Maple Syrup - It Comes From Trees

First cholesterol is bad, then just the Low Density Lipoprotein is bad, and now Lipoprotein(a) is the bad stuff. Similarly, fat is bad, then just saturated fat is bad, and now polyunsaturated fat is the bad stuff, and some fats like conjugated linoleic acid will make you a centenarian. White eggs are in and brown eggs are old fashioned, then brown eggs are back, and then blue eggs, and now any egg as long as the yolk is orange. Not long ago, boneless skinless chicken breast and 0% fat yogurt were held up as the pinnacle of lean protein and supreme nutrition, and now beef fat and full fat dairy tops the new USDA food funnel.

Corn is bad. Concrete is bad. Soybeans are bad. White chickens are bad. White and black cows are bad. Devil’s Milk. Lab Meat. Marigold Powder. Goodness gracious. I never wanted to be in such a contentious field. Maybe I should just remodel houses. Few people will judge my life’s work and personal character based on if I put in maple vs oak trim, or a sliding vs hinged shower door.

I think we can get through this. We don’t need to know what a CLA or an Omega 6 is. Probably nobody really does know. Instead, I think we can simply use our God-given power of observation to see what is “vital and wholesome” vs what is “bereft and adulterated”.

I don’t have a dawg in the fight. I don’t care if nitrates are fine or if they’re bad. I don’t care if corn wins or loses. I’ll cure my bacon with nitrates, celery juice or nothing at all, and I’ll feed my hogs corn or barley or whatever comes out on top after the test of time and rational discourse. I’ll even sell my hogs and raise garbanzo beans, if that’s where experience and observation lead. I want to raise the healthiest animals (or garbanzo beans), steward our farm ecosystem, and give people products they can afford, that they enjoy, and that bring them good health.

Back to our power of observation. Let’s talk milk. Is milk nourishing? To decide this, we could put milk in a test tube, ship it to the UW Lab with a check for $49, and get back a list of 25 components determined through spectroscopical analysis, PCR and antigen tests. Or we could just drink it. Does it make you feel good? Do you have a rash? Do you feel relaxed or do you feel agitated? Is your stomach settled or rumbling? Or, before even drinking it, we could look at the cow. My cows will bring tears to your eyes. They are shiny beasts with bright intelligent eyes, ambling across our pastures, laying in the sun to ruminate, their body and aura laden with productivity and fertility. Each year they breed back and give us a new calf in the Spring. These cows are healthy beasts. Clearly, their diet of 100% grass, eaten as living plants form the earth for 200 days per year and as stored hay for the remainder, their outdoor environment, and the affection given to them by the farmers are making for a healthy cow. The vet is never here. We don’t use pharmaceuticals. They are healthy, and it is obvious to your eyes, and to your soul, as you stand near them and feel their powerful, gentle and content energy.

Cows that are in a conventional environment with concrete, corn silage, buildings and manure pits do not fare as well. They usually do not provide a calf year after year for a decade, vet visits are frequent, and the cows generally do not bring visitors to spontaneous tears of joy.

We don’t need the laboratory to analyze the milk, or the meat, to see which one has more CLA and is therefore stated to be more nutritious. It is obvious to our powers of observation which is more healthful, vital and wholesome.

The sows (mama pigs) of Farmcraft are also beautiful beasts. Walk out to their pasture paddock on a sunny day this time of year and you’ll have to shield your eyes, so lustrous and shiny are our pigs. Like the cows, they have never needed pharmaceutical intervention, they breed on their first cycle, and they give us piglets year after year. Their base ration is organic corn and organic soybeans. They live in a diverse rotational pasture environment where they eat seasonal forages, living their days and nights outdoors in the sun, shade and fresh air. They come from heritage, outdoor, old-fashioned genetics. Their health and their productivity are obvious to the eye – right now, a month or so out from farrowing, their bellies are huge with piglets and their milk bags swing just above the ground. It saddens me to even compare them to a commercial sow, an animal that is kept in a metal crate within a metal crate, laying in her own waste, bred 3x a year, fed chemically grown and -cide laden corn and soy and dried distillers grains, used up and culled to the Spam factory by the time she is 2 or 3 years old. I don’t think we need a lab reported lipoprotein analysis to see that one pork will gives vital and robust human health, and one will not. Again, it is obvious to our power of observation.

Let’s move away from the animals and examine the pantry.

Take wheat. Wheat, the part we eat, is the seed of a wheat plant. You’ve got two extremes for what could be in your pantry. Walmart can get you a 10 lb sack of conventional, gmo wheat flour for $1.99, and they will have done a remarkable amount of processing for you – removing the bran, removing the germ, grinding, bleaching and adding an enrichment concoction. At the other extreme is organic, heirloom whole wheat berries (seeds) with bran and germ still attached. This is literally just a seed. Add water and the seeds will sprout into plants. Put them in the soil and you’re a wheat farmer. These whole wheat berries can be ground into flour and used in any sort of baking project from bread to cookies and pie crust to pastas. The flour from these freshly milled whole wheat berries is alive in your hands, multicolored, and it has a very short shelf life. It will go rancid in just a few days without refrigeration. The bleached flour, on the other hand, lasts indefinitely in a warehouse, on the shelf, and then in your pantry. It is stodgy and dead. It is not going to turn into a plant if you bury it in the soil. No lab tests needed to see the harmful or healthful potentials of chemical, gmo, bleached, enriched flour vs organic, heirloom, whole wheat berries.

One more grain – corn. This seems to be a hot topic these days. Like most hot topics, the discussion maybe lacks some nuance. It needs some nuance, because corn not one thing. Corn, freshly picked and slathered in butter, a nostalgic favorite at summer bbq, picnics and fairs. Corn, a staple of the comfortable and delicious cooking of the American South in grits, hominy and cornbread. Corn, a miraculous crop that provides huge yield per acre, can be planted, cultivated and even harvested by hand, is easily stored on the cob, and can feed both the humans and animals of the farmstead. And corn, from another perspective, the devil. Corn, the symbol of all that is wrong in the world, seen as the emblem of corrupt, negligent and malicious Big Ag and Big Food. Corn, the rotten heart of the Chem-Industrial-Gov-Ag Complex.

Corn is both and everything in-between, and it should be obvious to our power of observation that not all corn is in the same bucket. At its best, corn can be grown from heirloom seed, on flat land not prone to erosion, as part of a wise crop and animal rotation, with organic fertility and without the use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides or herbicides. It can be harvested, air dried and stored on the same farm it was grown, it can be fed to hogs and chickens and even humans on that same farm. This heirloom corn can have the necessary nutrients to be a nearly complete feed. At the other end of the extreme, corn can be grown on inappropriate slopes, year after year, with high-yield low-nutrition genetics, genetically modified to be roundup ready, sprayed with herbicide and fungicide, fertilized with industrial waste products, harvested and trucked to an enormous community drying/storage elevator facility where it becomes anonymous and commoditized kernels of corn without any reference to the land it came from, the growing practices it was given or the parent stock it came from.

Our power of observation can easily differentiate the extreme ends of corn farming. Both exist on our Wisconsin landscapes today.

We can also see and know for ourselves the difference between one corn product and another. Like wheat berries, corn kernels are a seed. Put the kernel in the ground, add moisture and warmth, and you’re a corn farmer. A plant will grow. The corn kernel is very much alive. You can feed these living whole corn kernels to hogs and hens. In our experience, it makes for healthy animals that function well (live long, don’t need drugs, breed well, taste good). I’m talking about feeding living corn kernels (or freshly ground), grown and stored on-farm, raised organically by the same farmer that tends and feeds his hogs daily. Contrast that with dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS). DDGS is a base ingredient in 21^st century non-organic hog rations. DDGS is what is left-over after ethanol production. To make ethanol, a high-yield gmo corn variety is grown with chemical practices, it is trucked to the ethanol grain elevators/storage bins, then the corn is processed in many steps including grinding, high temperature cooking, fermentation, fractional distillation, centrifugation and drying. What is left over is the DDGS. It is a waste product subsidized by subsidized ethanol production, so it is cheap. Since it’s high in “protein” and it’s inexpensive, it is a favorite for adding protein to hog, cattle and chicken rations. It is far from organic, so it is not in any organic rations. It is obvious, without testing the ration for glyphosate or PUFAs or any other analytics, that organic living kernels grown and fed on-farm are not the same as DDGS.

Without another drawn out example, we can use our power of logic and observation to see a related truth – not all corn products for human consumption are the same. Fresh organic sweet corn is not the same as Hungry Jack high-fructose corn syrup pancake syrup (in the plastic microwaveable bottle, “it tell you when it’s hot!”).

We feed organic whole kernel corn to our hogs and chickens. This year we even grew and are storing on-farm quite a lot of it. Our whole farm ecosystem, which includes organic corn, has resulted in very healthy and beautiful and tasty eggs, hens and hogs, so I’m inclined to think it is okay. But I'm not "team corn". I’m not married to corn and would happily feed hogs and hens garbanzo beans, or not have the hogs and hens at all, if that is where observation an experience lead.

Here are just a couple more examples of things that, through our power of observation and logic, we can be pretty sure are wholesome and nourishing.

Maple syrup. It comes from trees. This time of year, you literally stick a tube into a tree and maple syrup (well, maple sap) comes out. All you have to do is remove some of the water, and you’ve got finished maple syrup. That can’t be so bad. It tastes good, but if you drink a whole quart of it, you maybe don’t feel very good, so your power of observation could lead to you enjoying this beautiful gift from the trees of the earth with appreciation for its nourishment and purity, and with some degree of moderation against overindulgence.

Salt. It comes from the ocean. Remove water, and you’ve got salt from Mother Ocean. If you’ve ever bobbed in the briny ocean on a sunny day, or beheld in rapture the vast expanse and beauty of our waters, you know that sprinkling a little Mother Ocean on your food is probably not such a bad thing.

The list goes on. We know what is good and health promoting and what is not. No social media news feed, USDA food pyramid or circle or funnel, laboratory analytics, or pub med needed. You are a child of God and were born into this world with the tools and intellect to know the truth. Your observation, experimentation and independent thought can show you the truth. Trust yourself, beware the bandwagon and don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Be well, my good friends. I hope you are enjoying some winter sunshine. With love, gratitude and appreciation, and looking forward to hearing from and seeing you soon.

 

Luke