Tag Archives: beyond organic

Pasture-to-Plate.com and the Chilcotin Plateau

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25-rafter-ranch

This is Rafter 25 Ranch the base for pasture-to-plate.com. This is a beautiful example of the Chilcotin Plateau with its wide open spaces and low population density.

This summer I had the great pleasure of visiting the Chilcotin Plateau. We traveled through historic Gang Ranch, reputed at one time to be the largest ranch in the world, controlling four million acres. Dale Alsager wrote a book called The Incredible Gang Ranch. Dale Alsager talked about the problems facing the modern rancher. He felt the only way for a ranch to survive and be profitable in the present bureaucratic environment was to control the whole food system including: production, processing and distribution. Considering the modern complexity of completely controlling a food distribution system, I have rarely seen a small family-run company capable of this task. Pasture-to-Plate.com is one example.

Pasture-to-Plate.com was started by Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg, owners of Rafter 25 Ranch, located just north of Redstone, BC. Their ranch is beyond organic, chemical free, biodynamic and pasture based. The family has lived on the ranch for over 28 years. This is the “pasture” part of the business.

Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg have three daughters: Dominique, Barbara and Fiona Schellenberg which run different parts of the family business. Dominique runs Chezacut Wilderness Adventures, an ecotourism part of Rafter 25 Ranch. Barbara and Fiona help run the Drive Organics Retail Outlet and Ethical Kitchen and out of Vancouver, BC. This is the “plate” part of the business. These “spin-off” businesses have been described by Arthur Koestler and later Joel Salatin as holonic development.

Recently, I drove up to Redstone, BC for the grand opening of the Chilcotin Harvest Abbattoir. This is a beyond-state-of-the-art slaughtering facility. This facility has been the dream of Felix and Jasmin Schellenberg for many years. Big projects like this do not happen without help. The Schellenberg family enlisted the help of a Master Butcher from Switzerland. Jakob Jud moved his whole family to Redstone, BC and they all work at the abbattoir.

The Schellenberg family have a deep appreciation of the suffering of animals and want the animals to be as comfortable as possible before slaughtering. Long distance shipping is very stressful for animals so slaughtering on the ranch or very near the ranch is ideal. It’s also cost effective. (Unfortunately, our government regulators are not as concerned about the welfare of your dinner.) The amount of government regulation the family would have had to contend with boggles the mind. Controlling the processing of the food was the final part of the chain. This is the “to” part of the business.

I had a chance to try some of their products. I tried European-style Wieners, Bratwurst, Pepperoni, Bresaola, Land j?ger, Jerky, and pork lard. If you are looking for cheap food, you will not find it here. If you want the highest quality product, made with organic additives, by extremely skilled people, this is the place to buy. Barbara Schellenberg is the Weston A Price Foundation Chapter Leader for Vancouver, BC so the family values nourishing traditional food preparation methods. Their products are traditional. Try their wieners if you want to know what a wiener should look and taste like.

If you follow the Specific Carbohydrate Diet please be careful to read the ingredient list. Their ingredients are the best you will find commercially but could cause problems for sensitive people. Just because the food is organic, pasture based, and made by knowledgeable people doesn’t mean the food will be problem free. I reacted to those same delicious wieners. It is possible something in the “organic spice mixture” was the problem. If you interested in what kind of additives can be put into an “organic spice mixture” please read Canadian Organic Standards: 32.311 Permitted Substances Lists. Be warned, it is a long document.

If you would like to read more about holonic business development please read two articles in the Stockman Grass Farmer: Ghost in the Machine and 50 Steers a Year is a Good Living. In the case of Pasture-to-Plate.com the “mother-ship” is the Rafter 25 Ranch.

Pastured Poultry Profits

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Here is a family member of a Kamloops chicken radical. Backyard chickens help people that have never had contact with livestock connect with our food heritage. Photo courtesy of www.aholliday.com.

I have been reading Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin who runs Polyface Farm. We could not get this book through inter-library loan but fortunately it was someone’s birthday. This book is a must read for anyone interested in a unique system of poultry production.

We are trying to implement Joel Salatin’s system of “perennial prairie polyculture” on our property in Kamloops. As I stated in another blog, we are fortunate to have over an acre of land in the City of Kamloops and thus can have chickens on our property. I believe it would be a very good thing for the City of Kamloops to allow all single family zoned properties this same right. Unfortunately, this is not the case at the moment. If you are wanting backyard chickens contact the Kamloops Urban Hen Movement and work to change this bylaw or you may have to consider civil disobedience.

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Pastured Poultry Profits is my favorite book written by Joel Salatin.

We have been running the Cornish Cross breed, which is known for its incredible feed to meat conversion ratio. They go from the egg to the freezer in eight weeks. Watching these chicks is a lesson in sloth and gluttony. The chicks gorge on feed, then fall over and pass-out until the next session of gorging. My sister Christine has been horrified watching these selectively bred birds do what comes natural to them. The trick with these birds, when it comes to pasturing, is to make it easy for the birds to get to the pasture. The birds do not like walking much.

Joel Salatin has designed a system of “chicken tractors”, which are small pens that are moved daily to new pasture. This solves the walking problem for the birds. The farmer does the moving and the birds do the eating. The fresh pasture provides diversity of forage and a variety of insect life which makes for very healthy birds with incredible flavor. With daily movement of the pens there is no smell and the birds are not living in their excrement like what is typical for industrially raised chickens. With fresh air, a clean environment, and good food these birds do not need to be given medicated feed just to survive.

In Kamloops we have what Joel Salatin called “brittle” grasslands. The area will produce well if irrigated but some of his methods will not work here. So far, moving the chicken tractors to new pasture has worked on our property. We don’t have what I would consider good pasture and I would like to lease pasture in the area if we were to do more birds.

We will be producing enough birds to have chicken dinner, twice a week, all winter long. Slaughtering day is not a fun experience but at a store price of $20 to $25 for an organic bird, I can find a way to do it. These birds done with Joel Salatin’s method are considered “beyond organic pastured chicken”, and are another product not available through the industrial food system.

We are in week four of our production cycle. I will keep you posted regarding outcomes of our research in using Joel Salatin’s methods in Kamloops.

Update September 7, 2009: For an update please go to the posting called Slaughtering Chickens dated September 7, 2009. We lost one turkey within the first few days and one chicken about a week ago. I found it breast up in the hoophouse. Cornish Cross chickens are prone to heart attacks. We had under 2% death rate. A hoophouse, also known as a gobbledygo, is another Joel Salatin method of chicken rearing. It is used during winter and in areas where pasture is limited. It requires a deep litter to fix nitrogen and not loose it to the air. This system worked well for us.