From my friends at Cooking Up a Story! Temple Grandin.

 

Rare Breed - Saveur.com

By Molly O’Neill
Source: Saveur
Rare Breed Photo: Jim Turner

Beyond the town of Lindsborg, with its church steeples and 2,000 or so houses, the Kansas prairie is a flat forever. There's nothing to absorb wind or sound. The whinny of gears in a pickup; the bullish snort of a combine harvester turning frosty dirt—the noises of a winter afternoon seemed bigger than anything mortal. Standing in a field on Frank Reese Jr.'s farm outside town as the shadows grew longer, I felt truly alone.

I pictured Reese, a poultry breeder who was born near here, shepherding his turkeys across this same, endless horizon as a boy and wondered whether he too had felt alone. From an early age, he had the job of ushering birds on his family's farm from the barn to the open range so that they could peck for insects. He took to the role, and to the birds. When the other children in his first-grade class wrote adoring sonnets to their cats and dogs, Reese crafted a personal essay titled "Me and My Turkeys."

CLICK HERE TO READ WHOLE ARTICLE

"Cows With Names Make More Milk" - NYT

ILLUSTRATION BY JAN KALLWEJT
For dairy farmers, whether to name their cows may seem like a matter of taste. But it might not be. It could be a business decision.

A study of several hundred British dairies published in the journal Anthrozoös in March compared responses to a survey about cow treatment with independently collected milk data and found that cows that have names make, in a given year, about 258 liters more milk per farm than anonymous ones — a bump of about 6 percent.

More research is still needed. The possible psychological effects on cows of having a name, for example, have yet to be determined. But the results so far reveal a correlation: "The naming," says Catherine Douglas, the Newcastle University animal behaviorist behind the research, "reflects the humans' attitudes toward the cows, and therefore how they behave around them." Named cows are more often treated nicely, and well-treated, calm and happy cows make more milk. The point, Douglas says, is that it definitely can't hurt to name your cows.

Naming criteria vary widely. Some farmers name cows alphabetically; others recycle parents' names. Herb and flower names are popular in Britain. "You know," Douglas says, "Daisy, Rose, Buttercup." Douglas once named a cow after her sister, Hattie.

But some American dairy farmers scoff at this idea. Barbara Martin, a third-generation California dairy operator, says naming her 2,200 cows would be completely unrealistic. "Everyone," she says, "has an ear tag with a number." PAT WALTERS

Barn-Raising - from NYT

"Koefoed said that she has done everything backward and nothing by the book. The eggs came first: she raised them for her family on their 55-acre farm beginning in 2005 and sold some in the neighborhood. “Eventually it sort of dawned on me: Wow, this might be a nice little business.” She left her job at Havens Wine Cellars to farm full time, but things kicked in when a friend who was a sous chef at Chez Panisse took Koefoed’s eggs to work. The vibrant yolks and clean, grass-fed flavor won over the kitchen. Today the restaurant buys up to 100 dozen a week.

Then came the chickens. Alice Waters and one of her head chefs called a year into their relationship to ask Koefoed if she would raise birds for meat. “I said, ‘Nooooo!’ ” she recalled. “Then I hung up the phone and said: ‘Ugh! Of all the stupid things you have said — in your life — that may be the stupidest thing.’ ” She called back and told them she’d do it. “I was like: ‘No problem! Total breeze!’ and then the next day I ran down to the library and bookstore and bought every book I could find on pasture-raised meat birds and figured it out.”

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

Joel Salatin

Click here to hear his speech

Jonathan Safran Foer | Eating Animals Podcast

LISTEN HERE for a podcast interview

In Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer synthesizes philosophy, literature, science, and his own detective work in order to to explore the fictions that we use to justify our eating habits and reveals how such tales can justify an ignorance of the realities of the food industry.

Yale Sutainable Food Project

"Some observers think that a farm in the midst of a city is an odd sight. But everyone in New Haven eats, and eating, as Wendell Berry once wrote, is an agricultural act. "

My twitter friend @zacharycohen - Chicken Slaughter

Step 1: The Slaughter

Slaughtering is by far the most difficult part of our process. We have a great deal of respect for our animals and the sacrifice they make for us, so we try to do things as humanely as possible

CLICK HERE to read whole article

He has an awesome blog HERE

BASIS.com The Mission: Help farmers sell in the city.

Basis™ is a mission-driven company based in New York City committed to good food for all. We are passionate about good food that is traditional, localized, and 100% traceable. We partner with producers and local communities to sell good food at affordable prices.

"It’s hard for family farms to compete with large-scale agribusiness, and we recognize that getting products to market can often be the weakest link in the good food value chain. So we decided to make it easier. Basis can help take care of product pick-up, transportation, storage, delivery, and marketing. We can take care of all the logistics of getting product from farm gate to market in a cost-effective, reliable, and efficient manner. "

Ripe for Change - Movie Trailer

A carnivore rethinks his eating ethics

By Douglas Brown The Denver Post

We all have heard horror stories about the way livestock are sometimes raised in this country: chickens stuffed into cages for their short lives, pigs never allowed to see the sky or feel the sun on their backs, thousands of cattle standing shoulder-to-shoulder in pens knee-deep in mud and their own waste.

I don't know much about these places, called concentrated animal feeding operations. Are the stories true? I have not done enough homework and am not qualified to pass judgment.

I am familiar, on the other hand, with a single ranch on an Indian reservation in Wyoming where the cattle spend most of their lives roaming a sprawling range of grass, where osprey and eagles wheel above cows and calves and wolves and bears. Iam comfortable with Arapaho Ranch, a place that nurtures its cattle until the day they are shipped off to slaughter.

Working on the cover story for this week's Food section changed the way I buy food.

I eat meat. I savor how it tastes, I appreciate its textures, I sometimes feel compelled toward it, especially if I encounter the aromas from somebody's backyard barbecue.

But I feel compassion toward the animals I consume too.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

The Conscientious Carnivore - Barry Eastabrook 9/09

f you look at the raw (excuse me) numbers, the answer seems to be an unqualified “NO!”. Livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. A meat eater pumps about 1.5 tons more CO2-equivalent emissions into the atmosphere than someone who scorns meat.

But Nicolette Hahn Niman, an attorney and vegetarian who became something of an accidental rancher when she married Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch, offers a more reasonable, if less pat, answer to the question. “It depends on how your meat is raised,” she explains.

Niman, who is author of Righteous Porkchop, an investigative book about industrial-scale livestock farming and sustainable alternatives to it, made her statement last week in Chicago before a meeting of Chefs Collaborative, a group dedicated to local and sustainable foods.

Pointing out that the statistics about livestock production’s contribution to global warming include practices such as raising animals on trucked-in corn in vast feedlots in the United States and clearing rainforests in South America and southern Asia to make way for fields, Niman said, “Sheep, cattle, and goats can be raised on natural vegetation.”

Using her own ranch in Bolinas, CA, as an example, she noted that they apply no chemicals to the fields and use no irrigation. Their animals drink collected rainwater. Manure, which is a noxious pollutant at feedlots, is a precious resource for the Nimans. “We’ve had neighbors ask us if they can have any for their gardens and we say, ‘No, we need it all for our pastures,’” said Niman.

There is a downside: Meat raised this way costs more at the store. To those who grumble about cost, Niman suggests a win/win alternative: Eat less. “We don’t need twenty-four-ounce servings,” she said. “Eating less would make us a lot more healthy.”

The planet, too.

Truck Farm - Living on Earth

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers behind the documentary, “King Corn,” are at it again. This time they’ve planted rows of vegetables in the back of a Dodge pickup to show that food can be grown just about anywhere.

From @sisteramy on twitter :)

@HappyChickens just wanted to let you know I bought cage free eggs today. more expensive but you have changed my mind about eggs and chicks.

This makes me so happy

Life with Goats

Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Life With Goats

Most of us don’t herd goats anymore. Go far enough back in time, and a whole lot of humans did.

Brad Kessler left a rent-controlled apartment in New York’s East Village to raise goats in Vermont. He took it seriously — even spiritually — for himself, and now for us, in the pages of a wondrous little book on goat-herding.

There’s a reason, he writes, that Jesus, Moses, Krishna and Mohammed were all tied up with shepherds. There’s something magic here. And the cheese is pretty divine, too.

CLICK HERE to hear

A Tale of Chicken Rescue, Told in Six Parts - From Humane Society

Part 1: Ever Wonder What It's Like to Live with Chickens?

Marilee Geyer knows. She has a flock of more than fifty rescued chickens in California.

Marilee sees birds as charismatic individuals who each have their own personalities—and she welcomes them as part of the family.

"My mom was a kind, compassionate woman who taught me to care for and respect animals. She brought home every stray she came across, and so my family included a large number of companion animals."

Marilee came to view chickens differently after working in an animal shelter and doing rescue work.

"Working at an animal shelter gave me an opportunity to get to know an even wider variety of animals (sadly, just about every kind of animal you can think of ends up in a shelter sooner or later) and that's when I really got to find out what chickens were all about. I was charmed: chickens are highly social, friendly, smart," Marilee says.

But what really made an impact, in Marilee's case, was one particular little white hen named Willy.

Friends for Hens | HumaneTeen.org

Your mission:
Put the chicken before the egg! Get the word out about cruel cages for hens and see if you can help your community go cage-free.

Why? Most eggs produced in the U.S. don’t come from Old MacDonald’s Farm. Instead, they come from industrialized factory farms confining millions of laying hens in overcrowded battery cages. Stacked one on top of another, each small wire cage may hold as many as 10 hens. Each hen has less space than the size of a sheet of paper. Hens confined in battery cages can’t spread their wings, make nests, perch, dustbathe, or do other things they were born to do. Get more details at NoBatteryEggs.com.

How? Write letters and talk to your parents, friends, restaurant managers, and school cafeteria manager. Ask them to make the switch to cage-free eggs.

CLICK HERE for more info

Poultry

Americans eat more than 100 times as much chicken meat as we did a century ago. But the whopping 9 billion chickens we eat each year are genetically engineered, drugged, and sick. What happened?

* Anything Goes - Chickens are the most abused of all farmed animals, and yet they are completely unprotected under US federal law
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* Chicken vs. Chimp - New studies suggest chickens have some intellectual abilities that surpass primates. Is it true?

* Chickens and Turkeys Raised Right - Meet America’s last poultry farmer.

From Farm Forward

FarmFoward.com

If a meat producer doesn’t trust you to look at their farm, it’s probably not a good idea to trust them to feed your family.

Farm Forward is committed to supporting the ranchers, farmers, and entrepreneurs who are increasing the availability and market share of more humanely produced meat, eggs, and dairy. Here we feature some of the farms and corporations that have impressed us most.

Most farms today have become not just factories, but fortresses lacking even basic transparency. It is easier to see the inside of a prison than the inside of a hog CAFO1 or industrial slaughterhouse. This is part of a larger strategy deployed by agribusiness to prevent the public from knowing how the most important consumer products in our lives are actually produced.

Even experts are denied access that would be normal in any other industry. When the prestigious Pew Commission completed its 2-year study of industrial farmed animal production—the most comprehensive ever done—they made the following assessment:


There have been some serious obstacles to the Commission completing its review.

... The agriculture industry is not monolithic, and the formation of this Commission was greeted by industrial agriculture with responses ranging from open hostility to wary cooperation. In fact, while some industrial agriculture representatives were recommending potential authors for the technical reports to Commission staff, other industrial agriculture representatives were discouraging those same authors from assisting us by threatening to withhold research funding for their college or university. We found significant influence by the industry at every turn: in academic research, agriculture policy development, government regulation, and enforcement."

CLICK HERE to read entire piece

Three Wise Men

"Eating is an agricultural act," essayist Wendell Berry famously wrote. It's also a political one. Which is why last week Berry, geneticist Wes Jackson and sustainable-agriculture advocate Fred Kirschenmann made a pilgrimage to Washington to make a case for a new kind of food policy.

CLICK HERE for more