I still remember the forearm strain of carrying four four-gallon jugs of milk in from the car when mum would get home from the supermarket. When we were little, we drank what Americans called ‘Vitamin D milk’, which was full cream. A bit older and we were moved along to ‘2%’, the equivalent of something like ‘Rev’ in Australia. When I started university, I switched to ‘skim milk’, or as we’d say here, ‘skinny milk’.
There was a short period in my adolescence when Dad insisted we drink a glass of raw goat’s milk every day to help boost our immunity against poison oak. We loathed it, and I reckon I contracted poison oak intentionally to demonstrate the futility of this daily torture before he gave up.
When I gave up skinny milk, I repudiated it with the scorn of a reformed smoker. Keep that thin blue liquid with the mouthfeel of vinegar away from me, thanks. Nowadays I like my milk raw, especially after a night in the fridge so that the first pour has globules of cream to tantalise the tongue as it dances through the skim milk underneath.
It’s illegal to sell raw milk in Australia. You can buy cigarettes, eggs from chickens that never knew a day outside a cage, and as much Coca Cola as you want, but not unpasteurised milk. I understand the health risks, just as I understand them about raw eggs and undercooked meat. But I won’t give up drinking raw milk any more than I’ll stop making mayonnaise and eating burgers made from freshly ground beef cooked so they’re still red in the middle.
What I don’t drink anymore is milk from the big processors, and goddess forbid someone should offer me private label milk from Coles or Woolies. According to Australian Dairy Farmers, some 30 dairy farmers have gone out of business in Queensland since January 2011, at least some due to the duopoly’s unscrupulous milk wars. I know who needs my business most, and it’s the independent dairies, preferably organic. And I’ll continue to defiantly drink raw milk when I can.
My story is not unlike many who spent years as a vegetarian only to resume eating meat – I chose a vegetarian diet for ethical and environmental reasons, and returned to meat for health reasons. I had two very healthy pregnancies while vegetarian and breastfed my first two children with no issues, only to become severely anaemic early in the third pregnancy. I tried Floradix Herbal Iron Supplement, which had seen me through the final trimesters before without dropping into the anaemic range, to no avail.
As I sat in wan exhaustion at work one day in the third month, it came to me: a burger will fix this. Considering I hadn’t eaten nor craved meat for over six years (and no pork or poultry for even longer because of my particular concerns about the horrific conditions these animals face in intensive systems), this was a pretty weird thought. But moments later, I walked into a little burger joint in Smith Street, Fitzroy and ordered a burger and asked them to slather it with hot English mustard. I’ll be honest, I felt absolutely nothing except exhilaration and a sense of well being. No guilt – I think my body was thanking me, again, weird, I know, ‘cos it was a burger after all, not a scotch filet, but, hey, that iron slid into my blood cells and brought colour to my cheeks for the first time in months.
A recurring claim in discussions of food security is that small-scale organic agriculture cannot feed the world, a claim used to support the continued centralisation of agriculture into the hands of a few mega-multinational corporations, who will save us all with GM crops. Arguments are posited around higher yield and decreased pesticide use with GM crops, totally eliding the high yields that can be obtained in organic agriculture and the complete lack of pesticides in these systems, just for a start. Such GM propaganda is utterly spurious and refuted in the literature.
The field of agroecology offers a rich body of work that makes the argument for moving to more sustainable, small-scale agriculture, whether organic or with reduced external inputs such as commercial fertilisers and pesticides. In a few recent discussions I’ve had with supporters of GM, I’ve sent them links to reports to back up the clear and demonstrable evidence that we must move to a very different way of producing food that works to preserve natural resources and regenerate landscape while supporting local communities, but I don’t believe any of them ever read the research.
So today I decided to tweet quotes and paraphrases from one piece of work, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food report: ‘Agroecology and the Right to Food‘, released on the 3rd of August 2011. I hoped that by reading the 21-page report myself and offering just the highlights, those who speak loudly on a topic they appear to know little about might be better informed. Of course I also knew it would offer plenty of good evidence for those already advocating for sustainable ag. I offer you the list of the quotes and paraphrases I tweeted here in one place for easy reference. Note that most of these are direct quotes from the report, and a couple of them are paraphrased – I have not added any of my own comments.
I have an article up on The Hoopla today: Happy ‘Free Range’ Christmas. In it, I detail the certification standards around free-range meat in Australia, and give suggestions about which ones to trust and where to source ethically-produced poultry and pork, plus some advice and links on sustainable seafood.
There are more retailers and promoters of ethical and local produce than I had space for in the article, so I thought I’d put a few more here. Not all produce listed by these sites will necessarily be free-range meats – I’ve included local directories here, and you’ll need to do your own local homework on the details!
I’d be very interested in feedback on more sites – I’ll pop them into the following list as I’m made aware of more.
Last week it was my honour to do a guest post for Milk Maid Marian (a truly excellent and thoughtful blogger on the realities of dairy farming) on what ethical farming means to consumers. There is some great discussion in the comments on Marian’s blog, and the post generated a lot of interest on the twitterz. Next thing I knew, @andrewfaith had suggested to @wendyharmer that she might like to cross post the piece on The Hoopla, which she did the very next morning. The comments there are also well worth the read.
All of this happened while I was at the inaugural Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference in Kingscliff, and then immediately afterwards at the Annual Council Meeting of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), for whom I am no longer an office bearer as of 1 January 2012. Hence you’ll see I haven’t responded to any of the comments on the posts on Marian and Wendy’s sites, which I aim to rectify soon.
Just to finish this little update, I’ve also just been appointed Company Secretary to the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, where I look forward to using my years of higher ed advocacy and activism to step up my advocacy for sustainable and ethical farming and consumption practices.
Thank you, 2011, for the glorious life-changing opportunities, and here’s looking towards 2012 for even brighter (and bigger) horizons!
Everyone’s crying over spilt milk, or rather the calves who are sacrificed so that we may drink milk. Dairy farmers are crying over the reputational damage to their livelihood – and it’s not exactly a cushy job commanding six-figure salaries. And it seems to me that everyone is a little bit right, and a little bit wrong, but that there is a clear way forward.
To backtrack, this Animals Australia video which depicts the short life of a ‘bobby calf’ in a manner designed to evoke the most emotion possible managed to upset consumers and farmers equally, from what I can tell. According to the dairy farmers who are commenting on thoughtful blogs such as @milkmaidmarian’s, they don’t send their calves straight to the abattoir, and are acutely conscious of the value of each life they nurture and take on their farms. They frequently make the point that it is the city-based consumers who are too often utterly unaware (and uncaring?) of the conditions under which their food is grown.
I think it’s fantastic that animal welfare groups apply pressure to the livestock industry for humane treatment during an animal’s life and at its death. As an omnivore, I’m frankly not that interested (but also not really fussed) in being told I shouldn’t eat meat – I’ve made my choices thoughtfully and I’m happy with that – but I do want my meat ethically produced.
I also think it’s fantastic that farmers like Marian speak up about their practices, which are different from those displayed in the Animals Australia video. I know the dairy farmer near us has a similar practice – he raises the bull calves to 2 years then sells them for beef (and not for a lot of money, remember, as Friesians are not considered great eating for primal cuts) and the heifers are grown to be more milkers on the farm. I applaud farmers like Marian joining in pressuring for ethical treatment of animals – people like her can help by demonstrating alternatives.
But of course the reason the video exists is because there are apparently 700,000 bobby calves going to slaughter at around five days old – they are ‘waste products’ – and their few days of life entail an existence with which most people are deeply uncomfortable, both for its apparent brutality but also its brevity. I know I’m uncomfortable with the system, and grateful to be in a position to choose organic milk from a farm whose practices I know and trust.
I’m very conscious of the sensitivities in these debates – nobody wants to be ‘that guy who abuses animals’, and ‘abuse’ is far more relative than any of us care to admit. People running intensive animal operations (or CAFOs, aka ‘factory farms’) claim that the animals in their care are ‘happy’, ‘fine’, ‘safe’, or ‘healthy’, but by my definition that’s simply impossible, because I believe in respecting the ‘pigness of the pig’, as Joel Salatin says. So for me, farm animals should be able to graze, dig, forage, scratch and wander in a manner as close to how they would if we weren’t constraining them with some fences and the like as possible. But every time a consumer is happy to buy intensively-farmed chicken (or pork, or beef…), s/he is complicit in the system, and I have been too at times.
But when consumers (or the media or government) cry out in horror over the treatment of animals, they should think long and hard about the precarious position most farmers are in. Farms are at the mercy of the elements, which in this age of climate change has seen Australian farmers cope with constant rounds of drought and floods. Add to this an ever-narrowing range of distribution and retail outlets who control farm gate prices, which have plateaued for years in the face of rising costs of production.
As my limited experience as a producer grows and my interactions with other farmers deepens, I am keenly aware of how difficult it is to simply make a living producing food. And if all the farmers like us are forced out by low prices, consumers will be left with only intensive farms, the same ones where bobby calves are waste products, and pigs and chickens are raised in sheds.
So my thoughts are this: we farmers need to be transparent in our practices and let consumers judge for themselves whether they’re happy with how we treat our animals and the land. The internet is our friend – we can show pictures and tell the stories of our animals (well, slowly slowly until there’s a National Broadband Network, but that’s another post), so long as we are happy with what we’re doing. Those who won’t show us their animals certainly seem to be hiding something, though they protest they’re not. As @greenvalefarm said recently, ‘transparency is the best certification’.
And as consumers, we need to ask questions and listen to farmers. We need to value the people producing our food, both socially and economically. We need to better understand that the reason that farm gate prices may not have been immediately impacted by Coles dropping its price to $1 per litre for milk is because farmers have been getting around 50 cents per litre for over a decade anyway – any extra cash goes into the pockets of processors and retailers (that is, Coles and Woolworths, who have 80% market share in Australia).
I’m happy to pay a lot more than $1 per litre for my milk, but I want the extra to go back to farmers, not to those who would ‘value add’ to a product that I think is best straight from the cow! If you want that too, @flavourcrusader has an excellent alt.milk list on her wonderful blog.
‘It feels great TO BE A FARMER, and ah, I dunno, I’ve been married to Stuart for a bajillion years – feels kinda the same as always to be his wife.’
***
‘I’ll go ask Stuart where to plant this,’ our helper for the day says TO ME and walks away to find him.
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‘You don’t have the strength or the skills to do what he does.’
***
These are just some of the phrases that have made me despair in these first two months of farming. We came here with a shared vision – to be sustainable, ethical pig farmers. We’d been heading towards this decision for a long time, and once we worked out what we wanted to farm, we spent the year researching pigs – emphasis is on we. We came armed with a reasonable amount of knowledge for city slickers, but also with a huge learning curve ahead of both of us.
I was obviously aware that sexism is an issue in agriculture, I just didn’t consider how it would affect me. As a vocal feminist in academic (and previously secondary education and corporate) spaces, I’m no stranger to sexism in the workplace. But I thought I had a handle on it. Anyone can see from my blog and interactions with me that I (as part of we) have become a farmer – this is the newest phase in my many lives, and I am embracing it wholeheartedly.
So here we are on the farm, learning together. We have a mad menagerie of animals for whom I have largely assumed the leadership. Both of us care for them, but overall, I spend a bit more time feeding them, obsessing about their well being, and drafting a whole farm plan that will guide our paddock rotations and fodder planting schedule. We both spend hours out there working on fences.
Stuart’s dad described this to me as, ‘You’re a planner, and Stuart’s a do-er’. With all due respect, while it’s true that I am more of a planner and Stuart can’t seem to stop doing, I hardly think my planning habits are slowing down my doings, and I am growing the forearms to prove it! Ah, but see, there I go – being defensive. Oh, how I despise being put in this corner.
I have never been anything‘s wife. I’ve always been my own thing who happens to be married.
One of the most exasperating aspects of the seemingly relentless gendering of farmers is the ways in which we do in fact fall into traditional roles. The most obvious one occurs around cooking. I have not given up my role as the primary cook in our house, a role I happen to adore. But it results in me coming in from the paddocks an hour or more before Stuart (and other helpers on the farm) to do meal prep, and consequently less involvement outside, especially when others are here to stay. So visitors witness me inside more, and I feel the need to be there to provide for everyone – compounding both their stereotypes and my frustration.
There are other behaviours that compound the gender roles – Stuart’s background is in building, so of course his skillset while we construct fences, erect new gates, and convert a shipping container into our new bedroom and study is a bit more useful than mine. I therefore defer to him on building matters, which I think is the right thing to do for quality control. 🙂 But this also leads to further assumptions about who is doing what and how much, most of which involve assuming Stuart is a farmer and I’m a homemaker.
Stuart is a lot stronger than me, but in fact very little of the work requires mega-strength, and most can be done by normal strength people such as myself, especially if we work in pairs. Sure, Stuart can lift and carry huge fence posts inhuman distances, but I’d venture to say most farmers actually either couldn’t, or just wouldn’t. They’d use tools rather than brute strength, just as I do.
It’s interesting that nobody ever felt compelled to call me a ‘builder’s wife’ or similar – perhaps partially because our professional identities were distinct? But farming is such a masculine space in Australia – nobody has asked Stuart how it feels to be a farmer’s husband, I can assure you. And it’s such a disenfranchising experience having people fail to see you – in no other profession have people failed to acknowledge me for my work.
Let’s face it, we’re both learning farming skills and we’re both out there building and fixing fences, digging holes, feeding animals, and planting trees and fodder crops. I wouldn’t ask anyone to call me a builder, which I’m not, but I do want the respect of being called a farmer, because I am one.
As regular readers are well aware, now we are farmers. And so Jonai Farms must have its own website, of course, where I’ve decided to blog our adventures in farming.
It will be interesting learning which blog is for which post, and occasionally I will simply cross post. So for those interested in all things farming and the rural life, check out The Hedonist Life over at Jonai Farms. 🙂
Rhythms are so much better than schedules. One day might be at a super fast tempo, the next a slow, dreamy waltz. As someone who has never enjoyed regular schedules, I revel in developing rhythms.
In cooking, as in life, rhythms should respond to the seasons. When warmth comes from the sun, it’s the season for light, sharp chopping and cold, crunchy vegetables. When the woodstove warms the hearth, it’s time for slow-simmering stews, endless loaves of bread and a bottomless pot of chai.
Frosty mornings
Jonai Farms is teaching us its rhythms. Frosty mornings call for a hot oven to bake the sourdough that rose overnight as we watch another perfect sunrise.
Bread rising with the sun...Love that big new oven
Days that can’t break 10C beg for a chai station on the woodstove, which also doubles as a temperature regulator for the nighttime yoghurt making brought on by the endless supply of fresh milk from a local dairy.
Chai station
Perfect spot for setting yoghurtReal milk
A farmer’s life of physical toil from sun-up to sundown justifies fresh eggs daily on the morning’s sourdough with thick lashings of butter, and sometimes Greenvale Farm‘s most excellent bacon.
A farmer's breakfast
Warm days invite us out for lunches al fresco, but the mercury drop that trails just behind sunset demands enamelled cast iron be filled with luscious lamb shanks, a huge pot of dahl, or cinnamon-spiked chili.
Dinner our first night at Jonai Farms - big pot o' chili
When a big storm knocks out the power for the night, break out the hurricane lamps and shift that osso bucco out of the electric oven and onto the gas stovetop.
Cooking like they used to
A couple days of meaty wintery dishes lead us naturally back to gado gado or palak paneer kofta.
gado gadoPalak paneer kofta, masala dahl & fresh yoghurt
And no matter where we are or what the season, ‘peace and happiness begin, geographically speaking, where garlic is used in cooking’ (Marcel Boulestin).
These are the rhythms making the Jonai happy beyond our wildest expectations of farm life. What a privilege to be both grateful beneficiaries and mindful custodians of the land.
Road Trip USA was envisioned to serve a number of purposes, one of them to visit small, rebel farmers who are concerned enough about the impact of large industrial agriculture to participate in system-wide change through sustainable practices on their own farms. Those we have visited have been generous with their knowledge, and certainly fit Joel Salatin’s criteria that farms should be ‘aromatically and aesthetically pleasing’ – I’ll be posting on some soon…
The first farm we visited was in fact Polyface, which I’ve already detailed. It is a wonderful place, and an inspiration to many new and aspiring farmers such as ourselves. Salatin is not just farming, he’s also combating complacence and acceptance of industrial agriculture as normative through his many books, workshops, and what seems like a lot of time on the lecture circuit. I recommend reading a great post over on ‘Good Cooking for Hard Times’ that outlines some of the consequences of our faith in industrial ag and gives further detail to Polyface.
But I should begin at the beginning. For Road Trip USA, we packed the essential reading for our continued research into sustainable farming, then prepared ourselves for the Land of Processed Food.
When we encountered initial difficulties with the RockVan, you can imagine our surprise in the rather uninspiring town of Springfield, Virginia to find a little diner promoting itself as ‘Farm to Table’ just around the corner from our freeway hotel.
Turns out the Silver Diner is a regional chain that is ‘locally owned and operated’, and while it’s nice to see the interest and effort around sourcing produce locally, I’m really not sure about the ‘natural’ claims nor their ethical credentials after checking out their egg and milk suppliers.
The food we were served fit the bill of most chain fare in the States – large servings smothered in cheese, tasting of, well… fat. Vegetables were in short supply, the pancake breakfast managed to look as though there’s nothing local or natural about it – just what people want, right? I don’t want to knock Silver Diner for trying, but I was struck by how the commercial imperative to cater to the mainstream desire for sameness and quantity seems to be hampering their efforts at really tapping into the ‘farm to table’ movement. Less generously, these people are opportunists dressing up (relatively) local produce as ‘natural’.
But that’s just the first day.
As we’ve traversed thousands of miles across this vast, beautiful country, two of our most common interactions with food and agriculture have been amongst farmlands and supermarkets. Restaurants, while revealing what people eat outside the home, don’t tell you as much about their everyday existence as supermarkets do, and while supermarkets completely obscure their products’ sources, just drive through rural America and you’ll see the often-sad source for yourself.
Much of what we’ve seen evokes a bit of the nostalgic rural idyl – neat rows of corn bursting green across the horizon, the glimmer of red capsicums peeking through deeply verdant fields, circles of golden hay tidily surrounding a homely barn. In Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, it’s the cavernous old barns in varying states of decay or fresh repair, and if the mid-South is barns, Texas is windmills.
Yet if you drive through these fields day after day, week after week, and you have your sustainable and fair-trade agricultural lenses on, what you see is monocultures, dead and dying soils, rubbish-strewn poverty in small farming communities and field-workers’ cottages, and pastures decorated with billboards advertising casinos or treatment for Lupus.
The Mississippi Delta’s relentless monotony of cornfields made me wonder at the outcry against palm tree plantations in Malaysia, when our own backyard is so untidy. Not that I’m suggesting we shouldn’t protest the destruction of rainforests for monocultures, but that we should scrutinise the practices of our own countries more closely (who, of course, are also hugely reliant on palm oil for the gargantuan processed food industry). In case the monocultures don’t give you a touch of dysphoria, there’s the poverty – from run-down trailers to shotgun shacks held together with little more than a Southern Baptist’s prayers, rural Mississippi (which is pretty much all of Mississippi, the poorest state in the US) is poor – like, Flint, Michigan poor.
In Mississippi, what really struck me was the exploitation of labour, as it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t the farm owners’ houses we were despairing at.
But when you get to west Texas, where broad-acre cotton and wheat dominate the landscape, it gets harder to tell who owns what, and our sense was that the mid-sized family farms were the ones under enormous threat from long-term unsustainable practices and the current drought.
There’s spirited debate amongst the farming community here over when they can start calling it of a scale of the Dust Bowl of the 30s, but whether what we’re seeing is that bad or not, it’s very very bad. Whole wheat crops have been ploughed under, cattle sold early, and grain elevators gone bankrupt.
Even the rivers have up and left the state.
The detritus of industrial agriculture gone wrong is everywhere – from dead soils to deserted farmhouses, the dust devils are closing in.
Let them eat air - wind farms may be the real future of Texan farming
But from wind springs new life, and just across Interstate 40 from the sad and stinking feedlots outside Amarillo are some of Texas’ many wind farms, a hopeful backdrop to the crumbling disasters of industrial agriculture in America’s midwest. Even the private oil derricks seem relatively harmless as they dredge the last of the land’s lifebloods from under its withering skin.
Lone oil derricks feature in Texan pastures
Yet many argue we must have these monolithic systems in order to feed the world. But what that attitude has given us is a system so broken farmers pay enormous sums to Monsanto to grow tens of thousands of acres of Round-Up-Ready corn to feed ruminants who live out their lives in malodorous CAFOs so we can have 24oz steaks on our plates – in Amarillo your super-sized steak is accompanied by the smell of their excrement in the feedlots just west of town.
You smell the feedlots many miles before you can see them.
And I will point out the obvious – we’re over-feeding the so-called global north, or what used to be called the First World, where now we’re mostly just first in diseases of affluence.
In many of America’s supermarkets, you can’t miss the ‘mobility scooters’ as you collect a trolley. The prevalence of obesity in America is no secret, and the majority of those we’ve seen using the scooters have fit the description. I’m not remotely interested in joining others in fat-shaming – I see no shame in obesity, just higher risk for disease and a diminished quality of life. Yet I can’t help but ponder the motive of supermarkets full of 85% highly-processed food in providing mobility scooters for their customers?
Once inside, you could follow Michael Pollan’s advice and stick to the outer aisles and produce section. And regular readers of my blog will know we go a step further and avoid big chain supermarkets entirely, but for the purposes of research and creativity, we’ve not only gone in, we’ve gone deep.
It starts with a game – try to find a food you know in its original form. Butter? No – oh, wait, yes, some.
'I can believe it's not butter'
Rice? Sure, but almost all instant and flavoured. Cheese? Over there in the dry goods ‘shelf-stable’ area.
Yoghurt? Of course, but I hope you don’t mind artificial flavours and sweeteners, and of course you’ll be delighted it’s all fat free.
Right, so dairy is fat or even dairy free, rice is instant and ‘value added’, and there are typically 3-4 times as many processed meat products as whole. And that’s mostly around Pollan’s supermarket periphery – you should see what’s in the middle. Oh, you’ve been there? So you know there is nothing whole in the middle – it’s entirely made up of ‘ingredients’ created by the wonders of science to befuddle our senses into thinking it’s actually food, marketed as healthier than what we might grow in our own backyards.
It’s not full-cream dairy making you fat, America. Putting excessive amounts of ‘cheese product’ on highly processed meat products wrapped in highly processed ‘bread’ products served with a side of… well, I don’t know their scientific names… yeah, that and the super-sized sodas and high-sugar cereals, that might make you fat. When even the deli potato salad has High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), you’re going to get fat.
These processed foods will make us all fat while we blind ourselves to the exploitation of workers who grew and harvested the ingredients that made these ‘foods’ whose origins are no longer recognisable nor traceable. Meanwhile, the workers will continue to die the illnesses of poverty and over-exposure to chemicals, and everyone will get fatter and sadder and act like nobody knows why. And more farmers will continue to leave the land because where is the dairy farmer’s dollar in a product so ‘value-added’ by others down the supply chain it’s no longer primarily made from milk anyway?
Surely the fact that we can eat at the Silver Diner should make us happy? And not having to grow our own tomatoes, add seasoning to our rice, or fruit to our yoghurt – no need to pop our nachos in the oven to melt the cheese? Isn’t it marvellous that we not only don’t have to bake our own bread, we don’t even have to slice it? Those benevolent corporations will even boil your eggs for you.
I guess there really are people who 'can't even boil an egg'. 🙁
Industrial agriculture has made all of us so much happier, hasn’t it? I mean, just look at these tomatoes, right?
This post is linked to Fight Back Fridays – you should check out some of the other Food Renegade posts!
