Learning how to milk a goat

From Weed em and Reap:

Shouldn’t everybody know how to milk a goat. Photo via Weed em and Reap.

“Once upon a time there was a woman who bought a goat.

She was so excited to get FRESH milk every day!  She woke up early one morning, and with butterflies in her stomach she put her goat on the milking stand, poured some grain in the feeder, and started to tug. Nothing.  ”Hmmmm”, the woman thought.  She tugged and tugged.

After 30 minutes and approximately one teaspoon of milk later, the woman started to cry.

UV light instead of pasteurization: it seems to work at least for calf feeding

Should milk fed to calves be pasteurized or UV treated? Or raw? Photo via Wikipedia. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Click image for source.

These stories are about treatment of on-farm milk for use in feeding calves. Of course, if it works for calves, why wouldn’t it work for people? Though probably the bar of surety is set higher when we’re dealing with food for humans. Michael Schmidt’s two-calf study comparing the effects of feeding calves raw milk vs store-bought pasteurized milk comes to mind as well, in connection with this news. Michael’s “Tale of Two Calves” remains the single most popular post ever published on The Bovine. Did you know that some farmers actually do pasteurize milk before feeding it to calves? Either that, or throw the “surplus” milk out and buy milk replacer from the feed store. You learn something every day. Thanks to Deb for the news tips: 

From New Scientist:

“AT A 3000-cow dairy farm near Ithaca, New York, Rodrigo Bicalho wrestles a 3-week-old calf onto a scale. The calf totters about; the scale reads 52 kilograms, a healthy weight. Bicalho makes a note. He is trying to find out what happens if he gives his calves milk that, instead of being pasteurised, is treated with ultraviolet light.

Amish girl forced into chemotherapy?

From David Michael, on the Journal of Natural Food and Health:

“Early in October 2013, the entire nation heard about how Sarah Hershberger, a 10-year old Ohio Amish girl with leukemia (now recovered), is being forced into a two-year unproven experimental chemotherapy study by Akron Children’s Hospital (ACH). It was just learned the parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, took their significantly recovered daughter out of the United States before the court ruled that a hospital-affiliated, attorney-nurse, Maria Schimer, was made the medical guardian to make sure Sarah will get her treatments.

Food safety & the politics of cheap food

From David E. Gumpert on the Complete Patient blog:

“I was explaining to a friend yesterday that the federal government in the form of the U.S. Department of Agriculture continues to allow a multibillion-dollar food corporation to sell product, even after its chicken has been associated with hundreds of illnesses, many caused by pathogens that are resistant to conventional antibiotics.

He didn’t believe me. “I’m sure the chicken has been recalled,” he said. No, I explained, it hasn’t. Nor has the producer been shut down.

“Well, something must be going on so the chicken isn’t being sold,” he concluded, hopefully. 

I was a teenage GMO-labeling activist

Toronto’s Rachel Parent is now blogging on the Huffington Post:

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Parent lecturing at the University of Toronto.

“Hi, my name is Rachel Parent. I’m 14 years old and just started high school in Toronto. When I was 12 years old, I saw how GMOs were negatively impacting the entire ecosystem — the environment, soil, water, plants, animals, insects and people. Just everything and everyone. The issues seemed endless and scary! So I founded my non-profit organization Kids Right To Know. I figured, why not me? Why can’t I make a change?

Underground trade in raw breast milk?

Yet another demographic that has their own reasons for trading in raw milk, nevermind that it’s of human instead of bovine origin:

Yet another human for whom raw milk makes a difference. Photo via The Verge tech news website.

From Katie Drummond, on The Verge:

For new parents, there’s no avoiding the adage that “breast is best.” Major health agencies, including the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatricians, have long concurred that breast milk is the ideal source of nutrition for infants — especially in the first six months of their lives. But what if that breast milk came from another woman? And what if you ordered it over the internet?

Robert Scott Bell will speak at the Weston A Price Foundation 2013 Wise Traditions conference in Atlanta

Washington, D.C.—October 18, 2013–A prominent homeopathic practitioner who personally overcame chronic disease with natural medicine will bring his knowledge to the 14^th annual international Wise Traditions conference next month in Atlanta.  Robert Scott Bell, DA Hom, will present his lecture “Health Sovereignty and Gastrointestinal Recovery–The Power (and Freedom) to Heal is Yours!”

The alternative health event will take place on November 8-11, 2013 at the Sheraton Downtown Atlanta Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. This event is open to the public and will look at the benefits of nutrient-dense foods and holistic therapies for healing chronic disease.  The conference is of interest to physicians, nutritionists, nurses, chefs, farmers and health-conscious consumers.

Rare glimpse into dark arts of policy making at Ontario’s legislature and courts — how the big players do it

Contrast the events described in this story to the reception that the raw milk constituency has received over the years at Queen’s Park. Interesting that it was raw milk supporting MPP Randy Hillier who blew the whistle on this bipartisan effort to help out a big corporation in their time of need through special legislation. From Martin Regg Cohen, in the Toronto Star:

“EllisDon is the blue-chip construction company that called in its chits with the governing Liberals and opposition Tories. The firm had made massive campaign donations over the years, mostly to the grateful Liberals, and some Tories concluded that helping EllisDon could increase their share of future contributions.

StrategyCorp is the well-connected lobbying and consulting firm hired by EllisDon to do its bidding. The assignment: fix a delicate political and legal problem pitting EllisDon against unionized construction workers.

Food safety not what it’s really about

From Off the Grid News:

“In its efforts to ensure the safety of food, the US government may actually be ignoring the real problem while shutting down small organic farms.

So says the Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group which released a 16-page analysis accusing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in a way that will crush “the country’s safest farmers” while leaving what Cornucopia calls the “root threats to human health” – contaminated manure made on “factory” livestock farms and certain produce-processing methods – untouched.

“In response to deadly outbreaks involving spinach, peanut butter and eggs, Congress acted decisively three years ago to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act,” said Mark A. Kastel, co-director at Cornucopia. “Better oversight is needed but it looks like regulators and corporate agribusiness lobbyists are simultaneously using the FSMA to crush competition from the organic and local farming movement.”

New Zealand to be “Lord of the Seeds”?

From InvestmentWatchBlog.com:

New Zealand coat of arms via Wikipedia. Click image to go.

“I was shocked to learn from a friend on the weekend that a new Food Bill is being brought in here in New Zealand.  The new bill will make it a privilege and not a right to grow food.

I find two aspects of this bill alarming.  The first is the scope and impact the new bill has, and secondly that it has all happened so quietly.  There has been VERY little media coverage, on a bill which promises to jeopardise the future food security of the country.