of Sweet Seasons Farm. I don’t owe $100,000 on a combine, $40,000 for a tractor, $2,000,000 for a manure disposal system, or $500,000 for a milking parlor. The major capital expense at Sweet Seasons Farm has been the building of the barn, which was accomplished for around $6,000 dollars since it was built by the truty firm of Vater Smallholder & Son.

In the case of this small organic farm, the trade-off of slightly less production is minimized because I’m not starting from a Holstein base, what little drop will hardly be noticed, and animal health is a major goal as its own end.

The longer teat issue is also a function of being a small farm. The advent of mechanical milking machines has made teat size irrelevent to production - the vacuum pressure, unlike a farmer’s aching fingers, cares not how long a cow’s teats are. In fact, in a confinement situation where animals are crowded, long teats are a disadvantage because resting cows get stepped on by their herdmates. Animals that spend a great deal of time resting on manure packs also expose their teats to bacterial infection - and the longer the teats are, the greater the area exposed. So farmers have been breeding for smaller teats.

I milk by hand. I can barely get two fingers around Bonnie’s back teats. I wanted a cow with longer teats and found a bull that throws that trait in the Norwegian Red herdbook.

Norweigen Reds are also noted for their high fertiltiy and the heterosis will help on this level as well. Since I breed AI, this trait is important. It takes an average of three or four breedings for a Holstein to “catch” nowadays. Ayrshires average 2 or 3. It took 2 to get Bonnie in calf last year. Bonnie is a good cow that does not suffer from the environmental stress depressing fertility in confinement operations, rotationally grazes (which increases relative fertility), and doesn’t suffer from grain-induced acidosis, so she should be pretty fertile. But I want to keep breeding to make that trait better and better. Each breeding will run me around $40, so as a percentage of costs, can be a big slice of my tiny pie. Heterosis will also help.

Most dairy calves end up as veal. I raise mine to be petit beef. Dairy animals tend to be very thin and angular, so a larger proportion of the nutrition of the animals destined for the table goes into bone. If I could get calves that are blockier, they’ll gain weight faster and improve my paycheck at the end of the year. Norweigen Reds have many dual-breed charecteristics - the males are raised for beef, so my crossbreed, if male, should have a blockier frame than a straight Ayrshire calf.

As an additional bonus, Svarstad is homozygoously polled, which means that I will not have to dehorn the calf.

Artists: Support your local farmer!

At the end of October I will be meeting with my customers as they pick up their delicious custom-reared, grass-fed, humanely-treated organic petit beef and pastured pork. I would like to wear a shirt with a simple farm logo on the pocket.

However, I am remakable unartistic.

Is there an artist out there who would do a simple line drawing of the missus and I in an American Gothic pose with Bonnie between us?

Mrs. Smallholder has always been a big fan of firearm control.

The Foreign Minister will recall our heated college debates over the Second Amendment. I was always firmly convinced that the “well-regulated” part of the Second Amendment gave the (state) government the power to, well, regulate, firearm ownership and use. But I admitted that rifles and shotguns ought to be available to the citizenry (not as a right but as a reasonable tool). Mrs. Smallholder wanted to get rid of all the guns.

It is remarkable what farm life will do for you.

When the Maximum Leader and I were decrying the New Orleans gun seizures on the phone, we digressed, as we are wont to do, toward self-protection laws.

Evidently, Louisiana law says you may not use force to stop property crime.

In Virginia, you can shoot a burglar who is in your home. The assumption is that you have a reasonable concern about the safety of your family in the midst of a property crime.

In Virginia, you are also allowed - nay, required - to shoot dogs harassing your livestock.

So I posited the question to Mike: If I looked out my window and saw cattle rustlers trying to load Bonnie into the back of their truck, would I legally be allowed to shoot them?

The Maximum Leader and I regretfully concluded that I would probably get in serious legal trouble because the thieves were not physically inside my domicile.

My dear pacifist wife, th one who didn’t want me to get the .307, piped up from the peanut gallery:

“Who cares if it’s legal? If someone tries to steal our cow, shoot them. We’ve got pigs. Who’s going to know?”

This is what is wrong with agricutlure today.

Government subsidies of the family farm don’t help small farms - they overwhelmingly go to big corporate businesses that are bad for farmers, the consumers, the animals, the low wage workers, and the environment.

My cousin owns a remarkably similar facility in Wisconsin - 1400 cows and a dozen imported workers.

“Teabow Farms, about five miles north of Frederick, has a herd of 1,820 animals, of which 950 must be milked daily. There are 18 hired hands.”

The article doesn’t explain what the land base is. But if this is typical of a milk factory, then the base is disproportionately small. An acre of grass can absorb the nutrients deposited by a cow over the course of a year without runoff and leaching into water systems. My cousin has 1400 milk cows and 1400 heifers on 200 acres. Mmmm. Manure lagoons! Smells like… victory… for the banks! And e coli in the drinking water.

Note the number of non-milking heifers. Half the herd. It takes two years for a heifer to grow large enough to calve and produce. So this means that a half the heifers are calving each year - so the cull rate of the milking cows is 50% - most cows last only two lactations, long enough, on average to produce her replacement (half the calves are relatively worthless bulls). Cows aren’t culled willy-nilly. Living conditions are so atrocious that the cows are breaking down at this rate - ruptured udders, blind teats, blown-out knees, disease, etc. In fact, at this rate of turnover, it doesn’t make sense to control diseases like Johnes that don’t affect milk production until a cow is four or five years old - but on these mega farms, they’ll be dead before Johnes stops the flow of liquid. The fact that Johnes is incredibly painful way before the milk dries up is irrelevent.

We need to get government out of agricultural subsidies (admittedly almost impossible given the way the Electoral College and Senate magnify the power of farm states). If we didn’t subsidies the giant industrial factories, economics would tilt towards sanely-sized FAMILY farms.

The government that governs least governs best.

Somebody (Sadie?) give Fabienne some smelling salts.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was over reading Pejman Yousefzadeh’s new blog and took great interest in this post.

Your Maximum Leader can’t recall if it was in a past blog post, or just in a conversation with Smallholder, that he railed against Europeans (specifically) and others (generally) who are holding up use of genetically enhanced or even bio-engineered foods in Africa and Asia.

Your Maximum Leader has yet to hear a fully formed argument against using genetically modified crops. The most common argument against is that genetically modified crops will contaminate native crops. This is the favourite argument of Greenpeace. What would be the outcome of cross-pollination between modified and unmodified crops? That the modified crops might become less disease resistant and the unmodified might become more disease resistant? No one ever seems to ask that question.

And no one ever seems to address the plain fact that cereal staples have been bred for millennia (albeit using more primative methods than genetic engineering) to promote certain characteristics. Characteristics like greater yeilds and desease resistance. Where is the outcry over that?

Your Maximum Leader remembered reading about starving Africans in 2001 who could have been saved had they been allowed to eat golden rice that had been donated for relief. But due to concerns about the genetically modified rice, it was not distributed. (An interesting article about Greenpeace’s objections to golden rice is here.)

Your Maximum Leader is not going to be an avatar for genetically enhanced foods and claim that they will solve the problems of the starving in Africa. Indeed, if you read the carefully the statements of those who produce genetically modified foods they don’t claim that their foods alone will solve Africa’s problems. But they will help. And they will help a damn sight more than another pontificating rock concert. If European governments wouldn’t scre African governments we might get some crops that might help to Africans. It would also help to let African farmers use pesticides. If that could happen we might not have to have more gargantuan rock concerts to benefit starving Africans. Of course, it might also help if Africans didn’t fall into a rut of monoculture.

It is tragic that help is being kept from those who need it by those who have the sense to know better.

Carry on.

When cows are in heat, they mount their herdmates.

This is a great boon for farmers, as we can see when each cow is breedable by artificial insemination.

But I can’t figure out the evolutionary purpose. The bulls do not need a visual cue; they smell the vaginal discharge from a fair distance away.

It can be a dominance issue, because dominance games are played out at all times, not just when a particular cow is in heat.

I doubt that it is simply for pleasure. They pleasure we and Chimpanzees get from sex is largely to make the female receptive even when she is not likely to be impregnated, thus helping the man stick around and expend resources on his progeny (See Jared Diamond’s “Why Sex is Fun). Bulls contribute no resources to their progeny, and the cows are not receptive outside of the heat period.

Can anyone explain the Darwinian imperative that would have led this behavior become near-universal in the cattle population (I say near universal because some cows do not mount, having what we farmers call “silent heats”)?

Perhaps the behavior is ordained by the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Seriously, I’m puzzled and I have stumped the science teachers at my school. Hopefully we count some renowned Darwinian behavioralists amongst our readership.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that there are huge peanut surpluses projected for this year. This news adds to concerns of peanut farmers around the country. Why? Because there are 215,000 tons of peanuts from last year still sitting in government warehouses.

That is a pretty staggering number. 215,000 tons of peanuts sitting in storage around the country. It is like we had a strategic peanut reserve and didn’t even know it. (Perhaps it is a lingering program from the Carter Administration.)

So it looks like this year US farmers will raise and harvest 2,300,000 tons of peanuts. Add to that number the surplus from last year and you get 2,513,000 tons of peanuts. In the average year Americans eat 1,600,000 tons of peanuts. According to the article another 300,000 to400,000 tons are exported. Which leaves us with nearly 500,000 tons of surplus peanuts for next year.

Our federal government and its oft illogical farm subsidies policy seems in part to blame. The United States guarantees that it will buy farmer’s peanuts at a fixed rate of no less than $335 per ton.

One suspects that this means that after peanut farmers are finished supplying Planters and other nut companies with their nuts, and after more peanuts are sold to brokers for sale overseas; then the government steps in and buys the surfeit peanuts.

Now from this article your Maximum Leader has learned that the posted price per ton for peanuts is $337. Only two dollars difference between the government buy price and the open market price. But later in the article it says that US peanuts are being sold at $895 per metric ton in Europe. That $895 figure is high compared to $695 per ton from Argentina and $725 per ton from China.

Setting aside the logical question of why a European would want to eat peanuts from Argentina and China when American peanuts are available, why are US peanuts so expensive? If one adjusts for the difference between an English (or Short) ton and a Metric ton (1 English ton = .907 Metric ton) that means that US peanuts are still selling in Europe for nearly 260% of the price of the same peanut in US markets.

Now your Maximum Leader doesn’t mind “sticking it” to the Europeans (except for the British, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and Czechs), but getting them for 260% of market price? That is a little much. (Unless you’re French, German, Belgian, or Spanish.)

Why is this? It makes no sense. What does make sense it that we just flood the world market with cheap US peanuts. Argentina and China be damned!

Perhaps exchanging cheap peanuts for agreement on foreign policy issues would make the Europeans love us again. If not, they would at least get fat on peanuts.

And one little post script to this post… If the Government needs to dispose of some peanuts your Maximum Leader knows a small farmer, a small holder if you will, who has some pigs who could stand a little fattening up on peanuts in the months leading up to their slaughter… Just sayin’

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was reading over minionly comments this morning and found one that he really wanted to share with you.

Our new minion, Tikipundit, wrote a comment concerning yesterday’s post and the blurb on wild pigs in and around Berlin. Tiki wrote:

As readers of the Cambridge Guide to Hawaiian Gods will know (or at least, the “Big Dummies Guide to Deities”), your friendly local Hawaiian god TikiPundit was long resident in Germany. I had an apple tree in my back yard, and it was a fine addition to a typical German yard — a good complement to the yodeling, beer drinking and plans for ruling Europe that routinely took place there. I trimmed the tree. I nursed the tree. I pruned it, fed it — and hugged it every night, despite my carniverous nature.

The tree produced. It produced massive amounts of apples. I ate some. I baked some. I gave some to the neighbors. One day, a neighbor appeared, asking for [some]. I gave them. The neighbor cheerfully informed me they were for a relative — to feed wild pigs in the forest. I was ambivalent about this until she said he was going out every few days and feeding them at the same spot, until they got so used to his presence that they didn’t flinch when he turned up with a rifle and a hunting permit and shot the filthy little buggers, and served them up for dinner. Yummy!

So you see, TikiPundit helps the environment in many, many ways, all
over the world.

Ah Tiki… It is good to hear how you help the environment in many ways. Yum indeed. Your Maximum Leader is all in favour of hunting, and hunting wild pigs is no exception to that belief. Your Maximum Leader can only hope that Tiki got some of the pork from the hunted pigs….

Carry on.