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.