O Holy Cow

Radiance Dairy: Fairfield’s Milk Cult

(Editor's note - this story was written in 2002. Francis Thicke is now running for Iowa Secreatary of Agriculture & Land Stewardship. We will update our Thicke file soon.)

The food of 21st century Iowa tells a tale of irony. During the last 50 years we homogenized the foods we grow, as corn and beans replaced diversity from border to border. At the same time, the foods Iowans eat diversified, with regions holding on to unique specialties. Northwest Iowa is steakhouse country and the southwest is scalloped potato and ham land. One goes to the Loess Hills for apples, Fort Madison for fried strawberries, Scranton for loganberry pancakes and Fairfield for paneer.

Why do paneers, those ambrosias of fresh made cheese and vegetables, taste richer in Fairfield than anywhere else this side of India? Some credit the peaceful town’s good vibes, but the real secret is more physical than mental. It’s Francis Thicke’s divine cows. Radiance Dairy’s organic milk is the only milk in Iowa still bottled on the farm and it is only available in Fairfield.

The man behind the happy cows and their adored milk has an office appropriate for a “Goethe farmer,” as writer Parker Forsell labeled him. When we visited, a music stand held the score to Herbert L. Clarke‘s “Carnival of Venice.” Thicke played its wistful melody on his trumpet and told us how music changed him.

“I wanted to be a musician, thought I was pretty good within the context of my small Minnesota school. So I went to North Texas State, the second largest music school in America, and found out quickly that I was not professional class. That gave me perspective. The trumpet had been my whole life, but I soon noticed that outside the narrow world of trumpet players, no one much cared about the things that had consumed me,” he recalled. So after a Bachelor’s degree in Music and Philosophy, he went for a Masters in Soil Science and a Ph.D in Agronomy, then worked at the US Department of Agriculture.

A sign in the office read: Born Again Pagan.

“In Catholic school growing up we would put our money in a jar to buy ‘pagan babies,’ so that priests might convert Third World children in whom they saw no divinity. Now, I think there is divinity in all things. I call myself a ‘Born Again Farmer’ too, because I went off to be a bureaucrat. There’s a joke about a USDA worker who is crying, so his colleagues ask him ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘My farmer died.’

Thicke told us he has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for 30 years, but dissociates from the TM movement.

“I am a TM heretic. I run on instinct, not intellect. Bertrand Russell said that solutions come to problems, if you just forget about them for awhile. Einstein said his discoveries were not made through processes of rational thinking. I don’t make quick decisions,” he said, deliberately.

Thicke liked his work in D.C., but the lifestyle was not what he and Susan, his wife and business partner, sought. His ten mile commute to work took an hour. The city’s crime and violence interfered with his peace of mind. They knew Fairfield was a unique place.

“People who meditate think about what they eat, they care as much about the purity of their food as the purity of their thoughts,” he explained.
So the Thickes bought a Fairfield dairy business and its twenty-two cows in 1992 then relocated them to a 326 acre farm outside town. As he showed us around, the philosopher rose within the farmer.

“The farm is an organism. Diversity empowers an organic farm’s ecosystem.”

“I come from a part of southern Minnesota which is hilly, almost mountainous. Such land encourages independent thinking and diversity in farming - it was never appropriate for single crop agriculture,” he explained.

The rolling hills are better suited to the pastures Francis has created, than to the cornfields that were here when he bought it. At that time, there was only one field and a corn crib. The Thickes first built a processing facility and lived above it for four years. Francis has now divided his pastures into 60 paddocks, with moveable electric fences, water tanks and high grass, which is nutritionally better for the milk. Francis plants brome, timothy and various clovers and lets the cows graze in each paddock half a day. That pasture then is allowed to rest 20-40 days, depending on how fast the grass is growing.

“You should be careful of what kind of energies, or products, are brought onto the farm, or are taken off, because you really have an organism here and you want it to grow with its own integrity,” he explained.

Earthworms have returned in multitudes, a sure sign of healthier soil. Like manure, worms excrete rich organic matter and aid in recycling and building up the soil. Other things came back since converting to pastures: song birds; cow birds; meadowlarks; and bobolinks. Cowbirds help control flies, so do wild turkeys.

We saw waist high grass, but no weeds, nor bare spots of dirt. The cows were all clean, the day after heavy rains had made some roads to the farm too muddy to drive. How different from typical dairy farms where filthy cows have to hosed down before every milking and grass is rarely more than 2-4 inches high.

Thicke likes honey locust trees because they have a porous canopy, allowing enough light to promote grass growth. These trees also have pods that are high in protein and good nutritionally for the cows. He is planning a solar pump to a large water tank that would service several paddocks.

“Grass loves by nature to stay in one place. Cows love by nature to graze. The madness of modern agriculture reverses the process.”

Thicke’s cows were friendly, happy, if humans can judge that. One kept nuzzling my arm, like a dog. “Our cows harvest their own food and spread their own fertilizer and they love their work. This makes more sense than the modern mode of hauling fertilizer and feed in trucks going opposite directions. Production isn’t as great, but profitability is greater and energy use is significantly less, self sufficiency more,” he explained.

His cows are all Jerseys, a breed Francis finds best for grass diets. Cows are ruminants and more modern breeds have been cross bred for grain diets and short lives.

“Industrial agriculture is non-competitive. It’s a common myth that each farmer feeds 130 people, but that number doesn’t include all the people in each farmer’s support group: the people to build and service the combines and John Deeres; the fertilizer production plants and staffs; and the environmental clean-up crews,” he noted.

Francis’ milking parlor is “New Zealand style,” meaning a low cost, low maintenance operation that does not push cows to overproduce. The Thickes milk 60 of 130 cows and sell all their milk in Fairfield, where it is a civic heirloom. They deliver milk twice a week and each delivery sells out by the next. Three supermarkets and twelve restaurants consume all of Radiance’s production- milk, cheese and yogurt.

“Expansion misses the point,” Francis answered a question we wished we hadn’t asked.

At Every Body’s supermarket, probably Iowa’s best stocked store for organic and conscientiously raised foods, Radiance actually outsells all other milks, even at a premium price. It’s deep yellow color contrasts with other milks. Co-owner John Dey told us that he never has any returns, or any spoilage on Radiance products.

“We learn as we go along.”

Gurus admit imperfections. Francis is still short of one goal - total grass diets. He feeds the cows 6 pounds of barley a day, because barley is still an old crop that has only recently been biogenetically modified.

“It hasn’t been over bred. With corn, there are always some low levels of GMO contamination,” he said.

Other lessons required patience.

He used to keep cows in the loafing barn all winter until he realized they wanted to be out in pasture, even in cold weather. “This way, the manure is spread all winter and Spring springs quickly.”

Originally, Thicke thought cows’ horns were natural and fit his biodynamic agriculture model, so he let them all grow. But young cows used them as weapons on older cows, not a good situation during twice a day milking. So he stopped letting them grow out.

He used to truck chickens to help keep the flies off the cows, but in the pastures chickens became coyote dinners. Now he keeps them in the loafing barn with the calves.

“It’s as important for me to learn from the farm as it is for the farm to be improved by my activities. The land itself has the answers and its own organizing power. That’s part of this co-creative process, we have to be involved and give our best creative input, but it’s all there anyway,” he said, with an acquiescence unbefitting a heretic.

Consuming Radiance

Some of the health benefits of organic milk are obvious. Several studies have shown pasture-grazed cows produce up to 500 percent more of the anti-carcinogen Conjugated Linoleic Acid, than confined cows. Other benefits are subtler.

At The 2nd Street Coffee House in downtown Fairfield, owner Bonnie White told us that her customers wouldn’t tolerate a less expensive milk in their lattes. White is Asian, an ethnic group that is often lactose intolerant.

“I grew up only able to drink soy milk, but this milk is just fine, no problems at all,” she told us.

Thicke said he had heard the same thing from several others. “But I wouldn’t make such a claim because I haven’t seen the science,” he admitted, still learning.

Paramjeet Singh’s India Café on Fairfield’s town square serves a full menu of South Asian cuisine, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. They are one of Radiance’s best customers, mainly for their exquisite home-made paneers, made from organic milk and paired with different vegetables..

Paneer Recipe
for 6

4 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons vinegar

Boil the milk, after it starts boiling, add vinegar. When the vinegar makes curds out of the milk, put the curds into a cheese cloth and tie it with a small rope. Place the curds in the cheese cloth onto a plain surface and weigh it down with something heavy. This pressure makes the curds into cheese in about 3 hours. Cut it into bite size pieces.

Fairhope: Iowa Seeds Bear Alabama Fruit

A wise bear, Wro says that "History loves irony." From a tree on the Grand Hotel grounds in Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore, he's meditating on the intermingled destinies of Fairhope, Alabama and Des Moines.

Had Ernest Berry Gaston been born when Iowa farmland was not considerably more expensive than waterfront property on the Gulf Coast, he might very well have changed Iowa dramatically. Iowa’s loss became Alabama’s gain when the Des Moines expatriate fathered one of America’s most eccentric communities on populist, utopian principles that survived the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1889, even before graduating from Drake University, the precocious descendent of French Huguenot nobility bought the Suburban Advocate which served University Place, now the Drake neighborhood of Des Moines. Gaston used that newspaper as a platform to develop his ideas about social justice. During the next four years, he made a fortune in Iowa real estate, got married, started a family, invented a snow plow and was elected justice of the peace, town recorder and fire chief. He developed his "Single Tax" philosophy from a mixture of Henry George‘s social theories, Populist Party platforms and personal notions about human behavior.

Gaston organized his followers into "The Fairhope Industrial Association" (FIA) with the purpose "to establish and conduct a model community or colony, free from all forms of private monopoly."

Unfortunately, Iowa’s fertile land was prohibitively expensive and other utopian communities had already formed in the West and Great Plains.

Gaston’s followers researched several locations in the South and voted to plant the seeds of their dream on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in Baldwin County, Alabama where a wealthy Ante Bellum community had deteriorated into shanties. Land sold for just fifty cents to a dollar an acre.

Like today’s snowbirds, Gaston and his followers left Des Moines in November of 1894. Unlike other utopian communities, the heart of Fairhope remains free of private property today. That has attracted a community of artists, dreamers and utopians who anchor the Eastern Shore’s unique life style - called “Carmel on the Gulf.” Fairhope’s 13,000 current residents include colorful professional athletes like World Series star JC Romero and Leon ’”Wrong Way” Lett of the Dallas Cowboys, authors like Fannie Flagg ("Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe") and Winston Grooms ("Forest Gump")

and artists like Nall (pictured in the Grand Hotel lobby), whose eccentric art is as well known in Europe as Christo‘s is here. Fairhope and its cool image has attracted resorts, golf courses and some of the wealthiest zip codes in America, in all directions around it.

A master gardener and student of history, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie confesses a long fascination with the Fairhope experiment.

“My ancestors moved to Des Moines the same time that Gaston lived here. I like knowing that the seeds of that town came from Des Moines, especially because it has blossomed into something so interesting, attractive and unique,” Cownie said.

Last spring, the mayor sent heirloom seeds to the eastern shore’s historic Grand Hotel, which has an illustrious guest register that includes nearly every US Presidents since the Civil War. (The hotel in Point Clear ooutside Fairhope, was recently named to Conde Nast's list of the world's greatest hotels, at #31.)

Grand Hotel Executive Chef Michael Wallace planted Cownie’s seeds in the resort’s Chef’s Garden. By late summer, guests from Iowa were being treated to the bounty of those seeds.

Sometimes, it takes years for a seed to bear fruit. Sometimes it takes centuries.

Fast Food Goes Green?

A "salad" at Wendy's

Is That Even Possible?

Nearing the tenth anniversary of the first “fast food made me obese” lawsuits, marketers are busy crafting a new “healthier” image for McIndustry. Most fast food chains have reduced calories, fats, trans fats and sodium in their fare. Marketers for industry whipping boy McDonald’s now point out that their signature Big Mac has fewer fats, half as many carbs, and only 38 % as much sodium as a burrito from Chipotle - the Oprah-approved, green darling of the food media. Most fast food giants promote salads now, some with recently reduced calories, and sodium. Press releases for Wendy’s “apple pecan chicken salad with pomegranate vinaigrette” enticed me into the brave new world of fast food greens.

I began with McDonald’s “premium bacon ranch salad with crispy chicken.” Its greens impressed me with their freshness and generous ratio of mesclun to iceberg. Grape tomatoes were crisp but carrots were pale with age. A chicken filet was served hot on top of cold ingredients. A light Paul Newman dressing tasted like buttermilk. A fistful of shredded cheeses plus swarms of bacon bits challenged the claim that this salad has only 370 calories, 200 grams of fat, and 970 mg of sodium. All those numbers are down significantly from similar reports on the same salad a couple years ago.

I found the best presentation of the week at Taco Bell (TB).

“Chipotle steak taco salad” was served in a crisp tortilla bowl with beans and rice on the bottom. Lettuce and tomato topped that, covered with tender seasoned beef, cheddar cheese, sour cream, salty chipotle dressing, and multi colored tortilla strips. TB made no health claims for this salad’s 900 calories, 57 grams of fat, and 1700 mg. of sodium - numbers unchanged from a couple years ago. The lettuce was iceberg and TB’s condiment bar had no fresh salsas at all.

At the KFC by Drake, the company-promoted “zero trans fats KFC crispy chicken caesar salad” was not available. No specialty salads were. Does the company think college kids don’t eat salads? This was not the first time that KFC innovations have been withheld from the Des Moines market.

At Wendy’s, the new salad that had inspired my quest was not available either. In my mind, franchisees should not be the last people to know about a company‘s new products.

I tried a “Mandarin chicken salad” that had similar nutritional numbers to the one that had teased me. It included a good mix of greens, including mizuna and tango. Roasted almonds tasted strangely like peanuts. Crispy noodles tasted like salt. Mandarin oranges tasted like sugar. Chicken was bland with just a trace of paprika and garlic salt. White sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, and pineapple juice dominated the sesame and ginger flavors in the sweet dressing. At 570 calories, 25 grams from fat and 1370 mg. of sodium, nutritional numbers were second to McDonald‘s.

Burger King’s (BK) “TenderCrisp chicken garden salad with Ken’s caesar dressing” defied the trend toward “healthier” salads. Its 1070 calories, 86 grams of fat and 2900 mg. of sodium (almost double the CDC recommended daily allotment) were up from numbers on a previous nutritional check of the same salad. The difference might result from three kinds of cheeses not included in the previous count. BK’s packaging was true to their motto “Have it your way.”

Tired lettuce was packed in a salad bowl with baby carrots, tomatoes, and shredded cheeses compartmentalized in a different bowl. Additional packets included dressing, croutons and a chicken breast. That created a lot of personal plastic and paper to rip open. This salad was named one of six “diet destroyers” by business travelers’ web site Divine Caroline.
Bottom line. Costing around $5, most of these salads are not bargains. Less costly burgers were actually “healthier” choices than most too.

Beautiful Buglers of Henry County

Elk’s story is an All American tale. They are descendents of fearless explorers who migrated, like most native Americans, across the Bering land bridge from Asia during the late Ice Ages. Once in North America they became indomitable pioneers, adapting to all ecosystems except tundra, deserts and the gulf coast. They lived symbiotically with American Indians of the west where Kootenai, Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibwas fashioned blankets, footwear, clothing and housing from their hides. Plains Indians considered elk holy. Their teeth symbolized the life force to the Lakota.

Elk population in America grew to 10 million before the coming of the first Europeans, who misidentified them and named after German-Scandinavian words (elch, elg) for moose. With bulls weighing 700 pounds and sporting antlers four feet long, elk came to represent all the Europeans thought brave and fearsome in the wild. Males would fight, sometimes the death, during the rut, or mating season. Females would kill anything that threatened their young. Their bugle, or mating cry, became the mighty music of the frontier.

Elk were so successful adapting, they became a threat to more domestic livestock. Farmers and ranchers feared their fierceness and their susceptibility to infectious diseases. Unlike the Native Americans, Europeans hunted them to near extinction. Less than 1 million exist today and of the six subspecies that inhabited North America in historical times, only four remain. The others have been gone for over a century.

“Elk flourished in Iowa but the last wild elk here was believed to have been killed in Kossuth County in the mid 1880’s, though one stray was seen in Marshall and Jasper counties in 2006,” explained Richard Garrrels, a past president of the Iowa Elk Association.

Today, Garrels is one of about 30 Iowa ranchers have re-introduced elk to the state. A retired schoolteacher/farmer from Henry County, he decided to convert some corn and bean fields into an open range for elk in 1995.

“I had arranged to go elk hunting out west and that didn’t work out. So I decided to raise my own right here. I had raised quarter horses for years, so this wasn’t anything too new. Elk have breeders associations and pedigrees just like other livestock,” Garrels stated matter of factly, adding that elk are a transitional step into full retirement.

“I rent most of my acreage for cash crop farming and save this section for the elk. And I don’t ever have get up before dawn for chores. The elk are pretty independent and low maintenance,” he explained.

Garrels’ 30 head of elk are all Rocky Mountain sub species. He’s never had a problem with diseases.

“I have never had a veterinarian visit other than for calving,” he said.

Garrels thinks that’s a result from the measures he takes to keep his elk up to safety standards for meat sales. He tests his herd regularly for brucelosis, TB and chronic waste disease. That also facilitates sales of live elk across state lines. Meat sales weren’t the main motivation for most elk ranchers.

“Lots of people got into elk in the 1990’s when velvet was going for $60 a pound,” Garrels explained.

Male elk bulls grow and shed their antlers each year. Growing antlers are covered by a soft layer of vascularized skin known as velvet. Velvet is shed in the summer when the antlers have fully developed and is medicinally valued, particularly by Asians, for is aphrodisiac and mood elevation properties. A male elk can produce 25 pounds of antler velvet annually.
“This decade, the price went down to $10 to $15, after Asians backed out of the market after the mad cow scare. I don’t even bother with it. There’s more value in selling whole antlers without the hassle. I just sold a bull for $5000,” he explained.

“I can cover my costs selling elk meat to four restaurants and a few private consumers, plus selling at my concession stand at the Old Threshers Reunion (Labor Day weekend in Mount Pleasant). What I can’t cover of course is the lost income from prime farm land that could otherwise being earning with cash crops. The people making real money are the ones with low overhead, meaning cheaper land than this, who raise elk to sell for hunting,” Garrels explained.

Garrels keeps his bulls separated by a system of double fencing he developed over the years.

“If I leave the animals in one pen, the dominant bull will wear himself out keeping the others away from his cows. If I separate them with a fence, bugling will go on 24 - 7 during rutting season and the fence will come down. I lost one bull that way, gored to death by another. I don’t keep a bull who’s too aggressive.

Both Richard and his wife Liz described bugling as “beautiful sound” - the males whistle and the females chirp, “sort of like a cat’s meow.” They said they have never heard a complaint from neighbors.

“Compared to peacocks, it’s musical,” said Liz, who has raised both.
Richards feeds grain to the elk grain for a few months before rutting. Otherwise, their diet consists of grasses in warm weather and leaves after grass goes dormant. The fall and winter diet has a particularly Iowa adaptation.

“They love oak leaves but they seem really disappointed when I throw out a bag of maple leaves. They also prefer leafy alfalfa to grasses. It works out well, I get leaves from the city.

Elk ranching is seasonal. During the summer, elk eat almost constantly, consuming between 10 to 15 pounds daily. Fall brings rutting season and since gestation periods are 240 to 262 days, all Garrels’s calves are born between mid May and June.

Richard has won blue ribbons for his elk recipes at the Iowa State Fair, Taste of Iowa, Farm Bureau’s cook-offs “Wine & Tuxedo” and “Buckskinner.” He divides his elk meat into backstraps, which include tenderloins and ribeyes, and burger trim. Elk has a very healthy profile for a read meat, with only about 40% the calories, 20 % of the fat and 80 % of the cholesterol of lean ground beef. Tasting somewhere between beef and venison, elk is also higher in protein than either beef or chicken, and it’s a good source of iron phosphorous and zinc. So burgers are guilt free for dieters.

Four restaurants use Garrels’ elk burger. Jerry’s, Keo’s Bar & Grill, and Butch’s River Rock Café in Mount Pleasant, plus Short Stop in New London. The BrownStone in Mount Pleasant uses his steaks.

“I sell the elk burgers like crazy,” explained Kim Butch Bittle, who owns both the River Rock and the BrownStone.

Both Bittle’s restaurants have an pioneer spirit in which elk fits well. On a Skunk River park site, the River Rock building was built as a railroad depot in the mid-1800s. It has been a restaurant since the late 1940s.

The Brownstone has the look of Victorian hotel, with a lobby and different dining rooms. Bittle named one Edison, the other Carlyle, and there is the ballroom which is intended for banquets. Bittle said the building's history includes being a stop on the Underground Railroad, a vocational school and an elementary school.Bittle was chef at the Iris, an icon itself. After closing of Iris, after more than 50 years, Butch opened Brownstone for a test run one Sunday last fall and 175 guests showed up.

Richard Garrels’ Elk Ribeye

4 rib eye elk steaks
For marinade
Fourth cup honey
Three fourths cup vegetable oil
Fourth cup soy sauce
Clove garlic, minced
1 T. dried minced onion
2 T. white vinegar
Half t. ginger

Marinate steaks overnight.
Sear both sides of steaks. Grill to desired doneness. 140 degrees (rare) is recommended for flavor.

Hydrocodone King

He wanted customers to have a really ahppy meal.

News 4 in Jacksonville FL reports a Burgeer King employee who pled guilty to slipping painkillers into customers' food has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Woody Duclos was initially charged with poisoning food with intent to kill or injure a person. He was facing up to 30 years in prison.

Duclos was arrested in February after one woman got sick from eating a sandwich from Burger King. Another man said he found a blue pill in his burger at the same restaurant.

Police said the 21-year-old woman spit up a pill of the painkiller hydrocodone out when she took a bite of her sandwich, and she ended up having a seizure.

Duclos and another Burger King employee accused of selling him the pills were each fired.

Some people have been asking what could possess Duclos to do this. I doubt they ever worked at a Burger King in Florida.