Yep, the farmer must get in on this one. LOL!!

Ok, I finally got thru the movie (DON'T watch if you have a 5 year old computer like mine. Takes too darn long!). Now, my thoughts.

I punched in my zip code and only one place turned up in my area, and they don't have beef. Just chicken and turkey. Most of New Mexico is agriculture. I know many, many people that own family farms. Their names didn't turn up. I'll get to a point in a minute.

You know I used to have this on the old site, but now that we are here, I'll put it all down again. Ya'll that have read it or just don't want to hear it, just ignore this.

I have a family farm. We raise angus beef cattle, as well as hay. First the beef. We don't give our cows antibiotics, we feed them on pasture (we feed 51 head on almost 1,200 acres, so they have plenty of room), hay, and range cubes (a mixture of wheat, corn, cottonseed, molasses, veg. oils, dried skim milk, and vitamins and minerals). We give them one boost of hormones (in the ear), we brand them (you have to in New Mexico, or else you can't sell them), we dehorn them (safer that way), we worm them, we castrate the steers (we used to cut them and get yummy Rocky Mountain Oysters, but now we use a bander that gives a quicker recovery rate and has something better to do with hormones. It's a band that is tighted around their balls and after a couple weeks, they will just fall off. Very humane). The calves are raised on the before mentioned feed and their mama's milk (til of course we wean them). When they are yearlings, we take them to the cattle sale in Clovis, where they are bought by feedlots, who then finish them out and send them to the slaughter house. I don't exactly what they are finished with, but I know it involves hay, because we sell our hay that isn't up to the dairy's standards to them.

Hay: We grow our hay using some chemicals, such as pestacide to kill army worms and aphids. We use some fertilizers to help the yields. Why do we not do anything organic? Yields. When you live in a drought stricken area that is running out of irrigation water, you do what you can. We sell our hay to dairies (when it's good enough for them). The dairies mix it with insilage (mixtures of alfalfa, haygrazer hay, wheat, corn). I don't know what else they feed them, but every dairy in our area (60 of them, about 5,000 cows each, and ALL are family owned!) has a nutritionist on staff to monitor exactly what they are getting.

Milk and more dairy talk: Now, speaking from the milk plants point of view (my DH has to drive a milk truck this winter because farming and ranching didn't pay enough to cover the bills). The milk is picked up from the FAMILY OWNED dairies and taken to a large plant here in our town. I not sure what all is done there, but every load is tested for several things, and if anything unwanted by the plant(antibotics for one) are found, that load is REJECTED (and sometimes we let them dump it on our unused land). Water is taken out of the milk (and dumped on some farm land the plant owns), and shipped to a packaging plant.

Oh, I promised you a point earlier. ALOT of your meat is coming from family farms LIKE MINE! Just because we aren't on some web site doesn't mean that you aren't getting meat from us! The little man can't do it all himself, he sells it higher up. maybe they are the ones with the factory farm label, I don't know. Think of it as an assembly line. My family does it's part, the auction does theirs, the feedlot does theirs, etc. I know of NOT ONE factory farm anywhere near me. Not to say they don't exist. I'm just saying that all your supermarket meat isn't from a factory farm. I'm not a big rancher, yet. Someday I want a couple hundred head, but that involves alot of land. But you put all the little ranchers together, you have alot of cows.

And for what it's worth, produce in some big name supermarkets (you know, the forbidden W-word), get local produce as well. Ok, some is more local to me, Mexico isn't that far away. LOL! But I know the pumpkins and peanuts and a few others are from here. I know lettuce and potatoes are shipped in from family farms a little farther (Hatch, New Mexico and Alamosa, Colorado). Oh, and some potatoes are from here as well.

Ok, way too long, and if you are still with me, I hope you haven't gone to sleep from boredom. LOL!!

I'm getting back to the CMA awards. I hope the Dixie Chicks don't get squat and Toby Keith wins them all. We are singing "I Love This Bar" right now. LOL! You should hear dd6 sing it! Too cute!