I've been wanting to express some opinions on local, grass based farming and I've finally taken the plunge. Welcome to Let them eat grass. A blog written by a farmer that firmly believes in grazing their livestock. No huge climate controlled environment farming here. Grazing as much as we can. My first rant is buying your meat locally. There are a few of us in Central NY. With enough support we can keep going, turn a profit, even expand our farm. Maybe we can attract more people to come back to the land.
A large store chain announced a few weeks ago that they now were selling 100% grass fed beef. Gee, isn't that great I thought. Then I read and found out the bad news. It is from South America, way down at the bottom of South America. Strange they call it sustainable. Hmm, shipped all the way from there? How much fuel did that take?
This article author claims that there is no abundant source for good tasting grassfed beef in the United States. I have to wonder if that is the case or is it there is no source for abundant CHEAP grass fed beef. Cause, it is just a crying shame that us farmers in the U.S. want and need to make a living wage. The other slander against US grassfed beef is that the beef tastes isn't up to par here in the U.S because most farmers, us included feed hay in the winter. In case you didn't know, hay is dried grasses. This is done because in most of the U.S. in the winter we experience a season called... winter... maybe you are familiar with it. Plants and trees go dormant. Grass doesn't grow, often it it covered by feet of snow. Not easy to graze lush green grass then. So as farmers have done for centuries, we cut tall grass in the summer, dry it, bale it and store it for winter livestock food. This isn't bad and it doesn't produce bad tasting meat, it is a cycle of life.
So once again instead of supporting the U.S. farmers, the company goes for cheap and leaves the country. All on the claim that the consumer wants this. That company had it's chance to change the face of modern industrialized agriculture, once again they skipped out. They had the chance to support those grazing farmers. They didn't.
I am a consumer and I don't want food imported. This country at one time produced enough food to feed it's entire population, has that changed?
Take the plunge people and support your farmers. Wondering why their aren't more of us? Gee, because companies and consumers made their choice, they bought cheap food for so long the farmers went under. They, the farmers cried as they couldn't pay their mortgage. They sold the animals and machinery to try and pay off their debt. Then they sold the land their family owned for generations for houses to sprout up on, just to pay the property taxes. Then they watched their kids grow up, move away and never want to farm. Look for another round of farms go under this year.
It took a very short a time to destroy local food systems, it will take a long time to build it back again. If enough of us hang in there and defy the odds we CAN get it back.
