Still here.

Seven weeks since I've blogged. Anyone who was reading has probably long given up on me but we're still here.

The sheep are breeding, chickens are laying and kids are growing.

Ron Paul 2008.

Be well.

Transition.

Here at Liberty Farm, we've made the transition from summer to autumn. That means something that our family looks forward to every year - vacation. We spent the first week of October on Hatteras Island, North Carolina. The fishing was lousy but all in all it was a very nice relaxing week spent with my parents and sister, brother-in-law and their three kids.

As we move into autumn we have two major undertakings on the farm and they are the things I least look forward to during the year - shearing and dividing the flock into two breeding groups and one group of ewe lambs that will not be bred this year. So, every year about this time I entertain thoughts about what our life would be like if we didn't have this farm, livestock and everything else that goes along with it. I probably shouldn't admit that here but it's true and I know this melancholy outlook will pass soon enough.

Shearing the ewes is tentatively scheduled for October 27th. I will try to get the rams done one evening (or morning, depending on my work schedule) before then. The rams are going to be difficult because we don't have a good way of getting them into the barn and closing them in. The ewes are easy in this regard because their habit is to spend some time loafing in their barn each day so we just have to close the gate when they are all inside.

Dividing the flock for breeding purposes has always been one of the most difficult thins we do each year simply because we don't have adequate handling facilities. The corral I built last spring should be a big help with that. I plan to buy enough wire panels that we can construct a lane connecting the two barns. Then it will be a (simple?!?) matter of separating out the sheep we want to move and driving them down the lane. The white (ewe) barn will house one ram and his group and the red (ram) barn will house the other ram with his ewes. Additionally, we will have 3 or 4 ewe lambs in a stall in the red barn that will not be bred this year. I'm not sure of the number yet because we may breed the biggest of the ewe lambs. I'll know for sure after she is shorn and I can judge her body size and condition without all that wool getting in the way.

Good Winter Eating

We have two freezers full of lamb, chicken, corn, broccoli, cabbage and tomatoes, 30+ quarts of canned beans, a big bag of potatoes in the cellar and a very nice crop of celery yet to be harvested along with a big pile of dried beans to be threshed. It's a nice feeling going into winter with all this stored food. Certainly we have the option of buying what we need as we need it but having it already and especially having produced it ourselves makes all the hard work worthwhile.

I was reviewing the "books" this week and see that the lamb we sold this year almost paid for all our hay for the coming winter. That's not bad when you figure we kept two lambs and a hogget for ourselves. The chicken project worked well. The demand outstripped our supply (assuming everyone who placed an order ends up actually buying). On the economic side, $2.50 per pound provides a nice profit margin. A 5-pound bird sells for $12.50. In our experience, it ate about $6 worth of organic grain plus $0.65 for the chick. Basically, Jennifer and I made a combined $25-$30 per hour for butchering if we figure nothing for our labor in actually raising the birds. Since we would have done this anyway to raise chicken for our own table (priceless) that labor is not accounted for. For more information see Gene Logsdon's writings about "pastoral economics" vs. "industrial economics."

Last but not least, I was talking to Mike, who owns Border's Market when I picked up my lamb last night and I think I may have found a source for fat grass-fed beef. Most of the beef we've had has been quite lean. Since we've begun trying to eat in a nutrient-dense, traditional manner, I've become sensitive to eating meat that is too lean. I want grass-fed beef but it must be finished, i.e. fat. Mike gave me the contact info for a customer of his that is doing just that. If you're a farmer in north central Ohio in need of butcher, I can't recommend Border's in Plymouth highly enough. They are one of the only ones left doing on-farm slaughter which, in my opinion, is the most humane, natural way to bring an animal from the pasture to the table.

Late Summer Update

Random thoughts on what's happening now at Liberty Farm.

The garden is on it's way out. Beans are canned, corn, broccoli, cabbage and tomatoes are frozen, kraut and kimchi and made, etc. We still have lots of tomatoes to work with and our dry beans are drying. The potatoes are still in the ground. I really don't want to harvest them until the temperature drops in our cellar. That way they will keep better. I'm not sure how well they will keep in the ground. We'll see.

Pastures look great. I want to apply 2 tons of lime per acre in October. There are some weeds that need to be mowed and I want to trim under the fence one more time.

Speaking of fence, I've made several half-assed repairs this summer that need to be corrected. My goal is to replace all of our steel line posts with fiberglass and corner posts with wood. I would recommend that anyone building an electric fence avoid steel altogether. One problem with one wire on one post and you've got a dead short.

Lamb butchering is scheduled for 9/24 and I have photos of the chicken butchering to post. My youngest son has been proudly telling people that he helped gut a chicken.

BTW- the chicken is sold out! I vastly underestimated the demand. Next year we'll definitely be raising more.

Be well.

Sheep Pics

Food and Water...

...not necessarily related.

Food


We've been doing a lot of fermenting lately. Above is a yogurt cheese made from homemade yogurt. Just pour the room temperature yogurt into a cheesecloth-lined colander. Tie up the cheesecloth and hang it to drain. 12 hours for a creamy, spreadable cheese and 24 for a more dry crumbly cheese.

Below is kimchi - cabbage, carrots, green onions, garlic, ginger and chile pepper flakes. Just add salt and a bit of whey for a starter and pound. Pack it into the jars and press until the liquid covers all the veggies. We fermented this for 3 days ate room temp and then moved to the fridge for aging.

We've also made sauerkraut and pickled green beans. I have a Belgian Trippel aging in the secondary fermenter in the dining room and a gallon of kombucha on the kitchen counter. Our house is a den of yeast and bacteria.




Water


This photo shows the intersection of Sixth and Diamond streets in Mansfield on August 21st. Our machine shop sits just behind the red brick building with the billboard on the right. You may have seen this view on CNN. The Post Office is just out of the frame on the right.

We had 30 inches of water inside our building. 20-odd baked out electric motors later, and we are back in full production. Which explains why I haven't posted the last couple weeks.

Beans.

Here is our first picking of green snap beans. Another cooler this size is about 1/3 full of haricot verts (aka skinny green beans). Jennifer canned something in the neighborhood of 30 quarts today. That should about do us for the year.

With the remaining harvest, I plan to dehydrate some into "leather britches" and ferment some - i.e. lactic acid fermentation in the way of sauerkraut and natural (no vinegar) dill pickles.

We planted about 100 feet of snap beans. I always seem to forget how much they yield! In addition, we planted about 500 feet of 5 different varieties of dry-type beans. We're going to have to get some bigger coolers.

More On The Garden

Here is the photo of the garden taken from the greenhouse roof. The quality is not the best. We got about 3/4" of rain last night and this morning and it was hazy when I shot this.

The right foreground, which is covered with black plastic, was sod last year - hence the plastic. Staked tomatoes are on the right, peppers in the center and unstaked, uncaged tomatoes on left. Just to the left of that, off the plastic, is celery. It's hard to see from this angle because the tomatoes are taller but it's doing very well.

Behind this area are potatoes. The first row is in bottomless buckets with the following rows planted traditionally in hilled furrows. We planted German Butterball, Red Pontiac, Green Mountain, Russet Burbank, and Austrian Crescent.

Behind the potatoes are two short rows of beans. To the left is a compost bin which contains the remains of the 2006 chicken butchering. Behind and to the left of it are more beans (snap type).

Then we have 3 rows of corn hills running the entire width with more beans behind that. We're growing a lot of dry beans this year - Black Coco, Soldier, Tiger Eye, Vermont Cranberry, and Taylor's Dwarf Horticultural. Unfortunately, we've misplaced the diagram that tells us which is which so we'll have to wait for harvest.

Behind the beans is the broccoli with cabbage behind that. Then 3 more rows of corn hills. The garlic was behind that but it's already been harvested and is curing.

The left foreground that isn't shown has strawberries and the peas and lettuce which have already been harvested and not succession planted. The remaining bedding from the ram pen will go here after finishing the 10' extension of the growing area in the immediate foreground of the photo.

Scott asked about rotating the location of the garden. Since we're moving to a no-till, mulched system of annual production, we won't be changing the location of the garden - just rotating the plants within the space. I have been giving some thought to growing small grains in the pasture which would probably be a 5-7 year rotation. Annuals for three years, then back to perennial polyculture for 2-4 years.

Rain!

We got a good 2 inches last night and a little more this afternoon. Coupled with cooler temperatures over the next week, this should give the pastures a good foundation for moving into late summer.

Even with the rain, though, I've decided to feed a little alfalfa hay to the sheep. I'm afraid if I don't, we're going to have some little lambs when it comes time to harvest them in mid-September. The amount of hay I plan to feed equates to about $10 per head for the ram lambs (the ewe lambs and mamas will be eating it too) which works out to around 6 pounds in the live weight of the lamb. I don't have any research of my own but things I've read lead me to believe that feeding some alfalfa now will be a net gain when we sell the lamb.

We bartered chickens for some of this hay we got earlier this week. Today the woman we got it from left a message saying the chicken was fantastic and the carcasses were very clean. I sold another bird to an egg customer today. She said, "I'm so excited! I get to eat chicken again!" She can't eat supermarket chicken because of a reaction to antibiotics or pesticide residue or GMO grain or something. It's nice to be able to provide people with food of higher quality than they can get commercially. The truth is, you can't buy chicken in the store like we sell.

New Listings - What's For Sale

I updated my Local Harvest and Eat Wild listings today to reflect the following:

Liberty Farm began in 2005 with the purchase of our farm in northern Morrow County, Ohio. We started with a small flock of Icelandic ewes and a handful of laying hens.

It is our goal to build a sustainable farm for the purpose of raising healthy, pastured food and healthy kids. Our pastures are managed in a chemical-free style with an eye to long-term improvement of the land.

We have 100% grass-fed, drug-free lamb to offer for sale. Our lambs produce very mild flavored meat. They eat nothing but grass and mother's milk with some vitamin and mineral supplement.

In addition, we have chicken and eggs. Our meat birds and laying hens are fed certified organic feed from Curly Tail Farm here in Central Ohio and live on pasture in hoop houses that we move regularly to fresh grass.

The chickens follow the sheep in the pasture rotation. This means that the grass is nice and short so the birds can take full advantage of it. Their contribution is to fertilize and scratch the ground, making better pasture for the sheep.

and:

We are now taking orders for lamb that will be processed in September. Whole and half animals are available. They are going fast - reserve yours today with a phone call or email! The price is $3.25 per pound (carcass weight - processing not included).

Broiler chickens are available now and we will be butchering more in September. They are $2.50 per pound which includes processing. Weights range from 4-6 pounds.

Eggs are $2.50 a dozen. Our supply will be better in late August.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you may remember a post some time ago explaining that we don't sell chicken because we don't produce any grain which is their primary food source. Allan Nation has often pointed out that the biggest difference between organic and "conventional" agriculture is the name on the bag of inputs. He's right and that isn't sustainable. So why the change at Liberty Farm?

The first reason is practical. To be honest, we're hemorrhaging money and broiler chickens are a sure way to increase cash flow. Are we selling out? Maybe... At least the chickens are a good fit with our sheep on pasture.

Secondly, as much as I might like to see a change in modern organic and "sustainable" ag, it ain't happening yet. And it probably won't until the price of oil makes shipping grain and supplements cost prohibitive. When that finally happens, it will bring a lot of changes. For one, we won't be eating young, tender, large-breasted chickens anymore because those hybrid birds are so nutritionally demanding. They need lots of protein and a precise balance of vitamins and minerals. We found this out the hard way this spring when we lost 46 out of 50 birds due to a lack of vitamin B in the supplement.

So we're selling chicken for the time being - chickens that live their short lives feeling the sun on their back and the grass under their feet. There is no comparison whatsoever to confinement raised chicken, including the industrial organic crap. Get it while it's hot.

In the meantime, I'm working on learning more about organic no-till grain growing and experimenting with different heritage breeds of chicken that will thrive on feed that I can produce by hand.

Michael Pollan and Cheese

Here is a photo of my first cheese. It's a 3-pound Farmhouse Cheddar. We had some extra milk from our herdshare and finally got around to making cheese.
Michael Pollan was on "On Point" on NPR this morning. I don't know how long this link will be good, but you can listen here.

Promised Photos

Here is the corral we built to work our sheep. There is a gate at the end and a gate in the center. The dimensions of the corral are about 9 feet wide and 34 feet long.

These are the two hoophouses that used to be one. Broilers are in the left one and pullets in the right.

The chicks pictured here are golden-laced Wyandottes. They have recently been allowed to roam a little farther from home and enjoy going in to visit the rams next door. The rams lounge here in the barn while the chicks explore all around them. Of course, when I went in to take this photo, Luther had to get up. I had to hurry up and snap it before he came over to have me scratch behind his ears.

Be Fruitful and Mulch Apply

That title comes from the email sig of Keith Johnson of Permaculture Activist. It describes my work the last few days. I only wish I had gotten the entire garden mulched a month ago. Oh well, better late than never.

I've been awful about getting photos posted here this summer. I'll try to get some over the upcoming holiday week. We finally nixed our internet connection at home. It's so slow that we weren't using it. Why continue paying for it? Anyway, with the laptop there are plenty of places to get online. I just have to remember to get my photos on the computer so they're ready to upload when the opportunity arises.

Next week I'm going to start calling my hay sources and try to get some idea what local farmers are expecting regarding the 2nd hay cutting.

Summer Update

Summer is officially here and boy are we in the thick of it. I know that I am a native of this place but when it gets this hot I wouldn't mind being native a few hundred miles north.

In addition to being hot, it's very dry. I don't like to complain when I know others have it much worse. I just wish that I had taken the time to get rainwater collection put on the greenhouse roof and added extensions to our pond drain to make it deeper. I could have 300+ gallons in plastic barrels and maybe another 8,000 gallons in the pond (very rough estimate).

The weather lately has made me realize the importance of deep mulch gardening. I've got quite a bit of exposed soil and it's fried. So, in addition to the upcoming chicken butchering days, I plant to:

1. Put a gutter and downspout on the greenhouse.
2. Get 3 PVC elbows and short pieces of pipe to add 12-18 inches of depth to the pond.
3. Mulch the garden and get some soaker hose for targeted watering.

I'm a little concerned about the pending availability of 2nd cutting hay on this area. This has got me to thinking about putting up loose hay by hand. I've mowed about 5 acres of pasture. If I had managed it for making hay from some of it, I could probably have 4 or 5 tons of hay. When I say "loose hay by hand," this is what I mean.

Here's a cool blog for those of you with an interest in horses.

And, last but not least, here's some food for thought.

Hogget and Chickens

We ate the first of the hogget last night. As far as we could tell, it is indistinguishable from the 6 month old lamb that we've had in the past with the exception of the size of the cuts. If we can get more quantity with the same quality, I expect that all of our ewe lambs will be kept over to one year old.

We will be butchering chickens on July 7th or 14th and will have a few extra to offer for sale. More will be ready in mid-September and we are taking orders for then. Quantities are extremely limited! If you are in north central Ohio and are interested let us know soon. The price is $2.50 per pound, including processing. These birds are raised on pasture and live their lives feeling the sun on their backs and the grass under their feet. In addition to all the grass, insects and worms they can eat, we feed certified organic grain.

Hogget Butchering

Our hoggets were slaughtered on May 29th and I picked up the meat from ours today. I can't wait to try it for the reasons outlined in this post.

The corral we built for separating hem worked well - as long as I remembered to close the gate!

The butcher and I are on the same wavelength. He told me that he would be sure to tell my customers, "You know Joe and now you know me and that's a food chain!" Walmart could never match it. He is looking into expanding an offering "natural," i.e. no antibiotics, other drugs, artificial hormones, steroids, etc. meat by the individual cut. More power to him!

Belated Memorial Day Post

Wendell Berry on war:

As a father, I must look at my son, and I must ask if there is anything I possess – any right, any piece of property, any comfort, any joy – that I would ask him to die to permit me to keep. I must ask if I believe that it would be meaningful – after his mother and I have loved each other and begotten him and loved him – for him to die in a lump with a number hanging around his neck. I must ask if his life would have come to meaning or nobility or any usefulness if he should sit – with his human hands and head and eyes – in the cockpit of a bomber, dealing out pain and grief and death to people unknown to him. And my answer to all these questions is one that I must attempt to live by: No.

How different might the history of this nation look if more parents thought like this - beginning with the 600,000 dead Americans in the War Between the States?

I highly recommend Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists by Bill Kauffman.

Still Kickin'

Whew! It's been so long since I blogged I almost forgot how. We've been very busy but not much has been really blogworthy - just continuing in the cycle of seasons. There are a few things worth reporting here for sure so consider this post an update.

Border's is coming to slaughter four hoggets (yearling ewes) next Thursday, the 31st. In anticipation of that, I've had to build some means of working and separating the sheep. We put new door on one side of our sheep barn and are building a pen 8 feet wide by about 35 feet long. There will be a gate at then end and a gate in the middle. The idea is to run the sheep out of the barn (gathering pen) into the first section of the new outdoor pen (forcing pen, crowding pen). This area will be crowded and I can go inside and easily (hah!) catch the animals I want and lead them to the gate and through into the second section. The sheep being separated, the barn door is opened and the remaining ewes and lambs can go back inside, out the other door and back to the pasture. I'll let you know how it works.

We found out that our broiler losses were due to a deficiency of vitamin B in the supplement. The organic farmer who provides our feed switched back to Fertrell and everything seems to be OK now. Unfortunately, we lost most of our original 50 so we've got some new chicks. The few survivors from the first batch will be ready in a week or two. We've also had some predator losses so we've had to turn one of our stalls into a fortress of chicken wire.

At this point we have the best garden we've had for many years. We didn't get started as early as we wanted and so haven't done the succession planting we had hoped to do but we're getting a little better each year.

Be well.

Killing Cones

These are chicken killing cones that I just finished making. They are made from aluminum sheet which I already had here at the shop.

The chicken goes in head first with the head out through the hole in the bottom. The cone restrains the bird while it bleeds out.

Butcher Table

Here is my latest chicken butchering acquisition. It will make a nice addition to the plucker I built.
The table is 10 feet long with a sink molded into it. I plan to plumb a faucet in it with a garden hose connection and add a drain pipe to keep my feet dry while I'm working there. A friend and customer had this and sold it to me for a song.

I've been remiss in reporting on our lambing progress. The ewes are done now with the last set of twins born on Sunday, April 22nd. We arrived home from church to find them in the barn. Final count is ten - five sets of twins with 5 ewes and 5 rams.

My Whizbang Chicken Plucker

Here is my newly completed Whizbang Chicken Plucker.


This photos shows how it is wired. I attached a pigtail with a male plug end coming from the motor, then switched a waterproof receptacle box. The motor isn't wired directly to the switch because I wanted to be able to remove it from the frame for cleaning and storage.


This second photo shows the inside of the plucker.


Finally, this photo shows the motor and gear reducer. I got the gear reducer from a coworker. It has a 16:1 reduction ratio so I went with a 3450 rpm motor. The two are coupled together with a Schmidt coupling.

If you want to see one of these plucker in action, here's a video link.

More Lambs

On Sunday, Bunny gave us two ram lambs. One is solid black and the other moorit (brown).
And this morning, Frost had two ewe lambs. One is white and the other is black spotted badgerface.
Out of eight lambs born so far this spring, only four have been normal birth presentations. Two were backwards (hind legs first).This isn't a difficult birth as long as someone is there to pull the lamb. Lambs presented this way unattended, however, usually die of asphyxiation.

The other two abnormal births were twins born to Ingrid. The first had one leg back. Jennifer called me at work and I went home right away. The birth was too far along to push the lamb back in and bring up the other leg up so I gently pulled it with the leg back. After that I did some other work and gave the ewe privacy to bond with her baby and birth its twin. I came back later to find that the twin's head was out and both legs were back. This one was a little trickier. I pulled the head and neck gently with the contractions until the shoulders were ready to come Then, with my outstretched fingers, I grasped the lambs shoulders and stretched the ewe's vulva with the backs of my fingers. The lamb came through the birth canal with both legs back. All are healthy.

Lambs Have Arrived

Two ewes, Coconut and Ingrid lambed today. They each had twins - 3 girls and a boy. Here are pics:

Big and Pregnant

Here is a photo of our ewe, Ingrid. She will be three years old later this month - a "3 winter" ewe in Icelandic terms. She appears to have the largest rumen capacity of any of our sheep. Add pregnancy to the equation and this is what she looks like lying down.

I suppose someone used to an "improved" breed of sheep or someone raising show sheep would say she has a"hay belly." Personally I like hay bellies. After all that's what a ruminant animal should be.

Speaking of show sheep, we've decided to sever our kids' membership in 4-H this year. Sheep magazine has reported that in the 2007-08 season, all kids showing livestock will be required to register their families' premises with NAIS. Given that and the fact that our agricultural values differ vastly from the values promoted by 4-H, the decision was an easy one.

April's Here and Most Is Well

Since we've been engaged in any farming endeavors, I don't think I've ever been less stressed on April 1st. The ewes are shorn and bagging up nicely. Seed starting is on schedule and we have a straw bale cold frame with transplants and seeds about ready to go into it. Our rotational grazing plan is already underway. I don't do much in the way of recordkeeping but I think the pasture is greening up earlier this year. Miller Nurseries will soon be sending us about 10 apple trees, a few pawpaws and about 30 assorted berry plants including blueberries, cranberries, beach plums, bush cherries and a couple lesser known varieties. There are 8 and one-half quarts of homemade maple syrup in the cupboard. That's not as much as we've made in the past but it's not a bad start after not making any for a couple years. I saw a picture of a nice little homemade evaporator that I may try to copy for next year. Finally our replacement layers and first batch of broilers are brooding.

The broiler chicks have been our biggest disappointment. Eight of them have either died or had to be put down because their legs simply gave out. It's not all that uncommon to see older birds hobbling around because their legs no longer support their fast growing bodies but these chicks are barely a week old. My friend recently told me that all her turkeys and geese from the same hatchery died within twelve hours of being brought home. I wonder if the hatchery is having some quality problems with their breeding stock genetics. We've never needed to use vitamin supplements in the water before but maybe we should have this time. I wish we knew of a purebred meat bird whose flavor we liked as well as the Cornish cross. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know.

I attribute our preparedness and lack of stress to a few different things. Our kids are getting older and that frees up Jennifer to do more. She made almost all our maple syrup this year. I'm working a different schedule so I'm at home in the mornings when I'm fresh and able to get more done. Finally I think that we're getting to know our farm after two springs here and our management is starting to bear fruit

Peeps

We got our chicks on Thursday - 50 Cornish X Rock, 15 Barred Rock pullets and 10 Buff Orpington pullets. Our homemade brooders are made from bales of straw and ripe hay arranged in a hexagonal pattern. We made two because the hybrid broilers grow so much faster than the purebreds. We hope to have them outside within two weeks.
Here are some gratuitous cute kid and peep pics.


For the record, I'm predicting (based on udder development) that Bunny will be our first ewe to lamb. My guess is April 10th. We'll see.

Spring Clip 2007

Today the ewes got haircuts and pedicures. I was disappointed with the quantity of wool we got. It's mostly going to the compost pile. Here are the ewes - notice they're getting as far from me as they can within the confines of the fence.

We had a sort of multicultural St. Patrick's Day dinner after finishing the shearing. Leg of Icelandic lamb (homegrown of course) and cabbage rolls and tall glasses of real milk. And in celebration of the finished job, I'm drinking a bottle of Canadian lager.

Sunny Sunday Afternoon

I spent mine productively. Jennifer and Katie went to a ballet in Akron with Katie's Brownie troop while the boys and I worked. I would have liked to post pictures but the camera as with the girls.

First, we got out our LP burner and tanks and our syrup making gear and cleaned it up. Then we put out 8 taps in maple trees on our farm. When I left for work at 11:15 this morning, the first sap was boiling merrily away.

Next, we built a cold frame in the garden. It's made out of straw bales and old windows. This morning the chickens were intent upon destroying the straw bale sides so Jennifer will have to move their fence today to keep them off of it.

I also made a good start cleaning out one of the barns. Still a long way to go there. I have plans to add a second 4-foot sliding door in the side of the sheep pen and built a series of sorting pens outside it. Also in the works is constructing a couple more mobile hoop houses fro pastured poultry - more on that later.

OEFFA Conference Highlights

Wow. I was hoping for a good OEFFA conference but it exceeded even my hopeful expectations. The keynoters on both days were excellent and I learned a lot at the workshops. One of the best things, though, was just being there with so many like-minded people. I met neighbors who are doing some really cool things and we've got some tentative plans in the works to start up a local OEFFA chapter in the Morrow-Crawford-Richland county area of Ohio. I've already decided that next year I want the whole family to go.

I'll leave you with a quote from Weston A. Price Foundation president, Sally Fallon:

Totalitarian governments have recognized that the one enemy to their system is the prosperous, independent, yeoman farmer spread out over the whole country thinking independently who doesn't need anything from his government. That's a big challenge to totalitarian governments - how to get rid of all these people. In Russia they starved them, in Ethiopia and Cambodia they shot them and in the U.S. and Europe they just pass health laws.

She went on to say that the single largest reason that America farmers have ceased to be independent and prosperous is the law requiring mandatory pasteurization of milk. She announced then that the WAPF is in the process of setting up a legal defense association modeled after the Home School Legal Defense Association. Farmers, herd-share owners and consumers will be able to join this organization and will be provided with free legal defense when the government regulators come trying to shut them down. Look for more information on that around July 4th.

One Hogget Left

All but one of our hoggets (yearling ewes) are reserved for May slaughter. If you want the last one, call or email us to reserve! The price is only $2.90 per pound on a carcass weight basis. I expect weights to be in the 60-65 pound range.

On another note, Liberty Farm has gone high tech. I'm sitting at my parents' house blogging on my new laptop connected to their broadband internet through the wireless router that I just installed for them. I'm going to get spoiled and then have to go home to my 28.8 kpbs dial-up. I'm checking almost daily for new WISPs in my area.

Update: Sold Out! One of our lambs for next October is already spoken for but I don't want to take any more orders until all the lambs are born and we see what we have. I'll post details in May. Thank you to all our customers!

Animal Age and Flavor II

(This started as an update to the previous post but I decided to make it a new one).

In thinking about this topic some more, I think that artisanal food producers (of which I hope I am one) will likely revolutionize the way some (many?) people eat. Beyond the obvious categories of "grass-fed" and "organic" are many niches that may reawaken cultural eating.

I don't have my copy in front of me but in the preface to The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes something to the effect that the food culture in America is schizophrenic. This is evidenced by things like the Atkin's Diet that have people giving up time-honored staple foods like bread and pasta.

Slow Food is definitely on to something. I hope the organization continues to grow and flourish.

Finally, in the last issue of the Stockman Grass Farmer there was a report from the grass-fed dairy conference held recently. Jonathan White of Bobolink Dairy reported that people buying his cheese are not looking for consistency - they want to taste the grass.

Animal Age and Flavor

I had a conversation recently with a customer about the ewes that we intend to slaughter in May. She pointed out to me that technically meat from sheep ceases to be called "lamb" when the animal reaches a year old and wanted to know what to expect regarding the flavor and tenderness of the meat. I had to confess that I didn't know the answer to her question. This will be the first time we've slaughtered a sheep older than 6 months. Since this is something of an experiment, I decided to discount the per pound price of the animal that this particular customer was ordering.

Well, this has piqued my interest and I decided to look into the relationship between age, flavor and sex of livestock. Here are some things I've found out regarding sheep, cattle and hogs.

Castration
Regarding castration, it is something we have never done at Liberty Farm and our 6 month old ram lambs have had no hint of "buck" flavor. Walter at Sugar Mountain Farm has blogged about his experiences eating meat from uncastrated boars. He's up to 6 months old without any effect on flavor and a friend of his has eaten them considerably older than that.

Sheep
Ewes between the age of 1 and 2 years are called hoggets. So there are three categories of sheep meat: lamb, hogget and mutton. Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall of River Cottage in the U.K. writes, "the best sheep meat I have ever eaten has come from animals over a year old." And also:

Today, mutton and hogget barely exist in the mainstream meat market – and have the reputation of needing very slow cooking. This is a grievous misunderstanding. Sheep slaughtered in their second or third year are still young animals in the prime of life. Their meat is quite superb, and can be roasted and served pink, like the best cuts of prime beef.

In fact, it is in comparison to beef that mutton may be best understood - mutton is to lamb what beef is to veal. The key, of course, is that to reach its full potential, mutton does need to be properly hung – like the best beef, for at least two weeks, ideally three...which is why you don’t find it in the supermarket!

Cattle
The Stockman Grass Farmer often has articles about finishing beef on forage alone. In a typical situation with cool-season perennial pastures, this takes 2 years. So true grass-finished beef is typically 8-10 months older than grain-finished feedlot beef. In a past issue there was an article about the French preferring older beef. In the most recent issue, the editor responded to a letter with the following:

Many French breeds are large and late maturing. This is why grassfed steers typically are four years of age and weigh nearly a ton at harvest.

Most Americans would find grilled steaks from these chewy and bland because the French do not prize marbling as we do.

Grilling is not the major way beef is cooked in France. Cooking it at low temperatures for a long time is much more common.

The majority of French beef comes from five-year-old dairy cows. There is a strong correlation between butterfat content and beef tenderness and their cheese breeds are prized for their tender beef.

The best flavored steak I have ever had came from a nine-year-old French Alps-raised dairy cow.

After reading all of this I'm really looking forward to trying the meat from a hogget this summer. If we don't sell them all I may even wait until later in the summer and let one of them get even older. Perhaps next year we'll be charging a premium for this meat from older sheep.

OEFFA Conference

Tomorrow (2/16) is the deadline for early bird registration for the 2007 Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association Conference in Granville on March 3-4. I registered today. It sounds like it's going to be a great conference.

The keynote speaker on Saturday is Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. Her presentation is "How to Keep Added Value on the Farm... Where It Belongs."

Sunday's speaker is Mark Shepard speaking on "An Ecological Look at Energy on the Farm." Mark is owner of New Forest Farm in Viola, WI and is an educated permaculture practitioner. He has converted his farm to "a perennial agricultural ecosystem where trees, shrubs, vines, canes, perennial plants, and fungi have been planted in association with one another to produce food, fuel, medicines, and beauty." Cool.

Numerous workshops throughout the two days fall into the categories of:

1. Foundations of Sustainable Growing
2. Gardening and Orcharding
3. Growing for Market
4. Field Crops
5. Healthy Livestock
6. Individual and Family Well-Being
7. Communities of Well-Being
8. Taking Care of Business
9. Energy

I can't wait.

Brrrrr!

-19 degrees F here this morning. That's -28 C.

Storm Day 2

The above photo was taken before the storm. Jennifer was standing on our front porch.

The photo below was taken by me this morning also standing on our front porch. I zoomed in on the drifts behind the car but you can see that the two fence posts are visible in the backgrounds of both.
I have no idea how much we actually got because the wind blew so hard. Some of the drifts are well over knee deep and in some other places the ground is nearly bare. There is a sliding door on the red barn just around the corner in the lower photo. Behind that door was a drift inside the barn about 10 inches deep. The door was closed but the wind blew so hard out of the northeast that the snow blew in at the edge and underneath the door.

All the animals are fine. The biggest problem is our short-legged miniature Aussie finding a place to answer nature's call. She'll have an easier time of it when I shovel the walks and plow the drive and paths between buildings after lunch today. It's snowing now and the forecast is for another inch or so today.

Blizzard

We're in the midst of a storm that is supposed to dump 10-18 inches (25-45 cm) of snow on us. The wind is forecast to blow 30 mph and the low temperature to drop down to 0 degrees. These are borderline blizzard conditions.

We closed down our shop in town at noon today and will remain closed tomorrow. That means we'll have to make up the lost day on Saturday. Next week we're starting overtime. That means less time for farm work but more money to invest in farm improvement and animals.

I feel sorry for those people to our south who are getting freezing rain instead of snow. I'd much rather get a foot of snow than even half an inch of ice.

Be well.

Busy Saturday

This morning I attended a class at the Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware called Cow Talk. It was presented by Sylvia Zimmerman and was geared toward teaching people what they need to know to get started with a family milk cow and small-scale dairying. The bulk of the presentation was concerned with identifying positive traits and locating cows to buy. I learned some things I didn't already know and came away with the firm belief that we should be looking for a dual-purpose cow. Mrs. Zimmerman specifically recommended Devon, Shorthorn, and Dexter. The reason for this is that we want to produce milk with grass alone and all the dairy breeds have just had too many generations of being bred for high production on grain diets. Certainly there are people who are doing 100% grass dairying with traditional dairy breeds but they mostly using a lot of annuals for high-brix grazing.

Also I want to say that the Stratford Ecological Center is the coolest place I've been to in a long time. I took home one of their calendars and there are classes and other activities that I would like to attend just about every week of the year. We're an hour drive away so that probably won't happen but I will definitely be over there more times this year.

When I got home from Delaware, I planted onion seeds. Last year we tried to grow onions from seeds and ended up starting them too late so they weren't ready to plant out when the time was right. This year we're starting about a month earlier. I only planted about 240 seeds so this will be a crop that we will be expanding in the future in order to produce all the onions we use throughout the year. We've never had a really good crop of onions before so growing one will be a good first step. I planted Alisa Craig OP, Clear Dawn OP, and Red Bull hybrid.

Finally this evening we celebrated our daughter, Katie's, 8th birthday which was yesterday. That reminds me of a couple things from the recent past.
1. Last year at this time I posted about Katie's birthday on this blog. It was one of my early posts which means that the Liberty Farm blog has been online for just over a year now.
2. A few years ago we tapped maple trees on Katie's birthday. That seems really far-fetched since our high temperatures here have barely broken 20 degrees for nearly two weeks and our lows have been hovering between -8 and +3. I don't tap trees until the temperature hits 50.

Left-Right or RIght-Wrong?

From the Small Is Still Beautiful blog:

With regard to left and right, I think we should remember that these are themselves Enlightenment concepts. We should try to get out of the habit of employing such terms. We should ditch right and left and return to the more sensible discussion of right and wrong! If we do this, we will open up the terms of engagement. We will not see Greens as on the left, and therefore as being fundamentally on the wrong side, we will see them as being right on issues such as localism and decentralisation, and wrong in their adherence to the culture of death and the sexual hedonism which is a large part of its cause. We can then engage them in constructive dialogue by showing them that the enshrining of selfishness, which is what they do in their hedonistic “do your own thing” approach to sexual issues, is at loggerheads with the spirit of self-limitation necessary to conserve resources and the environment. Self-indulgence is the killer of the environment as much as it is the killer of babies. ~Joseph Pearce

Finally...

...we have winter. The ground is snow covered and our overnight low was -7 yesterday and -6 today. It's been windy too with wind chills in the -25 range. All the local schools are called off on account of that.

Some of our family on my side and Jennifer's have had a rough time of it - cold houses and frozen water pipes. We had frozen pipes at our shop yesterday and popped a joint. When the line thawed, water was spraying out in the wall. It wasn't the easiest fix but we got it with no problem.

The animals are all taking it well. In fact, I think our Icelandic sheep are enjoying this little taste of their ancestral home. Chickens are fine and still laying. The biggest problem we have with them is boredom. They don't like to go outside when it's like this so they stay inside and soil their nests and sometimes break eggs. I try to give them extra hay and straw to give them something to scratch in.

Hope you all are well.

Seed Starting Project

This is what my son, Keegan and I built with all that stuff I was hauling in my Versa a few weeks ago. Four shelves with a fluorescent light fixture hanging over each one for starting seeds and growing transplants. It's in the cellar - what the kids affectionately call "the dungeon."

The uprights are 2x4s and the shelves are 2x10s. I wanted to use 2x12s but they didn't have any 8-footers the day I bought the wood. I hung a shoplight over each shelf and wired up a 4-receptacle box on the right side. The box is powered by a wire with a male plug on the end so I can move this in the future if I want to.

We have an old computer desk in our greenhouse that we use for a potting bench. I'm going to bring it down to the cellar as well. My plan is to start our first seeds next weekend.

Book Recommendation

Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered by Joseph Pearce.

From the back cover:

A third of a century ago, E.F. Schumacher rang out a timely warning against the idolatry of giantism with his book, Small Is Beautiful. Few books before or since have spoken so profoundly to urgent economic and social considerations. Humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, argued Schumacher. Its obsessive pursuit of wealth would not, as so many believed, ultimately lead to utopia but more probably to catastrophe.

Schumacher's greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the industrialized world. He saw that we needed to relearn the beauty of smallness, of human-scale technology and environments. In Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher's arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which they matter now more than ever. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful.

And from Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons (also from the back cover of the book:

This could hardly be a timelier book. More and more people are coming to the realization that the materialism, the rootlessness, and the hedonism of this consumer's paradise we've built for ourselves are taking America down a dead-end road. E.F. Schumacher shows where liberals and conservatives go wrong, and Joseph Pearce makes Schumacher relevant for a new generation - one that desperately needs to hear Schumacher's message. Pearce shows why 'small is beautiful' is the only sane and humane response to our insane 'supersize me' culture.

The author is holding a discussion of the book in blog format here. I recommend both the book and the blog discussion for conservatives who are looking for something more profound than the modern mainstream neocon offerings. Likewise, I recommend it for liberals who are interested in learning more about a traditional conservatism that is wary of globalization, "free trade" and which understands that the world's resources are finite.

Shepherd's Pie

This is what I just made for dinner - Shepherd's Pie. The idea came from the recipe section of the new issue of Hobby Farms magazine. I used the ingredients from that recipe but modified the technique based on the recipe in Farmhouse Cookbook which, oddly, used beef instead of lamb. Here it is:

Mashed Potatoes

2# potatoes
1/2 cup milk
2 T. butter
1 egg

Meat and Veggies

1 1/2 # ground lamb
1 cup onion, diced
1/2 cup carrot, diced
1/2 cup peas, fresh or frozen

Sauce

2 T. butter
2 T. flour
1 cup lamb stock
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

Boil the potatoes until tender and drain. Heat the milk and butter in the microwave until the butter is melted and add to potatoes along with the egg. Salt and pepper to taste. Mash.

Meanwhile, brown the lamb in a 12-inch cast iron skillet. Remove the lamb when cooked through and saute the onions in the lamb fat until they are clear. Add the carrots and continue to cook for about 5 minutes.

In a second small skillet, melt the butter for the sauce and add the flour to make a roux. Cook while whisking for a couple minutes until you get a nice brown color. Add the stock and worcestershire sauce and cook for another couple minutes until thick and bubbly.

Add the meat back into the veggies and pour the sauce over top. Add the peas and stir. Then spoon the mashed potatoes over the top and spread to the edge of the skillet. Place this about 6" under the broiler until the potatoes start to brown on top.

Yum.

My New Farm Truck

Back in September, I traded my Dodge Ram for a Nissan Versa hatchback. As you can imagine there are times on a farm when a pickup truck is very handy to have but the truth is, 90% of the time my truck just hauled me around. Commuting 30 miles a day in an otherwise empty truck was just too wasteful. Our other family vehicle is a Jeep so I've been looking for a trailer to use with it for those times when we need to haul hay, straw, etc. In the meantime I'm saving lots of fuel and pumping much less carbon dioxide into the air.
As you can see in the photo, the Versa is no slouch when it comes to hauling things. I've got 2 8-foot 2x10s, 4 8-foot 2x4s, 3 4-foot fluorescent light fixtures, a case of 4-foot bulbs and some small miscellaneous tools and stuff. The hatch closes easily.

What I'm building with the stuff in the photo will be a topic for another day.