Northern Farmer

Today is a somewhat raw day with the temperature in the teens and falling, with winds gusting to 26MPH. I think tonight will be a good night to take a nice hot sauna. Today I made a quick trip (my kids probably wouldn’t call it quick) to the feed mill to get a few items that we needed. While there I helped put a bunch of feed ingredients into a skid loader bucket so that they could dump it into the feed mixer. It was an interesting mixture. Those of you who are dairy farmers are probably familiar with the ingredients, but it might be instructive to those of you who are not full-time farmers. The ingredients included the typical minerals; calcium carbonate, a zinc supplement, magnesium, rock salt, bicarbonate of soda, vitamin E, and a vitamin pack. It is a dusty job and you get to taste most of the ingredients as the dust wafts into your nose and mouth. The calcium carbonate tastes good, but the bicarbonate of soda is less than desirable. Other ingredients were fish meal (remember this is going to be fed to dairy cows) and a supplement that claims to be calcium based long chain fatty acids and that appeared to be a byproduct of palm oil production. A number of the ingredients came from big corporate Ag companies. I know the farmer for whom the feed was being mixed. He has big Holstein cows. Seems that we have bred cows that cannot sustain their level of production on the feed that is normally produced on a farm. I will gladly stick to my smaller Jersey cows that don’t seem to need all the added inputs. While at the feed mill there was some discussion that the high corn price ($3.50 a bushel) may result in more land being put into corn, reducing the acreage in hay and causing the price of hay to go up. This has spurred me on to try to rent a little more pasture this next year. Maybe I can extend the grazing system and avoid the amount of hay that we need. Fortunately, we only feed grain to the few chickens we have, so at least the increase in corn price has not affected us much up to this point.

This past week I read an article on cloning in the January 20th issue of World Magazine. I did not realize that cloning was so widespread. The article talks about a woman who cloned a gelding. She had won 10 world championships in barrel racing with the gelding. She cloned him so that she could breed with the horse’s “champion genes”. I know that environment can influence the expression of genes, so I wonder how close the clone is to the original horse. I can see from pictures in the magazine that the original horse has different coloring than the clone. After looking at the article I decided to look at the web site for the company (www.viagen.com) that cloned her horse. They charge a mere $15,000 to clone a cow, but if you clone 6 cows, the price drops to $6,000. (Tom, have any gentle Herefords you want to clone?) They also had a picture showing the first clone (a cow or bull) produced from a carcass. So now they can clone from a carcass ….. To clone an animal all you need to do is send the company an ear plug in the mail. I wonder if this isn’t a slippery slope. What will happen to genetic diversity – keeping a diversity of genes around that may allow an animal to adapt to various environments. The company’s web site says that the FDA has issued a draft risk assessment saying that food from cloned animals is safe. Whether food from cloned animals is safe or not, it seems that our society is plunging down a path that will lead to problems. I wonder how long it will be before someone insists on cloning some person who has special talents or gifts?

Jim V

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Jim V, Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.