Wales Farm Diaries

Little Acorns…

Shann — Wed, 25 May 2011 08:26:58 +0000

May 25
Things have been spinning so fast that I haven’t had a chance to write anything down! We have actually sold our first few pints of milk – I was so proud as I looked at them lined up on the counter like little soldiers. They got loaded into Taid’s old orange cool box and away we went – five to the farm shop in Sarnau, five to the health food shop in Newcastle Emlyn. They seem to be selling pretty well – we now have some more in the Carrot Cruncher in Newcastle Emlyn, and got word that another shop in Aberporth wants them as well. It’s such tiny money – four and five pounds at a time – but I carefully keep track of it in an envelope where our weekly takings are recorded. little acorns, little acorns, I chant under my breath. Keep the someday-maybe-we-hope-mighty-oak-that-might-grow-if-we’re-unbelievably-lucky in the mind’s eye, and don’t get discouraged…
In the meantime, we’ve finalized packaging for the soap. It’s lovely – unbleached cotton bags with a drawstring and the logo, inspired by an old Celtic symbol for animism, on the front. The bags cost a huge whack of money – so I’m holding my breath that it will all work, and we will earn the money back. Little acorns, little acorns…I want to find some new silicon moulds for the soap that have our symbol on. And I need to make some soap to sell!
In the meantime, (the other meantime?) I’ve just spent two days at Food Centre Wales at Horeb, working with the terrific team there to try to develop our probiotic smoothies. We spent two and a half hours the first day slowly and tortuously bringing the goats milk up to a boil, stirring it the whole time. Unfortunately the result was a nasty mess that tasted like goat sick, and all the flavorings I had brought with me didn’t disguise the horrible flavor! Not ideal, really…we tipped most of it down the drain. So, like Edison before he had his break-through with the light bulb, I know a thousand ways it doesn’t work! Back to the drawing board I go, bloody but unbowed…When I asked Mrs. Grant, the white-haired, no-nonsense great grandmother and doyenne of the goat world, who handily drove a bus for many years and raised many generations of her family on goats milk, what we had done wrong, she laughed. “I always just whack it up on high heat, boil it as fast as possible, then simmer for fifteen minutes. Heating it slowly like that just gives the bacteria time to develop, and will make it taste horrible. (No kidding!) Stirring it the whole time batters it – just boil it quick and leave it alone!” So much for high tech methods and data sheets! I’ll give Mrs. Grant’s way a try next…Good news is that I contacted the wonderful doctor, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, who wrote the book about the GAPS diet, with kefir and raw milk, that seems to have healed Rich. We followed it without even knowing what it was! The doctor is lovely, said that she was eager to try our kefir, asked if we would like to contribute our story to her book of success stories, which of course we would! Looking forward to asking her some of the scientific questions about the probiotic that I haven’t been able to answer…
Rich and I have been pole-axed by the amount of work involved. At the moment we have 16 goats, milking 6, feeding NINE GOAT KIDS three times a day. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like today, Rich goes off to work at the harps (they’ve asked him to come back for more days than two a week, but so far he’s resolutely resisted. It’s scary, because we’re not making enough yet to replace his salary – but if we don’t have his time and energy behind it all, we never will! Little acorns, little acorns…) and I’m here on my own. That means I drop Benji off at half eight, then come back, feed all the goats, turn on the milking machine, wipe and milk the milkers, put fresh straw and hay for all the goats, put extra milk into the bottles, feed the nine kids, who are now old enough to jump out of their pens, put their hooves up on my chest and fight each – and me – for the milk! Then the milk churn has to be hauled into the place where the milk is filtered and bottled. Only one bright spot – because we’ve found a proper source of new milk bottles, we don’t have to rinse, wash and disinfect recycled bottles, as we used to when it was just us drinking the milk. But the 9 kid bottles still have to be washed 3 times a day…And THEN any deliveries have to be made. And THEN maybe I sit down and have some breakfast. There’s maybe two hours in the middle of the day to do computer chores, things like editing the final proofs of the book that’s coming out in July! Or doing the soap labels. Or writing copy for the website. Or meeting with the computer guy to buy a reconditioned laptop that will actually run my business accounting software, since the bank neglected to tell me that it wouldn’t work on my mac. And this after I’d already spent that whole day in Cardiff, learning how to work with this particular software…
Then there’s shopping, dinner prep, picking up the kids from school. And the whole milking-feeding two hour routine has to happen again at night, after supper, before we fall into bed.
Goats, we says sometimes, looking at each other. Goats. Who’d have them?
It will all get easier, we tell each other. It must. Little acorns. Little acorns…

Sing a song of small things…

Shann — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:09:05 +0000

It suddenly occurs to me that the problem is not the galaxy out there. It is the galaxy in here.
“A human body is like a planet inhabited by huge numbers of various micro-creatures. The diversity and richness of this life on every one of us is probably as amazing as the life on earth itself. Our digestive system, skin, eyes, respiratory and excretory organs are happily co-exiting with trillions of invisible lodgers, making one ecosystem of macro- and micro-life, living together in harmony. It is a symbiotic relationship, where neither party can live without the other. Let me repeat this: we humans cannot live without these tiny micro- organisms, which we carry on and in our bodies everywhere. The largest colonies of microbes live in our digestive system. A healthy adult on average carries 1.5 – 2 kg of bacteria in the gut. All these bacteria are not just a chaotic microbial mass, but a highly organized microworld with certain species predominating and controlling others. The number of functions they fulfil in our bodies are so vital to us, that if our gut got sterilized, we would probably not survive.”- Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride MD, MMedSci(neurology), MMedSci(nutrition).
So, we are a planet, hosting innumerable life forms. Our ancestors co-existed happily with invisible tiny micro-organisms. They made use of them to create food, in the form of sourdough starter, yeast and cheese culture.
Cheese is made with rennet, which is the lining of a calf’s stomach. You take the rennet and put it into milk, to start the curds forming. The reason this works is that the micro-organisms from the calves’ gut that helps it digest its mothers milk, are in the rennet. You take those bugs and put them in the milk; you are essential borrowing the calf’s ability to digest the milk. The calf is extending its protection to you.
It’s the same with drinking raw milk; raw milk is essentially the blood of the animal, with the red blood cells taken out. The blood has its own protection to guard against infection; drink the raw milk, and you are essentially drinking in the animal’s ability to protect against infection. This immunity is extended to you, like a magic cape. Pasteurize the milk, and you kill all those living cells. It becomes a dead product, which your system struggles to digest. Thus, lactose intolerance.
Peasants lived happily enough with the world of tiny unseen things. Then we got smart – and technologically advance enough – to start seeing the bugs in the microscopes, and we were horrified. We called them germs, and set out to kill as many as possible. We tried to sanitize everything – surfaces, food products, soil, milk, the lot. Blast the bugs and the weeds with pesticides, and then put chemicals in to make the plants grow. Processed food loses taste, flavor and color, so chemical additives are put in to compensate.
We know now what the result of that has been. Sanitize a child’s environment too energetically, and you will create allergies. Feed generations of children processed food, and you create epidemics of autism, ADHS, eczema and asthma.
The next step for human beings, I propose, is this one – learn to understand the world of micro organisms, and co-exist with it.
Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride is a neurosurgeon who had an autistic son. Thus motivated, she discovered the link between the digestive system and the brain, and treated her son off the autistic spectrum. He’s now cured. She went on to crystallize her findings into something called the GAPS diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome) that has helped hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, suffering from autism, dysproaxia, ADD, dyslexia, ADHD, schizophrenia and depression.
Turns out that all these patients have something in common: They all struggle from digestive problems – abnormal flora in the gut. This creates “leaky” gut walls that don’t process food properly. So the patients are not only suffering from malnutrition, but food molecules that are not converted properly escape into the blood system, where they affect the brain, causing abnormal behavior.
The GAPS diet basically works on a two-part principle: first heal the gut lining, then re-populate it with good flora. You heal it basically by eating homemade meat stocks and a very low-fiber diet that’s easy to digest. Boiling meat bones in water puts the cartilageneous material into the water, that helps heal the lining of the gut. You then re-populate the good flora with homemade yogurts and kefirs.
Here’s the extraordinary thing: Rich suffers from ulcerative colitis. We had just gotten to the point where we went to see the specialist in London, and he told us that there was no more help for it; Rich would have to have a colostomy. We were horrified.
But when we returned home, Rich went into spontaneous – and complete – remission. He’s been entirely symptom free ever since.
We were so relieved by the timely miracle that we didn’t think that much about it. It was simply – grace.
But when I heard Dr. McBride speak on the radio about the benefits of raw milk – which she prescribes to her patients, I was intrigued. I ordered her book. And I read with increasing absorption about her diet – and realized that it was exactly what I’ve been feeding Rich for the last three years. We butcher our own meat, and put it in the freezer. To cook it, I bung it into a pan of water and cook it all day on the Alpha, because it’s too big to thaw in the microwave. So he’s been getting a lot of homemade meat stocks, with the cartilage and bone broth.
And because we had so much goat milk, I started making yogurt and kefir, just as a way to use up the excess milk. So he was getting the good flora to repopulate the gut as well.
We had accidentally stumbled on the diet designed to cure him – and it worked, just in time to save him from having his colon removed.
These are the ways that people used to eat, when tiny micro-organisms were a part of every day life. I have a jar of sourdough starter in the fridge. The living organism in it will make my bread rise. I have a container of kefir fermenting on the counter. The life in it will continue to heal Rich’s gut, and keep it healthy.
Like learning to co-exist with the world outside – we have to learn to co-exist with the world inside – all the trillions of tiny living cells living on us and in us without which we could not exist. We are the planet. Literally.