Jim Goodman: The Real Cowboys

It strikes me that many of the problems we run into on a day-to-day basis are caused by people doing a job for which they are not fully qualified. We have all run across the bad restaurant meal: a cook who wasn’t so good; an owner who didn’t get fresh ingredients; a wait person who ruined the meal with bad service.

Or how about the salesperson who knows absolutely nothing about what he or she is selling? Getting parts to repair broken farm machinery is always a challenge; most of the time the parts person has never operated the machine, nor does he have a clue concerning what the broken part in question does. It’s pretty frustrating.

Then there are the people who work for the USDA administering farm programs at a local level. Often very book-smart folks, they are also often not too experienced at farming. If you run a small farm like me, dealing with USDA can be even more frustrating because farms are supposed to be big and what it would call “efficient”. Since small farms, especially organic farms, don’t fit into the USDA ideal, we are generally written off as rather dim-witted, latter day dinosaurs that are doomed and waiting to die.

I have always had lots of respect for mechanical engineers; farm machinery is truly a marvel (most of the time), extremely expensive, but a marvel. It would, however, make much more sense if all those engineers designing marvelous farm machinery had grown up on a farm.

Wouldn’t it be great if those engineers recalled all the expletives uttered by their fathers as they skinned their knuckles, pinched their fingers and smashed their thumbs trying to fix those marvelous yet owner-unfriendly machines? If so, they would design machinery that is easy to fix, easy to grease and always worked as promised!

Now, I am sure there are former farm kids designing machinery, but, apparently, not very many. I would feel much better if engineers had experience trying to fix a hay baler when it’s 100 degrees in the shade and you have a thousand bales of hay to get in and rain is on the way. (As Bill Clinton used to say, “I feel your pain”.) It would also be very comforting to me if the engineer had to lie on his back and try to snake his arm up between belts, chains and layers of itchy dust to get grease to a bearing that only someone with an arm 4 feet long and double-jointed could reach. But that is not the way things work, certainly not in farming, and certainly not in politics.

Politics presents us with a similar situation; we have elected and appointed officials who sometimes are anything but qualified for their jobs. “Heck of a job, Brownie” will forever be the example of government appointee ineptitude.

So how do inept people get elected or appointed? Money seems to help; big campaign contributions generally pay off; Washington must be crawling with Bush’s big contributing “Pioneers.” Appearance counts too, not rich, but certainly not poor. White men are certainly more acceptable than women or minorities, and this year we found out pantsuits are trouble. It seems being a lawyer is a really good qualification, even though most people say they don’t trust lawyers. People who have been around awhile (insiders) have experience, but are attacked for being insiders. Those who exist outside of Washington (outside the Beltway) are not insiders, but they lack experience. So being an insider or an outsider is good or bad, depending on which one you are.

As a farmer I get frustrated with politicians, appointees and government service employees who have no knowledge of farming but still get to run our lives. I suspect teachers, for example, have similar frustrations. People who have not been in a classroom since they left college are setting the curriculum for the education of our children. Welcome to “No Child Left Behind.”

In the big picture, perhaps the heart of the problem is money. Most of the world is poor, yet the people who run it are rich. Most of them have never known poverty, or anything close to being low income. Those who have worked their way up from low or middle income to a place of power either join the club as in Orwell’s Animal Farm or they get marginalized or leave in frustration because they refuse to follow the status quo.

Clearly, as one moves from local, to state, to the federal government, those in power seem to become increasingly more detached from the lives and problems of the people they supposedly work for. World leaders, at times, seem hopelessly out of touch with reality, at least the reality of most people.

Most politicians have no concept of living in the real world, or at least if they ever did have such a concept it has long since been forgotten amidst the memories of travel junkets, golf outings and chauffeured limousines. In this country and I suspect a large part of the world, you get elected if you have money, if you can be “sold” as being blue collar (even if you can’t remember how many houses you own) and if you have a good public relations firm.

And what of the small picture? Government officials who don’t know farming seem insignificant in comparison to a world in crisis, but having some concept of growing food and caring for livestock would, I think, make for better government. Our current president likes to think of himself as a cowboy, but the question I would have for him is one a friend of mine used to ask of those who were obviously phonies: “Have you ever rassel’d a steer down and given it an aspirin with a balling gun?”

Farmers do. As my friend says, “We’re the real cowboys.”

Columnist Jim Goodman is a writer, activist, and organic dairy farmer. He is currently a Food and Society Policy Fellow and lives in Wonewoc, WI. To learn more about Jim, and read more of his published work, you can visit the page devoted to him at the Food and Society Policy Fellows website.

Jim Goodman: Welcome Back to Food

We often think that farmers markets are a product of our times as they spring up in cities and small towns across the country. Truth is, farmers markets are the traditional way of selling agricultural produce around the world.

The really nice aspect of this transaction is that the farmer receives just compensation for his product and the eater can be assured the product is fresh, local and grown in a manner that is acceptable to all. If these criteria are not met, the consumer can look for another farmer whose products better suit his or her needs.

After the industrialization of agriculture, farmers still sold at farmers markets, but it was just a matter of time before supermarkets were developed and farmers started selling to large companies that moved food all over the world; many Americans stopped planting gardens because it was so much easier to get “everything” at the store.

We certainly have gained something through the globalized food system: more variety, foods we cannot grow in cold climates and, of course, cheap food that is mass-produced by underpaid farmers and farm workers. Some good news, some bad. I certainly like coffee and chocolate, but I want to know the growers and workers were paid a fair wage and that it was grown in an environmentally- responsible manner. I would like to be sure all the food I need to buy meets those same standards, whether imported or locally grown.

So, we come back to farmers markets– local, fair, green and affordable. I am, as you can tell, a big fan of farmers markets and it’s not just because we are vendors at the farmers market in Madison, Wisconsin. I, too, can get vegetables that don’t grow well in our garden, as well as pork, eggs, fruit, chicken and lamb. I know all the growers personally, where they live, their children, and we get to enjoy each others’ company every Saturday morning. True, getting up at 3:30am to get to the market isn’t always so much fun, nor are those occasional cold or rainy Saturdays when few customers show up.

Understandably, not everyone is all about farmers markets. One of our customers, who we see very infrequently, showed up with his wife the other day and said going to the market involved three of his least favorite things: getting up early, shopping and crowds. Well, to each his own.

While the supermarket may eliminate getting up early, it still involves shopping and crowds and has little to offer in the way of fresh, local or fair food. Affordable, yes, but we know the affordability of mainstream food relies on low-wage farmers, and industrial farming practices that in turn rely on heavy use of chemicals, large-scale animal production and hidden costs to the environment.

We also know that the nutritional content of that supermarket food has been in steady decline for decades. We know most of our winter vegetables are imported and possibly grown in a manner that is not healthy, fair or green. Even the USDA, which touts our food as the safest in the world, (despite dramatically increasing numbers of food poisoning incidents) is critical of the declining nutritional content.

According to the USDA, Americans are increasingly deficient in calcium, potassium, magnesium and vitamins A, C, D and E. This lack of vitamins and minerals in our diet is indicative of depleted soils world wide, caused by industrial farming practices. A comparison of today’s soil mineral content across the world with that of 100 years ago shows an average decline of mineral levels of roughly 80%. No wonder supermarket food is lacking in nutrition!

Another statistic from the USDA’s Economic Research Service indicates that if all Americans were to eat in accordance with the dietary guidelines establish by USDA, we would need an additional 14.1 million acres for fruit and vegetable production and would be short 111 billion pounds of milk per year. Granted, Americans will never eat according to the USDA guidelines, which are probably too heavy on milk and meat and way too short on vegetable consumption. Still, even the USDA concedes we are a food deficit nation; globalization is apparently not working, for we depend on the rest of the world to feed us while many of them are starving.

While the practices of the industrial “Green Revolution” did increase food production, it appears it did little for food quality. Industrial production of the cheap food that fills our supermarkets is slowly starving us. It all sort of adds up: food safety scares, declining food quality, the world food crisis, all these abysmal failures of food production and marketing will eventually bring food production back to the local level. Local producers quickly learn that caring for the soil and making it healthy again produces healthy, nutrient dense food for both people and animals.

Could we be entering a renaissance in food production and eating? Many think we are, for many small reasons that together add up to the overwhelming conclusion that we can no longer ship our food 1,500 miles or more from farm to table; industrial farming has crested the hill and is on the downhill slide.

Oil will never be cheap again and climate change has made world food production very uncertain. Developing countries can produce more food that is more appropriate to their cultures if they are allowed to use traditional production practices as opposed to industrial farming practices. Local producers world-wide know that hands on farming affords a better way to care for the soil and produce healthy food.

Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper speculated on what the future and the future of food might look like, from giant chickens to hose-fed, genetically engineered bananas the size of a cruise missile. I know, it’s just a movie, but Monsanto may be working on it. Forget the movies. The future of food is local.

When one farms locally, or supports local agriculture, he or she may, at first, miss the convenience of the old cheap, globalized food system. Change for the better is seldom easy, but always worth it. There will still be getting up early, shopping and crowds, but in the end, I think, local farmers and eaters have more fun and live better for it.

Columnist Jim Goodman is a writer, activist, and organic dairy farmer. He is currently a Food and Society Policy Fellow and lives in Wonewoc, WI. To learn more about Jim, and read more of his published work, you can visit the page devoted to him at the Food and Society Policy Fellows website.

Jim Goodman: The Hard Way

The Hard Way

We are, for better or worse, part of the land we live on. We can choose to extract as much as possible from the earth around us, the “Manifest Destiny” (or nature’s in my way) line of thinking. Or we can take as little as necessary and leave as small a trace as possible, the “Seventh Generation” concept of the Native American peoples. If farming well were easy and profitable, everyone would be doing it. Farming is never easy, no matter how you go about it, but at least when we farm with nature it’s not a 24/7 battle.

Responsible farmers, organic advocates, environmentalists, etc. see nature’s way as our attempt to fit into the environment in the least invasive way possible. We realize that, no matter what we do, nature is in control; we cannot dominate for long. Eventually our best laid plans will fail, our monuments will fall, our cities will vanish and nature will go on in spite of us.

Since we are not fatalistic at heart, we try to find our place within nature. Farming depends on nature; it succeeds on our knowledge and a certain amount of luck. Farming fails when we are ignorant of nature or when we ignore its cycles and diversity.

Farmers, for example, learned that they couldn’t plow up and down the hills and that they needed to leave some sod strips to slow the water down as it followed the pull of gravity. They had to add nutrients and organic matter back to the soil with manure or plant matter if they wanted any kind of crop. Planting the same crop year after year depleted the soil and allowed weeds and insects to establish themselves as the natural diversity and competition were lost. Nature abhors a vacuum; weeds and grass want to fill the void when a field is plowed.

So from the beginning farmers struggled, trying to grow the crops they wanted in an environment that wasn’t always receptive to their efforts. Droughts, floods, hail, frost, insects and weeds; farmers always struggled with them, and it was never easy. They farmed in deserts and irrigated; they farmed in the north and developed crops that could grow in the short seasons; they raised animals, grains, fruits and vegetables. Some years they were lucky and had good crops, some years not. They cursed too much rain and prayed when they needed more, hoping in time things would balance out.

This has been a hard year in my part of Wisconsin, and we hope things will start balancing out soon.

The weather turned against us in May of last year. We had a nice rain on Mother’s Day, then for nearly three months we watched the pastures dry up, the corn shrivel and the dust blow. Some said be careful what you wish for; when the rains start it might not turn out as well as we had hoped. And, of course, they were right. In early August the rains returned to Southwestern Wisconsin, in some places nearly twenty inches in a week’s time.

The meteorologists said it was a “hundred year rain”, thus the hundred year floods. Farmers saw not only their crops washed away, but their soil as well. Fences, roads and bridges, all were swept away by the water that only days before we had been praying for.

Our farm is on a ridge, so other than some ditches, minor soil erosion and a crop of oats we couldn’t harvest, things didn’t look too bad. While the cows slogged through the mud, we felt lucky we were spared, yet we were sad for those who had lost so much. As things greened up after the rain, we felt fortunate that our heavy soils had held enough moisture, even through the drought, to keep things alive. Nature did balance things out and although the crops were late, they yielded well.

The cows were on good pasture until early December when the snows started and never seemed to let up. Over a hundred inches of snow fell from December through April and we worked and fed cattle in what became a series of white trenches connecting the farm buildings.

The snow melted slowly and with the hundred year rain and the hundred inches of snow behind us, we waited for the warm winds of spring. And we waited. It was an abnormally cool spring and a wet one. Some of the early planted corn didn’t come up or came up yellow and stunted. We plant our corn late, intentionally, the end of May or early June, to miss getting pollinated by the neighbors’ early planted GM corn. I guess that’s the official excuse, but sometimes we are just late.

Then on June 7-8 we got another hundred year rain: ten inches in thirty-six hours. Flooding was worse than last August. Many small towns were cut off as roads were flooded, bridges were washed out and power lines knocked down. Again, farmers had their crops submerged and they watched as their soil washed down the Kickapoo, the Wisconsin and the Mississippi rivers. Even on our high ridge the heavy downpour was enough to collapse the concrete walls of our manure storage pit. It was empty and thankfully there is no threat of a manure spill, but now we face building a new structure, costing at least $ 100,000.

As I write, it is raining again. We have measured another two inches and east of us over four inches has fallen. Several towns are evacuating and there is no travel permitted in our county. WWII amphibious “ducks” from the Wisconsin Dells are moving people to emergency shelters. Many highways are closed in spots, including Interstate 94 and 39. Tornadoes and straight line winds have destroyed homes, farms and other infrastructure. About half of our farm lies in Vernon County where the initial damage estimate was $60 million. Since that estimate, close to six more inches of rain have fallen, and the worst of the damage may still be under water.

Are we better off because we farm organically, with much of the land in pasture and hay? I think so. It really is not a question of “organic” vs. “conventional”; it is a question of being a part of the world around us, rather than trying to conquer the world. We need to fit in, just as farmers have fit in for thousands of years. They made mistakes and took their knocks like we did last week. We lost some soil in a few fields, but no more than the “no-till” farmers that rely on chemicals rather than cultivation to control their weeds. I know that none of the toxic chemicals headed for the Gulf of Mexico in the flood waters washed out of our fields, and there is some comfort in that.

What will come up when the floodwaters recede across the Midwest? It won’t be corn and beans. Look for grass and weeds.

Columnist Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer in Wonewoc, WI. He has published essays in the Madison Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is a fellow of the Food and Society Fellows Program.

Jim Goodman: Nature’s Way

Jim Goodman

Nature’s Way

Last month I had a pretty good idea how the cows would react to their first days on pasture, but I never get tired of seeing them acting like calves again– running, gorging on fresh grass and stretching out flat and dreaming of an endless summer. Cows love the spring and they love change; they would like a new pasture every day, every hour if we could arrange it. Cows have the attention span of a kindergärtner. Nature tells them to move, cover the ground fast and eat the grass when it’s fresh, then come back in a few weeks and start the cycle over again, just as grazing animals have done for centuries.

As the seasons change, our work schedules change as well. With the animals outside feeding themselves again, we can turn our attention from hauling feed to and manure away from the cows to spring tillage, planting and fence building. The calender tells us that spring comes around March 20 or 21. For farmers, spring really arrives the day we begin turning the remnants of last years crop under in preparation for a new season. The soil has a certain smell when it is ready; anyone who has ever worked the land knows it.

This year spring is late and wet. So, we wait until the ground is dry enough to spread the winter’s manure and plow, disk and seed a new crop. At times we farm between the showers one day at a time, hoping for enough dry weather to work the ground and plant, yet knowing seed needs moisture to germinate. We always hope for the perfect combination: moist soil, no tractor-swallowing “wet spots”, plenty of sun and no breakdowns.

Cloudy, wet days mean cutting firewood for next winter and repairing the fences that snow and fallen trees have flattened. Fixing fence means lots of walking, getting soaked from the rain showers and for me even those short breaks in the clouds can bring on a good sunburn. Splicing broken wires ensures that by day’s end you will have some new rips in your jeans and most likely in your hands as well. You do get a chance to watch the robins, larks, bluebirds and orioles flitting about making their nests and, if you are lucky and keen of eye, perhaps you might find those morel mushrooms that came up overnight. All in all, not a bad way to spend a day.

These days we always seem to lag behind the rest of the neighbors; they are busy planting and spraying their corn while we plow and prepare a smooth seedbed for this year’s crop of oats and barley and the grass and clover that will be next year’s hay and pasture. Our standard crop rotation of corn, oats, hay and pasture is considered old-fashioned by many.

By using genetically modified (GM) seed, farmers can plant without tillage and, in theory, kill everything but the GM crop with chemicals while insects are killed by a bacterial poison engineered into the corn. Rather than wasting time working up a smooth seedbed for oats or wheat, the “progressive” farmer plants corn and soy– lots of acres in a yearly exchange of GM monocultures.

But, one must remember, if it sounds too good to be true . . . it’s not easy to fool mother nature. The GM promise of one spray to kill weeds failed to happen; in a few years weeds became resistant and now several applications of even more chemicals are needed. Insecticidal corn, well, it worked to a point, but new bugs moved in so new insecticides and control measures are needed. Fuel savings, well, some university researchers now advise some minimal tillage may be needed to aerate the soil and break up compaction. Between those extra trips and more spraying and/or cultivation to kill resistant weeds, the no-till GM system may use as much fuel as the old crop rotation some farmers still rely on.

Most advocates of no-till farming would strongly disagree with me, as studies in Kansas ( http://kec.kansas.gov/reports/WaterOfficeReport2006.pdf ) show no-till reduces fuel usage by about 2 gallons per acre over other systems. Yet there are few completely no-till systems left as most farmers do some tillage, whether it is deep subsoiling, planting a winter cover-crop or minimum cultivation for weed control. When you consider the tremendous amounts of fuel used in transportation of crops, chemicals and fertilizers and the fuel used in the manufacture of fertilizers and chemicals for the global food system, smaller local and regional farming systems have a better potential for fuel savings and environmental protection. Long-term studies done by the Rodale Institute and Cornell University confirm that chemically intensive commodity crop production does not save fuel or reduce carbon dioxide production or significantly increase yields over sustainable and organic farming methods:
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/NFfield_trials/1003/carbonwhitepaper.shtml

I may be old-fashioned, but research is backing up what common sense has told farmers and gardeners for years: systems that mimic or work closely with nature work better for everyone in the long term. Nature eventually figures out a way to beat the best-laid plans of chemists and corporate profiteers. With good farming practices, managed grazing and a real crop rotation, soil over time tends to build its organic matter (and carbon) content, while commodity cropping with alternate crops of corn and soy tends to do just the opposite.

Traditional farming systems, those that rely on an integrated system of grains, hay and pasture in long term rotations, appear to survive the test of time. Livestock incorporated into these systems can efficiently utilize grass for feed and add fertility back into the system through their manure. Furthermore, growing and marketing food locally can greatly reduce the amount of fossil fuel used in transportation and promotes local economies.

By supporting these natural systems, farmers can earn a fair wage, informed citizens have access to fresher more nutritious food and while we feed ourselves we also allow the rest of the world to feed themselves locally and regionally. The wisdom of indigenous farmers around the world tells us that we cannot own nature; we can only hope to be a dependent yet beneficial part of it.

If a more holistic approach to farming were widely adopted, only the financial interests of the international grain traders, oil companies, fertilizer and chemical manufacturers would be harmed. To that, my cows and I say– “So”?

Columnist Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer in Wonewoc, WI. He has published essays in the Madison Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is a fellow of the Food and Society Fellows Program.

Jim Goodman: The Rebel Dairyman

By Jim Goodman

Recently I was reading Tom Hayden’s book Irish On The Inside and his speculation that the Irish character contains the seeds of rebelliousness rather than conformity, idealism rather than materialism and communal ethics rather than individualistic ones. I’d agree with that. I also think in these times we all need to be a bit more rebellious and do the right thing.

In 1848, my great grandfather, apparently having had enough of the Great Hunger in Ireland (and British rule, I suspect), left Ireland and bought a small patch of wilderness in SW Wisconsin. We still farm that land today although over the years the farm has grown and, of course, changed considerably.

Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told us in the 70’s that we needed to “get big or get out”. My wife and I tried getting big but didn’t much care for it, and really didn’t want to get out, so we got small again, started marketing locally and went back to organic farming methods. We still milk 45 Holsteins and run them on pasture. We sell direct market beef at the Farmers Market in Madison and try to advocate a food system that is local, healthy, fair, affordable and green.

Spring should be here soon, for the sun is getting more direct, the snow is receding, sort of, and the melt water is starting to move into places we may not want it: basements, cattle yards, through the barn walls. The price of spring, I guess, but after looking at nothing but snow for nearly four months, the sight of that winter wheat, when it shows up, will be welcome. It will be so green when the snow melts off and, like the Inuit’s first glimpse of the sun in the high Arctic, we will know that life will begin again.

Having lived on stored feed and spending most of the last four months indoors, the cows are telling me they need to kick up their heels. I will be glad to have them out; cows should be on pasture, but unfortunately, that is not a year-round option in Wisconsin. As soon as the frost is out of the ground and most of the mud is gone, I will open the gates, put a wagon of feed out for them and turn them loose.

The cows will spend the first day mostly running around, kicking up clods of mud and challenging each other in head butting. Shaggy, shedding their winter coats and panting, they stretch out flat on their sides, perhaps thinking of the endless summer, the warm sun and green grass that for them stretches out into days far beyond their comprehension.

While our cows will soon be out grazing, doing what cows have always done, studies show that in Wisconsin only about 25% of the dairy cows will be out on pasture. The rest, whether on smaller-sized farms or in larger herds of hundreds or thousands will be kept inside, or at best confined in dirt lots with no grass and little freedom to move around. The theory behind this folly comes from years of research that apparently indicates it is more “efficient” to harvest feed for your cows rather than let them harvest their own. Efficiency, of course, is measured in short-term profits, not the cows’ well-being or the farm’s long-term sustainability.

Dairy cows in other states probably have similar experience with lack of pasture access, especially cows in the West– California, Arizona, etc. Even organic cows are not always allowed the “access to pasture” required for organic certification. Some large factory-style dairies, like Aurora in Colorado, manage to skirt the USDA organic pasture requirements; so much for ethical organic farming. (See the editor’s note.)

Cattle, like people, need exercise, fresh vitamin rich food and sunshine. The chance to walk around on dirt is necessary as well;walking around on concrete all day is just not a very natural experience for man or beast. In a past life, I confess, I kept my cattle inside year round; I was told to do so by industry professionals and university researchers. It was what “progressive” farmers did. In hindsight, those experts were wrong. I can say with confidence that the most significant thing I have ever done to improve the health and comfort of my cattle was putting them back on pasture, no doubt about it.

There is no question that not only does pasture make cattle healthier, but as research has shown, the meat and dairy products produced by pasture cattle can contain from three to five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than products from animals fed conventional diets. Pasture cattle also show higher levels of Vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids. So, pasture is good for cattle and for people.

One does not need to be an agricultural scientist to realize that cattle can harvest their own feed much more efficiently than a farmer could. Cows on pasture don’t need machinery, their carbon footprint is pretty low, they like it better and, as an advocate of Masanobu Fukuoka’s “do nothing farming” model, it suits me just fine. Fukuoka felt that doing as little as possible, i.e., relying on natural systems and intervening in nature only as necessary, was the best way to farm. Smart man.

This will be an interesting year. Fuel may hit $4.00/gallon soon. Fertilizer and crop chemical prices will be high and I can’t help but think the low-input farmers will have a better chance to survive. While I will have to harvest and store feed for next winter, I think it only makes sense to let my cattle harvest their own feed this summer. The hilly terrain in the Driftless area is much more conducive to growing grass than to the corn/soy rotation we are supposed to be getting rich on.

We need to think in a rational manner: stop farming fence row to fence row, stop this senseless mining of the soil to produce commodity crops for energy and the world market, eat closer to home, be nice to our animals and to each other. Everyone who buys food needs to start thinking about eating closer to home. That means visiting farmers markets and getting to know who grows your food and putting a face on it.

I still have no plans to, as Butz said, get big. I think we feed enough people. There are, however, plenty of farmers out there who need to be encouraged to get small and produce locally, to farm sustainably and ethically. Only consumer support will give them the courage to change their ways in these uncertain times. This spring, as we begin another Farmers Market season, I wonder, what if everyone had a rebellious streak and decided to buy locally from the farmers who want to do it right?

Columnist Jim Goodman has published work in the Madison Capital Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other places. He is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc, WI.