Organic Beef Matters
News from Alderspring Ranch, with an occasional rant about American agriculture
Cabin fever has a way of bringing out the unique in people. They'll invent strange and sometimes vexing pastimes in those places under the brittle and icy veil covered by the darkness of a Northern winter. Take curling, for instance. Some of us will never quite understand why this ice-bound game …
Winter firmly laid hold of our high country this week. Yesterday morning, while driving my pickup through Stanley Basin up the Salmon River from us, the ice fog was impenetrable by even my off-road lights. The mercury read 24 below zero at the Stanley Mercantile. It wasn't quite daylight, and I have …
I stand in the backyard before anyone else is awake. It's just me and the big white dog, Allie. My hands find the thick ruff of her neck, and she likes it. And I have the sense that there is no atmosphere and that there is nothing that stands between the heavens and us. The rosaceous dawn …
"Put your hands where they can see them, and FREEZE!" I brusquely commanded the man who stood in the lane in front of our ranch house in the frosty morning air. His fully camouflaged person stopped midstride, and froze, just as our two Great Pyrenees stock guardian dogs descended on him, circling …
"Do you guys ever process cull dairy cows from big dairies for beef?" I waited patiently for Amber's answer. "No, we don't. We occasionally do a dairy type cow, usually like somebody's family milk cow that somebody fed out to fat for their own beef consumption, but we don't have any customers that …
The wolves are back in force. Jerry, a wildlife biologist friend of many years, cut the fresh tracks of a large pack on the snowy deck of the Hat Creek Bridge yesterday. Just hours before he arrived there, they quietly padded over the wooden structure that spanned the frothy cascade of Hat Creek in …
