Health Benefits of Grass Fed Products

This is just a short and sweet blog......I go on a lot about grass fed meat and this link tells it much better than I could. http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm So if you are interested in knowing more about why it's better this should help.

Our Western Diet

I've been on a journey of discovery over the last few years. Our food is killing us. When you look at people today and the health problems - obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, cancer......the list goes on and it is so depressing! More so because it is so unnecessary! These are all relatively modern problems - well the dramatic rise in the incidences is a modern problem. Primitive societies all over the world are gradually catching up due to the explosion of the western diet into their societies. Everyone wants a Macca's don't they? Aside from the obvious cause coming from the explosion in the fast food industry, there are other causes. Low-fat, good fats and bad fats, carbohydrates, protein and just good old nutrients. We are so aware of what's good and bad, health authorities have even changed the food pyramid to make it easier for us.......so why aren't we getting healthier instead of un-healthier! (I know that's not a word).

Nutrition is probably the problem. The scientists that come up with all these good and bad food ideas think that food is just nutrients! They want to take a good food apart to find out the nutrients and then they think that will work in isolation. A good diet is one that is well balanced, that has a mix of fruit, vegetables, grass fed meets, whole grains and of course good fats/oil, but most importantly is food that you have evolved to eat. (eg Eskimos, Kalahari Bushman, Aborigines all had different diets, but were good for them) We have not evolved to eat junk food! Maybe in 100 years, we will all cope with this diet, but should we want to do that?

I have recently begun to wonder if I’m gluten intolerant. I’m not really sure what it is, but if I go away and eat food from cafe’s or restaurants I get sick. I often think that it’s because I’ve started eating so much food that I’ve either grown myself or is organic, that when I eat conventional food, my body can’t cope. I’ve cut back on bread and this has helped but I don’t think it’s just gluten – is it our western diet! Everytime I go to a meeting/conference/workshop, you get the usual fair of white bread sandwiches and packaged cakes or biscuits. I just cannot eat this. I don’t even know why white bread is not a banned substance! We can’t buy raw milk because there’s a “health risk”. Isn’t there a greater known health risk with most of the packaged food that we buy in shops! I think I better stop on that note – will take it up again later........ 

Eggs

I have got so many eggs at the moment. The chooks are laying so well that we're having trouble eating all the eggs, although there is so much you can do with eggs. I'll have to do some baking on the weekend - like a big rich fruit cake - that will use about a dozen! I made an egg custard tonight for desert to go with an apple and pear crumble. I had some apples and pears getting past their best-by date and they certainly tasted nicer in a crumble than fresh! Because I'm trying to cut back on wheat, I made a gluten free crumble and was pretty pleased with the way it turned out.
Once you have your own chooks, you'll start thinking about what else you can do with eggs and honestly there are lots! We were away last weekend, so Sunday night dinner ended up being eggs, but the kind of eggs you would eat all the time if you could. Fried eggs - not the usual ones, this was a recipe I pinched (and altered a little) from Kylie Kwong and it really is worth trying. I've put this and a few others on the Recipe Page. They really are delicious and if you cook them in some grass fed lard, and serve with brown rice, it's all good! 
So what are some other ways to do eggs? Frittata, quiche, bacon and egg pie, mayonaise, ceasar salad, egg and potato salad (using homemade mayo of course - my daughter's favourite!), clafoutis, bread and butter pudding (use the scraps from some fancy sour dough bread - waste not want not). I won't put recipes up for all these, but if you want one, let me know.....
I have two flocks of chooks - 4 rhode island red hens, 1 rhode island rooster and 1 aussie game hen live in one large chook pen with 3 ducks and a drake. The chook pen is so overgrown with grass, that my daughter thinks I should put some sheep in there (she likes lamb). I also have a moveable chook dome in the vegie garden for 7 standard laying hens. As these get old, I will replace them with (hopefully) my own rhode island red chickens. I move the dome every couple of weeks, and the idea is that the shooks do the digging, mulching and ferilising before you plant the next garden bed. It's a great idea and works pretty well, although sometimes the grass is a little bit much. We grow big clumps of grass in CQ! But by the time they are finished I only have a little bit to dig out and then I just plant it out. I do add quite a bit of hay towards the end of their time in each bed. I'll take a photo in the next couple of days.
So think about keeping your own chooks and if they're in a moveable pen, all the better. Chooks, like every other farm animal, love eating grass, so if you can move their pen around the eggs will be so much more tastie and nutritious. Just be careful about letting them out, as they will end up on your back patio, or digging up your garden!

Grazing Management

I went out and helped Kim move the cattle yesterday. It was good, as I haven't been out in the paddock for a while. There is so much feed around after the rain and it all looks just fantastic. We practice a form of grazing management called cell grazing or time controlled grazing. It's based on the growth rate of the plant and the cattle graze the pasture when the grass is actively growing and therefore at it's most nutritious. The grass has more sugars at this time and therefore has more chlorophyll. Therefore it has a good balance of Omega 3's and Omega 6's. The cattle are only in each paddock for a short while and then moved to another paddock, before they eat the grass down too short. The paddock then has a long rest, giving the pasture a chance to re grow.

Apart from being more nutritious for the stock, this is also very beneficial to the environment, as it stores carbon. During the process of photosynthesis, the plant takes carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atomosphere, releases oxygen (O2)  back into the atmosphere and puts the carbon (C) into the soil, where an exchange process happens between the soil microbes and the plant roots. The microbes convert the nutrients in the soil into an available form for the plants to use. Cell grazing is ideal as it keeps the plant actively growing, thus photosynthesising.

New Additions

Dixie had 8 piglets over the weekend, 4 boys and 4 girls. They are all very similar, except one that doesn't have a stripe over it's back. The pig breeds we have chosen are heritage breeds and are considered quite rare. It may seem strange, but by breeding them to eat, we can do our bit to preserve the breeds. We only have the one pair the same - the Boar and one Gilt are Berkshires. The idea is to get started this way and then as we build up, we can get more and breed the individual breeds. The Berkshires will be sold as pure breds for other breeders and the cross breeds will be sold for eating. So these piglets we have now will be the start of our Pasture raised pork business. I'll post some photos of them, they are very cute.

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants

The title of this Blog is the first sentence in a book I'm currently reading by Michael Pollen - "In Defence of Food". He wanted to write about the need to eat Food. It may seem strange, because we only eat food - right? Well, no some of what we eat is not food, it's "food-like substances". Food is grown and it is not grown in a packet. The "food" that most people eat on a regular basis is killing us. Most of the diseases today can be directly linked to the "food" that is eaten. Watching the news over the last couple of months, I've been horrified by the amount of overweight people (adults and children) that I've seen. I'm not a skinny thing by any stretch of the imagination, but neither am I overweight (well not much anyway!). The reason that I'm not skinny is that I LOVE food - and I eat too much of it. It's good food, but even good food needs to be eaten in moderation, which when it tastes really nice is hard! Taste - that's also something that real food has. When you compare a freshly cooked meal which includes really fresh garden vegetables, there is absolutely no comparison to the taste of Junk Food! Unfortunately junk food seems to be addictive and when you eat it regularly you actually don't notice that it's disgusting. I know this, because my children eat it too often! They won't be happy with me saying that, but they don't read my blog (much) so it doesn't matter. I am changing that mindset slowly and in fact have spent some fantastic times cooking real food with my kids.

Piglets

We moved Latesha closer to the house,  into a pen that has water laid on and a decent shelter and a floor above the ground if it rains. We thought that she may have been a little bit protective, as sows can be quite agressive if someone comes between her and her babies. Not Latesha. We loaded the 3 little pigs (sounds like a good title to a rhyme!) into a carry box on the quad and thought she'd either follow or we might have to lead her up with a bucket of feed. Well, she was so happy to be out and able to eat some fresh grass, roll in her favourite mud wallow, eat some more fresh grass, have another roll and just generally enjoy being unconfined for a little while. She obviously trusted us completely to look after her little ones. In the end, when we couldn't persaude her to follow us, even with us holding onto the piglets so that they would squeal, we left her and put the piglets in their new home. An hour or so later, she waddles up to the shed and you could almost understand her pig talk, mumbling "well, I suppose you better show me where they are". Have a look at the photos of them if you like.

Trust is an interesting thing when you consider it in relation to farm animals. Latesha trusted us to look after her piglets, which makes it a little uncomfortable to think about the fact that one day we will take them off her for good to wean them, and then eventually when they are big enough, we will take them away to be slaughtered. But, that is just part of eating meat. If we want to eat meat, we must kill the animal first. One of the advantages in raising meat like this, is that at least you know that they have been raised humanely and in a healthy environment. This is what farm friendly food is all about - healthy nutritious food, and where there is a connection between the farmer and the consumer. I like to know where my food has been grown and I think that the more people that want to know this too, then we will see a shift in the way food is grown and produced.