Items Tagged With Government

What is at stake this election?  A lot frankly. Angus La Cense has been trying to get the word out about grass-fed issues . And yet, we are all still hurting. It is a scary time, and frankly grass-fed issues might not top anyone’s list, but they might, even if you do not know it. How we produce food in our country really touches upon all the issues that are troubling us: energy dependence, rising food costs, inflation, skyrocketing health care costs, and the attack on the middle class.   These issues can all be traced to how, we as a nation produce and consume our food. If we are going to change we need to reevaluate our dependence on big business and fossil fuels.  Many of us might feel helpless; we live in such a large, complex and powerful country. What can one citizen do? That is what is so exciting about this campaign, and Angus La Cense’s message. Even a small purchase of grass-fed beef or visiting your local farmer’s market, or choosing to cook a meal for your family can have implications that really generate change.  We can help to fix these daunting national problems by what we eat--- policy has to follow but the more of us who rise up, conservative and liberal alike, to ask our policy makers to make sensible policy change the more likely they will be to listen.

Yes, there is a lot at stake this election. We all know this, but there is so much that we can do.  We can choose to have a grass-fed America buy voting with our forks, supporting grass-fed producers and asking our elected officials to rethink how we grow and consume our food!  The more grass-fed party members the better! So join today!

Dear Mr. Pollan,

  As a candidate for President this year, I felt obliged to reply to your now famous letter printed in the New York Times this Sunday, as it was addressed to a Mr. President-Elect.  As a potential President-Elect, I read your letter closely, and hope that my fellow candidates have done so as well. 

 Mr. Pollan, I want you to know that I have been campaigning on a platform that seeks to reform the food system much like you have suggested in your letter.  I was more than happy to see that you addressed the President-Elect in your letter, as I believe that the changes in policy that are necessary for real Grass-fed Change to take hold in this country will be made when we have the cooperation of our President.

 I’ve listened to the voices of my constituents across the country, the voices of those who are ready for grass-fed change and the voices of those who want to make a living as grass-fed farmers and ranchers.  I ask them, “What is the greatest hurdle to achieving a true Grass-fed America?”  I have heard a resounding reply: subsidies. 

  We, the farmers, the animals, and other grass-fed believers know that the current subsidy and loan distribution is too heavily weighted in favor of the big corporations.  We know   that the status quo in Washington is keeping us from achieving what we call Grass-fed Change and what you call diversified sun farming.  The powerful lobbies in Washington ensure these subsidies are kept in place, however, it is in the authority of the President to stand up and steamroll these lobbies to redistribute the subsidies in a way that favors an agricultural self reliance that is crucial to maintaining the health of our people and land. So I applaud you, Mr. Pollan, for addressing the President-Elect in your reform proposal, and letting him know how crucial his role will be in preventing a serious crisis on our homeland, and that it must begin with reforming the policies of our farmland.  The people are waiting.

I thank you for the for the solid and radical advice laid out in your letter.  It has been very encouraging to me.

Sincerely,

Mr. Angus La Cense

Founder, The Grass-fed Party

P.S.  I enjoyed your proposal for a White House South Lawn Victory Garden.  If I am elected, I promise that my family will set an example for your polyculture sun farms.  I promise to unabashedly graze my meals on the White house lawn, keeping the soil healthy and ensuring that tax-payers dollars will be saved as we will not be needing any oil or chemicals, but only sun to produce the food that will keep my neighbors and my family healthy, safe, and self-reliant.

World's Columbian Exposition: Chicago, United States, 1893

Thoughts from Ulla:

The Midwest is possibly the most fertile place on earth. Glacial deposits blessed the Midwest and particularly Iowa with prodigious amounts of highly productive top soil. Our ascendancy to becoming THE world power can be traced to the productive agricultural might of the Midwest, and the freedom it gave us to industrialize and no other town has been impacted more by the riches of our agricultural bounty than Chicago. Chicago was the center for commodity trading and the financial center of the Midwest where cattle and hogs were brought and fattened and slaughtered in an unprecedented factory-like manner. The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards processed more meat then any other place in the world from the Civil War until the 1920s reaching its peak in 1924. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” chronicled the slaughterhouses to the horror of a newly industrialized America, in many ways Michael Pollen’s the Omnivores Dilemma has done the same for this generation; bringing the horrors of our modern day feedlots to the homes of suburban America. Our beef production is now controlled by four large packers who exercise control over the whole process of bringing beef to our plate, this was true back in our gilded age and policy makers where able to wrestle control back to help protect workers and customers. Sinclair’s book changed America he intended to shed light on industrial labor and working conditions, but food safety became a national obsession. Sinclair talked of workers falling into rendering tanks and being ground into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard". Americans where aghast, coupled with the high death rate of slaughterhouse workers and the exploitation of children and women and the fact that foreign sales of American meat fell by one-half impelled governmental action. Does this sound familiar? Koreans refusing our beef, immigrant children being used in meat packing plants and Americans becoming obese on unhealthy fat? This is true today and I think we have a unique opportunity to take the power back from the consolidation that has happened, we did it back then, why not now?


Notes from Franny on the Union Stockyards:

The Union Yards were established in a purchase of 320 acres of swamp land in 1864 by 9 railroad companies that saw a great opportunity in a consolidated railway shipping center taking the bounty of the west to the east. Originally, live cattle were shipped from the Stockyards east to local markets and local slaughterhouses where cattle production was waning. Pigs, on the other hand, were slaughtered at the Stockyards from the beginning; their meat was shipped salted, smoked, and cured.  In the early 1880’s, the entire cattle industry changed when an engineer friend of the Swift company invented the refridgerated railway car. This was the key to creating the 1st vertically integrated business where could be bought live (on the hoof), slaughtered, and shipped to butchers in local markets. The Armour Company and the Swift Company were among the largest holders of this vertically integrated businesses centered at the Union Stockyards and their hold across the many stages of production and distribution gave birth to the still present tension between small processor and large processor, producer and packer, and nameless slaughterhouse worker and corporate giant.

People noted that the Stockyards were in the truest sense a human machine.  They employed human labor to disassemble the animal parts.  At the time, machines were not capable of dealing with such raw and non-uniform materials as animals, so humans became the working pieces of the machine, setting an example for the marvelous organization of machines to come, machines that would propel American Industry to it’s height of might.  With 2,000 workers and roughly 38,000 animals killed per day, the development of organizational efficiency was key in creating a sustained center of processing that would feed the growing and hardworking American populace. The division of labor saw it’s day in Chicago at the Stockyards at  the turn of the century, and this division of labor model has since trickled into factory systems across the world. 

Although it was called the Union Stockyards, any attempt at starting unions were oppressed by the big operators. There were two Unionizing attempts, one of which was lost in a strike.  It wasn’t until Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, which encouraged collective bargaining, that a union was formed by workers at the Union Stockyards.

The stockyards did, however, offer employment to millions of immigrants over the years who dreamed the American dream. Chicago was a marvel as it grew more than any other city in the World in one generation, and this, as Ulla stated earlier was given to it’s place as an agricultural trading center sitting at the crossroads of a country’s farmland and newly industrialized cities.

Mark's grass-fed farm in the Ozarks.

We met Grass-fed Party member Mark Hudson in September at a Cowcus in New York. Mark had come all the way from Arkansas for the Cowcus! We found out that Mark was in the process of starting a small grass-fed farm in Southwest Missouri, the heart of Ozark country. The land he currently owns was settled by his great-grandparents in the 1860’s when his grandfather drove cattle over from Georgia and Tennessee to the Ozarks and met his wife, a woman of the cattle owning Caddo tribe. They established a farm together, which stayed in Mark’s family until the 1950’s. Mark, who grew up on an adjacent farm, recently bought part of the old family farm, which had changed hands in the 50s.

Tell me a little bit about the farm you grew up on. Did your family raise grass-fed cows?

 Our cattle were on grass; however, the majority of the calves were weaned and sold as feeder cattle. This is on land my father purchased in the 1960’s. Until the early 1970’s most of these light calves went to the wheat pastures in Kansas for finishing. Typically, during the 30 days prior to slaughter, grain was provided. As a kid we ate grass-fed beef from our own cows. I remember wishing we could eat the plastic wrapped supermarket beef, but I’ve since realized how much better I had it.

When my ancestors came to this area in the 1860’s they brought cows. Their calves were weaned and tuned to grass. They also grazed the mountainsides for acorns to supplement their diet. Old folks around here say, “A good acorn meant fat cattle in the spring.”

After 1 to 2 years, the fat cattle were driven to market. My Grandfather drove cattle to markets in Kansas City on horseback. They were all grass-fed. At first to Kansas City and later to the railroad in Crane, Mo. They were truly grass-fed for over 100 years.

As a kid did you see yourself owning your own farm one day?

 Yes. I always planned to continue and expand the farming operation. FFA and 4-H were a significant part of childhood on the farm.

Have you been able to do that?

While working as a grain inspector I established a farrow-to-finish hog operation. I grew grain, mixed feed, farrowed pigs and finished to 245 lbs. With high input costs and low returns, the operation was not sustainable.

Three years ago land next to our family farm came up for sale. This land was part of my great grandfather’s place. I purchased this acreage and am in the process of reclaiming pastures and installing improvements.

I spent a few years looking for a bank that would give me a loan to buy the cattle. Because grass-fed cattle need more time to grow, I wouldn’t be able to make a payment for at least 2 years. I finally found a local banker who knows me and helped me buy the cattle. It took a few years of looking.

I am establishing all pasture without chemicals and using the most environmentally sensitive practices. The USDA Conservation Service is very helpful in this area. I recently gained funding through the federal EQIP program. It basically helps pay for wells and fencing to keep cattle out of natural springs and to put native grasses back on the land. I have until November 2009 to finish my improvements.

What is ecologically distinctive about your part of the country?

 One distinction is in the Ozarks we have some of the highest carrying capacity per cattle per acre, given to the grasses, soil, and climate. We get about 2 snows per year. Grass is growing all year round. My cows will graze native warm weather grasses in the winter and cool weather grasses such as clover fescue in the summer. We also have hardy cattle for four seasons grazing.

What kind of cows are you raising?

I’m raising Charolais and I just bought a new herd of Black Angus Heifers from a local farmer, so I know their history well. I know what they’ve been eating. They’re bred so they’ll be calving in February.

What are the biggest issues in your region?

 The biggest issue is the market for the live grass-finished cattle. Where can I take a live grass-fed cow and sell it? We can’t process meat and sell it to anyone without a USDA certified facility processing it, and most of those are own by the big 3 packers. I couldn’t just bring in 30 cows. I consider myself a wholesale producer meat on the hoof. We never had control, before the packers, it was the government – they bought and processed the cows.

If the USDA would ease up, I could produce any grass-fed beef cheaper or for as much as a feedlot. If we truly had a Grass-fed America, I could take my calf to a sell barn that would have a way to process it or pack it as a grass-fed product without shipping it to a feedlot. The 2 sell barns within a 50 mile radius of my place run about 5,000 to 6,000 calves per week.

I was trying to find out what to do with my cattle that will be ready in 2010. I have friends who own restaurants, but because I don’t have a USDA processing facility to process them, legally I’d have to sell them as live cows to the restaurants owners, who would be in charge of processing them. I’m committed to it though. I’m raising them. I’m raising grass-fed cows and what I do with them I’ll have to figure that out when the time comes.

I’m very excited about our new administration. Our cheep food policy in the US has had many benefits but it has created the subsidized corn/feedlot/agri-busness we have today. It is imperative that we revisit our food policy as build new energy and economic policies.

Montana Ave. in Dillon

There was a lot of talk about Main Street last night at the debate. My Policy Advisor, Ulla Kjarval, asked in her blog entry, "Are they going to talk about food or farming?" They did not.

I came into this presidential race because I was tired of politicians remaining silent about food and farming. Consider what was addressed last night, time and time again: oil, the suffering economy, and the idea that oil independence is the answer to boosting the economy on Main Street.

I believe that boosting the economy on Main Street and reducing our total dependence on oil can be done simultaneously by changing the way we produce and distribute food. It’s very simple. Food production in the U.S. in the last 50 years has become heavily reliant upon oil in all stages of production and distribution. Many of our suffering Main Streets are surrounded by agricultural land, however much of this agricultural land is now owned by multi-national corporations which utilize processes, machinery, and chemicals that rely heavily on oil. Grass-fed ranchers, on the other hand, use minimal chemicals, minimal machinery, and are often able to sell their food directly to their communities. This is true for many independent produce farmers as well. Farmers benefit under this model by receiving a fair price for their products and by achieving a reduced dependence on oil and chemicals, which saves them money. Their surrounding communities (this where Main Street comes in) benefit because the farmer or rancher, and the people they employ, now have more money to spend at local businesses. Local people have greater access to fresh, healthy, locally produced foods, and increased business from the farmer. It is a more reciprocal relationship, with fewer middlemen and less oil used across the board.

This kind of Grass-fed Change is change we can really believe in. Connecting the dots between Main Street and what happens on our Farmland is essential to this debate, and it is essential that we, the people (and cows) of America support practices, legislation, and policy makers who understand the vital nature of this connection.