little cows & spotted dogs

There’s nothing like taking a ride in this season when the color is coming on and the days are high and blue and breezy, and so, a few days ago, I drove up northwest of Brandon to Spotted Dog Farm. Once there, I surveyed the vistas and spied not one cow. In fact, I’d been talking to Susan and Chic Whiting for a good half hour and the only animal I’d encountered was the enthusiastic and eponymous spotted dog, himself named Hawk, and a spotted pony that we were leading down to a corral. Oh, the registered Irish Dexter Cattle were off in a field (a breezy wave of the hand), said Susan, but I was beginning to doubt it. This wasn’t Montana, for instance, where a beeve could wander miles in its quest for grass.

But darned near it! There were 35 or so head of those diminutive cattle on 185 acres, and they were clear and way back on the back forty. Finally some black- and cinnamon-colored dots began to detach themselves from the rising treeline of one field and, like a wave, rushed the length of the field, stopping in a clump five feet away from us, heads down, necks stretched, their round nostrils whiffing and blowing bubbles, half-masticated clumps of grass sticking out the sides of their faces. These were the yearlings, half a dozen of them or so, sequestered from the mammas and babies so they might begin to learn to wear a halter and come when called.

Susan and Chic see their operation ultimately with three aims – cattle for beef, milk, and burden. At this point the meat operation is in full swing – they are able to sell the beef from six of the animals a year at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, and soon will sell from their farm store, too.

As for milking them – that’s in the future for now, and Chic and Susan doubt they’ll milk for themselves, but will raise the cows to sell for milk. And for burden. For these little cows are gentle, smart, and trainable, and can be used in pairs as farm-teams to do farm work. They will eventually – beginning with these six – be halter-trained, and sold for this purpose, too.

A person or two could own one or two of these little cows and have their own – very creamy – milk, a team, if two, to help pull up stumps or do other farm work, and, eventually, with careful breeding, beef to eat. Gee whiz, and Gee Haw.

The little cattle – boxy like angus or Hereford, but slightly smaller than the Jersey, to my eye – are fully grass-fed, grazing rotationally all the time grass grows green, and eating that grass in the form of hay in the winter, during which they retain the freedom to roam about and snuffle out what winter fodder they might, yet with the option of the open-sided barn for protection against the elements. They have their treats, too, which consist of beet pulp, the stuff that is left after beets are crushed and wrung for their sugar, then dried and compressed. They also love alfalfa squares, and apples from the many apple trees on the property.
We walked back up to the house and I sat on the porch to make some notes.

The Whitings have been here since 2001, with the first of the Irish Dexters, living in a small trailer until their house was hauled up the road in three parts. It’s a pretty house – cape on one side and ranch – with that long porch – on the other, perched on a high gentle rise. There’s a view of the Adirondacks and the acres are hilly, and were overgrown until they began the process of pulling out the Buckthorne that had taken over. What had been 300 acres belonging to the Vermont Land Trust, had been divided into two pieces. It hadn’t been farmed in maybe fifty years and, when it had been, it was a dairy farm.

Working with the Vermont Land Trust has been invaluable to them, a liaison visiting once or twice a year to help keep them in compliance with Land Trust rules and regulations and to offer other kinds of help. It was he who connected them with Diane Heleba at the USDA office in Rutland.  Sally Eugair, from the same office, helped them with a Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program (WHIP), to bolster up some areas and protect the wetland. EQUIP helped them deal with water quality. Cindy Watrous, from USDA, helped with a cattle nutritional program through a class that Susan took in Middlebury. And Willie Gibson and the Vermont Farm Viability Enhancement Program helped them produce a business plan.

“Networking is what it’s all about,” Susan says.

These names come as easily from their lips as from those of many other farmers I’ve talked to, because these people and agencies have been generous and helpful with their knowledge. And with that help, Chic and Susan have done an incredible job with infrastructure – water lines, barns, and berming of the land into paddocks – and growing a healthy herd.

“Wanna take the (John Deere) Gator and go find the main herd?” Chic asks, and I say an emphatic YES, having feared I’d taken up too much of their time already.

Well, shades of being 12 again. It’s been many many years since I’ve been on a tractor, and this little vehicle is much like one, though it has two seats and a small truck bed. Chic drives, I ride shotgun, and Susan is in the back. She slides off to open the many gates and close them behind us.

We wind up tippy, crooked little paths, around hills, down the farm path, all the way to the back of the farm, and there we find the main herd as we stop at one end of the field. After eyeing us quizzically from afar, the herd thunders bellowing to us down the length of the field. Some of them have wide and wickedly pointed horns. Those I do not approach, though I mix with some of the hornless mommas and babies.

Then Chic turns the Gator around and leads them out of that grazed paddock up to a nearer ungrazed one. It’s a slow start – they stand watching us at first but then notice that the gate is open and Susan and Chic are calling them and they suddenly thunder after us. It’s a wild race, the little truck with a slight lead as wild-eyed, wickedly horned beasts pursue us through the brush. Susan points out the hilly patches that they’ve cleared of buckthorn and other invasives. That’s a nice job, I say, imagining the challenge of it and long days spent outside doing this work. “It’s a good winter job,” says Susan. It’s the kind of  job, I know, that beaches you in the evening in front of a fire and crock-potted stew, feeling immense gratitude at having done real, hard, grown-up work!

The cattle are now contentedly grazing on the new grass, Susan fastens the gate behind us and we return to the house.

My friend, Ann Tiplady, from Red Houses Farm in Wallingford, constantly raises the issue, “Can one make a living raising beef cattle? And if one can’t, should one be occupying oneself in this manner?”
And so I ask the Whitings if they can make a living off this way of life.

“No,” is the answer to that. A rueful “no.” Susan works as a Physical Therapist at the Rutland Hospital, and Chic, a retired policeman from the Hyannis Port area, drove a school bus for several years after moving here but now works fulltime on the farm. He tells me that it is the prevailing wisdom that you’d need 300 head to make a living from it, and that would require a farm several times the size, and then, of course, it becomes a chore. But that number would be for a regular commercial herd. The Whitings rely on ‘value added’ to make a profit, and that value added for them is that their cattle are grass-fed and  tri-purposed.

My next, and last question: Do you love this life? Would you do it again?

The answer is instantaneous: “Absolutely!”

I take my leave, thanking them for the time they’ve taken out of their busy day to show me their impressive operation. Susan says, thoughtfully, “It’s good to take a little time, good to answer questions, because it makes us think about them. Usually we’re so busy we just keep on keepin’ on. Good to stop and think about why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

***

The Whitings welcome visitors but ask that you call ahead (247-6076). Spotted Dog Farm is a regular stop for the Audubon Society and popular with individual groups of birdwatchers. I can only imagine what a gold and glorious spot it will be in a few weeks.

Post Script: After this column was published in the Herald, a letter was appended to the column with some thoughts on cows and horns. This is it:

Not to worry about the horns on those little cows. Dexters are very friendly. But... if the animal wanted to hurt you.... horns would be the least of your worries! They can all kill you with very little trouble, if they wanted to. I watch my cattle & they don't use their horns to fight w/ each other. They head butt.
Dexters have an extreme amount of vasiclature in their horns. Like an elephants ears, they dissipate heat, to keep the cattle cool. I have a few cows that came to my farm w/ their horns removed. Poor things suffer terribly during heat spells.

Addenda: 10/12/10 
Sue checked out this information and got this reply from Animal Welfare Approved:

Horns for thermo-regulation

There is potential for sheep, goats, cattle and bison to use their horns as part of their thermoregulatory (temperature regulating) processes. In cattle the extreme is the Ankole Watusi , a cattle breed native to Africa which has horns that can grow up to six feet long, honeycombed with blood vessels. This makes perfect sense as the Ankole Watsui evolved to live in areas where the temperature stays very high all year round.

The way the heat exchange process works is for blood to be pumped round the ‘core’ of the horn – the bit that actually has blood vessels in it – and as this blood passes close to the outside of the horn heat can be lost to the atmosphere and cooler blood returns to the body of the animal.

However, other cattle breeds evolved to live in colder environments and there is a difference in horn morphology for cattle breeds from tropical and temperate zones. Research has shown that in temperate species the surface area of the vascularised inner core is reduced while the thickness of the outer keratin sheath is increased. This limits heat loss from the horns, as in colder climates loss of heat would be a welfare negative.

Animals have evolved to adapt to their environment but this adaptation takes many thousands of years. An animal from a hot climate cannot suddenly switch from using their horns to cool themselves to stopping that heat loss. It is worth noting that antelope originating from Africa have actually been found to have frostbite at the tips of their horns when they are kept in zoos in cold countries – the cooling effect of having horns cannot be controlled by the animal.

The Dexter is obviously a temperate cattle breed; originating from south west Ireland. Its horns will therefore not be a major part of its cooling process.

Further to the points above, thermoregulation in cattle is not solely a function of having horns. There are a number of breeds and strains of cattle that are polled – that is they naturally do not have horns. A number of popular cattle breeds such as the Angus are polled cattle and other widespread breeds such as the Hereford have polled strains. If the only way cattle could heat regulate was through their horns these animals would not look very healthy.

When temperatures exceed the thermo neutral zone for cattle – at around 85F or more – the animals regulate their temperature by evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling is mainly effected through sweating and respiration. Heat stress is a function of time, temperature and humidity, because cattle rely on water evaporation via sweating and panting to dissipate an excess of heat they have generated metabolically or absorbed from the environment. High humidity makes evaporative cooling less efficient. Cattle will seek shade when it is available to minimize the effects of high temperatures.

There are negative points to having horns for the animals and for the stock people managing their health and welfare. Animals can damage one another with horns – a boss animal whether male or female will keep less dominant animals away from feed and water with its horns. Breeding males can fight and injure one another with their horns. In the wild this is about survival of the fittest and allowing younger animals with different genetics to take charge of the herd and breed. In a farming situation this could be the incapacity or loss of your best bull. Lastly there is a human health and safety issue with handling horned cattle. A horned steer that throws its head around when it is being handled can be a considerable danger to those trying to work with it.

There are some farmers who choose to keep horned cattle and who have the particular skills and equipment to manage them – for example feeders and squeeze chutes must be specially adapted for horned animals to prevent them being trapped or injured.  AWA would never require that such farmers moved to breeding polled cattle or that they disbud their calves to stop horns growing. However AWA does recognize that for other farmers and other breeds disbudding calves may offer the best welfare for life. AWA does of course specify the age and methods of disbudding that are acceptable to minimize the stress of the operation. AWA does not allow the mutilation of dehorning – the removal of the horn once it is fully formed and attached to the skull.

References:

Picard K, Festa-Bianchet M, Thomas D (1996) The cost of horniness: heat loss may counter sexual selection for large horns in temperate bovids. In: Ecoscience 3(3): 280-284

 http://countrystudies.us/united-states/weather/vermont/brandon.htm

Splendid Burgers

A visit to the Farmer's Diner in Quechee yesterday was spectacular. This is what I want Rutland and Wallingford to offer me -- a 6 ounce hamburger made of grass-fed beef with a tomato slice, onion, lettuce and blue cheese all from local farms within a 70 mile radius. And a homemade bun from Klinger's. And a pile of hand-cut potatoes grown right here -- at Chapelle's Potato Farm, in fact -- and, I would like to think, deep fried in suet (but no, I called them and found out they deep fry with bleccchhh Canola Oil that man made stuff that used to poison cows. But I digress.) And lemonade/iced tea in a pint canning jar with a handle and no bottom. It was refilled three times! And hush puppies made of cornmeal grown at Butterworks Farm, served in a little cast iron frying pan with a maple BBQ sauce.

Photo by Lowell Snowdon Klock

Lowell had a NY style Rueben with Farmers Diner house cured corned beef, Boggy Meadow Swiss, sauteed
sauerkraut, creamy 1,000 Island Dressing on grilled LaPanciata rye, and Claudette, was clearly drawn to the Cock and Fire, which billed itself as a tender roasted Misty Knoll Chicken, finished with housemade buffalo sauce, topped wth GreenMountain Blue Cheese, all wrapped in a soft, warm flour tortilla.

Photo by Lowell Snowdon Klock

The wait-staff was made up mostly of pert young things, but our waitress was mature woman, Judy, who, when pressed just the slightest, erupted with passionate pride in the place and the product. Soon she brought out the young chef, Scott, who showed equal passion and accessibility. We talked and talked, and learned that there's a Farmer's Diner in Middlebury, too, that I will visit next week with my friend Dana, who will be visiting from Virginia. And that there are plans for one to open in Burlington. And two in San Francisco.

Tod, The only fault I can find is that you fry in Canola oil. Please consider switching to something more sustainable, like cow fat.

Please note, all you local mid-priced restaurants (my meal cost me a whopping $13), that it can be done. Note it, and do it!

Please, I mean.

Please, please, please, please!

...for want of a hamburger...

Nick Ronfeld and Kim Stewart have their way with Chicken Marsala over Linguini

Where we used to TGIF immoderately and with great enthusiasm at the Back Home Café – the original – back in The Day, nowadays we’ve formed a habit of walking down to Sal’s South in Wallingford to have a carafe of red wine and a bite to eat. It’s a most enjoyable thing to do, as well as prudent if the carafe is a large one – we can walk home. Walking is good after celebrating, almost as good as dancing.

But the point of this whole thing is that I find myself unfairly stigmatized because I ordered a hamburger the other gorgeous evening, sitting on the big stone patio and watching the sunset. Yes, of course, Sal’s is known for their pasta dishes, the delicious Chicken Marsala (with mushrooms) over linguini, for instance. But sometimes a person just wants a bit of protein without all the starch and cream so, though I searched the menu over for that very thing and did not find it, I knew there must be a hamburger hiding there somewhere.

Not only that, but Kim, who once was my favorite waitress in the world, waited patiently while I said I wanted a hamburger, even egged me on, asked me, with one arched eyebrow, “And how would you like that done,” and stood by patiently as I decided that it would be medium instead of medium rare, and asked her – rather, told her – that of course that would be free-range beef, right? Maybe from Ann Tiplady’s farm down on Hartsboro. “Oh,” I added, no bun, of course, but “with a thick slice of onion?” Kim stood there with her pen held over her pad. I noticed she wasn’t writing. It was getting busy. She’d humored me enough. She has a baby at home, and a husband, and a life, and customers clamoring at every table before she could go home to them. Everyone was looking at me. “What?” I said. “What!”

“I’m waiting to find out what you’re really going to order,” said Kim.

“I’m ordering...” I began. God, I’m slow.

I ended up with an appetizer portion of meatballs, mostly because I’d held everyone up for too long already. They weren’t exactly what I was looking for. That would’ve been the dark, crusty, salty bite through the hamburger’s well-grilled outside to the spilling of pink-to-red juiciness inside, complemented by the crisp sweetness of the onion.

Well, Sal’s might never have stooped to serve a hamburger – as everyone and his brother have told me gleefully since – but times are’a changing, and maybe they should.

...jiggidy jig...

Perhaps you don’t know how Sal’s got its start. It was on Friday Nights at the Back Home Café – the real Back Home Café, started by Will Patten back in 1971 – when Sal Gullo started hand-making pizza with a genuine, hippy-dippy whole-wheat crust. Friday nights were live music nights at the BHC, and a pizza or two along with a jug of wine was the perfect stimulus to get you out on the floor dancing your fool head off, then back to the table for a sip and a bite. Some of you remember, eh? It was great fun, kids and all. We lived in Rutland then, on Oak Street, so it was by way of Shanks Mare or bicycle that we got home again, jiggidy jig.

In the way of things, that tradition ended but, soon afterward, Sal and Jack Elliott started Sal’s Italian Restaurant – somewhere around 1977 out on Woodstock Avenue – serving hearty home-made and home-inspired food in the Italian manner. Not too long after that they moved to their long-time home on West Street. Jack Elliot, who’s no longer involved, reminded me the other day that it was the first non-smoking restaurant in Rutland, maybe even in Vermont. And I do remember conversations revolving around that very thing: “Let’s go get a Sal’s pizza.” “Yeah, but you can’t smoke there.” “Oh, right.”

Jerry Kyhill, along with Steve (Rebo) Abraham, bought Sal out in ’81, then Nick Ronfeld bought out Rebo 11 years ago, and Jerry and Nick started the Wallingford’s Sal’s in 2001. Got that straight? Well, in any case, they must be doing something right. They’ve been around for a long time.
Stone patio at Sal's South in Wallingford

A few nights after my gaffe on the stone steps of Sal’s South, I told the story to a few friends over cocktails down at the beach. Carol said, thoughtfully, “We had some of Ann Tiplady’s hamburgers last night, and they were good, but I couldn’t really tell any difference between that grass-fed beef and what you get in the grocery store. A little more expensive.” As it turned out, Leo and I had Ann Tiplady’s hamburgers the night before, too. I thought they were juicier and also crumblier, probably due to the fact that store-bought meat is fattier and mushes together more. Otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference in taste between grass-fed and the best commercial hamburger that I used to get at the Locker, but I am perhaps more aware than most people of the way factory farmed beef is raised, and I am increasingly reluctant to buy it and eat it.

...w.a.w.w.e.e....

A pound of hamburger from the supermarket, or even from your local butcher, is not meat from one cow, but rather a mixture of several, possibly hundreds, with perhaps traces of thousands.

A typical beef was born out west somewhere, in Colorado or Montana or the Dakotas, and lived the life of Riley for the first 6 months, with its mother, nursing at will, roaming the grasslands it fed on as it was designed to do, free as a bird.

Then things began to get a little rough. First of all it was weaned, taken from its mother, put into a pen and taught to supplement its grass with grain and corn. After a month or so there, it was shipped to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) somewhere, most likely Kansas, where it was confined in even more crowded conditions with huge numbers of other cattle, wading around not in grass but in excrement – they slept in it too – and were fed even more grain and corn.

The centerpiece of the CAFO is the feed mill. On one side of the mill, tractor trailers feed 50 tons of corn into it every hour upon the hour. On the other side, tanker trucks pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat – often beef fat, in spite of the danger of disease from cannibalizing beef – and protein supplements made of molasses and urea, which is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to fertilizer spread on corn fields.

All of this is mixed with synthetic vitamins and the hormone, estrogen, as well as the antibiotics Rumensin and Tylosin. A cow was designed to eat grass; making them eat corn and grain makes them sick. Most of the antibiotics sold in America today go into animal feed. It’s as simple as that.

This sludge is fed to the animals in confinement before they are slaughtered for our dining enjoyment. Immobile confinement and a diet of grain and corn and antibiotics and hormones gets a beef to slaughter in 16 months where it used to take anywhere from 2 to 5 years.

Read that again, and repeat after me: We are What We Eat and We Are What We Eat Eats, too.

In the grasslands, on the home ranch, the sun shone, the grass grew, the cattle ate it, created cow-plops which fertilized the grassland, completing the great cycle of nutrition naturally. In the CAFO the great lakes of manure created by these confined and poisoned animals cannot be spread on neighboring farmers’ fields for it burns and poisons them, too. What is done with it? Well, besides it seeping into waterways downstream, I don’t know – it’s a little like burying spent rods from Vermont Yankee on the bank of the Connecticut River. It creates big sores in the earth’s hide that are not capable of healing themselves, and the infection spreads into our waterways and air.

Michael Pollan didn’t seem to know either – he followed his steer and the corn it would die on, but he seemed not to’ve gotten too far with that manure lagoon. For this short outline of our meat’s origins, I am heavily indebted to Michael Pollan for his thorough research in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In it he outlines several different meals and traces the components of them from sun to grass to table. The industrial meal, involving corn and beef, is an eye opener involving the mass poisoning of the American people and their air and water and land by a few companies, notably Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland who, in the midst of hunger riots, recently announced record-breaking profits.

I’ve been quoting from the Omnivore’s Dilemma since it was published, and I’ve skipped around in it, but only recently sat down and read it from cover to cover. It’s absolutely breathtaking – I know a lot of you have it in your To Be Read pile, and I encourage you to read it now. The facts are so horrific in our food industry that sometimes your eyes glaze over because it’s like everything else – it’s too big, it’s too hard to grasp, “there’s nothing I can do!” But we can do something, we can not buy industrial food, we can vote with our pocketbooks.

Ann Tiplady’s Red Houses Farm beef spends its whole life, like the first six months of the industrial steer, munching grass. If she had her druthers, though, she’d rather have a portable slaughtering station so the beef wouldn’t be stressed out at the end of its life by being loaded on a truck and shipped to a strange, grassless place to be slaughtered. Ann sells her beef at the Rutland Farmers’ Market, both inside and out.

Ann Tiplady's ladies amble down the path to pasture

And that’s the hamburger I was envisioning as I sat out front of Sal’s South the other night. Owner, Jerry Kyhill tells me I might have to wait a long time. “We’re an Italian restaurant,” he says. “We don’t do hamburgers!” but then he tells me, “Give me some advance notice...” Please, Jerry, I’ll spend more for a grass-fed hamburger. All around me people are eating pasta or pizza for $8 to $15: I’d gladly buy into a really good hamburger for that! And sometimes I’d gladly go for Jerry’s favorite Shrimp Fra Diablo. “It’s spicy shrimp over spaghetti – nothing out of the ordinary, but tasty. Really good,” he tells me.

Leo loves the Fettuccini Alfredo, and we often order pizza, either out or in. Nick Ronfeld is the chef who divides his time, as does Jerry, between Sal’s South and Sal’s Rutland, and his favorite dish is Shrimp and Scallops in Spicy Red Clam Sauce over Linguini. Yup, I’d go for that, too, occasionally.

Kim Stewart (okay, I still adore her – who could resist the deadpan manner in which she led me on) says the pizza is great! She, and her husband, are excellent cooks, too.

...what if?...

If I had my ‘druthers, smaller local restaurants like Sal’s would use more local ingredients, including chicken and beef and other meats, as well as vegetables and fruit in season. Nick looks thoughtful at that heartfelt sentiment, and then repeats the mantra – “It’s a matter of cost – we can’t keep competitive unless everyone else used local ingredients too.”

Of course, what’s really expensive is industrial food. The system is not sustainable and it’s making the American people sick – both long term, with all the chronic diseases we have, which include diabetes, heart disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer, and depression, as well as the various psychic illnesses our kids are prone to, and it sickens the animals, the land and the economy, as well. At some point we will have to make other arrangements, and the sooner the better. What if all the smaller, local restaurants – Sal’s, Sabby’s, Back Home Again, Constantino’s, formed a little union and vowed to keep up with each other buying local food?

Someone tossed of a figure out to me the other day – one of our supermarkets sells $250,000 worth of produce a week, and ninety-nine percent of that money goes out of state and to big corporations. What if we in the Rutland area took even one quarter of that business and gave it to our farmers at the Farmers’ Market or the Co-op? That money would stay in the area and support our farmers, our health, and our landscape, as well as our economy. What if Diamond Run Mall allowed a farmer to put some cows to graze on that big grassy area that surrounds it? They’d save a whole lot of money on chemical fertilizers and lawn mowing, for sure. What if, instead of yet another MALL (yet another mall?) proposed for the area across Rt 7 from Diamond Run at the intersection of Rt 4 – what if there were cows and tracts of vegetable fields, and incubator farms? Even fruit trees? What a statement that would make to visitors coming into Rutland! What a reminder that would make to each and every one of us which side of our bread the butter is on! What a valuable resource for new farmers and people wanting to eat locally!

Yet another mall? As the same person commented rather inelegantly – “Who needs more CRAP?!” That made me remember an incident that happened a month or so ago when we were driving from Portsmouth up to Portland on 95 in a heavy, wet blizzard. Humongous trucks flew by us with all the confidence in the world, and the last, that added such insult to injury that we got off at the next exit and made the rest of the way on Rt. 1, was a Frito-Lay truck that completely whipped our small car with slush. Yup. Fritos gotta get through in spite of rain or sleet or snow.

But of course Nick has a point – Sal’s probably wouldn’t be able to stay in business if its prices were higher than other restaurants who continued to serve industrial food. Why don’t you guys get together and get with the program? I urge you to. We have to start somewhere.

...thank you, mr. pollan...

“So yes, you should eat mostly plants, but if you’re going to eat meat, your meat should eat mostly plants. And I think that’s really a big part of where we’ve gone wrong with raising cattle in this country: feeding them grain.” Michael Pollan in an interview by Gourmet magazine.