Growing Local: Foggy Bottom Farms - John Langlois' Passion For Grass-Fed Beef

  • Friday, March 9, 2012
  • Jen Jeffrey

Located 25 miles northeast of Scottsboro, Foggy Bottom Farms is nestled in the Paint Rock Valley of Jackson County, Ala.

With 30 acres of bottom land and 47 acres of hills, waterfalls, streams and forests, the farm is as beautiful as it is productive.

John lived at Dunwoody, Ga., until 2003. What made him want to come to Estill Fork? “Living in Atlanta!” John quips, “I lived three and a half miles from work and it took 45 minutes to an hour to get there; it was crazy.”

John and his wife Marsha had purchased their 77-acre farm for retirement purposes. He had expected to only purchase 20 acres or so. When Marsha saw the land and the nearby stream with waterfalls, she told her husband, “Write the check!” John decided since he had acquired more land; he really wanted to do something with it, “Without having to put out an inordinate amount of capital, cows just fit the bill - and chickens are just too easy... everybody ought to have chickens.”

John started off with a cow and a bull and then purchased four more. The livestock started having babies and John started his farming practices. “I didn’t want to do things on a large scale and I am kind of afraid of large cows- which is why Dexters are perfect for me to raise.” The Dexter breed is short-legged and stout.

The Langloises also have chickens and roosters. John has a few hens that lay actual green eggs. “I also like goats and when my wife says that we can have some we will. Right now the house is first. It’s not finished yet,” John concedes.

Wife Marsha works for Roche Diagnostic systems. She would eventually like to grow a garden, “She likes the idea of field peas, purple hull peas…stuff like that,” John explains, “if we were to do more right now, I would need the CSA and I would need workers, because one guy can’t do it all. Whereas for our own needs; I can plant enough where it comes in and we get what we need the first time and let the cows have the rest.”

John also has fun with a wine berry bush. The berries look like raspberries but their flavor is more like a blackberry. 

Who do you sell to?

“Individuals. They will find me on the website, call and buy a live Dexter to raise their own or to have slaughtered. The government has closed so many of the slaughter houses it is becoming a problem in getting a cow processed.” 

Where do you take them?

“Old Salem, a state inspected abattoir. As opposed to USDA… what that means for me is; I can’t sell my slaughtered beef in a grocery store. It’s the exact same inspection - nothing inferior about the beef; it just doesn’t have the USDA stamp on it. With regulations being what they are you can’t resell the beef.  “Which is fine, we were doing private sale anyway. The government has made processing meat more difficult,” he admits.

John is confident in his grass-fed beef, “The problem with grain being the majority of a cow’s diet is you run into the problem of allowing E. coli to thrive.”

 The reason for the greater persistence of E. coli from grain-fed cattle, the researchers speculate, is that feeding grain to cattle makes their digestive tracts abnormally acidic. Over time, the E. coli in their systems become acclimated to this acid environment. When humans ingest them, a high percentage will survive the acid shock of their digestive juices. By contrast, few E. coli from grass-fed cattle will survive because they have not become acid-resistant.

“These fields basically feed them,” John says, “I bring in hay to get us through the winter. They eat a lot and they drink a lot. Cows can go through 90 gallons of water a day.”

John laughs, “Everyone wants to know how come I have Legos out on the farm” as he demonstrates his watering system, which are a bright colored plastic watering stations. “The floating balls keep debris out of the water and, when a cow comes to drink, they push their nose on the ball and can get water - and for the most part - they don’t freeze.”

The farm has a pressure tank and there is a well under the chicken house, where it pumps water to the pressure tank and the tank pushes it out to the watering stations so the cows always have fresh water.

Walking across the pasture to see the cows, John greets them all and introduces his bull, ‘Wazzint Me’. John quips, “I asked who was getting all my cows pregnant and this guy just says, ‘wazzint me’, he jokes. John says he is not a part of a CSA program, “As you can see, I don’t have a lot of neighbors here.  For them to drive all the way out here or for me to drive to them when I don’t have a refrigerated truck - that is not something I could pursue,” he explains.

John is not just a farmer who enjoys raising livestock, he is passionate about what he has learned, “Things you hear about in the general public now - like ‘sustainable agriculture’ - that came out of the organic community saying, ‘look, what’s going on out there with NPK – the petroleum fertilizer, and ‘Monsanto’, ‘Round Up’ and all of that- that is not a sustainable model. It will exhaust the soil, the weeds will fight back and win. People don’t appreciate having poison in their foods, and we see that come through in a number of levels.”

John continues, “And so, being certified organic was a big deal. In fact, you could charge 30, 40 sometimes 100 percent more …and get it, because of supply and demand. The agricultural corporation figured out there is a lot more margin in organic and all of a sudden they are co-oping the good will that goes with organic and they’ve infiltrated the government supervision levels, so they keep watering down what organic is supposed to be. Now you’ve got this battle and we’re trying to control the conversation. I found on a website not long ago, how Monsanto and DuPont are talking about how their stuff is sustainable and it is not. But they are trying to put it out there that they are going to feed the world - it’s been their story forever,” John passionately insists.

John has thoroughly educated himself with a lot of reading on the science of plants, soil and even manure – in which he explains with demonstration how you can tell when a cow is healthy and what manure is good for the soil. He shows many of his books and talks of websites he reads up on.

“The way that agriculture is forced into the rigid structures that the USDA requires,” John declares, “is not a normal way to do agriculture. It’s geared towards the ‘concentration camps’ with 20,000 chickens in them, instead of a guy with 200 chickens serving the local clientele.  If you are going to promote CSAs and you want to have an integrated kind of agriculture, it’s really hard.”

John opens his refrigerator and displays a bottle of raw milk, “It is so good, it feels like velvet going down your throat. "We make ice cream with just a teaspoon of vanilla and a little sugar and our grandson just goes nuts for it,” John insists as he shares how he learned about the benefits of raw milk, “His younger brother has asthma and studies show that children who drink pasteurized milk have a much higher asthmatic rate than children who drink raw milk, basically because the pasteurization leaves the dead bacteria. They kill the bacteria but it is still in the milk. And you have an allergic reaction to that, plus it break down the caseins and you can’t digest the milk and the lactase is destroyed.”

An excerpt from John’s website explains more about what he found out;

 “Most have assimilated a profound prejudice against raw milk because of what they were taught in school about the ‘benefits of pasteurization’. That idea, compounded by the daily germ phobic assaults from products like Lysol, have them living in terror that they may somehow come in contact with deadly pathogens. Therefore, our first challenge is to help you understand that life is filled with ‘good bacteria’. Yes, good guys. Helpful little critters - you need them. They live inside you. In fact, if your body ever killed off all the microscopic creatures that you have a symbiotic relationship with, you would die.

 “From time to time, we need our food to replenish those bacteria. This lesson was brought home to me in a startling fashion when my grandson's digestive system failed to work properly shortly after his birth. The allopathic doctor said "give him antibiotics" (That must be a mantra of theirs.) Nothing changed. My alternative doctor said, "Give him a few rounds of Acidophilus, Bifidobacterium bifidum, Bifidobacterium longum, Intestinal Flora, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus casei and Saccharomyces boulardii." After 20 minutes with a dictionary I found all those critters in a form we could put in his bottled breast milk. Within two days his stools were normal and I was on a new path of discovery. Through the work of the Weston A. Price Foundation, I discovered that properly collected fresh milk from properly maintained cows was better for me and less likely to make me sick.”

Being a web designer, John’s own website is packed full of informational reading with interesting topics such as this:

·         Complete circle of life

·         Because you have a right to wholesome food

·         What you need to know about processed food

·         How processed food removes food value

·         Why traditional diets are better.

 

What did he want to be when he grew up? “I wanted to be a renaissance man,” he laughs, “I never knew what I wanted to do - I just did whatever I wanted to.  I like to learn. That’s all I really wanted to do growing up was just to learn.”

Visit John Langlois’ website for more information at www.foggybottomfarms.com

Jen Jeffrey

jen@jenjeffrey.com

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