Stephen Leslie and team plow a field at Cedar Mountain Farm in Vermont. (Photo by Carla Kimball, http://revealedpresence.com/2009/08/25/farming-with-horses/)Before they came to eastern Vermont ten years ago and launched Cedar Mountain Farm, Kerry Gawalt and Stephen Leslie ran an organic vegetable farm in New Hampshire. The rules about how you were to handle matters like pesticides and soil care were straightforward and made sense.
Now that they run a raw dairy in Vermont, the process seems much more cumbersome. “In Vermont, the record keeping and paperwork are such” that the couple decided to do without the “organic” label for both their raw milk and the veggies they sell via a CSA (community supported agriculture). (In Vermont, organic standards from the U.S. Department of Agriculture are administered by Northeast Organic Farmers.)
Most important, their dairy customers—about 40 families and a cheese-making operation that purchase their raw milk—seem unconcerned. “We sell everything within ten miles” of the farm, and customers seem content to be able to view the clean conditions and focus on sustainability—things like a modern state-of-the-art barn and a horse-drawn plow (pictured above), both of which use virtually no carbon fuels—and not worry about a label.
I had an opportunity to visit with Kerry and Stephen yesterday as part of a visit to a friend at Cobb Hill cohousing, where the Cedar Mountain Farm is an enterprise.
Kerry regrets that the “organic” label has become ever more complex, and thus less accessible, for smaller farming enterprises. The big problem in her view is on the dairy side and concerns the rules about antibiotics—for example, that cows given antibiotics to deal with “life and death” situations need to be culled from the herd. “Occasionally, a calf needs tetracycline” to save its life, she says. “You get punished if you don’t treat the animal and punished if you do.”
A calf that has been treated once with antibiotics usually recovers and goes on to become a good milk producer, she argues. “We don’t lose a single calf”under current practices.
Other organic rules affect the administering of nutritional supplements, like calcium gluconate to head off or treat milk fever. She doesn’t want the strict rules on when and how it can be administered to interfere with what she sees as effective nourishment of the animals.
The rulemakers, driven by zealous foodies and increasingly by agribusiness interests, “don’t care about cows,” says Kerry. “It’s about people.” And people have been taught that administering antibiotics, in particular, forever taints an animal.
I guess if there’s one thing I’ve learned in talking with farmers over the last few years is that farm animals are a lot like people. Invariably, the better their nutrition, the healthier they are. Moreover, occasional treatment with antibiotics to deal with occasional disease that otherwise isn’t responding to treatment or is worsening, can be appropriate.
As Kerry points out, there’s a huge education issue for consumers. Many, for example, don’t understand why it’s so important to clean their refillable milk jars thoroughly.
I’ve found a great deal of confusion about “organic,” especially as applies to milk. I am frequently asked how organic pasteurized milk compares to organic raw milk, and to non-organic raw milk, and I try to explain that the most important difference isn’t necessarily the “organic” part, but the “raw” part. All of which invariably leads into a whole new conversation.
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Interesting that after all the discussion here about gut health, the mass media and scientists from the National Insitutes of Health are openly worrying about the problem. A new study suggests that not only do antibiotics do a number on gut flora, but at least one antibiotic may do a permanent number. That’s pretty scary—take a round of antibiotics and permanently disable your gut.
I love this quote: “The gut harbors the largest collection of micro-organisms in the human body. Yet these microbial communities remain largely a mystery to scientists.
“Studying gut bugs could one day yield much knowledge about the role bacteria play in human development, physiology, immunity and nutrition.”
My question: why wait for the scientists to make official something that many people have known for hundreds of years?
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Okay, I’m venturing into this social networking business. I’ve started using Twitter. I promise not to tell you about what I’m eating for lunch (unless it’s super special), or how I got caught in a traffic jam, and try to provide alerts that “feed” off things happening in the food and health worlds. Right now, it’s definitely a work in progress.
Brilliant post. I especially enjoyed Dr. Youngs work and the NIH reference to mice eating eat others feces and how essential fecal bacteria is to our health and lastly…how some antibiotics can permanently destory our inner ecosystems and therefore our immune systems.
Perhaps this is the channel by which our friends at the FDA will finnal;ly get it…
That sterility is not our friend and that rawmilk with its biodiversity…is one of our oldest best friends. Great post!!! I will be quoting this data for the next while that is for sure.
Perhaps CP and Lykke can read about mice being cured of their disbiosis by eating each others feces and perhaps get a new appreciation for raw milk as well. Healthy normal fecal material is not a bad thing….it can save lives.
Just a liltte bit of healthy crap is a very good thing in deed.
Mark McAfee
What I found more interesting about David’s post…the fallacy of "organic," especially as it relates to animal health and well being. I am vehemently opposed to the overuse/abuse of antibiotics, but question this organic black and white approach as something that is naive at best, animal cruelty at worst. Perhaps do-gooders turn their heads and allow an animal to suffer because of some "human" idea that treating a sick food animal is bad for their human health. Yet, there are well established withdrawal times for antibiotics, and science that shows it is safe to use these treatments under the right circumstances.
Kudos to these farmers that appear to understand the time and place for treatment (and other "organic" push backs)…vs. cowing down to standards created by idealists that do not have the animal’s welfare in mind. Indeed, to suggest that a sick animal must be left to die if so-called natural treatment doesn’t work–or sold off a farm to some other unknown demise because it doesn’t fit an organic standards–that seems like total nonsense.
it’s calcium gluconate, I think.
Lykke,
Spoken like someone who has never kept livestock.
Where are the all knowing "scientists" that will deliver us from the folly that they have inflicted upon us?
Very few have a thorough knowledge on how to treat animals with alternative medicine and the standard treatment for many many diseases is antibiotics. Even some vet books on alternative medicine will advise that antibiotics are the necessary and only treatment for some diseases for which alternative treatments work well and have a higher success rate. On top of all of that too often natural treatments are engaged too late to be effective; either after conventional medicine has failed or after we failed to deal with general substandard health.
The above reasons lead to overuse of antibiotics, even among those who honestly espouse to only use them when ‘necessary’. Maybe there is a place for antibiotics, but it ought to be so rare that it wouldn’t matter that the animal has to be pulled from organic for it. But that this is an issue with many tells me they are still used too much.
But personally, we won’t use them at all. The intentional and unintentional overuse of antibiotics is having horrific effects on human and animal health. Saving the rare cows life is not worth the risk of the antibiotic resistant bacteria now plaguing humanity.
When we started OPDC back in 2000 we used to call the vet and give antibiotics to save a life and then sell the cow….what we got was a dead cow and a bill from the vet.
In short order that practice stopped.
What we have now is very few sick cows and no bill from the vet. When a cow gets sick we allow her to rest and remove her from the herd to recover. If she does not recover she is a very small part of our herd and the rest is getting better and better over time.
Now we have literally no cases ( very seldom ) of mastitis. When we used antibiotics and vets we used to have lots of them.
This may seem to be an inverse reality….but it has been our experiece and it is what mother nature has dictated for a million years.
Change the conditions, the environment, the diet and the stressors and most of the challenges go away.
Mark
Mobile Slaughterhouse Allows Local Farmers To Bring Meat To Your Front Door
A new kind of mobile butcher and slaughterhouse is making house calls in Western Washington with the goal of bringing local meat straight to your dinner table.
http://www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-081109-slaughterhouse,0,566881.story
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200909/health-care
"And what about usthe patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. "
This man’s been doing it for the past 40 years. A friend of mine from MIT says it well when she says, ‘What science is just now cataloging, Jack has been learning what to feed these critters for the past 40 years.’
Self-taught. Self-experimenting. He is just now beginning to be recognized for his work. And he is an ardent supporter of raw dairy.
http://www.cheeseslave.com/2009/03/31/top-10-reasons-to-eat-real-sourdough-bread-even-if-youre-gluten-intolerant/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112035045&ft=1&f=1001
Article this morning on NPR – Monsanto in the sights of the Justice Department?? Worry about dairy farms disappearing??
Diluted Money Diluted Milk and Diluted Morals
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/08.09/cigarettes.html
Thank you so much for opening up the port hole to the worm hole at the NIH and the Human Microbiome Project.
Raw milk will be vindicated by this research. I predict it today and watch this closely.
These researchers have $185 milion dollars to study bacteria as they live and interact at their location in the body…not in a petry dish. They are studying how change of diet and antibiotics change the inner ecossytem of the body. Things we and I have been preaching to those willing to be consciuos enough to listen for years.
Yes…mark these words. Raw millk will be studied by the NIH and others and it will be vindicated….very soon. The truth is never denied its triumph.
Mark McAfee
Insight into insect symbiosis could help humans
The gut of just about any organism is surely an unpleasant place, often teeming with a battery of hostile enzymes, yet such places in animals often harbor multiple species of bacteria. The exact physiological processes that allow some of these bacteria to thrive, while others perish, are not fully understood. A group of researchers headed by Serap Aksoy, professor of epidemiology and public health, is moving closer to explaining this dichotomy. They used the tsetse fly to understand processes that allow some bacteria to live in harmony with their host.
The Yale team discovered a mechanism that is at least partially responsible for the successful relationship between the tsetse fly and its symbiotic bacterium, Sodalis glossinidius. Sodalis, which is related to some important human microbes such as E. coli, Salmonella, and Yersinia, likely benefits the fly by increasing its longevity and possibly modulating immunity. A better understanding of the nature of symbiotic relationships — which abound in nature and are crucial to the survival of most species — could eventually have implications for people suffering from degenerative bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s.
The Yale team is onto something here…..
When flies each crap and survive and thrive….they must have some seriously good immune systems and bacteria to match.
Us humans can learn a few things from flies.
Mark