Franklin Hiram King. You may not know the name, but you know the legacy: More than 100 years ago King invented the cylindrical silo.
It was King’s aversion to waste — something that any farmer can appreciate — that led him to create a new way of storing corn.
Until King, grain was held in rectangular buildings that had to be incredibly strong to support tons of weight and pressure. Rectangular buildings used up valuable land, and yet they waste space (those corners rarely get filled).
Wall and roof joints admit moisture, rodents and insects that led to rot and spoilage.
In fact, even today, the lack of proper storage facilities in India leads to the loss of 10 per cent of the total foodgrain production—in a country where hunger still claims the lives of a million children every year.
But the cylindrical silo has just two joints, is airtight and therefore easier to fumigate, and seals the harvest safely away from the elements.
Silos also put gravity to work. So, no need to use equipment to push grain into a corner, and no need to use a machine to load it onto a truck either. Both problems are easily solved when you load from the top and unload from the bottom.
A modern marvel and distinctly American invention, the cylindrical silo is a form so beautiful that some say Frank Lloyd Wright used it as inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum.
A new study has determined that cows raised on grass (rather than grain) produce milk that’s better for human beings. Those findings held true even after researchers took into account “heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and smoking.”
Turns out that milk from grass-fed cows has significantly more of something called conjugated linoleic acid (which may create insulin resistance in the body) than grain-fed cows. Some researchers will add that cows fed on grass are just plain healthier. Cows may love grain but it’s not great as a steady diet.
Smart farmers don’t just turn animals loose on pastureland; they follow a process called rotational grazing.
Goats Are Your Offensive Line
Jen Dustin and her husband, Phil Leahy, of Leahy Farm in Lee, Massachusetts, will tell you that Step One is clearing brush, especially the invasive species. This is most efficiently done with goats—nature’s own brush-clearing machinery. They’ll eat the bark right off the trees if you’re not careful. Only when the goats have cleared up overgrown fields will Jen and Phil bring in their cows.
Phil makes sure that his herd of Milking Devons only spends a couple of days on any one area of pasture, so they’re always on fresh grass.
Like a gardener working on a massive scale, he knows that when you cut back a plant—as grazing does naturally—it stimulates growth. The pastures are more productive, the animals healthier and the milk they produce is apparently more nutritious and tastier. And if the cows don’t nibble the grass all the way down to the ground, they are less likely to ingest parasites, which would require medical intervention.
It’s more work to do rotational grazing; Phil and Jen are constantly moving electric fences powered off a car battery. They’re fortunate to have enough land to feed their herd. But many farmers are limited by acreage in how they feed their animals. Grain becomes a necessity or a supplement if pasture is limited.
Helping the Farmer Next Door
Do you live next to a farmer raising animals for dairy or meat? Do you have open land that is lying fallow? Consider leasing that land to your neighbor. You’ll get a nice tax break, a nominal cash payment and fresh meat and dairy. And the inevitable manure factor can be mitigated when a right-sized herd is moved frequently.
You want to do the right thing. Eat locally and sustainably 12 months of the year. Easy enough in California, but you live in Vermont or Minnesota or even New York—where winter settles in early and leaves late.
As currently deployed, New York State’s 36,000 farms can supply perhaps 40% of local food needs, so unless all New York residents become victory gardeners overnight, we will continue to depend on food imported from thousands of miles away.
But what if you started putting farms in new and unexpected areas closer to home? Areas with plenty of sunlight. Look up. Think green roofs.
Building owners motivated to lower HVAC costs, speed building approvals, and lower construction costs are turning to green roofs. But the roofs—while they provide significant business, health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits—are not always farms. They could be. They should be.
Welcome to Farms in the Sky
At investor conference Agriculture 2.0, I met Bob Fireman, a long-time real estate executive, who is now the president of Sky Vegetables. Bob dreams big. His vision is to have rooftop greenhouses raising vegetables 12 months of the year in communities from the Bronx to Boston, from the Bay Area to Detroit.
Big stories sometimes get buried between Christmas and New Year’s Day. That’s when the Associated Press’s Martha Mendoza, and Margie Mason reported on the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock in this country. Let’s go to the headlines:
Of 35 million pounds of antibiotics used in the US in 2008, 70 percent of the drugs, or around 24 million pounds, were injected or fed to pigs, chickens and cows.
Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that kills more than 65,000 people in the U.S. per year
Industrial agriculture is a perfect machine for creating a superbug. Agriculture provides bacteria with hosts: livestock. The first half-million times bacteria meet antibiotics, the bacteria may be beaten back. But bacteria tend to respond to changes in their environment. They get better at what they do and expand outward to what every farm inevitably presents: a rotating cast of new characters to infect.
Dr. Margaret Mellon from the Union of Concerned Scientists put it this way: “when you expose a population to any lethal agent, you will over time select those that are resistant to the agent.” If they’re “fortunate,” the bacteria then make the jump to a receptive human host.
Three Easy Ways to Infect Humans
Resistant bacteria in animals can be transmitted to humans via multiple pathways, including meat (and sometimes vegetable) consumption; close contact with animals (through body parts open to the environment, like noses or open sores); through manure; and through dust and run-off into lakes and rivers.
Cows become part of the family when you name them. Then they return that kindness and attention with more milk.
An award-winning research team from Newcastle, England, Drs. Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson, have shown that farmers who give a cow a name and treat her as an individual can increase annual milk production by almost 500 pints.
It was a breakthrough that was picked up by Harvard’s annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then think.
A former dairy farmer I know called all his heifers “his ladies.” And, yes, they all had names. Turns out he was not only treating them with natural kindness but it was increasing his business too. (Years later when he visited the herd, they recognized him.)
In fact, farmers interacting with their animals is straightforward rather than sentimental. There’s a clear connection and caring between the farmer and the animals (and plants) in his care. Think about it: These are living, breathing creatures that you come in contact with every day.
Of course, in a factory setting it would be damn hard to care for one animal over another. But a small farm is different.
On a small farm you’re constantly engaging with your herd, flock or gaggle. When I have been in the middle of herd of cows taking photos for Friend of the Farmer, I’ve been surrounded by dozens of cows weighing from 200 to 1,000 pounds. These are big animals and yet the experience is a remarkably peaceful. Some cows may run away initially while others wander over to get their heads scratched. The one constant is the sound of grass being cropped.
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