Farm Catch Up

It’s bloody cold out there. In the last few of weeks we’ve had a 14 inch snow storm, some of the coldest weather the state’s ever had, followed by temperatures jumping from -37F to +50F in just a couple of days, then more snow, then back in the deep freeze again, then freezing rain and more snow. In other words, a fairly typical Wisconsin winter. So with nothing to do outside I might as as well do something to justify the name of this website and talk about farming for a while.

Stoned Pigs??

No, that’s not some kind of strange code or some new meme up there in that title. I mean seriously, we’re talking about feeding pigs weed. Well, sort of. Moto Perpetuo Farm in Oregon is feeding their pigs marijuana. They’re feeding scraps and outdated marijuana laced bakery products to their pigs because, well, they can, I guess. I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone would do something like this as some kind of marketing gimmick. And I suppose it’s better to feed the stuff to pigs than landfill all those brownies, cookies and other stuff when they go stale. Feeding bakery waste to pigs and other cattle is a pretty common practice and has been going on for as long as there have been bakeries. But feeding them marijuana brownies? Well, hell, why not, I guess. As MrsGF said when I told her about this she said “Damn, I bet those are some happy pigs!”

I wonder what this is doing to the pigs, though. Marijuana is not a normal part of a pig’s diet and while it doesn’t seem to be harming them, no one knows for sure. They seem to be doing this for no reason other than as some kind of marketing gimmick and that troubles me.

African Swine Fever

I haven’t seen much about ASF outside of the ag press, but this is a seriously scary disease if you’re in the pork business. ASF doesn’t harm humans, but it is highly contagious among pigs, and almost always fatal. There is no vaccine or treatment for it. It can’t be cured. All they can do is try to isolate it, and that is proving to be almost impossible. In China it has quickly spread to more than 25 provinces. The country has instituted bans on moving live pigs and other measures to try to contain it, but that doesn’t seem to have done much good. It’s been hitting small Chinese pig farmers hard because they have trouble dealing with the restrictions and health measures. It’s looking like a lot, if not all of the small pig farms will be put out of business by this.

It’s been spotted in the EU as well. Authorities are urging hunters to kill wild pigs which can carry the disease. There has even been talk of putting up fences along borders to keep wild pigs from spreading it into adjacent countries. France has supposedly deployed the military along the border with Belgium because they’re afraid swine from Belgium will sneak across the border

There is a swine fever problem going on in Japan as well, but that seems to be a different strain of disease that isn’t related to ASF. The country has slaughtered thousands of pigs in some prefectures in an effort to halt the spread of the disease, and the farm minister called the situation “extremely serious”. The major concern there is that no one knows how the disease is spreading.

Whole Milk in Schools?

You may not know this, but it is illegal to serve anything except low fat or skim milk in public school lunch programs. Apparently the belief is that if you let one tiny, tiny bit of milk fat past the lips of a child they will immediately swell up to 300 pounds, get diabetes and drop dead of a heart attack. Yeah, right… As if the few calories they’d get from whole milk is going to make any difference to a kid who is gorging on chips, soda, candy, and sodium loaded fast food outside of school.

Anyway, a couple of professional criminals — ahem, excuse me, I mean congress persons, are trying to change that and are putting forward a new regulation that would permit whole milk to be served, accompanied by the usual hype from the dairy industry. The usual suspects, the various dairy marketing organizations, are hyping the hell out of this, using it as an opportunity to promote the alleged “health benefits” of drinking milk. They are desperate to try to prop up ever decreasing consumption of milk. About 10 ethically challenged bas… oops, a bit of a typo there… Ten congress persons have signed onto this thing so far and I would think more will join up because it’s “for the children”, makes them look like they really care when they don’t, and doesn’t cost them anything while letting them suck up those yummy bribes … oops, another typo there. I mean, of course, campaign contributions from the dairy industry. Wink wink nudge nudge…

Uh? What do you mean I’m a cynical old grouch?

Dicamba Antitrust Lawsuit

I’ve talked about the herbicide dicamba before so I won’t go into detail about it here except say it is nasty stuff with a habit of vaporizing and drifting long distances and killing and damaging millions of acres of crops, mostly soybeans, and a lot of other plants. Despite changing the formula of the herbicide, more strict application regulations, etc., nothing seems to have stopped the damage.

A new lawsuit has been started against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, claiming it violated antitrust laws when it introduced it’s “Xtend” brand dicamba resistant soybeans. Xtend soybeans have taken over almost 75% of the North American soybean market in just three years. The company claims this is because their seed is just better. The plaintiffs claim that sales are driven, at least partly, by fear.

The claim is that farmers are planting the stuff not because it’s better, but because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their whole crop if their neighbors use the stuff and the herbicide drifts over their fields. That fear is entirely justified because dicamba damaged or killed millions of acres traditional soybeans across the country since it came into widespread use when Xtend seed came on the market. They also claim that seed salespeople are actively promoting this fear, telling farmers that if they don’t buy Xtend seed, they risk losing their whole crop. The lawsuit claims that Monsanto knew about the risk of dicamba drift and deliberately exploited it in order to drive competitors out of the market.

Bayer, which bought Monsanto last year, denies it, claims that the herbicide doesn’t drift if used properly, and claims that damage from drift were down last year after new restrictions were put in place. The plaintiffs claim that the damage has been reduced because farmers have been forced to buy the Xtend seed or face losing their crops.

Rent A Chicken. Seriously?

In the “no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people” department: There is something out there called “Rent a Chicken”. For “just” $450 – $600 a season, this outfit will rent you a couple of chickens, a small coop, a bag of feed and a couple of dishes. And…

Oh, come on, really? The free range “organic” eggs you’ll get out of those two birds will cost you something like $20 a dozen. Plus you will experience the “joy” of taking care of a pair of birds that will try to escape, run out into the road and get run over, piss off your neighbors and leave chicken crap all over your yard for your kids to play in.

But apparently people are actually doing this. And enough of them are doing it to let this outfit have outlets in 23 states and parts of Canada and…

Look, you can get free range, organic eggs from small farmers around here for about $5/doz if you’re looking for eggs. And if you think a chicken is going to be your pet, well, tell that to the emergency room doctor when you have to take your four year old in to get her face stitched up after the bird went for her. Can you say tetanus shots?

Look, if you really, really want to have a couple of chickens for some reason, here’s how you can do it for free.

You can cobble together a pretty good coop out of an old pallet or two and chances are good you can pick up a couple free. The birds themselves? Check Craigslist or other community bulletin boards and you’ll generally find ads from people trying to give the things away because they found out what you’re about to find out, that chickens are A) stupid, B) vicious, C) annoying, D) filthy, E) without a carefully controlled diet the eggs they produce (if any) taste bloody awful, and F) drop dead for no apparent reason leaving you to try to explain to little Rachel why her bird went to live in chicken heaven, and costing you thousands of dollars in therapy bills when you haven’t even paid off the ER bill yet from the time the chicken tried to peck her face off. And as for feeding them, well, that’s free too because, well, your neighbors got bird feeders, right? Besides, chickens will eat damn near anything including small rodents, bugs, snakes and each other.

Fake Yogurt

Danone, makers of Dannon and Activia coagulated milk products (yogurt), bought a building in Pennsylvania that it plans to use to make “vegan yogurt”. Basically you take soybeans or some other legume or nut, process the hell out of it, spin off some kind of juice from it, throw in a bunch of chemicals and additives to make it vaguely resemble real yogurt, add a lot of sugar and/or artificial sweeteners and flavoring agents so people can gag it down, then throw in some bacteria, cheap vitamins mass produced in China, and then use a massive marketing campaign to convince you it’s “healthy”.

Anyway, the company has jumped into the fake dairy product market with both feet. Back in ’16 it bought the company that manufactures Silk and other vegan products for something like $12 billion so they want to get into the fake milk and dairy business really, really bad because, well, profits, of course. Sales of regular yogurt have gone flat or even started to decline in some areas so it has to do something to prop up the sales.

What really caught my eye in this story was the term “flexitarian”. I’d never heard of it before. What the hell is, some of you are asking, a flexitarian? A flexitarian, my friends, is a vegetarian who eats meat. Seriously. Oh, they say, I’m better than you are because I don’t eat a lot of meat… And, well, it’s all just pretentious drivel. It’s greenwashing on a personal level

Tinder for Cows

Yeah, seriously, Tinder for cows. A company in the UK has introduced an app called “Tudder” which lets farmers find breeding matches for their cattle by using a Tinder style app where you can swipe left or right as you page through a selection of cows and bulls. You can narrow things down by specifying various characteristics such as breed of animal, whether it’s organic or not, health, age, etc. I know it sounds silly but there is a genuine market for this kind of app. It isn’t being put out by a fly by night company, either. It’s backed by Hectare, which provides marketing platforms for trading cattle and grains that are used by about a third of UK farmers.

And, of course, the article offers the obligatory pun about a possible sheep version called “Ewe-Harmony”.