Hasselstrom: Keep Public Land Available for Healthy Grazing

My friend Larry Kurtz says some wild things on his blog Interested Party and in various comment sections around the South Dakota blogosphere. But he also directs us toward a lot of good reading, like this essay on the importance of protecting public grasslands for grazing. Among other points, South Dakota author and rancher Linda Hasselstrom notes the superiority of grass-fed beef to factory-feedlot beef:

E. coli contamination thrives in feedlots, but grass-fed livestock, including beef, pork, chicken, sheep, elk, deer, antelope and other wild meat animals, is free of this dangerous pathogen. Range cattle roam freely, rarely spending more than a day in one spot. They must be branded to prevent theft and vaccinated against disease, but they are herded only briefly into corrals. Since cows live outside in all weather, their wastes are scattered and broken down by elements and insects. Pastured cattle never stand knee-deep in manure, because cows don't like to eat near feces. That's why, in winter, ranchers scatter supplementary feed onto clean grass. Buyers who cram cattle into feedlots for fattening waste resources and in the process make the animals—and those who dine on them—less healthy [Linda Hasselstrom, "Private Stash," Missoula Independent, 2010.11.25].

Mr. Kurtz also directed my attention, via the Goat Blog, to this really cool interactive map that helps you find which states are producing the most unhealthy feedlot beef, dairy, and pork. In 2007, South Dakota ranked 16th nationwide for feedlot livestock units: 8th in cattle, 20th in dairy, 11th in hogs.

Make a Stand for Free Market Ranching: Support Tony Dean Grassland!

Mr. Kurtz brings to my attention commentary on another good bill Thune and the Republicans are holding hostage for the sake of more tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%. Well-traveled George Wuerthner at New West observes that S. 3310, the Tony Dean Cheyenne River Valley Conservation Act, would preserve our swiftly dwindling native prairie. Wuerthner also finds it ironic that a bill bearing Tony Dean's name would (contrary to Kristi Noem's willfull ignorance) protect existing grazing rights:

America has very little of its native prairie in any protected status. Most of the plains have been carved up by till farming, and the rest is grazed by livestock. Tony Dean Cheyenne River Valley Conservation Act would correct this by designating 48,000 acres as wilderness in the Indian Creek, Red Shirt and Chalk Hills areas of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland on the borders of Badlands NP. Walking these vast open breathing spaces reminds me of being on the vastness of tundra in Alaska. It’s a sense of freedom that is more difficult to experience in more forested terrain. As with any designated wilderness, livestock grazing will continue. This is particularly ironic since Tony Dean, who was an outdoor writer in South Dakota, railed against welfare ranchers and their impact on the state for decades. However language could be inserted into the legislation to permit buyouts of grazing privileges so that eventually bison, not cattle, will be grazing these lands [George Wuerthner, "Omnibus Wilderness Bill Likely," New West, 2010.11.29].

Welfare ranchers? Did Tony Dean say that?

Well, he let Sam Hurst say it on his website, and in reference to this very land:

Welfare Ranchers on Public Lands," Tony Dean Outdoors, 2006]

Dean himself called the no-bid grazing leases on public lands "welfare ranching" in this article. Neither Hurst nor Dean was advocating eco-socialism. They argue for ending subsidies and letting the free market rule.

The Tony Dean Cheyenne River Valley Conservation Act would create a unique national grasslands wilderness. It's a good idea. So is ending the market-skewing, deficit-widening subsidy to a handful of ranchers who plea for socialism. Why don't John Thune and Kristi Noem get that?

AgStar Wins Veblen West Dairy at Bankruptcy Auction

After extensive legal machinations, Richard Millner appears to be losing his battle to hang onto his dairy fiefdom. Yesterday U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Charles Nail granted Trustee Forrest C. Allred's motion to sell the Veblen West Dairy in northeast South Dakota. According to court documents, Financier AgStar, which took the dairy into receivership in March, bought the giant confined animal feeding operation for $8.7 million. AgStar also bought the CAFO's cattle, numbered in the trustee's motion to sell at around 3700, for $2.96 million, $800 a head.

Millner and his business partners had successfully delayed the bankruptcy sale for a couple weeks with a transparently bogus lease plan. In a filed objection, AgStar lambasted the debtors' proposed reorganization plan, saying the document "miserably fails to provide adequate information," "ignored... reality," and falsely claimed compliance with DENR orders after "serial violations by the Debtor of its environmental obligations." Trustee Allred also submitted responses saying the Veblen West owners had been unable to meet a whole slew of payments over the past months and would not be able to carry out their plan. After feebly claiming they would amend their disclosure statement to address these objections, the equity owners yesterday withdrew their plan and watched Veblen West slip from their hands.

Making a bad month for Millner worse, he stands to lose another 4476 heifers in Montana. The following public notice appears in the Sidney (MT) Herald:

NOTICE
SHERIFF’S NOTICE TO OWNER OF SALE OF OWNER’S PROPERTY AT
PUBLIC AUCTION

To: Vantage Cattle Company LLP, 104 S. Greenman Street, Veblen, SD 57270
YOU ARE HEREBY GIVEN NOTICE IN ACCORDANCE WITH 71-3-1203 (4) THAT:

1. On Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 10:00 AM, or as soon thereafter as the cattle are assembled, sorted and prepared for sale, at the Yellowstone Livestock Sale Barn located in Sidney, Montana, replacement dairy heifers owned by Vantage Cattle Company LLP will be sold at public auction to enforce an Agisters Lien held by Steven Lunderby and Shanna Lunderby d/b/a Lunderby Livestock.
2. The amount of the claim against the livestock to be sold at the public auction is Five Hundred Ninety Five Thousand Eight Hundred Seventy Five and 31/100 Dollars ($595,875.31).
3. The property to be sold is approximately 4,476 dairy replacement heifers, or so many thereof as will satisfy said lien.
4. The name of the owner, and who contracted for the services to be performed, is Vantage Cattle Company LLP.
5. The name of the lien claimant is Steven Lunderby and Shanna Lunderby individually and d/b/a Lunderby Livestock.
   

DATED this 10th day of November, 2010.
Brad Baisch
Richland County Sheriff

Vantage Cattle Company: Notice that Veblen, SD address? Vantage is another of Millner's shell companies. According to documents from the South Dakota Secretary of State's office, Millner is the official agent of the company. The partners listed in 2009 were Aaron Anderson, Duayne Baldwin, Jay Hill, Jorden Hill, Dennis Pherson, Lenny Pherson*, Wayne Viessman, and Michael Wyum... mostly the same guys who make up the (former!) Veblen West Dairy major equity holders and the Vista Family Dairy company Millner formed to try leasing Veblen West back to himself.

Distantly related: Sidney stockyard owner Steve Sunderby was also tangled up in a $7.8 million cattle fraud scheme that sent Todd Kenneth Horob to prison for eleven years.

Now I don't know much about cattle, but I have to wonder why Millner and his pals were trucking cattle all the way out to Sidney, on the Montana–North Dakota border. Veblen to Sidney is an eight-hour drive, says Google Maps. It would seem that even if I was getting a really good deal on feedlot or pasture rent, I'd still save money and stress by keeping my heifers a little closer to my main operations. But I welcome the comments and corrections of my cattleman-readers on that point.

So Millner is out one big dairy and about 8000 cattle. He still faces $453,000 in liens for back taxes owed to us South Dakota taxpayers, as well as DENR's apparent willingness to deny Millner an environmental permit to run any South Dakota feedlot. 2010 is not ending well for Richard Millner.
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*Update 09:51 CST: Lenny Pherson died last summer at his home in Rutland, ND. He was still listed as a partner in Vantage on the last annual report filed March, 2010.

Hospitals Resist Industrial Livestock Antibiotics

Pro-industry blogger Troy Hadrick asserts that the livestock industry never misuses antibiotics. Everyone else—over-prescribing doctors, dopey patients—is to blame for any problems with antibiotic resistance, not the members of his industry.

I thought Hadrick was a cattle rancher, not a fish farmer. But his mastery of the red herring says otherwise. Medical professionals, the people who study and deal with the consequences of heavy antibiotic use in our agricultural system, will tell you the problem is not a handful of ranchers misusing antibiotics. The problem is an entire system of meat production that relies too heavily on antibiotics.

This Chicago Tribune article notes that 300 hospitals across the nation are working to improve the health and sustainability of the food they serve. For many of these hospitals, that includes serving only antibiotic-free meat:

Administrators say they hope increased demand for those products will reduce the use of antibiotics to treat cattle and other animals, which scientists believe helps pathogens become more resistant to drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections kill 60,000 Americans a year.

Although the U.S. doesn't keep national records on antibiotic use in animals, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that up to 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are administered to healthy animals to speed growth and compensate for crowded living conditions. Some of these drugs, such as penicillin and tetracycline, are also used to treat sick people [Monica Eng, "Meat with Antibiotics off the Menu at Some Hospitals," Chicago Tribune, 2010.07.20].

Antibiotics essential to agriculture? Only if you insist on pushing unnatural growth rates and crowding thousands of animals into feedlots that don't have enough space for their own filth.

But oh, that fancy-pants grass-fed beef costs a lot more, doesn't it?

Diane Imrie, director of nutrition services at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Vermont, also started serving antibiotic-free beef at the hospital in recent years as part of her plan to switch to local, seasonal, sustainable food.

"When we started a sustainability council at the hospital a few years ago, antibiotic reduction was one of the first things on my list," she said. "I think it has the most impact on farming, the environment and public health."

Imrie estimated that her food costs rose about $67,000 last year when she switched to antibiotic-free chicken from conventional. "But that's also about the same cost as treating a single MRSA infection," she said, referring to drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria [Eng, 2010].

So let me see if I have this right: ranchers could spend a little more to raise beef without antibiotics, charge a little more in the market, still come out even... and we could reduce the cost and death of antibiotic-resistant infections? Sounds like the only people who could be against that are the mouthpieces of an ag-industrial complex that relies too much on antibiotics and disregards any consequences beyond the speed and profit of their own business model.

South Dakota Farm Numbers Increase 0.6% in 2009

The number of farms in South Dakota increased last year. We added 200 farms, for a total of 31,500. The number increased 100 in 2008. These are the first increases in farm numbers since 1931, when South Dakota had 84,300 farms.

Two years of less than 1% increase don't exactly reverse the historical consolidation of farms. They could just be a statistical glitch caused by better counting methods, like the methodology refinement that increased the count of farms nationwide by 5.6% in the 2007 ag census. But Thomas Jefferson would agree that more people farming is good for the Republic. (Now if those new farmers just didn't have to buy all their seed from the Big Ag monopoly.)

The full USDA report breaks the farm numbers down by sales class:

sales class	2009 total	change from 2008
$1000-$9999	9200	-200
$10,000-$99,999	9800	200
$100,000-$249,999	5000	-200
$250,000-$499,999	4200	300
$500,000 and up	3300	100
total	31500	200

The amount of land in farms remained the same, 43.7 million acres, or 90.0 percent of our land area.

Nationwide, the number of farms remained unchanged at just over 2.2 million. Eight states gained farms, but fifteen states lost farms. In our neighborhood, Montana gained 1% more farms; Nebraska lost 0.4% of its farms. Farm numbers everywhere else bordering South Dakota held steady.

I am pleased to note that nationally, small operations are still a big part of livestock production. Over two-thirds of our cattle and calves come from operations with fewer than 1000 head. Dairies with fewer than 1000 head still produce a majority of our milk. Small producers also account for a majority of the sheep inventory.

On the downside, 93.5% of hogs and pigs are on feedlots with a thousand head or more; 62% are in facilities with over 5000. That's 62% of production coming from just 2% of the hog operations.

South Dakota Dairy Historical Trend: Get Big, or Get Out

Earl Butz lives, family farms die...

While reading up on cow poop over breakfast (and how's your morning so far?), I learned that South Dakota was first in the nation during Q3 2009 in percentage increase in number of cows and milk production. Last quarter we had 95,000 milk cows, which gets us back up to where we were in 2000, up from a low of 79,000 in 2004. We're still 19th nationally in volume of milk production and 13th in per-cow production.

Too bad more South Dakota dairies aren't able to share in this rebound. According to the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, South Dakota had 20,500 dairy operations in 1965. That's over 300 per county. One family running each operation—that's easily double the current population of Brookings, able to make some portion of their living milking cows.

Since then, the number of dairy operations has decreased at an annual rate of about 8%. In 2007, the number of dairy operations in South Dakota was 660.

click chart to enlarge

"Get big or get out" rules the industry now. The only size of operation showing any recent growth are operations with over 500 head. In 1998, 10 such big dairies accounted for 12% of South Dakota's dairy production. In 2007, 35 such operations accounted for 57% of that production.

click chart to enlarge

Part of this is ugly market reality, but part is also the big-ag mindset in Pierre, where our state government continues to hand out favors to the tiny minority of big operators and lets small family farms die.

Lemons to Lemonade, Poop to Power: Dairy Waste Makes Electricity

Stan gets me thinking a little more about bovine emissions. Senator Thune and the Farm Bureau have made a big issue out of pre-empting any regulation of livestock flatulence. So if we can't tax cattle waste, how about we plug it into the grid?

According to the EPA, there are currently 140 anaerobic digester facilities in the United States that capture biogas on commercial farms and turn it into electricity. South Dakota has one of these lemons-into-lemonade power plants: a dairy near Milbank can turn the waste from 2400 dairy cows into power for 250 homes.

Some quick math: South Dakota currently has 95,000 dairy cows. Pump their emissions into 40 anaerobic digesters the size of the one near Milbank, and we get power for just about 10,000 homes.

Of course, you could get more annual energy output from 40 1.25-megawatt wind turbines like those powering the city of Rock Port, Missouri. But as my friend Tony will point out, you need baseload power, always on. The wind doesn't blow all the time; cows do.

Now all this poop power isn't a lot: at most, all those dairy cows might produce enough waste to power 3% of South Dakota's households. That power would come at the cost of keeping all those critters confined in feedlots. I don't want to bring cattle in off the open range just to collect their solid and gaseous waste. But if we already have all these cattle and hog confinement operations, why not polish the turd and get some electricity out of them?

In the end, electricity from livestock emissions could be a win-win for everybody. We get renewable power, we reduce pollution, and feedlot operators get one more revenue stream. Can't beat that!

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Update 10:30 CST: Ah, but Grant County neighbor Joelie Hicks reminds me of some messy truths shown in these photos which I'm told show overflow from the Milbank manure digester in summer 2008 after a big rainstorm: