Getting Ready for Terra Madre

In a few days I will be 30,000 feet over the Atlantic. We are in a mad rush to get all of the preparations made for our for our visit to Terra Madre 2008 in Turin, Italy. Judy and I are fortunate to have been invited to participate in the event for a second time. Slow Food Calgary nominated us and Slow Food International invited us to attend. In 2006 we attended for the first time an this event made us look differently on what we do, which is bison ranching and how we do it. One of our main focuses in our business is controlling the process from conception to consumer. We look at ourselves as food producers first and bison ranchers second. Since we sell directly to the consumer every week at the farmers market we get feedback with almost every sale. We have found that by controlling almost every aspect of the production process we can produce some of the best bison meat anywhere. Attending Terra Madre again will hopefully strengthen how we raise our bison, care for our land and service our customers. We are trying to always improve ourselves and our business. Our goal is to conduct our business in an ethical, environmental freindly and socially concious manner.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we are trying to get all of the work done before we leave the ranch to our housesitters. Mostly they will be caring for Dixie our dog and our cats. But the bison, horses and cattle will need checking on. Terra Madre 2006 showed us that October is a great month for our annual vacation. The weather is still quite good, there is grass in the pastures for the livestock, the water is still running and we are tired after a long busy summer of farmers markets and all of the repairs an maintence that a farm requires. In a few more days we will have everything winterized, we will complete our last meat deliveries and we will be on our way.

Our travel plans have us flying to the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein where my family still farms near the city of Lübeck. My mother's family the Steens first settled here in the 1100's and most of my relatives still live in this part of Germany. I will be good to get back to land I know so well and am connected to. After almost two weeks here we plan to travel to Italy with some time in Bergamo, Milan and then into the Val d'Aosta in the Alps for some hiking in Gran Paridiso National Park. Then a few days on the Ligurian Coast in Portofino and Cinque Terra. Finally we will finsih with the Terra Madre in Turin.

I will try posting when I find time and computer access to update my travels and adventures during this trip.

Powered by the Wind

Come visit Buffalo Horn Ranch and you won't see a windmill.  We use  electricity for our household, ranching and meat marketing operations.  We need to pump water, keep it from freezing so the bison can drink it in the winter and at any time we need 3 to 7 deep freezers running to store the bison meat we sell.  It has always been our goal to keep our environmental footprint to a minimum and we are always looking for ways to reduce our energy consumption. 

We have looked at installing windmills and solar panels to generate electricity on the ranch.  Currently the cost to do this on a small scale is too high, but may become more feasible in the future.  We lobbied our energy supplier a few years ago to allow us to buy wind credits through the Pembina Institute.  Instead they came up with another plan.  Our electricity is provided by the Central Alberta Rural Electricification Association, CAREA.  Last year they introduced a plan by which there 8000 member rural households could buy wind power credits to supply all or part of their electrical needs by wind power.  It costs us an additional $15 a month to supply all of our needs 100% by wind energy.  At this point wind power is still more expensive than coal fired power, so it costs more if you choose this type of energy.  We felt that it was a worthwhile expenditure to switch to clean energy this way and not invest the thousands of dollars in our own power generation system. 

After the program had been running for a year we contacted CAREA to inquire about the number of households who had decided to switch fully or in part to wind power.  We were shocked to find out that only about 50 of the 8000 customers had chosen this option.  It is unfortunate that so few people are really concerned about the environment.  They are simply thinking about the here and now, tomorrow is far off and they would rather invest in something they can enjoy today as opposed to investing in their future and that of their children and grandchildren.  Our business is ranching as any change in climate could drasticly change our ability to continue raising bison.  We have already experienced three years a of drought in 2001 to 2003.  This even nearly cost us our ranch and herd.  I am not sure if we could survive another even like this again.  So I feel that it is our responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint and do what we can to prevent climate change.     

Purple Carrots, Yellow Beets and Blue Potatoes

We often have preconceived notions of what are food should look like.  The term carrot top refers to someone with red hair and beet red is that dark purple red.  Mashed potatoes are a creamy white, but never blue.  This year in my garden I have been experimenting with heritage vegetables.  I have a general interest in old varieties and for some reason I was inspired to try some of the old varieties that are being brought back by the seed sellers.  This year I planted purple carrots, these are the original carrot before Dutch plant breeders began to play with them in the 1700's.  The royal family of the Netherlands is called the House of Orange and to please them Dutch gardeners breed the purple color out of the carrot and created an all orange carrot, which to this day is still the standard.  The purple carrot is orange inside and is beautiful when sliced into a salad.  Continuing on the purple theme, we have been growing a purple bean for the past two years.  It is really a green bean and looses its purple color when cooked.  It to is beautiful in a salad, but the deciding factor is that the plants yield more beans than other varieties.  Beets for me were always a purple red pickle you served with a meal.  I never thought to eat otherwise until I met my wife who is of Ukrainian heritage and began to eat borsch.  This winter I had dinner at the Route 40 Soup Company in Turner Valley.  Chef Mark served up a terrific yellow beet borsch and off I went in search of yellow beet seed, actually called a golden beet.  I now have a new favorite vegetable, boiled yellow beets.  I start by boiling the roots for about 20 minutes, I then add the stalks for about 5 more minutes and finish with the leaves for another 3 or 4 minutes.  I serve this with a little salt and butter with a splash of vinegar.  This is a great vegetable to grow, just like the traditional red beet.  You can eat the root and the leaves and not just as a pickle.  Last night I also served for the first time Russian Blue Potatoes, I dug the first hill from my garden and boiled a few of these up.  The potato is you guessed it purple on the outside and a rich blue on the inside.  It had wonderful flavor that will be even better as the potato matures. In Peru where the potato originates there are hundreds of different varieties in a rainbow of colors.  It is unfortunate that we had to choose the bland colored varieties as our main ones.  There always seems to be something bland colored on our plate like potatoes, rice or pasta needing to be livened up with some more colorful food.   I am still waiting for my tomatoes to ripen as they are all still green.  My garden should yield yellow, brown and purple varieties later this fall.  Am I going to switch fully over to strange colored vegetables?  Probably not, but they make an interesting addition to my garden which keeps it fun.  They will also be great for when I have company for dinner.  You eat first with your eyes and this will add to the dinner conversation.  It is important that we as gardeners and consumers not forget the huge variety of heritage vegetables available to us.  By growing and eating these we are continuing a 10,000 year tradition of multiple varieties in agriculture.      

Good, Clean, Fair

This entry was written in November 2006 after our return from the Slow Food, Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy.  It was published in my Buffalo Horn Ranch, Newletter .  

Judy and I have just returned from three weeks in Italy and Germany.  We were honored to be nominated by Slow Food to attend the Terra Madre (Mother Earth) conference in Turin, Italy.  We attended representing the Bison Producers of Alberta and were amongst 5000 small scale, organic and natural food producers from 154 countries.  This was the United Nations of Food. We were brought together to share our experiences of small scale and traditional food production.  In this era of mass produced industrial food, genetically engineered organisms and and internationally homogeneous foods, we represented the traditional alternative.  We are in an time when more and more farming practices are decided in the board room and the laboratory is, unfortunately, becoming more important than the kitchen in preparing the food we eat.  For thousands of years small scale farmers have worked with the land, cultivating tens of thousands

of varieties of seeds and breeds of livestock suited to the local environment and working with mother earth to provide a healthy and sustainable food source and lifestyle for local communities.  Today the forces of globalization, large multinational food corporations, chemical companies and organizations like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank are dictating to the worlds farmers, the crops that they should grow and to the consumers of the world, what foods they should eat.  The motivation is no longer healthy and delicious food or sustainable agricultural practices, but quarterly profits for shareholders.  Small scale and traditional farmers around the world are under severe threat due to these trends.  Terra Madre was all about maintaining thousands of years of food traditions that result in food that is Good, Clean and Fair.  Good tasting, Clean of chemicals and other pollutants, and Fair as in fairly priced for the farmer who produced the food.  I will expand on what we learned at Terra Madre in future issues of the newsletter.  It was a honor attending this world meeting of food communities and we are obligated to share what we learned with you.