Last year, in maple season sometime around the middle to end of March, we had a sugar snow. It looked like this:

A sugar snow is a late winter/early spring snow that encourages the maple season to extend, by slowing down the trees production with cold nights. It’s the kind of snow that comes down one day and is gone the next. We haven’t had that kind of weather this year, and our maple sap harvesting may be over or close to over for the year - a couple weeks earlier than last year. So yesterday we made maple cream to celebrate.

If you like spreadable honey, honey butter, Nutella, maple glazed doughnuts, etc, you might love maple cream. (Also known as maple spread, or maple butter.) It’s not hard to make it, just takes some attention. We put a couple quarts of maple syrup in a deep pan, and brought it to a boil, then boiled it until the temperature - by candy thermometer - came up to 236 degrees F. It bubbles and foams up in the pan a great deal, thus the deep pan. I forgot to take pictures of it at this stage - too bad! But below are some of the finished product.

After it reaches this boiling temperature, we set the pan in a basin of ice water to cool rapidly. You’re not supposed to “disturb” it in any way while it cools (don’t stir). We waited until the temperature was around 70 degrees, then we divided it up between three bowls, took three wooden spoons, and three people started stirring.

This part went on for a long time. You pretty much stir until you think your arm will fall off, then switch to the other hand and stir until you have to switch again. You stir, past being certain it’s not working and you should give up and stop. It really helps to have several people doing it, because you can compare progress and egg each other on, and distract each other. The other thing you could do is switch back and forth between a couple people so you can rest your arm.

Eventually, after stirring with no results for what seems like forever (probably it’s about 15 minutes or so) you realize that your mixture is starting to change color and texture. You keep on stirring, and things happen faster at this point. The sugar is crystallizing, but the combination of the temperature it heated to, the rapid cooling, and your stirring is making it form very tiny crystals. This gives it a creamy texture. The color changes from golden-brown maple syrup color to light buff yellow, and it feels different to stir. It looks eerily like creamy peanut butter or cashew butter, or wood glue. When it gets to the point of having a dull sheen to the surface when you stop stirring a moment, it’s done. We spooned it into jars, divided them up, and put them in our refrigerators. This stuff has a shorter lifespan, and must be refrigerated.

How can we describe maple cream? It disappears in your mouth. It looks like it will be TOO sweet and gooey, and it’s not. It’s great on toasts, popovers, muffins, cakes, and spoons. I’ve been wondering what it might be like to freeze teaspoons of it and dip them in dark chocolate. It’s very special, and we’re glad we kept stirring!

This is George Raider Hamilton Clooney Fat Boy the Third. He’s the biggest baby of our cattery, always lounging, ever running from fights or confrontations with other males, always ready for a scratch on the belly. George likes to lounge in the chicken yard where he can be near the chickens. The Delaware hens sometimes will come up and peck him lightly, to see if he’s food, and George just accepts that as a part of life at Dragonwood. They are the same age, George and the Delawares, to within a few weeks, coming up on their first birthdays later this spring.

George has the most perfectly coifed fur on the farm. It has a nice mixture of colors, with just a hint of gray that gave him the Clooney/Hamilton parts of his name. The “Raider” part was his original name, after he gave us one of these looks (in the photo) and it reminded us of the evil or not so evil after all Cylon Raider starfighters in BSG. Fat Boy was added later, as he grew into his skeleton. There’s no hint of evil in him these days, despite this look, just pure kitten playfulness, laziness, gluttony and Georgeness.

Sigh.  It’s not starting off to be a good year, legislatively, for small farms, for organic farms, for people who eat food locally grown, sustainably grown, thoughtfully grown.

Yesterday it was HR 875, the bill that will make it functionally impossible to grow food sensibly and in effect make only the lowest common denominators of food products available, the kind mass produced by Big Ag in our stores.  Urban farmer’s markets selling local produce will become economically untenable, and they’ll wither and disappear or turn into craft fairs.

Today it is HR 814, the bill that will make NAIS mandatory.  HR 814: TRACE Act of 2009, “Tracing and Recalling Agricultural Contamination Everywhere Act of 2009″.  This bill requires, for the “safety” of our food supply, that every farm animal on every farm, large and small, be registered so that it can be traced from birth to death. As if that will make us all safer.

What’s wrong with our food supply is that certain large corporations value profits over consumer safety, and value revenue over responsibility.  They find creative ways to cut costs by poisoning the soil (and everything that grows in it) in the name of cleanliness and safety.  They pack their animals into tiny concentration camps where they defecate all over each other

HR 814 doesn’t specify how to trace the animals. That’s left to the regulators to decide within a year of the bill’s passage.  One year?  That means the only choice is to make mandatory the government’s only animal tracing program, the NAIS run by the USDA.  NAIS is the National Animal Identification System, an Orwellian Big Brother surveillance program for animals.  Ostensibly voluntary, the USDA puts pressure on state agencies to get their local farms to sign up and participate.  The state agencies cheat on this by using existing farm records to sign up farmers without their permission, or by calling farmers with surveys and using these results to sign them up, or by refusing state benefits or programs to farmers if they don’t sign up.

What’s wrong with NAIS?  That’s not the question.  What’s right about it?  There is no research that says the many millions spent on it will be able to stop any disease outbreaks or help anyone deal with the situation.  It is designed by Big Ag to benefit Big Ag and to penalize small farmers.  For example, if your company grows hundreds of beef cattle at a time and ships them all in one batch from feedlot to slaughter, then you need exactly one tag, one registration for all these animals.  But if you’re a small farmer with 60 sheep, trying to raise lambs for local sale, you have to register and track from birth to death every individual animal, every ewe and every lamb.  Sixty times the paperwork of a whole feedlot of cows.  Sell one lamb?  File the paperwork.  Keep the records.  Allow a government inspector to make copies of any piece of paper and any disk drive that might have information related to any of your animals.  Trust them with your privacy.

Sigh.  I’m not really the one to write this… not yet.  I don’t know enough about it, haven’t experienced it firsthand.  Go read the accounts of people who’ve already been affected by it at NoNAIS.org.  Find out why several states have banned the NAIS, who have taken a stand against this onerous burden on small farmers… with no increase in food safety, only costs.  Find out that federal legislation such as this could run roughshod over the states, forcing their farmers to comply despite the state statutes.

And then wonder why the supermarkets have more and more of less and less that you want to take home to cook and eat.  And think of us while you eat it.

I can’t write a lot about this just yet… too much studying to do, learning about the ways of politics, agribusiness, deceit (aka “framing the discussion”). But I want to put something down here.

Introduced last month into the US House of Representatives is a new bill, H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 , that has been carefully designed NOT to enhance food safety per se, but to ensure the long-term dominance of agribusiness at the expense of small farmers.

This bill was introduced by a Democrat and is co-sponsored by 39 Democrats (unfortunately including my own, Rep. Mark Schauer, 7th District Michigan). I’m glad that Republicans are standing, so far, against this. What I’d like is for Democrats AND Republicans who care about health, food and the freedom to choose will take a stand against this and make their voices heard.

What’s HR 875 about? HR 875 first charges that the FDA is inadequate to the task of protecting our food supply proactively… not enough inspectors, hamstrung by antiquated legislation, yada yada. Next it proposes a new Food Safety Administration within… well, let’s let the bill speak for itself:

Purpose: To establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Who could be against safe food? Nobody. But this isn’t really about safe food… it’s about large-scale, factory-farm agribusiness coming under fire for endangering public safety. Think about it… every food safety issue you can think of has involved large-scale factory farms and agribusiness, not small farms and organic farms and folks who care sincerely about delivering healthy fresh food to you. There’s no major E. coli or salmonella outbreaks coming from farmer’s markets in this country.

What’s wrong with HR 875? I’ll take a first shot at it, but I’ll come back to visit the topic more in the future, because it’s that important.

Since agribusiness knows the situation for them is bad and that legislation could be introduced to penalize them for their sorry ways, what do they do? Well, if your CEO $$$ bonuses were on the line and stock options were underwater, you’d come up with a way to turn the situation on its head. And that’s what HR 875 does. It says “Hey, we need to protect your food from the farmer’s field to your table, and we can only do that with more regulations and unscheduled government inspection and animal surveillance, with mandatory food safety plans approved by the government, including minimum standards for fertilizer use, hygiene, and packaging.” These things might sound reasonable if you live in town and buy your food from a supermarket. But not if you’re a small farmer just trying to scrape by, which is about all that small farmers can manage to do, usually with the help of some outside income.

In short, make regulations that put an administrative burden on ALL farms regardless of size. If you sell food to consumers, you must comply. That makes some sense in a Big Brother, We Know What’s Best For You kind of way. But let me give you an example of what this means.

A farm, of any size, is called a “food production facility” (as opposed to a slaughterhouse, which is called a “food establishment”). Section 206 of HR 875 states that the government has the right and responsibility to visit and inspect the facility, approve the food safety plan, review food safety records, conduct monitoring and surveillance of animals and plants, and more. It goes on to establish that the government has the right to have access to and ability to copy ALL records (paper and electronic) necessary to determine whether the food is in compliance with food safety laws, and to track the food in commerce.

Hmmm? To “track the food in commerce”. Paul, I don’t see your records as to tracking your food in commerce. Wha? I deliver eggs and produce to a farmer’s market in Ann Arbor and make a few special deliveries door to door. I sell a few eggs from my back door. I need to track this?

A few years down the line, the regulations change… I need to what? Use bar codes to track my tomatoes? I need to use RFID tags on any lots larger than 10 pounds?

OK, could I be jumping the gun on this? Could I be paranoid that maybe big business really doesn’t have it’s own best interests at heart, and it’s really concerned first and foremost about the safety of our people?

No. I’m right. They know what they’re doing. Who? THEY. This is the biotechnology lobby, that got former Iowa Gov Tom Vilsack into the Department of Agriculture Secretary position (Vilsack champions GMO products and was selected “Governor of the Year” by the BIO, Biotechnology Industry Organization). This is Monsanto, whose strategic consultant Stanley Greenberg is the husband of US Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, who introduced HR 875 in February.

This is the dirty tail wagging the food safety dog. This is going beyond overkill to create overlords.

(sigh. breathe. focus.)

There is a Variance. In this bill! You’d hope that there would be a Variance, a loophole, something that would allow those with a legitimate need to skip the more onerous parts of this bill, and just get their jobs done. And there is! Right there in section 206, right after the hard parts about the bill’s burden of inspection, surveillance and seizing of records…comes this welcome relief:

States and foreign countries that export produce intended for consumption in the United States may request from the Administrator variances from the requirements of the regulations under subsection (c).

That’s right… not small farms. FOREIGN farms. All they have to do is write a request to the Administrator describing their practices, have their request reviewed, and get a variance. No inspection. No surveillance. Just ask and it shall be given unto you. So… all you have to do is get yourself a foreign farm, and put a few containerized freight carbon miles on your produce, and everything is fine again.

( breathe. )

I’m going to quit this post now. I’m going to think about it some more, read some more, and probably write some more. I’ll consider writing about it as if there is no complicity, no devious big agribusiness plot to come out ahead by writing food safety legislation their way. Perhaps I’ll convince myself that this bill is well-intentioned, but simply has too many unintended consequences for small farmers, for organic farmers, for reducing the food choices of all Americans, and ultimately the food safety of all Americans. I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, every Representative in Congress who will vote on this bill needs to know what the small farmers in their districts think of this bill, what every person who cares about the food that goes onto their plates thinks about this bill. It’s about choices. Where is that Farmer in Chief anyway? It sounds like Michelle might be getting the picture, with her new vegetable garden coming today. As long as they don’t try and sell any of the produce without keeping tracking records. No vegetable market stand on the White House lawn for those Obama children, not after HR 875 passes, or at least not without a White House staffer to record and track that produce.

Yesterday I blogged about my Day, but some people thought I was talking about Work.  I believe I even mentioned the “W” word once or twice.  What I was talking about was Play, the “P” word.  Everything in that post, everything in my day was play.  Oh, yes I get paid for working on computers in my day job, but the people and environment for that job is sheer joy and the work itself is rewarding (we’re trying to help develop a unique, playful yet deadly serious way for kids to learn about the dangers of drug abuse), so it’s as good as play to me.  And our little farm here?  Pure fun, the sheer joy of creating good healthy foods with your own hands and the gifts of the earth, and sharing them with (and selling them to) the community around us.  Whether it’s chopping wood, cleaning out the chicken coop, working the garden soil or mowing the lawn (and raking it for mulch) or helping family with their farm chores, it’s fun!  It’s active, outdoor work, it’s communal, it’s earth-friendly, it’s peaceful with time for reflection, it’s just plain wonderful.  I have to get my exercise somehow, and this way I don’t have to force myself to go run or anything… I just stay fit enough all the time.  So, just so you know, here as I write this at 8am this quiet sunny morning with the wood stove fired up and hot water caressing the coffee in the press pot waiting for my touch, it’s play all day for me today.  Whoohoo!

I’ve not written in a while.  Just to break the ice, I’ll stream my consciousness and try to tell you what I did today, from near the beginning to now, near the end, leaving out a few of the more personal items. Here goes.

I didn’t wake up for my alarm that I set at 4am.  It was supposed to wake me to refill the pans of boiling maple sap on the kitchen stove and refire the woodstove for the pots there.  Instead I woke with the cat pawing me in the kidneys sometime before sunrise, between 6 and 7.  The pans were fine, the woodstove fire was down to fine embers and all was well, I did those chores and dropped back into bed for a bit, not quite sleeping, not quite awake.  I thought about computer programming for the iPhone, about the servers I run at work, and about the chickens (there was a rooster crowing in the back of my head somewhere).

I got up and added more wood to the woodstove, took one of the two 3.5 gallon roaster pans of evaporating sap off the kitchen stove and replace it with the kettle to heat water.  I ground some beans and put them in the press pot, then I slipped on the outdoor slippers and went to the woodpile for more wood.  The water boiled, and I poured it in the press pot, stirred it in and put the top on it, without pressing, and filled Mandy’s cup with hot water.  (please continue reading only if you’re really dedicated to the mundane…)

more…

It’s been a busy couple weeks!!

Three new babies welcomed in the midwifery practice, dozens of new plants sprouting, three new chickens joined our flock, and many pints of maple syrup processed and canned! We’ve been keeping busy, but we’ll work on catching up!