Our two female Great Pyrenees guard dogs (and family friends) recently had a total of 21 puppies!  These purebred Pyrenees are wonderful dogs, serving well as guardians of both young animals and young children.  We will be selling these puppies through a new website our oldest daughter put together: IdahoPyrenees.com

Sophie protecting a newborn calf.

They are pretty cute tho.

Glenn, a kid, and Amos prepare to feed cattle with “Red” and “Snap”. 

Hope you all had a wonderful Holiday season, however you celebrate it. We celebrate a pretty traditional Christmas here on Alderspring.

It starts with the tree, about a week before Christmas Day. We get ours high up in the mountain forests that surround our remote valley. We just drive up one of the canyons that enter the flats of the Pahsimeroi from the quiet and wild peaks. Only the valleys in our country have homes and ranches in them—pretty much all of the mountain country is uninhabited, and public land.

Usually, there is pretty deep snow that forces us to walk up into the timber. In your mind’s eye, you could probably imagine us, walking single file in the powdery snow into the fir trees, with me (Glenn), breaking trail up front, packing the bow saw, and 7 girls trailing behind. Caryl usually brings up the rear, helping the little girls over the now well broken trail. At least one dog runs back and forth over the trail, sniffing fresh tracks of the elk, deer, mountain sheep, and wolves who live there.

Glenn and kids selecting the perfect tree.

This year, we picked a canyon a little too steep for the wee ones. We proved that early when Binner crashed on the frozen creek and landed hard on her rear. Ow. But Mel, the oldest, roared ahead of us in search of that perfect fir tree. Last year it was a spruce; this year, the kids unanimously decided on a fragrant fir. And not prickly, either, as they had many of their own collected ornaments to hang on it.

Sledding on the way to get a tree.

After what seemed nearly a mile up a steep timbered draw (pretty nice view, too of the surrounding peaks) Mel found a really nice fir in a cluster of other young trees. I always keep the kids from picking a lone tree (though perfect it may be) as there would be no others to regenerate that spot of forest.

We found it!

I pulled out the saw, and captured our prize, and eagerly carried it down the draw to waiting Caryl and the tikes. They were all grins: they would be decorating it tonight!

Then the Caroling, the night before Christmas Eve. Folks in our valley are pretty spread out, with most ranches at least a mile apart. So we loaded up in our beef hauling van and headed out. With us were some friends and most of the hired help we had this summer. We caroled old Christmas songs in the the single-digit air to half a dozen mostly older friends and neighbors down the valley. Some clapped (we aren’t real good, so that surprised us), one nearly cried (she had been lonely), another couple insisted on taking our picture, and another begged us to come in (there was a lot of us) for cookies and hot chocolate. I’m not sure who enjoyed it more—them or us…

Frost and snow on Alderspring Ranch.

On Christmas Eve, we usually head into town to our little church. This year, we did the same. Usually about 50 of us show up that night, and the service is just made up of some readings by congregants, and some real eclectic music (a traditional trumpet solo by Arlene, the little Anderson kids sung ‘Silent Night’ and the Tuck Family Band performed a rockabilly version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’—all quite good), and a short but sweet meditation.

And on that moonlit night, we headed off up the Lemhi Valley to some older friends, Gordon and Auntie Em, for some Christmas treats, and unbeknownst to the kids to a remote, lamplit log cabin they had up in the shadowy timber for us. No power or water, but a nice woodfire and oil lamps. Flickering palm oil candles beckoned us along on the trail through the trees. As we led the kids down the trail, the little ones wondered who was staying there on that cold moonlit night in this faraway place (the older ones figured it out!).

When they found it was us, they quickly warmed to the idea of a quiet Christmas Eve snugged in newfound bedding in that quiet cabin in the woods.

We had fed the stock extra the day before, so we would enjoy Christmas dinner with Gord and Em. I’ll tell you what we had for that wonderful meal on our next blog…

What about presents? Well, they do feature in. And there are many. But we also celebrate Christmas with those gifts for the 12 days, and those 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas, so all the way into January we open and share gifts to extend the best of holidays as long as possible.

The Christmas tree in all its splendor.

Caryl says it just gives me an excuse to keep playing Christmas music (I do really love it).

I say it gives the kids an excuse to leave that tree up much longer (they put so much into decorating it).

It really is the best time of year. There is a magic, a spirit in the air that we perceive every year as the Day draws near. A hope for peace on earth. And good will to all men.

The Western Farmer Stockman magazine ran a story in its July issue about RR sugarbeets (bet you can’t wait), and a farmer with a RR alfalfa field. The alfalfa grower now applies Roundup annually to this field, and it is quite productive. What I found interesting, however, was that the article said:

His enthusiasm for the technology is tempered with concerns. Unlike corn and other annuals, alfalfa plantings last several seasons with numerous opportunities for flowering and seed production by plants missed in harvest. Bees and other pollinators can carry the RR alfalfa pollen to other alfalfas. The escaped RR pollen can transfer glyphosate tolerance to seed produced by alfalfa plants, often miles from the source…..
In Idaho, conventional seed growers aren’t convinced the buffer the state’s ag department mandates between varieties of alfalfa is enough (900 feet).

As organic producers, RR alfalfa is a big concern. Our commitment to you is GMO free food. If a neighbor plants RR alfalfa next to us, how will we protect our fields, and maintain our commitment? I get so frustrated with agriculture as an industry. More and more people want GMO free food, why is American agriculture continuing headlong down this path of genetic modification, especially when it is so difficult to contain (avoid contamination on a broad scale as has happened with corn)?

It seems that American Agriculture, as an industry, has forgotten who the actual consumer is. We farmers produce food for people. We feel that very acutely here at Alderspring. American agriculture should produce the food people want. Instead, the industry tries to convince people its OK to eat GM food, or irradiated food, or cloned meat, or any of the other things that agriculture, in its drive for efficiency, has come up with. Why do other countries refuse American beef? They don’t want hormones! Let’s grow what they want–beef without hormones–instead of trying to convince people that beef grown with hormones is perfectly safe (I know I’m not convinced!).

I’m thankful every day that we can grow our own food, but I’m frustrated for so many of our customers who cannot find the food they want because American agriculture refuses to produce it for them.

As producers of organic alfalfa pasture for our organic grass fed beef, we are relieved here at Alderspring Ranch.

This alfalfa, genetically modified to resist glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, has potential to contaminate our organic alfalfa, and jeopardize our organic certification.  In fact, Monsanto has. in an Orwellian twist of legal logic, successfully sued producers whose crops were contaminated with Monsanto’s patented plant genes for patent infringement.  (See keepmainefree.org/suesuesue)

The Center for Food Safety, the Western Organization of Resource Councils, the National Family Farm Coalition, The Sierra Club, Beyond Pesticides, Cornucopia Institute, The Dakota Resource Council, Trask Family Seeds, and Geertson Seed Farms initiated the legal action against the USDA in February 2006.  The lawsuit argued that the USDA’s approval of deregulating of "Roundup Ready Alfalfa" was illegal because a thorough environmental impact study wasn’t completed.  They successfully convinced Judge Breyer that the USDA had failed to completely assess the potential that GM alfalfa could harm the environment and contaminate organic and non-GMO alfalfa crops.

Anyone interested in pure food should be concerned about genetically modified crops.

Learn more:

NewScientist.com instant expert on Genetically Modified Organisms
Network of Concerned Farmers (in Australia) list of 10 reasons for concern about GMO crops.
U.S. Center for Food Safety’s 2005 report Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers.  Some highlights:

• "To date, Monsanto has filed 90 lawsuits against American farmers. The lawsuits involve 147 farmers and 39 small businesses or farm companies, and have been directed at farmers residing in half of the states in the U.S.
• The odds are clearly stacked against the farmer: Monsanto has an annual budget of $10 million dollars and a staff of 75 devoted solely to investigating and prosecuting farmers."
• Farmers have paid a mean of $412,259.54 for cases with recorded judgments.
• Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineered crop; when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crop has sprouted, or “volunteered,” in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year…"

It is of interest to American agribusiness because of the current effort to remove the existing restrictions on movement of Canadian cattle and beef into the United States.  All Canadian beef was restricted in 2003 after the discovery of a BSE infected cow in Canada.  In 2005, that ban was partially lifted, and last year, the USDA proposed a rule that would allow importation into the U.S. of any Canadian cattle born after Canada’s 1999 ban of using rendered cattle and high risk material in cattle feed.  Comments for that rule closed in March.  The animal in the current case would have been allowed into the U.S. system under that proposed rule.

Currently, any live cattle imported from Canada must be under 30 months of age and must be going directly to a feedlot or processing facility.

Of course, beef that are 100% grass fed have never eaten any "feed," just grass and hay.  Although no one else seems to care, I’m glad we eat our own beef.