Snow lightly blankets the ranch now, typical of this early part of November. We’ve seen a lovely October, and now winter steals upon us, venturing forward quietly, as dusk settles over the valley. The grass bends under the weight of the white while still very green underneath. The beeves don’t seem to mind the change. I can hear the animals taking footsteps a half a mile away in the black night as the air thickens with the humidity of wet snow.
We’ve watched the snowline drop over the past few days. First, it dusted the treeless tops of the highest peaks—over 10,000 feet, all was white. The next day, much of the high elevation timber got blanketed. Over the next few days, the horizontal contrast line worked its way through all of the low elevation forests down into the sagebrush. Now, it has finally reached us.
The wild animals also respond to the change. The rabbits start to change color, becoming lighter for better camouflage. Deer become more abundant and noticeable along lower elevation streams. Two mornings ago, right after sunrise, about 400 head of elk came trotting down the paved road along our ranch, as if the county built it for their exclusive use. They stretched out over nearly half a mile; I nearly expected a sheriff escort.
Pickups pulled over in surprise. The cowboys and I were sitting in the bunkhouse when they came by—just a few hundred feet away. We came over and stood by the tall windowpanes, a little dumbfounded. It was like a herd of caribou on the barren ground of the North”¦or bison on the prairie.
Just the night before, I ran into a good-sized mountain lion along the river on the way home in the Salmon River canyon. I was rounding a 15 mile-an-hour hairpin, and there he was, just trotting alongside my pickup about 10 feet from my window. He was athletic looking, but very well fed, and his deep painter belly nearly brushed the pavement. I tried to get Mindy the Kelpie dog to notice as she stood alert on the passenger seat next to me, but she was looking for deer. The cougar’s body length tail, an obvious object of pride, waved in a half curl as he floated forward alongside me. The hot-blooded Australian bush hound just kept her eyes fixed forward. Dumb dog. I just wanted someone to share this moment with me; a witness. Before she laid her eyes on him, he dove for thick cover in the willows along the river, bounding into the blackness like an apparition enveloped by night.
It was one of those times where reality was a dreamlike sequence, remembered by me in slow motion, an encounter with what you know was real but you rarely, if ever witness. I checked it mentally on my bucket list.It’s a continually intriguing time of year. The changes are always fascinating, and make their indelible mark on memory as if I’ve never experienced autumn in the Rockies before. It’s the same with the beef business. We think we can forecast what is going to happen, but people’s buying (and eating?) habits change pretty unpredictably. Sometimes we see something happening in a NY Times or an Atlantic piece that changes people’s buying habits, and it actually affects us over the next several weeks. Then, things stabilize, and we are back to what looks like the status quo.
That’s why I was a little freaked out about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) red meat findings report released a couple of weeks ago. Because there is nothing else of interest going on in God’s green earth, the media got a hold of it and trumpeted it as yet another reason why we should all become vegans and prevent further tyranny of animal species.
Red meat was said to have the same carcinogenic effect as cigarette smoke and diesel fuel smoke. What the media did not quickly yield is that the rating they assigned was only applied to processed meats like bacon and summer sausage. In other words, it was the additives placed in the curing practices that were warranting the carcinogenic label. Nitrates, nitrites, erythrobates”¦we’ve been hearing about these things for a long time. We knew they were bad. Duh.
They were much more vague on the specific health warnings associated with uncured red meat. We’ve been hearing about those for years as well”¦colon cancer and heart disease. Indeed, they may be true, as I believe red meat raised in feedlots is not food at all, and probably more akin to cured and chemicalized hot dogs than beef raised on wild greens like our very own Alderspring.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had last week with Allen Voortman. He is a certified organic raw milk producer in Washington State. We shared speaking panel seats at the Idaho Sustainable Agriculture Conference, and during the mixer following he and I realized that we were like minded souls in that when we traveled, we never ate of the dairy (for him) or beef (for me) fruits of the land when we traveled
The problem was that we knew too much. We had realized the grim truth about practices in both of our respective disciplines, and would not subject ourselves or our family’s wellness to the risk of poorly practiced beef or dairy.
Allen actually pulls a trailer with a fridge in it, sharing his goodness of raw wherever he stops. We always pack a cooler”¦full of our webstore products: beef, cheese, butter, salmon, and lamb. Who wants to get sick on a trip”¦or worse, on one of our rare family vacations?
I almost forgot: back to WHO. The week the WHO released the findings of their International Agency for Research on Cancer, we sold more Alderspring ground beef than we had in any week previous for 6 months.
Apparently, those members of the Alderspring tribe had already determined that the media interpretation of WHO’s findings should be destined for the manure pile. Mouse click delete.
It’s pretty cool to have educated customers who don’t need a thesis presented by us to counter the media’s interpretation of data. You already have created your own.
Thank you.
Leave a Reply