FOOD PRODUCTION

The force – feeding of poultry needs to stop. Like all other animals they require to be fasted for three full days – before they are killed – but they can’t be fasted in their present numbers – because they would turn cannibal. That would leave them with a minimum of both toxins and drugs in their meat. Present – day mass fed poultry, are as close as we will get to poison. The farmers who produce them know not to eat them. When things are done the way the poultry companies want, there’s not much in the way of drugs in the meat. It’s just that all producers don’t adhere strictly to their rules.

The force – feeding of laying hens also needs to stop. The present – day eggs also contain high concentrations of both toxins and drugs. A hen should only lay an egg every second day – and not eight or nine days out of ten – as at present.

When we kept even up to a few hundred hens on deep – litter, the yokes were pale in colour but those eggs were still perfectly healthy. That’s because the fowl were fed only good wholesome feed. Except you live in the countryside and know the source – it’s highly unlikely you will buy a product – even remotely resembling free – range.

Take a chicken for example. It has enough Lactobacillus to detoxify a certain amount of feed per day. However – when the feed is going through it at a far greater rate – it can only partially detoxify it.

When we eat their meat or eggs that adds to our intake of toxins. That’s why quite a number of those birds drop dead from heart attacks, even though they are very young.

Those of us that are old enough – know that present - day bacon is rubbish – compared to what it used to be. So why? Here is why that is: A pig like a dog should be fed less than it would like to eat. My guidelines would be that the pigs are fed at a rate – that puts the best pig in the litter – to 230lbs in 26 weeks.

The whole litter should then be fasted for three days, and killed and scraped on the farm. The factories could take over at that stage. Then they should be graded in the same way as I have suggested for cattle and sheep. To fast the pigs it may be necessary to keep them in the original litters. A pig producer would need to have a number of pens – at the edge of a yard – where the pigs could be moved to for fasting.

Back in the 1950’s do-gooder MPs, protested in Parliament about our method of killing pigs. They said that a big sharp hook was stuck through the jaw and it was absolutely barbaric. If they’d had the guts to have gone closer – they would have seen that the hook used wasn’t sharp but was in fact – blunt as the end of your finger. It didn’t require being sharp.

With the present system – the pig has to endure a prolonged period of stress before it is killed – in a similar way to that of the past. Apart from being more humane than the present system, a pig can’t be hooked unless it is well fasted.

Cattle and sheep would be the easiest to put right. As long as they are kept disease – free and only fed what they should be – it would be only necessary to detoxify them – to leave those two products as good as ever again. Where the stock is coming off grazing, it would be better if it hadn’t been fertilized for about two months.

Cattle and sheep production could continue much as it is, but to get healthier meat here is what needs to happen: The live grader in the factory, should be replaced with an after-slaughter grader.

When an animal is killed and it is seen to have no food in it – and there is deemed to be nothing else wrong with the carcass – give that animal a good high grade. If there is some food in it downgrade. If there is more food downgrade further. If there is a lot of food, have it dyed and sent for pet-food without payment.

There should also be an effective nitrogen test developed for meat. Then there could be a nitrogen cut – incorporated into the price to penalize producers who haven’t been doing things – as I have recommended. When an animal is fasted for three days, it loses considerable weight. So we would have to be prepared to pay more for that healthier meat.

Butchers need to play their part and keep the meat hanging, until it is dark in colour. It would need to hang for three weeks or more, to be as good as two weeks in the 1960’s. Either that, or the chills could be turned up slightly.

As things stand, a butcher can add a large quantity of salt to the meat and add greatly to the profit. In an area where that is happening, it’s destroying a great many kidneys.

The bakeries need to get the Lactobacillus back into the bread. The creameries need to go back to making sour – cream butter and give us descent buttermilk, which we will want to drink. For that to happen the milk needs to be hygienically produced, which it is not. It is not to say that it can’t be done using the modern system, for I know that it can. I myself – milked cows for quite a few years and never once had a sample – that failed its hygiene test.

The dairies are using the pasteurisation system to kill off all bacterium, in order to get rid of dirt bacterium. That way the milk keeps for a long period and no one complains. Therefore, today’s sweet milk no longer contains the vital Lactobacillus.

During the grazing season especially – the milk is heavily contaminated with nitrogen and at all times – it is contaminated with antibiotics. So whereas milk used to be good for us, it is now extremely bad for us. Farmers who add urea to dairy feed are criminals, of the worst possible kind.

It used to be said: “A well-fed Englishman is one who has breakfast three times a day”. At present those three big fry-ups per day will kill him. The standard of the food is nowhere good enough, to eat that way now.

Man is now getting what Man has long wanted – cheap food. The small producers who had been doing things right all along, have been squeezed out of the system. We are now at the mercy of a more progressive and greedy farmer.

The present system of farming is unsustainable. A country can only withstand so much pollution. Restricting farmers as to when they can spread slurry is set to make a bad situation far worse. The slurry needs to be spread when the ground is reasonably dry, just whatever times of the year that happens to be.

For quite a while now we on these islands, didn’t have enough land to grow all the food we needed. However – we had more than enough to have kept the Lactobacillus system going – and that is what should have happened. We could have imported grain and meat or anything else that was needed.

It may be necessary for us to go back more-or-less to scratch, to get the proper food again. That would involve dividing the land up again into smaller units. The original farms in this part of the world, were just ten acres so weren’t big enough to justify keeping a horse.

The whole Dairy Industry has been an abject failure. It doesn’t work nor maybe it can’t be made to work. So here is my suggestion for what might need to happen: That some of the land is divided up again into about fifty acre units.

Those units need to supply us with the following produce: Sweet milk, sour-cream butter, buttermilk, proper cottage cheese, whey and all poultry products. There could be electrified tumbling churns made to facilitate that. The hypochlorite already used by dairy farmers, would greatly aid the hygiene process.

The churning was done in ‘stops and starts’. That’s where that term came from. That allowed the beads of butter time to conglomerate. When done correctly it took just one hour and ten minutes to churn the perfect butter. Hence another of our old sayings concerning lengthy courtships: “Long churnin’ makes bad butter”

The dairy produce could be taken to marketplaces, in the towns and cities and sold directly to the householders. If things are not done to the highest standards then those products will not sell. That’s the way it was before.

There should be permanent containers made, for the householders to get those products in. That would bring that part of life back to the way it was.

To make sour-cream butter, you have to keep the milk until the under-milk has soured. It is then necessary to stir the cream through it once a day, for a couple of days to get the cream to sour as well. It is then ready for churning.

If we get that sour-cream butter back again – we will need to be prepared to pay at least three times the price – of present day butter. But let me assure you that it would be well worth it.

People may be concerned about the quality of today’s high-yield crops, but I see little cause for concern. So – if a wheat grower for instance – wants a higher yield does he just sow additional fertilizer? No, it’s not quite as simple as that. If he did he would produce a lower yield of poor quality grain. Those high yields are attained – with the help of lab staff who are in effect – plant nutritionists.

It is their role to fine-tune, not just the amount but also the constituency of the fertilizer that’s needed. By the time the crop is ready for harvesting – the fertilizer has its job done – and is long gone out of the ground. In a grain-belt that ground will need about the same the next year. High yield equals high quality. The growers themselves and the lab staff who assist them, shouldn’t be berated but congratulated.

I watched an old man as he prepared his garden for potatoes. He sowed so much artificial fertilizer that the ground was white. He grew what I had expected him to grow, big tops but very little in the way of potatoes. I have seen exactly the same done with farmyard manure. In both cases the potatoes were, to use an old term ‘sloamed’ and most unhealthy for it

The over-use of farmyard manure is equally as harmful as the over-use of artificial fertilizer. I would prefer to buy potatoes or other vegetables that are grown by professional growers, that ones grown by an amateur messing about with farmyard manure. But even if he wasn’t an amateur – it’s a lot easier being accurate with artificial fertilizer – using modern machinery.

When a crop like potatoes is harvested – there is still some fertilizer left in the soil but it hasn’t been growing for quite a while – so it will not have been absorbing it. A vegetable like rhubarb where the part eaten grows above the ground, can easily be boosted with fertilizer. But the fact that it can should tell us not to do it.

There will also be suspicions concerning the chemicals used in crop production. But again when used responsibly there shouldn’t be much cause for concern. At the stage serials are sprayed for weeds – the shoot on which the grain grows – hasn’t even started to appear. Even if there are some cases where there is low-level contamination to the finished product, they will just be other toxins to be eaten up by the Lactobacillus.

But what I have said about other crops doesn’t apply to grassland. The more high nitrogen fertilizer is sown, the more grass it will grow. Cows grazed on that nitrogen-rich grass, pass it on to us in their milk and all other dairy products. I am not suggesting that fertilizer shouldn’t be used to grow grass. It’s just that things need to be done differently.

The cows can be strip-grazed on mature grass, when the nitrogen level is much lower. During a very wet spell, the cows can be kept in and the mature grass drawn to them. For silage the grass shouldn’t be cut for two months after the fertilizer is sown. In this part of the world it could be sown in mid-April and the first cut taken in mid-June. The second cut could then be taken in mid-August and make those two heavier crops do.

Dairy farmers producing milk that’s high in nitrogen must be financially penalised. Any found to be killing off the bacteria in their milk, should be allowed to keep it from that day forward.

The creameries could still kill off all bacteria – to get rid of the dirt bacteria and then find a way to reintroduce the Lactobacillus on it’s own – using something like Lough water. It should then be possible to make sour-cream butter and proper cheese again.

The milkman would then need a fairly large van so as to allow him to deliver all the main dairy products, which would be sweet-milk, buttermilk, whey, butter and cheese. When people collected the liquid dairy products – either in the market towns or at the farms – little aluminium cans were used. At this stage I would suggest that they would be made of stainless steel.

The butter could be slowly melted and poured into Tupperware type containers. However – they shouldn’t be filled to the top – as the Lactobacillus needs oxygen. Hard cheese can be wrapped.

I don’t like suggesting that we go back to go forward but if this system can’t be made to work, then it will have to happen. The Lactobacillus must be got back into the food; otherwise the present health problems remain with us.

When the pasteurisation system began, it was meant to prevent TB being spread to children. It only lowered the Lactobacillus count but by the time the consumer was using the milk, it had built up again.

The cows we had fifty years ago were better suited for that, than today’s cows. That is because the milk started off with a greater concentration of Lactobacillus. So for that same system to work effectively today – the milk needs to be produced more hygienically – than ever before. A lot of the dirt bacterium has faster breeding rates than the Lactobacillus.

Most of the dirt in today’s milk is sucked up off the floor. With today’s high-yield cows, there’s very little space between the udder and the floor. If I were milking cows at present, I would have a batch of clean towels at the ready. I would place one under the udder before putting on the cluster. The vast majority of antibiotics are for the treatment of mastitis. Most mastitis is caused by over milking. The system needs to be upgraded so that the cups are removed one at a time, as the cow milks out.

For the present-day dairy system to work – a lab worker would have to travel with the tanker and test the milk for hygiene – before it is collected. If it’s not clean enough – have it collected with a different tanker – at a very different price. It would then be the responsibility of the lab workers, to make the system work.

Farmed fish are another high-toxin product and would be best avoided. With manufactured food, we don’t really know what we are eating. It would be better to go back to a more traditional way of eating.