Why I don’t care about Chipotle ads…kinda

Posted on September 18, 2013 by wagfarms

My world has been abuzz lately regarding the latest ploy by Chipotle to make people afraid of their plates…and frankly, it’s getting old.

Perhaps I should clarify a bit. 1) Yes, I do care that Chipotle is blatantly misleading and borderline immoral in their advertising schemes. 2) Yes, I would love to see their businesses eerily empty and their storage rooms filled with happy, warm, fuzzy, free-range, antibiotic-free chickies slowly rotting away. 3) I know they do not care, nor will they ever care, about what I think.

Now that I have that out of the way, let’s talk business.

It’s Chipotle’s job to gain business. All I ask is that they use truth and perhaps a few morals. Since they appear to be incapable of that, then it is our job as agriculturalists and agvocates to make sure that our friends and family know the truth, and are aware of the businesses lack of morals.

That’s all we can hope for, and if we accomplish that much, then we can call it a good day.

Yet so many more strive to change the world with a mighty swipe of their writing swords…or is it a blogging bludgeon…alright, now I’m digressing.

My point? We aim so high to fix the problem, that we miss out on communicating with those that we can really educate and influence. And although we can be successful occasionally doing just that, I prefer the easy victories.

The neighbors that aren’t on Facebook, the lady in the pew next to me on Sundays that talks about her weekly trips to town, the teacher at school who shares educational articles or the long-distance friend that has questions about something she’s read.

No, our efforts do not always have to be grand. But our responses must be true and heart-felt. And if you work on your inner circles, you’ll find your circles naturally growing…and before you know it, people will ask you to respond to a national ad campaign that has little to do with food and a lot to do with expensive marketing.

Congratulations, Chipotle, you’ve put together an amazing package. It’s wrapped up in lies, deceit and fear, and you’ve made one mistake. You’ve given myself, and a whole army of people like me, ammunition and a platform.

So while Chipotle is off spending millions on an ad campaign that insists people be afraid of their plates, I’ll keep working to show people just where their plates are filled. And since I will not change their policies, I will continue to use it as the opportunity that has been presented.

Funny enough, when I shoot a video on my farm, I don’t have to resort to animation and scary music to explain how we grow our crops or raise our animals….maybe Chipotle should spend more time talking about how they make their food, instead of how I raise it. But if they would like to bring out a crew, I can show them our cattle in the pastures. Or the alfalfa and corn that we’ve been growing and caring for all summer, just so that the cattle have food this winter.

Truth in advertising? I don’t think so.

A sure sign of fall

Posted on September 6, 2013 by wagfarms

I received this in the mail this week:

This is a landowner gratis tag. There’s no charge for the tag, but it only allows me one deer, antlered or antlerless, and I can only hunt on the land we own or lease that I have specified on my application.

Which means I’m anxiously waiting for the time to do this:

Hopefully this year I’ll stay a little drier.

But sometimes this:

Not exactly what I “planned” to wear when hunting, but it works!

Which occasionally leads to this:

Apparently being a mom that hunts makes me weird. I can live with that.

But can almost always lead to this:

I don’t just hunt because I enjoy it. I also hunt to provide for my family.

Which is much better than this:

This is a pile of deer carcasses that were collected from our hay yard a few years ago. Approximately 60-80 deer in this group. We had hundreds in our yard, and many died that winter. To make a long story short, our hay was too rich for their system and we could get no help in dispersing them from our land.

What’s your sure sign of fall?

Just a glimpse

Posted on September 4, 2013 by wagfarms

After a post that I wrote two years ago went viral, I’ve had a slug of comments from people across the globe. Most are encouraging and supportive, some are people with genuine interest in learning more, and a few are down right hilarious!

But then there’s the detractors.

You know what I mean, right? They point out inadequacies and make you feel guilty for not including everything. So here goes nothing…

A few have chastised me for complaining about my farm life, and have encouraged me to spend more time outdoors, standing next to my hubby than at the keyboard, lamenting about my spot in life. To those people, I must apologize.

I didn’t mean for it to sound as if I’m ungrateful or bitter or pining away at my kitchen table, dreaming of a moment stolen with my spouse (although, that does sound a tad bit more romantic than real life). My post was merely a moments entertainment, that somehow struck a chord with a few hundred thousand people, give or take.

And my moments spent with Boss Man? Well, I don’t usually publicize them. You see, those are my special memories, that I keep close to my heart and they keep me going when our worlds seem so crazy. But just to give you proof, here’s a little glimpse:

I'm on the cutting edge of blizzard fashion, I know.

I check cows…usually at night, mostly in the winter. He must love me, when I go out looking like this, right???

My husband’s comment when I asked him to take a picture of us working? “If I take the picture of you, won’t they wonder why I’m not working too?”

Cleaned up and off the farm…hardly recognize us!

Pitching fresh hay in calf shelters. It’s more fun when you work together!

Working together…these moments mean the most.

From my front porch

Posted on August 23, 2013 by wagfarms

Well, actually, not my front porch. More like my office. But I’m hoping that one day soon it would be from my front porch. I’d go into that, but that would take a whole other post, or maybe another blog…and perhaps a marriage counseling session or two.

But I digress.

An amazing thing happened to me this week. Sometime over the weekend, someone stumbled across a post that I had wrote two years ago: “How to Spend 10 Years Married to a Farmer.” I remember writing it as if it were yesterday, but it definitely wasn’t yesterday. Boss Man and I are now closing in on 13 years of marriage, and just celebrated 15 years of being together.

This is what happened Monday:

Consider my mind blown…completely.

Yes, somehow more than 100,000 people decided that something I had wrote was worthwhile reading. Are you kidding me?

In fact, I received messages left and right from people who saw the post shared, including this one:

I love the “whatever” part!

So while it was cool to see my traffic have a crazy jump like that, it taught me one of the most valuable lessons in my life: You never know what speaks to others, but if you never speak at all, they will never hear you.

You can quote me on that.

I am not a professional writer, it’s a hobby. I don’t write about things that I don’t feel passionately about, and I speak from the heart. And I write when I should be sleeping, doing laundry, washing dishes, name it.

You don’t have to be in New York City to make a difference, you don’t have to work for a large publication, you don’t have to have years of education. You simply have to have a message and let someone hear it…well, or read it.

I live in rural North Dakota, and the world is my audience.

It can be yours, too.

If Farmville had a Farm Bill

Posted on August 22, 2013 by wagfarms

Research would tell us that most people are a few generations removed from the farm. This means that it can be more difficult for us to explain what’s happening out here, just because we’re not talking the same language.

What if that were to change?

Research would also tell us that a vast majority of our society enjoys playing online games, one of which happens to be a farming-based game called, “Farmville.” If you’re reading a blog post, or an email, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of it.

So I’m going to make an attempt to combine the two, so that I can use a little of what I know, and a little of what society can relate to, and see if we can get a basic understanding of what the Farm Bill can accomplish. (Wish me luck.)

Let’s start with the basics of how it should work…in theory (I’ll throw in some of the contingencies later):

In Farmville, you start your game and are given opportunities to earn some coins, so that you can start to play the real game, then you pay to “break ground,” and then pay some more to plant seed. The cost of the seed is in direct correlation to how much you can make, the higher the cost, the higher the return.

Then you water your crop, make sure it’s taken care of, (maybe even check on a neighbors crop), and when the time is right, you harvest, reaping the benefits of your work.

The game follows the basic principles of farming, for the most part. But the game already has a farm bill built into it.

What?

Yes, Farmville does, indeed, have a farm bill.

Look at the set up of the game. You know your costs going in, you know your benefits coming out, you still have risk (you may come to harvest too late), but the risk is minimal if you play by the rules.

Imagine the game without those safety nets? It would look more like this:

You would come back from planting, putting most of your coins into the new crop, then find out that the crop is no longer worth anything. Losing all your coins and having to start from scratch, hoping you could find a way to scrape together enough to begin again.

You may go to help a neighbor and find everything gone, in the blink of an eye…and have no recourse to recoup your losses.

Developers would factor Mother Nature into the game, randomly setting players back at the beginning, where they have a choice to start the game over, or pick a new game to play.

And imagine, just about getting the gist of what was going on, and getting to be somewhat successful in playing the game, just to find out that the rules have been changed, the game has a bug and the developers no longer want to fix it.

Does that sound like a game that would be fun to play? How many complaints would the developers get over the wildly fluctuating rules and obstacles? Would there be anyone left to play at all?

In real life, the farm bill can provide a safety net that allows farmers to keep playing the game…but in this case, the game is keeping our plates full, our backs covered and our vehicles on the road. And it shouldn’t be a game at all.

Mother Nature can wipe out a crop in the blink of an eye.

In real life, the farm bill may not guarantee that every crop is successful, but at least one crop failing wouldn’t kick you out of the game. Instead of paying 6 coins for a crop that should be worth 16 when harvested, you may be guaranteed at least 4 coins if Mother Nature got in the way. Not what you were hoping for, but better than nothing in the end.

No, the real farm bill isn’t a game. And those in Congress shouldn’t treat it as one. They have real work to do and short amount of time to get it done.

Every single one of us has a stake in getting a farm bill passed. Yes, there are places that can be cut from existing programs and ways to save money from a bulging budget…but that doesn’t change the importance of passing safeguards for the people that provide so much, for so many, yet number so few.

Using toy tractors and farming the paper isn’t the only farming I want our children to be able to enjoy. But their future is at stake as well!

They estimate that 80 million people play Farmville. Imagine if just 10 percent would contact their elected officials about the importance of the farm bill?

Perhaps we should give them extra coins for submitting an email?

Please realize that this simplified version comes nowhere near explaining the true complexity of the bill…I realize that as well. But we need to act and we need to think, and I’m not sure our elected officials are doing either of those things very efficiently right now.

The start of a new school diet…I mean year

Posted on August 21, 2013 by wagfarms

School kicked off yesterday. I couldn’t wait until I could get home and ask my children how their day went. Did they like their new teachers? Did they have any new classmates? Meet any new friends? As a typical mother, I was starved for details!

And also at the top of my mind? Were my children starved as well?

Do the these boys look like they would all eat the same amount of food?

For those new to my blog, not only am I a farm wife, a mother of four boys and a lover of all things agriculture, I’m also passionate about a few causes. One of those just so happens to be the new school lunch guidelines. Perhaps it’s because those mandates not only hit me in the pocketbook, they hit my children in the stomach…and it’s something that I cannot stand to see.

So I sat down with my two oldest children, and asked how the day went, I asked about recess, I asked about teachers, I asked about lunch. And what I heard made my heart sink.

My oldest (in sixth grade) told me a story about his lunch. He explained that he was served three chicken strips, about the size of his pinky. And they were good, but you had to pay for seconds to get three more. A friend of his also wanted seconds, but he said he didn’t have school lunch money. (Which in the sixth-grade world, I would take to mean that either he’s on the free-or-reduced-lunch program, but isn’t allowed seconds because even the free-lunch program students need to pay the full price for seconds OR his parents have requested that he not be allowed to go back for seconds.) So he asked another friend to go back for seconds and share his food, which his friend more than happily obliged.

Here are the two things you can take away from this: 1) There is an amazing group of boys in that class that watch out for each other, and 2) The new school lunch guidelines are causing an even larger hurdle for parents to overcome.

My questions that I would love to have answered:

Why are schools required to charge a minimum price for lunch?
Why are schools mandated to charge for seconds?
What is the purpose of calorie limits, unless it is to put our whole public school system on a diet?
What else will be at risk if a school were to turn away from the nutrition program?
Why are educational funding dollars connected directly to the nutrition program, for example, Title One?
Why? Why? Why?

I’ve asked these questions multiple times, including directly to the USDA during a Twitter chat regarding school lunch. All I received was the typical song and dance, no real answers and no real hope of anything being done.

But I’m not done yet.

Can I pack my children’s lunch? Certainly. In fact, I could cater them a meal to the school and not have a worry in the world about their tummy’s rumbling come the bus ride home. But that’s hardly the point.

The system is broken. The “Band-Aid” to fix it is doing little to address the problem, and creating more in its wake.

The media is touting the new guidelines, claiming that our obesity rates are dropping. But I have news for you. They were dropping prior to all of the new mandates. And they can continue to drop with education, and a large variety of offerings at our schools, not calorie limits and federally mandated diets.

No, I will not sit quietly by and listen to my son tell stories about how a couple of elementary students have found a way to beat the system. I will step in and work to change the system. It’s not the children that are broken…it’s the one-size-fits-all regulations that are in place.

I have no doubt that this will be an uphill battle, and there’s a good chance that I won’t get all of the changes that I am hoping for, but I know I’m not alone. In fact, there’s even a whole Facebook page dedicated to seeing Sensible changes. And I’m hoping that one day, before too long, children won’t have to be ashamed that they are hungry, and they won’t have to rely on close friends to smuggle them food.

Not when there is plenty in front of them.

So how do we work together for change? Contact your local school districts and state officials. We CAN make a difference! Is your school doing something different? Do you have stories of children helping each other to get a full meal? Use the contact me above to share your story, and together we’ll make a difference! (I will keep all information confidential, unless instructed otherwise.)

Animal care – it’s what we do…an update

Posted on August 20, 2013 by wagfarms

Last spring I wrote about a little calf on our farm that we found had a broken jaw. In some cases, it may have been considered a lost cause, but our vets are pretty special, and most farmers that I know would do anything to alleviate pain and suffering in an animal.

This is what “Darrel” looked like when he was in the process of being fixed (read the original story here):

The calf is still sedated, but the jaw is now aligned and secured to heal. Notice the feeding tube, so that proper nutrition can be maintained.

And I’m happy to say that this is “Darrel” now:

And this is the calf a few months later!

Even with a broken jaw, this calf was able to continue to get the nutrition it needed.

So why share such a story? Well, it seems so many times we hear the evils of farms and ranches that raise animals for food…and most of the times those stories are exaggerated, fabricated or taken out of complete context. But it doesn’t change the fact that our farm and farms just like ours do the best that we can, for each and every animal that we raise.

Including a small calf with a broken jaw.

Sometimes it doesn’t turn out like the fairytale we wish, sometimes the cause is lost before you even begin the fight, but as we weigh the benefits and the risks, the pros and the cons, we all have one thing in common: we want to eliminate needless suffering.

Sometimes that takes a round or two of antibiotics, sometimes it takes a call to the veterinarian and a surgery…and sometimes it means letting go and making sure that the animal is put to rest as quickly as possible.

But I will admit, I like the happy endings a lot better.

The power of Grandmothers

Posted on August 19, 2013 by wagfarms

An amazing woman recently passed away. She was not only a caring wife, mother, neighbor…she was, by all accounts, an exceptional grandmother. And although I know that she is now without pain, and no longer trapped by a crippled body, my heart aches for those left behind.
Her passing hit close to home for me; not only because she was a neighbor, but my own grandmother passed away Aug. 11, just a short three years ago. I still miss her so much, and I still catch myself dialing her number when something is going on and I need to talk to her.

Valerie Lynn Brandenburger and Vivian Lorraine Brandenburger – peas in a pod.

And so, today, I’m writing a list of things that only Grandmothers know how to do…at least mine, anyway.
1) Grandmas know how to make the world go away. It may take a homemade cookie, a walk in the garden or a “job” that needs to be completed. (Sweeping out gutters, anyone?) She knows that sometimes we just need a mundane task to work out our aggressions, or a simple snack to give us a second to think. Somehow she just knows.
2) Grandmas know how to keep secrets. Whether it’s a cookie too close to meal time, staying up too late, or the name of a crush that’s been on your mind…when you tell Grandma not to tell anyone, you know her lips are sealed.
3) Grandmas make special moments even more amazing. Going shopping? Take Grandma with, and it’s always good for a few amazing memories. Especially if your Grandma is anything like mine. She loved clothes. LOVED. In fact, for her 80th birthday she wanted a pair of leather pants. It was my mission to find some for her, and to this day, one of my favorite pictures of her is her standing in her yard, all decked out and ready to rock bingo. That lady had an amazing sense of fashion.
4) Grandmas know how to be brutally honest, all while having your best interest at heart and making off-handed compliments that could be taken in several ways. For example, my husband would always chuckle over stuff my Grandmother would say, that would probably land him in the doghouse for a few days. Such as, “That outfit looks much better than the one you wore yesterday,” or “Do you have a recipe for this? If not, don’t bother writing one down.”
5) There isn’t a problem in the world that doesn’t seem less daunting when you’re holding Grandma’s hand. Whether it is crossing the street for the first time, healing your first broken heart or saying good-bye…there is powerful medicine in those fingers. It’s the one thing that I miss the most.
I’ve heard many people comment that the reward for having children is getting to be a grandparent one day. I look forward to that opportunity (many, many, many years from now!), and hope in my heart that I am at least half as good at being a grandmother as mine. Although, I’m pretty sure I won’t go through a leather stage…
Or maybe I will.

The price tag of healthy eating

Posted on August 15, 2013 by wagfarms

Last night was a very busy night for me…I was trying to get caught up on all things in the home front (have I mentioned that I’m now employed as a paralegal?), getting ready for a meeting today AND trying to catch a Twitter chat on #GMODairy.

My candle was truly burning at both ends, and it kind of felt like I may have lit it in the middle as well.

I was mostly reading in on the Twitter chat, because I was trying to make supper and get a few other things done. But one statement stopped me dead in my tracks. A lady commented that, “More and more Americans are going organic because they have become savvy shoppers. Health has no price tag.”

Wait a minute…

Come again?

I beg to differ.

Health certainly DOES have a price tag. If it didn’t, why would so many people be up in arms over health insurance? Why would “Obamacare” be treated like the apocalypse? Why would premiums be skyrocketing, insurance companies folding and people going bankrupt, all because of medical bills?

Yes, health has a price tag. And the beauty of the country we live in, is that we get to decide what it is…Each. One. Of. Us.

Yes, even with “Obamacare.” You don’t want insurance? Don’t buy it. Pay the fine. A choice you may not like, but a choice all the same. (And no, this isn’t about arguing the faults/promises of that law…just a point to make.)

So here’s my problem with the #GMODairy Twitter chat. It was a session in bullying. Yes, I said bullying. Not school-yard bullying, but adult, if-you-value-your-family-you’ll-spend-the-money type of bullying.

And here’s what it boils down to: if you want to buy organic, go ahead and do it. If you want to buy conventional, go ahead and do it. If you want to buy GMO, go ahead and do it. Just don’t feel guilty about the decisions you make, and don’t make me feel guilty about the decisions I make. Those are the only “rules” I want you to follow.

My grocery budget is pretty large. I have a large family, and my four boys can put away a LOT of food in a week’s time. I grow a large garden, but I admit that it’s mostly for therapy, not just food production. I enjoy giving away the food that I raise, and we eat as much as we can. In the store, my decisions revolve around my youngest son’s diet, what’s on sale, what I feel like making and what the produce in the store looks like…and not necessarily in that order.

When I get home, I rest easily at night, knowing that I’ve done my job to the best of my ability. I know that my children are well fed and that we have gone one more day without being hungry. And I am thankful for that.

The price tag of healthy eating? It’s up to you to decide.

And that’s all that should matter.

Standing out in your field

Posted on August 14, 2013 by wagfarms

Some have asked why we would want our sweet corn to be able to be grown with our field corn, and I thought it would be easiest to just show you the answer: