In need of a jump start…
☆ September 23, 2012
Hey all ~
I’ve fallen out of the blog routine and I need your help getting back in it.
Shall we do a Q&A?
Entertain me with your questions and I’ll try to entertain you with my answers.
Post ’em in the comment section and we’ll be off!
S.
Maia!
☆ September 18, 2012
It hasn’t taken me this long to name her, I promise,
it’s just taken me this long to write about it.
Way back when I first posted about this calf, a brilliant commenter left the suggestion to name her after a star, apropos of Star Brand.
I loved this idea and looked up a bunch of star names, and wrote them down along with some other suggested names. I went out and sat about fifteen feet from where this little calf was lying and started reading the names out loud.
When I said “Maia,” she raised her head and looked at me. I kept reading through the names and she went back to ignoring me, but when I said “Maia” again, she got up and trotted over to me. So Maia is quite certainly her name! It’s a star in the constellation Taurus (the bull), which is also rather fitting.
She’s feisty and sweet and has seamlessly integrated into the Farmily.
♥
Star Brand Beef ~ Year One Recap!
☆ September 13, 2012
First off, I now know why middle-men exist. Organizing and coordinating this first run was about three times as much work as I was expecting ~ and I was anticipating a lot. I’ve spent the last month catching up on everything that fell by the wayside this summer, hence my blog slacking of late. But it was so worth it. The reviews have been pouring in and they, too, exceeded my expectations:
“The beef is UNREAL. I grilled up some New York steaks and could cut them with a butter knife. I have never tasted beef like this. Ever. Bravo.”
“We have been buying sides [of beef] for a long time and this is the best ever.”
“Star Brand Beef is the best beef I have ever eaten! I’m not a great cook so I know it’s not my cooking skills but the actual meat :-) It was incredibly tender, flavorful and juicy. I only used a little bit of salt and pepper to season it, that was it.”
“Been to some high end steak houses but this was THE best steak I’ve ever had. Seasoned with salt and pepper only. Wow.”
“I have to say, this beef is incredible tasting. And this whole process has made me much more conscious of the meat industry.”
“Star Brand Beef is what a hamburger is all about. Spouse saysit’s the only beef he’ll eat from now on.”
“We grilled up a package of hamburger on Saturday night. They were unbelievable! It makes you wonder how it’s possible that we’ve been duped for so long into eating the tasteless stuff in grocery stores. I’ve been so thrilled with this whole experience…”
Healthy beef, humanely raised, better for the environment, and it’s delicious beyond words! Hurrah!
When we were loading Bethany’s truck, a number of local ranchers found reasons to “happen by” and watch. Word has spread around the area and I have a list of ranchers who want to talk with me and learn more about what I’m doing. This excites me so much ~ for this is how large-scale transformation of the industry and feedlot system (which is intimately linked with GMO corn and soy) can eventually take place.
In regards to the future: I’ll be spending the winter figuring out next year’s route, and the years beyond that. In addition to those in the East who patiently waited out this year, I’ve heard from a number of customers on the west coast who are hoping I’ll deliver West again next year, too. Hearing from you will help me enormously. I am putting together a mailing list, and info for next year’s sales will go out to this list before I make it public on the blog. If you’d like to get on this list, please email me with your name and city and state. If you have an idea of how much you’d like to order (whole, half, or quarter), that info will also help me plan for the future. I won’t be sending out many emails to this list and certainly won’t consider these emails from you as set-in-stone orders, rather, it’s information gathering so I can try to make everyone as happy as possible.
THANK YOU so much for your patience, support, and enthusiasm!
Skunked
☆ September 7, 2012
So, it turns out having a skunk blow its load in one’s house is not as horrible as one would imagine. The immediate smell is horrible ~ more horrible than you could imagine. But dealing with it is not so bad! It’s amazing how rejuvenating it is to have a break in routine, even when it’s caused by skunk-bombing.
I moved up to Mike’s house with Mushy, who is still healing from
her talon wounds and I didn’t want her outside.
Lo and behold, Mike and I realized we really like living together!
Quite a surprise for both of us ~ we’ve spent the last six years living like Frida and Diego ~ but good info for us to know as we scheme about the future….
The rest of the house Farmily stayed at my place, as I was back and forth often and had every door open day and night for them to come and go ~ and to air out the place. A little scrubbing, a little laundry, a little purging of clutter, and home was back to normal and odor-free much sooner than I expected.
Thanks to everyone who emailed with suggestions ~ the hydrogen peroxide / baking soda / liquid soap recipe works like a charm.
The OK Corral
☆ August 14, 2012
The last I wrote about the Farmily was the tragic loss of Daisy’s newborn calf. Thank you to everyone who expressed concern for Daisy ~ I didn’t even address that side of things because it was too sad for me to write about ~ Daisy loves being a mother. I did what I could to minimize her loss by making sure she had companionship ~ Sir Baby has been in one section of the corral since his injury, as confinement is an important part of his healing process, and I had Daisy in another section of the corral for the week leading up to her due date so I could keep a close eye on her. Since I wanted to continue to monitor Daisy and since Baby is healing so well, I opened up the two sections in the corral so that Daisy and Baby were together, and we brought in the ancient matriarch cow, who is over 20 years old and a total badass, and one orphaned calf, whose mother died this spring, to join Daisy and Sir Baby in the corral.
The Matriarch was part of the Special Project cows who roamed the home place, but since it’s been so dry, we moved the Special Project bunch, including Fiona and Frisco, to grassier pastures just down the road. Though the matriarch can get around surprisingly well, trailing her to the new pasture with the rest of the group seemed a bit much. She has been a strong, gentle presence in the corrals with Daisy. The orphan calf has been weaned for two months since he lost his mother, but I had hopes that he and Daisy might connect. Unfortunately, he wasn’t at all interested in milk anymore. The most essential part of making an unmatched cow-calf pair is the calf’s drive to nurse. You can help manipulate all the other elements, but you can’t force that. When I saw that connection was futile, I told my vet that I was looking for a bum calf ~ it’s not the season for calves, but one never knows what might pop up and my vet is hooked into everything.
But back to Sir Baby and Daisy for a moment. For new readers, I bought Daisy from a dairy. She’d calved about three months before I got her, so she was in milk, and she was bred back (pregnant with Frisco). Cows are mammals, not machines, and must have a calf annually in order to make milk. Dairy protocol is to remove the calves from their mothers immediately (veal is a “by-product” of the dairy industry), so Daisy had never raised a calf when I got her. I was pretty overwhelmed with milking when I got Daisy, and I wanted a bum calf to help me with the excess milk. A neighbor happened to have a freakish love triangle occur with some of his cows ~ one cow had a calf, and all was normal. Then another cow had twins and accepted one of them, which is also normal. The first cow abandoned her calf and adopted the other twin! Very weird. But it was fate. That abandoned calf was Sir Baby. I still remember going to pick him up and sitting with him in the backseat of Mike’s truck on the ride home. Daisy was NOT interested in being a mother when I introduced them; she didn’t know, she had only been milked by machines, and then by me. But baby Sir Baby was determined to nurse, and after about a week, Daisy clicked into motherhood and she and Sir Baby still have an incredible bond to this day ~ they are family. In the days following her calf’s death, I’d often find Daisy licking Sir Baby’s neck and shoulders, tending to him as her first son, and the connection they share seemed to really help Daisy with the absence of her newest calf.
My vet called me on Thursday afternoon announcing he had a calf waiting for me to pick up. Buying bum calves at the sale ring is risky business because you generally don’t know what their first hours and days were like ~ how was the birth? Did they get colostrum? So many factors can affect whether a calf becomes a strong, healthy youngster or expires early, as proven with Daisy’s calf. But the stars aligned in this case ~ a rancher brought two dozen “cull cows” to the sale barn on Wednesday night for Thursday’s sale. Some of these cows were pregnant, and one of them had her baby that night, between midnight and 6 am. Cull cows are generally fine cows, just older ~ as I’ve written before, most ranchers sell their cows when they reach a certain age. Older cows are generally excellent mothers, so it’s likely this calf nursed and got her first dose of colostrum right after the birth. My vet bought the calf for me before the sale began, and I’m grateful beyond words that this cow’s last act was to provide Daisy and me with her beautiful baby. I had given my vet a gallon of Daisy’s colostrum as a thank you for coming out in the middle of the night to help with Daisy’s breech birth, so she was bottle fed Daisy’s colostrum throughout the day until Mike and I got there to pick her up.
Daisy was less than thrilled. Cows have very strong instincts to not allow any calf but their own to nurse ~ doing so would jeopardize their own baby, and this instinct carries even when that baby dies. So, twice a day, I put Daisy in the head catch with a bunk full of gourmet hay and let the calf drink her fill before I milked. A head catch is not a torture device ~ it’s a levered metal apparatus that closes around a cow’s neck but doesn’t actually touch her. Cow’s necks are wide when viewed from the side but incredibly narrow when viewed from above. The head catch has two curved panels that close around the cow’s neck but leave a hole ~ if you touch your pointer fingers together and your thumbs together, this is the shape of the hole it leaves. It’s not tight against the cow’s narrow neck but she can’t pull her wide head through the opening. I use this every day when I milk; it keeps Daisy comfortable but relatively still.
I wasn’t worried about this routine lasting forever, as Daisy and I went through this exact process with Sir Baby when he was a calf ~ at first, Daisy would only stand for him in the head catch, but after about a week, something switched inside Daisy and he was HERS. And today, that switch happened again. I went to the corral this morning and saw that one of Daisy’s teats was already pulled down (all the milk in that quarter had been drunk) and the calf was full and dozing. We have a love match! The calf is amazing ~ she adored Daisy from the start ~ and she’s huge. At one day old she looked like she was a month old, and now at a week old she looks three months old. She has her health, she has a new mother, and now all she needs is a name!
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