L'Etoile's Pig

L'Etoile, the finest restaurant in Charlottesville, is going to have a pig party this winter. Mark Gresge, the owner and head chef, has asked us to raise a pastured pig for the occasion. Since my sow has yet to deliver her batch, time has been a'wastin' and finding piglets has been difficult this year. But I was able to buy two piglets yesterday. Here are some pics:


And video:




Of course, right after the video stops, the little bugger managed to nose his way under the fence and escape into the general pasture. We spent three long hours trying to find a way to keep him and his brother contained. Temporarily, they are in the barn, but I'm planning to redo the electric fence and lay board along the ground outside of it so that they won't have the ability to make a break for it again.

2009 Brochure

The better-resolution powerpoint file is here.

The order form (excel) is here.

Family Pics

Batesville Day

Batesville is a one-horse town.

But the horse died.

Nonetheless, we are a fun little community and the local Ruritan group puts together neighborhood festivities throughout the year.

My favorite is the Batesville Day parade.







We may not have big name parade marshals but we do have the junior high school band, fire trucks, local businesses, protest groups, among others, who make up the motley parade participants. My kids' playgroup decorates bikes and waves their way down the parade route and then we put on a petting zoo for the local kids.
Two years ago, we had a hundred people watch Martha the sheep give birth to twins. I'll never top that, but now that I have a trailer, I brought Bonnie and Brownie down along with the usual lambs and chickens.


The last page of the June 2009 Crozet Gazette mentions Bonnie, but not by name.

My Wee Photographer

Digital cameras are awesome inventions.

When I was a kid, my parents rarely let me take pictures - film was too expensive. The new digital cameras make the cost of picture taking zero - if a kid takes an odd picture, you don't have to print it and simply press delete. Emilie borrowed the camera and started taking pictures around the farm. I think some of them came out very well.

Cool Local Farm

Working as an election volunteer, I met a neighbor who farms butterflies.

This is exactly the kind of creative thinking that will keep small farming alive in the future.

Go check out Linda Marchman's "Social Butterflies."

Here is a Washington Post article from a couple of years ago.

Call Me Fan Boy

I love me my Gene Logsdon.

He has two good posts over on his blog.

Glorious Shit

and

Chore Time

Logsdon on the coming value of manure:

"I half-jokingly suggested about a year ago that animal manure— used livestock, horse, and chicken bedding— was going to be the hottest commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade. There are indications now that such a seemingly absurd prediction might not be so absurd after all. Last year the prices of some farm fertilizers shot up to over a thousand dollars a ton. Ammonium polyphosphate is still nearly that high. Deposits of potash in Canada, a main source of our potassium fertilizers, are declining. Natural gas, from which commercial nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured, is rising in cost as other uses compete for it. Long term, there are reasons to believe that the era of abundant manufactured fertilizers is passing...

It is however difficult to suppress a smile at the irony of the situation. For years shit has been seen as something so repugnant that the word itself was scrubbed from polite conversation...

Cheap, plentiful manufactured fertilizers and a seeming infinity of farmland allowed the United States over the last two centuries to become the champion wastrel of agriculture (and everything else). One can only imagine the famine and chaos that would result if we continued that kind of extravagance for forty centuries, even if we could. As sources of cheaper chemical fertilizers decline, manure will either once more become the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or population levels will dramatically decline."

From Chore Time:

"Many people are once again expressing interest in “going back to the land”, as we say rather euphemistically. (Why not forward to the land?) If you intend to keep animals you are making a commitment to a home-centered life. You have to take time for chore time. My sister, Jenny, says that to enjoy husbandry, one must have farmer genes. Not everyone does.

I have a hunch from my mail that many more people would enjoy husbandry however. On a soft early spring night, doing chores in the twilight, I throw hay down to the sheep and then sit up in the loft listening to them crunching away and making contented little snuffles of pleasure as they eat. Otherwise, all is quiet and utterly peaceful. I am aware that far away sirens are blaring, bombs are exploding, traffic is roaring, and people are screaming in fear and rage. I am so lucky, so happy to be where I am. I have to believe that millions of other people would also be happy to be where I am, if only they knew. If only they knew they could."

Bad News For Organic Dairymen

I (not-so) secretly dream of having a grass-based dairy farm that sells directly to the consumer.

Unfortunately, the regulatory process makes it economically impossible to pasteurize and bottle milk for sale on a small-scale basis. These regulations don't make the consumer safer. They are simply barriers to entry to assure that the big milk processors don't have to face small competitors.

The New York Times has an article about the woes that organic dairymen are facing right now - many families are cutting back on organic milk purchases, so the processors are cutting producers - and the producers can't sell their milk directly.

Here in New England, where dairy farms are as much a part of the landscape as whitewashed churches and rocky beaches, organic dairy farmers are bearing the brunt of the nationwide slowdown, in part because of the cost of transporting feed from the Midwest. The contracts of 10 of Maine’s 65 organic dairies will not be renewed by HP Hood, one of the region’s three large processors. In Vermont, 32 dairy farms have closed since Dec. 1, significantly altering the face of New England’s dairy industry.

“We expect to lose a lot more farms this year,” said Roger Allbee, Vermont’s secretary of agriculture.

Hood and the two other big processors, Horizon Organic and Organic Valley, say cutting contracts, pay and production are necessary to absorb overproduction and offset softening demand.

Bold emphasis is mine. There are three processors that control all the organic milk produced in Vermont. The conventional system is similarly structured.

The current regulatory system leaves farmers utterly dependent on the big processing conglomerates (an oligopoly) - and the conglomerates know that they have disproportionate power. They use that power to squeeze the little guys.

I don't mind regulations that protect the consumer. Require that farmers wishing to bottle their own milk have sterile pasteurization and bottling facilities. Have random testing of their products. Safe processing facilities could be built for 20-30 thousand dollars. But when you start adding things like a separate bathroom and office for the milk inspector, the costs reach into the hundreds of thousands.

De-regulate. Sanely - we don't need and shouldn't want the wild, wild west. But we should allow the competitive nature of the market to thrive.

Backyard Chickens At The Washington Post

Backyard chickens Rock!

The Washington Post has two introductions to the idea:

Audiovisual presentation here.

Article here.

An older, more local take is here at Edible Blue Ridge.
Spread the word!


UPDATE:

Northern Virginia laws about chickens can be found here.

It's heartening to know that chickens are permitted, but the standard "100 foot from a dwelling" is devastating in practice when you consider the size of suburban lots.

Watching a Girl's Weight

No, this isn't about the dieting travails of Kirstie Alley.

It's about my girl Bonnie. You can see her on the blog masthead.

Most animal mothers balance their own nutritional needs with the production of milk for their babies. If the mother does not get enough nutrition, she'll cut back on the milk production so that she doesn't starve to death.

Modern milk cows have been bred to MILK. Many Holsteins cannot take in enough forage to support their milk production and must be fed high-protein grain mixes. Even then, they will "milk off their backs" - utilize their own fat reserves to make more milk than their diet can provide. This is also called "will to milk."

In buying an Ayrshire, I was hoping to get away from the high-production "will to milk" genetics. The selection pressures of modern dairying have been narrowly focused on Holsteins, and to some extent on Jerseys.

Nonetheless, Bonnie still has a will to milk. She raised three seven hundred pound calves for me without any grain input at all. Instead of trailing off on her milk production, she milked the fat right off her back.


Dairy cows are scored in their body condition on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 is very thin, 5 is fat, and the ideal range is considered to be 2.5 to 3. Thinner than 2.5 and they can have trouble conceiving their next calf.

A good dairy cow should have prominent hip bones and you should be able to see the outlines of three ribs. As you can see, Bonnie was much less than that - I'd say she was down to a 2.25 or so when we pulled her calves off.

She has had a few months off now - Dairy cows generally milk for 305 days and then have sixty days off to rebuild their body score with grain before calving again. Bonnie doesn't get the grain but does get a longer dry period. Since drying off, Bonnie has rebounded nicely and now, if anything, she is a bit fat.

I'm not quite sure what to do about the excessive weight gain. She is pregnant and due in August and I expect that she will put on more weight on our lush pastures. It's not like I can tell her to graze less.

Benefits of Good Grazing Management

I don't use chemical fertilizers on the farm. I also don't bring in the traditional pasture fertilizer - poultry manure for fear that the disease-ridden commercial flocks' waste would infect my chickens. Commercial flocks can survive with endemic diseases because they receive a daily dose of antibiotics in their water and feed. But give those same germs to my free range, antibiotic free birds and we'd have a total wipe-out.

I do spread my own animals' manure through the pastures.

But the single greatest source of my soil improvement is managed rotational grazing. My animals move through paddocks for periods of intense grazing followed by long periods of rest and regrowth. This allows the grass to send down deeper roots and store energy. The pictures below, taken April 3, show visually the difference between managed rotation and continual grazing.
A paddock behind the house.

In this picture you can see the pasture grasses making a good start in the spring.
Shifting the camera up, you can actually see the yellow line behind my wildlife break trees. That yellow swatch is the neighboring farm which is badly overgrazed. The color difference is amazing.
This picture was taken over the dividing fence. Note the difference in grass color and length.

Management matters.

Happy Toads

I posted a discussion of toad sexing last year. After a heavy rainstorm, I found this pair out by the barn. I guess it was so wet that they thought anyplace was a good place to lay eggs. They were so intent on their current activity that they didn't stop even when the kids were passing them around.

We have a fair number of amphibians on the property - one of the benefits of not spraying chemicals everywhere.

Ben and the Bottle Lamb

America's Odd Relationship With Food

Sally and I first bought our land with the intention of growing grapes. We have a nice South-facing slope and deep soil that would support a small little winery.

However, as I went to classes to find out about how to manage a small winery, it became apparent that modern grape growing requires spraying an ungodly amount of pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, heck - omnicide. I decided that I did not want to spend my working hours wearing a chemical mask, so shifted towards grass farming. I did put in fifty vines as a test plot - the agents told me that you couldn't grow grapes organically - and they were right. Only the row of Concords did well.

While the organic wine-grape experiment lasted, my biggest challenge was the infestation of dear. Dad and I spent a lot of money and many hours putting up a dear slant fence - but then they learned to walk around the slant fence and jump the gate.

Eventually, the county agent recommended that I get a kill permit for the deer.

I have no problem with hunting deer - they are overpopulated and very destructive to the environment. But I'm generally opposed to wasting an animals life. I found a local food pantry that took several deer, but wanted to find new avenues of distribution.

I work at Harrisonburg High School and sent out an e-mail to my colleagues to see if anyone was interested in a deer if I brought one in. One of my fellow teachers cornered me in the hallway between classes and began berating me - in front of students - for grossing her out. I had, you see, ruined her whole day when she got such a horrifying e-mail. Sharing venison was immoral. Hunting was murder.

Now, I'm not a person who revels in confrontation, so I stammered out an apology - "I'm sorry, I was just trying to share some excess meat and I guess I just didn't stop to think how vegetarians would react.

"I'm not a vegetarian - I just like to picture my meat coming in nice plastic packages from the meat factory."

Nonplussed, I just walked away.

Evidently, there is no ethical quandry about eating meat - as long as someone else does the killing.

I do believe that our diet choices have an ethical dimension, but not because of a moral equivalence between and humans and animals. Although animals aren't our moral equivalents, we should not cause them to live lives of misery like one sees in the confined animal feeding operations. I want to know that my dinner had a good life - and a life that ended without pain or fear. Another ethical element is the way our food culture effects the environment.

But dude, objecting to discussions of food because it shakes your fantasy world that the meat you eat was never alive? Bizarre.

Multi-Generational Farming

Picking grapes with Grandma and Grandpa Tueting.

Sally: City girl in the country.

Lambing

An old pic, but it still makes me smile.

Recommending Links

My friend Dave has a blog that (among other things) relates his experience with having a small backyard flock.

I'm a terrible businessman. Our customers adore our pastured eggs - so much so that we can't keep up with demand. So, instead of expanding or raising prices to balance supply and demand, I always end up trying to talk people into getting their own small flock.

If you want to start your own flock, contact me - I'd be excited to be the St. Paul of chicken keeping in Albemarle. You can come over and learn how to raise your own little guys and I can walk you through the dos and don'ts of making a chicken tractor.

O-Man

In the previous post I bemoaned the "get big or get out" nature of the dairy business.

One thing I do enjoy about modern farming is the incredible choice I have when I'm picking my calves' baby-daddies. You can order semen from around the world and rapidly improve you herd's genetics.

Now, it's not like I have a big herd - Bonnie, her daughter Connie, Connie's daughter Brownie, Cleo, her daughtera Princess Mel and Charlotte , and Cookie.

Connie and Mel are daughters of the great Angus bull Bextor whose semen is distributed by Select Sires. Connie's daughter Brownie is the daughter of Oyama, whose semen I imported from France.

Charlotte's dad is O-Man. She's the third calf I've had out of O-Man but the first heifer. O-Man is an incredible bull - he has been the best in the world in combined merit for years.

One of the drawbacks of artificial insemination is that it can rapidly narrow the gene pool. O-Man has over 33,000 daughters. Read that again - 33,000 daughters.

I avoid the inbreeding and narrow genetic base issue by choosing different breeds for each generation.

Bonnie and Mel are both currently bred to a polled Red Holstein bull - Aggravation Lawn Boy.
"Polled" means hornless. Many beef breeds have been genetically selected to be hornless - Angus and Charlais both lack horns. Most dairy breeds have horns - the selection pressure has been for milk production, milk production, and milk production. I'm going to try to alternate polled dairy cows with the polled beef breeds and eventually end up with an all naturally-polled herd. You can de-horn cows - we did with Bonnie - but it is painful and for small guys like me, requires an expensive vet visit. Of course, when we did Bonnie, I'm sure that the vet thought I was a weirdo when I wanted to pay extra for pain killer.

If cattle genetics interest you, I recommend the cattle genetics blog.

Horse Manure Rocks!

Well, all manure does.

Take a deep breath - it's the smell of soil fertility.

Of course, I can't stand the smell of confined animal operations - they are truly repugnant. As Joel Salatin once wrote, if you can smell a farm from the road, they're doing something wrong.

But our post topic is horse manure. I've been quoted as calling it an unmitigated blessing.

But failblog shows us that even glorious horse manure can have its drawbacks:

1946 Auction Ad

I haven't posted in months and months.

I'm going to try to ease back into things - put up a little short post here and there.

The picture above is a scan of my Grandfather's dispersal sale. As you can see, he was small time.

Grandpa Carl made a living and raised a family with about 20-odd cows.

Wow.

My uncle, who took up dairy farming when he got back from the U.S. Marine Corps World Tour '45, had forty milking cows throughout most of his career and was able to raise a family on the milk checks (and some commodity crop sales).

Outside the Mennonite-dominated Shenandoah Valley, farms with less than eighty cows just aren't seen any more. Even Wisconsin, the land of the family dairy farmer, has seen a big trend upward (pdf file).

His grandson is a partner in a dairy that runs 1400 cows.



Grandpa Carl was proud that his cows had produced 189,000 pounds of milk in a year. A little quick math says that this high-producing herd averaged 8,590 pounds of milk. Over a typical 305 day lactation, that comes to 28 pounds a day - about 3 1/2 gallons.

Today, "good" supercharged, grain-doused cows will produce in excess of a hundred pounds per day.

Grandpa Carl had kept back 4 bred heifers to enter the herd in '46, and 3 heifers to enter the heard in '47. He was replacing about one sixth of his herd per year - which means that the average life expectancy of each cow was eight to nine years.

Today, those grain-doused cows are lucky to make it to their fourth birthday. The average dairy cow life expectancy is 44 months in Virginia.

Things sure have changed.

I'm pretty sure that they haven't changed for the better.

Picture me as an old man waving my cane at the horizon: "Progress! Bah!"

NPR's Tragic Farmer

Yesterday's NPR feature on Illinois farmer Dave Burt was quite interesting. The link takes you to NPR's text summary, but you can click on the "listen" icon to hear the longer version.

Now, I'm normally excited when farmers get favorable mentions in the media. I'm also sympathetic to farmers who are attached to the well-being of their animals. Dave Burt seems to fit that bill.

And yet...

I'm not sympathetic to Dave Burt.

Burt bemoans the fact that it is too expensive to farm and is upset that the numbers are forcing him to sell his herd. In the auditory portion of the story, he explains that it cost him $500,000 to plant and grow his crops on the 1000 acre farm he inherited from his uncle. He worried about whether he can support his family.

Dude, if you can't make a living on 1000 mortgage free acres in the fertile midwest, you are doing something wrong. Perhaps Burt shouldn't have bought the expensive combines and chased the 200 bushel corn crops with petroleum-based fertilizers. His cows would probably do very well - without the $500,000 annual investment and the expensive fertilizer and combines if he just put his whole farm to rotational grazing.

These corn-based farm subsidies don't really help the "small" farmer - he has been pushed out by mega-farms who go deeply into debt for large-scale machinery and still cling to solvency by their fingernails.

A quick trip to the farm subsidy database reveals that Burt has also received $102,000 in welfare - er, subsidy - payments. Great google-moogly.

In case the imp of the perverse is inspiring you to check out whether your humble smallholder host is a hypocrite, I'll save you the trouble.

Small Farmers and Owner Operators: Sorry, Dave

I have started adding links to other local farms on the sidebar.

When I was pulling CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) out of a guide to eating local, one of the farms mentioned was Dave Matthews' "Best of What's Around" farm.

I struggled with whether to add a link to their site. Matthews' farm does follow sustainable practices and serves the local community. His decision to set up the farm on an old dairy farm kept a fair amount of land in agricultural use, safe from developers' bulldozers.

And yet... Some part of me wants to support agriculture that is owner operated. One of the problems of the farming community is the prevalence of contract labor and relationships that can come to resemble lord/serf dominance.

I want to support family farming. I don't have anything against Matthews - he makes some darn fine music. I also love that he and his bandmates are active in the local philanthropy scene (they're our version of Staunton's Statler Brothers). But I'd rather direct people to small family farms who are actually trying to make (or supplement) a living for their families. I suspect that Dave Matthews won't be deeply harmed financially if you buy your vegetables from Michael and Kathryn Bertoni at Appalachia Star Farm, or Rob and Megan Weary at Roundabout Farm or support meaningful work for the developmentally disabled at Innisfree Village.

Random Cartoon

Consider this a supplement to my earlier feedlot post.

Michael Pollan for AgSec!

Not that it will happen.

But if you want to send a message to the new administration that it ought to stop counterproductive and environmentally destructive corn subsidies, go and sign the petition.

My signature comment:

How has Butz-style "Get big or get out!" been working for America's farming communities? Let's get government out of subsidizing big agribusiness so that small sustainable farms have a level playing field. We small farmers will smoke the big guys if we stop them from sucking on the teat of government.

Don't know who Earl Butz is?


An excerpt from Wikipedia:

In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Butz as Secretary of Agriculture, a position in which he continued to serve after Nixon resigned as the result of the Watergate scandal in 1974. In his time heading the USDA, Butz revolutionized federal agricultural policy and reengineered many New Deal era farm support programs. His mantra to farmers was "get big or get out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow." These policy shifts coincided with the rise of major agribusiness corporations, and the declining financial stability of the small family farm.

He's probably more famous outside of the agricultural community for his obscene racist comments to John Dean and the ensuing Nixon-era scandal. To balance the rosy charts of increasing grain exports, here is a contemporaneous graph showing the impact of "get big or get out" on dairy farms:

Thanks, Earl*.

Heck, If i had been around at the turn of the last century, I'd have supported Mary Elizabeth Lease for AgSec (if such a thing had existed).

* I know that Butz isn't the sole cause of this; increased mechanization, the increased affordability of college offering different opportunities to farm kids, and, most importantly, the continuation of New Deal farm subsidies all contributed. But Earl Butz certainly didn't help.

Boy, Do I Feel Foolish!

God bless 'em for getting it.

A Good Reason For The Kids To Pick Up Their Toys

I saw this at the Fail Blog.

Thanksgiving Turkeys on PBS

Article here.

Don't tell my wife about people getting $5-14 a pound. Heh.

I set the price of the turkeys at the beginning of the year, choosing $2/lb based on what we were charging for chickens. The turkeys cost more at the beginning, but would have a larger weight to average that cost. They have about the same feed conversion ration, so I figured a comparable cost was a good place to start.

And then organic feed prices doubled (shaking fist at the sky: "corn subsidies!").

We actually will lose money on turkeys this year. Several customers have urged me to raise the price, but I didn't. How many businesses see customers asking to pay more? But I made a deal with customers early in the year and I intend to keep the deal. And if I just raised the price for buyers who did not reserve their bird, it would feel wrong to charge different people different prices. Perhaps I'll build that in to next year's brochure: $3.00/lb if ordered by July, $3.50 after July. Then it would be pre-announced and fair.

In purely economic terms, setting the price at $2 wasn't just bad from a personal profit perspective - it was inefficient because we sold out early - a higher price would have allowed people who wanted a free-range turkey to buy one later. As it is, I'm referring new callers over to Polyface Farms, who also raise pastured turkeys.

Polyface is in Swope Virginia in Augusta County and can be reached at 540-885-3590.

Just as it is odd that customers want to pay more, this business is also odd in that we farmers tend to share the demand rather than trying to hoard it all for ourselves. Kathryn Russell over at Majesty Farm has steered a large numbers of poultry customers my way and I thank her!

Backyard Chickens

Backyard Chicken raisers have made the big time! Newsweek has an article in the revived phenomenon of the family flock.

There is a video clip accompanying the article.

I'm an advocate of actually rotating a chicken tractor around the yard in order to give the chickens fresh grass and to spread the manure, but in an urban yard like the one portrayed that isn't a possibility. The Mackin family makes a virtue of this limit by trading the soiled litter and manure to a local garden for hay bedding.

If you are local and want to start keeping a few chickens, you are welcome to visit and learn from out experience. I am now on chicken tractor Mark IV and have some ideas about how to make Mark V better.

Grassfed Beef

Omnivore's Dilemma by Micheal Pollan is an incredible introduction into the world of sustainable farming.

Pollan and Gene Logdson have both written about the asinine government corn subsidy policy that contributes to the unhealthy, unsustainable, and environmentally apocalyptic world of the feedlot.





Cattle are overpacked into pens and fed corn to fatten them quickly for supermarkets. David Biello reports on the almost universal presence of corn in animal protein in Scientific American:

Eating a diet of meat from corn-fed animals hasn't been linked to any specific health effects in humans. But it has resulted in widespread environmental degradation, including drained water supplies, degraded soils, and reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides and farm machinery fuel, says preventive medicine physician Bob Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study.

It's also hard on cows, whose stomachs are specially designed to break down the cellulose in grass, leading to an epidemic of antibiotic use. Also, humans may lose out on beneficial omega-3 fatty acids—important for development of the nervous system and heart health—when they consume corn-fed as opposed to grass-fed beef.

"Instead of eating a predominantly whole grains, fruits and vegetables, we are diverting the grain supply to feeding the animals," Lawrence says, arguing for a diet that treats meat as a garnish rather than the main course and corn for human consumption rather than cows. "Corn-finished beef does add to what has become a preferred taste for the American palate. We've acquired that taste at our own peril."

Read the whole article here.

Building the Barn Part One

When we first moved to Batesville, my in-laws bought a lot on top of Wintergreen Mountain. They liked the view but not the cedar house. When they tore it down to build a new home, the contractor dumped the old house remains in my upper pasture. My Dad and I then undertook the ultimate recycling project: building a barn.

The initial process was fast because we hired help for the major elements of the job. When the framework was done, Dad and I worked on weekends for almost a year to finish it off. It certainly would have been faster (and maybe cheaper) to keep the hired hands on, but then we would have missed the joy of working together.

Here are some pictures from the start of the project: