In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Billy wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Billy wrote:
In article ,
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote:

"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
FarmI wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message

Salatin does not claim this level of productivity because there
is 450ac of woods as well as the 100ac of pasture. The woods
make a sizeable contribution to the farm, it produces much pig
feed and biomass that is used for a variety of purposes and
assists in other ways. So to be more accurate the above
production is from 550ac.

I would be interested to know what can be done by conventional
means. The comparison would be very difficult to make fair I
think because the conventional system uses many external inputs
and would have trouble matching that diversity of outputs. I
suspect that just measured in calories per acre the intensive
monoculture might win. The whole point of this is that you can
only do that for a limited amount of time with many inputs and
many unwanted side effects. Not to mention that man does not
live by bread (or high fructose corn syrup) alone.

Fair comment David, but then there is a much higher cost to the
quality of life for the animals? I'm sure that you, like me,
have seen intensive operations such a feed lots and caged chooks.


That was one of the side effects I had in mind. We have chook
sheds for meat birds in the district. Ten thousand or twenty in a
shed with a dirt floor with just enough room to move between the
feed and the water. Lights on half the night to get them to eat
more. The workers wear breathing apparatus to clean out the sheds
and it will make you puke at 400m on a hot night. The eagles dine
well on those who get trodden under. Nuff said.


Indeed. I've been to a feed lot and I had the same reaction
although this was probably one of the better run ones. I'd turn
vegetarian if our local buthcer sourced his meat at places like
that but I can see his 'feed lot' (for want of a better
description as it's jsut his farm) from the road and his cattle
have quite a nice spot for the final finish on feed before they
take the trip to the abattoir. (sp?)

I grew up on a poultry farm and my mother refused to have any
cages on the place with the exception of a row of 10 where she
used to put birds that were off colour and needed to be taken
away from the bullying tactics of the rest of the flock. In the
50s and 60s when other poultry farmers were moving to cages and
proud of it, we were free ranging. We once had a city person
come back to us and complain about the eggs they bought off us.
According to them, the eggs were 'off' and had to be thrown out
because they had 'very yellow yolks'.

In those days it meant the chooks had a varied diet not just
pellet chook food. A question that you would know, is the yellow
yolk still such an indicator or is it emulated these days by diet
additives?

That is one of those 'it depends' answers as in, it depends ont he
feed.

If you feed them on kitchen scraps (not recommended as that isn't
nutritious enough) then free ranging (as opposed to keeping
confined) will change the colour of the yolk. Pellets contain a
yellowing agent, but apparently that yellow isn't carried through
so that in baked goods show up the yellowing. Yolks that are
yellow as a result of the feed they find outside does hang on
through the baking process so that the baked goods (like say a
butter cake) will appear more yellow. I've not done these tests
myself but there was a long article on it (with comparative pics)
in one of the 'Australasian Poultry' mags a couple of years ago.
A great little magazine and as cheap as chips.


My food books say the yellow of the yolk is due to xanthophylls
which come from plants, typically lucerne and corn. Not having
chook books I do this backwards. Apparently corn feed is also
responsible for the yellow skin and fat found in some "organic" meat
birds.

Besides having a yoke that looks like an apricot, instead of a
lemon, real eggs have a viscosity to them that factory produced
eggs don't.

Is the height and viscosity of the egg contents a result of diet and
health of the chook or a sign of freshness, or both? The same ref
(McGee 'On Food and Cooking') says freshness has much to do with it.

Come on chook people - give me the scoop before I build the chook
house.

David

Xanthophylls come from plants to be sure, but typically lucerne and
corn? That seems like more of a production setting. They should get
the same thing just scratching on a meadow.


No doubt they would, this was from a food book not an agriculture book.

How much land do you have? Does the mobile chicken coop offer you any
advantages? It seems that if you can build top soil à la Salatin, it
would be worth your while, since it would be better at holding water.


I have toyed with the mobile coop idea. I am quite attracted to the mandala
garden where the coop move around a series of beds but I can't see how to
make it work with the succession of seasonal planting, nor how to make it
fox proof.

All I know from eggs is that we get our eggs from a friend who turns
her chickens out to pasture during the day. They get a supplement to
replace calcium, and to my understanding that is all they get. The
eggs are fresh, and as I said, the yolks are the color of apricots.
My biggest surprise was when I had my blood work done (at least once
a year) while I was eating the eggs, my cholesterol had dropped. The
eggs were the only variable that came to mind.


I will allow my chooks to range over the pasture during the day but first I
have to build a secure coop for them at night or the fox will have them.

Anyway, if you look at p.265 in Omnivore's Dilemma, you'll see a
description of "real" eggs, and it is what I'm used to. If we can't
get out friend's eggs, I stop eating eggs.


I am a serious cook that's why I read books like McGee. My understanding is
that the qualities that he praises are mainly from freshness.

Must be quite a good book. It has held its price. Shame it's not
available from our local library.

The following is a bit of over kill, but to the subject at hand.
Omnivor's Dilemma
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...als/dp/0143038
583/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

pg. 266 - 269

I had made pretty much the same meal on several occasions at home, using
the same basic foodstuffs, yet in certain invisible ways this wasn't the
same food at all. Apart from the high color of the egg yolks, these eggs
looked pretty much like any other eggs, the chicken like chicken, but
the fact that the animals in question had spent their lives outdoors on
pastures rather than in a shed eating grain distinguished their flesh
and eggs in important, measurable ways. A growing body of scientific
research indicates that pasture substantially changes the nutritional
profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk. The question
we asked about organic food‹is it any better than the conventional
kind?‹turns out to be much easier to answer in the case of grass-farmed
food.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin
E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh
of the animals that eat that grass. (It's the carotenoids that give
these egg yolks their carroty color.) That flesh will also have
considerably less fat in it than the flesh of animals fed exclusively on
grain‹also no surprise, in light of what we know about diets high in
carbohydrates. (And about exercise, something pastured animals actually
get.) But all fats are not created equal‹polyunsaturated fats are better
for us than saturated ones, and certain unsaturated fats are better than
others. As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters
are the best kind for us to eat.

This is no accident. Taking the long view of human nutrition, we evolved
to eat the sort of foods available to hunter-gatherers, most of whose
genes we've inherited and whose bodies we still (more or less) inhabit.
Humans have had less than ten thousand years‹an evolutionary blink‹to
accustom our bodies to agricultural food, and as far as our bodies are
concerned, industrial agricultural food‹a diet based largely on a small
handful of staple grains, like corn‹is still a biological novelty.
Animals raised outdoors on grass have a diet much more like that of the
wild animals humans have been eating at least since the Paleolithic era
than that of the grain-fed animals we only recently began to eat.

So it makes evolutionary sense that pastured meals, the nutritional
profile of which closely resembles that of wild game, would be better
for us. Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less
saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Pastured
animals also contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatly acid dial.
some recent studies indicate may help reduce weight and prevent cancer,
and which is absent from feedlot animals. But perhaps most important,
meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of
omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and
algae that play an indispensable role in human health, and especially in
the growth and health of neurons‹brain cells. (It's important to note
that fish contain higher levels of the most valuable omega-3s than land
animals, yet grass-fed animals do offer significant amounts of such
important omega-3s as alpha linolenic acid‹ALA.) Much research into the
role of omega-3s in the human diet remains to be done, but the
preliminary findings are suggestive: Researchers report that pregnant
women who receive supplements of omega-3s give birth to babies with
higher IQs, children with diets low in omega-3s exhibit more behavioral
and learning problems at
school, and puppies eating diets high in omega-3s prove easier to train.
(All these claims come from papers presented at a 2004 meeting of the
International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids.)

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in
modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the
other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds
of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of
fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In
fact, there's research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our
diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of
omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because
omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an
inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-innammatory.) As our diet‹and the diet of
the animals we eat‹shifted from one based on green plants to one based
on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone
from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than
ten to one. (The process of hydrogenadng oil also eliminates omega-3s.)
We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious
dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It
was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not
recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of
soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the
industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes
in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the
diseases of civilization‹cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.‹that have long
been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and
behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.

Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional
thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with
eating red meat‹long associated with cardiovascular disease‹ may owe
less to the animal in question than to that animal's diet. (This might
explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more
red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.)
These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain,
with the predictable result that their omega- 3 levels fall well below
those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3
because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the
algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom
holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that
judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed;
if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might
actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a
two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in
corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what
the animal you're eating has itself eaten.

The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that
food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench
into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is
beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question
of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the
price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients
in it. If units of omega-3s and beta carotene and vitamin E are what an
egg shopper is really after, then Joel's $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs
actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial
eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like
another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution
of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it
is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope
or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.




I don't know what it is with Garden Banter, either. I'm used to Brits
in other groups, and they aren't nearly as, . . uh, rustic as the
ones that we attract.


Rustic people are smarter than this lot. It's a puzzle.

David
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/2/maude
http://english.aljazeera.net/video/m...515308172.html