Happy Chickens

With the combination of construction and the snow all the chickens are being kept in their house for the winter. To keep them happy we take lots of treats, scraps of food, stale bread, vegetable pieces like carrot ends or bits of lettuce and stuff. Here the chickens are happily scratching for their latest goody.

We have several breeds of laying hens, Rose Comb Brown Leghorns, Gold Penciled Hamburgs, Cream Brabanters and Gold Campines. In spite of the cold they are all laying very well. Normally they would be out scratching around but it doesn't make sense to have them loose in winter. We don't crowd them in a small house so they do fine when locked up.

The geese are also often locked in their winter quarters. They will tolerate more cold than the chickens and so on sunny days they get to go outside. We have a fenced pen for them so they can't get into trouble helping the construction crew.

Off to Slaughter

It's fall and this year I vowed not to go into winter with as many sheep as I had last year. So our fall slaughtering has started. We've already done 16 adult ewes and today was 10 young rams.

We have to schedule slaughter dates over a year in advance and I have 66 slots this fall. I can always call a couple of weeks before the date and cancel a few but there is no way to add a few sheep to a slaughter date or get another date if I have more sheep ready to go than I planned on. I have already had to schedule my 2008 and 2009 slaughter dates. This can be a real problem, not only do I have to estimate how many sheep I will have to slaughter but I have to do it before we've even put rams in with the ewes and way before I know how lambing has gone. I've been caught before with more sheep than I can get killed and so this year I decided to make sure I had plenty of dates.

Our slaughter protocol starts at a minimum 3 weeks before the scheduled date. First step is deciding who is on the butcher list. Rams that butt us, ewes that have failed to care for lambs, have no more teeth or other similar problems are on the list. I also cull out to the freezer the lower ranking lambs. My goal is that the keepers of the ram lambs are all in the top 25% so I have 75% of the ram lambs born that are scheduled to be dinner. For ewes I try to select keepers (which for us also includes all for sale animals) from the top 50%. This year we produced 88 lambs, 49 ram lambs and 39 ewe lambs. So right off the bat I have to select about 37 rams and 20 ewes to butcher. That doesn't leave us many slots for old ewes so we'll end up with a few spare dinner sheep over winter.

Once the sheep are on the list we have many things we do to ensure that they produce good tasty meat with as little stress as we can manage. Our sheep are forage (grass and hay) finished. That means no grain. While this is more natural and produces wonderful healthy meat it does mean there is no excess glycogen in the muscles of the slaughter sheep. Muscle glycogen stores are what affect the Ph of the muscle at slaughter and the Ph and the subsequent changes in Ph as meat ages are what affects tenderness and taste. Grain fed animals have excess glycogen stored in their muscles. Under stress the glycogen of the muscles is used to combat the stress. We have no cushion that a grain fed animal would have so we need to do more to ensure that our animals are not stressed. Through experience we have learned that 15 minutes of really high stress will ruin the meat. And the bad effects from a significant stress situation will take 2 weeks to clear out of the muscles.

To reduce stress all butcher sheep are kept togther in sex segregated pens starting about 3 weeks before their slaughter date. So rams will be kept with rams and ewes with ewes. We keep all the slaughter sheep together so that they are with their buddies. One huge stress for animals is to have to deal with strangers so we make sure there are no strangers in the butcher pens.

Keeping the sheep in small pens means they are more used to us being near them so the stress of human contact is also minimized. We feed as high a legume feed as we have during the last 3 weeks. Legumes produce more muscle glycogen so a high legume diet is better for loading the muscles with glycogen.

We load the sheep into the trailer the night before so that the minimal stress of loading has several hours to wear off. We also keep feed and water in front of the sheep right until they walk off the trailer into the kill pens. Most slaughter houses want the animals to be off feed and water for 24 hours but for our forage finished sheep that would ruin the meat and stress the animals. We are fortunate to have a butcher willing to take the extra time it takes to properly prepare sheep who have full rumens. It's possible but does take more time and many places will not do it.

Finally, based on research data from both France and Finland on glycogen stores in the muscle of grass finished cattle we have added an additional insurance policy. Just before we pull out of the driveway we give each and every sheep about 10cc per 50 pounds body weight of a mixture of 50% propylene glycol and 50% molasses. Propylene glycol is a food additive for ruminants. It provides a quick dose of glycogen that gets into the muscles within 15 minutes of administering. It's often used to treat pregnancy toxemia or when sheep go off feed. Molasses makes the mixture good tasting and ensures the sheep will eat it. We found that this gives us about an hour and a half to get the sheep to the slaughterhouse and killed before they are using up their own muscle glycogen.

Once there we slowly and easily unload the sheep and get them into the pen. The butcher has worked with us to make sure our sheep are killed first so as not to run out of muscle glycogen.

This process is very labor intensive but we feel it produces the best meat we can and minimizes the stress our dinner sheep feel.

We are proud to provide tasty meat and also proud that we take care to make sure our precious sheep perform their function with as little stress as we can manage.

Back on Pasture and Why Labels are Misleading

The early snow has pretty much all melted and we got one batch of ram lambs back out on our triticale pasture regrowth. We made sure they were all pretty full with hay before putting them out and made an aisle of electric fence to prevent too much pugging of the permanent pastures. We'll bring them back in to the corrals at night to reduce predator pressure. Our plan is to replant this to permanent pasture in the spring so any pugging that happens now won't matter and I'd rather the feed go into sheep rather than be wasted.

This brought up an interesting dilemma regarding labeling of food products. I've already explained why I consider USDA Organic regulations to be cruel and inhumane for livestock. However, there are other labels that we might qualify for that we have so far not used. Terms like free-range, cage free, no hormones, vegetarian diet and the like are all potential ways to describe our products.

Grass-fed has up until now not been regulated by the federal government. That has changed and there is now a new Federal grass-fed standard. I'll talk a bit more about it in a later entry.

The American Grassfed Association has developed a very strict interpretation of grassfed that limits feeding of stored forages and use of winter corrals. It's a nice idea but we'll never qualify. The sticking points for us are "All livestock produced under this standard must be on range, pasture, or in paddocks for their entire lives. This means that all animals must be maintained at all times on land with at least 80% forage cover or unbroken ground." and "AGA grassfed ruminant animals cannot be fed stock-piled forages in confinement for more than 30 days per calendar year. "

The limit of 30 days confined feeding is not necessarily enough to protect our pastures from severe pugging and erosion in wet, muddy times. Our attempts at feeding hay on our pastures resulted in destruction of the pasture in that area for a year or more. Our heavy clay soils are the most likely culprit in the problems and compaction we experienced. The people I know who are successfully meeting those restrictions either have sandy soils or have large areas they can plow for annual crops and so use those for their feeding of stored forage on pasture to meet the no confinement requirement. I had hoped to be able to do this on our farm with a multi-year rotation that would include brassicas and small grains like oats and triticale as pasture for our sheep. In addition to providing feed during our summer slump it was also going to help extend the grazing season into fall and provide a way to feed hay on pasture in winter reducing VM contamination of our wool.

Unfortunately we learned by trial and error that plowing our fields only plows up a new crop of rocks. We've been talking to people who have tried no-till but so far everyone has said that nothing they've tried works in our soils with our huge rocks. The giant rock walls that ring our pastures haven't really made a dent in the rock component of our soil. There is a reason that our mesa has always been planted to perennial crops like fruit trees, hay or more recently wine grapes. So we use our winter corrals as places to put sheep when the pastures are too wet or muddy to safely graze and use stored hay forage as needed when pastures are dry or not growing. Now if we sold primarily lambs we could get them to qualify as from birth to harvest they would meet all those restrictions. But our primary product is mutton, an older sheep that for us is usually 18-36 months old and has experienced at least one winter here. Many of our butcher animals are old ewes or rams who have performed other jobs for us and now go on to their final and in many ways most important job, providing tasty mutton for our customers and ourselves.

The new federal grass-fed standard requires that animals get 99% of their feed from pasture or hay and that they are on pasture from the time of the last frost in spring until the first frost in fall. So what does it mean when we pulled sheep off before first frost because the pastures were too wet, and yet now after a major frost have some back out on pasture? I would maintain that long term sustainability means we take good care of our land so that it continues to be productive for generations. A rigid standard that ignores individual farm conditions seems counterproductive. Certainly other farms in our valley can plow regularly and can plant crops without encountering huge rocks. But those farms are on the other side of the valley, not here. Yet our farm is highly productive when I work with the soils growing permanent crops with only very rare plowing. Shouldn't labels designed to promote healthy food and better land stewardship be flexible enough to account for what's best for an individual farm?

What about other labels like free range or cage free for poultry and no hormones or antibiotics?

Free range is federally controlled. The definition of free range for poultry is that the birds must have "access to the outside" No indication of for how long, or how much and certainly no real requirement that they be outside once they are done brooding. And since the time from the end of the brooding period until the time to slaughter for most commercial broilers is so short even if they were outside they won't get very much time there. In short, many birds can be labeled free range when all that it was was an open door at the end of a broiler house for the last week or so of their lives. Since free range doesn't mean what people think it means we have generally avoided it unless we qualify it by explaining that our birds are "really free ranged" and explain the legal defintion plus what we do. We have picked a slower growing commercial cross that we don't butcher until 14-16 weeks of age. Our chickens are outside during the day but penned at night for predator control. When outside they are free to get into everything and do. Our birds range freely over the farm eating all sorts of stuff.

Cage free only means no cages. Most birds are now raised cage free. But they are still in indoor confinement sheds with thousands of birds. Cage free does not mean outside access. So be aware when you purchase eggs or meat from "cage free" birds.

Vegetarian diet is another one that is commonly used. For ruminants like our sheep a vegetarian diet is the natural diet. Geese too are almost exclusively vegetarians and will only rarely eat insects. But what about chickens or ducks? One of the best fly controls is to have chickens range behind the grazing ruminants and scratch and eat the fly larvae and adult flies on a regular basis. Ducks can be important in preventing liver fluke infections by eating the snails that are an intermediate host. Using these natural parasite controls only makes sense but doing so means those birds can no longer be said to be raised on a vegetarian diet. Yet vegetarian diet is promoted as natural for chickens when it isn't really their preferred way to eat.

No added hormones is a difficult one as well. It is illegal to add hormones to poultry or pig feeds or to give them any so a no added hormones label on either pork or any poultry is irrelevant. Yet it does make sense for ruminants like cattle and sheep. Dairy animals are the ones most commonly given additional hormones and many people prefer to avoid them. So whether the label is meaningful depends on species. For the record we do not give our sheep hormones except when used to bring them into heat for artificial insemination, a procedure we use very rarely and so far only with imported semen from UK rams.

What about no antibiotics? Poultry is routinely given antibiotics in the feed from birth to death. Pigs too are often given low levels of antibiotics in the feed. They are also used in ruminant feeds. All of these applications are potential problems. While they do increase weight gains, and therefore farm income it's certainly not in the best interests of the animals or the consumer to eat constant low levels of antibiotics. Yet if an animal is injured or sick antibiotics are a necessary part of humane care. For us here is a recent example. One of our ewes, Ann, got severely injured. We found her with the inside of one front leg with no skin from the knee up to her elbow. The missing skin area was as if someone had skinned her leg. She was put in a small pen and the injury bandaged. There was no skin to put over the wound, it was gone, so as a precaution she was on a course of injected antibiotics for 10 days with pain medication as required to keep her comfortable. We also used an antibiotic and antifungal ointment on the wound at each dressing change to prevent any problems. She is making a full recovery, there is no nerve damage and there is good scar tissue over the whole area. We fully expect her to be fine in another couple of months. She raised two lovely lambs for us and is a wonderful young ewe that is worth the extra effort and care. However she will eventually be a slaughter animal. We hope it will be many years but there is always the chance she will do something that puts her on the butcher list, fails to care for a lamb, starts eating trees, causes a significant problem with her behavior or the final cause, getting so old that she has lost too many teeth to be able to eat. When that happens she wil be put on the trailer to be processed into mutton for our customers or ourselves. Should we prevent her from ever fulfilling her final job due to an injury and succesful treatment years earlier? By all the rules of all the various labels she could never be used for meat due to the antibiotic use while treating her injury.

The bottom line for us is that we want our customers to ask questions and talk to us about how we produce and care for our animals. We automatically double the federal slaughter withdrawal from any drug, dewormer or vaccine we use but we will always provide the best and most humane care we can for our precious sheep. But we are unlikely to promote federally regulated labels unless there is no way we would ever have to compromise those standards. For us the higher goal is long term sustainable food production given the limits and challenges of our particular farm, soils and climate.

Emergency Preparations for a Farm

Watching the news about the big fires in San Diego county yesterday and today prompted me to review our farm emergency plan. We used to live in San Diego, in Ramona, one of the towns in the path of the fires. The latest data indicates our old house was either on the edges or was burned, the information varies but it was clearly in the evacuation area. When we lived there we were primarily raising horses. We had a clear evacuation clipboard in the barn, halters and lead ropes for every animal labeled with their name on duct tape and a priority list of who to evacuate first in case we couldn't get them all out. We even had luggage tags of laminated plastic on each halter with a description of each horse, our name and phone numbers, vet info and any critical behavior or medical information about each animal. Our plan was that if we had to leave animals there would be identification on each horse in case someone else evacuated them. If we evacuated we planned to put the same tags on as we loaded horses into trailers in case we got separated or animals ended up in different shelters.

When we got the sheep we had enough small pens that we were able to keep critical sheep separate and they got added to the list and I had a paper with ear tag numbers and data on every individual. I still carry a full listing of every sheep with me at all times in a belt pouch along with my camera and a small notepad and pen.

Our priority list looked at the relative value of the bloodlines represented by all of our animals. In an emergency we would of course try to save them all, but if time is short we might not be able to and we had to make those tough decisions in advance.

This past lambing season we were faced with a similar instance. An odd heavy snow storm in the middle of lambing had us racing to bring in hay bales to make windbreaks and build small pens for the most critical ewes and lambs. I was woefully unprepared to triage the lambing ewes on pasture to save critical bloodlines. I spent valuable time deciding which of several ewes and lambs were most important as we could not make small pens or shelters for all of them. Thankfully everyone made it ok (Black Welsh Mountain ewes are extremely good mothers) but it was a particularly stressful time.

So a task I have set for myself for the next couple of weeks is to again develop a farm disaster plan. In our area the likely natural disasters are either blizzards or fires. The appropriate response to each is obviously different. Sheltering in place is fairly easy for us, we typically have plenty of hay on hand during blizzard season and with ponds on the place we are also fairly well protected in case of major fires.

But what if we had to evacuate? Which animals would be the priority to get out?

In our case the sheep flock contains all the bloodlines of Black Welsh Moutnain sheep that exist in North America. We'd need to try to evacuate critical breeding ewes and rams of each bloodline. Without our guard dogs the sheep would be targets so moving sheep would require taking at least some guarding animals. If we were unable to evacuate everyone we'd have to leave some guard dogs with those left behind.

Our horses are also fairly rare but in terms of overall value to the breed as a whole, I have to admit that all of our horse bloodlines are represented in breediing herds elsewhere. The other stock, chickens, donkey and geese, although important individually to us are not critical or rare and would have to take a back seat to getting sheep and horses out.

What I plan to do is put in place a list of all the animals, in order of priority, for an evacuation in case of emergency. Thinking now about the hard decisions of who to take vs who to leave when I am calm and not stressed is vital to being able to respond quickly and efficiently in case of disaster. I'll also be evaluating our own personal evacuation plans, do I know where critical papers are and can I grab them in a hurry if I need to?

For shelter in place I will be looking at whether we have a plan to provide for our own food and water in case of a major blizzard or other event that kept us on the farm for an extended period.

These plans can be adapted to other potential disasters, what if there is an outbreak of a major disease? Do we have disinfectant? Can we lock gates to prevent any visitors if we are quarantined? What medications and first aid items should we have on hand for both us and our animals?

I'd urge all farmers to look at their own situations and develop a disaster plan for your farm's most likely problems. Every part of the country can experience disaster, a bit of time now making a plan for how to handle it could save lives in the future. If nothing else you will save time if there is a disaster as many of the really hard decisions will have already been made. Whether it's fire, blizzards, flooding, rain, tornados, hurricanes or something else now is the time to prepare.

US Organic is Cruel and Inhumane for Livestock

US Organic is Cruel and Inhumane for Livestock

The above statement will shock many and be denied by others. The US standards for organic production of livestock are cruel and inhumane. They are a travesty of what organic should be.

In an ideal world buying organic would mean the products you purchase are produced in a fair manner, provide a decent living for the farmer and improve the fertility and long term sustainability of the farm land. There should be no bad environmental effects caused by the farm’s management practices and it should be a thriving, long term sustainable food producer for many generations to come.

Many people think that organic means no sprays, no chemicals and no treatments for the problems that beset agriculture. However, organic does in fact allow and use many chemicals. Some of them are actually more toxic and lethal than their non-organic counterparts. The difference is that organic treatments are natural and not synthetic. All of agriculture defines the time between when a treatment can be given to a crop and when it is safe for humans to eat or otherwise contact that crop. Organic pesticides can have longer withdrawal times for both handling and harvest and for entry than non-organic counterparts.

Domestic animals should be free to express natural behaviors, protected from disease, parasites, predators and illness, eat natural foods appropriate for their species and sheltered for their well being. All these requirements should be adjusted to reflect the vast differences in farms, soils, breeds and species and should reflect the diversity that is the birthright of many thousands of years of agriculture.

In many ways the organic vegetable and fruit growers are working towards this goal but the US standards for livestock are woefully lacking in common sense and good animal husbandry.

Under US organic rules no slaughter livestock can be given any sort of paraciticide at all. On the surface this sounds reasonable - after all with proper management there should be no parasites in your stock right?
WRONG! While there is much in livestock management that can be done to minimize common parasite infestation of your stock there is no way to prevent it completely. All livestock is eventually slaughter stock, a responsible farmer will make certain that the animals are healthy AND free of medications before they go to the stock yard. Parasite infestation causes not only significant harm to the individual animal and can cause death but even animals that do not die fail to thrive. This affects not only the quality of the wool, meat and milk from infested stock but causes unnecessary discomfort, shortens their lifespan and can cause significant loss of young. Increased costs to raise replacements is a hidden but significant cost in a flock that is heavily parasitized.

Parasites in sheep can be broadly classed into several main groups.

There are intestinal worms - round worms and tapeworms that can infest stock. Flukes can infest the liver, lung worms can infest the bronchial passages and meningeal worms can infest the nervous system. External parasites include ticks that can carry several different virus diseases, sheep keds and lice in two varieties. And there are the hybrid parasites such as the bot fly which lays eggs in the sheep’s nose; the grubs eat blood from the nasal passages and will cause internal damage if they get into the stomach. Some bot flies are viable in humans and other animals. Warble flies are another hybrid style of parasite.

There are many techniques the farmer can do to reduce intestinal worm infestation in their stock. Proper grazing management combined with a large enough area to rest pastures, a hard freeze cycle and using other species such as chickens, geese or cattle can help break the life cycle of intestinal parasites. If the land can be grazed by both cattle and sheep a farmer can use the cattle to sweep the pastures of the primary sheep parasites and vice versa. The animals are still infested, it just will reduce the losses caused by the parasites. Proper grazing management can make a huge difference in the intestinal worm burden of a flock.

One technique, FAMANCHA, is used to detect individual animals that are infested with the barber pole worm. While touted as the solution to parasite problems this only works with one, specific species. However, if you are in an area that has barber pole worm, using FAMANCHA can help you reduce the amount and number of times you must deworm the flock and target the drug to only those animals that need it. Knowing the animals are infested is useless unless something is done to kill the parasites without killing the animal.

Breeding for sheep that are somewhat resistant to parasites can and does work, for the farm where the animals are selected. However, significant research in Australia and New Zealand indicates that animals bred to be resistant to parasites on one farm may not be resistant to the ones found on another farm so while helpful for the farmer in reducing their individual use of dewormers it is not a total solution.

All of these techniques can and should be used by all sustainable farmers to mitigate the problems caused by intestinal worms.

Nothing in an individual farmers' grazing management can do anything about the parasites carried by the wild animals and transmitted to the domestic stock.

The meningeal worm is commonly carried by deer. Sheep are a dead end host when infected because unlike deer they can die from the infestation. Nose bots are a serious problem in some areas and because they are the larval form of a fly the individual farmer cannot control it. We personally have lost sheep who died from nose bot infestation. Liver flukes are another parasite carried by deer and elk.

There is very little that farm management can do to curtail external parasites.. Shearing at the proper time and providing clean bedding is about the limit of management that can be used to prevent infestation by lice, keds and ticks. Fortunately, such infestations tend to be rather rare. In our own flock in the last 8 years we have only had to use an insecticide on our sheep twice. In modern agriculture the old sheep dips have been replaced with much smaller doses of targeted insecticides. Most are based on pyrethins, a natural insecticide in chrysanthemum plants but for consistency and safety a synthetic version is used. Natural pyrethins can vary in lethality and that makes deciding on the dose of a natural pyrethin very difficult. You must use enough to kill the parasite but not enough to kill the animal. Synthetic pyrethins are consistent in drug effect and can be administered more safely.

Given that all domestic stock will become infested with parasites it is critical that organic standards provide a safe effective way to deal with these pests when management is not effective or when there is nothing the management can do, such as pests carried by wild animals. Sadly there is no safe and effective paraciticide that is also US organic approved. While many things have been tried, under rigorous on-farm testing in the real world all of them have either proved ineffective, worse than doing nothing or unsafe and resulting in deaths of the treated stock. And even the most promoted potential remedies do not handle infestations by flying pests or flukes.

This significant problem is well recognized by the organic standards in other countries. Under the international IFOAM standards, or the EU standards proper control of parasites is deemed an animal welfare issue and is mandated by the standards. Treatment using approved paraciticides is allowed when a defined need is documented, under the direct knowledge and control of a licensed veterinarian and when at least double the slaughter withdrawal time for the drug used is adhered to. Additional regulations concerning prevention of any environmental contamination are also required. This is a common sense approach and has resulted in the widespread adoption of organic standards by many more diversified farms who would not consider it unless parasites could be controlled.

In US organic standards when, for example, an apple grower is facing a parasite problem like codling moths there are several safe, effective ways to deal with it. Initially dormant oils are sprayed on the trees to reduce the hatching rate of the over wintering eggs. Later pheromone lures are used as mating disrupters to prevent the moths from finding mates. When the inevitable infestation does occur there are several safe and effective chemical sprays that can be used to kill the codling moth grubs. Similar options exist for the control and elimination of pests for other vegetable and fruit crops.

The livestock producer is denied any way to safely and effectively treat his or her animals.

In the past there were few if any safe and effective paraciticides.

This resulted in the use of unsafe ones, such as straight nicotine and also in the needless deaths of many animals. Some medieval records indicate that it was not uncommon to lose up to 50% of the sheep in a flock in a year due primarily to the worms they contracted. Such a waste of animals is abhorrent to anyone who really cares for them. Even the best current US organic farms seem to accept a 10-15% death loss of lambs as normal yet a well managed ‘non-organic’ flock standard is less than 5% deaths including stillbirths and accidents and no deaths to parasites.

The second big issue is vaccinations. The US standard says vaccinations are allowed in one section. But in another section it says that nothing can be given that is not on the approved substances lists and no vaccines are on the list. This has led to differences in how certifying agencies interpret the rules. In some locales any vaccination to prevent disease is allowed. Others will allow vaccines but only if the vaccine is labeled for the species to which it is given and yet others say that until vaccines are individually listed no vaccine will be allowed.

This is cruel. In our area there are many sheep diseases that are in the soil. They can stay in the soil for decades and are carried by wild animals. Before we used a vaccine that protected against these diseases we would lose lambs. They are horrible clostridial infections, a group of organisms related to tetanus and once the animal gets sick there is almost no possibility of saving it. Their deaths are prolonged and terribly painful. To deny the farmer the option of preventing these diseases is to condemn animals to unnecessary and cruel deaths.

It is for these reasons that I consider that the current US organic standards to be cruel and inhumane and is why we will not become certified organic until the standards reflect the high level of care we demand for our special sheep.

If we were in Wales or in Europe, or Australia or New Zealand we could in fact be easily qualified as organic as their standards do recognize the critical animal welfare issues parasite infestation and preventable disease represent and have provided a way for that to be treated effectively, humanely and safely.