Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Weekly Review through February 24!

Another awesome week in Fitness, Farm, and Life! Read on for more!

Fitness
This week started off strong, but we were really busy over the weekend, so I really tapered off on Friday-Sunday.
February 18- 30 minute dance workout on YouTube
February 19- 35 Minutes virtual ride on Rouvy!
February 20- 30 minutes dance routine for Shape Up Montana challenge!
February 21- 45 minutes treadmill walking. Sometimes I watch movies or tv shows. I have to say that the climax of Thelma and Louise really kept me walking! Such a great movie!
Recognize this unforgettable scene?!
February 22- Rest.
February 23- Drive to Bozeman. Rest day.
February 24- Drive from Bozeman. Rest day.

This week for Shape Up Montana, our weekly challenge was to complete the "Shape Up Jam" dance and submit a video of the dance. I did it. My video is ridiculously bad, as are my dancing skills. If you want a laugh, here it is:

Farm-
We are nearly ready to start calving season. Our "due date" is March 1, so we could actually start any day. Jeff spent the week preparing the corrals and doing other chores in advance of calving. Then on Friday, he and a friend of ours sorted our animals into groups: older cows, young cows/heifers, and late-calvers. We also have a separate pen for our bulls, and another for the yearlings. It remains frigidly cold with highs in the single digits below zero and lows in the -20s or worse. Horrible weather for calving. We are hoping the cows will hold off until it warms up even a little bit!
Hello, girls!
This is the yearling pen. 
Life
We took a quick overnight trip to Bozeman for a family gathering. It was nice to get together, even if it was brief. It was a lot of car time for Genevieve, but overall, she handled it pretty well!
Traveling to Bozeman!
She's just too much with those pigtails!

I also just finished reading Becoming by Michelle Obama. I don't normally read a lot of biographies/autobiographies, but I really enjoyed this book. She is someone I think we can all learn from in terms of making the best out of every situation, positive mindset, encouraging others, and much more. If you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it, regardless of your politics. To be honest, it's much more about her as a person than it is about politics anyway. It is especially eye opening to read about life from the viewpoint of an African-American woman, as her experience was vastly different from mine.

That's all for this week! Have a great week, everyone!

Monday, February 18, 2019

Weekly Review Through Feb. 17

Another week in Fitness, Farm, and Life!  I just realized I never did my weekly review post for last week. Oops!  Oh well. It was a relatively quiet week for us anyway. Here's a look at this most recent week

Fitness:
February 11- rest. Daily #RLYCORE challenge pose.
Executing a side plank!
February 12- rest, again. Daily #RLYCORE challenge pose.
February 13- Evening treadmill hike, 30 minutes. Daily #RLYCORE challenge pose.
February 14- Rest. I had planned to exercise when I got home, but Jeff surprised Genevieve and I with a surf and turf dinner! Daily #RLYCORE challenge pose.
This was such a fun surprise and Jeff executed it all PERFECTLY! SOOOO GOOD!
February 15- Treadmill hike, 45 minutes.
February 16- Indoor cycling via Rouvy for 50 minutes, covering 11.3 virtual miles in Kona!
February 17- 45 minutes of snowshoeing outside with Harvey!

This week, I did a one-week-long challenge from @runnersloveyoga (find her on Instagram!) called #RLYCORE, with a new pose each day focusing on core strength. It was a lot of planks and plank variations. I am proud of myself for sticking with it and doing each pose each day!
This was a fun, quick challenge. Can't wait to see what she does in March!
Even though I didn't have a ton of dedicated workouts this week, I was still happy with my overall step counts. I've been working hard to walk more while at school, breaking up the time I'm at my desk. I actually had a great week in our Shape Up Montana team, too, and I'm on my way to reaching my goal of scoring 600 points overall throughout the three month duration.

Farm:
Wow- thanks to everyone who checked out Jeff's guest post on Country of Origin Labeling for beef and meat products! It had a great response! Jeff actually went to Helena to testify on Tuesday in front of the Ag committee. He said it was a great experience and that he learned a lot. He has also done a few radio interviews, which were aired on AM radio ag stations this week. Did anyone happen to catch any of them? We'll keep you posted on how the bill ends up, but either way, I'm really proud of Jeff for his hard work on this! 

Life:
Temps have been very frigid outside! It hasn't been above zero for a week at least, with no end to the freeze in sight! We are doing our best to entertain ourselves indoors, but we are also all getting a little cabin fever! Yesterday (Sunday) it was one whole degree above zero, so I bundled up and took Harvey outside for a snowshoe hike in our field. The windchill was still -20 or so, but we hiked right along the shelter belt and honestly, I didn't feel the wind at all! I was actually OVER dressed!
Harvey and me, enjoying some chilly sunshine!

He has the sweetest face! He was so happy to be outside!
I also attempted some yeast baking, and I'm happy to say it turned out great! I've always been pretty intimidated by baking with yeast, and yet it's something I'd like to get better at. I love the concept of possibly grinding our own flower from the wheat and grains we grow, and then baking them into bread and other treats, right here on the farm. So, this being a very simple recipe from Bettie Baker, I thought it would be a good one to try. Jeff, Genevieve and I all gave it a thumbs up! I'm definitely going to check out more recipes from her website.

That's all for this week! I hope you all had a fabulous weekend, we'll catch up again soon!

Monday, February 11, 2019

The Scoop on COOL


Today I have a special guest blog post from my husband Jeff! As I've mentioned in my weekly reviews, he is now on the Board of Directors for Montana Farmers Union, and is working on MFU's legislative efforts for the current Montana session. One of the issues he's become particularly endeared to is Country of Origin Labeling, or COOL, especially as it pertains to beef. Jeff is actually headed to Helena today to lobby and testify on behalf of Montana ranchers, in favor of better labeling for our beef. Please read on for more information!

Hi folks, this will be either a rare treat or a fiasco, as I attempt a guest blog for the first time. I know Katie has built a substantial and discerning readership, so I’ll do my best to live up to that!

As you no doubt know from reading this blog over the years, we’re cattle producers in addition to being grain farmers. We are proud of the way our animals are raised, and proud of the product they ultimately turn out to be: US Beef. Born, Raised, and Processed in the United States.

As you also may remember, Katie and I have been active members of Montana Farmers Union for the last 7 or 8 years. One of the issues we became most engaged with, due to our pride as Montana cattle producers, is Country-Of-Origin Labeling of meat products. National Farmers Union fought alongside several other industry groups for years to label meat, both to give consumers a choice in what they purchased at the meat counter, and to aid US producers, because when given the choice, consumers in this country will buy US Beef and not think twice. 

However, the meat packing industry has always fought against COOL, stating basically that consumers didn’t really NEED to know what country their meat came from, and that it was just too hard to keep all those animals separate anyway, and we should just forget the whole thing. Quite a bunch of nonsense, but nonsense backed by a ton of lobbying clout and $$$$. We finally prevailed, and we had national COOL as law in 2013, 2014, and 2015, but other countries were battling the law at the World Trade Organization (WTO), on the grounds that our product being labeled and differentiated from theirs was negatively impacting their producers, violating the provisions of various free trade agreements. The law was tweaked twice and re-submitted to the WTO, but in 2015 Congress decided to give up on that fight and repealed COOL.

Here’s the thing, though: Those meat packing companies, the ones who always said COOL was an impossible, over-bearing regulation, never stopped labeling meat when the law was repealed! But, the law was gone, and replaced by a Food Safety Information Service rule. That rule says basically: Any meat product that comes into a USDA-inspected processing facility and undergoes a change in its structure can be labeled “Product of the USA.” Key word: any. A box of side of beef cutouts from Brazil, Australia, Mexico, or anywhere else can come into the country, be processed into your chuck roasts, rib steaks, sirloins, etc., and be labeled “Product of the USA.” They’ve taken all the work that those of us in the industry did on behalf of US producers and consumers, and basically turned it into a method to mislead consumers. Why? $$$.

So, you ask, what can be done? Several states have tried to create state-level COOL, by passing laws that require a placard in the grocery store to accurately describe a meat product’s origin, either by saying Product of the USA, or Country of Origin Unknown, processed in the USA (or some variation of that language). This year, there are a couple of attempts to create a law like this in Montana, and MFU is monitoring them closely, so stay tuned.

So why is it important? Well, for one, consumers want to know what they’re buying and eating, and the current rule is an active impediment to that pursuit. Certainly most beef consumed in this country is domestically produced, but that’s the point, isn’t it? You, Joe and Jane Consumer, want to know what you’re getting, and you currently don’t know. 

Second, the beef industry is consolidating and globalizing to the point where producers are at risk of losing their independence, and their ability to discover a fair price for their product. The US hog and chicken industries are basically run by the meat-packing industry, with no competitive marketing available to producers even if they want any. The largest meat company in the world, JBS, is now Brazilian-owned. You can see how this system could lead both to producers being squeezed into a system of dependence on the packers, and to consumers being sold product which has no verifiable information about where it may have come from.

Whew, that was long. I guess that’s why she keeps me away from here most of the time! I hope you learned a little something, anyway, and that it kept your interest. Thanks for reading, talk to you again sometime!

Wow! Thanks Jeff for that super informative post! I hope everyone learned something. What can you do as an individual consumer who cares about where their meat and food comes from? 
  • Buy and eat locally, especially in places that work with local and small scale producers.
  • Get to know some farmers. You may be able to purchase beef or other food directly from them. If nothing else, you'll learn a whole lot more about food production!
  • Join farm/food advocacy groups, such as Montana Farmers Union. You don't have to be a farmer to care about where your food comes from and groups like MFU are working to keep farmers on the farm and keep good information in the hands of consumers.
  • Contact your local representative and let them know your thoughts on COOL or any other issues you may have a "beef" with! (See what I did there?!?! haha!)
Product of the USA! (Or should we say Siberia?!?!)