Ferdinand the Bull(s)

A couple weeks ago, we welcomed some additions to the farm. Blog, meet Ferdinand the Bull (Part I).

Actually, there are three bulls, and while none of them actually have names, I have a dismaying tendency to name everything I come across. Sylvester the Toyota Echo. Sneaky the Cow. Trevor the Laptop. And Ferdinand the Bull, Parts I, II, and III.

The bulls are actually all just a year old, and when they arrived, they were virgins. (Not the case anymore.) The way I understand it, bulls tend to become more aggressive as they get older, but are still pretty tractable and nice when they're young.

I don't know if it's the breed (Jersey) or just because they're still young, but the Ferdinands look pretty similar to the cows. They're all de-horned, aren't any bigger than the cows, and (at least to my untrained eye) don't look as though they're built differently.

They do, however, have wrinklier foreheads. And testicles.

At any rate, the Ferdinands will be around for another month or three, before being sold off to another farmer to perform the same services.

Three bulls. Fifty-five cows. The Ferdinands sure do have it tough.

The Farm of Many Faces: Touring Joel Salatin's Grass Farm

It's hard to think of any farmers more famous than Joel Salatin. The owner of Polyface Farm, Salatin has been featured in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and in the documentary Food, Inc. He has written numerous books, lectures far and wide,* and happens to give weekly tours on his farm, one of which we attended two weeks ago.

For those who aren't familiar with Polyface Farm, a little background: Joel Salatin describes himself as a "grass farmer". He pastures broilers, turkeys, layers, pigs and beef on his land, using intensive grazing methods. Salatin is not organic certified (see here), but he doesn't need to be. He's made a name for himself in the sustainable agriculture world. In fact, Salatin only sells directly to consumers at his farm, and to restaurants and buyers' clubs within a four hour driving distance of the farm.

Tours at Polyface Farm are very well attended, if my experience was any indication. Everyone loads onto a couple trailers that have been comfortably padded with straw bales, which Mr. Salatin then trucks around the farm with his big ol' tractor.

First stop: the broilers and the turkeys.

The broilers, as you can see, are kept in separate pens that are about ten by ten feet. They are moved across the field to a new spot every day, giving the chickens new grass and new insects to feed, but without leaving them in one area long enough to kill the field with their "hot" (i.e. nitrogen-rich) poop. The turkeys are moved every two days.

The pigs are kept in woods on Polyface's 550 total acres. They're moved about every two weeks, which is enough time to stir up the soil in the forested areas without killing the trees. According to Salatin, after being used as a pig run, this area will be far more lush and vibrant than if it hadn't been.

Salatin says they don't cut much hay...just what they need.

Salatin's so-called "Egg Mobile", where his layers are housed. He follows them about two days behind the cows, so the chickens can go through the cow dung and pick out parasites and flies, mimicking the symbiotic relationships between birds and some migratory animals in nature. By scratching up the cow droppings, the chickens also spread it around, making it a more effective fertilizer, and fertilize the fields with their own leavings as well.

The cows are moved every day. By grazing them within a smaller area, Salatin says they are forced to eat everything, not just pick and choose the nicest bits. The cows are grass fed and, in winter, put on hay - they are never given a corn-based diet.

If you've read or seen anything about Salatin, you know that he has a lot of stock phrases, and we got to hear them all. (If I were giving a tour a week and lecturing 100 days a year, I'd probably have some handy sound bytes too.) But despite that, he was certainly not merely reciting a memorized script. He was genuine and approachable, answering questions in detail, and no topic was off-limits.

Although the tour ended after the cows, we took a few minutes to explore around the farm. This is Polyface's chicken processing area. Because it is open to the air, the USDA has tried to shut Salatin down numerous times, saying the area doesn't conform to USDA standards. Somehow - through the forcefulness of his personality, perhaps - Salatin has managed to keep them back.

They process a lot of chickens. These chickens actually come from a satellite farm that grows and processes chickens for Polyface, and is run by a former intern.

Our last stop was the gift shop, which features quite a bit of meat products, as well as t-shirts proclaiming things like "Lunatic Farmer" and "Everything I want to do is illegal." Nearly everyone on the tour came armed with large coolers, which they then stocked with Polyface Beef, Polyface Pork, and Polyface Chicken. We were no exception.

*Salatin will be a keynote speaker at this year's Acres U.S.A. conference, incidentally.

Lamb Chops? Not this girl.

Last week, we were eating dinner when Brian came in and said, "Um... I think Eunice is lambing." So we all ran outside, abandoning our meal to the flies.

AND she's a girl, so we get to keep her! Huzzah.

Look at those eyelashes. I'm in love.

180 degrees later in the circle of sheep life: on Saturday I went to Front Royal (about a 75 minute drive) to pick up Mr. Wether*, the lamb we dropped off last week who now resembles a cooler full of vacuum-sealed lamb chops.

Blue Ridge Meats, where Susan and Dean get their animals processed, is "humane certified". They don't use electric prods on the animals, they don't deny them food or water (some places do that because it apparently makes less of a mess on the kill floor), and they don't do anything to cause the animals any suffering. So I think I can enjoy a Mr. Wether burger without too much guilt.




*Wether: noun a male sheep who has had his bearings removed.

Mail Order Chickens

On Sunday, we recieved a box.

Whatever can it be?



Gasp! Baby Chicks!

Fifty-seven of them, to be precise - mostly Araucanas, which lay blue/green eggs, and Silver Laced Wyandottes. They all came from McMurray Hatchery, which is in Iowa, and were only one day old when they arrived.

Here is their new home, which I like to call the Chicky Red Light District:

The maroon ambiance comes from a heat lamp, incidentally, and is not actually an aura of illicitness resulting from their naughty night-time chicklet activities.

See? Totally innocent looking.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Death and the Farm

The overabundance of funerals in my family over the last month has me thinking about a lot of things, death naturally being one of them. When I returned to the farm two weeks ago, I felt much more attuned to the ebb and flow of life here - the balance of predator and prey, the birth of baby goats destined to become goat burgers, the knowledge that our Peking ducks will be ready to process in just a month.

In her book Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Barbara Kingsolver notes the increasing distance between Americans and their food. She describes how few people in this country have ever processed a chicken or lamb or cow. Instead, we go to the grocery store, where we purchase the appropriate part all nice and clean in its styrofoam and cellophane packaging, beautiful beneath the flourescent lighting, bearing no hint of its messy beginning.

It’s a disturbing train of thought. How many of us can say with certainty which part of the steer originally housed our rib eye steak or chuck roast? In the store, thighs and breasts, ribs and shanks, are all completely devoid of their original context. So few people today have anything to do with their own food production, lacking even a lonely tomato plant to dot their lawn. We think of food as it appears in the supermarket: clean, unblemished, stacked neatly into tall piles and organized by color.

This separation between animal and human has ramifications that reach beyond our dinner plate. It speaks to something far more substantial: our relationship with death.

For many, the only time we encounter the dead is when a loved one passes away. Often, we do not witness the moment of their passing. Only later do we see them turned out at a viewing or funeral, the product of modern embalming practices. With rituals like these, it is no wonder that so many people find death to be upsetting, disturbing, and even traumatic.

Death and farming are remarkably intertwined. I saw my first livestock death about six weeks ago, when a sick chicken needed to be put down in case it was contagious. Brian took it and hung it upside down by its feet, before using a knife to slice the major vein running down the size of its neck. The chicken shuddered. Then it flapped wildly. Then it was still.

It was my first time to see the death of an animal on the farm... but it won't be my last.

All of which makes me wonder: does being exposed to death on a farm make it more acceptable in life? It's hard to say. I don't think it makes it any easier, necessarily. But I think that it makes death a little less traumatic.

On a farm, as in nature, death does not happen arbitrarily. The chicken is sick, Old Yeller needs to be put down, the lamb will be eaten and respected as part of our meal. There is always a reason. Death is merely one step in a long chain of events - and not necessarily the last one.

If more consumers were involved in their food, up to and including witnessing and perhaps helping with its death and processing, then I have no doubt that they would be much more mindful of how they used that animal. And if we were more exposed to death and its effects on the farm, then we might be a little better prepared to meet with it in life.

Sheep Shearing: A Picture Diary

Today was a big day for the sheep - they finally got to shed their winter fleeces. High time, considering that it's been in the 90's all week.

We on the farm do not shear the sheep. Susan hires someone specifically to do this. His name is Matthew, and he's a senior in college, studying biology. He also happens to know how to cut the fleece of a sheep in a timely manner, without damaging them too much.

Hopefully, the little sheep will now be much more comfortable.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch... er, farm.

Due to some unfortunate events at home, I was in Indiana all of last week. Thus the blogging moratorium.

Although I wasn't present to witness it, the farm kept operating. Plants grew, animals ate, people harvested. And despite my (relatively) short absence, I was faced with plenty of changes when I returned yesterday.

For starters, Juanita the Spanish Meat Goat had her baby - a single boy. I don't have any pictures of him yet.

Second: two of our remaining three ducks ran a-fowl (hee) of a predator in the night, and are now swimming in that big lake in the sky. The last duck has been put in the aviary for protection... where she will soon be joined by the cute little bevy of ducklings that arrived while I was gone. (The red light is from a heat lamp.)

Third: plants grow fast. Really fast. The potatoes, which were a few scant inches tall when I left, are now a foot at least. The buckwheat now reaches my hips, despite being merely knee-high a week ago. And the heirloom tomatoes I planted the other week? Take a look.

This must be what having children is like. One second they're seedlings... and before you know it, they're bearing fruit of their own. Where, oh where, does the time fly?

We also have strawberries now. They are delicious.

And, judging by the numbers of Kermit look-alikes leaping about, it is well into frog mating season.

Sadly, I will be leaving the farm again on Thursday, to return on Monday. Hopefully, there won't be too many more changes in my absence.

Baby Goats, Extra Fresh

Last Wednesday, Blanca finally had her kids!* Three of them, to be precise. No wonder she was so wide.

The next morning, we had to do the goat kid check in. You need to do this before they can walk enough to run away from you. It involves checking the sex of each kid, giving them a selenium injection (a trace mineral they need), and cleaning their umbilical cord type thing with iodine.

Since there were three kids and three interns, everyone got one.

Despite my innate hatred of putting up pictures of myself because I never like how I look, I posted these because the goat kids are just too darned cute. They are only twelve hours old in these pictures.

Just one pregnant goat left. It appears that each goat is a cycle apart - a goat estrus cycle is about three and a half weeks, and Juanita just does not look ready yet. So look for more baby goats in the future!




*I would have posted these much sooner, but due to the epic fail of Blogger for two days, I couldn't do a thing.

More Baby Goats

I got a video of the baby goats down at the farm house yesterday. Grumpy dads are apparently not restricted to the human race.

Still no sign of more baby goats... Blanca and Juanita are taking their sweet time.

Arrival of the Goat Kids

We have baby goats!

Florencia, one of our pregnant Spanish Meat Goats over at the Farm House, gave birth a couple days ago to two adorable little goat kids. Mostly they've been hiding behind the hay feeder when I go over there, but I did get a couple pictures yesterday.

The other two goats, Blanca and Juanita, haven't given birth yet, but Blanca looks just about ready to pop.

The Pied Piper of Chickens

Whenever I go to feed the chickens, I feel like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

The Great Chicken Heist

It was the perfect night for a chicken heist.

Well, actually, that's not true. It was about 25 F last night and we were all freezing our tails off in the dark. But there was still beauty in the cold - the newly formed frost that crunched crisp and fresh under our feet, our breath billowing like steam in the beams of our headlamps, and the stars, undimmed by city lights and flickering above us in the frigid air.

Not that I had much time to observe such things. We were moving chickens.

It was a three part operation. Part One: Take down the fence and move the mobile chicken coop to the front yard. Part Two: Move the young chickens from the front yard coop into the mobile chicken coop with the rest of the chickens. Part Three: Move the mobile chicken coop to a new location and set up the fence.

The second part was where things got tricky. Susan, Caitlin (a part time worker on the farm) and I formed a daisy chain that went like this: Caitlin crawls into the tiny front yard chicken coop, grabs a chicken, and hands it to me. I pin down the chickens wings - or, for the roosters, hold them upside down by their feet - and carry the chicken out to Susan, who puts it in the big mobile coop. Easy as pie.

Well, maybe "easy" isn't the right word. For example, please examine Exhibit A - the fact that we were doing this in the dark wasn't because we just got too busy to do it earlier, but because, according to the theory, chickens are sleepy and therefore much more docile at night. We also turned our headlamps to infrared light for the endeavor, since chickens can't see infrared light, helping to preserve the atmosphere of calm and docility. Or so I'm told. Because if what I witnessed last night is evidence of chicken "docility", all I can say is I never want to move one when it's being feisty.

Who can blame them, really? I certainly wouldn't stay calm if some disembodied force came out of nowhere to pluck me from my nice warm bed and stuff me in a new one that was already inhabited by people who hate me for disturbing their rest. And based on last night's events, I think some of the chickens would say the same.

Regardless, the entire episode only took a little over an hour, and all things considered, the chickens were fairly well behaved, despite the inelegant interruption to their night. And in the end, it was yet another new and exciting experience to add to my list of things I would never have done if I weren't here.

Life on the Farm - Let's meet our contestants!

Who doesn't picture a farm without a some chickens, a cow in the distance, and a few cats killing mice in the barns? Although Brightwood Farm doesn't have all the most stereotypical livestock wandering around, Susan and Dean do have plenty of animals roaming their gently rolling hills - in fact, they were featured in a local paper today about raising heritage breeds. (Check out the article to learn a bit about the farm and to see a great picture of Susan with her heritage Indian Runner ducks.)

So without further ado, allow me to introduce the players - give it up for the inhabitants of Brightwood Vineyard and Farm!



From Left: Sadie, Izzie, Rosie

The donkeys - Sadie, Rosie and Izzie - are used for what Susan calls "fertility" (a euphamism meaning "manure"), which is used in their compost. Izzie is also Rosie's daughter - when Susan and Dean bought Rosie, they thought she was just getting fat. Au contraire, as they discovered one morning upon finding a slimmed down Rosie and a baby donkey with enormous ears.

Next up are the sheep. They are friendly. Very friendly. (PS: That is Isaac, the friendly WWOOF-er).

And what are sheep without goats? Feeding them is Caitlin, who works on the farm a couple days every week.



Juan the goat.

Naturally with all these tasty treats practically laying around for the taking, something must be done to protect them. That's where the guard dogs come in.



Charlie the dog.

Charlie hangs out with the sheep all day, in a field adjascent to a couple goats (Juan and Phil, a bottle baby goat) and the donkeys. (Charlie is also camera shy, so I had to be covert while lurking about shamelessly.) He is a Maremma Sheepdog, a breed of livestock guardian dog originally bred in central Italy.

Charlie has a brother, named Ben.

Ben guards the chickens.

And while we're on the subject of birds, let's not forget the ducks and Guinea fowl.

They might eat ticks, but Guinea fowl are still one of the most obnoxious birds on the planet.

Duck eggs - apparently great for baking.

There are actually more, but I won't make this entry any more unwieldy than it already is. You will have to wait to meet the rest until later.

Until next time...