The Circle of Life

9 February 2010

It caught us by surprise.

Death continued to hang around as our chicken bravely battled on. She seemed to get stronger and stronger by the day and seemed to be walking quite well.

“This isn’t going to last is it?”

Aaron agreed. He was as unconvinced as I at the chicken’s once again miraculous recovery.

It was HelpXer Kuri’s last day with us and she asked if she could see the sheep. The sheep have been on the other side of the stream for several weeks. We generally check on them twice a week and it was a good excuse to go for a wander and make sure the lamb was still doing well.

Kuri, the dogs and I walked behind the stream and out into the open paddock. The sheep were in the shade under the macrocarpa. I did a head count and then I moved around the tree and did another head count. Tulip was missing.

And then the wind shifted direction and both the dogs and I caught a whiff of something rotting. The dogs took off across the paddock and I after them.

“Stay here Kuri!” I yelled behind me.

I got to the stream edge and looked down.

It was bad; 3 or 4 days in the hot sun bad.

What had once been Tulip floated on the edge of the stream, bloated to hell and down to bone where the eel’s had been feasting. I couldn’t recognise her at all as Tulip

I turned around and Kuri was walking towards me. There was no way in hell she’d want to see this and the dogs were getting excited by the stench. There was nothing I could do and so I quickly walked back the way we’d come, taking the dogs and Kuri with me.

I expected to feel distraught but what I’d seen floating just didn’t look like Tulip at all. If it had just happened or she was stretched out in the paddock I think I would have felt differently but instead all I felt was acute embarrassment. For some reason I didn’t want a vegetarian HelpXer to know our sheep had drowned.

To be honest I can’t figure out how it happened. The stream is so low now with the drought that the water is barely ankle deep in most places. Although she may have fallen (?) in in a deep place there were plenty of places that she could have got out. She must have jumped, slipped, fallen into the water and then panicked and floundered in one spot until she exhausted herself. Recently shorn she didn’t even have wool to weigh her down. It would have been an awful end.

She was due to go in the freezer next month.

So Death got bored waiting for the chicken and took our ewe instead. It seems an unfair exchange to me but what am I going to do about it?

She’s Wearing What?!

Troy and Jacqui got married on the 29th.

Aaron and I drove down to Auckland early morning. Aaron spent the morning with Troy and I with Jo. I took 3 outfits from my wardrobe and I tried them on at Jo’s. I’d lost too much weight for the little black number, I’d put on too much muscle for the long brown dress and the purple top and black pants didn’t match.

Once again Jo emptied her wardrobe for me. I tried on various outfits and narrowed it down to 2.

I decided on the black and white halter neck, Jo preferred the brown and gold.

I ummed and ahhed, ummed and ahhed and then had a shower, did my hair and face and put on the black and white one. Suddenly it looked blah. I put on the brown and gold and it was a winner.

We arrived at the venue and went straight inside to get away from the heat of the sun. We stood around talking to various people for about half an hour and then suddenly my sister was waving me over with a slightly mortified look on her face.

She pointed at the doorway just as my sister-in-law walked through in the exact same dress as me. She laughed and saw the funny side but quite frankly I was mortified and promptly died a thousand deaths.

How often do I ever go anywhere that affords me the chance to dress up? And to find myself wearing the same outfit as my sister-in-law???

And so now my overriding memory of that day, apart from the unbearable heat, is of the dress, and not even the bride’s!

So Much Pork

We are in a bit of a quandary. Aaron has calculated that we could have some 40 piglets on the property between March and July.

That’s a lot of mouths to feed. 17 buckets per mealtime he’s worked out.

That’s a lot of pork to sell. How? Where? To whom?

I don’t think the deal with the German butcher will happen. He wants an abattoir and the more we think about trying to build one with no money the less likely it seems. We know someone who will build it and we can only hope they will allow us to utilise it. But that won’t make the German the money he wants and if we sell our pork to him it’ll it be at break even price for us.

Is it worth it?

And so we are slogging our guts out, producing great pork but floundering in terms of selling it. The meat regulations are so restrictive in New Zealand. The laws are designed to make it easy for the big corporates and virtually impossible for the small player. Ethics and old-fashioned quality count for nothing.
What did the man from the NZ Pork Industry tell me? - Free-range pork is of inferior quality and not worth producing.

No one will buy it apparently.

And so our next plan is to investigate getting into a Farmer’s Market. We know which one we want to get into but the question is how? We worked out a basic business model this weekend and then Googled the various costs.

For us to enter the Farmers Market arena will mean set-up costs of up to $20,000.

Maximum profit would be $20,000 per annum.

So it would mean every Saturday at the market for a year before maybe 18 months before we made anything. After that the profit’s ours, we’d have assets to sell when we’ve had enough and the extra money on our mortgage would mean we would be mortgage free in 7 years. The interest savings alone would equal around $16,000.

We both agree that it’s worth the risk (?) / challenge (?).

This isn’t about getting rich for us. It’s about ridding our corner of the world of unethically farmed pork.

So now we have a lot of planning and investigating to do. The biggest challenge I can see will be getting past any NZFSA hurdles thrown at us. I’ve emailed a number of questions to them to ask what is and isn’t possible. If we can meet the requirements we next go to the Market owners, and if we pass their inspection we need to get permission from the local council to sell meat. If all that goes according to plan we then need to sort out a deal with an abattoir and a butcher. Finally we then need to approach a bank for a business loan. Worst case scenario is we put it against the mortgage.

So now the aim is to be in the market in September or October.

Written down it sounds simple but I’m expecting a big fat “No” from someone along the chain. What we do then depends on what it will take to get past the “No”.

We’ve spent the last year floundering around looking for a break but ultimately the issue is that this is a hobby. It’s not our main line of work and therefore we can’t dedicate hours to the cause or produce pork in the quantity that would enable us to fight and win many battles.

The Cult of Aaron and Lisa

It’s happened; we’ve become our own cult. Woe betide any poor soul who comes around to visit as they are bound to find themselves assaulted with vast amounts of information about the corruption of the food industry and the food we eat.

The more I read the more I am horrified by what has happened and what is continuing to happen in the food industry. I have spent years being conned and manipulated by large corporations with absolutely no interest in my health or wellbeing.

Almost everything I’ve been led to believe is a lie and it’s all designed with one goal in mind – global domination by a few very large, very scary corporations. The ultimate goal of these corporations is to eliminate every small player in the market and to own everything within the food chain, from the soil to the supermarket shelf. These companies want to siphon all that money off our shores and into their own foreign bank accounts. They are trying to ensure that the food we eat is so nutrionally poor or unhealthy that we are forced to gain health from other sectors – weightloss clinics, nutriosinists, gyms, pharmaceuticals, supplements, etc. Not only do these companies want to be the sole producers of food, they have also started buying up and own most of the above sectors. Nestle own Jenny Craig for Christ’s sakes!

These companies are giving huge amounts of money to Food Safety Authorities in various countries (including New Zealand) to create rules to to make it difficult for people like me and Aaron from selling the food we produce.

Having read an enormous amount of information about the global food trade I now know why doing what we want to do is so difficult but I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why big corporates are so hellbent on market domination to the point that they want all small players eliminated. Yes it’s money, it’s all about the money but why do our few paltry dollars that we could make make such a difference to them?

Fuck them. I mean seriously, Fuck Them! No way am I going to allow those bastards take away my right to eat nutritious, unadulterated food. No way are they going to stop us selling good food.