So God Made a Farmer

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Mike Callicrate

The Ram brand declares 2013 the Year of the Farmer

In Ram’s newest brand commercial, we dedicate 2013 to celebrating the American farmer. Share the video, and join the Ram brand throughout the year as we celebrate the people, the food and the lifestyle that keep America growing.

WELCOME TO THE YEAR OF THE FARMER.

* * *

What Happened Grandpa?

Standing before the rickety abandoned farmstead the young man asked, “What happened Grandpa?” Well son, the same thing happened to me and Grandma that happened to my grandparents in Ireland. We were driven from our land and home by low prices.

Like others on the land, we worked hard to produce the food to feed the nation, trusting that our works would have its reward and that we could live out our hopes and dreams. We know now that the markets didn’t work for us, they only worked for those who bought our grain and livestock. The big grain and meat packing companies were making record profits while we were going bankrupt.

Son, I remember when we were losing this farm. Grandma and I felt like we had failed. We felt so alone. We thought it was something we had done wrong.

Grandma had two jobs in town and I had one. No matter how hard we worked, it just wasn’t enough. We were convinced we had failed not only as farmers, but we worried we had also failed our ancestors and our children, including your father and even you.

The government, our universities, and our own producer organizations kept telling us we had to become more efficient and that we had to continue to lower our costs. They told us, if we were struggling, it was our fault, not theirs. They told us we were just bad managers. They said low prices were a cycle and things would get better. Despite what we were told, we knew then and we know now that we really were efficient and low cost producers.

Son, as I look back on it, I can’t blame Grandma for what she did. I was suffering, too. I only wish she was still with me today. Looking back, maybe I was better able to fight the depression big corporate and government economics put on us. I worked outside, closer to God’s daily miracles. But you know, son, there is something about working on the land, caring for livestock, the feel and smell of the soil, the caring for God’s blessings and creations that brings you closer to the understanding of what is really important in America. People like us will farm for very little income. We will fight the droughts and the blizzards. We love our country and what we do so much.

You see son, when it’s money and power that you think you need, you can never get enough. People are what really matter. Respecting the wonderful human spirit in all of us is what is most important. Doing unto others as we would have others do unto us, and investing today in our children’s futures by caring for God’s gift to us, the land, is what Grandma and I believed.

Most of us, so fortunate as to grow up on our farms and ranches, know this. We know that the land provides for everyone. We know how to help create the wealth that drives our nation’s economy. For these reasons, I worry about our nation on the long road towards losing its farmers and ranchers, and with that, our connection to the land.

Still, there are people fighting for farmers and ranchers. I know it is too late for many of us, but it is still probably the most important fight there is. After all, it’s about economic freedom allowing people all around the world to feed themselves and to care for the land, so the land can continue to provide wealth for all people, not just a few big corporations. It’s about people everywhere sharing in the prosperity, not just creating prosperity for a few.

A few years ago Grandma and I attended a meeting at the livestock auction. A man told us it was the market power of big corporations that was the cause of our low prices, not oversupply like everyone else was saying. He said, “You are making too little because those who buy your farm commodities are taking too much of the consumer dollar.” He instilled hope in that crowd that night. He was so determined to do something about the problem. We thought maybe there was a chance for us to survive.

I was so proud of Grandma when she fought her way through the crowd to tell him to keep up the good work. But then I was so embarrassed when she told him that he should tell everyone that he spoke to, to not be too proud to accept welfare. She said, “We wouldn’t be here tonight if we hadn’t taken food stamps.”

Grandma seemed to do better for awhile after that meeting, but then the taxes were due, and we missed another mortgage payment. We lost too many calves in the spring blizzard. When we couldn’t pay our doctor bills she seemed to just give up. I pray that she is with God. I believe she is, I feel her spirit helping me through each day.

Son, all things considered, I think there is still hope. I believe people are beginning to understand the importance of what our family and others have done so well for generations. Thankfully, today we are beginning to hear God’s message crying out from the pulpit, answering prayers to help his people of the land. I believe we are making progress. Maybe with God’s help, farmers and ranchers will be given the opportunity to do what we love for ourselves and our country.

Grandpa, “I’ve heard all you have said. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it long and hard, and, if you don’t mind, I think I want to be a farmer!”

By Mike Callicrate | September 19, 2003
Presented to the Catholic Bishops gathering in Washington, DC.

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Performance Enhancing Drugs Really Work!

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Mike Callicrate

…but, should they be used to produce the meat we eat?

Feedlots fatten cattle using a grain-based diet until the animals are just under two years old or weigh around twelve hundred pounds. Feedlots increase rates of gain by the use of pelletized natural and synthetic sex hormones that are implanted in the ear skin of cattle. According to Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, professor emeritus of environment and occupational medicine at the University of Chicago School of Public health, the hormones used in beef production are associated with an increased risk of reproductive and childhood cancer. He says that “residues of these hormones in meat are up to twentyfold higher than normal” and “still higher residues result from the not uncommon illegal practice of implantation directly into muscle.” Unfortunately, the USDA does not monitor the meat for hormone residues. Page 157, Foodopoly

“I started taking anabolic steroids in 1969 and never stopped. It was addicting, mentally addicting. Now I’m sick, and I’m scared. Ninety percent of the athletes I know are on the stuff. We’re not born to be 300 lb (140 kg) or jump 30 ft (9.1 m). But all the time I was taking steroids, I knew they were making me play better. I became very violent on the field and off it. I did things only crazy people do. Once a guy sideswiped my car and I beat the hell out of him. Now look at me. My hair’s gone, I wobble when I walk and have to hold on to someone for support, and I have trouble remembering things. My last wish? That no one else ever dies this way.” Lyle Alzado was one of the first major US sports figures to admit to using anabolic steroids. Alzado died at age forty-three.

Related articles:
As Beef Cattle Become Behemoths, Who Are Animal Scientists Serving?
What Happened to the Meat?
Beef’s Raw Edges | Views on quality beef
Foodopoly by Wenonah Hauter

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Pastured Animals Deserve Good Care and Good Nutrition

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Mike Callicrate

Unlike wild animals that are basically free to roam, domesticated animals are limited to a certain space – a pasture (ranch), a feeding pen, a corral. Cattle, sheep, goats, and other domesticated ruminants are a gift to humanity. They convert plants that are inedible for humans to healthy and nutritious food. Showing our appreciation should include not only providing good care to these animals, but also a healthy and nutritious diet that promotes growth, reproduction, and good health.

The semi-arid High Plains region receives 12 to 17 inches of moisture per year on average.
Eight inches fell in the NW corner of Kansas in 2012. Virginia received 30.32 inches in 2012.
Photo Courtesy of CallicrateCattleCo.com

There are few fenced grass pastures anywhere, if any, that provide adequate nutrition on a year-round basis to grazing animals. The ideology that these animals should survive only on grass ignores their nutritional needs, more or less, depending on climate.

Many books and films talk about the evils of feeding corn. In advising writers like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan over the years, I have been a primary source of that message. Corn grown below the cost of production, subsidized by taxpayers, using valuable and disappearing water resources, in a chemically dependent, fossil fuel intensive, industrial model of production is wrong. Feeding this corn to livestock at levels in the diet that require antibiotics to keep the animals alive is also wrong. Family farm advocates like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser and Joel Salatin are correct in warning us about the destructive nature of industrial agriculture.

Feeding too much corn to ruminants is only a small part of what is wrong with our monopoly controlled food system that mines our lands, abuses animals, producers and workers, while causing unprecedented degenerative disease.

Applying cattle manure to cropland – “Our cow dung is worth more than your Wall Street stocks” – Vandana Shiva speaking to Hillary Clinton

Michael Pollan describes, in the film Fresh, the importance of combining animal and crop agriculture, where, crops are fed to the animals and manure is spread on the crop land producing healthy animals and fertile soils – combining good animal husbandry with good land stewardship. The key to this beneficial approach to livestock production and farming requires people living on the land and caring for the land and the animals. Unfortunately, as our food system has become more and more corporate controlled and industrialized, and access to markets limited to only a chosen few, farm families have been forced off the land. Less than one percent of our population now feeds us.

In conversation over lunch, Temple Grandin advised, “Cattle love corn.” I responded, “Yes, they do, and men love whiskey, but too much will kill ya.” Temple is right. For centuries grains, grain crop residues, and grain byproducts have been an important part of a healthy diet for grass eating animals. Their ruminate digestive systems especially love distillers grains (barley mash from Bristol Brewing), which contain nutrients favorable to healthy rumen activity, while improving fat quality in the meat. Not only are the animals gaining more weight in receiving essential nutrients not available in the typical grass pasture, but the land is benefitting greatly from the higher nutrient manure.

Loss of fertile top soil is a major problem with the extractive, sort of strip-mining, quick-profit approach of industrial agriculture. Grazing of animals can heal this land. Pastures of low nutrient, poor quality soils, in a closed system, without supplementation, fail to provide an adequate diet for the animal or improve the health of the soil.

A more diversified model of family farm agriculture, where farm families, making a living income, producing grass, crops and livestock in the same place, best serves all of society and our future generations.

Perhaps we should be asking for well-fed livestock?

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School districts put local beef on the menu

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Mike Callicrate

Written by Ann Schimke on Jan 22nd, 2013. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org

The South Routt school district is a rural district with just over 400 students attending its three schools. It is also among a small but growing number of Colorado districts where local, grass-fed beef is now on the school lunch menu.

A third-grader at South Routt Elementary School bites into a burger at a cookout in May 2012 to launch the district’s use of local beef from Yampa Valley Beef. Photo courtesy of Jane Colby

A third-grader at South Routt Elementary School bites into a burger at a cookout in May 2012 to launch the district’s use of local beef from Yampa Valley Beef. Photo courtesy of Jane Colby

It started last spring when South Routt parent Jane Colby applied for a $1,500 grant from Colorado Action for Healthy Kids to help cover the cost of the more expensive beef. She won the grant on behalf of the district, and this year, some of the district’s burritos, taco salads and spaghetti sauces contain ground beef from cattle raised in grassy fields about 25 miles away.

“We live in this ranching community and I myself like to buy the local beef,” Colby said.

She believes local beef raised on grass with no added hormones or antibiotics is healthier than traditional feedlot beef. It’s also more expensive. The district pays $3.48 a pound for the ground beef it gets from Yampa Valley Beef every month.

The district pays about $2 a pound for beef from a food service supplier and also receives beef from the USDA’s School/Child Nutrition Commodities program.

Even at $3.48 a pound, the district’s price is about a dollar less than Yampa Valley Beef’s wholesale price of $4.55. Sonja Shoemaker, who owns the company with her husband Wayne, said they agreed to the lower price because they wanted to help the district provide local beef to students.

“I was surprised they could get a grant and get this going,” said Shoemaker. “We can’t compete with Sysco. We can’t compete with those government programs…We appreciate them stepping out and wanting to do that.”

A growing trend

Although there’s no exact tally of school districts that use local beef in their cafeterias, the number seems to be growing, said Jeremy West, nutrition service director for Weld County District 6 and chairman of the Colorado Farm to School Task Force. He estimated that a dozen districts in the state use some local grass-fed beef in student meals.

“We’re very excited to hear districts making these changes,” he said. “Farm to school isn’t easy.”

Weld District 6, which is in the second year of a move toward majority scratch cooking, is currently in the bid process for beef patties from cows raised with no added antibiotics or hormones and at least partially on grass. West said if a viable bid comes through, local beef hamburgers will debut in February in the high school cafeterias, where some weeks feature a “make-your-own” burger bar.

“We want a better hamburger to serve in that format,” West said.

If the switch is successful, West hopes to implement the same change for burgers served in middle and elementary schools, and ultimately switch to local beef for all beef-based meals served in the district.

It’s unclear whether the discovery last spring that some school ground beef contained ground-up meat scraps treated with ammonium hydroxide has prompted districts to join the local beef movement. Colby, the parent who spearheaded the local beef effort in South Routt, said she applied for the grant before the “pink slime” episode.

Wayne Shoemaker, who owns Yampa Valley Beef with his wife, tending his cattle on horseback. Photo courtesy of Sonja Shoemaker

Wayne Shoemaker, who owns Yampa Valley Beef with his wife, tending his cattle on horseback. Photo courtesy of Sonja Shoemaker

West said while the uproar didn’t affect Weld District 6, it may have sparked a greater interest in local beef in other districts.

“That could have been a springboard for people…to say, ‘Let’s go find something a little less processed.”

As an early adopter of local beef, Colorado Springs District 11 also escaped the “pink slime” controversy. The 28,000-student district began a gradual switch from government commodity beef in 2007, focusing first on hamburger patties served at the district’s high schools.

Since 2010, all beef served in the district comes from Ranch Foods Direct, a meat-packing facility and retail market based in Colorado Springs with a cattle ranch in western Kansas. The beef comes from cattle partially raised on grass with no added hormones or antibiotics.

“We immediately had success with the fresh flavor, and the texture of the beef was so much better,” said Rick Hughes, director of food and nutrition services for District 11.

In neighboring Falcon School District 49, Nutrition Services Director Monica Deines-Henderson switched to bulk ground beef from Ranch Foods Direct three years ago.

“I’m a firm believer in keeping food as natural as possible for the students,” she said.

In keeping with department’s “simple food” slogan, the district aims to use fresh, minimally processed ingredients that have no added preservatives, dyes, growth hormones or antibiotics.

Deines-Henderson said although nutrition was her top priority in switching to local beef, “Helping the local economy is big too.”

Overcoming the obstacles

Switching to grass-fed local beef doesn’t come without challenges for school food service departments. In addition to tight budgets, there may be limited kitchen facilities or a lack of staff training on handling and cooking raw meat.

In the South Routt school district, the local beef grant was simply not enough to cover more than 20 percent of the district’s 500-pound monthly order. Susan Hart, the district’s food services director, said she still uses USDA commodity beef as well as pre-cooked hamburger patties with soy filler.

Like most food service directors, Hart believes hamburgers are an ideal use of local beef because the meat’s higher quality is more obvious than when it’s incorporated into dishes like chili or spaghetti sauce. She hopes the local beef program will continue next year with a few refinements.

“I would really like to spend a little more and have them process it into burgers,” said Hart.

Rick Hughes, food and nutrition services director in District 11, agrees that higher quality beef costs more but believes it’s still affordable for any district. The key is taking a hard look at the budget, he said. For example, Hughes and his team eliminated some of the paper products used on cafeteria trays after discovering they added 3-5 cents to the cost of each meal.

Finding a high-quality beef producer is also a challenge in some districts.

West, Weld County District 6 director, said, “For us, it’s been hard to source, which you wouldn’t think in Weld County, which has more cows than people…The quality of beef we want can be hard to find.”

Safe food-handling techniques are also an issue for districts introducing raw beef products, particular hamburger patties. Hughes said that is one of the reasons District 11 introduced local beef gradually.

“It was scary for us at first,” he said.

Today, the district has at least one employee in all 65 serving locations certified by the ServSafe Food Safety program created by the National Restaurant Association. West said the same is true for all 31 kitchens in Weld County 6.

“It’s a matter of staff education,” said West.

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Mike Callicrate featured in “Foodopoly” by Wenonah Hauter

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Mike Callicrate


Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America

Wenonah Hauter grew up on a family farm that her husband runs today as a Community Supported Agriculture Project (CSA), which is part of the growing local food movement. Yet, as one of the nation’s leading healthy-food advocates, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America’s food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the control of food production by a handful of large corporations—backed by political clout—that prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.

Blending history, reporting, and a deep understanding of American farming and food production, Foodopoly is the shocking and revealing account of the business behind the meat, vegetables, grains and milk that most Americans eat every day, including some of our favorite and most respected organic and health-conscious brands. Hauter also pulls the curtain back from the little-understood but vital realm of agricultural policy, showing how it has been hijacked by lobbyists, driving out independent farmers and food processors in favor of the likes of Cargill, Tyson, Kraft and ConAgra. Foodopoly demonstrates how the impacts ripple far and wide, from economic stagnation in rural communities at home to famines overseas. In the end, Hauter argues that solving this crisis will require a complete structural shift—a change that is about politics, not just personal choice.


8
Cowboys versus Meat Packers:
The Last Roundup

Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.
-James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838)

The burly cowboy roping cattle on the western range, an American icon immortalized in western movies and country songs, has just about disappeared from the national landscape. Long marked by violence and lawlessness – from the range wars of the nineteenth century to the land-grabbing exploits of the western cattle empires – the U.S. cattle industry has been devastated in more recent decades by a type of economic violence. The titans of beef have eliminated the cowboy and created a system that pushes independent ranchers out of business, drives cattle of the range, and creates huge profits for some of the largest corporations in the country.

Mike Callicrate’s blog, No-Bull Food News, is an apt description of the outspoken opposition to big agribusinesses. The owner of Callicrate Cattle, his vocation is fighting for the independent cattle producer. Callicrate says he was “blacklisted” by the monopolistic beef packers because of his advocacy. In 1996, he was one of ten ranchers who filed a class-action lawsuit against IBP, the giant meatpacker that merged with Tyson, for its unfair, deceptive, and discriminatory cattle-buying practices. The case ended when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case against IBP. Callicrate continued to criticize the industry voraciously for its market power, including Farmland National Beef, which retaliated by refusing to purchase his cattle. Without a market for his cattle, he was forced to close down.

Callicrate, energetic and entrepreneurial, invented a widely used castration device that has provided the resources for him to circumvent the market power of the meat industry. Undeterred by being driven out of business, he invested a “few million” into remodeling an existing processing plant and opened Ranch Foods Direct. A local source of high-quality meat, the company primarily does business in Colorado Springs, where he distributes beef to more than a hundred restaurants.

Callicrate concedes that most ranchers do not have this option, because they have no way to slaughter and market their beef. Unless a rancher can sell a quarter or half of its beef to the consumer, it is hard to make a profit selling direct. Most consumers do not want to store this much beef and they are only interested in steaks and good-quality roasts, not all the pounds of hamburger that come from purchasing part of a cow.

To mitigate this problem Callicrate has been involved in developing and promoting mobile slaughter units that can be used on-site at farms. But he believes the only way that independent ranching can continue is if the government begins enforcing antitrust laws. He explains that ranchers face untold obstacles to making a living. Cattle used to be sold at a competitive live auction, where the big meat packers had to compete with smaller firms. Today there is no place for an independent rancher to take his herd to market and get a fair price.

Eric Schlosser, author of the best seller Fast Food Nation, has an apt description of the industry.

Over the last twenty years, about half a million ranchers sold off their cattle and quit the business. Many of the nation’s remaining eight hundred thousand ranchers are fairing poorly. They’re taking second jobs. They’re selling cattle at break-even prices or at a loss. The ranchers who are faring the worst run three to four hundred head of cattle, manage the ranch themselves, and live solely off the proceeds… Ranchers currently face a host of economic problems: rising land prices, stagnant beef prices, oversupplies of cattle, increased shipments of live cattle from Canada and Mexico, development pressures. (1)

Just how do cattle become burgers? Increasingly, the whole process – from farm to plate – is industrialized, beginning with the vial of semen that is used for artificial insemination. Production of semen is dominated by three corporations – World Wide Sires, Cooperative Resources International …

pages 155 – 156

Copyright © 2012 by Wenonah Hauter. This excerpt originally appeared in Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, published by The New Press Reprinted here with permission.

If you care about the food you eat, you’ll want to find out more about Foodopoly.

REVIEWS OF FOODOPOLY

“…a meticulously researched tour de force…examines the pernicious effects of consolidation in every sector of the food industry.” Publishers Weekly

“A forceful argument about our dysfunctional food system.” Kirkus Reviews

“Hauter knows where the bodies are buried beneath the amber waves of grain. . . .By turns heartbreaking, infuriating, and inspiring, Foodopoly is required reading for anyone who wants to understand both the scale of the challenge in reclaiming our food system, and the urgency for doing so.”
— Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

“In compelling prose, Hauter breaks down why the concentration of corporate power over food matters—and what we can do about it. Foodopoly is a vital book—essential reading for anyone who wants safe food and clean water.”
— Anna Lappé, founder of Food Mythbusters and author of Diet for a Hot Planet

“This may be the most important book on the politics of food ever written in the United States. . . . Hauter puts the blame for our food crisis squarely where it belongs:
on the political and agribusiness leaders who benefit from a corporate-dominated food system. Read this book and take action!”
— Maude Barlow, co-author of Blue Gold and author of Blue Covenant

“A shocking and powerful reminder of the distance between our image of the family farmer and the corporate agribusiness reality. Make sure you read it before dinner.”
— Bill Mckibben, author of Eaarth

“A compelling case. . . . Hauter is absolutely right that unless we break the stranglehold of corporate power with significant policy change, the food movement will continue to have only marginal success.”
— Michele Simon, public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit

“Food is life. Today, food and life are being hijacked by corporations—and our earth, our farmers, and our health are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits. Foodopoly [is] a story we must hear in order to create food democracy and food freedom.”
— Dr. Vandana Shiva, author of Stolen Harvest

Purchase Foodopoly.

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