The Flush - It's All About The Grass

“The Flush”.  If you are not in the dairy industry, it’s a phrase that conjures up the face of an embarrassed young girl.  For me, hopelessly engrossed in a new business that’s rooted in traditional dairy, its living proof that our cows and goats do in fact eat grass.

In early June and September our plant is full.  Totally full.  That means we have lines of trucks waiting to unload, staff that hover over our processing facility making constant adjustments to maximize our throughput, a drier that’s running 24/7, and people who have worked 7 days a week for several weeks.  In February, we were nowhere close to full.  Wiser people who have been around a while said, just wait until June.  I thought that meant we would see a bit more whey from each of our plants.  I had no idea how much more whey we could get…

And it’s not just more whey, it’s different whey.  Some of our cheese plants only make certain types of cheese in the spring.  That’s because their cows and goats and sheep are eating loads of fresh grass in the spring, and fresh grass has different components in it than mature grass or late season grass.  To a cheese maker, different components mean different flavors in their cheese.  Old time cheese makers tell me that the differences can be so pronounced that they change their starter cultures in the spring to enhance the natural flavors and ward off the bitterness that can occur in cheese made from spring milk. 

This is in stark contrast to confinement systems where cows are fed the same rations day in and day out all year.  No variation in feed means no variation in production volume, less variation in flavor, and no need to change cultures or make a different kind of cheese.  Great if what you want to do is produce the same cheese day in and day out; not good if you want distinctive flavors, believe that cows should be allowed to exercise their natural behavior and graze, and are interested in having dairy products with all of their constituent health benefits.

This is all possible because the amazing stomachs of cows change when they graze.  Their guts become huge as the villai expand to break down the grass, so much so that they can look a bit like a cow in one of those 18th century Dutch paintings with tiny legs and a huge girth.  When their guts digest the grass, they extract nutrients, which end up as biochemical components in the milk and the products made from the milk.  The most commonly understood difference between grass fed milk and silage fed milk is the CLA level.  CLAs are a fatty acid that has been shown to have health benefits for people.  Less well understood are a huge range of trace vitamins and minerals that come from the soil, feed the grass, and are consumed by grazing animals.  I just read an amazing book called, “ Soil, Grass, Cancer” that was written in the 1950’s by a French Veterinarian.  In it he discussed the scientific evidence that existed at the time of how depleted soil produced depleted grass which grazing animals then converted into nutrient deficient tissue and milk that was in turn eaten by humans.  The author then went on to cite studies that linked a nutrient deficient diet to cancer.  Not calorie deficient but nutrient deficient in trace minerals like copper.

What I found most concerning about that book was it was written in the 1950’s in France, a time that predates a lot of the worst modern agricultural practices and place that has banned GMOs and still practices relatively traditional farming and values its local and regional food culture.  If the data from the 1950’s showed enough soil nutrient depletion to cause problems for both grazing animals and humans, imagine what we are exposing ourselves to when we eat food produced on severely depleted soils in an industrial food system.

For good reason, people often ask me if our whey is grass fed.  Then they ask if we’ve tested for CLA’s.  What I tell people is that the CLA’s, as fatty acids, follow the cheese not the whey.  Which means that testing our whey for CLA’s will not help us understand whether our cows eat grass.  Beyond there, the component differences are small, but as the book convincingly demonstrates, even small differences in trace elements can make a huge difference.  In our goat whey, for example, the ratio of alpha to beta lactalbumen changes throughout the lactation.  I bet if we tested our cow whey across the season, we would find similar but less consistent variations.  Goats are milked seasonally in this part of the country so they are all hitting their lactation at a similar time and are therefore all in the same stage of their lactation together.  Cows have a longer lactation and milk all year round, so they don’t tend to be as close in their lactation stages unless it is a seasonal dairy.

So it turns out that, even in this world of high tech scientific analysis, the best way for us to tell that our whey comes from animals on pasture is still The Flush: the fact that we have them in Spring and in Fall, the fact that our components vary from month to month, and the fact that we have trucks lined up in June and not in February.  That and driving through the countryside tonight and watching cows literally lope down a grassy field just for the fun of it on an early fall evening.

Brian's Ride with Teraswhey

The most amazing thing about doing what I do is the people I get to work with.  Here's a note from Brian who will be fueled by teraswhey on his ride across the US.  WOW!!!

Tomorrow we embark on a ride across the US.  Leaving from our home town of Santa Barbara, we will travel through the southern part of the US, with a final destination of Charleston, SC.  Passing through 11 states in 3,240 miles, we will ride for 35 days, taking a day off at the Grand Canyon, Taos, Branson and Nashville.  My wife and I will be "powered" by Tera along the way, and while I will likely post on my blog about nutrition over the weeks ahead, I thought I would share a little bit about our planning in this area.  A quick note - we are a married couple, who grow some of their own produce, and by most of the remainder of our fruits, vegetables, meat, pork, chicken and fish from locally sourced providers of organic product wherever possible.  We generally seek out food that is minimally processed, trucked, and not modified by some chemical or external means.  Food is fuel, and we try and make good decisions that support our bodies and our local communities, since we are fortunate enough to live in a place where we can make good choice three times per day.

For anyone who has embarked on even a single day century, and rode again the next day, you are aware that you will likely burn more calories than you can consume on the bike, and while off you are still in a deficit.  Taking into consideration other factors like hydration, the need to rest, and the absence in many parts of the country of locally sourced, organic ingredients, it becomes clear that long distance stage riders must have a plan.  Ours is quite simple.  Whenever possible we eat "real food" like baked sweet or russet potatoes, rice, fruit and occasionally sandwiches while on the bike.  We will, of course, have to supplement our endurance fueling with commercially prepared bars, but this is more of a back up to our core food, and chosen carefully amongst the vast array of products out there.  We drink a combination of water and sports drink to stay hydrated and balanced in our electrolytes, and we pull it all together with our after bike routine.  While showering and stretching, we make rice in a small rice cooker, and mix up a Tera's Whey protein drink.  The two make for a very good combination of clean protein and carbohydrates, and the key is to start taking these in within the first 30 minutes off the bike.  With this meal, we can then generally rest before seeking out dinner, preferably with the products of local farms, dairies, and restaurants that focus on healthy, organic food.  On particularly hot or long days, we may start off with a "liquid breakfast" of Tera's Whey as well, and find the product is well tolerated at either end of our long rides.

Tera's Whey is a particularly significant part of our nutrition strategy.  I stopped eating milk, cheese, and cream about ten years ago, and found that my health and energy were greatly improved.  My nutritional advisor felt what I needed to do was avoid casein.  It wasn't that I suffered from lactose intolerance, it was more a matter of my being constantly congested while consuming these products.  When I first started to prepare for the trip, I experimented with soy, rice, and other protein powers, avoiding whey based products.  These didn't work for me; either because of the nutritional component or the inability to be drunk as a standalone product without requiring juice or milk.  In consultation with sport nutritionists and the advisor who had first steered me away from dairy, we determined that it would be wise to test a variety of whey protein based powders.  The criteria was casein free and organically produced products.  This quickly narrowed down the choices, and I settled on Tera's product line as providing the maximum benefit, and suffer little lymphatic system congestion utilizing this very clean and minimally processed protein source.  I sincerely believe that my ability to tolerate and metabolize the product well is based on how it is made - the quality of the underlying organic ingredients, and the minimal processing that occurs at their factory.  Even the flavorings (where you can truly get in trouble with other "recovery" products) are organic and taste fresh and unadulterated.

Those who want to follow along with us can do so at crosscountrybybike.com.  We will try and post ride statistics everyday at about 3 pm or so (while shaking up a Tera's Organic Whey Protein Drink - Bourbon Vanilla being our flavor of choice), and then follow up with an account of the day and some photos later that evening.

Best wishes from the road,

Brian

Tomorrow we embark on a ride across the US.  Leaving from our home town of Santa Barbara, we will travel through the southern part of the US, with a final destination of Charleston, SC.  Passing through 11 states in 3,240 miles, we will ride for 35 days, taking a day off at the Grand Canyon, Taos, Branson and Nashville.  My wife and I will be "powered" by Tera along the way, and while I will likely post on my blog about nutrition over the weeks ahead, I thought I would share a little bit about our planning in this area.  A quick note - we are a married couple, who grow some of their own produce, and by most of the remainder of our fruits, vegetables, meat, pork, chicken and fish from locally sourced providers of organic product wherever possible.  We generally seek out food that is minimally processed, trucked, and not modified by some chemical or external means.  Food is fuel, and we try and make good decisions that support our bodies and our local communities, since we are fortunate enough to live in a place where we can make good choice three times per day.

For anyone who has embarked on even a single day century, and rode again the next day, you are aware that you will likely burn more calories than you can consume on the bike, and while off you are still in a deficit.  Taking into consideration other factors like hydration, the need to rest, and the absence in many parts of the country of locally sourced, organic ingredients, it becomes clear that long distance stage riders must have a plan.  Ours is quite simple.  Whenever possible we eat "real food" like baked sweet or russet potatoes, rice, fruit and occasionally sandwiches while on the bike.  We will, of course, have to supplement our endurance fueling with commercially prepared bars, but this is more of a back up to our core food, and chosen carefully amongst the vast array of products out there.  We drink a combination of water and sports drink to stay hydrated and balanced in our electrolytes, and we pull it all together with our after bike routine.  While showering and stretching, we make rice in a small rice cooker, and mix up a Tera's Whey protein drink.  The two make for a very good combination of clean protein and carbohydrates, and the key is to start taking these in within the first 30 minutes off the bike.  With this meal, we can then generally rest before seeking out dinner, preferably with the products of local farms, dairies, and restaurants that focus on healthy, organic food.  On particularly hot or long days, we may start off with a "liquid breakfast" of Tera's Whey as well, and find the product is well tolerated at either end of our long rides.

Tera's Whey is a particularly significant part of our nutrition strategy.  I stopped eating milk, cheese, and cream about ten years ago, and found that my health and energy were greatly improved.  My nutritional advisor felt what I needed to do was avoid casein.  It wasn't that I suffered from lactose intolerance, it was more a matter of my being constantly congested while consuming these products.  When I first started to prepare for the trip, I experimented with soy, rice, and other protein powers, avoiding whey based products.  These didn't work for me; either because of the nutritional component or the inability to be drunk as a standalone product without requiring juice or milk.  In consultation with sport nutritionists and the advisor who had first steered me away from dairy, we determined that it would be wise to test a variety of whey protein based powders.  The criteria was casein free and organically produced products.  This quickly narrowed down the choices, and I settled on Tera's product line as providing the maximum benefit, and suffer little lymphatic system congestion utilizing this very clean and minimally processed protein source.  I sincerely believe that my ability to tolerate and metabolize the product well is based on how it is made - the quality of the underlying organic ingredients, and the minimal processing that occurs at their factory.  Even the flavorings (where you can truly get in trouble with other "recovery" products) are organic and taste fresh and unadulterated.

Those who want to follow along with us can do so at crosscountrybybike.com.  We will try and post ride statistics everyday at about 3 pm or so (while shaking up a Tera's Organic Whey Protein Drink - Bourbon Vanilla being our flavor of choice), and then follow up with an account of the day and some photos later that evening.

Best wishes from the road,

Brian

Marking Time

There’s nothing like research to stretch things out.  I am a big fan of making fact based decisions, but it seems like right now we are faced with so many significant changes at once that the scientific method is failing to keep up.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati Medical School published findings last week in the on line Journal of Pediatrics that confirmed that girls are now developing breasts and hitting puberty as young as age seven.  While confirming something that many of us had suspected for a long time after watching our own kids, their friends, nieces and classmates, the study could not present any conclusive explanation of what could be causing this shift.

The study compared 1200 girls age six to eight in New York, Ohio, and California.  It compared the age when the girls showed early signs of puberty against the results of a similar study from 13 years ago.  At 8 years old 18.3% of white girls showed signs of developing breasts, 43% black, and 37% Latina.  In all categories the ages of the girls were statistically significantly younger than they were just 13 years ago. No explanation of the divergence among the races was offered.

The researchers posed two areas for further research.  The first is that the data showed a statistically significant correlation between obesity and early puberty.  In the study, the girls who reached puberty at a young age were also more likely to be obese.  The disturbing thing about this is that these young girls will be at a higher risk of many health problems for the rest of their lives due to their early obesity. Unfortunately, however, correlation doesn’t prove causality.  Is it the obesity that causes the early puberty or is there something out there that is a precursor to one or both?

The second was environmental toxins.  Over 100 chemicals were found in the girls.  The study author, Dr. Frank Biro of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, postulates that pollutants that mimic the female hormone estrogen might also be contributing to early puberty.  “Whether {they be in} food that they’ve eaten, or products that are used for personal care products, as well as products that could be used at their homes”.  Note that the Dr. didn’t call out something like proximity to a nuclear waste site or early exposure to radiation; he called out things that we all have in our lives every day.  Could it be that the food we eat and the personal care products we use are causing early puberty?

What pollutants mimic estrogen?  Carbon chorines used in pesticides, phthalates used in the plastics industry to soften pvc, dioxin that is a byproduct of paper processing, and herbicides. These are all chemicals that can interact with the same receptor molecules inside the body that estrogen can.  The theory is that we may be overdosing living things with excesses of hormone-like signals.  Pesticides and herbicides are certainly used in food production in the US, and we use them on our lawns and in our homes.  Our food comes wrapped in plastic, we use bleached white paper products.  The potential list of everyday contaminants goes on.

So what are we to do?  I heard a doctor interviewed on a cable news channel after the release of the Presidents report of the state of our health that discussed the mounting evidence that organophosphates were associated with ADD in kids.  Imagine thinking your were doing the right thing getting your kids to eat more vegetables, only to find out that the veggies you gave them were making them sick.  This doctor advised people to “eat local food, not something from Mexico”.  What is it about local that means it hasn’t been exposed to chemicals?  We use more chemicals in food production in the US than Mexico does.  Where I live in the Midwest, our local farm production is some of the most chemical intensive in the world. 

As un-cool as it sounds, eating organic food is still important.  Local and organic is the best, but it’s dangerous to confuse local with chemical free.  In the world of Venn diagrams, they are two different circles that overlap but they are not identical.  I also think its interesting that the study authors didn’t attempt to explain the significantly higher rates of early puberty among African American and Latina girls.  It may not be an accident that these demographic groups are more likely to be poor, eat a less healthy diet, be obese, and live in cities, than white children.

Conclusive research moves slowly at best, and may never happen because of the difficulties inherent in conducting scientific research on this kind of long-term effect of multiple factors.  In the meantime, maybe a bit of common sense would work better?  Something is going on that is making animals lower in the food chain multi sexual, sterile [frogs for ex.]; something is here that’s driving down male sperm counts globally; something is making young girls pubescent when they used to be playing with dolls.  Maybe we don’t have time for definitive research?  Maybe we get to work on getting chemicals out of our food now, not decades from now when the research is more definitive.

Thanks Ken!

It seems like every year I’m getting on an airplane out of Madison with a slug of sinuous, gaunt, and ecstatic people who just finished the Wisconsin Ironman.  They sort of limp onto the plane and grimace while they carefully lower their sore bodies into the seats. 

I can’t even imagine attempting to do an Ironman…  Mini-tri’s are daunting enough for me.  People apparently love coming to ours because they can have great ethnic food, run through the University and state capital, and cycle through through rolling farmland on some of the best cycling routes in the country.

I’ve always struggled to figure out how teraswhey can participate in the event.  Booths there are very expensive for a small company like ours and the big athletic nutritional brands take up most of the space. While lots of ironman participants have whey protein in their training regimes, these folks also need lots of carbs, so terawhey is only the right product for recovery for them. They are also heavy users of what I call engineered protein products, because what they do to their bodies involves a level of punishment that stretches them beyond the normal limits of human activity.  That means they don’t tend to care much about unpronounceable additives in their protein powders.

So how does an organic, natural, not engineered product without a big marketing budget participate in the ironman?  This year my marketing genius friend Ken who owns Fromagination finally figured it out: Fromagination will be handing out pouches of teraswhey in their store, which is right by the finish line, most likely to the family members who are in town to support their loved ones who are busy doing the impossible.  We use the raw whey from a number of the cheeses they carry in the store, which is why we are there.  Ken and I are betting that lot of the people here to support their athletes or watch the race care about their own health and are looking for a whey product that is more natural and made for them.

Thanks Ken!

Getting Out of the Potash Corner

It’s a funny thing about being a manufacturer of a nutritional product like teraswhey, I get to care where my ingredients come from.  And since whey comes from milk, things that impact raising cows or goats are things that I care about.  This is why I care about Potash.  Without it, we can’t grow the forages (including grasses) and crops that feed livestock.

Since my last potash posting, I’ve done more research on alternatives to potash as a source of potassium in soil.  The Rodale website has information on it for helping diagnose nutritional deficiencies in soil.  In the case of potassium deficiency, it recommends adding composted manure, wood ashes, greensand, or seaweed.  I have yet to figure out what greensand is, but otherwise the list was a bit reassuring for small-scale agriculture.  We can compost manure and find sources of wood ash – may include burning your garden in the fall as part of a soil improvement effort, for example.

What about large-scale production alternatives?  Seaweed could be promising, so I used the global trade database Alibaba to search for seaweed fertilizer companies.  Wow.  More bad news for us.  There were 8 companies listed there, none of which are in the US.  3 were Chinese, 3 Indian, 1 Pilipino, and 1 Peruvian. 

Next I dug around more and discovered that the American agricultural giant Cargill owns 60% of Mosaic, a US company headquartered in Minnesota and traded on the NY stock exchange.  Mosaic has 3 potash mines in Saskatchewan and one in the US.  All of their planned supply expansion is in Canada.  They plan to take their production from 8.6MT to 15MT.  US Potash consumption in 2010 is estimated to be 4.1 MT.; Mosaic’s US production is 1.5MT.

So, does it feel better to know that our alternative for large-scale supply is controlled by Cargill?  Yes, it’s certainly better than no alternative.  And yet, this has its own ramifications – large-scale agriculture in the US is increasingly controlled by a handful of very, very large companies, Monsanto, Cargill being the leaders.  The smaller scale alternatives are all overseas in places like China and India.  This feels a bit like alternative energy projects.  The largest manufacturer of wind turbines is now located in India.  China is on track to develop its alternative energy technologies and use far faster than we are in the US.

What has happened to the US being the worldwide leader in innovation? If we ever want to have middle class jobs again, we need to start creating innovative young companies that produce alternative technologies to those that are controlled by global giants.  Here in the Great Lakes, maybe that could be freshwater seaweed fertilizer?

Oh, and check out this recipe for making your own seaweed fertilizer:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5362326_make-own-organic-seaweed-fertilizer.html

Can Berries be Sexy?

I often tell people that great design is one of those things that people know when they see but find difficult to explain in words.  That’s because, like great art, great design is appropriate and compelling and stimulating in ways that do not reside in rational thought.

When we were first talking about packaging for teraswhey, I had an image in my head of what I wanted.  It was inspired by a product I bought in London that was a series of cubes in a sleeve, each cube being a type of chocolate from another part of the world.  One side of the cube was white and had a picture of the particular single cacao bean on it.  It was so simply dramatic and seemed to align with the products I was making – clean, naturally formulated, few ingredients.

So we decided to include among a wide range of design approaches one that was white with nothing but a glamour shot of the relevant fruit or flavor on the front.  It was a radically different approach to packaging a protein product.  The industry has made whey protein, something that has been consumed as a medicinal food for centuries, into a scientifically re-engineered agglomeration, and as a result, the packaging has to list a plethora of data and claims and certifications about contents and manufacturing processes.  Alternatively, the body building community creates brands whose fundamental personality is physical power and narcissism:  pictures of guys with six packs and women with biceps and bulging veins in their arms.  My packaging designer, a person who I’ve worked with forever and trust implicitly, kept telling me that fruit pictures was a risky approach; my sales experts kept asking for more copy.  And what was this poem thing? It didn’t even line up…

In the end I decided to stick to my vision and my impossible to explain gut and create packaging that was beautiful and emotionally compelling in its simplicity.  The reception in the market has been phenomenal; everyone loves it and can’t explain why, which was my goal.

When I do events, 95% of men who buy something choose a berry over chocolate and vanilla.  95% of women do the opposite.  I told this to a male medical doctor and he laughed, lined up my berry canisters, and told me that when men look at my berry packaging, the primitive part of their brains are thinking its time to eat, hunt, or have sex.

Who knew berries were so sexy???

Painted into a Potash Corner

Just when I thought I understood the implications of our increasingly concentrated and globalized food system, a new dimension crops up.  This time it's potash.

People have been applying potash to soil pretty much ever since sedentary agriculture began.  The word potash comes from the Dutch word potaschen.  People would make the potassium carbonate they needed to replenish their soils by leaching wood ashes and evaporating the solution in large iron pots, leaving a white residue called pot ash.  Pot ash was spread on soil to replenish the potassium lost to crop production.

Plants use potassium ions for protein syntheses and for the opening and closing of stomata.  When plants don’t get enough potassium, they lose the ability to maintain these processes.  Leaves turn brown and scorch, veins turn yellow, and purple spots can develop on the underside of leaves.  They become more prone to damage from wind, drought, frost, and disease.  Most balanced natural fertilizers such as manure contain some potash, which helps minimize the amount of supplement needed.  However, modern, chemical based fertilizers derive most if not all of their potassium from potash.

The first global trade in potash occurred in the 1700 – 1800’s.  Farmers who cleared the United States for agriculture made potash from the tree stumps and roots they dug up.  The potash was shipped back to Europe. Fast forward to 2010. Now over 150 countries use potash, and it is currently produced in 14.  Potash Corp of Canada currently produces 20% of the world supply and has 60% of the world’s known reserves.  The next largest producers are Russia and Belarus.  8 companies control 80% of the supply.  The US has only 1.6% of known reserves, which makes our dependence of foreign potash far worse than our dependence on foreign oil.

As incomes of people around the world increase, they tend to migrate toward a western diet and more meat consumption.  More meat consumed means more livestock, more feed required, and more industrial style crop production to feed the livestock.  Potash that used to command $200 per ton now fetches over $800.  That price is projected to double in the next decade. 

400% price increases are now attracting speculative capital to the once sleepy global fertilizer business.  In the 1980’s the government of Saskachuwan had a hard time selling shares in the IPO for its privatizing Potash Corp.  Now the company is the largest listed fertilizer company in the world and has suitors from Australia, China, and Brazil offering billions for the privatized company.  The headline in China’s Business Journal reads, “if BHP buys Potash Corp, is it the end of Chinese agriculture”?

Back in the US, the Wall Street Journal is covering the story as a tale of a billion dollar corporate takeover.  But what about the potential vulnerability this exposes in our food system?  Canada is one of the most politically stable countries in the world and it's right over our border.  The Canadian government, now recognizing the downside of privatization for its own not insubstantial agricultural sector, is trying to figure out a way to keep the company under Canadian ownership.  What would happen if Potash Corp was owned by a Chinese company?  A Brazilian company?  An Australian company? Do we care? Since we cannot support large scale agriculture in the US without a source of large scale potash, we could find ourselves at the mercy of foreign governments at a scale we've never experience before.  Even small scale organic food production systems require a source of potash.

Does anyone remember how to make their own potash from ashes or composted leaves?