Lex Anteinternet: Not that local. Dairies

A 2013 post from our companion blogs. Comments to this one appear at the original site.

Lex Anteinternet: Not that local. Dairies: 

Not that local. Dairies

Meadow Gold dairy truck.   "From local farms to local families."

Some time ago I was hiking from my mechanic's shop down to work, after dropping my truck off to be worked on, and saw this Meadow Gold delivery truck at our hospital.

Now, let me first note that I don't have anything against Meadow Gold milk, etc.  At any one time there's a good chance that there's a gallon of Meadow Gold milk in my refrigerator, although I also don't pay all that much attention to what milk brand I'm buying.  The big decision in milk purchases here is whether to buy whole milk or 2% milk.  My wife buys 2%, I buy whole milk.  I do this because I like the way whole milk tastes better and I disregard the whole fat content thing because, well, whole milk tastes better.  

I feel somewhat justified in this view, by the way, because a recent study suggests that whole milk wasn't as bad for you as some want to believe, but I mostly feel that way because it validates my desired view.  It's part of the same thinking, on my part, that causes me to chuckle a bit in glee with the fact that my coffee addition is turning out to be a good thing.  Ha!

But I digress.

What caused me to take this cell phone photograph is the truck's claim that the milt the truck is hauling goes "From local farms to local families."  What does that mean?

It doesn't mean that the milk comes from a farm outside of town, that's for sure.  In spite of very occasional attempted start ups, there hasn't been a local dairy milk farm here for decades.  There was one, or perhaps more than one, at one time, but that's an extremely long time ago.

 

Dairy farmer in Waterloo Nebraska.

Local dairies were, at one time, the rule nearly everywhere in the United States.  At that time there were dairy farmers who did indeed milk a herd of dairy cattle every day, and truck the milk to a local creamery. Casper had a local creamery at one time.  But this is very much a thing of the past.  There's no local creamery, and there's no local dairy farmers.

Downtown location of the Jersey Creamery in Casper Wyoming, now long gone.

The reasons for this are varied, with some being national in origin, and others being local.  Some, seem to me, to be obscure.  Locally, truth be known, Natrona County Wyoming was a hard place for a diary to start with.  The area is great cattle country, but very poor dairy cow country.  Beef cattle, in this region, basically wonder around the vast prairie and are fed in the winter out on the range.  Dairy cattle are fed on their farms all year long, and fed a lot, as producing milk is a calorie intensive business. This means that hay farming is an absolute local necessity for a dairy.  For beef cattle producers, hay is something we buy for the winter, and we can gauge which type is what we'll buy by need and price.  Dairy cattlemen, however, need a constant supply of high quality forage . . and they won't be finding that here on their farms on a  year around basis. This may explain why certain Quixotic efforts to start local dairies in the past two decades have rapidly failed.

Another aspect of this, however, is that milk more than other types of agricultural products, is uniquely suited for mass processing and delivery.  Milk was delivered to people's houses daily up until the 1970s (at least locally), which made a local distributor's economic viability a little easier, but even as early as the 1940s the large chain grocery stores would generally only carry their own brands.  This meant that local dairies had to principally rely on home deliveries, which of course, as noted, they did, also delivering butter in some cases and also taking specialty Holiday orders..  But its likely that societal changes slowly did that in.  I can't be precise on it, of course, but there must be some changes that caused the convenience of home delivery to give way to simply picking milk up at the store.  Indeed, as home delivery seems so convenient to me, and lasted so long, I'm struggling a bit to determine what the cause of the demise was, but it may simply have been that people work odder hours, and move around a lot more, than they once did.  Other types of home delivery have also fallen off in the past half century too, and it's fairly rare to find a grocery store that will deliver, like they once did.

 Milk man delivering milk to transient worker location, 1930s.  Note the uniform, which was the norm at the time.

Before I move on from that, for what it's worth, as home milk delivery seems like such an oddity to people who have never experienced it I'll simply note that, when I was a kid, this was done by men who drove around time very early in the morning with a refrigerated van.  We kept an insulated box, provided by the creamery, on our back porch and that's where he left the milk.  I remember that as I got a bit older if I was awake I could hear him drive up and delivery the milk, which seems to me to have been usually around 5:00 am. In earlier years, however, in most places this same service was done by a man who used a horse drawn wagon.  Both of my parents had recollections of milk being delivered in this fashion.  In my mother's case, her recollection was that the neighbor's dog hated the milk cart horses and would bark his head off at them.   My father remembered milk being delivered this way in Denver in what was probably the 1930s.

Anyhow, home delivery, no matter how convenient, couldn't keep local dairies going, even if I'm not sure why that was.  Perhaps the lack of a local source of milk contributed to that.  Perhaps also the price of fuel which shot through the roof in the early 1970s had a contributing influence.  And, I suspect, a more mobile society in which both men and women were routinely employed probably also had something to do with it.

Man delivering bottles to washed.  

Another factor, however, probably is that milk must be processed.  Milk, at least commercial milk, is pasteurized and it's no doubt easier to pasteurize a lot of it rather than smaller quantities.  As noted, milk is uniquely suited for mass production, in some ways.  And milk can pose a health danger if not processed adequately.  I suppose that means there is a danger that lurks in large facilities, but if there is, it seems to be pretty minor as milk is very efficiently produced at very low risk to the public.

I suppose given that, I've been very surprised that there's been a movement in the state to allow the local sale of unpasteurized milk.  Some ranchers have kept milk cows for their own families for a long time, and some people with small acreages do as well, but this is a bit different.  Ranchers with milk cows know cows very well in general, and they know what they're doing.  That milk tends to be consumed nearly immediately.  I think this is generally also the case with the very few people with small acreages.  But having a milk cow as a commercial proposition, or a share in a milk cow, which is another way this has been proposed, seems a very poor idea to me. That concept is part, generally, of the "local foods" movement, and whatever its merits otherwise are, it should be kept in mind that milk's a product that requires special care for safety reasons.  Ranchers with milk cows are generally consuming the milk immediately.  People who think that they're simply replacing Safeway with a cow, however, may not be, and may be exchanging safety for a loose concept of the product being better which, in the case of milk, might not match reality.  There has been, I'd note, at least one milk related illness outbreak in the US in 2012.

 

I also wonder if people who buy unpasteurized milk are in for a bit of a shock.  Most people have never had milk that hasn't been pasteurized and homogenized, and don't realize that unhomogenized milk  tastes different and that the cream separates out.  I've had it just once, when I was a kid, and still recall that it seemed to taste odd.  My wife, whose family did keep a milk cow when she was young, can't stand it, but then she prefers 2% milk, which I don't like.

I 

At any rate, here's another example of something that's really changed, but which we must still look back upon to some extent.  There are no more Milk Men, at least there aren't very many, and in a lot of the country, the milk comes from a long ways away.  Local milk producers in some places are having a hard time, which is a shame.  For an area like central Wyoming, however, local milk production wouldn't make very much sense.  Some milk producers, as noted above, are emphasizing that they get their milk locally, but that would seemingly require a little explanation to make sense.  Probably what it means is that the milk was local to where it was processed, probably down in Colorado, but not to us here in Wyoming.  Nor could it be, really.

Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War One Homesteads

This actually was first posted on our other site in 2013, before this blog existed.

Lex Anteinternet: The Post World War One Homesteads: 

The Post World War One Homesteads

Recently, on our companion site, I posted two photo threads about Post World War One homesteads.  Those posts are here and here.

 

People commonly think of homesteading in the 19th Century context, often having a really romantic concept of it.  What few realize is that the peak year for homesteading in the United States was 1919.

That's right, 1919.

Homesteading itself carried on until the Taylor Grazing Act ended it in 1934 in the lower 48 states.  It carried on in Alaska for longer than that, under the Federal law, and still exists under Alaska's state law, although its really a different type of homesteading than existed in the lower 48.  There were some exceptions, which I'm unclear on, that opened lands back up after World War Two, on sort of a GI Bill for the agriculturally minded type of concept, but the enthusiasm for it was apparently limited.  In Canada I think that homesteading may have continued on into the 1950s.

But it was World War One that caused the last big boom in U.S. homesteading, and it was they year immediately following the war, which was also the last year that farmers had economic parity with urban U.S. populations, that saw the greatest amount of homesteading.  And it was a homesteading boom, in some ways, that was uniquely 20th Century in character.

Truth be known, homesteading was never really viewed the way that we have viewed it in the post homesteading era.  Our modern romantic view of it is unique to the post World War Two industrial era in some ways. There's always been a strain of romanticism attached to it, to be sure, because it fit in with the Frontier character of the country that existed in the 18th and 19th Centuries. And it also tended to define, as we've forgotten in modern times, a real difference between Americans and Europeans.  American farmers, which meant most of the population, could own land and do well by it.  European farmers, which meant most of the population, often did not.  Europe became an urban center earlier than the US in part for that reason, as the landless could have a better chance of owning something of their own off the farms, and getting  a farm of your own was extremely difficult, if not impossible, in most European nations if you were not born with ownership of one.  Indeed, the desire for land fueled immigration to the United States, Canada, Mexico, and various other areas that Europeans colonized, far more than any other source.  We may imagine that immigration was mostly the tired, hungry, and downtrodden, and of course it was. But land hungry made up a big percentage of immigrants as well.

19th Century homesteading, even at the time, was seen as sort of a transitory affair, and you can find a lot of contemporary articles about farmers being the vanguards of civilization. This is particularly true of stock raising homesteaders, i.e., ranchers, who were seen as a pioneering, but temporary, force, except by themselves.  Theodore Roosevelt, himself a rancher, commented in one of his late 19th Century articles about how herds of stock inevitably gave way to the plow, comparing ranchers to Indians, which meant that even he saw his ranching activities as doomed by history.  If so, he misjudged the progress of the plow.  Even as late as the early 20th Century, however, people seriously believed that "rain follows the plow."  It doesn't.

20th Century homesteading was something else, however.  The homesteading boom  of the teens was fueled by the globalization of the grain market, and a unique but temporary boost in the market and a unique, but temporary, increase in the amount of annual rainfall.   All of these combined created the conditions which allowed for a spike in homesteading, followed by an inevitable collapse in the agricultural sector.

The unique and temporary boost in the market was caused by warfare.  The second decade of the 20th Century was one of the most violent of the 20th or the 19th Centuries, and even the horror of World War One did not occur in a vacuum.  European wars started in the teens with a series of Balkan Wars; wars limited to the Balkans and Turkey, but which presaged the international conditions which would expand past that region and into Europe in general. The Mexican Revolution broke out south of the border in 1910, and was really rolling by 1911.  But it was World War One that really strained the global agricultural system to the limit.

In the abstract, how a war could do that is sometimes difficult to understand, in our modern, overabundant, era.  But the reasons are fairly plain.  The war put millions of men into the field, in harsh conditions (the war was accompanied by unusually harsh weather in Europe) where their caloric requirements were high.  Additionally, and now much more difficult to appreciate, the war also put millions of horses into the military service with a high caloric requirement as well.  For the men, their needs were met with meat and grains, and for the horses, grains and fodder.  The requirements were vast.  And this was compounded by the fact that animal production also provided the leather and wool upon which the armies also depended.

Not only, however, were the requirements vast, but the labor to do the work was now serving in various armies. Not only did the war require a lot of agricultural production, but it required the men who were doing it, in large part, to serve in the armies.  This caused a shortage of farmers, just as there was a great need for them. And not only was there a shortage of farmers, but of farm animals as well, as agriculture remained mostly horse driven.

 War time poster encouraging the saving of wheat, based on a famous contemporary photograph of women serving as the power for an implement, in the absence of draft animals, in France.

Farm labor shortages were partially made up by pressing women into service as farmers, everywhere.  There's a very common myth that women entered the workplace during World War Two, but it simply isn't true, or even close to true (we'll address this in an upcoming post).  Women entered the factory and fields in massive numbers during World War One.  Their role in food production became a national campaign in most Allied nations, where there were official efforts to put them into the field.

American Women's Land Army poster.

U.S. poster encouraging men below the age the Army was then seeking to serve on farms.  In short order, the Army would be taking me down to 18 years of age.

The American appeal was more rustic than the Canadian one, which made a martial appeal to young men to serve on the farms, relating that service to military service.

Resources became so tight that, even though rationing was never required on a national level in the United States (at least one state rationed, however) there was also an official campaign to encourage food conservation, and even conservation of some particular foods, so that more was available to feed the troops.

Canadian wartime poster encouraging consumers to switch to other foods to save food for the armies.

The war also had the impact of physically taking millions of acres of land directly out of production.  Not everything can be produced everywhere, which is fairly obvious.  Grains remain the staple of life in modern times just as much as they did in ancient, and this is particularly true in the case of grains. Grain can be grown, and is grown, in many regions, but large scale export grain crops are not. Grain production has greatly increased since World War One, but something that may not be readily apparent is that grain growing regions have expanded as well.

During the First World War era, grains were widely grown in Europe, North America, Argentina and Russia.  Much of the European production, however, was part of a regional market.  Italy, for example, has always been a grain growing region, but we tend not to think of it as a grain exporting region (although it actually is to some extent).  Of these regions, only two remained unspoiled by the war that being Argentina and North America.  Russia, one of the worlds most significant grain producing regions (well, the Ukraine actually) was taken completely out of the picture by the disaster of the war, which was followed immediately by the Russian Civil War.

This is also true of livestock production.  Horses, a critical item for every army, were so much in demand that Europe was basically stripped of them, nearly causing the extinction of one breed, the Irish Draught.  The United Kingdom, a major horse user, had always replied on imports for military horses and had worried about the supply pre-war, and now found itself fighting with an ally that had the same concern.  The large horse producing regions of the planet, North America, Australia and, at that time, Argentina remained relatively unscathed.  This was true for beef cattle production as well.  It was less true of wool production, which was a critical fiber in the war, and the United Kingdom itself was a significant producer.

 Wartime Canadian poster appealing to economic opportunism and patriotism.

While all of this was a human disaster, it was an agricultural opportunity of unprecedented scale.  A vast demand for agricultural products was created, and in certain regions, the means to exploit it existed.  And not only did the means exist, in the United States the government was encouraging it.  The US government encouraged homesteading, particularly for grain production, as if the boom would never end. And, as the Homestead Act remained in effect, and as the weather was unusually wet and therefore farming easier than usual, a land rush was soon on.

And the boom was experienced in other areas of the agricultural sector as well.  Horse ranching went into a massive boom in the West, starting just as soon as British and French remount agents started scouring the US and Canada for horses; a need which could never be fully met, in spite of a global effort.  Soon, with the Columbus, New Mexico, raid of Pancho Villa, the U.S. Army was in that market as well, pushing off French and British agents in the US so that it could acquire the horses and mules it required for a much larger Army that was nearly completely horse powered.

 

Remount shipping point.

Thousands of Americans who had previously had no direct connection with agriculture entered the rush, so lucrative was the grain trade at first, and so little, it seemed, had to actually be done in it.  In Kansas new towns sprung up full of such entry level farmers, many of whom didn't actually live on their farms, but in the towns, a practice that is common in some regions, but in this instance reflected an urban centric way of thinking.  Soon, these thousands were joined by discharged or soon to be discharged servicemen, many thousands of whom did have practical farming experience and agricultural roots, but who had the surplus cash to start up a farm, or small ranch, for the first time.  In Wyoming, hundreds of tiny homesteads, at most 640 acres in size, were filed, which with the favorable weather and market conditions, were actually viable in spite of their tiny size.

The boom couldn't last.  It trailed into the 1920s, but by then the prices began to fall. Soon after, the rain began to stop falling. An agricultural depression hit the US far earlier than the general Great Depression did.  By the 1930s the situation was desperate, and not only had the economy turned against farmers, but the weather had as well. Finally, in the early 1930s, the government repealed the Homestead acts, and new entries stopped.  Many of the teens homestead had already been abandoned by that time, once prosperous hopeful small units, but out place both economically and, as it turned out, climatically.

 Related Posts:

When Resources were Tight.

Disappearing Homesteads.

Dugout.

The Old Homesteads.

Lex Anteinternet: Matters of preception. "Rancher"

From 2015.

Lex Anteinternet: Matters of preception. "Rancher": 

Matters of preception. "Rancher"

This past Sunday, the local paper ran an article on Frank Robbins.

Robbins is a Thermopolis area landowner who ranches around that area.  Often the articles about him repeat his often stated desire, at age 59, to protect his way of life from the Federal government.  He's been involved in a variety of spats with the government since he showed up there.

Yes, I said showed up. Robbins bought three or so ranches in that area and combined them into one, after selling a ranch in Montana.  He did that about a decade or more ago.  And he came into Montana from Alabama.

In Alabama, apparently, he was in the lumber and flooring business, and did very well at it. So well that he amassed a fortune of this type, or so I've read, seeing as I only know about him what I've read.

Now, out of staters coming in to ranch isn't new, it's indeed the original story of ranching in the region.  Homesteaders were not, after all, from here.  But in terms of "way of life", do you have a good claim to that in an area you aren't native too, particularly as the modern story of ranching is that the vast amount of money required to buy a ranch now effectively means that locals, including many families and individuals with strong connections, are priced out of owning their own places.  In a way, Robbins is preventing other people, purely accidentally, from engaging in their way of life, as we're from here and don't have that kind for fortune.  Under those circumstances the "way of life" claims rings pretty hollow to natives.

Lex Anteinternet: Ambition and Ambition

Lex Anteinternet: Ambition and Ambition: 

Ambition and Ambition

I've been doing a little reading recently about  the founding personalities of this state.  And I'm not too sure I like them.  And, given as I know why I'm not too sure, I'm not too sure what this says about me.

The early history of this state's politics is heavily, almost exclusively, marked by men of high personal ambition. But that's what bothers me, their ambition was so personal.  None of them were from here, but then we couldn't expect them to be either, given as the native population was either truly Native, and therefore not recognized as US Citizenry at the time, as well as being an oppressed class, or otherwise very small in numbers.  That we would have to take as a given.

But the founding fathers, if you will, of the state, or at least those who obtained high political office, seem to be marked by a singular story.  They were from back east, they were often lawyers, they saw Wyoming as a wide open place where a person, often a lawyer, could make it big really quickly, as there were so few people and so many opportunities, and they translated this into political power.  Sometimes they stuck around thereafter, but often they did not.

I may be misreading them, but to those people this state was nothing more than a vehicle to personal success.  The state probably meant nothing more to them than any other place, and their own personal "success" was the goal.  They were highly personally ambitious.

But what about that sort of ambition?  It certainly doesn't comport with what Wendell Berry calls "becoming native to this place", and it isn't the sort of ambition that I have, or most long term residents of this state have.  People who have stuck it out here in lean times (and aren't all that happy to see people moving in, in spite of the pathetic babblings of the Casper newspaper calling 70,000 new residents something to be thankful for. . .hardly).  People who are really from here, love the land as a rule, and while we don't all agree with what means, we can all agree we love the state.

I suppose this might mean that my personal ambition is pretty skewed, or at least not very American.  I really don't get the thinking of people who move all over to follow a career.  And that seems destructive to me on top of it.  Never living anywhere, really, they never value anything other than themselves.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, September 13, 1923. An effort to beat swords into plowshares.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, September 13, 1923. Spanish democracy co...:

Going Feral: Fishing season is over, and hunting season has begun.

Going Feral: Fishing season is over, and hunting season has begun.: 

Fishing season is over, and hunting season has begun.

I am, by vocation, a hunter.  A hunter of wildlife and fish.  And I'm not exaggerating.

This isn't a hobby with me.  I'm stuck in a feral past, or perhaps a more feral future, but lving in the present.  

And I'm more of a hunter than a fisherman, in contrast with my father, who was the other way around

The first two seasons of the year open on September 1.  Like most years, due to my occupation (which most people, at least who are professionals, would claim as their vocation, although I'd wager that it is with less than half, very conservatively), I worked.  Opening weekend for me, therefore, is usually when I first get out, and I first get out for the greatest of the wild grouse, Blue Grouse.

They are, I'd note, delicious.

This is a somewhat complicated story, but because of the route I take in, I need permission to cross, which is always forthcoming but I didn't hear back in time this year. That meant that I needed to drive into a location a good two miles further from my normal jumping off point.

And the road, due to the heavy rains this year, and the winter snow, was eroded to impassable. So the walk was further than expected.

But still very pretty, in the morning light.

Because of the very long hike, and my recent surgery, I armed myself with a kids model 20 gauge and buttoned my shirt up to my neck.  Because my old M1911 campaign hat was a casualty of a rattlesnake event two years ago, I wore a replacement United States Park Service campaign hat.  I don't like it nearly as much as my old M1911.

I will say that those wearing synthetic hats are, well, missing the point, and the boat.

The entire trip involves some mountain climbing for the dog.

The dog won't eat in the morning (poodles and doodles are strange about this) due to excitement, so I packed his uneaten breakfast with me. When we hit the high country, he was by that time hungry, in spite of his excitement.

Those boots?  White's smoke jumpers.  Best boots ever.

We hike a fair amount. The dog drank out of a few streams, but I also carry a canteen and he's learned to drink out of a canteen cup.

We found and bagged two young grouse.

And ate them one that evening.  I fried both, that night, and had the second one, reheated the second evening.
 

M'eh. Homesteaders of America promo.

I see Joe Salatin is at this event:

Homesteaders of America

Am I the only Agrarian in the world who isn't a Salatin fan?

I can't even really explain why.  I'd heard of him way back when and then bought one of his books and was not impressed.  Since then, I've learned that he inherited his farm back east from his father, who was a hardworking accountant who bought it back, apparently, in the day when you could still afford to buy farm land.

That's part, I guess, of what bothers me.  He has a book with a title of something like "You Can Farm", but frankly, in a lot of the country, you aren't going to be able to become a full time farmer unless you were born into it.  That's the brutal reality of it, and the thing that needs to be addressed.  

While I'm at it, while I'm a prolific writer and love doing it, that's not everyone's cup of tea.  I think a lot of would be agrarians (I don't like the term "homesteader", as I think it's inaccurate) imagine just living off the land, on a small acreage farm.  That's really hard, indeed impossible, to do without some production that can be sold.  At least one of the participants in this conference works off the farm in a nearby very small town and is pretty active in other promotional endeavors.  I'm not saying that person isn't genuine, but that's not the same thing as being one of Jefferson's yeomen.

I could go on, but I'll just note, I'm not a fan, and I can't even really explain why.

Well, I probably shouldn't be.  While traveling to a homesteading conference strikes me as sort of contra agrarian, I hope that the attendees have a good time and learn a lot of valuable information.