The pause that refreshes.

The The pause that refreshes.

Lex Anteinternet: USDA Blog » 19-Year-Old Hopes to Retire and Farm

Lex Anteinternet: USDA Blog » 19-Year-Old Hopes to Retire and Farm: 

USDA Blog » 19-Year-Old Hopes to Retire and Farm

USDA Blog » 19-Year-Old Hopes to Retire and Farm

Lex Anteinternet: Working outdoors

Lex Anteinternet: Working outdoors:

Working outdoors

I was recently asked for some career advice, and I have a long post on that topic I may, or may not, post, but it's sort of related to this.

We have another thread up here on Working With Animals, the basic point of it being that there were, even fairly recently, (within the last century) a lot of jobs where people worked with animals.  Just recently it occurred to me, however, how many jobs there once were that were outdoor jobs that no longer are.

Indeed, it seems as if the entire western world has moved indoors, and not for the better really.

Working outdoors is something that a lot more people experienced on a daily basis than they do now.  Prior to the heavy mechanization of agriculture there were a lot more farmers and ranchers, for example.  People like freighters worked outdoors.  Policemen did. They still do, but at that time, they were truly outdoors.  Even people you wouldn't associate with outdoor careers, like lawyers and doctors, actually traveled locally a fair amount, in a way that was truly outdoors.

I don't think there's any replacement for being outdoors, and working inside and never seeing more of the outdoors than the space between the office and the car, or the parking lot and the store, isn't a good thing.  Of course, people know that, but what most people do, and even have little other choice but to do, is to replace being outdoors by necessity or vocation with a sort of anemic substitute.  I'm not blaming them, but an hour in a small city park in the middle of downtown isn't really being outdoors, in a true sense.  It's better than nothing, but it isn't the same thing.

I'm sure that in some sense all this indoors has a negative impact on our physical and psychological health.  With a nation in which so many are indoors, all the time, that's a fairly disturbing thing.

Lex Anteinternet: Economics of Farming with Horses

The original was posted in 2013, and it can be found with comments on our companion site.

Lex Anteinternet: Economics of Farming with Horses:         

Economics of Farming with Horses

 This interesting article appeared some time ago in Rural Heritage:  Economics of Farming with Horses.

 Cotton farmer, 1937.

At the time it ran, I subscribed to the magazine, and I even wrote a few articles for it.  None of mine dealt with this topic, however.  Nor could they, as I'm not a farmer, and I wouldn't know how to use a horse in farming.  Or a tractor, for that matter.

 Unhitching horses, 1937.

The same topic, horse vs. petroleum economics, is being explored here on the SMH site, but with a different prospective.

 Army freight wagon, 1940.

It's an interesting topic, and one that we usually don't consider in this fashion. The slow (and it was slow) switch from horses to petroleum horse power, was an economic decision more than anything else.  There are other factors, but the "inevitable" march of progress type of prospective is wholly in error.  Gasoline powered vehicles of all types were enormously expensive originally, and gasoline was as well, contrary to the popular concept that it was darned near free.  Early on, gasoline was actually more expensive in real terms than it is now, and for that matter, so were automobiles.  The switch away from horse was influenced by other factors in various areas, including convenience and easy maintenance in urban settings, but dollars and cents mattered more than any other factor.

 U.S. Army recruiting poster from 1919, the year after the Allied victory in World War One.

Of course, once they came in, petroleum fueled farm equipment not only came in because of an economic tipping point, they changed the economics of everything as well.  After awhile, all farmers nearly had to switch to them, or such was the perception.  That impacted what they could farm, and then what they had to farm.  The irony of mechanization is that in the end, it not only meant fewer farm horses, it meant many fewer farmers.

 World War One vintage recruiting poster for the Indiana National Guard.

Lex Anteinternet: Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Mind...

Lex Anteinternet: Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Mind...: 

Old Technology, New Technology, Techies, Open Minded and Luddites

One of the frequently visited topics of this blog is the change in various material items, or the introduction of technology.  Some might suspect that the author might be, therefore, a Luddite, or perhaps a Neo Luddite.  This is not so.

That is, I'm far from the vie that all technology is bad, but at the same time keep the point of view that the measure of a material things worth includes (but only includes) its effectiveness.  Something that works well, works well.  That means, of course, that something old that works well may work better than something new that doesn't work as well.  For example, those who are familiar with ranching can't help but note that the horse has outlasted several of its intended replacements, in some of its traditional roles.  I've seen the dirt bike, the three wheeler and the ATV all come and go as rivals to the horse. They just don't cut it in comparison, so the horse keeps on keeping on.

 

And many other examples of this can be found.  Old Coke was better than "new Coke" because it was.  Lots of old tools do the job as well or better than anything that comes after them.  The big old heavy Dodge Power Wagons are still coveted because nothing compares to them in their intended use.  Cast Iron cookery is better than newer items that are designed for the same purpose, not because they are old, but because the are better.  Espousing all those things doesn't make a person a Luddite, just open minded.

All that is fairly obvious.  When the truly open minded sometimes note that a really old technology or method remains applicable in the modern world in an unexpected way, however, it can be a bit of a shock. Retuning to the horse again, for example, its a mind bender to some to realize that there are armies in the world today that retain mounted troops, and that extensive field forces have been deployed of that type as recently as the 1980s, and actually much later.  Both Portugal and Rhodesia, for example, deployed mounted infantry into the 1980s, in combat.  And mounted rural patrols remain perfectly viable in some places, including parts of the U.S. border, today.  That the horse would remain a viable platform should be self evident, but it comes as a shock.  Its competitors, in this context, offer speed and lower training, but they also are inflicted with noise and cost.  It's a cost balancing matter, therefore, and in some instance, the costs favor the horse.  In a related sort of analysis, some work has been done by economist that show on small acreages horse drawn implements are actually more cost effective, if the cost of the human farmer's labor is deducted, than machinery, up until a certain point at which the speed of the machinery tips the balance. Noting that doesn't make a person a Luddite, just a bit eccentric.

What does make a person a bit of a Luddite, however, is refusing to accept that any technology is either an improvement or useful. . . or in sometimes necessary.  I recently ran across an odd example of that.

As folks who stop here know, I'm a lawyer.  Moreover, I'm a lawyer in Wyoming, which means that I travel around quite a bit.  I was also an "early adopter" of the Internet, which was coming into law firms just at the time I entered the law, which is about a quarter century ago now.  Most younger lawyers, I'm sure, can't imagine a day when every firm didn't have the Internet, but I do.  We were just getting dial in when I started up. We still had to go to the county law library to use Westlaw at that time, which I frequently did.  Now, of course, we all have West Law on our PCs, and were connected all the time, literally.  Is that good or bad?  Well, I've debated that, even here on this site, and there are good and bad elements to that.  But anyway you look at it, it is.

Part of that, of course, includes email.  We use email constantly.  And it has very much impacted how we work, I realized today.  And that's where, perhaps, the Luddite aspect of this kicks in.

I won't say that every type of business everywhere must have internet connectivity.  But law firms must.  A firm without the net is not only a rarity, but obsolete.  I've come to assume that most law firms have a webpage dedicated to their firm.   Having one wouldn't be absolutely necessary, but it's darned near necessary.  It's like having a sign out in front of your shop.

Email is necessary.  I don't know how any lawyer can operate without email.  But today I ran across one, to my surprise, that didn't.

In this case the lawyer was across the continent, literally.  I've been having trouble catching him by phone, and he's been having trouble catching me.  That's easy to occur in this situation.  When I first come into the office most mornings, I probably have a series of early morning emails to catch up with. At that same time, this fellow is doing his mid morning work.  By mid morning, when I might have the best chance of calling from my office, he's probably gone for lunch.  When he comes back and returns my call, I may be just getting back or be out doing something.  If I call him after 3:00, he's probably gone, and so on.  

However, if a person has email.  None of this matters.  I'd catch him first thing in the morning with an email, or vice versa, and we can exchange them over a day so that, in the course of one day, we'd probably be well on our way to having whatever it was all worked out.  So, I went to find his firm website so I could send him an email.

Low and behold, I couldn't find a website, or even an email address.  His state bar listing didn't even list a fax number.  Finally, I had my secretary call his to ask for a fax number or email address.  They did have a fax number.

Here I'll digress that whenever I call this office, the receptionist is invariably snooty.  That may be, in part, because I have a Rocky Mountain accent (yes, there is such a thing) and I'm dealing with somebody who has a certain distinct regional accent.  She might not be able to understand me, and I can't really understand her all that well.  Or she might just be a bit rude.  I always find that odd in a receptionist.  I'm just trying to call her boss on a work matter, which would seemingly be good for us both.  Treating me like an annoyance would not seem to be warranted.  Oh well.

Anyhow, I resorted to the fax, a technology that seemed pretty amazing when I started 23 years ago but which now seems sort of redundant to email.  Oh well.  But here, I can't grasp how, or even why, somebody in this line of work wouldn't adopt this technology.  Shoot, here we couldn't get by without it now, as everyone else has it, and that's the speed at which we must work.  Indeed, even Iphones are a necessity, as they pick up email.

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fishing and gardening

Lex Anteinternet: Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fish...: 

Rediscovering the obvious: Diet and hunting, fishing and gardening

For those who follow dietary trends, the current in vogue diet is the "Paley\o Diet".  And for those who take the National Geographic, you are aware that they've been running a semi scary series of articles on food in the 21st Century.

Elk hunter in northwest Wyoming, first decade of the 20th Century. For many in this region, this scene could have been taken any October.

The National Geographic articles have been inspired by the scare that's existed since at least the early 1970s that the planet is about to run out of food, although that particular article isn't really on that topic.  Quite frankly, and as well explored by an earlier National Geographic article, there's small chance of this indeed.  If anything, production agriculture has so vastly increased the global food supply that there's an overabundance of food and most fears of this type are very poorly placed.  Production agriculture, in fact, has hardly touched Africa and there's vast potential there, although not without vast cultural cost at the same time.

That's not what this article addresses, however. Rather, it addresses something that has been so obvious to me for decades that it not fits into one of those "geez, I wish I'd thought of marketing that way back when. . . " categories.

That is, human beings are evolved to eat a diet that we ate in our aboriginal state, for the most part, which we could still largely do.  Failing to do so has all sorts of negative health impacts.

Now, I am very well aware that this idea, which is an obvious truth, runs counter to the whole peak of the vegan trend, but that entire trend is one that is basically neopaganistic and hateful of nature.  We are part of nature, are evolved to eat a natural diet, and that diet was a wild one.

 Deer hunters with camp, early 20th Century.

So, hence the paleo diet trend, which I've largely ignored  A better study of this was presented by the National Geographic.

And what did the National Geographic discover? Well, people in their native states are hunter gatherers, with the emphasis on hunters. They eat a lot of vegetative material, but mostly because they're left with little choice.  When they don't have meat, it's because they can't find it, and they crave it.  If meat is abundant, their diet is heavy in it.  If it isn't, they feel deprived and make do with what they can find.

 Don't have the time, or perhaps energy to pursue deer or elk, or whatever.  Well, poultry lovers, perhaps you should try something a little more wild. Women hunters with pheasants.  Pheasant taste better than chicken any day.  For those who worry, moreover, about mass poultry production and how chickens are killed and raised, these pheasants enjoyed a wild bird life and generally when they're culled, they go from that to processed, so to speak, instantly.

And, as we now are increasing learning (and which I've known for decades) a natural diet of that type, with what you could locally hunt, is the best thing for you.

Now, as folks around here know I'm a fan of agriculture, and indeed I own beef cattle (although I'd live off of deer, elk and antelope if my wife, who is more of a beef fan, would allow).  And agriculture does have a peculiar role here.  

 Female pheasant hunter, 1960s, Colorado.

Agriculture is, or can be, the enemy of the wild in that it's allowed, as has long been known, civilization to rise.  Only the production of surplus foods can sustain urban development and our type of civilization, even though farmers and ranchers are often shunned by the people who depend upon them 100% in cities.  This has long been known, and some cultural anthropologist in fact make a big deal out of it and sort of smugly argue that all production agriculture is the enemy of the wild.

But in fact, as the National Geographic explores, agriculture can exist and does exist in a blurry line with hunting and gathering in those societies.  Nearly all, but not all, hunter gather societies are actually small farm, hunting, and gathering societies.  That's been obvious for millennia, but is generally ignored.

 Rabbit hunter, early 20th Century.  Rabbit taste nearly identical to chicken, and is the leanest meat on the planet.  It's so lean, in fact, you can't survive on a diet of it alone.  In many nations, domestic rabbit is a common table item.  It oddly isn't in the U.S., but there's no good reason for that. Wild rabbit taste like chicken and can be used anywhere chicken is.

Okay, so what's all this have to do with diet?

Just this.  While it puts me in the category of food campaigners, a wild diet is the best diet, and some direct relationship with your food is vastly superior to none.  People who sit around extolling vegetarianism or veganism are largely allowed to do that on the backs of farmers who are supporting their pagainistic anti natural dietary beliefs.  People who have a direct relationship with consumption and understand it (the two not necessarily being the same) tend to feel differently.

 Trout fishing in the Catskills.  Fishing is really fish hunting, and I've always thought that people who try to make a distinction between hunting and fishing are fooling themselves.  For that matter, anyone who eats fish, poultry or meat and doesn't think that they'd personally hunt or fish is really fooling themselves anyhow.  While on this, I'll also note that I truly find the modern emphasis on "catch and release" a bit bizarre.

Even now, in the 21st Century, many of us could have that direct relationship.  Most urbanites have the room to plant a garden (and yes, I've done so in the past but haven't the past several years, so I'm being a bit hypocritical).  And hunting is on the rise in the United States.  Taking some of your food in the field, either by hunting or fishing, is to be encouraged, and not only has the benefit of giving you a diet that somewhat replicates the one you are evolved to actually eat, but it gives you a lot of exercise as well.  Indeed, something non hunters don't appreciate is that the actual work in hunting involved can be quite intensive, and usually really dedicated hunters in the west try to stay in shape for that reason.  For those who can't do that, a direct relationship with your beef supplier, or pork supplier, or poultry supplier, is nearly always possible.  The cow in our freezer has always been the trendy "grass fed" beef just because of that sort of, but of course it's one of our own that's a "volunteer" having determined to retire from calf raising.

 World War One vintage poster campaigning for War Gardens, which the U.S. encouraged to be planted in towns and cities.

 World War Two photograph of a Victory Garden being planted.  This fellow had such a big yard (its in a town) that he's acquired a tractor to do it.

 School Gardens probably passed away about the time this poster was made during World War One, but there's plenty of space in most urban areas for yard gardening.

There's no down side to any of this, and we can only hope that this trend continues in the future, with more hunting, gathering and planting, on their own.  Shoot, most urban areas are so darned boring in real terms, the benefits can hardly cease.

Deer hunter bringing in a deer on skies. The uninitiated will think, "oh surely, that's the far distant past". Well, not always.  I haven't hunted deer on skies, but I have hunted snowshoe hares on skies many times.

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.