I don’t agree with some of Ron Paul’s positions (immigration and the gold standard to name a couple), but am excited that there is actually a candidate running for the highest office on a platform of reduced government intervention.

On November 5th, he guaranteed that he will get my vote:

From the Congressional Record:

Mr. PAUL: Madam Speaker, I rise to introduce legislation that allows the transportation and sale in interstate commerce of unpasteurized milk and milk products, as long as the milk both originates from and is shipped to States that allow the sale of unpasteurized milk and milk products. This legislation removes an unconstitutional restraint on farmers who wish to sell unpasteurized milk and milk products, and people who wish to consume unpasteurized milk and milk products.

My office has heard from numerous people who would like to purchase unpasteurized milk. Many of these people have done their own research and come to the conclusion that unpasteurized milk is healthier than pasteurized milk. These Americans have the right to consume these products without having the Federal Government second-guess their judgment about what products best promote health. If there are legitimate concerns about the safety of unpasteurized milk, those concerns should be addressed at the State and local level.

I urge my colleagues to join me in promoting consumers’ rights, the original intent of the Constitution, and federalism by cosponsoring my legislation to allow the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk and milk products.

Woo and hoo!

Ron Paul for President!

The last forty-eight hours have overwhelmed my natural optimism.

I’ll get that optimism back (he says with natural optimism), but I feel like venting.

If you don’t like meaningless whining, skip the rest of this post.

I was supposed to drop my steers off to the butcher yesterday before school. Everything was going very well.

I was able to hook up the trailer solo without a ground guide. So far so good.

I called the boys and then came out of the pasture and I penned them up. So far so good.

I opened the gate and drove the truck and trailer into the paddock. The paddock is rather hilly.

When I tried to back up to the pen, I slid downhill on the frosty, wet grass.

I spent half an hour trying to get the truck back up the hill and couldn’t. So I had to call my dear sweet wife to come and get me so I could go to work. So my poor wife has to wake up the children, bundle them into the van, and come get me.

Rescheduling a slaughter date in the fall is very difficult. This is the busy season. They finally found a way to work me in the next morning. I was able to get the truck back up the hill that evening after the frost was gone.

Trick of treating was great fun (so the days weren’t all bad). When we got the kids to bed and went to sleep, I didn’t sleep long. I woke up smelling gas.

I couldn’t find the gas leak and the valve on our exterior gas tank was rusted so badly I couldn’t turn it off. We called the gas company to come out.

We finally found the leak and I went back to bed. Exhausted, I must have hit my alarm the next morning. I was supposed to get up at 4 so I could pen up the boys again, load them, and take them in. Instead, my wife and I woke up at 7:30. My first class at school starts at 9:14. It takes an hour and a quarter to get to the butcher. We couldn’t reschedule the slaughter again, so I had to call and embarassingly tell the school that I would be late to work.

When I finally got to the butcher, three of the steers went off the truck well. One got agitated, shoved past me, and jumped the four foot barrier. We couldn’t get him back to the catch pen. The butcher ended up getting his rifle and shooting it. The first shot didn’t kill him right away - he had to reload and take a second shot.

I understand that animals are not humans. But…

These are animals that I work with everyday. I understand their purpose is to provide meat, but I take great pride that my boys have good lives and then die without knowing what hit them. I use this particular butcher because he is so good with the moment of death - the boys walk in, looking around, very calm, and he just touches their forehead with his special .22 killer and they fall down, dead as a stone. They never have any fear or pain.

This one lad had about twenty seconds of pain. I felt terrible. I know it was irrational, but I had a real emotional response to it.

And now I’m mad at myself for being irrational.

Arg.

Venting off. Carry on.

Cleo the cow went for a stroll last weekend. I thought she was pregnant, but I guess I was wrong and she hopped the fence and went looking for love.

She also took two heifers down the path of wantoness.

The trio walked four miles over the river and through the woods and ended up in another farmer’s herd. He doesn’t castrate his bull calves. She had a lot of fun.

It took me an entire weekend to track her down (assisted by my fine friend Polymath). When I found her, she was surrounded by ten bulls who were taking turns. The farmer commented that her heifer calf had been crying because she couldn’t get through the crowd to nurse - and that the “activity” had been going on since the previous day. When I said that I had thought she was bred, he said “well, she sure as heck is now!”

I’m glad to have my girls back, but rather disappointed that I’ll have a scrub calf rather than an AI-sired genetic improvement. Ah well.

My daughter named my new heifer “Princess.”

I wanted to name her M.E.L., short for Mary Elizabeth Lease, the great populist rabble-rouser. (”Farmers should raise less corn and more hell!”)

My daughter wanted to name her princess.

So wee Emilie turns to me and says, “Daddy, you always say that it is good to compromise. We can compromise and name her Princess Mel. We’ll just call her princess for short.”

And the evil wife chimed in “That’s such a good suggestion, Emilie! I’m sure Daddy would love to compromise when you suggest it so nicely.”

So I call the heifer Mel. Everyone else calls her “Princess.”

I hope wee Ben starts to talk soon so I’ll have another Y chromosone vote.

If anyone is interested, Mel is the product of my Charlais cross cow Cleo and and AI service to Bextor, a pathfinder Angus.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was invited a little while ago by his friend Ted (of Rocket Jones fame) to participate in a new group blog he was starting. Ted, you see, had recently completed reading the “Dangerous Book for Boys.” So impressed by this book was Ted that he thought it would be a great idea to get some bloggers together to share bits of knowledge and life experience (or just trivia) in a way that would be educational and fun for parents and kids.

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, your Maximum Leader has not read “The Dangerous Book for Boys.” (But he has ordered it on Amazon and will likely get it in the mail pretty darn soon. (There is nothing like Super-saver shipping is there…) But he will trust Ted’s judgement that your Maximum Leader has something worthwhile to contribute to this worthy endeavour.

Without further adieu… Your Maximum Leader presents: The Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls.

And since your Maximum Leader is plugging the new site, allow him to plug his first contribution to the Dangerous Blog… Without asking the Smallholder’s permission at all, your Maximum Leader went ahead and slapped down some editing on two of the most linked posts ever in the history of this blog… Yes… Long-time readers will remember the posts well… They were the toad sexing posts. (Originals here and here.)

Go over to the Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls… Learn how to sex toads, make spider houses, and tell a ghost story.

And in case you are wondering… The most linked post in the history of Naked Villainy… It was this one: 10 Things…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader must thank the many readers who commented on the Vermont Secession posts. Your Maximum Leader had no idea that there were so many hotbeds of secession around the nation. Although, to be honest, most of these movements are people wanting to create their own new state out of a portion of their old state (the Ole West Virginia/Virginia situation). Very few, including some secessionists in Texas and the aforementioned Vermont, actually seem to want out of the United States.

Well… Your Maximum Leader, as he’s stated before, will not let Vermont go peacefully. He’ll fight to keep Vermont in the Union. He’ll fight to maintain the Northeast Dairy Compact. Heck, we might need those Vermont dairy farmers to help keep the price of milk down (provided we could let market forces work outside of the Northeast Dairy Compact). Have you noticed food prices recently? Your Maximum Leader has. He spend $1.99 on a gallon of milk about three months ago. Today, he had to buy a gallon of milk (1% in case you care) and it was $2.95. Insanity!

The people at the Christian Science Monitor (and Yahoo News) have also noticed this price spike in food. In case you are too lazy to clicky on the linky:

The reason people are smarting: Inflation in grocery aisles is up by more in the first six months of 2007 than in all of 2006. That means food costs are on track for the biggest annual percentage hike since 1980, according to the Labor Department. The anticipated 7.5 percent increase would readily outflank the 2.6 percent core inflation rate to date, which excludes food and energy. It’s across every grocery aisle, too, from burgers to bagels, from duck to dumpling.

Added to sticker shock at the gas pump, high food prices, especially for meat, are forcing consumers to scrimp, coupon-clip, and ponder the possibilities of a deep freeze to take advantage of discounts, says Boyd Brady, an extension agent at Auburn University in Alabama.

“There’s a … combination of higher demand, natural disasters, higher energy prices – just a myriad of factors driving what price increases we’re seeing across the food sector,” says Chad Hart, an agricultural economist at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development in Ames, Iowa.

The chief culprit is corn, namely No. 2 feed corn, the staple of the breadbasket. In answer to President Bush’s call for greater oil independence, the amount of feed corn distilled into ethanol is expected to double in the next five to six years. Distillation is already sucking up 18 percent of the total crop. The ethanol gambit, in turn, is sending corn prices to historic levels – topping $4 per bushel earlier this year, and remaining high. All of this trickles down to the boards at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, affecting the price of everything from sirloin to eggs (which are up, by the way, 18.6 percent across the nation).

In a welcome response, US farmers told the government in April they plan a record-breaking 93-million-acre corn crop, though its true size won’t be known until the end of June. But corn alone does not explain the number of products that have become more expensive of late.

Facing higher costs at the farm and shareholder pressure to maintain profits, companies such as Tyson Chicken and Coca-Cola are raising prices. The fact that fuel prices remain relatively high hasn’t helped either, allowing no break in the cost of transporting perishable goods.

For fruit and vegetable growers, labor shortages are also a factor. A $2 cantaloupe sold for $3 at the South Carolina Farmer’s Market in Greenville recently, largely because of labor woes, says Thompson Smith of the South Carolina Farm Bureau. Winter cold snaps and hard freezes in California and the Southeast have made peaches, apples, and oranges pricier.

In the heartland, low yields on winter wheat mean cookies and baguettes are more expensive. Meat costs are up by 15 percent in some regions, in part because of drought that, as in Alabama, caused a cattle sell-off. Milk prices are up in part because of a global shortage, with milk exporters such as New Zealand unable to add capacity and Australia enduring a debilitating drought, even as demand rises in Europe, China, and India.

Damn those people in Europe and China and India. Drinkin’ our friggin milk! Don’t they have clean drinking water over there? Oh… Yeah…

Anyho…

Although your Maximum Leader isn’t sure how a $2 cantaloupe is actually a $3 dollar cantaloupe (did some important information get edited out of that line?), he does see the price increases with frightening regularity. One wonders if we are going to see record price increases on victuals this year does that mean that farm subsidies will be lower? After all, some of these record prices must get to a farmer’s pocketbook…

Your Maximum Leader was joking there… He knows that subsidies aren’t changing… (Thanks Congress!)

Anyho… Moving back to the first point of this post… With record dairy prices coming and demand growing, we must keep Vermont in the Union. Damn those Vermalcontents, Your Maximum Leader will go up there and secure those dairy farms and keep the milk and cheese flowing. He’ll make sure that those cows are fed and milked at gunpoint if need be.

By the way… For those of you wondering what your Maximum Leader’s Colonel-in-Chief outfits might look like… We have a few styles to choose from… Here we go:

Your Maximum Leader in the style of the Virginia Militia (Colonial Era):

Your Maximum Leader in the style of British Colonial officer:

And your Maximum Leader in the style of a 1930s dictator (a la Ian McKellan’s Richard III):

You can take your choice as to which one you like best… Your Maximum Leader will make sure to take them all with him on campaign…

Watch out Vermoonbats! Your Maximum Leader’s got your number!

Carry on.

Robbo over at Llama Butchers doesn’t live on a farm.

While perusing a nature book with his child, they came across a picture of a pair of elephants propagating the species. His wee one gleefully pointed out that the elephants were playing leapfrog.

This reminded me of a farm tour we gave a year ago. We had a preschool over to the farm and the ids and their parents were walking between the paddocks learning about farm animals when my Tunis ram George Washington* began doing his duty to God and country. A preschooler piped up: “What are they doing?”

My wife, horribly embarassed blurted out “They’re playing!”

Only to be corrected by our three-year old. “No they’re not, Mommy, George is breeding her!”

Ah, the farm life.

My daughter also helps with the lambs when they are born and there is much rejoicing when we get a female. She understands how to tell them apart. At preschool this year, she was playing with a stuffed animal and identifying it as a female. One of her classmates was upset because he wanted it to be a male. The teacher, attempting to mediate, told them that it could be whatever they wanted it to be. Emilie, unconvinced, asserted that she knew it was a female, turned the toy over, and triumphantly declared: “Look, no penis!”

At our recent small town celebration, one of my ewes gave birth in front of a large crowd (Polymath has a pic).

Emilie was dissapointed that it was a male lamb. She mournfully reported this to her friends: “Daddy says we only need one ram.”

But then she brightened: “Maybe we can cut his testicles off and keep him for wool!”

I’m waiting for social services to show up at the door.

* Tunis sheep were popularized by our first President so I followed a historical naming pattern until my daughter began naming them after her friends and assorted Disney princesses. I wondered if I was tempting fate when I named the ram - our first president was sterile and that would be a major problem in the herd sire. I shouldn’t have worried. Old George is dedicated to his job and breeds everybody on the first heat. I loaned him to another shepherd who was preserving the Tunis breed and he went above and beyond the call of duty. My friend has several different types of sheep and she carefully calibrates which ewes go in which paddock with which ram. While George was there, he bred the Tunis girls and then battered down the division fence, assered his dominance over the Rambouillet ram, and bred those girls too. My friend locked him in the barn and called me to pick him up. He destroyed the gate and bred a third set of ewes before I could get there. Father of his country, indeed.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wonders if you had read the latest out of Llanpumsaint, Wales? No? Imagine that.

It seems that Llanpumsaint has a particularly devout Hindu community. The Llanpumsaint Hindu community is favored with owning their own sacred cow. Yes… A real sacred cow.

The cow’s name is “Shambo.” Shambo means (if you trust the news wires) giver of joy… It seems as though Shambo is not only a giver of joy, but a carrier of bovine turberculosis. As a carrier of bovine TB, Shambo ought to be “culled” - which is a polite way of saying “killed.”

The believers at the Community of the Many Names of God, think that Shambo should be given a repreive since he lives, not on a farm, but in a religious compound. The wire story implies that Shambo would not come into contact with other cows in the area and pass along his infection.

Frankly, this story works on a whole bunch of levels… Your Maximum Leader, generally a law and order type, is all for culling the beast if it poses a contamination risk to other livestock. That is the law afterall and you just can’t allow known carriers of infectious diseases to go around infecting other cattle. Then there is the sanctuary element of the story. Now your Maximum Leader knows that no secular democracy recognizes the ancient privledge of “sanctuary” as we have all learned it from novels and film. But deep in your Maximum Leader’s little autocratic heart, there is a soft spot for “sanctuary” in churches.

(Excursus: It seems as though the US military does offer, to some extent, sanctuary to terrorists in mosques. This is one type of sanctuary with which he does not agree. Of course, militarizing a mosque (or church) generally would void any claim of protection the holy space should offer.)

So, should Shambo receive sanctuary? Should Shambo be allowed to live out his (reduced - presumably) days in the Community of the Many Names of God?

Well… No… Shambo should be culled his community should find a new sacred cow.

(NB: This post was hard to type. If one wasn’t careful in typing “Shambo” one might wind up with another name that could cause one to be unfairly accused of being a racist.)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees on loyal reader and commenter (and neighbor of the Smallholder) Polymath’s site that our good friend the Smallholder was displaying some of his sheep at the local town fair over the weekend.

And while displaying his livestock to the crowds… Something happened… Something natural…

But you will have to read all about it to find out more! (Pictures too!)

Carry on.

Bonnie appears to be caught. Her suitor this year was O-Man, one of the greatest Holstein bulls in American history.

He used to be the highest net merit bull, but he has been around long enough that recent generic progress has left him behind.

Here’s hoping for a heifer!

Mrs. Smallholder just wrapped up tax season.

I’m off crutches.

It’s time to get farm work done!

We purchased our pigs yesterday. I got taken a bit by the seller; the price seemed to change when we had the pigs loaded AND the weight of the pigs was higher than estimated. Ah well.

It’s not like I farm to make money.

Farming is fun.

And:

Spring is here! (Life is skittles and life is beer!)

William Seletan on cloned animals.

As a small farmer, I’m concerned that cloned animals are NOT good for the farmer (imagine the price of milk if every Holstein calf is a cloned heifer), but they are safe to eat.

Found via Volokh.

In anticipation of quadrupling my grazing land this spring, I purchased a springing heifer and eight steers on Saturday. The springing heifer, which my daughter has named “Cleo,” is a lovely Charolais-Angus cross that will drop her first calf in mid-February. I bought her from Messer Farms, a very impressive operation in Staunton, Virginia. I could have chosen a registered Angus, but like the larger size of the Charolais because she will be able to carry a Holstein calf - I eventually hope to breed up to a dairy operation.

The calves are mixed-breeds. One of them is blind. I took it because they offered to let me have him for a big price break. I may have made a mistake - it will be hard to train him to electric wire. I may have to hamburger him come grazing time in late March.

I’m finally getting comfortable with this whole business thing - I didn’t even blink when I wrote out a check for $4500.

The Smallholder will appreciate this:

It seemed best to stick with the arrangement that was already in place with the sheep farmers while we improved the land. As part of this process, Paddy insisted that we do something about the rooks.

There were certainly lots of them, a multitude. It’s hard to tell exactly how many as they wheel and soar, spectacular and secret, high above the forest. I didn’t mind them around the place.

They are a nuisance, though. Along with magpies, jackdaws, ravens and jays, rooks are members of the corvid family. They’re tough and clever.

The collective noun for rooks is a parliament, and a parliament of rooks can be deafening. The sheep farmers claim they will peck out newborn lambs’ eyes.

This may well not be true, but they do eat other birds’ eggs, and if you “let it be”, you end up with just rooks. It seemed that the reasonable thing to do was to reduce numbers, to lend a benign hand to the balance of nature, to cull them. Kill them, that is.

Killing rooks is not nice at all. There are no neat boxes for exterminating them; shotguns are the only thng that work and it’s a pretty medieval and messy business, which I don’t enjoy.

But I felt I was acting for the greater good. It was a hard decision for a vegetarian to make, and the moment I made that decision was the moment I became a farmer.

The Volokh Conspiracy had an interesting thread on the government’s role in agriculture.

I got into it a little bit with one of the liberal Volokh posters (See, Brian, you’re not alone). If you’d like to see feisty Smallholder acting like a true conservative, click through.

As an aside - I can’t reply anymore because the thread is closed, but does anyone see where I argue that the government should preferentially treat family farmers (the last comment accuses me of that). I thought I was pretty clear that I wanted government out and the market to rule.