An Accidental Cattle Ranch Points the Way in Sustainable Farming

- By STEPHANIE STROM - November 11, 2013 - The New York Times

PESCADERO, Calif. — When Tom Steyer first learned that his wife, Kat Taylor, wanted to sell beef from the cattle herd on their ranch here, he rolled his eyes.

Mr. Steyer is the founder of Farallon Capital, one of the largest hedge funds in the world with some $20 billion under management for universities, foundations and some of the country’s wealthiest people — and he was sure beef was a lousy business investment, particularly on a small scale.

“Practically every year since 1865 has been a bad year for beef,” he said, only somewhat in jest. “And Kathryn” — virtually everyone else calls her Kat — “knew nothing about selling beef.”

Mr. Steyer may have made billions of dollars for his investors before retiring this year, but he would have lost money betting against Ms. Taylor and Leftcoast Grassfed, the brand name of the Steyer-Taylor beef.

While Ms. Taylor says, modestly, that it is hard to know how profitable the business is, her husband said it had outperformed his expectations. “We could sell 10 times the amount we raise, in 10 minutes,” he said.

The couple did not set out to raise prime grass-fed beef at TomKat Ranch, which sprawls across some 1,800 acres in this rural community near the ocean off Highway 1. The plan was to create a model conservation project, demonstrating ways to improve soil health, use solar energy and conserve water. “This wasn’t about cows,” Ms. Taylor said.

But once cows became part of the plan to restore the land, it was not too long before TomKat also became an agricultural project, one that the couple hope will help develop sustainable farming practices that can be put to use far beyond Pescadero.

“Think of the ranch as a huge science experiment,” Mr. Steyer said. “Can you raise animals sustainably? Can the land become the carbon sink that it once was? Can you demonstrate a way of doing agriculture, raising food, that doesn’t damage the environment?

Since his retirement, Mr. Steyer has stepped up his work on environmental causes, creating a national campaign to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and spending heavily to support candidates around the country whose credentials on environmental issues mesh with his goals.

No statistics are available on the size of the market for grass-fed beef. But in a sign of the growing interest in it, the Agriculture Department this fall began publishing a monthly report on prices for such meat in partnership with the Wallace Center, part of a network of nonprofit groups established by the Rockefellers that work on food issues.

Ms. Taylor has a full-time job as chief executive of One PacificCoast Bank, the community development bank she and Mr. Steyer started. On a sunny spring day this year, she drove out to the TomKat ranch to talk about Leftcoast Grassfed, arriving in a beat-up Toyota SUV together with her constant companions Fang and Ziggy, a wheezy pug and fluffy chow.

She said the ranch’s goal was to help reverse the trend of lower levels of carbon in soil, a worldwide issue that coincides with the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the air.

In a book, “Grass-Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef,” the author Julius Ruechel theorized that soil was enriched as a result of the migration of giant herds of ruminants and other animals across the world’s great plains.

According to his book, large herds of heavy, hoofed animals help force dead plant materials back into the ground, where they are broken down by microorganisms in the soil. Herd migration also churns up the earth, allowing rain to penetrate it further and slowing runoff, and natural “fertilizers” containing additional microbes are left in the herd’s wake.

All of that produces more and better grass, which then feeds the herds the next time they migrate across the land.

“The conservation movement now largely says these large, migrating herds aren’t so bad after all,” said Wendy Millet, the ranch director who formerly worked at the Nature Conservancy. “Ranches can be working landscapes if people understand how animals and land work together.”

TomKat is aiming to mimic the migratory patterns that developed the world’s great plains on a small scale by rotating cows, birds and pigs around the ranch in a deliberate dance.

The ranch has been farmed since at least the mid-1800s, when homesteaders named Honsiger contributed their name to a creek on the property that still is home to coho salmon and steelhead. The Honsigers put up barns and houses, orchards and stock ponds that still dot the property, and their descendants have perpetual access to a grave site near its entrance.

In the 1970s, it was owned by an Austrian count and countess, Alfred and Beatrice Von Homola, who used it for family retreats and entertaining. “Then the count died of a heart attack while on a European voyage, and the countess was heartbroken and reportedly couldn’t bear to return to the ranch,” Ms. Taylor said.

The countess leased the property to new occupants who effectively worked it to the bone. “They literally had sold everything, even the topsoil,” Mr. Steyer said. “People came in with dump trucks and carted it away.”

When a friend of Ms. Taylor’s called her about the ranch in 2002, technology titans were snapping up big swathes of property in the area and putting up gates and fences. “He told me if we didn’t buy it, it was going to end up as a housing development,” she said.

Having grown up in San Mateo, Ms. Taylor wanted to keep the ranch as an integral part of the community.

This spring, for instance, silos were installed where nongenetically engineered feeds are stored that can be bought by nearby farmers and ranchers. Such feeds are in scarce supply and thus out of reach of most farmers, but TomKat makes the investment in a bulk buy and then passes on the savings to its neighbors.

The silo is housed at a barn leased to the Early Bird Ranch, a poultry, egg and pig business owned by Kevin Watt and his wife, ShaeLynn.

When TomKat’s herd has finished grazing a pasture and been moved to another spot, Early Bird’s chickens and turkeys move in and dine on the insects that have been attracted to the cattle droppings.

“The bugs are a good source of protein for my birds, and my birds eat up the insects and parasites that are bad for the cattle when they return,” Mr. Watt said. “And of course, they leave a little beneficial deposit behind, too.”

The Watts sell their chickens locally in farmers’ markets and sell eggs, bacon, Italian sausage and other products via a website, goodeggs.com, in the San Francisco market.

Mr. Watt said Early Bird cleared roughly $6 in profit on each bird. Out of that, they make a lease payment to TomKat for the acres they use for their poultry, which rotates depending on where the TomKat herd has been. “It really is a symbiotic system, for the chicken and turkeys and cows as well as for Early Bird and the ranch,” he said.

Similarly, a company devoted to aquaponics, Inka Biospheric Systems, is developing a fish and vegetable business on the ranch. Inka’s goal is to raise the food it needs for its fish, things like barley fodder, earthworms and black soldier flies, using waste manure generated by the horses Ms. Taylor keeps on the ranch.

The vermicompost byproduct Inka produces is used to fertilize more stressed locations on the ranch and made into compost teas that can be spread on the orchards and on livestocks as a natural pesticide.

“We’re the garbage men of the organization,” said Brian Whitney, the recently retired chief executive of Inka. “What we are slowly doing is taking on the waste streams the ranch creates and converting those into assets.”

Inka pays the ranch a portion of its revenue, but its profits, when it starts generating them, will flow into a philanthropic foundation, in the same way that a foundation benefits from the operations of One PacificCoast Bank.

“We want to see if we can create a closed-loop system here — water with fish waste will get pumped into the land, and the land will produce things that go back into the fish,” Ms. Taylor said.

Not everything in the experiment works, of course. The ranch originally bred its herd to deliver calves in the fall on the theory that since most calves are born in the spring, it would be producing fresh beef in the off-season.

But the colostrum in cow’s milk is highest in the spring, when the herd is eating the new grass.

“Nature intended for babies to be born in the spring, and we eventually had to go along,” Ms. Taylor said.

The herd, which started with 30 heifers in 2006, now numbers 120, about half of which are breeding stock. They produced about 60 calves this year.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the subtitle of Julius Ruechel’s book “Grass-Fed Cattle.” It is “How to Produce and Market Natural Beef,” not “How to Raise and Market Natural Beef.” Also, an earlier version misspelled the formal first name of Kat Taylor, an owner of the TomKat Ranch. It is Kathryn, not Katherine.

28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima

Michael Snyder - Global Research, October 23, 2013

The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center.  It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated.  As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States.  Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean.  That means that the total amouont of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain.  Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin.  They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation.  We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse.  The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima…

1. Polar bears, seals and walruses along the Alaska coastline are suffering from fur loss and open sores…

Wildlife experts are studying whether fur loss and open sores detected in nine polar bears in recent weeks is widespread and related to similar incidents among seals and walruses.

The bears were among 33 spotted near Barrow, Alaska, during routine survey work along the Arctic coastline. Tests showed they had “alopecia, or loss of fur, and other skin lesions,” the U.S. Geological Survey said in a statement.

2. There is an epidemic of sea lion deaths along the California coastline…

At island rookeries off the Southern California coast, 45 percent of the pups born in June have died, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service based in Seattle. Normally, less than one-third of the pups would die.   It’s gotten so bad in the past two weeks that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event.”

3. Along the Pacific coast of Canada and the Alaska coastline, the population of sockeye salmon is at a historic low.  Many are blaming Fukushima.

4. Something is causing fish all along the west coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

5. A vast field of radioactive debris from Fukushima that is approximately the size of California has crossed the Pacific Ocean and is starting to collide with the west coast.

6. It is being projected that the radioactivity of coastal waters off the U.S. west coast could double over the next five to six years.

7. Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

8. One test in California found that 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna were contaminated with radiation from Fukushima.

9. Back in 2012, the Vancouver Sun reported that cesium-137 was being found in a very high percentage of the fish that Japan was selling to Canada…

• 73 percent of mackerel tested

• 91 percent of the halibut

• 92 percent of the sardines

• 93 percent of the tuna and eel

• 94 percent of the cod and anchovies

• 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark and monkfish

10. Canadian authorities are finding extremely high levels of nuclear radiation in certain fish samples…

Some fish samples tested to date have had very high levels of radiation: one sea bass sample collected in July, for example, had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium.

11. Some experts believe that we could see very high levels of cancer along the west coast just from people eating contaminated fish…

“Look at what’s going on now: They’re dumping huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean — no one expected that in 2011,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told Global Security Newswire. “We could have large numbers of cancer from ingestion of fish.”

12. BBC News recently reported that radiation levels around Fukushima are “18 times higher” than previously believed.

13. An EU-funded study concluded that Fukushima released up to 210 quadrillion becquerels of cesium-137 into the atmosphere.

14. Atmospheric radiation from Fukushima reached the west coast of the United States within a few days back in 2011.

15. At this point, 300 tons of contaminated water is pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

16. A senior researcher of marine chemistry at the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute says that “30 billion becquerels of radioactive cesium and 30 billion becquerels of radioactive strontium” are being released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every single day.

17. According to Tepco, a total of somewhere between 20 trillion and 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium have gotten into the Pacific Ocean since the Fukushima disaster first began.

18. According to a professor at Tokyo University, 3 gigabecquerels of cesium-137 are flowing into the port at Fukushima Daiichi every single day.

19. It has been estimated that up to 100 times as much nuclear radiation has been released into the ocean from Fukushima than was released during the entire Chernobyl disaster.

20. One recent study concluded that a very large plume of cesium-137 from the Fukushima disaster will start flowing into U.S. coastal waters early next year…

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016.

21. It is being projected that significant levels of cesium-137 will reach every corner of the Pacific Ocean by the year 2020.

22. It is being projected that the entire Pacific Ocean will soon “have cesium levels 5 to 10 times higher” than what we witnessed during the era of heavy atomic bomb testing in the Pacific many decades ago.

23. The immense amounts of nuclear radiation getting into the water in the Pacific Ocean has caused environmental activist Joe Martino to issue the following warning…

“Your days of eating Pacific Ocean fish are over.”

24. The Iodine-131, Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 that are constantly coming from Fukushima are going to affect the health of those living the the northern hemisphere for a very, very long time.  Just consider what Harvey Wasserman had to say about this…

Iodine-131, for example, can be ingested into the thyroid, where it emits beta particles (electrons) that damage tissue. A plague of damaged thyroids has already been reported among as many as 40 percent of the children in the Fukushima area. That percentage can only go higher. In developing youngsters, it can stunt both physical and mental growth. Among adults it causes a very wide range of ancillary ailments, including cancer.

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish caught as far away as California. It spreads throughout the body, but tends to accumulate in the muscles.

Strontium-90’s half-life is around 29 years. It mimics calcium and goes to our bones.

25. According to a recent Planet Infowars report, the California coastline is being transformed into “a dead zone”…

The California coastline is becoming like a dead zone.

If you haven’t been to a California beach lately, you probably don’t know that the rocks are unnaturally CLEAN – there’s hardly any kelp, barnacles, sea urchins, etc. anymore and the tide pools are similarly eerily devoid of crabs, snails and other scurrying signs of life… and especially as compared to 10 – 15 years ago when one was wise to wear tennis shoes on a trip to the beach in order to avoid cutting one’s feet on all the STUFF of life – broken shells, bones, glass, driftwood, etc.

There are also days when I am hard-pressed to find even a half dozen seagulls and/or terns on the county beach.

You can still find a few gulls trolling the picnic areas and some of the restaurants (with outdoor seating areas) for food, of course, but, when I think back to 10 – 15 years ago, the skies and ALL the beaches were literally filled with seagulls and the haunting sound of their cries both day and night…

NOW it’s unnaturally quiet.

26. A study conducted last year came to the conclusion that radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster could negatively affect human life along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Alaska “for decades”.

27. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is being projected that the cleanup of Fukushima could take up to 40 years to complete.

28. Yale Professor Charles Perrow is warning that if the cleanup of Fukushima is not handled with 100% precision that humanity could be threatened “for thousands of years“…

“Conditions in the unit 4 pool, 100 feet from the ground, are perilous, and if any two of the rods touch it could cause a nuclear reaction that would be uncontrollable. The radiation emitted from all these rods, if they are not continually cool and kept separate, would require the evacuation of surrounding areas including Tokyo. Because of the radiation at the site the 6,375 rods in the common storage pool could not be continuously cooled; they would fission and all of humanity will be threatened, for thousands of years.”

Are you starting to understand why so many people are so deeply concerned about what is going on at Fukushima?

The Fluoride Deception exposes the truth about water fluoridation and the phosphate mining industry

- By Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

The Fluoride Deception is the latest mini documentary from Mike Adams, executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center. Through the use of animation and motion graphics, it exposes the truth about where fluoride really comes from: The toxic byproducts of the phosphate mining industry!

Here is the transcript of this documentary:

Fluoride. Dentists say that drinking it can protect your teeth against cavities. Cities and towns all across the world actually dump it into the water supply, hoping to indiscriminately medicate the population through their tap water faucets.

The official story on fluoride sounds wonderful: Drink the stuff, and you won't get cavities, we're told. It's a nice story. But there's another side to this story -- the side you're never told. And it starts with the astonishing but verifiable fact that nearly all the fluoride dripped into municipal water supplies isn't naturally occurring fluoride at all.

In fact, it's actually a combination of hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride.

These two chemical are considered highly toxic by the EPA. They're actually classified as hazardous waste and when packaged for transportation, they must be labeled as poison and handled by workers wearing industrial safety gear.

So what are hexafluorosilicic acid and sodium silicofluoride, and where do they come from?

That's the part of this story that you probably won't believe. That is, not until you check it out yourself. Because the more you look into the mythology of fluoride, the more bizarre this story becomes.

And this bizarre story begins at phosphate mining companies. Phosphate is an important mineral used in fertilizers. It's mined from natural rock deposits scattered across the world, and the phosphate rock is then refined to produce phosphoric acid. If that name sounds familiar, that's because it's one of the main ingredients in carbonated sodas such as Coke and Pepsi. Phosphoric acid is often compared to battery acid. It's a highly acidic liquid that is believed to be the primary reason why drinking sodas can result in kidney stones and a loss of bone mineral density.

Phosphate rock is also used to create fertilizers. The problem is, phosphate is often contaminated with high levels of fluoride -- as much as 40,000 parts per million, or up to 4% of the raw ore. To remove the fluoride, sulfuric acid is added to a wet slurry of phosphate and water. This causes the fluoride to vaporize, creating highly toxic gaseous compounds such as hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride.

These toxic fluoride chemicals used to be released directly from the smokestacks of phosphate mining operations, but the nearby farms suffered devastating losses of cattle and food crops which withered away and died due to... guess what? Fluoride poisoning.

In order to stop this environmental destruction, the phosphate mining industry put in place a way to capture the toxic fluoride chemical vapors so that they wouldn't be released into the air and kill the surrounding livestock and vegetation. This was accomplished by installing "wet scrubbers" that captured the toxic fluoride chemicals, preventing them from being released into the environment and killing the plant and animal life living nearby.

It is from these wet scrubbers that toxic fluoride chemicals are now harvested. They're collected, re-packaged, shipped to your local city, then dumped into the municipal water supply. So instead of these toxic fluoride chemicals being released by the phosphate mining smokestacks, they are instead captured, and then released into the water supply of large cities where the chemicals then contaminate the water of millions of people at a time.

This is called water fluoridation.

When dentists and doctors say they support fluoride in the water supply, what they're really saying is that they support the mass poisoning of the population with a highly toxic hazardous waste product that, if it weren't dripped into the water supply, it would have to be disposed of as highly toxic hazardous waste under strict EPA regulations.

Curiously, it is a violation of federal law to dump hexafluorosilicic acid or sodium silicofluoride into the water. Such an act, in fact, is considered an act of terrorism. Yet it is mysteriously allowed today as long as it is accompanied by a loosely-justified claim that "we're doing this to stop cavities."

But setting aside for the moment the inconvenient truth that water fluoridation involves the illegal act of dumping hazardous waste into the water supply, there's another important question in all this: Do these toxic fluoride chemicals actually prevent cavities?

Roughly ninety-nine percent of the municipal water pumped through any given city never ends up in the mouths of the people. Most water is used for showering, washing dishes, washing clothes, watering yards and filling pools. Almost none of the fluoride dripped into the water supply comes into contact with human teeth.

It does, however, end up downstream, where it contaminates rivers, streams and ultimately the oceans of our world. In this way, water fluoridation policies have become a convenient loophole through which the phosphate mining industry can dump its toxic waste byproducts into the environment without adhering to any EPA regulations whatsoever. Phosphate mining companies even turn a profit by selling their hazardous waste to cities, then labeling it "fluoride" even though this name is scientifically inaccurate.

All this raises an obvious question: If fluoride kills cows, and crops, and fish, and is considered a hazardous waste chemical by the EPA, then how could it be healthy to ingest?

And why don't doctors and dentists, even though they openly recommend fluoride -- sometimes with irrational exuberance -- know where fluoride really comes from? If dentists knew fluoride was derived from the chemical waste of the phosphate mining industry, would they still recommend that we consume it?

The truth about fluoride is a lot like the truth about Enron, or Goldman Sachs, or every other shocking revelation that nobody believed until it suddenly became obvious that we were all being fooled for so long. Fluoride is a clever scheme, where a hazardous waste chemical is dumped into the environment by passing it through the bodies of people first. We, the People, have become the toxic waste dump site of the phosphate mining industry, and chances are, your local dentist fully supports this entire process.

Over the last several decades, an astonishing twenty-four studies have established a statistical link between fluoride exposure and low IQs in children. One study conducted by the Center for Endemic Disease Control in China found that each additional milligram of fluoride detected in every liter of a child's urine was associated with a 0.59 point decrease in their IQ score. Another study found that fluoride exposure slashed the number of children achieving "high IQs" by more than 70 percent.

It shouldn't be surprising, of course, to learn that a consuming a hazardous chemical might impair brain function. Water fluoridation, in turns out, may be the root cause of the alarming drop in academic aptitude among children in first-world nations. Historically speaking, the mathematics that used to be taught to eighth graders in the 1950s are now college-level courses in 2011. Maybe the reason why Johnny can't read or spell is because Johnny's been drinking too much fluoride.

So I have three bits of advice for you. First, for your dental needs, always seek out a holistic dentist who understands the toxicity of fluoride and mercury. They will advise you NOT to drink toxic fluoride chemicals from your tap water.

Secondly, don't drink unfiltered tap water. In addition to the toxic fluoride chemicals, tap water is also usually contaminated with chlorine and even dangerous elements from old water pipes. Buy a good countertop water filter from a company like Aquasana. Or get a whole-house filter to remove chlorine and fluoride from the water entering your home.

Thirdly, help fight water fluoridation in your local city or town. If your city is like most cities, water fluoridation policies have been pushed by dentists and doctors who are technically ignorant of the origins and the composition of fluoride, and yet they seek to assert power over the composition your local water supply. They essentially attempt to mass-medication the entire population with what can only be called a "drug" -- a biologically active chemical that they claim can prevent a health condition.

And yet, has this "drug" called fluoride ever received FDA approval as a drug? Have the individual members of the population been individually assessed for their need for such a drug? Have medication doses and drug interactions been considered? Has anyone even been written a prescription for this drug?

The answer is no. Fluoride is an unapproved drug, being used in a highly illegal mass-medication scheme that provides an excuse for the real agenda of disposing of a highly toxic hazardous waste chemical.

It's time to stop fluoride.

Demand an end to fluoridation in your local cities and towns. Call for those who purchase and handle fluoride to stop what they're doing. Question the safety of these toxic chemicals being dripped into the water supply. These are actions that endanger the public. They could be called acts of terrorism. And publicly shame the doctors and dentists who have taken part in this mass chemical poisoning, causing untold harm to populations all over the world.

Help us stop the fluoride poisoning of our world.

Learn more at NaturalNews.com. Join the Facebook group "No Fluoride." See more videos about fluoride at NaturalNews.TV. Visit FluorideAlert.org and other fluoride truth websites that are working to end the fluoride poisoning.

The Great Culling: Our Water Official Full Movie
http://venusproject.org/enlightening/the-great-culling-being-orchestrated-against-humanity.html

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* Landmark Fluoride Lawsuit Restarts in January: Here Are Four Reasons You Should Care

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* U.S. Towns Suspend Water Fluoridation - Two towns in New York state will suspend water fluoridation