Author Archives: jericacadman

What REALLY happened to the turkeys that got eaten…

Before I tell you what really happened to the turkeys that fell victim to a predator attack a few weeks ago, I wanted to share a bit of farm turkey history for your entertainment and education. Our very first batch of turkeys was actually a bit accidental. Sure, we planned to get into turkeys eventually, but that first year we landed in Jefferson, we were focused on getting the cattle operation up to speed, building fences, shelters, freezers, and all the absolutely-necessaries in the first year of a pasture-farm.

But we happen to have a friend who is into all-things-natural-and-homesteadish, and she and her husband had begun raising a few little turkeys one year, but decided that they just wouldn’t be able to face them at harvest time after such a long care-taking period. So they gave them to us to finish out and try our hands at. I think there was some sort of arrangement to give them some of the meat or something. It is so long ago now that I can’t quite remember. We sold our share of turkeys that year to a few trusted and adventurous customers, not having any idea what we were doing. We grew them too long, so they were monster-sized, and our poor guinea-pig customers had to wrestle the massive (but delicious!) birds we helped produce that year.

The next year we raised them from day-old poults, but only a small batch. The next year after that we raised more, and each year following, we kept tweaking the process: the hatchery and the breed and the timing and the feed and the brooder and the water supply and the pasture shelters and the harvest dates and the processing help and the pickup schedule and the reservation strategy and the freezer storage and the size distribution and all the little details that go into producing these special, seasonal, pasture-raised meats.

Some of you may remember the year all the turkeys turned out about 8 pounds smaller than expected! And another year the smallest bird we had was over 16 pounds! And the other year where we harvested them right at the last minute so that we actually had to make a special turkey delivery run just to accommodate the altered harvest schedule. Yet another very hot and dry year, the turkeys started randomly killing each other, and continued until we determined that they needed extra free-choice salt to go with all the water they were drinking! The mineral salt stopped the mayhem in its tracks. Makes you wonder what some good mineral salts would do for our society…

Oh, turkeys. It’s all so complicated! To be honest, last year was so tough with so many random mortalities, that we almost threw in the towel. But our chicken season this spring was so full of wonderful breakthroughs in learning how to do Pastured Poultry that we decided to give it another good go.

This year, 2017, we have produced the most turkeys ever, and they are way happier and healthier than ever because of all the careful changes we’ve made in our pasture-management. Turkeys are very likely the most difficult livestock to raise because when they’re young, they are very fragile, and when they get older, they just get themselves into So. Much. Trouble.

But this year was going well. Maybe we had finally made peace with these wild-ish birds. Many of our customers have told us they’d buy turkey year-round just to diversify their grocery portfolio, and because they love it so much. We’re all about pleasing our customers when possible, so it had begun to look tempting. The turkeys this year were doing so well and so much fun to watch. We even discovered that they eat Stinging Nettle, one of the nastiest plants we have at the farm during the summer season. Nothing else eats it. Way to go, Turkeys!

But one tragic morning just a few weeks ago, we discovered something terrible. Something had killed and partially eaten at least a half dozen turkeys. We found 7 carcasses. Mostly wasted and scattered across the pasture. A terrible loss, and less than a month away from harvest. Some of those birds were probably already at harvest weight.

We immediately moved our best guardian dog, Zeke, in with the turkeys. He’s trustworthy and attentive and has easily solved all of our predation problems with only his intimidating presence. I’m not sure he’s ever actually had to attack anything. He had been in with the young laying hens to protect our hefty investment in raising 470 hens right up to laying age. We had just obtained another Pyrenees female, but she was still in training with Zeke. She’d have to get on-the-job training now because Zeke was needed elsewhere.

We penned up the other farm dogs and set out baited snares near the turkey paddock. Matt camped out after dark with the rifle and spotlight in hopes of catching whatever-it-was, but nothing came, and it was too dark, anyway, to make that work. Finally, at a reluctant bedtime, I turned off the bedroom fan so we could hear, and Matt and I slept fitfully that second night, waking at every tiny noise in the dark and wondering if it was a turkey attack.

The next morning I waited for the report. Not good. Two more turkeys lost. Traps untouched. Pyrenees still on guard. What happened? When did it happen? And what kind of an animal would challenge the 100+ pound alpha Pyrenees? Was Zeke becoming ineffective? Or perhaps we were dealing with a pretty serious predator…

On the third night, Matt decided to go out early and watch.

That was the key.

At dusk, when the turkeys were supposed to be heading in to the roost, for some reason were fluttering around and being crazy instead. (Much like my own children at that hour some days!) And because of their large size, a gang of them could easily (and did) push some stragglers toward and OVER the portable electric fence! It’s a fairly flimsy fence, made lightweight enough to be picked up and carried to the next paddock. Mobile-pastured. What we’re all about.

But the flimsy fence, electric or otherwise, couldn’t stop a sea of 20+ pound turkeys from bowling over it in their evening excitement. Who knows what was going on in their bald, bird-brain-size heads? But the end result was a few turkeys trapped on the outside of the fence, with no feathered ocean of bodies to push them back IN. No guardian. No shelter. Totally defenseless against attack.

It wasn’t Zeke’s fault. It really wasn’t even the predators’ fault. It was the turkeys’ fault! Some coyote had simply stumbled upon a few lost and vulnerable turkeys some evening and helped himself. And he just so happened to find seconds the next night. But by the third night, we got smarter and were able to move the exiled turkeys back into the fence, up onto the roosts where they were safe and cozy. And so, every night since then, we added the daily chore of “Tucking In The Turkeys.”

And that, friend, is why we do not raise turkeys year-round.

They’re wonderful creatures, but a poor farmer can only take so much of a good thing. They head to Freezer Camp next week. But you can meet the crazy things in person TOMORROW during our Farm Tour. It’s not too late to sign up here (https://shadygroveranch.net/tours) ! Help us spread the word by sharing our Facebook event (https://www.facebook.com/events/133767614034176/) !

Oh, and if you haven’t yet signed up for a turkey, we have just a few spots left (http://shop.shadygroveranch.net/late-season-turkey-deposit.html) ! For those of you on the Turkey List, I’ll be in touch really soon about picking up your birds when they’re ready in November!

Should eggs be stored on the countertop?

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Should you store farm eggs on the countertop?

You probably read the little article that circulated social media about how Europeans never store their eggs in the fridge. How convenient, right? More space for leftovers, potential for edible kitchen decor, and all those recipes that call for a room-temperature egg, you are now totally ready for!

But is room-temperature storage of eggs right for Americans, even those Americans that buy directly from a natural-practices farm like ours?

The European culture is just different. They are a market-centric culture, buying daily or at least a few times a week, whereas in the US, we tend to do things Sam’s-Club-Style. Everything in bulk. Fewer trips to the store. More storage space. Everything is big here. Really big.

In fact, many of us have jumbo refrigerators plus a storage fridge besides, whereas European refrigerators are relatively small. We can afford to store a few dozen eggs at a time. It’s a good thing, too, because it’s pretty rare to be close enough to a quality source of groceries that you pass it on your walk home from work.

It simply isn’t practical for most of us here in the Arklatex to visit the store daily, so we make our special drive and stock up while we’re there, hoping it will be at least a week until we have to go again. Some of our crazy customers buy a month’s worth of eggs at a time, either to take advantage of our 10-dozen discount price, or because we only hit their town once a month. Eggs keep very well when refrigerated. Why not?

So back to the question. Eggs keep well. But can we keep them on the counter? I’ll keep the rest short.

The reason I don’t recommend storing eggs long-term on the countertop

Only perfect eggs can handle room-temperature storage for long periods.

That means no cracks. Minimal dirt. Very minimal washing. But no cracks…that’s tough. Here at Shady Grove Ranch, we check Every.Single.Egg. that is produced by our hens, using a combination of visual, candling, and “belling.” And we have a pretty good pass record, but with as many eggs as we process by hand, we are bound to miss a few here and there, because (no surprise here) some cracks are SUPER hard to see.

This is how an egg looks during candling, the process of shining a bright light into the shell to reveal shell and internal anomalies.

To demonstrate how hard cracks can be to see, I digitally manipulated this photo and circled what I believe to be a crack in the shell. Can you see it now?

But even if we caught every single crack during packing, the eggs still have a long way to go. After the hen lays the egg in the box, it rolls away to safety where she can’t peck at it or soil it. That afternoon, we collect all the eggs and carefully transport them back to the grading room via ATV (because remember, our hens are pasture-raised, so the chickens are sometimes quite far from “civilization!”). Then we sort the eggs, grade, candle, and package the clean ones, wash the dirties, and sort, grade, candle and package those, and then move them all to cold storage.

Then on delivery day, we load them up and transport them to whatever venue you buy them from. Then you cart them home and to your kitchen. There’s a lot of chance for breakage in there, especially if your 4-year-old insists on “helping” you put groceries away! “Not the eggs, honey!” (Been there, done that, haha!)

If an egg gets cracked, even a little, the protective membranes are no longer as functional, and gas transfer begins to occur inside the egg, and eventually bacteria will be able to grow and turn a lovely, fresh egg into a stinky rotten egg! The worse the crack and warmer the temperature, the faster this happens.

Before you start frantically checking your eggs for cracks, though, remember this: Refrigeration SIGNIFICANTLY slows down spoilage. Remember that egg-sorting step? What happens to all the cracked eggs, you ask? THE CADMANS EAT THEM! Yep. It’s been a long time since I worked with eggs that weren’t pre-cracked! 😉 And I can tell you that refrigerated-cracked eggs keep plenty long in the fridge with no issues. But on the counter… within a couple of weeks, I will see some spoiled eggs come along. Yuck!

The long and short of it is this. You COULD keep eggs on the counter, and I often do for a day or two. OK, so sometimes it turns into a week, if they last that long, or if I forget about them! But to get the best quality and longest shelf-life, I prefer to keep mine in the fridge. Even crack-less eggs will eventually go bad on the counter, even though it does take a long time. So we just say, keep ’em refrigerated. And don’t be afraid to stock up! They really do last for months at fridge temperatures. A bonus for having that extra “egg fridge” is it’s a great place to store things like homemade sauerkraut, extra raw milk & yogurt, and veggies I got a good deal on in-season.

How do you know if an egg has gone bad?

The short answer is… a rotten egg is unmistakable! They smell terrible and look weird–the colors aren’t right and the yolk will not be intact and may be completely mixed with the white. If in doubt, toss it out! If you do choose to store eggs on the counter in hotter months, I suggest breaking each egg into a separate container before adding it to your mixing container or pan. That way if you do happen upon a spoiled egg, you don’t contaminate your whole meal!

A quick way to make sure an egg is fresh before cracking it is to drop it in a deep dish of water. If it floats, it’s bad. If it sinks, it’s good! The reason? A good egg is mostly water, but contains protein and shell that make it just slightly denser than water, causing it to sink. A bad egg has already begun to dehydrate and ferment and fill with CO2, thus making it less dense than water, and it will rise to the surface.

So now you’re an eggs-spert. 🙂 Enjoy those real pasture-raised SGR eggs!

Organic Egg Deception

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An interesting little story came out last week about the day-to-day practices of a major brand of organic eggs. The article subtly criticized the confined quarters that offered no apparent access to outdoors, and gave readers some insight into how the actually-quite-deplorable practices still meet organic standards.

There will always be your occasional outbreaks of over-and-above corruption, like the CEOs who got caught repacking and selling expired eggs, which led to a food illness outbreak, and ultimately their imprisonment.

But that is not what this is.

This is just a brief and not-very-widely-reported peep under the veil of regular, approved, organic production that reveals not an acute problem, but a deep, festering, chronic misuse of customer trust and understanding.

Organic Egg Rules

Sure, the rules sound really good: access to fresh air, outdoors, direct sunlight, with “continuous total confinement indoors” being prohibited. But it is so easy to just have in mind to “check the boxes” of compliance, while missing the mark entirely. Anyone could make the case that 2-inch holes drilled in the side of a building at floor level provide “outdoor access” to the chickens because they can stick their heads out there. If you stuck your arm out a window, is your arm inside anymore? No! Of course not! So doesn’t that mean you now have “outdoor access?” If your arm could breathe, it would be breathing fresh air, wouldn’t it? You have to concede the argument.

But is that really meeting the intention of the standard?

What about the next provision? “Direct sunlight” sounds good, but then again, one could argue that this whole side of the building with the chicken-head-holes faces south and gets 6+ hours of sunlight per day. Not that the environment actually benefits from the sanitizing and Vitamin-D-enhancing properties of the sun…. Still–we have access to direct sunlight. Check!

I have it on good authority that a certain major organic egg producer complained that higher-ups were trying to force them to allow actual pasture access for their hundreds of thousands of hens. “That would require us to be buy more land, and it’s too expensive!”

Instead of thinking in terms of scaling down size and scaling up quality, the producer was only interested in figuring out how to fit the square peg into the round hole. Checking the boxes. Minimal compliance. Is that the kind of mindset you want for the person manufacturing your kids’ car seats or the roof of your house? But we so often accept this quality of management in our everyday consumption of nutrients by continuing to support these kinds of food systems. The best-but-cheapest eggs. The biggest green sticker on the package. The one with the most healthy-sounding claims.

This is a very convoluted issue, and the reason it will never be straightforward is because you can’t define standards specific enough to enforce true quality, without alienating 90% of good producers. Our various climates, land profiles, farm size, labor force, and ingenuity, necessitates highly customized solutions to pasture-based farm production. You really can’t even say how often the chickens ought to be moved because even that varies based on time of year, rainfall, hen age and breed, and paddock conditions.

I once wrote that running a farm is like flying a spaceship. Developing production standards specific enough to cover all scenarios would be like trying to write a step-by-step protocol for every maneuver your spacecraft and all its personnel might ever make during a trip to the moon. It can’t be done. There are simply too many variables. Even if it could be done, maybe it shouldn’t because it just might accidentally eliminate a really fabulous small-time farmer.

I know you’re busy and just need to know how to wisely feed your family. I could talk all day about this because it’s such an important and interesting issue, but I won’t bore you with the ponderings of a pasture-farmer. Here’s the takeaway, as pertains to eggs in particular:

Cage-Free Eggs

“Cage Free” means eggs were produced “by hens housed in a building, room, or enclosed area that allows for unlimited access to food [grain], water, and provides the freedom to roam within the area during the laying cycle.” Notice: no actual outdoor access of any kind. Does not address GMO feeding practices or drug use at all. Practically meaningless in the poultry world.

Free Range Eggs

The term “Free Range” requires “outdoor access” but does not define what that means. Remember your arm-out-the-window idea? Lots of abuse happens with this term. Does not address GMO feeding practices or drug use at all. Practically meaningless in the poultry world.

Organic Eggs

Slightly better than Free Range in terms of GMO feeding and drug use, but as seen above the the infamous example of the largest organic egg producer in the nation (supplying over 10% of the organic eggs sold in the USA!), it’s very easy to check the boxes and not actually have a substantially better product for the price.

Pasture-Raised Eggs

This one is dangerous because, just like “Grass-fed” for beef, it is considered a marketing term and is not officially defined or regulated. In the states where we are licensed to sell eggs, there is effectually no oversight regarding label claims, leaving it to whistleblowers to report on false advertising, which virtually never happens. Yes, we use this term because we feel the mental image it invokes is accurate to describe our operation, and we try to maintain transparency by allowing farm visits and answering consumer questions. But in practice, industry use of the “Pasture-Raised” term doesn’t speak to the conditions of the pasture, feeding standards (i.e. GMO or not), drug use, or rotation of the environment.

Why Animal Rotation Matters

If you’ve ever kept chickens or a dog in a small permanent outdoor “run,” you’ll understand that it doesn’t take very long for the “pasture” to turn to a manure-caked desert. Sure, the hens may actually be outside in cases like these, but we feel the main benefit to having hens on pasture is that they can consume living vegetation to increase their nutrition and detoxify their bodies (chlorophyll is an excellent detoxifier!).

But the chickens have to keep moving to new ground to keep the pasture healthy and growing, and that’s where it gets really complicated and expensive to produce eggs truly “on pasture,” especially for very large producers. Not saying it can’t be done on a large scale, but there are a LOT more hurdles to outdoor production than indoor. For example, the nest boxes have to be close to the chickens at all times. Chickens won’t walk to a barn from out in the pasture, so their coop has to move with them, and be large enough to provide roost space and shade during the heat of the day. But a traveling coop means you have to go out to the coop to get the eggs, then carefully haul them back in to where you can grade, candle, and package them. How do you drive across the pasture with thousands of eggs without breaking any?

Then there are considerations like getting water and food out to the chickens (no, contrary to popular belief, chickens can’t survive on grass alone–could you survive on only dry salad?), and keeping predators away from the hens. Everything LOVES to eat chicken. It takes some major thought to eliminate predation by owls, hawks, crows, skunks, opossums, coyotes, dogs, bobcats, bears, snakes, etc.

But even the deployed state of the adult chickens isn’t the only infrastructure question. You can’t put baby chicks in the same living conditions as adult hens and expect them to survive. They need warmth and protection from the elements, and an extra degree of predator protection. So you have to have separate facilities for babies, and then another living situation for the “teenagers” that haven’t begun laying yet, and perhaps are too small to stay inside a mobile net fence. And you have to move the hens from space to space as they grow up and have new and different needs. It takes 6 months to get that first egg. No wonder eggeries just keep them in a single building their entire lives. It’s just simpler.

How You Can Know For Sure

This concept of discussion applies to all aspects of natural livestock production, not just eggs. People want to know what brand is best because then they don’t have to think about it either–they can just check the box. But there is no one-size-fits-all answer to regulation of animal farming practices. This question bounces around constantly among pastured poultry producers, because it would be so much easier to have that one magic word to describe what it is that sets us apart from the rest. But some things have to be done the hard way, the old fashioned way. We can’t microwave this one.

I believe the best way to handle the accountability issue of food production is for you to find a farmer you can trust and build that relationship with. Local farmers are often excluded from the mainstream marketplace because there are many bureaucratic hurdles that a small-scale producer cannot overcome, and they need avid and loyal supporters to continue producing the superior quality products on a smaller, but better, scale.

You have a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, a pastor. Why not have your personal farmer, too?

Why does fat go SPLAT?

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I was just chatting with someone about whether or not one could “harvest” the fat that floats to the top of broth while it’s cooking, and use it just like lard. I told her you could, but that it’s not as straightforward to use as regular old rendered lard, that it might tend to explode if heated for frying, and I thought this might be a great topic to share here.

The question was, Can I harvest the fat that rises to the top of my pot during broth-making?

Interesting factoid–if you do this with chicken, the official name of the fat is Schmaltz. Of course, the term “schmaltz” refers to wet-rendered or dry-rendered fat, as long as it comes from poultry. Lard is the oil rendered from pork fat. Tallow is the oil rendered from beef fat.

Dry- vs. Wet-Rendering of Fat

But today we’re going to talk about any kind of fat that rises to the top of a pot of broth. Let’s call it “wet-rendered” fat. The distinction is to separate it from “dry rendered” fat, in which you put chopped or ground raw fat into a dry pot, maybe add just a smidge of water to keep the tissues from scorching while the first of the oil renders out, but then after that, for all intents and purposes, you basically have a pot full of oil with no appreciable water-based liquid in there. When people talk about “rendering lard,” they are talking about the dry-rendering process.

Is it a good idea to do Wet-Rendering?

So the answer to the question of whether you can harvest the layer of fat on top of broth… is yes! You can keep and use the fat that rises while broth-ing. But fat skimmed from the top of broth is going to tend to have a high residual moisture content.

That means when you try to fry something with it, it’s going to tend to splatter a lot!

Why?

Because the boiling temperature of water (212F) is much lower than the typical frying temperature of oil (ballpark of 350F to 400F depending on what you’re doing). If you try to heat the water-laden oil quickly, the water will effectively superheat and create volatile pockets of steam. When they try to rise out of the viscous oil… POP! Lots of little (and sometimes big!) explosions!! And burns, messes, and frustration can follow!

What can you do to safely salvage “wet-rendered” fat?

Here are a couple of ideas:

Method 1: Chill the broth first.

If you thoroughly chill the broth with fat still on top, you will be able to peel/scrape the hardened fat from the top of the broth, which will have gelled at the bottom of the container. The more saturated the fat (as with beef fat), and the colder you chill it, the harder the fat layer will be. With beef fat, you will actually be able to “chip” away the fat, whereas with pork and chicken fat, the fat layer will be softer, like slightly softened butter. Either way, the separation between broth and fat will be VERY distinct.

Cons: Unless you’re REALLY careful, there will still be some residual moisture (aka broth) sticking to the fat, and you may still have issues with splattering. Another negative to this method is that broth actually keeps better with the fat layer intact. If you disturb it in order to harvest the fat for other uses, you’ll need to use or freeze the broth right away, as it will spoil within a couple of days otherwise.

Method 2: Triple-skim the fat/broth.

This is going to be a very labor- and dirty-dish intensive method, but it will yield a very low-moisture oil if you do a good job.

How to do it: When your broth is done cooking, turn off the heat and let it sit, covered, for a while so the oil layer settles into place with no broth bubbling up through it. Use a ladle to skim as much of the oil layer as you can get at without bringing over too much liquid.

Remember those little paperweight toys with the two layers of liquid that never mix?

That’s the idea. You want only the oil to come through when you’re skimming! Repeat this process a couple more times until you’re satisfied that there is no broth left below the oil. Narrower containers will make this easier, as they will make the oil layer deeper and easier to skim near the top. Another thing to keep in mind is that for this method to work, the oil has to still be liquid, meaning the whole concoction must be a little warmer than solidying temperature, which is usually around 78-100 degrees for animal fats, somewhere in there. If it’s a really cold day, you may have to rewarm the broth a little for this to work.

Method 3: Low-temp boil the water out.

A sure-fire way to get every last bit of water out is to bring the oil up to water-boiling temperature (212F) and gently boil the water away. This method definitely has some downsides: It is time-consuming, and it’s the most dangerous method for the reasons I explained at the very beginning. If you try to do this at too high a temperature, you’ll run into the splattering issue. Also, if you’re not close by when the water finally evaporates, the oil will begin to heat rapidly and may start to smoke if unattended. You’ll also have to adjust the heat until you find that sweet spot that makes the water boil, but doesn’t cause splattering. I do use this method, especially if I am going to fry chicken using that very oil, but I don’t go far from the stove while I’m doing it. When I hear the boiling water slow down, I know I’m just about done.

My advice?

Unless there’s just a huge amount of oil atop your broth, leave it! Fat in soup adds flavor and filling characteristics, plus nutrients. And it extends the shelf life of broth significantly. Lots of modern cookbooks say “skim the fat and discard it!” But I just haven’t seen any compelling reasons to do that with pasture-raised meats. Instead, if you want cooking fat, save the drippings from bacon and sausage, or render raw fat (beef or pork) using the “dry” method.

Just for fun – Springtime Farm Babies

Are you falling asleep at the kitchen stove?

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There is an interesting thing happening in our culture. Advertising. Advertising wins. If you can come up with the prettiest ad, the cleverest motto, the most touching video clip, you can sell anything. But what if you can’t…

Farmers aren’t usually very tech-savvy, at least not compared to the big-wig corporations out there nowadays. And we’re definitely not very up to speed on large-scale advertising trends. We are busy delivering calves, repairing water lines, baling hay, and changing giant tractor tires!

Even if we were able to keep up, it’s thousands and even millions of dollars just to get in the door and get in front of a larger audience. We tend to get pushed aside with our quaint paper flyers and our old-timey market cashboxes.

After all, there are more options available to consumers now. There are more convenient options.

Why would any sane person pay more for the lesser convenience of buying from a local farm out in the sticks, when they can just pop in to the local supermarket on the way home from work, and get their grass-fed beef, their pool toys, their toilet paper, a new toothbrush and a Happy Graduation card, all in one place? All on one plastic transaction. Using a shopping cart. And a scannable coupon on their phone. In the air conditioning. Talk about efficiency! Convenience abounds!

Did I mention the price is right, too? That supermarket can offer an everyday price that’s $2 lower per pound than the local farmer’s version. Sure, the local farmer’s product is probably better. But this product is good. The label says so. It has to be.

Right?

It has all the right words… But remember—that’s what advertising is about.

I know you don’t have time to read my ravings on the wiles of slick marketing majors working to gain the edge for one of the 10 major food companies in America.

But think about this: If you thought globalization and modernization was about diversity and choices… Guess again. Only 10 food companies own all the store brands you see on the supermarket shelf. What if you had only 10 shirts to choose from? That’s NOT much diversity. That’s hardly any CHOICE. It’s only the appearance of diversity. And yet we support and feed this ever-swelling, already-gigantic food industry controlled by less than a dozen entities, because of convenience. They have wooed us away from the real farms using convenience and marketing as the bait.

But it’s “free range!” It’s “organic!” It’s “hormone-free!” They know that consumers want better quality meat. Well, they know that many consumers will accept meat that SOUNDS like it’s better quality.

But not you. That’s why you’re here. You’ve seen behind the curtain and know that there is something better—something genuine. It can be a little hard to get to sometimes, but it’s worth the extra effort.

Still, it is easy to get sucked in and settle for “good enough,” especially with the fast-paced changes that are happening with the labeling laws today. Those giant food companies have money to throw at lobbying for dilution of marketing terms so they can reach even the better-informed and more conscious consumer.

Don’t believe me? Here are a few examples you may not have heard about:

They’re working hard to change “high fructose corn syrup” to “corn sugar.” Sounds better, doesn’t it? Another example: For years, there’s been major push-back against GMO-labeling, in spite of the fact that MOST consumers WANT GMOs to be labeled. Opponents cite “unreasonable fear” of consumers against this supposedly-safe technology. If it’s so safe, why don’t you just tell us you’re doing it?

Most of the terms in our industry are the same—the labels have become captivating marketing terms and really tell you nothing about the quality of the product you’re buying. “Free-range” chickens only have to be able to look outside, not actually go there. “Organic” beef can be standing in an organic feedlot eating organic corn and never eat one lick of actual grass. “Hormone-free” pork and chicken? It’s illegal across the board to administer hormones to pigs and chickens. EVERYONE’S chicken and pork are hormone-free. That’s like claiming that the package of meat you’re scrutinizing is “Sold in the USA!” OF COURSE IT IS! Tell me something I don’t know!

And my personal favorite… very quietly, about a year ago, THEY RENEGED ON COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN LABELING REQUIREMENTS FOR MEAT.

Packs of burger used to be required to disclose where the cow was raised—You’d see something like “Product of Uruguay,” or Brazil, New Zealand, Argentina, U.S.A., etc. Now they say nothing. This change was great timing because recently, the USDA starting having talks with Chinese chicken processing companies about outsourcing the processing of chicken before shipping it back to the USA for sale. The rules have changed, and no one has to tell you that your chicken was fileted and marinated in the People’s Republic. Organic, or otherwise! The Chinese Chicken thing hasn’t quite gone through yet, as far as I know, but it will soon, and how we will know when it does? They are no longer required to tell us.

Why would they take away a law that no one was complaining about, that apparently was able to be complied with, and that aided shoppers in choosing to support American farm economies and domestic rural communities and their own peace of mind? So much for choice… Why would they nix our opportunity to know whether our meats are imported?

It’s because deep down, the big marketers knew that no matter what pretty words they put on the package…“Grass-fed,” “Humanely Raised,” “No Hormones…” people would still be wary of meat brought in from overseas, as they should be. So they killed the facts. The facts are still there. You just can’t know them if you’re meat-shopping at the store.

They did the same thing with “Grass-fed.” They killed the facts. The Powers that Be suddenly decided that it was “unfair” to be policing such a widely-used term and officially declared that the term “grass-fed” was now strictly a marketing term, internally defined, and the burden of proof now falls solely on consumers to seek out. Officials said that consumers would now have to visit each company’s website to research whether that specific company’s definition of grass-fed matched their own.

Yep, I’m going to stand there at the freezing-cold meat counter with 4 hungry, squirming, noisy children asking me every 14 seconds when we will be home and what’s for dinner, with icecream melting in my cart and my phone buzzing repeatedly, reminding me that I’m already late for my next stop. I’m going to take THAT busy moment to go online, weed through the marketing nonsense to try to track down what Barbecue Bob’s “Grass-fed” Beef actually ate, and whether it was actually raised in America or not. Yeah, right!

Most folks think, “Well if the label says ‘Grass-fed,’ even if it’s internally defined, it still must mean the cows ate mostly grass, right?”

No. It’s internally defined. It’s internally defined! The word “grass-fed” as it appears on pretty green stickers at the meat counter is now completely meaningless, and your meaning has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of the company’s meaning!

They call this era the post-truth era. Think about that for a moment. We’re a generation no longer interested in truth as much as feeling good about what we do. Many areas of our lives are suffering. The area relevant in this article is the local, really-grass-fed farm. Our farm, and many other small farms of integrity, are struggling to compete with our real products against a multitude of fake, but oh-so-convenient products.

Don’t fall asleep at the kitchen stove. Keep your eyes open to the truth about your food. We at Shady Grove Ranch have tried to make it really simple through online ordering, email reminders, attending farmers market, selling through local retailers, and offering free routine drop points.

You have to do your part, too, and eat the best food in the world every month, every week, every day. I know we sometimes have seasonal shortages of things. (Beef is almost ready—hang in there! Just a couple more weeks!!) That’s what real, connected-with-the-farm eating is like sometimes. I am the Ingredient Substitution Queen, and I am happy to help you find meal ideas that will please the tummies in your house while your favorite out-of-stock item finishes fattening on real grass in a real pasture, right here in Jefferson, Texas.

Thank you for supporting our work so we can be around to feed your grandkids and ours in 20 years! Please make it part of your routine to visit us at Shreveport Farmers Market tomorrow and support REAL pasture-raised foods raised by a REAL family farm!

Time-Saving Kitchen Tips You Can Do Today

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If you’re into real ingredients, you probably spend a lot of time cooking and have accumulated your own set of kitchen tips. When we started working through the healing process for Matt’s autoimmune disease (ulcerative colitis), we had to make everything from scratch to avoid the ickies like preservatives, GMOs, vegetable oils, trans fats, artificial flavors and colors, etc. A bonus feature of cooking at home is that you get to enhance the nutrient content of the foods you’re making by using more nourishing ingredients. For example, if you’re making rice or gravy or bread, use homemade broth instead of water. Use mineral-rich real sea salt instead of white salt to boost trace mineral intake. Use unrefined sugars and less of them for homemade desserts that have an extra healthy boost. You get the idea…

Scratch-cooking takes time! Yet for his health, and mine, and our family’s, it’s worth it. But as an engineer, I am always thinking about ways to speed things up and save myself time. If you’ve never read the book “Cheaper By The Dozen,” we highly recommend it for a fun family read. It gives a glimpse into the mind of an engineer-type—we’re always microanalyzing our movements to eliminate “unnecessary motion.” Looking up the same information over and over again would definitely qualify as unnecessary motion! I have compiled a handful of simple but effective kitchen tips to help you save time cooking that nourishing, real food, so you can spend more time enjoying your good health.

Kitchen Tips to Help You Save Time

Here are just a couple of simple kitchen tips that you can implement in the kitchen today, most of them completely free!

Have a handful of favorite recipes?

I have a handful of recipes that I find myself using at least a couple of times a month. I’m an index-user in the cookbook, and looking up the same recipe over and over again wastes time. Write the page numbers of your favorites in the front cover of your cookbook! Or you could flag the pages with page protectors. Easy!

Always having to look up weight/volume conversions?

I don’t know about you, but I find it extremely inconvenient that a half cup of butter is the same as a quarter stick of butter. Or is it the other way around? Stop second-guessing yourself on conversions and stop wasting time looking the same information up on your phone over and over again! Instead, print yourself off a handy kitchen conversion chart and tape it inside the cabinet door above your favorite workspace! It’s not a bad idea to leave room for your own added notes. I have written on mine things like how much a cup of flour weighs, and what amount of salt to use when making a salt brine for fermented foods. I don’t have to stop to look those things up with my sticky fingers in the middle of my kitchen frenzies!

I have created just such a chart for you. With love from your favorite farmers! 🙂

Click here to download this free printable Kitchen Conversion Chart!

Forget to zero the scale?

On that same kitchen “cheat sheet,” write down the weights of your common mixing dishes. That way if you’re in the middle of creating something delicious and realize that it’s too late to weigh the dish, if you have the weight already recorded someplace, just do a little math to adjust your measurements! A calculator in the kitchen can be a help, too!

Want to reduce dishes when measuring?

Grab yourself a simple digital kitchen scale! You can usually find them for $10-$15. Even if you don’t do much baking, weighing ingredients is so much simpler and reduces the number of dishes to wash, especially if you’re using things like home-rendered lard. It’s one of my most-used kitchen tools!

I hope these tips save you some time and make your real-food-cooking more efficient. Thanks for supporting real food farmers like us!

What are your kitchen tips?

Sometimes Momma Has to Run

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Most of our cows don’t have real names anymore–truly, there are over 100 cows out there in the pasture, and most of them have a new baby every year, so it would be pretty tough to keep track of every single one! Matt knows a lot of them by number and will report in sometimes, “Boy, A07 is looking really good!” But the handful of cows that we started with all had names, chosen for personality quirks or looks or even just for fun.

We have this one cow named Tilly. She’s feisty and does not put up with farm dogs, so we figure she’d be pretty good at defending the herd if needed. We named her after a favorite movie character in a movie called “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.”

Tilly was one of the first cows we bought to stock Shady Grove Ranch, and when she finally had her first calf, it disappeared down in the West Pasture, a distant paddock that is more wild and remote than the rest of the farm. Matt searched and searched for that calf. Pap Pap searched. I searched. Even Tilly searched after the herd moved up to a new area (rotational grazing and all). I remember her running up and down the fenceline, bellowing loudly, to no avail. After three days, we thought there was no hope, and that surely the coyotes or even a bobcat or cougar had carried it off. What could have got past Tilly, we didn’t know, but we were heartbroken. And then one day, out of nowhere, that calf appeared, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and has been with us ever since.

We named that calf (a female) Millie after another favorite movie character from “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” We hoped that the losing-your-calf trait was not genetic, but as it turns out, it is. We have a tricky time keeping calves with the herd in spring anyway, even before the Tilly-Millie trait, because calves are slow and sleepy for the first few days, and we have to move the cows daily to achieve “flash grazing.” Why not just leave the cows in one big pen until everyone’s done calving? Well, that would lead to poor management during the most nutritious grazing of the year, both for the cows and the land.

Instead we just try to keep up with who’s who (thus the ear tags!), checking frequently for new babies, scouring perimeters, and making sure new moms have been nursed on. Now, as we had already discovered years ago, the whole line of calves out of Tilly and her daughters just LOVE to disappear in the same way. Maybe their moms hide them. Who knows? We try not to worry too much now, but it’s hard not to.

Here’s how it goes: They’re born, we see them within the first 12 hours, then they fall asleep for three days in some tall grass at the edge of the woods someplace and we don’t see them again until they’re too fast to eartag. I guess they don’t like having name tags… It wouldn’t be so bad except that we really do rotate our cows daily, so after three days, they’ve covered a lot of ground, and that calf may or may not have made it with the rest of the herd! The weirdest part is this particular tendency seems to be isolated in this one line of cows–Tilly and her daughters! I suppose we’d cull them if they didn’t produce such nice, fat calves every year!

The kids and I decided to go blackberry picking one lovely Sunday afternoon while Matt did evening chores. In passing he said to me, “Millie’s calf is missing. Keep your ears open for a calf mooing.”

Tevka offered to pull the wagon… until she realized how huge Matt Jr. has gotten!

The 3 Musketeers, aka the 3 Berry-Pickers!

Oh boy. Good ol’ Millie loses another calf. Sure enough, about the fourth berry I put into my basket, I heard a little baby moo. I hushed the kids because I wasn’t totally confident of what I had heard or where it had come from. Yes, I heard it again! It had come from the very paddock that Matt suspected, which the herd had left behind some two days before.

I gave instructions to the kiddos to stay in the berry patch and keep feeding the baby berries (he loves those!) while I went to investigate.

Matthew got really excited when I set the berry basket right next to him!

My little berry-lover!

I don’t think there’s much in this world that is cuter than a baby stuffing his face full of blackberries!

I walked quickly, watching and listening to try to put eyes on the calf. I didn’t know whether he’d be standing or lying down, in the woods, or in the fields or brambles. I stopped to listen. Another baby moo!

I sped up and headed toward where the sound had come from. I rounded a tall bramble bush, and there, in the midst of a blackberry patch, was our missing calf!

I was between him and the herd. Calves are particularly difficult to “steer” by pressure because they don’t always go in a predictable direction. So, giving him plenty of berth, I jogged around behind him to prepare to chase him up the hill.

We had a long way to go and a wide open field to cover that was filled with random patches of brambles and downed trees waiting to be milled into lumber for our farm store. Thankfully the calf headed the right way, so I ran behind watching to see what he would do. He passed the open gate, so I went top speed to try to head him off and send him back to the gate. This part would be tricky because if he didn’t turn left, he’d end up in another 20 acre paddock, and you know, I just didn’t want to run across 20 acres on my day off! I’ve never been much of a runner!

Suddenly the calf decided to go left, and he bolted right through the electric smooth-wire fence! He got shocked a couple of times getting through, but he made it and headed up past the house toward the other cows. What luck! There was only one more fence between him and his momma, but he needed to head toward it and not veer right along the house and up the driveway back toward that 20-acre open paddock.

I leaped over old garden rows and weeds and caught up with him. He scrambled forward and, yes! Ran right through the fence into the cows’ paddock.

He finally made his way back into the right paddock–now he’s trying to spot his momma!

It had been a couple of days since he nursed, so he latched on to the first momma cow he encountered, and she took a sniff of him and tried to kick him off since he didn’t belong to her. By then Matt had made it back to us and helped steer him back toward his momma, who was rather shocked by his eagerness to feed (and probably by her soreness from not having been nursed for 2 days!).

I went back to my own kids who were still happily munching on berries. During my calf-chase, I had spotted an excellent climbing tree, so we ventured out to that so that the kids could climb, and Momma could catch her breath. Farming sure keeps us young! Thanks for the exercise, Millie!

A lovely natural playground where I could catch my breath!

Where’s Waldo?

Someone is trying to trick you.

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Someone is trying to trick you.

They have started using this marketing word, and it’s working. What’s the word?

Local.

“Local” is the new “healthy.”

But my, oh, my, how the falsehoods abound.

(Quick disclaimer: I don’t think “local” is the only criteria for good food. I think rearing practices trump nearness of raising critters or veggies. Every crop-duster and chicken CAFO is local to somewhere. But we definitely need to address this Local Love issue because I think it has gotten way out of hand.)

Take, for example, the giant Geico billboard we saw while driving on a delivery one day. It has the famous little lizard, and it says, “We’re local!”

What does that even mean? That they have a local office you can go spend money at that ends up at HQ in some huge metropolis out of state, just like every other national multi-billion dollar company? Does it mean they have a local phone number so you don’t have to pay for long distance….which pretty much doesn’t exist anymore anyway, except for international calls? It’s so ambiguous that it’s practically meaningless, and yet it sounds so good.

Following is another good example of the misuse of the term.

A pasture-based farmer colleague of ours near the Ozarks in Arkansas snapped this photo of some apple cider for sale. The sign on the display says in prominent lettering, “Farm Fresh. Locally Grown.” The subheading states, “Proudly Supporting Ohio Farmers.”

I guess management forgot that they are a mere, oh, 700 miles away from Ohio. Then you check out the fine print and discover that the cider is actually a product of Michigan! If any of the signage is even remotely true, you’re looking at a distance traveled of over 1200 miles. Thank goodness our “local” schools and shopping centers are closer than that!

Grocery stores are especially bad about abusing the attractive marketability of supporting local farmers. Matt once stopped into Kroger and noticed, again, the prominent “We support local farms!” signage, which you see at so many stores nowadays.

We’re always looking for more locations to serve our customers via retail sales–we’d love to sell our products through Kroger! So Matt decided to ask about it. He flagged down a manager and introduced himself as a local farmer, and inquired about how to initiate the process to become a vendor for their store. The manager looked dumbfounded and said, “I have no idea.” She even went to ask their buying manager there at the store, and his reply was the same. They were so unfamiliar even with the concept of buying from local farms that they didn’t even know where to begin or whom to ask.

Question: If these stores are really selling these wonderful local products from dozens or maybe even hundreds of local farms–because you know, by nature of buying local, there have to be LOTS of farms spread across the nation–why don’t the people who DO THIS FULL TIME know how to get an actual real-live local farmer in touch with the right people to start selling his real-live local products there?

I’ll tell you why. It’s not really happening. They are trying to trick you.

It’s not just grocery stores.

There are a lot of restaurants and restaurant distributors using the same sort of marketing language. They get a couple of poster children farmers, and maybe they really buy a few things from them (or maybe not…) and then they head straight for mainstream, Big Ag suppliers.

Why don’t they just do what they say they’re doing?

I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out. People like the idea of buying local. They like even better the idea of local being fresher and healthier. But money talks, right? Bigger farms (aka CAFO operations–confinement animal feeding operations) are cheaper to operate and have economies of scale on their side. Plus there’s that convenient advantage of separating the consumer from the supply chain by moving the supply chain farther away, and so the food system begins to operate like a money laundering operation.

Restaurant Q buys from Distributor X, who buys from Natural Hub Y, who buys from Brokers A, B, and C, who buy from Farm Co-ops H, I, J, K, who buy from some obscure farms out in Farmland that no one really knows much about, and definitely no one ever visits. Somebody said the farms are pasture-based, and we can surely assume that they’re reasonably close by…

I won’t name names, but I know of two in particular, right here in Texas, that tout their “local” and “pasture-raised” products. One sources beef direct from Australia, citing that American producers can’t meet supply and standards simultaneously.

Like I said, I’m not going to name any names, but I’m just going to leave this link right here for you in case you want to read about it.

The other is a restaurant supplier actively marketing their local, pasture-raised farm products in a major Foodie city in Texas. They have a lovely little website with a prominent menu item, “Why local?” and they go on to answer the question by defining local as farms located “within one day drive from [their city.]” OK, so that sounds pretty reasonable. A day trip to the farm, right?

Well, it just so happens that this Texas farm-to-table group uses for its main supplier of pork a co-op of farms …in Iowa.

Is that meeting their definition of local? It’s a 15 hour drive to Iowa without pigs. And navigating downtown Big Texas City with your livestock trailer would add at least another hour or two, not counting stops. I don’t know many folks that can make a 15+ hour drive in one day without livestock!

In college, I moved from my hometown in South Mississippi to Ithaca, New York, to do an internship with a metallurgical testing company there. In the early days of MapQuest, I staked out my route and highlighted my paper atlas, said goodbye to my mother, and started out early. I made it 11 hours the first day, and I was so exhausted and delirious that I could barely order a meal at McD’s before stopping for the night (back before I knew better). I wouldn’t have made it all the way to Iowa in one day… I would not call that “local.”

Now, if you’re my crazy hubby, who once drove from Longview, Texas, all the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in one go, you might say it can be done. But gee whiz! Who wants to leave at 6 A.M. and arrive at 9 P.M. (not counting stops!) and call that a “local” farm! Not to speak of whether or not they meant that you were supposed to be able to return home in the same day… Buying pork becomes a full-fledged business trip!

By the way, I have forbidden Matt from doing any crazy long driving now. That was back in his “bulletproof” days…

But you can see how ridiculous the use of this term “local” has become. Granted it might not be out of the realm of possibility if we were all “driving” Lear jets around. Lear jets full of pigs for restaurants…

What this trend means is that you, the buyer, must be oh, so cautious, and not get sucked in by the fancy marketing and attractive buzz words. Worse, people often read “local” as synonymous with “grass-fed” or “hormone-free” or a whole host of other non-applicable terms.

How should we define local?

Polyface Farm, home of Joel Salatin and his family, is probably the most well-known farm like ours. A truly loco-centric, rotationally-focused real-deal type farm. They define their local food-shed as those customers that can make a day trip to the farm and back home again after spending a bit of time browsing the farm, viewing the operations, and shopping in the farm store.

So for most folks that means less than a 3 or 4 hour drive. That sounds pretty reasonable to me. Honestly, anything beyond that would just seem ridiculous. I mean, for us, that would mean buying from farms near Houston, or on the other side of Dallas–that far-reaching of a “food-shed” would be a stretch, to be sure, but it could be done if we had no other options. But you bet your biscuits that I wouldn’t be looking at Iowa or Ohio or Michigan for “local food.”

When buying local isn’t possible

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying.

If you have to ship your food in because there really aren’t any decent rotational-pasture-based farms near you, do it. It’s worth it for your health.

If all you care about is low price, and Iowa pork is cheaper than Texas pork, fine. Capitalism wins, right?

But what gets my goat is when companies are deliberately deceiving customers through marketing schemes that say, “We support local farms!” when they really don’t–they’re just like everyone else, buying through the handful of Giant Food Suppliers and giving consumers the illusion of local, small, diversified economies. And finally, even if it really is local, that doesn’t make it healthy.

What if there’s not a good local farm? Simple! Take your signs down!!

How can you know the truth?

The best way to know is to go SEE it. Meet the farmer. Know your source. It’s worth it.

There is good news.

I hate leaving you with all bad news. So here’s the good news. We’ve been working hard to get our products into some restaurants in the area (and of course we so much appreciate all of our local stores that really DO support local farms!). Here are two restaurants that have recently put our pork on their menu. More coming soon!!

Restaurants Featuring Our Products

Wine Country Bistro in Shreveport, Louisiana
El Cabo Verde in Shreveport, Louisiana

Our Wonderful Retailers:

Granary St. in Longview and Tyler
Vitamins Plus (inside Drug Emporium) in Longview, Tyler, and Shreveport
Jack’s Natural Foods in Longview
Sunshine Health Foods in Shreveport and Bossier
The Farmer’s Wife in Mt. Pleasant
Flour Child Fine Foods in Texarkana