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5 Ways to Stretch your Food Dollar

With the rising costs of commodities, many people find it hard to justify their ideals of good beyond-organic food. Even people who have dedicated themselves to organic and farm-fresh food feel pressured to rethink their food budget because of rising costs of not only food, but gasoline and other essentials as well. For a myriad reasons ranging from cheap ingredients in commercially produced foods to subsidized crops to mass production to cheap food imports, beyond-organic food purchased from farms is almost universally more expensive than supermarket fare. In times like these, it always saddens me to get email from patrons who are canceling an order or a subscription because they can’t justify the cost. True, it’s not the best thing for us as a farm and business, but more unfortunate than that is that people feel forced to compromise their food values for budgetary reasons. I feel for these situations—there have been many times over the years when we had to tighten our belts. With that in mind, today we’ll offer a few hacks as potential workarounds for this problem. I’ll go through each point separately after the list. Here goes: Value-adding in the kitchen Buying in bulk Low-demand vs. high-demand items Optimizing Nutrition Avoiding Waste Let’s dissect each of these separately to learn more. Value-adding in the Kitchen– We live in a convenience food culture. Whether it’s prepackaged heat-and-serve food from the supermarket or eating out, convenience foods are just that, convenient. They are also very expensive per serving, and even more so when looking at it from a cost/nutrition perspective. Look at your monthly food budget on fast food, DoorDash, or UberEATS, even just three nights a week, and then compare cost with these meals cooked at home. A study compared an $18 Chick-fil-a meal with a beef-and-rice meal using the best quality organic white rice, grassfed ground beef, and raw grassfed cheese prepared at home. Would you know, the home cooked dish (with the best available ingredients), was far more economical that the Chick-fil-a, not to mention fed 5-6 people. This study was conducted almost exclusively from an economical point of view and did not measure nutrition. Chick-fil-a, for all its hype, is not nutritionally superior compared to other fast food. Preparing simple meals with fresh ingredients is not hard, even more so with some experience and you take an interest in meal planning and cooking multiple meals at once in order to save time. There are numerous delectable casseroles that can be premade, frozen or chilled for several days, and then heated and served with minimal effort. One of my favorites is a dish Esther has prepared many a time when she was gone for the day. It’s as simple as putting a thawed beef roast (in a covered glass casserole dish) in the oven (at 260 degrees) in the morning before she leaves. Dicing potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic in a separate dish, she will instruct me or one the older children to add it to the roast casserole (spreading it out around the roast) at noon. When she returns at 4:00 PM, the dish is ready, the roast is tender, juicy, and cooked to fall-apart perfection, the vegetables are soft and perfect, and we sit down to a wildly tasty and hearty meal that took no more than 10 minutes to prepare. It cost about $45 and feeds a family of ten. I could go on describing meals we’ve discovered along the way that are both healthy and economical, but the point is, it doesn’t have to be complicated or glitzy to taste good and feed your family optimally. A word of caution in terms of watching TV chefs or cooking shows in order to learn how to cook. Most of them are over-complicated, both in the tools and equipment they have and in the methods they’re using. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when watching that level of expertise. Where does overwhelm and overcomplication take us?... Nine time out of ten, to not doing any of it. Remember, in this information era almost anything can be learned in a few minutes with a can-do attitude. Buying in Bulk –Whether it’s meat bundles instead of individual steaks or sausage, multiple pack discounts, or flour, sweetener, nuts, and other dry ingredients, buying in bulk allows for significant savings. Usually, the savings is at least 5% and can be as much as 10%. That’s worth considering and adds up to a lot of money over time. If you’re buying from farms, you can usually get volume discounts on staple items like eggs or milk as well, which is not a feature normally offered by grocers and supermarkets. It may not be an easy task to come up with several hundred dollars to invest in food (which is the most common pushback against buying in bulk) but if you make a food budget and start with smaller bulk purchases, the savings is significant enough to allow you to then budget for larger bundles, which means even deeper savings. The difficult part is to start and to stick to a budget, but committing to it can yield remarkable discounts on even the best quality food. Low-Demand vs. High-demand Items – For those concerned about the higher cost of quality food, one simple way to stretch a dollar is to buy items that are not as high demand. For example, chicken thighs are always in demand, and therefore are more expensive per pound, ditto boneless skinless breast. Most people don’t think of the fact that for every thigh there must be a drumstick. Because drumsticks are less in-demand, the price is drastically dropped to create buyer incentive. Our in-store price for thighs is $13-and-change per pound, while drumsticks are $4.59/lb. Sounds unfair, doesn’t it? It’s simply because of demand. I know drumsticks will never match thighs in delectability, but they’re easily prepared, are excellent dining, and are certainly as nutritious as thighs. The same is true for sirloin steak vs. T-bone or Delmonico. A beef carcass yields x amount of each, and to keep from carrying a growing inventory of the less desired cut the price must be adjusted according to demand. Interestingly, every farm or retailer has cuts that sell well or not-so-well due to the demands of their unique customer base. If you’re not sure, ask your farmer what he’s long on and the chances are high that he will give a discount on volume purchases of that item. Optimizing Nutrition – If you’re buying from farms there will always be items that—while they are priced higher than their supermarket counterparts—are an excellent choice because they pack a lot of nutrition. Such as eggs. Or ground beef. A dozen eggs weighs about 1.8 lbs. without the carton. At roughly $7.50 a dozen, that’s a lot of nutrition per pound. Plus, they’re so versatile and can be used in many different ways (think hard-boiled, egg & vegetable dinner casseroles, raw eggs in smoothies, etc.). The same with ground beef or pork sausage, extremely adaptable, highly nutritious when raised well, and affordable. To be clear, I’m not opposed to eating steak, boneless breast, or other high-end foods, but in this post the focus is on highlighting ways to save money without compromising on food quality. Unless we detach it from human health, which we can’t, the cheap food argument simply lacks substance because for food to be as cheap as most Americans expect it to be, corners must be cut not only in production, but ingredient quality as well. Avoiding Waste – I see it as an unspeakable atrocity that 40% of food in America is wasted. Maybe it’s nothing more than the fact that we value things in direct proportion to the time and money invested in it, and we’ve championed cheap food and fostered mediocre food expectations in this country for at least four decades. Food waste is much more than the price paid for the food. It's a drain on the inherently necessary natural resources of soil, air, and water needed to produce food. Perhaps the principal obligation to avoiding food waste is to learn preservation skills such as canning, freezing, and fermentation. Many foods—when on the verge of spoiling—can be tossed in a freezer bag and frozen, or packed in a glass jar with water and whey to be fermented. Leftover meat can be turned into tasty stews and soups to be enjoyed for another meal. If you don’t have the skills to do this, I assure you it’s a very straightforward and uncomplicated process, not to mention rewarding. Social media is rife with people who have these skills and film themselves doing it. Mastering a skill is one of the most empowering things you can do. Practical hands-on skills—especially culinary arts—will always be in demand and are of great worth in good times and bad. More, investing in the old arts of food preservation and culinary skills can bless you and your family for years to come. The Last Word – If I had a dime for every time Esther and I looked for ways to slash our food budget in the early years of our marriage, I’d have a pile of dimes. However, as our awareness of food quality and its impact on health increased, we gradually gave up on the spend-as-little-as-possible-on-food mindset, and began viewing as an investment in our growing children. And today, we look at our children (the oldest are teenagers now) and see the benefits of staying the course with nourishing food when they were younger. I could go on for a long time about this but suffice it to say that investing in quality food for our young children is one of the best investments we can make in their lives. Given the glut of cheap processed foods in this country, it can be difficult to prioritize food quality over price when you’re trying to get ahead financially. But at the same time, the beauty of investing in quality food is that it’s a repeated relatively small investment that can reap untold benefits of better health for generations to come. And that, is The View from the Country.

When Male Cattle Lactate...

There was a time, only several days ago, when I would have cast the above title into the same box as "if pigs could fly" or some other nonsensical absurdity. But an article crossed my desk that grabbed my attention. More because of who had written it than the actual title, because I read the author a lot and she's no-nonsense. As it turned out, the article in question was not written in jest. But it was about beef steers (castrated beef bulls) that were found to be lactating at slaughter. Male cattle, similar to human males, have small nipples that vaguely resemble their female counterparts. And the breaking story is that about 20% of conventionally produced feedlot beef are producing milk—to the point where it can be expressed from the nipples similar to a lactating cow. I’m relatively open-minded, but this was wildly far-fetched even to me. I raise cattle. A steer is a castrated male bovine. A steer does not get pregnant, nor does it have a calf—which is a prerequisite for female cattle to lactate. At first, I thought it must be a joke. But the author of the article had brought the receipts and was a source I know and trust. The subject has been officially studied (although only to a degree) at West Texas A&M University, along with researchers from Cargill Protein. In the study, 20,481 finished cattle originating from 33 feedlots were examined, out of which 6,078 were found to be lactating, all outside of pregnancy and calving. Before delving into this further, a little cattle terminology might be helpful. A heifer is a female bovine that has never given birth. It’s strange for a heifer that has never had a calf to be lactating. But a steer is a castrated male bovine. A steer producing milk takes strange to another level. The Texas A&M study showed that among native beef heifers, 28.77 percent were lactating. Among dairy-cross heifers, an astonishing 55.81 percent were lactating. Among native steers, 14.55 percent were lactating. Among dairy-cross steers, 19.66 percent were lactating. I’m still having trouble comprehending these numbers. A few steers lactating could be dismissed. A one-off. A freak occurrence. But 15-20% demands attention. I raise grassfed grass-finished beef and have for over 15 years. While our cattle are in many ways the same type of animal raised in feedlots, we don’t use hormonal implants. I have never seen a steer lactate. Neither have any of our heifers produced milk prior to calving. Why do I mention implants? Because at least 90% of feedlots steers and heifers have hormonal implants applied between placement in the feedlot and slaughter. Hormonal implants are a simple device attached to the ear that slow-releases substances like estradiol, zeranol, and trenbolone acetate in order to manipulate endocrine pathways because doing so increases growth and improves feed efficiency. Scientists have known since at least the early 1970’s that lactation can be induced in bovines outside of pregnancy via hormone manipulation. Using substances like estradiol and progesterone, researchers were able to hormonally induce dairy heifers to lactation without pregnancy and calving. To be clear, inducing heifers to lactation is not achieved using the exact pathways used in beef to increase growth and feed efficiency. However, there is overlap in the compounds used in both situations. Estradiol (an estrogen enhancer), for example, is used in both situations. The study I cited earlier did not record whether or not the animals had implants, but we can be relatively sure some did, given the ubiquity of hormonal implants in feedlot beef. The hypothesis given by the researchers was that excess body fat in beef animals can increase estrogen production and could contribute to galactorrhea—milk production unrelated to normal pregnancy and birth. It’s not uncommon for research to have what I call no-go areas, which is to say there are certain factors that are essentially off-limits in order to obtain funding for the study, which is often funded by either the industry or by land-grant universities that are heavily subsidized by agricultural industry. I don’t know if this was the case in this particular study or not, but Texas A&M is a land-grant school, and hormonal implants are considered the holy grail in the beef industry. To have a study portray them unfavorably would not be appreciated by the beef industry. Do I think implants play a part? Yes, I do. But I don’t know—because it hasn’t been studied. And that’s the exasperating part of this whole discussion. Certain things, seemingly, are protected to the point where too much is on the line to allow an honest review. Knowing, perhaps, would upset the apple cart. Maybe the researchers are right. Perhaps it’s all about body fat. But then again, maybe implants also play a role. Maybe it’s diet. Maybe it’s a combination of more than one of these factors. Nevertheless, something in the biological environment is telling the mammary glands of castrated males to produce milk. I want to know more. Were steers lactating at anything approaching these rates in 1950? In 1970? In 1990? Were slaughterhouse workers seeing this for decades while nobody thought to count it? Or is this a modern phenomenon? More, is it a bridge too far to ask what this means beyond cattle? Human beings also live in a complicated endocrine environment, more so than ever. Endocrine disrupters are a rising concern, whether it’s chemicals in plastics, water, cosmetics, or food. We are exposed to multiple substances that potentially affect our hormonal systems. Meanwhile, in meat production, we intentionally manipulate animals’ endocrine systems to make them grow more efficiently. Whatever is making these steers lactate has not been proven to instigate a particular health problem in humans. We don’t know that. But if factors in the environment, diet, or management of our food animals is producing an endocrine effect dramatic enough to make castrated male beef animals’ lactate, we should know what that something is. We should also be concerned whether or not it has downstream consequences for the animal, the meat, or the people who eat it. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s concerning enough that we should find out. Hormonal implants work. That’s why the industry uses them. They allow cattle to gain weight faster and convert feed more efficiently. The question of the day--especially regarding the modern food system—is: What are we willing to trade for efficiency? Is it early pubescence in girls? A growing estrogen-related infertility crisis in men? How about increased risk for certain cancers or disturbances to the nervous system? These are all endocrine related issues that are widespread in our day. I’m not saying lactating male cattle, hormonal implants, or anything else mentioned in this article are causing the human health problems I just mentioned. We don’t know that to be true. Most health-related matters are not caused by any single one contributor. But thinking people tend to notice similar language. And no one can be blamed for connecting dots between hormone manipulation in food animals and endocrine problems among humans. We can all draw conclusions as whether or not we believe these things are connected. But unfortunately, for lack of actual scientific study, we can’t know for sure. All we can do is notice common practices in certain sectors of agriculture and see that it causes very strange unintended consequences (such as lactating male cattle). And then we can wonder what the unintended consequences are when humans consume the resulting food coming from such a system. And that’s The View from the Country.

A Bold Return to Giving A Damn

Some time ago, a patron and friend recommended a book to me. As I’m wont to do when a book sounds interesting, I purchased it. And read it with much interest and pleasure. The title, the same as the title of this article—is interesting in itself—and the book even more so. Written by Will Harris, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn is the story of a piece of land being in the Harris family from 1866 to the present. The first two generations, of course, managed it successfully without chemicals or any of the agricultural tools of modern science, which means they produced food within the confines of nature, being forced to respect the natural cycles and yields nature offered. These two generations were livestock farmers that primarily marketed their product to local eaters—in a time when food was by necessity local. Will Harris’ father, however, introduced to synthetic nitrogen as a fertilizer in the 1940’s, steered the ranch into modern American agriculture, which is to say pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic nitrogen for the land. Parasiticides, antibiotics, and steroids for the cattle. Taking cattle from pasture into an on-farm feedlot, and selling the remaining beef calves into commodity markets rather than marketing them to local eaters. It’s the story of several generations of men who had work ethic, swagger, grit, savvy, and by the 4th generation, used “with impunity” (his words) the host of tools modern agribusiness offered, to the detriment of the natural resources in his care. Will, fourth-generation Harris, tells his story in what is part memoir, part manifesto, in a very entertaining writing style—course enough to show his macho irreligious Harris character, but well-worded and on-point in a way that brings out his vision for a friendlier and more responsible food and farming model. Here’s a brief glimpse; I was a very industrial cattleman. It was a system predisposed to excesses—and I loved that part of it. The alpha-male, testosterone-charged person that I was relished the chance to play hardball now that I had control of things on the farm, and the game came naturally to me… I had a foot on the pedal and a hand on the brake—high-carbohydrate, grain-based diets promoted super-fast growth, then pricey pharmaceutical drugs took down the painful bloat and liver infection that resulted. The results were hard to deny…I was a hard-pushing commodity cowboy and I’d mastered the skills better than just about anyone else around me. Until one day I looked around at what I was doing and said, This sucks. This sucks real bad. Starting to care about the resources in his care (giving a damn), according to the book, came from a completely non-religious point of view, rather a repulsion to his own overly aggressive use (abuse) of agri-chemicals, antibiotics, parasiticides, etc. He was not hurting financially, was debt-free, and paid plenty of taxes every year. In his words; I was sitting pretty, from anyone else’s perspective. But my perspective had changed—kind of like when a small corner of your house becomes the junk zone…and you realize it won’t ever go away unless you make a very conscious decision that This sucks. I am cleaning this s**t up! That’s how it was for me, nothing lofty or philosophical or grand. Just a C-student’s aha that he didn’t like what he was doing, and now he wasn’t going to do it anymore. The conclusion of "farming-this-way-is-wrong" when it doesn't stem from a moral or religious conviction, or from financial hardship is rare. Most people, I would say, come to regenerative farming and food production from either financial pressure or from something of a moral conviction. And yes, in a sense Will Harris had something of a moral dig when, as he writes; "One day in the fall of 1995, I stood at our corrals and watched a hundred head of five-hundred-pound calves get loaded on a double-deck eighteen-wheeler that would wrench them out of their coastal savannah eco-system and transport them to a massive feedlot thirteen hundred miles away in a very different eco-system, the high plains of Nebraska...I knew from two decade of experience what would happen when they left my farm: a thirty-hour ride with each steer jammed up against the next, deprived of food, water, or rest; the steers on the top deck peeing and shitting on the ones on the bottom. Transporting calves this way off the farm to big feedlots in Iowa or Nebraska was absolutely standard in our industry...But standing there looking at it on this particular day, something changed in me. I wish I could say that God spoke to me or that I saw a burning bush; but it wasn't that dramatic. It was just that something that had always felt reasonable and rational to me suddenly felt very wrong...It suddenly felt like raising your daughter to be a princess and then sending her to the whorehouse" The book, to me, is a very enjoyable read, weaving in and out of where contemporary agriculture went wrong, the hard realities of reversing course, and the satisfaction of seeing—after a few decades, the results—on the farm, in the livestock, and in the community, of actually giving a damn about the outcome. Will Harris paints the story—in a personal way—of how reckless food and farming policies have vastly diminished America’s natural resources, how in the big scheme of things government, agribusiness, agricultural academia, and even the farming community have been so drunk on “progress”, on technology, on agricultural exports, and on “feeding the world” that essentially the entirety of the agricultural and grocery sectors have stopped giving a damn about any sort of long-term vision for the future of food and farming in America, not to mention the health of Americans. His is the story of exactly what the book title implies—returning to a place where one begins to care again. To me, that’s profound. It’s profound because I see the same phenomenon around me—farmers stuck in the conventional mentality, not looking further than the current generation, if even that. Agribusiness continually coming up with new ever-more-egregious ways to subvert nature, with no thought of how their innovation helps or hurts our finite natural resources, not to mention the food animals it’s intended for. Even eaters, stuck in a consumeristic mindset that food needs to be pre-prepared and “affordable”, with little thought of how it’s produced or what producing it does to our children’s survivability. Yes, it may be a cultural phenomenon—especially for farmers and eaters, but it’s also the essence of ill-informed and thoughtless decision making. Not giving a damn about things as essential as food and farming, regrettably, is commonplace in America. But let all excuses be gone—if someone as deeply entrenched in chemical conventional farming, as tuned out to what is natural and sustainable, as rough and reckless and irreligious as Will Harris (I mean no disrespect, rather a deep respect for the 180 degree about-face he did) can make a bold return to giving a damn, then any one of us—whether we’re farmers or eaters—can do the same. Never has it been more necessary. And that’s the View from the Country. Quotes Worth Re-Quoting -“The food that came out of the [industrialized] system was artificially cheap - the price was subsidized by the environment, our wildlife and aquatic life, and our bad health. We just couldn’t see those hidden costs - nor could we grasp how future generations would inherit the effects of our extractive, intensive farming methods. When you add up all the ways the bill is coming due, it takes the shine off the glittering promises of postwar industrialized food. The deal we made with our planet, its creatures, and our rural workforces, all so we could enjoy a slightly cheaper hamburger, might just be the worst deal that was ever made.”~ Will Harris Our family and our farm participated in creating the bedrock of rural America, then inadvertently helped to crack that foundation by participating in the industrialized, centralized, commoditized system that rendered rural America close to obsolete. We traded the autonomy of the small farmer for the security that came by scaling up; then we began to risk degradation and disrepair to our land, animals, and community as a result. And we participated in a system that sold consumers a bucolic image of farming that wasn't actually true. ~ Will Harris

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5 Ways to Stretch your Food Dollar

When Male Cattle Lactate...

A Bold Return to Giving A Damn

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