Mouthful
The garden snake does not see
his wild analogy to human nature,
wrapping his unhinged lips
over mouth and nostrils
of a toad too big to swallow.
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With less than two-tenths of an inch of rain in the past 50 days, we’re facing another short grass season. Temperature highs during the past two weeks have vacillated between the low-50s to the mid-90s with 36 degrees forecast for tomorrow morning – no rain on the horizon. The hills have turned three weeks early, but judging by how the cows and calves look, what feed we have is fairly strong.
One local impact of the Hallmark/Westland debacle has been the USDA’s recent enforcement of dairy milk quotas that has brought more (younger) slaughter dairy cows to town. Cow prices fell to $28 cwt. at one local auction yard last week. With alfalfa hay topping $300/ton and corn prices high, California beef cow operators will face a second summer of reducing numbers. Some nice, young bred cows sold for $600 - $750 in Visalia last week – a far cry from the $1,750 they brought two years ago.
Bill Maher slammed “meat” again last night, citing the misuse of grain for feeding livestock while the rest of the planet is rationing rice and other grain products for human consumption. His assumption that livestock are raised exclusively on grain misses how beef is produced by harvesting the renewable (though variable) resource of grass and converting it to protein; hopefully producing a calf to then ship to the feedlot. Typically, a 10-18-month old calf is finished on grain for 90 -110 days in the feedlot in order to grade USDA Choice or Prime, the cow remianing on grass. But is the American consumer ready for grass-fed beef? Amid political, economic and weather extremes, we cowmen must adapt.
Robbin and I have been busy planting vegetables, hoping to keep our trips to town this summer to a minimum. Though slow and methodical, we could be quite happy as gardeners for rich people if and when the cattle business goes to hell.
A very interesting arts blog laced with poetry and short prose created by artist David Richardson whom I met some years ago at the Battle Mountain Ranch near Springville, California.
Though given ample time to subside, my anger persists over the irrefutable evidence of inhumane cattle handling at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Plant in Chino. Pete Crow’s objective editorial in the February 25th edition of Western Livestock Journal assuaged my indignant rage only slightly as he concluded, “it seems the dairy and beef cattle industries, as well as the meat packing industry, must start policing ourselves better.”
Yes, our congregation needs a good preaching to – that goes without saying. But where was the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, where was the film clip for the media to depict any number of the diverse and humane activities employed by beef producers? One would think that after the maelstrom of bad press for the past two decades, the NCBA might be prepared with some good news. A visit to their/our website for a statement was painfully political and disappointing. I recall several homemade videos from Elko that would have been more appropriate.
If honestly calculated, the NCBA dues are not cheap, but ever since the USDA’s Dairy Buy-Out debacle that put many beef producers out of business, I’ve wondered if the association officers were merely looking for another acronym to add to their obituaries. Though mistakenly, I also thought that adding the ‘B’ to NCA was to differentiate us from the dairy business, but apparently political correctness and a Farm Bill in limbo precluded any public comment to label ‘dairyburger’ for what it is: ground-up, burnt-out dairy cows with who knows what in their systems. Frankly, any real vision from our industry comes from the pure-bred breeders in the form of Certified Black Angus, Certified Hereford, or other certified beef breeds - good faith attempts to brand meat and offer consumers some clue as to what they’re eating. Unfortunately however, most folks think beef producers endorse the practices at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Plant.
The opinions expressed in the Western Folklife Center's Deep West online journals are those of the online journal participants and not the Western Folklife Center. The Western Folklife Center does not moderate these journals and as such does not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided in the journals or in any hyperlink appearing within them.