interesting, thanks for sharing!Baurak Ale wrote: ↑April 28th, 2022, 8:12 amWe are also putting in a large garden right now. It feels right but I don't expect success to be 100% the first time around. I've been telling my friends around here that the most valuable thing we will harvest this year is the knowledge from the mistakes we will make. We are going to want to have this down to a science in short order.mudflap wrote: ↑April 24th, 2022, 6:45 am Garden plans for 2022:
https://mudbox.freedombox.rocks/ikiwiki ... 22_Garden/
because:
https://westernstandardonline.com/2022/ ... acilities/
As an aside, I happened upon your post about Kalona Supernatural Milk. I used to unload milk tankers for them! I would test the bacteria and fat levels of the milk coming in. Always super clean and super creamy milk coming from those Amish farms. The "low and slow" pasteurization process Kalona Supernatural (we just call it the Kalona creamery) uses really makes a difference. That and the milk they get is sourced from the Amish. Some of the Amish I know are getting irritated by them though because they keep pursuing additional "organic" certifications that have increasingly bizarre rules for the Amish to follow. In a recent example they told me how the Kalona creamery was going to require some sort of milking instructors to come down and teach the Amish how to milk their cows. The Amish man I was speaking to balked at the thought, saying, "Do they think we don't know what we're doing? I'm going to start selling to an A2A2 place down in Missouri before that happens." Mind you this is only one of the latest hurdles the creamery has imposed on their farmers in the pursuit of regulated certifications. The government makes it hard and expensive to get certain labels, further pushing out small-scale family farms. That said, the Kalona creamery could afford to pay around $25 per 100lb of milk—the highest in the industry a couple years ago (most conventional milk farms are paid $5-or-so per 100lb!).
One more anecdote from Amish milking: a family we know used to do the common thing and feed their calves formula so they could maximize the milk production of the mother for increased milk sales. Well they took the advice of Sally Fallon, whose wisdom we stick to in our family's diet, and started feeding their calves their mothers' milk despite the anticipated financial loss from lower milk sales. Turns out they ended up increasing profits because this change eliminated a huge expense that had otherwise been a standard among cow farms: veterinary bills! Turns out that calves raised on their mothers' milk are healthy enough to not need constant doctor upkeep. I've worked with farm veterinary systems and—let me tell you—in the standard livestock industry that is a huge, huge business. Just like people, the medical maintenance of livestock is a money machine when money-driven dietary standards are adhered to.
And also sad....they keep squeezing that golden goose...
I'll go back to raw before I go back to anything less than Kalona. Yes, I'll have to find a new supplier. There's one guy here in AL that sells to Whole Foods and to the public (I won't shop at Whole Foods - too much Amazon for me...), but I think he does what a lot of them do: stores his milk in the same freezer as his meat. I don't know why they don't get it: plastic will suck up flavors of whatever it's around. makes it taste weird/bad.
we go through about 3 gallons a week for a family of 3. Most people my age can't stomach "milk" anymore (because what they are drinking isn't really milk, duh). huge difference between "walmart" and "super kalona". walmart shouldn't even be able to legally call what they sell, "milk", IMO.