Spring is in the Air

Spring is in the air here at the Flying T.

Our resident Boer Goats, Jessie and Gracie, are off at another farm for a month or so in the hopes that they make very close friends with the buck there.  That would bring us kids in September.  In their place, we welcomed two more 4-month-old full-blood Boer does, Ruby and Samy (Samantha).

The Muscovy ducks started laying a few weeks ago, but weren’t sitting, so we ended up collecting a lot of them.  They’re not bad eating and very good for cooking.  On Monday, however, Midnight got the urge and has been faithfully attending a nesting box full  of eggs ever since.  If all goes well, we should be seeing our first batch of ducklings mid-May.

One thing that hasn’t been here at the farm is much in the way of rain.  That, and a dearth of snow this year, means the ground is a lot dryer than normal.  We’ve done some improvement to the soil – lime in the fall and manure in the spring.  But the grass isn’t growing very quickly yet up here or anywhere in our neighborhood up here on the hill.

I overseeded the pasture with with a mix of Orchardgrass, Kentucky Bluegrass, hybrid Fescue, and White Clover right before what was supposed to be a pretty good rain, but it never happened.  Instead, the chickens have had a bit of a feast – an expensive one.  Hopefully we get some rain tonight.

The Winter Rye we planted as a cover crop in the vegetable garden, on the other hand, is quite healthy and ready to be tilled under so we can plant our lettuce, broccoli, and the like.

The drought hasn’t seemed to bug the apples or the peaches, though.  And so far it looks like they survived both our 1st attempt at pruning and some voracious Ruffed Grouse.

The berry bushes are starting to sprout as well, and if we can keep the chickens and goats out of them, hopefully we’ll have another plentiful harvest like last year.

And back in the house, our seed starter setup is working just peachy, with the tomato plants just about ready to transplant into 4″ pots.  They’ve actually done so well that we’ll probably end up selling some of them because we can’t use half of them.

So, all is well here on the farm, but we sure are praying for rain!

Starting Seeds Indoors

We can tell Spring is here because both the jobs that keep the bills paid and the jobs around the farm have really gotten busy! Almost a month since my last post tells that story.

One of the things that we’ve been working on is getting our garden ready.  Though the weather has been unseasonably warm the past few weeks, we still have some frost in the forecast and we even woke up to a light dusting of snow this morning.  Last year, we got hit with a snowstorm on April Fools day.

But, that doesn’t mean we can’t start planting, especially because my parents didn’t need their seed starter this year, so they gave it to us.  My dad made it, and if you’re looking for a relatively simple project, you might consider building one yourselves.

Materials list:

• One metal rolling audiovisual stand
• Four sheets of 30″ x 14″ sheet metal (he used galvanized ducting sections, that are bent in 90 degree angles)
• Four 24″ florescent light fixtures with grow bulbs
• Eight lengths (about 2′ each) of light chain
• Four pieces of chicken wire, cut 9.5″ x 19.5″ (to fit in a 10 x 20 planting tray)
• Four lengths of 5-6′ each of insulated soil warming cable (this is not cheap to buy new!)
• Six lamp cords/plugs and wire
• Lamp timer
• Six-outlet power strip
• Assorted screws, washers, and nuts.

Dad took the galvanized sheet metal, folded the short edges to keep them from cutting hands (the long edges were already folded for the joints), overlapped each pair to make the center double-strength, and bent the sides down to form two simple reflectors.  He then mounted a pair of florescent lights on each.

They’re suspended from the shelf above by four chains, allowing you to move them upwards as the plants grow.  He spliced the cords for each set of lights into a single plug just for convenience (you could also use a second power strip).

The soil-warming wire is fastened in loops to the chicken wire grids with zip ties.

The simple lamp timer saves a small bit of electricity – we’ve got it set to be off during the day later in the growing cycle when the plants should be getting some natural light through the windows.

That’s “it.”  The soil warming grids fit nicely into our 10×20 seed planting trays.  We’ve currently got a flat of tomatoes, a half of peppers, 4 basil plants taking up a corner, and a few “empties” waiting for some seeds we need to start in a week or so.  We’ll start two more flats a bit later.

Hopefully, we’ll get a good jump on the garden this year, since last year’s was a bit of a bust until very late in the season.

Organic?

When we first started dreaming about our farm, “organic” was high in our priorities.  This flows out of our family mission, to glorify God in all ways, and to live that out on our farm by raising, managing, and using His creation in a healthy, sustainable, humane, and respectful manner.  Since we planned to produce food for others, organic certification seemed like the way to pursue this mission.

Rhode Island Red Free-Ranging at the Flying T

However, as we started researching exactly what organic certification involved, our dream crumbled a little.  This crumbling was due to two primary factors:

1. A realization that “organic” just wasn’t the utopia we’d imagined, and…

2. The unrealistic requirements for a very small farm to maintain both organic certification and solvency .

At the risk of making ourselves vulnerable to claims of “sour grapes,” I’ll say that the first reason was the most disheartening to us.  Previous to our research, we had held special reverence for the word “organic.”  We’d paid extra for organic produce, animal and vegetable, and assumed a lot about organic certification.

Organic certification requirements are pretty complicated – not as bad as the US tax code, but it’s obvious that the authors went to the same law schools.

http://www.x1pointo.com

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it helps make sure that folks that stamp their goods with “USDA Certified Organic” have met certain standards.  For animals, those standards in a nutshell are:

1. Appropriate housing that permits natural behavior, including outdoor access.  Depending on the animal, this may include a minimum number of days on pasture.

2. Certified organic feed, including pasture.  Again, some types of animals require a certain amount of their feed to come from pasture (I believe Dairy cows are now above 30% of total Digestible Dry Matter, which is a good thing).

3. No antibiotics, drugs, or synthetic parasiticides unless they are published on the NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) list.

4. Organic processing of meat, milk, and eggs.

5. Record keeping in accordance with the regulations.

6. An “Organic system plan,” a lot like a business plan that shows how the farmer plans to maintain organic practices.

7. Measures to prevent contamination of soil and water from production (such as manure runoff).

8. Absence of genetic modification, ionizing radiation, or other such interventions/contaminations.

This sounds pretty good, and it is.  But any time you get a bunch of lawyers to write rules for folks to follow, those folks are going to hire lawyers to make sure that those rules don’t get too much in the way.  Let’s use the organic chicken industry’s lawyers as an example, and to keep this from becoming a book, let’s focus on rules 1, 2, and 8:

Rule #1:  When the lawyers get here, they run square into the 2010 Access to Pasture rule, requiring that any bird raised indoors must have free access to pasture except in certain circumstances.  What this has been interpreted to mean is that a factory organic farm can raise 2,000 chickens in a 100′ x 40′ pen (2 sqft per bird) as long as those birds have free access to outside “pasture.”  This pasture can be enclosed and covered, and doesn’t have to have anything growing on it.  Access can be satisfied with some small openings leading to a few 30 sqft outdoor “porches.”  All the food and water is inside the big room, but if the birds want to leave that behind to go see the reflection of the sun, they’re free to do so.

Organic chicken farm, from http://www.myessentia.com

Rule #2:  Now if you’re running that many birds in that little space, there is no way they can support a majority of their dietary needs on forage.  Any vegetation that might exist at the beginning will be gone in a matter of days, and with it will go all insect life.  So 100% of their feed will have to be what the farmer provides.  Rule #2 requires that this feed also be certified organic, and most of this will come in the form of processed grains from organic farms, the various components of which were grown, harvested, and transported to the mill with fossil fuels, processed using more energy, and then trucked through the distributing train, again with fossil fuels.  Of course, it is possible that this farmer lives next to a grain mill that in turn has local access to organic corn, soybeans, alfalfa, limestone, monocalcium phosphate, kelp, diatomaceous earth, clay, salt, DL methionine, vitamin & mineral premix, garlic, horseradish, anise, and juniper berry (all ingredients of one brand of certified organic chicken feed).

Sadly, the Toyota Prius Combine release date has been pushed back again

Rule #8:  What can the lawyers do with this rule?  They can ensure Cornish Rock Cross hybrid chickens, most likely the organic or non-organic chicken you buy at the supermarket or farmers market, qualify as organic.  They’re not genetically modified, just specifically bred to grow extremely quick (usually harvested from 8-12 weeks of age), with sparse white feathers (easier plucking with no pigment left on the skin), and broad, tender, white breasts.  They also can exhibit extreme mortality rates past around 4 months of age due to heart failure, exhaustion, or skeletal problems.  They taste great, by the way, and I don’t have any problem with folks that raise them.  They just don’t fit into our plan right now.

Cornish Rock Hybrids - from tinyfarmblog.com - notice they're growing faster than their feathers

These principles, of course, also apply to other areas of agriculture, whether producing fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk, or other products.

This isn’t to say that organic practices or certification are bad.  We are not to the point yet where we can produce even the majority of our food on our farm, and though we patronize several farms in the area as well as farmers market, we still do a lot of shopping at the grocery store.  When making food choices for our family there, we lean heavily on certified organic produce.  The National Organic Program (NOP) rules and regulations are far from perfect, and subject to a bit of controversy, but by and large, they provide guidance under which which healthier and more wholesome food can be produced.

Not certified organic, by the way...

That’s where the strength of the NOP lies.  Though it’s obviously not perfect, in a world where the vast majority live in densely-populated cities far removed from farms, the NOP provides a framework for consumers to make smarter decisions about the composition and quality of their food.  It does this by holding larger producers accountable to these better (again, not perfect) practices.

Why do I say “larger producers?”

That gets us to point #2.  Besides the fees involved in organic certification, maintaining organic practices obviously carry some expenses that can be difficult for a small operation to bear and still present a price consumers are willing to pay  (Slowmoneyfarm has several excellent posts on this topic, particularly this one).  Much of this is because of competition with larger producers both able and willing to take advantage of the loopholes in the system such as discussed above.

Ability is one obstacle.  A volume producer will always have advantages that come with being able to purchase in larger lots and lower prices while combining and reducing other production expenses.  Still, if small farmers can find a supportive market, it may be possible to approach competitiveness here if they are willing to take advantage of some high-volume practices, though again Slowmoneyfarm does a good job explaining how this is extremely difficult.

That willingness to do this is the second obstacle.  Profitability (or perhaps even solvency) requires taking advantage of practices such as use of non-heritage breeds, stocking stables/pastures/pens at much higher rates, using higher levels of confinement to minimize labor costs, culling rather than treating many sick/struggling animals, and stockpiling feed.

Willingness is the obstacle that stopped us.  We have the facilities that with a bit of modification would make this work with organic chickens and ducks.  It would mean confining them and stocking both our laying and meat flocks at what to us seems an absurd density.  We would need to use non-heritage high-production hybrids for both operations.  Besides the problems these present to our values, such confinement would eliminate the benefits of free-range poultry.

Do you really want to put us in a pen?

We could do this also with meat goats.  Again, we would stock at much higher rates, and manage both the confinement systems and available pasture to ensure they maintained a 100% organic diet.  This would include separation from our poultry, horses, visitors (and probably our kids) to make sure that they didn’t end up eating something improper.

For all of our livestock, this would drive us to breed for size and speed of production, not non-production values such as temperment.

So what is a small farmer to do?

Photo by John Vachon.Oct. 1938. From the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. America From the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the Farm Security Administration-OWI, 1935-1945.

I believe the solution is an old one.  In lieu of third-party state-managed certification processes, farmers and customers need to know each other and talk face-to-face.  The farmer needs to know what the customer values and desires, in product, quality, and methods.  The customer needs to be able to trust that the farmer will produce according to those values and desires.  Both need to come to an understanding of what this will cost.

The only way this can happen is through local consumption… and that is a subject for another post.

Tri-Dye Jam

Tri-Dye Jam

God blessed us with some amazing fruit this year, both on our trees and in the bushes around the Flying T.

We picked berries through the summer.  Wild strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries were superb on the farm and in the neighborhood.  Our blueberries were a bust, but two friend’s blueberry groves were absolutely amazing.  We also did a couple trips to pick-your-own places to fill up on strawberries.  As berry season was coming to a close, our peaches arrived by the bushel.

The canning operation was in full bore several days during August and September, and one of the many fun experiments we tried was what we call “Tri-Dye Jam,” made completely from peaches, raspberries, and blackberries we picked right here.  We’ve been using generic white labels, but decided to have some fun with these ones.

Tri-Dye Jam ready for the larder

For Tri-Dye, we modified the Peach Jam recipe from the wonderful website, pickyourown.org, using 4 cups of peeled and diced peaches and 1 cup each of raspberry and blackberry puree.

And yes, it tastes as good as it sounds.

Fruits and Veggies

 Our past posts have dealt primarily with our animals and the work associated with them, but another blessing we’ve got here is what we’ve been provided with in the way of fruits and vegetables.

Kids picking the first lettuces

We had a late start to the garden itself as we were pretty busy with all the projects that came from moving in.  A combination of that late start and me mixing entirely too much compost into the garden led to a relatively low and late yield.  By mid-summer, only the lettuce (which absolutely loved the nitrogen high I’d given it) was harvestable for our table.

Meanwhile, the other vegetables turned the nitrogen into leaves and stems, growing somewhat out of control but not producing flowers or fruit.  It wasn’t until late summer that we started to get a few beans, cukes and tomatoes. 

Cukes are Here!

The tomatoes, combined with fresh basil and some store-bought mozzarella allowed us to make one of our favorite summer appetizers, Caprese salad.

 The recipe for Caprese, btw, is ridiculously simple: slice and arrange 2 or 3 very ripe tomatoes on a plate, top with slices of buffalo mozzarella and basil leaves, then drizzle with balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

 

Mmmmm... Caprese!

 

Come to think of it, you may want to use 4 tomatoes for this… It dissappears quickly around here.

 

While the garden was slow in ripening, the wild offerings were not.  Our property (and the area surrounding us) has a good selection of berry bushes – primarily wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries.

 

The wild strawberries came into season first, and though we had grand plans to collect them for jam, most of them went directly from the pickers’ hands to their mouths – what a great early summer treat!

 

We filled our need for canning strawberries by patronizing a few of the many local pick-your-own farms in the area, our freezer space dwindling by the day.  Wild Raspberries ripened next, and this year’s crop was impressive (though this bowl had some stray early blueberries as well).

 

Wild Raspberries... and Some Friends

 

We managed to find very few black raspberry bushes,  so we added those extra-special treasures to a bag in the freezer until we had collected enough for canning.  My wife asked for only one thing for her birthday… a food mill, and after researching several different models, we found a good deal on a Victorio (here it is at Amazon) and an accessory kit (4 more screens and a grape auger).

 

The wild blueberries were rare (and tiny) this year in our area, but a friend’s high-bushes were absolutely out of control, yielding nearly grape-sized berries by the basketfull.  In a half hour at their house, we had picked nearly 10 quarts to share with their neighbors.

 

While waiting for the food mill to arrive, we started to realize that the peaches were going to be ripe a lot earlier than we expected.  We also realized that we should’ve been a lot more dilligent about following my Dad’s advice and culling the overproduction earlier in the season.  By late July, a branch had already fallen, and I had to build supports to hold up the other ones to prevent further damage.

 

That's a Lot of Peaches

In one day, we picked a bushel or so of pre-ripe peaches to take some of the load off.  In the following weeks as the fruit ripened, we found ourselves with more peaches than we knew what to do with, especially when we decided we needed to empty the tree in preparation for Hurricane Irene.  By the time we were done, we had picked upwards of 5 bushels of peaches and discarded maybe 3 more (windfalls and insect-damaged fruit).

 

Now What?

 

A modified version of the scene from Forest Gump, where Bubba talks about all the ways you can prepare shrimp, became the household joke.  Peach salsa, peach cobbler, peach pie, peach jam, peach chutney, pickled peaches, canned peaches, peach sorbet, peach gumbo… 

 

Peach Pyromania Salsa

 

Our Peach Salsa Recipe is here: http://pickyourown.org/peachsalsa.htm.  We modified it by using only 1 cup of sugar, doubling the red pepper, and adding sliced jalapenos.

 

 

Peach Cobbler

 

Blueberry and Peach Jams

Special thanks to http:///www.pickyourown.org for all the help in the way of recipes and canning advice, btw!  We used and adapted many of their recipes.  A few favorites:  “Blue Suede” (Blueberry-Peach Jam), “Tri-Dye Jam” (raspberry, blackberry, and peach Jam), Peach Cobbler, Pickled Peaches, and strawberries.

 

Then, as we finished processing the peaches and most of the berries, the garden went into full-bore production mode, as did our apples.

 

Apples Ripening

 

The first early windfalls ended up as applesauce – again a simple recipe: cut up apples, cook them until soft in about an inch of apple juice, run through the food mill, and can in a hot water bath, but soon we had quality ripe apples for eating, cooking, and canning to go along with our broccoli, beans, peas, cukes, zucchini, tomatoes, and bell peppers!

 

All has to end at some point, though we recently discovered a small grove of wild grapes at the end of our driveway!.  The first frosts have arrived, and though we’re keeping the garden going by covering it at night, the end of our garden produce is in sight.  Next year, we’ll work on some cold frames and perhaps even a small greenhouse… and we’ll make sure to prune the peaches.