Culinary School Visitors

We had Culinary School of the Rockies students here again this year. I didn't get pictures of both groups. We had 2 sets of students, each group for 2 days. We evaluated sheep, trimmed toes, built fence and sorted sheep.

Good way for them all to lean about the cost of food and where good local food comes from.

Here are some of the students after we finished building fences.

Culinary Students, Ram Sorting and Chicken Processing

The Culinary School students came back today for more farm work.

Today we evaluated all the adult rams, trimmed toes and gave dewormer as needed. Then we took a field trip to Karla's to pick up our chickens that were butchered yesterday. The students got to see a bit of the butchering process and then came back to our house and helped us turn our chickens for the year into piece parts for our freezer. We got 24 chickens dismembered in 1 hour. It was sure nice to have additional knife skilled workers to help deal with the chickens.



Here are the students from left to right, Erica, Kade, Leah and Garrett.

Thanks folks, we had a great time and really appreciated the help.

Edited to correct spelling of names, Sorry!

Meat Cutting

We got the opportunity to watch some of our sheep being processed at the slaughterhouse.


This is a typical carcass of a US line sheep.


First step is breaking the carcass in half.



This is the cross section. This is not a very meaty loin compared to some of our sheep.


We had one lamb show up with a spool joint. This is usually the designation for a mutton. She was only 6 months old. The carcass on the left has a break joint and is a lamb. The carcass on the right has a spool joint and is a mutton.


Frenching the racks.


Trimming all fat off.


Bagging the boneless roasts into netting .


The packages are prepared to be vacuum sealed.


Here they are being packaged by carcass into the boxes.

We learned a lot watching the crew work on our sheep. Our biggest impression is how much fat our sheep have on them. These are entirely grass finished and not fed any grains yet they had more fat cover than I expected to see. I can only imagine how fat they would get if fed grains.

The lamb that had to be marked as mutton was also interesting. Most Black Welsh are slow growing and it is unusual to have one grade out as a mutton when less than a year of age.

The meat cutting and packing crew was 8 people and it took about 20 minutes to fully process one carcass. That is one reason for the high cost of food. A good slaughterhouse has a very skilled set of workers and they spend a lot of time making sure the meat is cut to order. The difference between a small place like this one and a huge assembly line is obvious. The smaller plant cares and every person is skilled and can do most of the jobs. They know how to cut meat to individual orders and are willing to keep individual carcasses separate and tracked for us. A far cry from huge plants where each worker only does a single cut all day.

It's a pleasure to have such a good partner in providing our customers with good meat.

Food Safety and You

Well there has been another major food contamination issue with meat. The largest ever beef recall for E. coli contamination. I want all of you to look a bit behind the headlines to see the system that allowed that to happen, what problems it presents for small farmers and how you can help keep your food safe.

No one disputes that the actions and contamination are serious and the animal welfare issues are significant. But why did they occur? The American consumer must share the blame for the problem. The huge push to get their food cheaper and cheaper has led to the systems breakdown that caused the problems. By wanting really cheap food the consumer has set a limit on what they will pay for. Yet the demand is there so the companies look for ways to cut costs to meet the demand. A lack of government funding for inspectors led to inspection delays. No real good traceability of the individual animal into the constituent parts means that if there is one bad one it affects and contaminates many thousands of pounds of meat.

I think the issue all started when we decided that in pursuit of low cost we'd let our manufacturing jobs go overseas. Globalization is nearly always a disaster when it's for basics and staples. When we lost those highly paid, skilled jobs the workers in the service industry had lower incomes driving food prices down. A factory worker in the early 1950's with a high school education could afford a car, a house and good food. But when you lose the manufacturing you move to service industry work which is lower paying, less skilled and the jobs are less reliable.

The push for bigger houses, more cars, more consumer goods at an ever decreasing price puts pressure on the companies to cut corners and costs. Open borders to basic goods from other countries mean we are forcing our workers to compete against places where the wages, standard of living and benefits are all much worse than in the US. That's why big companies want to move to other countries, lower costs, but at what price not only to our own workers but to the workers there.

The speed with which a big slaughter plant is forced to move nearly requires that workers push animals faster than they want to go. Any fearful or slower animal can get hurt or go down and yet there is no provision for working the animals calmly. To their credit many big plants have worked with Dr. Temple Grandin to develop less stressful handling systems but not all do and if the workers are not allowed the freedom to slow the process down or stop it if necessary all the good design in the world goes down the tubes. When faced with one very fearful and belligerent steer holding up the line the temptation is to move it along no matter how it gets done because the company will not accept a slowing down of the slaughter line. And with fewer and fewer people active in or living on farms there is a significant lack of knowledge by many people in how to move and behave around animals in a way that provides a calming influence. Anyone raised on a farm learns rather quickly the best way to get the stock to do what you want with a minimum of fuss, but we don't train our slaughter workers in stock handling but treat them like assembly line workers dealing with a car body.

Now come the calls for change, increased regulation and the like.

Well I have a very different idea of what we ought to do. I doubt if any politicians will support it yet I am convinced that it would make our food supply safer.

First : We need much more slaughter capacity. The regulations are so onerous now that only a huge plant processing hundreds of animals a day can support the overhead. I am willing to agree that more inspections are good, but I also know that it is possible to produce safe healthy meat products in ways that do not meet the USDA regulations. Any hunter knows that a carcass can cool over a longer time and still be safe. It's possible to process an animal in the field in the open and yet never have a contamination problem. In fact one of the best disinfectants known is sunlight but the US will not allow any processing to be done outside at all. At a minimum we should allow that any plant that is considered safe to process game meat for human consumption, or do custom processing of livestock should be allowed to package the meat for wholesale and retail sale. Ideally any farmer willing to maintain a food handlers license should be allowed to process and sell both retail and wholesale his or her own animals both as whole animals and retail cuts. We have to schedule our slaughter dates 12-18 months in advance. Think about it. I have to guess at the water, the grass growth, the lambing rates and figure out how many animals I will have finished and ready to slaughter before I have even finished butchering last years crop. I cannot get additional dates so I tend to schedule lots of them and then cancel dates if the animals are not ready. If I have a special customer request for a particular special cutting order I cannot accommodate it unless there is a slaughter date coming up soon. With such long lead times I and other farmers end up booking the butcher in advance and yet they are never sure if we will be ready for them and exactly how many we will bring on any given day. The excess dates I have to reserve make accurate scheduling a problem for the plant. More choices and more capacity would mean that I could schedule slaughter a month or a few weeks before the animals go and allow me to be more accurate to the plant on exactly how many are coming in on a particular day.

Second: Increase the identification requirements. I would like to see every single package of meat include the animal tag number on it and a place to track back to where that animal was born, raised, fed out and slaughtered. If the animal is processed on-farm under the rule above then the farmer address and contact info needs to be on every piece of meat sold. There is no reason we cannot implement that requirement especially in the smaller plants. Custom butchers are already skilled in processing a single animal at a time and keeping each and every carcass identified. With that level of tracking there is no reason why any current custom butcher cannot produce food that is at least as good a quality as the big plants and I would be willing to bet a sheep that it would test out cleaner with less bacterial contamination than even the best big plants.

Third: Replace inspection with testing. Instead of requiring an inspector have samples taken randomly of products and they must meet the contamination regulations. If you meet the rules you can sell your meat to any consumer, restaurant, wholesaler or store.

Fourth: Eliminate the restrictions on selling meat across state lines. If it's processed in a safe fashion there should be no restrictions on where it's sold.

Fifth: Eliminate the restrictions on how meat is packaged and who can buy it. Right now a farmer can process at the farm a certain number of poultry and sell them as whole birds only to direct consumers. If it's safe to do that, and the thousands of birds eaten annually that are processed that way prove it is safe, then that same farmer should be allowed to cut up the chicken into pieces and sell pieces individually both to consumers and to restaurants and other wholesalers. The birds or parts must be identified with the name and farm of the person who raised and slaughtered the bird. All the same options should also be available for the processing of all livestock species not just poultry. It's just as easy to properly process a sheep or a steer if you have the right equipment.

Sixth: Require the same level of care and regulations for any species that is eaten. Bison, rabbit, elk and all other alternative species should be held to the same regulations as their standard domestic counterparts when it comes to slaughter handling and safety but they are not. Some are more restrictive, elk must be tested for CWD before the carcass is cut while some are less restricted. All species should be treated the same. If there are individual disease issues that only affect a single species then address those individually but the basic regulations should be identical.

Seventh: Allow for any additional testing that any specific farm or processor want to do. The big hassle that occurred when a company wanted the right to test every steer for BSE is ridiculous. It doesn't matter if the USDA says it's not necessary, if the farmer or processor has customers who want the assurance of individual testing it should be allowed not prevented.

Eight: Eliminate the restrictions on what parts can be sold. Right now it's not legal for most plants to process sheep intestines for sausage casings. Or to provide the caul fat or many of the offal cuts like lights, sweetbreads etc. if someone wants them. Why not allow any part of an animal that the consumer wants to buy be available?

Implementing these changes would serve to distribute the food processing system. A distributed system is more stable and robust and less subject to catastrophic failure. If one plant has a contamination issue the labeling requirements would allow for the quick and simple identification of the affected meat without affecting other plants in the area. Increasing the slaughter options means that fewer animals have to be processed at any one place thus both limiting the time constraints and the contamination possibilities. Standardizing the regulations across all species eaten is just common sense. Why there are different regulations is beyond me.

Give farmers the tools we need to provide meats in a safe manner in a variety of ways and the consumer will have more choices.

However there is a cost, a big one. This is much more expensive than the lowest cost approach of the big plants. Smaller plants have to have workers skilled in a variety of jobs not just how to efficiently make one or 2 cuts on every carcass that passes them. That means training them in meat cutting science and it's not cheap. Small plants will also process fewer animals in a day so that means their prices will be higher on a per animal basis and those costs must be passed on to the consumer. However we will gain in less transportation costs as animals are slaughtered closer to their finishing farm and meat sold locally as well so the total dollar increase may not be as much as the big plants would have you believe.

So do write your various government officials about the problems but propose new and innovative solutions like mine rather than more of the same. We should have learned by now that verticle integration and big plants is a disaster when it comes to food safety. Our worst contamination problems come from large plants not small ones yet the small plants are going out of business under the weight of ill conceived regulations that do not prevent the safety issues they are designed to address.

We need a new system and the consumer will have to require it.

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.

Labor Day Musings

On a farm every day includes at least some labor. Today was no exception, today we started the sorting process of the ewes. Any that were marked for butcher or for sale got sorted out into the winter corrals for further evaluation. While this may seem to be just physical labor it's actually a skill that is very hard to learn. How do you select whether a bad mother is worse than bad teeth? Does temperament count and for how much? Will a great fleece offset some grey fibers in the fleece? As we processed the entire flock evaluating and sorting sheep I got to thinking about labor and our attitude towards it in the US.

In many cases we denigrate skilled labor that involves physical labor. A skilled fence builder is as much an artist as a manual laborer. At least a good fence builder is. A skilled tailor is far far better than any off the shelf clothing purchased at the nearest discount store but we don't value skilled tailors and refuse to pay for their services so there are fewer and fewer of them. Farmers, who feed us all, rarely if ever get the actual value of the products they produce if you included all the inflation in the costs they pay for materials and other expenses. Right now the going price for lambs on the hoof for slaughter is running about $1.00 per pound. That is for live weight. The parity price, the price the lamb should be bringing if the costs for all the inputs and an allowance for all the inflation that has happened since WW II was included should be around $2.15 per pound. And a live animal is not all meat. There is the head, hooves, hide, guts and other inedible portions. Even once the lamb is reduced to a carcass the cutting and wrapping will reduce the edible portion further by removal of fat, bones and other trim. And unlike every other major livestock species that is slaughtered in the US, sheep are charged a per head slaughter fee. All other animals are charged based on the carcass weight. If you have small sheep it costs the same to have it processed into meat as it does a large sheep. So meat from smaller animals will always cost more to produce.

Small farms like ours cannot compete against multi-national corporations who will import product from the lowest cost vendor. Most of those imports do not count the true cost of the transportation and may ignore wages, working conditions and regulations that producers here are required to comply with. Our labor is only rewarded if we go outside the standard ways to sell our product and sell direct. And because we are small we will never achieve the economy of scale that a larger company can do. So our food and products are always going to be more expensive than the competing products.

So when you next go to the grocery store and complain abut the high cost of domestic food, keep in mind that maintaining a skilled local labor force that can provide high quality food is critical to the long term survival of a culture. Do we really want to be dependent on other countries for our food as well as our oil?

Food for thought this Labor Day.