New Americans turn to goats to address food demand

WTTG-TV / The Associated Press ^ | April 18, 2014

[2ndDivisionVet]

COLCHESTER, Vt. (AP) -- A bunch of kids in a minivan are solving twin challenges in northern Vermont: refugees struggling to find the food of their homelands and farmers looking to offload unwanted livestock.

The half dozen kids - that is, baby goats - that arrived last week at Pine Island Farm were the latest additions to the Vermont Goat Collaborative, a project that brings together new Americans hungry for goat meat with dairy goat farmers who have no need for young male animals. Some dairy farmers who otherwise would discard bucklings at birth or spend valuable time finding homes for them now can send them to Colchester....

[MSF BU]

What if the goat is sent directly to the butcher...eh, “processor”. We’d drop of lambs and pigs to one local outfit and pick it up within a day or two all packaged. Is that no longer allowed?

[tumblindice]

Off Avenida Revoluccion in Tijuana, lunchtime, and we smell something really good ...
Tracked it down and found a mamacita in front of a bodega bent over a garbage can lid cooking scraps of meat.
Then we saw something hanging in the store window that might have been a goat carcass, but someone thought it was a large hound.
Beef, chicken or pig, thank you very much!

[Organic Panic]

A Mexican place down the street slaughters a goat every month or so and has chiva especiales for a week. Everyone loves it. Goat soup, goat stew, goat burritos, goat tacos.

[Bigg Red]

The worst one is stabbing the animal in the heart and letting the blood squirt out while the animal slowly dies...

***
It figures. Mohammedans have the most disgusting attitudes and rituals.

[familyop]

Was it a kid at about six months, penned for a month or two while fed oats or something like that and kept away from wild garlic, sage, etc.? Best way to do it. Many people in Mississippi have liked barbequed goats.

[Bigg Red]

The better way would be real agricultural extension services (like those in the past) educating rural people on how to slaughter a goat.

***
The mohammedan blood and death cult would not permit slaughtering of the goats in a humane way, I am sure.

[Georgia Girl 2]

It was a goat roast in Jamaica. Curried goat. Ugh!!!!!!!!!!!

[familyop]

"Raised goats and sheep for local “ethnic” groups for the past several years. Their slaughter techniques very but can be rather horrific. The worst one is stabbing the animal in the heart and letting the blood squirt out while the animal slowly dies..."

Never heard of that one. Jewish people don't do it that way, and neither do Islamics. They use a very sharp knife to slice through the front of the neck all the way past the carotid arteries or insert a very sharp drain tube into an artery.

The American way to do it is to stun the animal by shooting it just above (within about a half inch above the centerline) and between the eyes or halfway between the eye and the ear. Then it's quickly hoisted it up with the head down and a carotid artery severed to bleed it out.

Both are humane ways to slaughter animals. Animals don't worry about what's going to happen next. Who stabs an animal in the heart for slaughter?

[sean327]

I bet you and your family hold on to a few traditions that were brought here from the “old country”. There is nothing wrong with doing so. Most groups who emigrate to the US end up assimilating by their 2nd or 3rd generations.

My family has held on to the tradition of La Matanza (hog killing) that was brought to New Mexico from Spain in the late 1500’s. It’s a part of who we are. It brings the family together and it will be a sad die if the tradition ever dies out.

[j. earl carter]

now it’s gonna be Amateur Hour, with any idiot hacking away at the poor goat.

Are you sure that's the position you want to take? Seems to me, your logic could be applied to the millions of "idiots" who go deer hunting every year.

I admire people who strive for self-sufficiency.

[familyop]

Yeah, no tellin’ the age of the goat or what it was fed, eh? Curry is pretty nasty stuff for us westerners—those of us who haven’t developed a taste for it. I have relatives who commented negatively about the smell of hamburgers cooking in U.K. fast food joints. Should’ve paid our American Cajun cooks better to keep them going (the real ones of the past—not the Hollywood types). ;-)

[Valpal1]

Yes, that’s still purchasing from the farmer, the consumer pays the processor.

But the farmer can’t send his animals to the local guy and have them packaged for resale to sell from the farm or at local markets and grocers unless it’s a USDA processor and most of them won’t take your 6 or 8 animals. They only want to do big batches. Partly because segregating a small number of animals for processing and packaging to custom orders is something they’re not set up to do.

Of course this is perfect work for the small butcher and precisely what he is set up to do, but getting USDA certified and then having the inspector on hand for only a handful of animals is wildly expensive and so not cost effective, so none exist.

The USDA is like the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. This is why the meat industry is run by gigantic packing houses and all the disgusting malarkey that goes on in them.

[Valpal1]

The better way would be real agricultural extension services (like those in the past) educating rural people on how to slaughter a goat.

It's not rural people that don't know how. I'd rather have ag extensions educating urban people on how food is produced and should be cooked. I'd like every urban school to have a 4-H program and a land lab (a garden and animal barn for lamb and pig rearing).

[relictele]

Er, no, because this IS our ‘old country’ for a century or two. Scots-Irish-German heritage is the bulk of the distinct American culture. If I had to pick something, I suppose an affinity for spiritous liquors but that’s all. Just lucky I guess.

But the issue isn’t so much tradition as it is more of the Legion Of The Politically Correct and their highfalutin euphemisms. Vermont Goat Collaborative? Give me a break. And it’s got a community organizer! Based on our wonderful president’s experience we know they’re great at, um, organizing communities.

And then we have the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, now called AALV. Because apparently the original name, a clear statement of exposition, must now be couched in an anodyne acronym. ‘A cooperative entity representing the new American population ‘ - in other words, collectivism aka communism albeit small scale.

‘It’s also very cultural in terms of the way that people are wanting to participate in the whole process.’ Oh, brother. Even if you eat goat meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner can’t it be done without the touchy-feely UN rotgut?

This is Noble Savages under the rubric of agriculture and animal husbandry.

[familyop]

"It's not rural people that don't know how. I'd rather have ag extensions educating urban people on how food is produced and should be cooked. I'd like every urban school to have a 4-H program and a land lab (a garden and animal barn for lamb and pig rearing)."

Here, in much of the West (CO here), most rural people are direct or indirect recipients of government incomes or big investment benefits and don't know how to raise or slaughter animals. They assume that cattle only need the plants of semi-arid desert. Beef is, for the most part, stringy and tasteless. What they believe to be tasty, tender, "organic" and only grass fed is actually grown on lush, irrigated land yielding high legume content near a river and very expensive (won't name names there).

Extension services issue quite a bit of information on environmentalism and the like but not much that's useful for high, dry agriculture. 4-H clubs are for women only. Rodeos are for rich animal worshiper "in" crowd--the English saddle kind. Even some of the most remote and sparsely populated counties are regulated to extremes (e.g., permits required for building barns, camping by owners restricted, even on large lots). That's a picture of much of the contemporary West for you. A decade or more for an attentive former Midwesterner on the Rockies can be a surprising education.

[Revelation 911]

I look forward to anything new to try

[familyop]

Here's an example of what can be done to a rancher in some parts of the West and a clue to the overwhelming demographics of today. People have flooded in from the northeast (mostly)--some of them from the northeast with short stays in California then to settle and control less populated areas of the West (like CO). Being "professionals," they dropped right into business and government to construct the anti-competition, nature worship paradigm of their mother countries. They're not long descended from Europe, either (most only a 100 years or less). They're not assimilating.

[Valpal1]

I live in the rural west, did 4-H, my children have earned thousands of dollars selling their 4-H market animals. I paid only for the 1st animal/feed, after that they were self financing. 4-H clubs tend to have more male participants in the agricultural clubs, more females in the home-ec clubs.

All of my children regardless of gender can tag, castrate and shear lamb as well as spin and knit. The boys kinda suck at it, but they understand the engineering principles better than the girls.

I have butchered rabbit, deer, elk, lamb, beef and a large variety of fowl, wild and domestic as have most of my rural friends.

My experience is quite different and wonder if you actually live in the urban or suburban west rather than the rural west.

You are right about the government checks though. The government (all levels combined) is the largest employer in the county and outvote the farming community and then wonder why there are no jobs except government jobs and want to know why the food in a food growing region is so expensive.

Guess they couldn’t find directions to the Food Factory Outlet Mall. heh

[familyop]

Yes, things are different. It’s a gigantic, Republican majority county that’s very sparsely populated. Very few neighbors within ten miles and none within a mile. Mostly government and pensioners who don’t want any domestic animals, young men or otherwise working men or whole families around. They want “open space” and “sustainability” as in “no humans” except those with big accounts (”revenues”). There are impact fees, “wetlands” and the like, even though the climate is more like that of Mars than most places (high winds, colder than anywhere else in the USA and extremely dry). The main monsoon is during the winter with sometimes several feet of ice piling up and roads impassable. Soil is hard packed, sterile and evaporates very quickly. Policies and people are much like those of some combination of Germany and Italy.

[familyop]

On government checks, they want revenues from tourism only, except anyone who might consider being a resident for a short while to empty accounts a give up properties.