Ep 059 Jeri and the Wensleydales: A Grand Day In

04/20/20 • 36 min

We have to admit – sitting at home is much more tolerable with the cool weather and rain we’ve had in California this year so far. If California has a stay-at-home order in place, it’s much easier with a crackling fire and a warm sweater. But we’re in mid-April, and those days are soon to be gone, so we’ll take this last moment to remember warm wools and thick sweaters.

We bring you a visit with Jeri Robinson-Lawrence. She and her daughter Irina run Flying Fibers, a brick-and-mortar yarn shop in Landisville, Pennsylvania, with an online portal for those of you who might want premium wool but don’t want to get on a plane right now. Jeri and her daughter specialize in British fibers and breed-specific blends, grown both here and in that island from which they originated. On top of that, she raises some pretty rare breeds of sheep, including Wensleydales, Leicesters, Shetlands and Teeswaters.

Jeri is an example of a person that has profoundly been impacted by the Covid-19 lockdown in more than one life area, so the going-into-her-store part is important. You can’t actually do it, because she is one of those who had to close the front door (though the online portal is still busily filling orders). If that wasn’t enough to deal with, they had to move their fiber classes online. The ability to import or export products (including wool and genetic material) has experienced some disruption for most people in America, and she’s no doubt one of them. Jeri is a teacher, so you can imagine the bobbing and weaving with the chaos in the educational system. And she’s the volunteer go-to girl running the sheep barns for the New York Sheep and Wool Festival held every October in Rhinebeck, NY. We’re sure that’s still up in the air, until further notice (and it’s not a little event, let me tell you).

So we are thrilled to bring attention to the basics of one of the most comforting stay at home things that we can possible imagine – the soft, warm (and sometimes cool), cozy, homey feel of wool -- at least until summer hits next week, that is.

After the podcast, we urge you to please visit Flying Fibers to find out more about this wonderful farmer, shop owner, craftswoman, teacher, and tireless volunteer. Thank you, Jeri and the Wensleydales, for a Grand Day Out at the NYS S&WF 2019.

Links

https://www.flyingfibers.com/
https://www.flyingfibers.com/covid19-qa
https://sheepandwool.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wensleydale_sheep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluefaced_Leicester
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wensleydale_cheese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_and_Gromit
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104361/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/agriCulturePodcast)

Links

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/agriCulturePodcast)

Previous Episode

Ep 058 Spanglish and the Pineywoods - Beginning of Beef Cattle in America

We are constantly amazed at our agricultural system, and how fast and how far it seems to have come since the early days. And when people use the phrase “early days” with regard to agriculture in America, the usual mental picture has to do with Pilgrims, a multicultural exchange, squash, corn, and a turkey. But the turkey, although it is one of the few agricultural items in our food system that actually existed here before most of us, has not become the meat-producing animal that has come to represent America. It seems that that particular title goes to the beef industry. We can thank John Wayne, the Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Sam Elliot for indelibly stamping herds of majestic beef cattle in our minds as being part of our national identity. It is what’s for dinner, anyway.

The Pilgrims did bring cattle with them. The Milking Devon, as we have found, came over in 1623, and is a wonderful bovine that produces milk, beef, and pulls that plow while it’s at it. But the Plymouth colony wasn’t the first. That honor goes to the Spanish, and they beat the Pilgrims by over 100 years.

Spanish cattle arriving in this country in boatloads in the early 1500’s established what has become the quintessential American agricultural animal. True to the landrace concept, those original foundation herds did what all of us did. Arrived, adapted to the environment and thrived, or died trying. The ones that made it started as one thing, but as they moved across the country over hundreds of years, they became something else. In Hispaniola, Mexico and Texas, they became Texas Longhorn Cattle. In Florida, they became the Florida Cracker Cattle.

And in the southeast states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, they became the Pineywoods Cattle. Today, we are bringing you a conversation with Bruce Petesch of Tangled Oaks Farm in Siler City, North Carolina, who raises this endangered breed, one of the oldest in our history. It was here before John Wayne, before the Angus, before the railheads, and before the Pilgrims. Plus, it’s really good at handling not just the heat, but the humidity. Georgia in August. That’s the true measure of something to be admired.

Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criollo_cattle
https://www.ushistory.org/us/3a.asp
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Plymouth,+MA/@41.8881638,-70.7749408,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e4b9efe1b22d71:0xe99070cab6ea2e23!8m2!3d41.9584457!4d-70.6672621
https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/pineywoods
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/america-promised-land-season-1-episode-1-spanish-ranchers-bring-cattle-to-texas-video
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Cracker_cattle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniola
https://www.pcrba.org/
https://6b934cd0-f6fe-4ea6-a870-cb38602597f1.filesusr.com/ugd/9a1eae_583f1ccb7aac4d9f9319f8d52c192c21.pdf?index=true
https://www.pineywoodscattle.us/breed-history

Support the show

Next Episode

Ep 060 John Wilkes and The British Invasion – But It’s a Good Thing This Time

The whole planet is in the midst of an eruption of disease. Agricultural occurrences are no different than human epidemics, in terms of potential damage.

The British Isles are on the list of places that come to mind when the words “agriculture” and “outbreak” are put together, not because they have any more than the rest of the planet, but because their battles over the last 30 years have been a particularly media-rich affair. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, and Scrapie (another transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE) hit Britain. They’re pretty powerful examples of the destruction that occurs in our food and economic systems from something like this.

But it’s not all bad. Humans have some pretty powerful tools to work with, and top on the list are conceptual ideas like collaboration, cooperation, information, and resource diversification.

Today we’re going to bring you a conversation with a guy that uses all of those tools in his daily life. John Wilkes is a business consultant and journalist who uses his life experience and expertise from both sides of the Atlantic to produce a balanced perspective on commercial U.S. livestock production topics. The first half of his life was on a traditional mixed farm in Shropshire, England, with a later stint in business and the restaurant industry. He married a colonist (read: American), and ended up living in Maryland, and writes a column for the UK Farmers Guardian called “View From The Hill.” We caught up with him in November 2016 at the Livestock Conservancy Conference in Amhurst, Massachusetts, where he was attending both as a member of the Board of Directors of the Conservancy, but also in his role as the North American Ambassador for the UK’s Rare Breeds Survival Trust. He has a broad base of knowledge about many areas of British and American agriculture, including commercial and small farm production, heritage and commercial breeds, import and export requirements, genetics, the food supply, and on and on. We hope you enjoy our conversation with a man that truly understands the power of collaboration.

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-wilkes-0b533a26
https://www.fginsight.com/
https://www.fginsight.com/news/top-stories/view-from-the-hill-us-talks-tough-on-trade-with-eu-77283
https://www.rbst.org.uk/
https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/about/internal/board
http://www.rarebreedscanada.ca/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Breeds_Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Livestock_Conservancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Breeds_Survival_Trust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie
https://www.rbst.org.uk/news/rbst-join-up-with-the-greatest-online-agricultural-show