EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS: FREE TRADE KILLED MY FLOCK OF LAMBIES « Culture of Life News 2
Some news stories cause me real pain. Today, the NYT wants me to feel sorry for cheap, imported labor who tend sheep in the West. Instead, I am enraged! I used to have sheep! They didn’t roam the lands, I tended them at home, they had a barn! And they had sweet grass in summer and nice hay in winter and I was driven out of business by free trade and the importation of cheap labor. I miss my sheep. I loved them. They were sweet animals, each one an individual. I could tell 1,000 sheep stories….all this is now gone. Thank you.Actually, I am crying. I miss my lambies. I trained the eldest ewes, the ones I kept to be the mistresses of the Flock, to understand various things I talked to them about. They knew to come to me when a younger ewe was giving birth, for example. They knew the dogs and knew how to work with the dogs to protect the Flock. When baby lambies were lost or trapped somewhere, the older ewes knew to come to the back door of the tent complex to summon me.
The hens learned to sit on the backs of the ewes in winter and would groom them so they were not bothered by mites, the hens and the ewes were so in tune, the chickens would ride on the backs of the ewes when they went outside, in winter. After the ewes ate their sweet mix in the evening, the hens would pick at the last grains.
The ewes trusted us so much, we could call them over and handle them. When they had trouble birthing, they would lie between my legs and I would pull out their babies. I milked the ewes, too. when they miscarried, I would nurse the babies. One of my biggest heartbreaks was when I lost Itty Bitty who died during a terrible blizzard in 1996. As I clutched this miniature lamb to my breasts, she looked at me, bleated, and then passed on to where ever Pegasus flies and lambs dance in perpetual springtimes.
All of this died due to the price of wool collapsing from 1992-2000. I had to sell my flock. It was so painful. But I couldn’t afford to keep them any longer. Anyway, here is the NYT story today:
A Lonely and Bleak Existence in the West, Tending the Flock – NYTimes.com
But like the other sheepherders, or “borregueros,” in the West, Mr. Vargas has barely any contact with his new country, where he earns $750 a month for working round the clock without a day off.
He lives alone in the crude 5-foot-by-10-foot “campito” with no running water, toilet or electricity, save for a car battery he has rigged to a small radio. A sputtering wood-burning stove is his only source of heat in winter, a collection of faded telephone cards his only connection to home.
“They never tell you exactly what it’s going to be like,” Mr. Vargas, 28, said in Spanish. “But you’ve got to stick it out here. What are you going to do?”
Sheepherding has long occupied the bottom rung of migrant labor. Most borregueros speak no English; many have only a vague idea of where they are and no knowledge of their legal rights as documented immigrants. The herders enter the country under the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, which allows companies to hire foreigners if no Americans want their jobs.
I wish I got $750 a month for watching over my flock!!! That would have been fantastic! Look at where they are herding sheep! In wastelands. I had my sheep on a mountain and they had shelter, none of these sheep have shelter, ever. My sheep lived in a tent complex with me. My son used to love feeding them their sweet mix because he could lie across all of their backs while they ate. He could roll around on them like a huge, multi-legged mattress, a centipede bed!
Once, a reporter was here. He asked us how we herded the sheep. ’Lambies, to me! To me!’ I called while waving my arms. With a bleat of happiness, the entire flock, across the mountainside, came galloping up to me and circled me, eyes on my hands, wondering why I called them. They used to come into the tent complex and would lie down under the piano or next to my bed. If the weather was bad, they loved to come inside with us.
Here is a news story from 2000:
Sales lessons from Vermont sheep | In Business | Find Articles at BNET
When sweater makers didn’t like the quality, a Vermont farmer came up with the idea to use “not-so-good” wool as mulch at construction sites to prevent erosion.
FOR the past four years, most Vermont sheep farmers haven’t been able to find buyers for their wool – that is, until Chester Parsons came up with the idea to use it for erosion control. The state’s 500 farmers raise 18,000 sheep and lambs that produce approximately 115,000 pounds of wool annually. “Most of the sheep are raised for meat, but they all have to be sheared every year,” explains Parsons, a sheep farmer who is also a livestock specialist with University of Vermont Cooperative Extension.
According to sheep farmer Laini Fondiller, shearing costs $3 to $9/animal, depending on flock size – often more than the price farmers get for the wool. Each sheep produces four to seven pounds of wool. Since a federal subsidy ended in the early 1990s, wool prices have continued to plummet from a dollar a pound to less that 25 cents. Fondiller says the quality of Vermont wool declined along with the price. “Sheep farmers started filling up their bags with wool just to get rid of it.”
I raised a rare breed of sheep. An ewe cost over $250. I sold the wool for lots of money. Suddenly, the market simply vanished in a flash. Free trade finally reached the wool markets. I groomed my ewes and protected them and watched over them so their wool would be most excellent. Suddenly, none of that mattered anymore. The skills I used were worthless, with the slash of a pen, all was shattered forever.
Sales lessons from Vermont sheep | In Business | Find Articles at BNET
Sales lessons from Vermont sheep
In the past, the Vermont Sheep Breeders Association organized a “wool pool” where producers could pool their wool for a buyer. The last wool pool was held in 1997. “Since then, we have not been able to get a wool buyer to even give us a bid,” says Parsons. In 1999, wool sales in the state totaled only $40,000. “Some of the high quality wool is used or sold for hand spinning, but most of the wool can’t find a market,” he adds. “I was asking myself what would use up large quantities of not-sogood wool. Then I imagined rolling out wool mulch on a construction site or road project.”
Sheep Producers in U.S. Feel Pinch of Global Market – Los Angeles Times
Sheep Producers in U.S. Feel Pinch of Global Market
Up before sunrise in a blowing snowstorm, John Faulkner is out in the barn repairing his truck. He’d driven home from Southern California just the night before but still must take more of his 12,000 sheep to Blythe for the winter.
It’s the grueling life of a third-generation sheepman, made all the more frustrating because he is losing money with every lamb he delivers to market.
“My incentive for getting up on mornings like this,” the 69-year-old rancher said, “is that I owe so much money.”
Throughout the West, from Texas to North Dakota to California, 66,000 sheep producers–all family-run operations–are struggling. Faulkner’s is one of the largest, so he is hurting more than most.
The chief reason: Currency exchange rates that mean lamb from overseas can be sold to American distributors at prices that sharply undercut U.S. producers. Even with the cost of shipping and a 3% tariff on imports, the exchange rate favors sheep ranchers in Australia and New Zealand–which rank first and second, respectively, in worldwide production–by about 40%.
I remember fondly our wool cooperative. We had letters and phone trees. We had parties. We went to the State Fairs and had our wool auctioned. We had it graded by professionals. My wool was always top quality: clean, healthy, long and strong. My Rambouillet and Finn wool were popular.
Finn Sheep had many babies. But you had to have shelter for them! Itty Bitty was one of four Finn Sheep babies, for example. The Rambouilette were very thick, tight-curled sheep with very dense wool that needed great care so they didn’t get burrs or dirt in their wool.
Google Image Result for http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/sheep3.gif
1994: the year I began to worry. I gave up by 1997. It was impossible. It flattened out only after 80% of the shepherds gave up. Now, according to the NYT, the remaining shepherds are hiring aliens to herd sheep across marginal lands while perfectly beautiful, rich grazing lands in the Northeast go fallow or return to forest! This is so wrong.
NASS -Charts and Maps – Sheep and Lambs
Note that not one Northeastern state is in these statistics. No winters is good for meat but terrible for wool. Wool grows best when it is stressed by winter’s cold winds. My sheep, for example, went outside in winter but when lambing season came, if it was still cold and from 1992-1996, it was very cold in spring with huge blizzards, they would go into their ‘house’ to give birth.
Call for government action as sheep prices plummet
Thu, Aug 19, 1999 By Mark Woods, PA NewsThe crisis-hit sheep farming industry has today put forward a four-point plan, including a 1.7 million advertising campaign, to try and ease the burden on the country’s lamb farmers. Don Curry, chairman of the Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC) said he would be putting pressure on the agriculture minister Nick Brown to act as prices continue to fall.Mr Curry was speaking at the first major sale of the year in the north of England at Bellingham, Northumberland. During a day’s trading prices for breeding ewes fell to almost half of last year’s mark. With the average price dropping to under 32 per head around 700 sheep were left unsold. Mr Curry, who himself farms in Northumberland, said: “The Sheep Statutory Council arm of the MLC has endorsed a four-point plan today aimed at taking pressure off the market and tackling the crisis in the industry. “
A 1.7m promotion campaign is to be launched, primarily on television but also with point of sales promotions aimed at increasing demand. “Governmental support is also to be requested for a disposal scheme for the older cull ewes that will take ewes off the depressed market and ease some of the pressure.
“It is unlikely that the government would endorse a scheme that envisages direct compensation to farmers, but as a short term measure we would urge the government to implement a proper disposal scheme. “We will also be requesting that a private storage scheme be set up for lambs with the market being so depressed at this time. “This would enable the industry to take quantities of lamb off the market and reintroduce it when conditions were more favourable.”
By 1999, I gave up. I sold the flock since I couldn’t afford to pay a shearer to come and due to my husband’s brain damage, we couldn’t do this, ourselves. I got not one penny of ‘direct compensation’ for free trade wrecking my own lucrative business. I go exactly nothing. This is probably why I have a desire to take scalps. The bankers want to be protected from their own follies. While I did not follies, I was savaged by these bankers and others who pushed stupidly for ‘free trade’. This destroyed my business and worse, ruined my happy times with a flock of 55 head of sheep, animals I loved. I can barely stand the emotional stress, to write more about this.
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“lambies to me! lambies to me” hahahahahhahahah! i don’t have one happy or good sheep story elaine and i raised them probably 5 years. “lambies to me!” hahhahaha!
personally what i think is going to happen is slowly but surely….well what thomas jefferson said. i used to wonder how it came about that roman emperers could give their soldiers free land after a campaign and in 20 years the soldiers had lost it all. or how free men going into the middle ages ended up ruled by dukes and earls. or how free romans for that matter would sell themselves into slavery for money for their families. i have no confidence at all that despite 95-100 people being pissed off and against how things are going, the banksters and the evil illumiatti and the crooked bought politicians and the fascist corporations will end up with everything worth having soon and the rest of us can suck it and do what we are told or die homeless and hounded into debter hell.
now i am all bummed out . blues i will order those seeds soon. i intend to grow me a huge garder this year for the first time. and put a manual hand pump in one of my wells. and try and figure out how to build myself a wood stove out of bricks and concrete blocks for supplemental heat. damned if i am paying $6000 for a wood stove that cost under $1000 not too long ago. oh it is going to suck to be us soon i bet!
we would have to be the most stupid weaner people in history to let the fraudsters and criminal elites lose their money, and they just charge more to themselves and we all can pay it back for them over the next 50 or 100 years. cause we are all afraid…. lambies to me….sad.
i had Rambouilette sheep at this time too elaine. what pisses me off the most is the few “important” people i know are actually horrible immoral weasel people and they really do think of others as “bottom feeders” as they happily go about their larceny and basically immoral and evil lives.
if the markets really loose it making stuff people need yourself could be practical
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-181259944046452879&q=iluminati&total=111&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4
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sheep are still in demand
Openly Hidden, you`re right. There`s nothing like standing on your own feet to teach you what freedom means, it`s continually under attack from all directions. If you have anything at all, someone will envy you and try to take it away, or at least the benefit and the use of it. And so many paid-off bumboys! Pick up the soap willya……Baah (oops).
I may be wrong, but isn`t there such a thing called a “Judas” sheep, the one that leads the other sheep to the slaughter?
US turns to China to resolve econ crisis
http://tinyurl.com/ahcdeq
Elaine:
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Dad had a few beef cattle…beautiful white face breed. After Dad died, I didn’t have the heart to sell the remaining two that remained…ended up with 2000 pound pets until they died of old age…talk about no profits, but that was my fault.
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Talk about free trade and big corporations ruining America, I will tell you our local story…just told some of it on a previous post,but I’ll repeat.
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Our area of the South is woodlands. Beautiful Red Oak, White Oak, Maple,Popular, and Yellow Pine. Hardwoods take about 50 to 100 years to grow to maturity for furniture lumber…Yellow Pine about 20 to 30 years…so you have to manage these forests very carefully for the future.
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Our local furniture industry came to the South with the carpet baggers after the Civil War…Northern carpet baggers who came to the devastated South looking for cheap resources and labor soon became part of us by marrying into our local families.
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Some were German furniture makers, and so our furniture industry was born…and grew into the finest in the world. Local trees,local factories, local labor, local owners. And through hard work and thrifty living, we all moved to living modest middle class lifestyles…(little conspicuous wealth displays even by frugal owners who worked nearly as hard as their laborers). And other services grew to serve the furniture industry. Some of the world’s finest machine tools for wood working were made in the US. Some of these are Neuman lumber Planers, Fletcher Machined Tools, and others. Frick lumber mills have been made in Pennsylvania for over 100 years since the steam era…all dependent on furniture making and wood working industries. (when you destroy an industry, you also destroy a myriad of suppliers also…that is what stupid free trade advocates do not realize when they move an entire industry to China, and all of this is the destruction of present and future American wealth.
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The bastards can print all of the money they like,but money is not wealth. Such things as I described above are real wealth.
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Now, what is left is the lumbering industry. Instead of select cutting those oaks and popular, local timber companies move in and clear cut entire tracts of land, and process the lumber with cheap Mexican labor and haul the timber past those empty factories to ports where it is loaded onto ships and sent to China.
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Then, cheaply made, poorer quality furniture is shipped back here to be sold under the same brand names as before, but the banks, that own most of the brand names, are making the profits and are running these brand names through hired managers…so these former great American producer companies are simply subsidiary marketing companies owned by greedy banks that make most of the profits from this scheme.
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Many of the furniture industry suppliers of hinges and fixtures, machinery, repair services, bearing retailers, varnish makers and other services such as marketing companies, health care facilities, and other things are located in Greensboro NC. Once one of the fastest growing cities in America, I just read on Yahoo News that Greensboro is one of the American cities that is in the most decline…so you can easily see what happened…and these industries and businesses are not coming back after this recession-depression ends if it ever will.
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God….! Just writing about this destruction of great wealth and lost human skills and potential astounds me…
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Free Trade is the most destructive thing that America has experienced since its founding. Why do these insane leaders hate the country of their birth? Are these leaders completely BLIND?
‘They don’t care! They don’t care….whatever they want they will do to you…’
These are some lyrics slightly changed, from ‘I don’t care’ which was a pre-WWI song that was briefly popular in Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency.
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Yes, whole industries vanish. We shipped out our computer making and now, our computer programming and soon we will be utterly helpless there, too. Absolutely everything is being shipped out and we are told, our commodity exports and Boeing jets are going to balance trade but it never, never does. Now, even Hollywood is being outsourced to China, look at the names of the directors and a number of actors. Isn’t that hilarious?
yes i have seen the auction barns using what they call a judas goats i think to lead into the sale ring. now i remember what i hated about raising sheep the most is their helplessness! where i live, the previous owner cut off a corner of my farm generations ago and three houses were built there and i have a couple of neighboring farms around me and all owned DOGS! and it turns out that to a dog, chasing sheep around is just about the most fun thing a dog can do. a sheep to a dog is just about as much fun as free range chickens! and it really, really got bad i had to shoot a couple of neighbors dogs and one of my own dogs, which to this day scum-bags from the neighboring town will drop abandon their dogs down my road knowing my wife or my kids will adapt them or try and find them a home and i hate these people for giving me these moral problems too…. anyway, shooting dogs for killing sheep was a really bad thing for me to do so i got rid of the sheep finally when i saw the young neighbor lady literally run away from me clutching her infant when she saw me “patroling” nearby our mutual property line. coyotes are really thick around here but i have never had a problem with coyotes. and foxes made their den beneath the sheep barn for two winters with their young cubs until i think coyotes ran the foxes off. and i had lambs and fox cubs sunning themselves in the same lot one day together. i keep the god of the coyotes well fed and placated and they leave me and my animals alone. and about helpless lambs….crap thats what jesus meant! i hope our helplessness as the wolves among us devour us at their leisure is not what jesus was always referring to. and in the wet ass hour, i would fear free-lance gangs of predators feeding on the helpless patriotic and religious and law abiding and formerly employeed middle classes wondering where the hell the law is more than armies coming in to shoot us.
Meanwhile, I have had absolutely no luck whatsoever trying to find a sturdy, made-in-USA wool shetland crewneck sweater. I wear these constantly from fall until spring each year, so they wear out pretty fast. I can still get good sweaters from LL Bean, but now they are made in China. I would rather not have to take up knitting, but it may come to that.
Lamb meat is doing pretty well here in the mountains of NC, though. As you know, Elaine, mountains and sheep are a good fit, so lots of people have flocks around here. It is pretty easy to find local lamb meat here. I eat lamb at least once per week. Because the lamb is grass fed and free range, I don’t have to worry about antibiotics, BSE, etc. It is a shame about the wool market. We do have quite a few craft weavers around here, I hope at least a few of them are obtaining wool directly from the people keeping sheep.
Grrrrrr….is all I can say.
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http://www.afn.org/~govern/foreclosed.html
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Here`s an article which is relevant to this discussion. They want to finance their profligacy by confiscating land…how typical!
I don`t believe that this is “tinfoil hat” stuff. It explains events and changes which have occurred over the last forty years.
david my wife and i listened to a free concert this weekend. the boys were from sumpter south carolina and good. the guy sang “upper-middle class white trash”. anyway, my boy is in with me in a legal business partnership now and i have to start using better management skills for sure. the last 6 old cows i had i took care of them and let them die a natural death instead of culling them out and selling them. no more can i do this. and i expect when budgets go david, taking care of old hippies from the 1960′s is not going to be in anybodys list of things to do if the governments are broke. no dignified golden senior citizen years for us i bet. and even the local CPA i went to last wednesday could not get it in her head that my “capital” that i provided was pretty insignificant compared to the youth and the mechanical skills and the enthusiasm and outside mechanics job my boy brings to the partnership. i could tell the idiot money woman actually thought the only important thing in a business was the “capital” provided by the owner. actually being able to physically do things and grow things and fix things and make things go and actually having a future instead of being too old to do a lot of things physically means nothing much important to her the way her mind works. it was the money that was important to her. she is married to a banker and her company lost a lot of money for their customers and i made a joke about asking her if the peasants were running around her windows outside with their pitchforks at night and SHE WAS VERY SERIOUS about this. she told me they WARNED their clients there was risk involved in giving them their money to send off to financial capitalists to invest for them and she could not imagine that americans WOULD ACTUALY STOP SHOPPING and thereby ruin her world. she mentioned this two times. i told her maybe the unimaginable might happen.
To keep coyotes, bears and dogs at bay, we had our little war horse, Sparky. He was an Austrian Haflinger and if a dog came snooping around, he and my dogs would go nuts and chase the intruders away. This is how we protected the sheep, the beehives, etc.
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And hive collapse! That gets me totally steamed. Lost all my hives.
bee hive collapsing too! i read about this. maybe this is the end. and now my last word on sheep is this: never, ever get into a fight with someone that shears sheep for a living as they are always amazingly tough for their size and apparently can take a lot of pain!
People who wrestle roosters are dangerous, too.
Elaine and OH:
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I have a new housing development (without houses) bordering my property…I’ve thought of keeping bees along that property line to discourage people wandering onto my land…The economy, however, has taken care of this for me…the development only has two houses in it.
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I am thinking about keeping some chickens…Cows are too expensive to feed and I don’t eat much beef anyway. Deer are plentiful here too if I need meat.
Elaine: Don’t give up on beekeeping, try again! Be sure to get your equipment fumigated, then start building up again with Nucs from local beekeepers. The thinking now is that we are going through a “survival of the fittest” moment, that the colonies that survive will end up being resistant to the mites and pathogens. We are gradually going to be getting more resistant bees, it is just a matter of keeping at it.
Are you close to any big ag operations that do lots of spraying? That is one thing that could have done your hives in. You may be organic, but if your bees fly to things being sprayed, they bring it back to the hive. This weakens the whole hive and leaves it vulnerable. That, in any case, is the current theory on CCD.
We need lots of small-scale backyard beekeepers. The big migratory operators servicing the big industrial ag orchards is an unsustainable model, and mainly serves as the perfect vector for the rapid transmission of pathogens and parasites.
Oh boy, sheep. Of all the farm animals I most detest, it is the sheep. Maybe we just had exceedingly stupid specimens, but I tell you, biddies have better brains!
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David, if you have a pond or some other wetland nearby, try geese for keeping people off your property. They are big, territorial, and vicious. Anybody who comes walking onto their territory is going to get ‘goosed’ bigtime. Very painful.
I had mountain sheep. Finn sheep in particular, are quite intelligent. Also, the more you interact with animals, the ‘smarter’ they become. The sheep lived with us INSIDE the tent complex! We talked to them and taught them many things we wanted them to do. They were quick learners.
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This is why people think cows are dumb, too. Our ox team certainly were slow, making up their minds but once they did, they were unstoppable. And unlike even the clever horse, all the work we did with them involved only verbal commands to whoa, gee and haw as well as the hearty, ‘Come on up, boys, lets’ go!’ command.
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They ‘talked’ to me with their horns, their eyes and other body language. Most people think animals are just moving around, randomly. They are not. We know dogs communicate with their tails and fur levels, etc. But so do cows! And sheep.
“I sold the wool for lots of money.”
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And now we know… why prices for Pendleton were just insane.
Cows are certainly not dumb! I saw a film of a herd of cows walking along a narrow road towards a snail which was crossing the road. After the ca. fifty cows had passed, the snail was still there, untouched.
rowan: thank you. i have ofter wondered how my cows can run and skip and jump while going full speed down a ditch or up a hill around trees without breaking their legs. they must average 1500 pounds each for the cows. and your post tells me cows must be very, very good at being aware of what and where they are stepping. thank you. and david. good post but as far as i am concerned, you and confucius give people entirely too much credit. as far as i am concerned, most people are nothing more than beast-pigs in human form as they root around this world seeking their pleasures and satisfactions and feeding themselves without limit (masturbating their minds) if they can….
You know Openly Hidden, I have the greatest respect for farmers. My wife is a Mountain farmer`s daughter from the Engadin valley in Switzerland, where we live. If you know the story “Heidi” well she is a Heidi from the same mileu as in the story. The last cow left the farm when the uncle broke his leg at the age of 65 and the father was 69 years old and they had to let them go. They were heartbroken. Up here at 1800 meters (valley floor) the cows lived in the stall in winter from hay gathered in the summer (one crop only). My wife tells me that these cows were really “spoiled”! In the summer the cows and sheep and goats were taken up to the alps and everyone lived in weilers (summer houses) making cheeses…the swiss have a lot of experience making cheeses! Every alp tastes different.
The father and the uncle were farmers in their hearts and souls…they never took subsidies, ever, preferring to do it their way. They were absolutely people to respect. The other old farmers I know are just the same, it really gets them in…they have get-togethers from the whole Canton every couple of years, thousands come…they are real animal lovers, also the younger ones. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to become a little part of this world. It`s really a very old peasant farmer`s world that got going about 400 years ago when these mountains were settled by people from Italy and the Tyrol.
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There is of course an old Roman road through here (or bits of it, anyway), one mountain pass is the Julier Pass (Ceasar), about 5 K`s from where we live, and the Septimer Pass, also nearby.
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The tourist world here (it`s very big, St Moritz. etc) has little idea that this world exists. They see only a chocolate-box landscape, which they exploit, but the people they don`t see.
Oh yes, that is the mountain farming cycle! When I lived in Europe, I climbed all over the Alpen Bergen and did some haying in summer where you walk along the steep mountainside and swing the scythe holding it at your waist then rake it downhill after it dries in the sun using really long handled rakes! I use a tractor here and the tilt is so great, I feel like I am sideways!
“it is illegal to issue shares in a nationalised company”…
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http://tinyurl.com/d5p5by