Spring has finally arrived and it’s time to plant. Strictly speaking this is not a cow-operative venture, but it is about food security and so runs parallel to one of the site’s themes.

I purchased some heirloom tomato and carrot seeds from the Vancouver Seed Bank. I tried to choose seeds that would be good for this climate rather than for strange characteristics (rainbow carrots or black tomatoes). I settled on two types of tomatoes, Brandywine and Amish Paste. The Brandywines are regular eating style tomatoes and the Amish Paste look a lot like Roma tomatoes. We make a roasted tomato sauce and I’m planning on using those in place of canned San Marzanos.

The carrots are Royal Chantenay. They are a fat carrot that reportedly stores well.

The Brandywine

The Amish Paste

The Royal Chantenay

I started all of these seeds in the house, in Jiffy Pellets, under a dome. This gives you a head start, but you need a warm, sunny area or else some grow lights. I transplanted everything the second weekend in April. Because I haven’t finished the landscaping at my place I built a temporary garden box out of old concrete blocks a buddy salvaged. Once the box was built I filled it with a yard of compost costing me $30.00.

The seedlings all survived transplanting, and seem to be thriving. However, one thing to remember is that a small bag of seeds needs increasing amounts of room. I’ll need several garden boxes of that size in order to get any worthwhile food security production.

My name is Rob Chipman and I’m a realtor, pilot and all around renaissance man based in Vancouver, BC. I really enjoy flying, playing guitar and hockey, real estate and the Chilcotin. My company is Coronet Realty Ltd., located at 3582 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V5K 2A7. I have a C-150L that I own with two other pilots, based out of Pitt Meadows. Do not hesitate to contact me by email if I can help you do anything, especially if its likely to be interesting.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. That’s one of the problems when you have about 12 websites to run!

I have no complaints. It’s a great learning experience.

A lot has happened in the world since I last posted here. We saw the budget deadlock in the US. We’ve seen sovereign debt crises emerge. And the latest thing is Occupy Wall Street.

The world is changing. I ran across a new Twitter hashtag – #democratizingtheeconomy So far it’s only Luke Brocki making use of it, but I’m going to spread the word.

What’s it mean? Who knows? I guess you can define it any way you like. I think it means taking individual control of those aspects of the economy that affect us. I could get all woo woo philosophical about it, but I won’t. instead, I’ll just say that a cowoperative works for that hashtag. It delivers control of your own food supply, it provides for sustainability, and it creates independence. Yes, it comes at a cost, but morecheaperfasterinlessspace isn’t always the goal.

I discovered Luke through Twitter, where he turned up by tweeting a headline about co-ops in the Vancouver Sun. As the article points out, co-ops are common here in BC, and are successful. Think Mountain Equipment Co-Op and Vancity Savings. The article says one third of British Columbians are members in at least one co-op. I’m a member of both of those and have been for decades.

Copyblogger's Brian Clark

Marketing-focused almost never works.

That’s because no one actually understands what the market wants. When you choose to make something magical instead, when you bring passion instead of calculation to your work, you’re as least as likely to get it right as the guy who is selling out.

For the cowoperative (I actually got this name from another Seth Godin podcast, but couldn’t find anything about them on the web, so I grabbed the URL myself) I think this applies because I don’t know if the market wants this, and I’m not going to tweak it for the market. I’m going to tweak it for myself and my friends and whoever wants to come along for the ride.

I won’t riff a bunch on Guy Kawasaki here, but he’s worth checking out as well. Like Godin, he advocates doing what you want and then finding a market that supports it. (I paraphrase- do your own homework).

Anyway, we’re on the edge of a big change, maybe even a revolution. I don’t think we’ll see anarchy and societal breakdown. I think we’ll see a revolution of values, and I think co-ops will become more attractive. I’m going to keep working on this. If you want to join in, sign up and sign on.

My name is Rob Chipman and I’m a realtor, pilot and all around renaissance man based in Vancouver, BC. I really enjoy flying, playing guitar and hockey, real estate and the Chilcotin. My company is Coronet Realty Ltd., located at 3582 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V5K 2A7. I have a C-150L that I own with two other pilots, based out of Pitt Meadows. Do not hesitate to contact me by email if I can help you do anything, especially if its likely to be interesting.

Birke Baehr, an eleven year old, talks about food at TedTalks.

I think its a good talk, and worth watching. Groundbreaking? No. The kid’s eleven. But its worth watching.

My name is Rob Chipman and I’m a realtor, pilot and all around renaissance man based in Vancouver, BC. I really enjoy flying, playing guitar and hockey, real estate and the Chilcotin. My company is Coronet Realty Ltd., located at 3582 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V5K 2A7. I have a C-150L that I own with two other pilots, based out of Pitt Meadows. Do not hesitate to contact me by email if I can help you do anything, especially if its likely to be interesting.

StatsCan indicates that we eat about 63 kilograms of red meat annually as of 2001. That’s 138 pounds.

Will Taft indicates that the average American eats over 200 pounds per year, as does the Huffington Post.

Pasture to Plate says the average BC’er easts 30 pounds per year, but what is average, and does it include vegans?

Michael Bloch at Green Living Tips says Canadians eat about 48 kilos of meat per year, but that was a 1969 figure.

There’s a big dif between 30 pounds and 200 pounds, or even the 138 pounds from Stats Canada. Which is right?

I know I’ve looked at what I feed my dog, Scout. He’s on a raw food diet and eats mostly meat, with some bone and veggies (and yeah, it works great). He eats a little less than one pound per day, which is pretty standard according to the BARF people (BARF means “bones and raw food” btw).

We looked earlier at a meat breakdown that gave us about 600 pounds of carcass weight and 420 pounds of useable beef off a 1000 pound on the hoof steer. If I want to feed Scout organic beef, and plan on giving him only the cuttings, I can use something less than the dif between the 600 and 420. Let’s say 100 pounds of usable scrap from the steer (trim meat, not huge leg bones). I need three steers of scrap for the dog alone. In fact, if I give him 1 pound per day from the 420, I’m only left with 55 pounds of meat. (I better keep the T-Bones, I guess).

Of course, Scout eats about 80% meat, even if he’s only 1/3 my size.

30 pounds a year means 120 1/4 pound hamburgers. If you eat the equivalent of 1 hamburger every 3 days then 30 pounds is about right.

If you eat red meat 3 to 4 times a week its going to be higher than that. The Cleveland Clinic’s Heart and Vascular Health & Prevention page says a “serving” of meat is 3 ounces. Ellen’s Kitchen recommends 6 ounces per person.

Go with 4.5 ounces, 4 times per week, and that adds up to just over 1 pound per week, or 52 pounds per year.

420 pounds of useable beef divided by 52 pounds equals 8 people per steer. A two person family (without a dog like Scout) needs 1/4 of a steer. A four person family needs half a steer.

Track what you go through each week and see if it corresponds with my numbers. If so we have a pretty good idea of how many steers we’ll need for how many people.

My name is Rob Chipman and I’m a realtor, pilot and all around renaissance man based in Vancouver, BC. I really enjoy flying, playing guitar and hockey, real estate and the Chilcotin. My company is Coronet Realty Ltd., located at 3582 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V5K 2A7. I have a C-150L that I own with two other pilots, based out of Pitt Meadows. Do not hesitate to contact me by email if I can help you do anything, especially if its likely to be interesting.

Google. I love it. Whether it was Google Analytics or Google Alerts I don’t know, but through google I learned about the South Cariboo Meat Cooperative. They are building a red meat abbattoir in One Hundred Mile House. We can use them, I believe, to slaughter the cattle in compliance with all laws, rules and regulations. Once they slaughter the animals we can have them cut and wrapped in the same area, ready for delivery to the urban center.

Not a 100 mile diet, I admit, but still pretty low impact, and healthier.

How much of that turns into beef hanging in the cooler? The number seems to be about 60% of live weight, so that’s 600 lbs. Of course, if you’ve ever witnessed butchers at work you know that the 600 lbs. will get whittled down further.

Grass fed beef tends to be leaner than feedlot beef, and there tends to be more usable meat, relatively speaking, so we have to subtract somewhere between 25% and 30% of the hanging weight off the 600 lbs. Let’s use 30% to be conservative, which is 180 lbs, leaving us with 420 lbs of beef. (If we got 65% usable meat and 25% waste we’d end up with 500 lbs).

The website at Chicamarun.com breaks the steer down thus:

A 1,000 pound choice steer will dress out at 61.5% (615 pounds). Of that 183 will be fat, bone and other loss. That leaves 432 pounds of beef.

Chuck (shoulder area): 164.8 pounds (26.8% of total carcass)

* Blade pot roasts-59.3

* Stew or ground beef-32.1

* Arm pot roast-22.3

* Cross rib pot roast-10.7

* Boston cut-9.9

* Fat and bone-30.5

Brisket (basically between front legs): 23.4 (3.8%)

* Boneless-9.4

* Fat and bone-14.0

Shank (basically lower leg below brisket): 19.1 (3.1%)

Short plate (belly under rib area): 51.0 (8.3%)

* Plate, stew, short ribs-40.8

* Fat and bone-10.2

Flank (belly under the loin): 32.0 (5.2%)

* Flank-3.2

* Ground beef-12.6

* Fat-16.2

Rib: 59.0 (9.6%)

* Standing rib roasts-24.2

* Rib steaks-12.4

* Short ribs-4.7

* Braising beef-2.7

* Ground beef 3.5

* Fat and bone-11.5

Loin (between rib and round): 105.8 (17.2%)

* Porterhouse steak-18.7

* T-bone steak-9.5

* Club steak-5.2

Where it al comes from

So, 420 lbs of meat should cost, what? Believe it or not, it looks like a live steer, bought in bulk, goes for just over $100 in the US and about $150 in Alberta per 100/lbs if I’m reading the tables correctly. Its going to take more investigation, but it looks to me like there’s room here. If the rancher is getting that little then there has to be a lot of marking up at each stop from pasture to table. $1500 for a 1000lb steer, which turns into 430 lbs of beef a $3.50/lb, which is what I’ve seen it advertised for.

Two currently for sale in Kamloops weighing in at 500-600 pounds would cost $1100 ($1/lb live weight)

In 2009 Mark Tijsson ran afoul of an absolutely ridiculous Ontario government official for sharing pork that he’d butchered at home with a friend. Apparently you can butcher and consume your own pork, but it can’t leave your property. Not with a friend, not in your kids’ lunch boxes.

Then there is the story of Farmer Schmidt. He actually organized a cow share to allow people to acquire and consume raw milk. Its not against the law to consume raw milk, but it is against the law to sell it.

Still, in a province where growing weed is arguably the largest industry, and in a world where corporations make huge dollars legally selling products that kill humans, how much should we care whether we the government blesses our food before we eat it? After all, at a city level we’re putting vegetable gardens on City Hall’s lawn and some city officials advocate doing away with lawns in order to secure a local food supply.

Part of me says “Boca cerrada no entra mosca”, wise advice for all low-profile endeavours, but how do you do that with a blog?