Posted on 02/09/2009 12:36:11 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny
>>>>It amazes me how smart they are and how careful they can be of someone who is not a trained rider.<<<<
I used to take my free horse ‘Nikki” and go through the woods, off trail and go around trees and then just let him find his way back - It was funny to see him when he wasn’t quite sure on one of the trees to go around, and he would pause, look around and you could almost feel him saying ‘Ah I remember now left of this tree and right of that one.’
When we would pasture our sheep on pasture that wasn’t fenced, and we wanted to keep them out of the garden area, I would ride Nikki along the border and tell him to keep the sheep in there - I would lie back (bareback of course) on him and enjoy the warm sunshine and if the sheep would start to get near the border I had set out, he would very very slowly start moving till I would sit up, then he was off at a trot to herd them back where they belonged - I was more or less a passenger, enjoying the ride. He took that job very seriously!
Economy Spurs the ‘Urban Chicken’
‘Maybe we should allow chickens’
February 17, 2009
By Brenda Schory
Kane County Chronicle, Illinois
GENEVA – Chickens are egg-laying, bug-eating, compost dropping, occasional squawkers that might make a fine addition to the city’s urban neighborhoods.
And as a way for people to cope with the current tough economic times. Fifth Ward Alderman Paul DesCoteaux said he will bring up the idea of approving an ordinance to allow city residents to keep chickens as a hedge against rising food prices.
“I feel that times will be tougher than what they are now before they get better,” DesCoteaux said. “Nobody knows when it will get better. Some towns allow the raising of chickens without a rooster to wake people up. Maybe we should allow chickens.”
In that vein, DesCoteaux said, he would also suggest that Geneva cultivate an area of the city where residents can have community gardens. This would also allow them to cut food costs by raising their own vegetables.
Mayor Kevin Burns said the city could consider community gardens – but he did not embrace the idea of chickens.
“Anytime a project benefits the community, it will receive all consideration and support,” Burns said. “But chickens? Really? I’m going to start raising cattle. I spent the last eight years with chickens. They’re called aldermen. They’re annoying, and they smell.”
But chickens being smelly and annoying are myths that Craig MacLean hopes to counter once the issue is discussed seriously.
MacLean, owner of the Pure Gardener Inc., 502 W. State St., Geneva, which specializes in organic and natural products, brought both issues to DesCoteaux and asked him introduce them to the council. Areas he suggests for community gardens are the green space on Peck road and the inmate garden at the former jail site.
As for chickens, MacLean said, many cities including Madison have introduced ordinances to allow residents to keep them.
“Urban chickens – there’s tons of [ordinance] models in place,” MacLean said. “We’re not asking them to start from square one, we’re asking them to consider what others have put a lot of thought into. People who are interested ought to be allowed to do it, in a responsible way so it’s got little or no impact on neighbors – except they might get free eggs out of it.”
Cities in Colorado, Washington, New Mexico, California and Wisconsin have approved ordinances allowing urban chickens, MacLean said.
Madison, Wis., has a 2004 urban chicken ordinance that requires the birds to be in enclosures at least 25 feet away from neighbors, chickens not to be slaughtered and roosters not to be allowed, MacLean said.
“Chickens are a natural insect control and their droppings are good for the compost pile,” MacLean said. “We really believe the people of Geneva are forward-thinking people. And once you get the information out there and disinformation and fears out in the open and deal with the facts – it becomes a clearer issue. It’s a doable thing no more complicated than raising dogs and cats.”
http://www.kcchronicle.com/articles/2009/02/16/36191528/index.xml
In Ranch Country, Fewer Riding the Range
The number of ranches and other operations where cows are raised for beef has reached a new low... Some are even worried about the nation’s food supply.
February 14, 2009
By Nate Jenkins
AP
CALLAWAY, Neb. — To pay the bills, Richard Cool drives 45 miles down a lonely highway from the family ranch to a small-town auto parts factory where he works the overnight shift.
It ends at 6 a.m., then Cool’s future begins.
“Not only have I been hoping for the past 15 years that I could own cattle of my own, I’m now seeing it becoming a real possibility,” he said.
If Cool’s dream turns into reality with help from a first-of-its-kind program launched at a small ag school in western Nebraska, the burly 35-year-old who carries textbooks in his ranch pickup won’t have to make the drive to the factory. And he would be bucking a national trend.
Like others with country roots, the simple love of working outside with cattle — not grand ambitions of securing the nation’s food supply — is what appeals to Cool. For years, his dream of doing it full-time seemed unattainable.
There isn’t enough land in the small ranch that has been in his family for three generations to split among he and his nine siblings.
Cool also faces the same obstacle as other young ranchers with little or no collateral, and scant business experience: getting a large loan.
Now it’s within his grasp because of the 100-Cow Program, which is confined to Nebraska.
The program offers hopeful ranchers with no collateral, low-interest, government loans of up to $300,000 if they complete a ranch management course. Besides teaching students the best way to raise livestock, it teaches them how to run a ranch as a successful business. And participants must complete a business plan to present to U.S. Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency, which lends the money.
Industry experts say it could be a template for the rest of the country.
High land prices, poor planning for the transfer of ranchland from one generation to another, the allure of city lights and other factors have slowly been draining Nebraska and other agricultural states of ranchers — and the cattle they raise. The iconic image of young men riding the range on horseback is mostly a myth now — graybeards in their 60s and 70s are the fastest-growing segment of the ranching population.
The number of ranches and other operations where cows are raised for beef has reached a new low, leading some observers to worry that an important thread that has helped bind rural areas for generations is becoming dangerously frayed. Some are even worried about the nation’s food supply.
Last year, the number of beef cows in the U.S. dropped to 41.8 million, an all-time low, down from a high of 50.2 million reached in 1982.
In 2007, the last year for which data are available, the number of calves they produced reached its lowest mark since 1951.
And the number of ranches and other types of beef-cow operations has dropped to fewer than 758,000. That’s the fewest on record and a 22 percent decline over the past two decades, according to statistics provided by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“I am concerned,” said Andy Groseta, a third-generation Arizona rancher whose term as president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association just ended. “There’s not enough young people. It’s a dying industry. There will be a point where this country won’t be able to feed itself.”
While participants in the 100 Cow-Program are paying off the loan, participants will have to annually give the Farm Service Agency a business plan.
A hundred cows often isn’t enough to make a living for a family — it takes more like 500 — and $300,000 falls short as well. A more realistic amount needed to start a cattle operation is around $1 million, mainly due to land prices that continue to hover at record-highs.
But creators of the program think they have a way of closing the distance between the $300,000 and approximately $1 million it takes to start from scratch: Participants like Cool have to partner up with established, older ranchers who agree to let them use their land and equipment at a low cost.
Those who oversee the program hope the older ranchers will agree because they need help running their own operations.
The herds belonging to the young and old ranchers will run together until the youngster gains a foothold, creates a track record of business success, and gains the collateral he needs to get another loan from the local bank, instead of the government.
The hope is that years later, ranchers who once could only answer “no” to questions from private banks about whether they had business experience and collateral, should be able to answer “yes” when seeking loans to buy their own ranches, said Weldon Sleight. He is the main architect of the program that is offered by the Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture, where he is the dean.
“The answer’s going to be a whole lot different than the hired hand who says ‘I’m sorry, my employer’s given me a home, I get a beef a year, and I really have a good understanding of beef cattle, but I have a pickup”’ for collateral, Sleight said.
“We in higher education, I fear, have been training people to be hired hands rather than owners,” he said. A generation of those hired hands has been “hoping, on a wing and a prayer, that some way, someday, they would own a ranch.”
Worries about the lagging number of young ranchers have also convinced the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to act.
Groseta said he is worried the day is coming when livestock-raising improvements that have put more beef on the bones of cattle will no longer be enough to offset the decline in ranches and cattle.
For the past decade, as the number of ranches and cows have dropped, the amount of beef produced in the U.S. has stayed relatively steady — ranging from about 25 million pounds to 27 million pounds per year.
Between 2006 and 2007, for instance, the number of beef cow operations dropped by nearly 5,000, and the number of cows slipped by 246,000.
During the same time, the total amount of beef produced, measured by carcass weight, rose by about 273,000 pounds.
Groseta said he couldn’t predict when, but at “some point we’ll reach a critical threshold” where declining numbers of ranches and cattle decrease the amount of beef that is produced.
With Groseta’s encouragement, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association recently started the Young Producers Council, which met for the first time on Jan. 29 in Phoenix. The goal is to get more people ages 18 to 35 involved in policy issues surrounding the beef industry.
Formed partially to help increase communication, the need for the group is also a sign of the widening cultural cracks in remote rural areas caused by the long, dry-run in ranching demographics.
Thirty-one-year-old ranch owner Trent Fredenburg, a member of the council, said he “couldn’t imagine the challenges” he and his wife would have faced starting out on their own without the land and other help they got from their ranching parents.
He’s already finding it tough to expand his ranch near Greenfield, Ind. because land prices have increased by about $1,000 an acre over the last 1 1/2 years. He blames it on high crop prices that have encouraged people to turn pasture ground for livestock into farm ground.
There’s few peers for him to talk to.
“Our grandparents, when they faced challenges, they could go to the coffee shop and talk to others having the same challenges,” Fredenburg said. “That’s not the case today. Young people have challenges, but they’re so spread out across the country. They aren’t at the coffee shop.”
On the Net:
Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture: http://ncta.unl.edu/index.html%3bjsessionid
9439D6211EFD7E1282F9A033 7FA66EE5
National Cattlemen’s Beef Association: http://www.beef.org/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-ne-100cows,0,6345466,full.story
Following publicized reports that the Army National Guard was planning a military training exercise on the streets of a rural Iowa town, the commanding officers have called off the mock "invasion."
The Guard had planned a four-day urban military operation in tiny Arcadia, Iowa, population 443, sending troops to take over the town and search door-to-door for a suspected weapons dealer.
It's amazing what people waste. I never buy salt pork. We have several friends that just dispose of the fat slabs from pigs, so we just salt it down and share. Likewise the small pieces of fat-we try it out for lard to fry donuts. Oh the cholesterol!!
>>>if company comes unexpectedly,<<<
Hmmm Maine - 7 1/2 hours drive... but for Mincemeat, I just might make that trip!!! (I usually make some and can it) The rest of the family ‘tolerate’ it, but I love it! So, when I make a mincemeat pie, they eat a thin sliver each and I eat the rest! Well, not all at one sitting - usually finish it off for breakfast the next morning - Now that’s the way to start the day!!!
>>>>It’s amazing what people waste.<<<<
I know... I usually do 9 or 10 chickens at a time, and it takes me two days. But when I am through, I have 2 cases canned, livers in a package, take de-boned scraps, gizzards and a couple of livers and make chicken scrapple - Get about 16 pounds of that - then I can the broth for cooking veggies and for soups. Feathers, innards, bones and feet go to the chipper/shredder for the compost pile. I know they say not to put meat scraps in compost, but that is the way the commercial chicken farms dispose of theirs regularly. Works great, and I have never had a problem with it.
>>>>Oh the cholesterol!!<<<<
Sometimes I think that cholesterol hype is just that... I eat about 4 eggs a day and my cholesterol is LOWER than it was before. LDL is lower and HDL (the good kind) is higher. Lard is absolutely fantastic for cooking! I cannot eat a french fry from McDonald’s - can’t get past the rancid tallow smell (at least that’s what it seems to me).
I really need to get my wife to reconsider on having a couple of pigs. She isn’t too keen on them, but they would certainly fill a void in my preparedness - AND you can use just about everything but the Squeal. Plus, I miss the lard for cooking, the hams, pork sausage (even though I make venison sausage and am going to do chicken sausage from the next batch) but most of all, I miss a nice slab of smoked bacon... where you can slice it to the thickness you want. Mmmmm Good!
I used to have my deer done at a butcher shop, but they keep going higher and higher in price and you get less and less meat, so this year I went back to doing it all myself. My wife was amazed - couldn’t believe I knew how to do all that... (grin) Gotta keep her surprised... (it’s fun)
Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.
Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.
| Canning 101 | How Do I?
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Using Boiling Water CannersElizabeth L. Andress, Ph.D. Most boiling water canners are made of aluminum or porcelain-covered steel. They have fitted lids and removable racks that are either perforated or shaped wire racks. The canner must be deep enough so that at least one inch of briskly boiling water will be over the tops of jars during processing. Some boiling water canners do not have completely flat bottoms. A flat bottom must be used on an electric range. Either a flat or ridged bottom may be used on a gas burner. To ensure uniform processing of all jars with an electric range, the canner should be no more than 4 inches wider in diameter than the element on which it is heated. (When centered on the burner or element, the canner should not be more than 2 inches wider on any side.) Follow these steps for successful boiling water canning:
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Oh my! All of us like-minded people should live close by. When hubby got a moose permit in 2007, he bagged a large moose and was afraid he couldn’t get it processed before it spoiled , so he paid 300 dollars to have a butcher do it and he has been complaining ever since. He says never again-not trimmed to suit him-steaks not cut to suit him. He has a large butcher wheel (?)- a hugh wheel with heavy rope attached to pulleys. You pull on the rope and yout “critter” is attached to the pulleys and as the rope winds around the large wheel it then winds around a log up in the top of our pole barn, the critter is pulled up in the air for skinnig and processing. There must be a name for this apparatus and if anyone knows what it is called, I would love to know. Several game wardens in the area are aware of this device, so they bring road kills for skinning and we usually get a hind quarter for our help.
We also get the most of our animals. Heart, tongue, liver and hogs head cheese are all items the children shudder at whan hubby is processing. They also hesitate to visit when he is processing lard as the smell turns them off. Guess they have never been through hard enough times. I tell them it smells like “money saved” to me. Likewise with the smell of any seafood. Shrimp is real cheap right now if purchased off the boats when they dock. Hubby has shelled over 200 pounds of shrimp purchased at fifty cents a pound. Shelled out, that averages about $1.30 a pound for shrimp.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I get too attached to animals to raise them for food. In a survival situation I know I wouldn’t be that picky but how do ou know in advance? Have always wanted goats and hubby would like chickens but know our numerous gardens would suffer with either of these.
Your receipe for caramel icing reminds me of a simple inexpensive dessert I used to make for my children when they were little and money was scarce. If we had a good, rich dessert, they were satisfied with cheaper meat dishes. I would prepare a biscuit receipe using a little sugar and work in as many apples as I could. Then I made a sauce similar to the caramel icing only thinner. Poured over the hot apple biscuits, it was delicious and inexpensive.
If I follow the description, it sounds like a ‘block and tackle’ It certainly makes it easier to hoist it to skin and cut. I put a spreader bar between the hind legs and hoist mine from a tree in the back yard. Sometimes here though, I have to bring it in to the extra refrigerator in the back porch to age as it can sometimes get too warm during deer season. I did 4 deer this year - 1 pre-season when a doe had ripped her stomach open on a fence and I put her down (and called the game warden to register it.) and I got one hunting, my brother in law brought me another and his hunting buddy brought me another. They like to hunt, but their families are not too keen on eating it, which suits me fine.
I got innovative with my cutting, and put an 8” wood blade in my saws-all and used that to split the carcass - worked way better than the old meat saw.
Wow, the shrimp sounds fantastic - My wife will be there really fast for that - she can make an all day affair at eating steamed shrimp. peel dip and eat hour after hour...
I like scallops and when we were in Nova Scotia, I stopped in at a small country store and the owner was just sitting down to a heaping plate of them... Looked like about 3 or 4 pounds. Of course I stocked up on them and we had a feast at the campsite that night! Don’t remember the price, but it was way less than they are here.
Something I had up there also that was new to me was lobster sandwiches. Mmmm good too.
>>>I would prepare a biscuit receipe using a little sugar and work in as many apples as I could. Then I made a sauce similar to the caramel icing only thinner. Poured over the hot apple biscuits, it was delicious and inexpensive.<<<<<
Fantastic. Guess what’s for desert here tonight!
I gotta try that.
Well, desert is cookin...
I made it like an ‘apple pan doughty’ in a 12” cast iron skillet and it is baking in the oven.
Now I better check out that caramel sauce... :D
That is definitely a ‘down eastern’ comfort food.
yummmm....when should we all be over?
http://www.thenews.com.pk/updates.asp?id=69259
Seed sowing festival celebrated in Manipur, India
Updated at: 1730 PST, Saturday, February 21, 2009
MANIPUR: The seed sowing festival of the Naga people, Lui-Ngai-Ni, was celebrated with pomp and gaiety today in different parts of the State.
Celebrated under the theme ‘Culture of Peace’ Lui-Ngai-Ni was celebrated at the Maha Union Government High School ground at Chandel district today.
Cultural dances and songs were presented by the different tribes of the Naga family at Chandel, which enthralled the gathering.
Troupes representing Chothe, Tarao, Anal, Moyon, Lamkang, Monsang and Maring presented their respective cultural items during the festival at Chandel.
Tengnoupal AC MLA Morung W Makunga, ADC of Chandel Lunminthang Haokip and SDO of Chandel Jacintha Lazarus graced the function as chief guest, guest of honour and president respectively.
Former Minister DK Korungthang, ADC of Moreh Th Hopeson Chothe, Major Prem of 20 Assam Rifles, CO of 8 MR IK Muivah, Principal of United College Th Oliver were the special guests.
The celebration kicked off with Makunga lighting the inaugural lamp with Advisor of the UNC giving the welcome address.
LOL - I think you are right - she would have had to be Auntie Em...
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2008-weekly/health-25-11-2008/index.html
[end of report]
Daily physical exercise keeps the brain young, mouse studies suggest. But don’t wait too long to start. The brain-boosting effects of exercise diminish rapidly after early middle age, say researchers working in the lab of Yu-Min Kuo, PhD, of Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University Medical College. Kuo’s team previously found that young brains create new brain cells and integrate them into existing brain networks. As animals get older, however, this process dramatically slows. And this slowdown in brain cell creation is linked to impaired memory and learning. Mice that started exercise in early middle age did much better than mice that didn’t start exercising until later middle age. Interestingly, the brain changes seen in exercising mice weren’t caused by a drop in stress hormones, as some studies predicted. Instead, the positive changes came from increased production of signalling molecules that promote brain cell growth and survival.
[Granny notes:
There is a small simple photo of the brain and it [to me] looks like the inside of a cow’s udder.
Years ago, a Rancher lived on the next block and he had a small building where he dressed out his beef.
My dogs brought home a cow’s udder, just as it was cut from the cow and it, as I remember, looked like this brain photo inside.
Makes sense, the udder holds the milk and releases it, does it also make it there?
Truth is, I don’t know what the milk making process is?
LOL, the things that I still need to learn.
granny]
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