A friend of ours sent along a link (Hi Chris!) to a video that I’m going to share with everyone eventually. However in poking around the site, there are multiple videos that are really good. They are produced and published by PBS and are short, artistic, and well done. I thought I’d share the ones I like here in various posts, and maybe give a little insight from our perspective.
This is something we get questioned about from time to time by potential customers. When they are asking about our products, they will ask if we are Organic. Note that’s organic with a capital O. My answer is we call ourselves “beyond organic” because the Organic label has been corrupted by the process and the money, as most any government program will be. There has been much controversy over that standards and you can see some of it here and here. It was interesting that when I was in New York city last year, all the restaurants that I visited had their items labeled as Organic but none that I saw mentioned the farm that the food came from. Here in NC it’s common to see the farm name beside your steak choice. To me it was a contrast between big city and small city. To consumers in NY, being certified was the standard and how they chose to place their trust in their food system. To consumers here in our area, being from a local farm is the standard. I know there are exceptions to all I’ve said, but it was the impression I had when I visited.
Another point about this video I thought was interesting was the farmer in Alabama saying that they didn’t get help going Organic and that their local advisors weren’t informed and encouraged them to just go conventional. While I’ve had that experience with some people in our farming system, I’ve always felt that there was plenty of assistance in NC for anyone who wanted to go Organic. Maybe I’m connected with more people who are on that bandwagon, I don’t know, but I see grants and assistance offered often for converting to Organic.
The farmer referenced three reasons why farmers in the South don’t go Organic. From my perspective, the third one was the most pertinent. Farmer’s tend to be a rather independent lot. There isn’t a lot of trust for the federal government in the South and the idea of having Federal inspectors come to your farm routinely to audit your practices just doesn’t sit well with this set of factors. I know it was the first thing that put me off when I initially looked at Organic certification. However I’m perfectly happy to have our friends at the Soil and Water district come by. Heck they stop by now to work and I’m not even here. They are from the government but it’s our local government and these people live and work here. There is a different level of trust with them. I’m not championing an idea here, it was just interesting to me that Southern farmers as a group don’t tend to certify Organic compared to West coast or probably Northern farmers.
I’m started this post while I was sitting there burning the trash from today. We generate a lot of boxes in our system and we routinely burn them in our large burn barrel. Once again there aren’t many pictures from today. I stayed too busy to take many.
I started at about 5:30 in the shop working on our new pig trailer.
Pig trailer under construction
Here is part of the way through construction. You can see the hydraulic cylinder (it’s the bright red thing). That cylinder will push down on the axle which is now hinged so that the wheel raises and lowers. I was able to get a bit more done than you see pictured this morning but I was held up by the fact that my hydraulic hoses are too short. Unfortunately I can only blame myself as they seem to be about the length I asked for. Oh well, new hoses on Monday. I spent 30 minutes fiddling around with them first to prove to myself they weren’t actually the right size. Unfortunately I proved it, after wasting 30 minutes of the two hours I had allotted for this project.
About 7:30 I headed back over to the house for my new daily routine which is to make breakfast for the family. This routine suits me because I can get up and work when I want to, but the family can get up when they normally do and I still get to see them. I had some great sausage an employee of mine brought.
Home made pork sausage
After breakfast I tackled a few odds and ends like taking out the trash and tidying up various small to dos. Then I jumped on feeding all the animals which takes a while in our produce feeding system. Many times the products have to be taken out of bags and sorted into who eats what. You’d think all the pigs would be the same, but some pigs love mangos while others refuse to even try them. They are like kids, go figure.
Just as soon as I finished feeding the animals and was just unloading the last of the mangos, I receive a call from a lady who wanted to come by and buy some meat and maybe see a farm. I scurried down to the gate to meet not just the nice lady I’d been emailing back and forth with but also her friend and her friends cute little daughter Maggie. We headed back to the barn and all got in the Gator to take a tour. They were all interested in the pigs so we spent a good bit of time touring the different pig paddocks. Shaina had just bought a nice piece of property earlier this year and was interested in bringing some animals to her homestead. This lead to extra conversations on animals, habitat requirements, etc.
Maggie meets Cotton
Through all this Maggie was having a ball and was cute as a button.
Maggie had a ball with the cows, even getting one to sniff her
During the tour, I received a call from Miguel that he had a lady who wanted to buy a pig. Not just any pig, she wanted to come here and pick it out, then have me shoot it and then she could take it home. This was an unusual request but one I didn’t see a problem with as long as she was doing the processing at her place. No sooner had our guests left after their tour and meat purchases than this lady and her family showed up to pick up their pig. Luckily Miguel showed up right behind them so we all proceeded to the barn. It took about 10 minutes for them to pick their pig and about 5 seconds later I had it on the ground twitching. We hoisted it up, weighed it, bagged it and sent them on their way. Grand total time invested, about 15 minutes. That’s the way to sell a pig!
While Miguel was here, he noted that we had a dead pig in the new pig paddock. The girls had said they thought they saw another prolapsed pig and I’d been looking for one all morning. However I’d been looking for a live one, not one dead still in the piglet house. Sure enough this sibling to the pig we are currently treating also had a prolapse but it had died of something else before we could begin to treat it. Not a good part of our day. Miguel and I disposed of the body and he went back to his house to continue his day off, but only after leaving me some home made tamales and some deserts for the kids. The tamales were SPICY and I loved them.
With two pigs gone, I went back to finishing the morning’s work but Dustin stopped by to get some stone for a project he was working on. We had a bit of stone hauled in the past two days.
Freshly graveled barn yard
This is just a small part of what we stoned. We probably hauled 20 loads of stone onto the farm the past two days. With all the rain we’ve had, it’s been a soupy mess in the barn yard and I wanted to get it fixed while I could. Dustin needed a few bucket fulls which was no problem. Fortunately while Dustin was visting he mentioned lunch, which lead to a conversation about Angie’s. I had it in my head they were closed today, but a quick check of Facebook showed that they were indeed open. Dustin and I high tailed it to Angie’s because it was already after 2 and they closed at 2:30. Our plan was to get some lunch then wait for them to clear the kitchen so we could pick up our food buckets and bring them back to the farm. We both had a traditional Southern new years day meal of collards and black eyed peas to bring good luck in the coming year. Then a stop to fill up the truck and back to the farm.
After arrival, I dropped Dustin off and proceeded to get back to the mornings work. I emptied the rest of the trailer then proceeded to pick up all the boxes from today as well as some small piles of boxes from previous days. Before leaving the barn yard, I took a hard look at our newest addition.
Bucking saw
This is a saw that is used in the forestry business. It’s for cutting the tops off of trees, or “bucking” them. The plan is to test it out for cutting firewood. It should work, if we have enough hydraulic flow, which is questionable. All it should take is a few adapter fittings and we’ll at least be able to test. There was zero cost in this saw so if it works, great, if not, we’ll haul it off and sell it.
Once I drove the trailer of boxes to the burn barrel, I cleaned all the metal wire from the previous days burning and started a new fire for today. I actually wished it was a bit colder at this point because the heat from the fire is something else. After about 20 minutes of burning, I packed it in for the evening but not before one final shot for everyone.
Sunset at the farm
After a wonderful dinner it was time to work on the computer and then finish this post. As you can imagine, I’m a bit tired so please forgive me if this post isn’t very well written. I’ll clean it up when I’m not so tired.
Today was Justin’s last day interning for us. Justin has learned how to operate heavy equipment without crashing too often, how to back a trailer, and how to handle animals both large and small. He is one semester away from graduating at C.C.C.C. and will shortly be on his way to managing his own farm.
The reason for Justin’s leaving isn’t because he was done with being an intern but it has to do with me quitting my day job to take up farming full time! I’m selling my company, with a hopeful closing date of January 16th. If that goes through I will be a full time farmer come the 17th. With that kind of change we had to cut our internship program short but I hope that this will lead to bigger and better things going forward. Very few farmers are able to make a living off of farming solely, and nobody I’ve heard of has made it on this small of an acreage but we are going to give it a go. We have growth plans in multiple areas but we will take it one step at a time and see what God has in store for us. Plan on seeing more posts, and more kids as I drag them out of the house and put them to work.
One of our friends dropped off a present for us today. She made it herself and it’s perfect!
Here is the view on the tree.
Another one of our great friends made this awesome soap and brought it to us for Christmas. When you farm pigs, you need all the soap you can get but what’s cool is that we both enjoy making soap and I am looking forward to trading soap making tips in the future.
However she has blown me away in the quality department. Plus the cool wooden soap holder is just over the top. I really need to do something with our packaging. As if the whole ensemble wasn’t enough, check out the name of the soap.
Today I came across an article written by none other than Joel Salatin covering the exact same study. I was relatively benign in my opinions of this study whereas Joel was pretty to the point however it is good to have someone you respect have a similar opinion on a point that you did. I’ll take a little validation wherever I can get it.
Apples, peeled and in the pot, cooking down to make applesauce.
Today after Christmas at Grandma’s, and feeding everyone on the farm I headed to the kitchen to start working on apples. A few hours and one bad movie later I had 1.5 bushels of apples peeled, sliced, and cored. I took a quick pic of the start. The wine bottle was for comparison only, there was no wine in the applesauce nor the cook on this one rare occasion.
One hour into cooking.
Here we have the apples about 1 hour into cooking. At this point there are only apples in the pot with no other ingredients.
A few minutes with the stick blender and viola! Applesauce.
Now we add some sugar so the kids are happy and a bit of cinnamon to give it a little kick and transfer everything to jars. There is no measuring. It’s all to taste, just like your grandma did. This time we’ll put about 1/2 the sugar of the last batch, which for this bushel was about 3/4 cup. By sneaking down the sugar each batch, the kids never notice and shortly you have no sugar added applesauce that the kids love as home-made. What’s the point of being a parent if you can’t fool your kids.
The end result, 14 quarts of apple sauce.
14 quart jars of apple sauce, plus one bowl for the chef. Only two more bushels to go.
Yesterday we tackled the 8 bushels of apples that Miguel snagged from one of our farmers about a week ago. These were prime #1 apples and a real treat to get.
We started off by the pool trying to press some apple juice. It worked ok but eventually Miguel and I moved the press back outside and tied it to the front of the Gator again like we did last time. This worked much better and it’s the way to do it in the future. I’d tried to do it without the Gator because it was raining and cold outside but eventually I figured a way to get the Gator positioned out of the rain so we could work in comfort.
We processed about 6 bushels of apples into various items leaving about 2.5 bushels to go to apple sauce. We ended up with about 4 gallons of apple juice from yesterday’s work. Our project today, after Christmas at Grandma’s, is to turn the rest of the apples into applesauce, and then can everything and get it put away. It sounds like the family may stay at Grandma’s tonight so it will be a solo event in the kitchen tonight. The only hard part of doing the apple sauce is peeling and coring all the apples. We have two cool old time apple peelers that work well, however it still takes a while to do all the work. No worries, though, after feeding today, it’ll be a pleasure to spend some time in the kitchen with some music and a simple chore.
After everything is peeled and cored, it’s just cooking things down in our large stock pot, and then blending with the immersion blender. Instant apple sauce. Then just a quick batch of canning and clean up.
This weekend was a pretty busy one for me. After working all week in my day job which has its own set of issues, I arrived home Friday to interview a very nice young lady who was attending NC State and looking to get some work on a farm. After reading her resume, and talking to her for a few minutes I suggested to her that she is more qualified than I am to be a farmer and that she’s not going to learn enough at our farm to justify her time. I wish I had a place for her, she’s a really smart and accomplished lady.
After she left, I spent some time working in the barn before meeting two different customers who wanted to buy meat. It’s still the best part of this gig to meet customers, and to meet their families. One of them on Friday had young girls and they were on a search for humane beef that their daughter was ok with purchasing. She’d learned about factory farming and was now refusing to eat meat that wasn’t raised ethically and humanely. I gave as good of an explanation as I could, standing in the dark with nothing to point to and show her. I think she was satisfied but I guess we’ll know when they show back up and buy more beef.
Or not. That’s one of the downsides to this business, sometimes people don’t come back for more product and your don’t necessarily find out why. Was it too expensive? Did they revert back to store-bought meat? Did they find someone closer? I wish I could have taken her on a tour and showed her the cows and how happily they live on our farm. I think that would have cemented her desire to buy from us. Anyway, it was nice to be able to close the week with some sales off of the farm.
Saturday my day started with a ride to Zebulon and picking up 13 pigs from a farmer there, Howard and his grandson Stephen. Howard was what my father would have called “a card” or “a bird.” I think today we’d call him a crazy old coot. He was a nice man and was certainly entertaining. Dustin went with me and we had some adventure getting the trailer backed into their driveway because it was so tight but Dustin kept a lookout for me and I just took over the state road for a few minutes while I backed in. Luckily nobody came by so we had the whole road to ourselves, which was handy because we were taking up the whole road! Stephen had all the pigs already loaded in the back of a truck so all we had to do was transfer the pigs from his truck to our trailer and we were done in five minutes. $60 per pig x 13 pigs, $780 worth of swine. These were Duroc and some other cross of a few heritage breeds, mainly Duroc. I forgot my ear tags so I crossed my fingers and snuck back home with no issues. It’s a $5000 fine PER PIG if you don’t have your ear tags so $65,000 in fines was riding with me. The ear tagger in permanently in the trailer now. I’m not making that mistake again.
After I got home with the pigs, Miguel and Justin were moving pigs from one of our paddocks to another. This was to make room for the new pigs. Justin looked somewhat defeated and Miguel (who had the flu but was still at work) looked tired. Turns out the pigs were simply running through the wire back into the paddock as fast as those two were putting them out. I hopped out of the truck and jumped into the paddock to help move the pigs while Justin stayed on defense keeping the pigs in their new paddock. Kind of a pig goalie.
Prior to arriving at the farm, I had lamented that I’d gotten a big of “pigginess” on my pants and I needed to change. Just a small spot on my pants. After dragging about 6 pigs through the mud and I don’t want to think about what else, I was covered head to toe in a rich cake of pigginess. Sweating, dirty, stinky, and tired I went over to the house and stripped out of my clothes. I didn’t have a place to wash and I was too dirty to go any further than the door of the house. Luckily I had some clothes I’d dropped there earlier which were covered in “cowiness” which smells not nearly as bad. Plus it was dry. I slipped on those clothes and ran back out the door because Dustin and I had a class to take in Durham at 11.
We arrived in Durham, just off of Briggs Avenue at Bountiful Backyards for a mushroom growing class I’d seen advertised. I’ve been told that growing mushrooms is a no brainer if you’ll just learn how. The last time I went to a class like this it was hippie central. In fact when I told SWMBO about some of the stuff we’d had to do in this class, she laughed till she cried (I’m not the best hippie in the world)and she still laughs disturbingly when the topic comes up. So with trepidation, Dustin and I attended the class, with me trying to stay downwind of everyone because I smelled like a pig riding a cow through a rendering plant. The instructors introduced themselves and were very nice but a bit crunchy. However a few minutes in we learned that our instructors were Dr. Khalid Hameed and Dr. Rytas Vilgalys. Both professors of mycology at Duke University! Holy cow, talk about driving a nail with a sledge hammer. Needless to say we learned some things at this class and came home with some logs inoculated with mushrooms. Quite a value for the money spent.
So when we got back from the mushroom class, it was time to unload the pigs into the pig pen. I like to let them settle down in the trailer after the ride back. It’s a closed environment and the calmer they are the easier the transfer goes later. Justin, Miguel and I went to work transferring the new pigs into the pen. The jobs were:
Justin catches the pigs in the trailer. Once he has the pig secured, and all the other pigs have run to the front of the trailer, I open the door and take the pig from Justin.
I then take the pig to Miguel who opens the gate to the pig pen and puts the pig into the pen. He then closes the gate behind the new pig and we wash, rinse, repeat.
About 2/3 of the way through the load of pigs, Miguel dropped one of the pigs who only fell about 2 inches. However it was now loose! Another Flash Gordon?! Nah, this pig was more of Yogi Bear.
This is more of my speed for a pig.
We quickly worked him back to the gate and walked him in. Crisis averted!
Saturday night we had dinner with all of our friends and Ron and Katie’s house. It was a Christmas party where everyone was dressed up formal, except me. Not smelling like a pig and wearing pants was about as far as a I made it. I did smell like a lot of soap! With great food, great company, and lots of Katie’s famous punch, we chatted and laughed our way to midnight when I finally said I had to go before I passed out. I’d been up since 4am so it had been a long day. It was a great time though! Thanks Katie and Ron!
Sunday was another day of pig wrangling. We try to get 20 pigs at one time so that we have a group that can finish together 8 months later. With thirteen in hand, I needed another seven or so and I had found another nine pigs in Robbins, NC. Five were with one farmer for $50 each with anther Duroc and something cross and the final four were a Glouchester and Land Race/Duroc mix for $60 each. The population of Robbins, NC is about 1100 people so the luck of finding two farmers with pigs at the same time was just awesome. That saved me a lot of driving.
I came home to unload all the pigs in the paddock with Saturday’s lot, and to meet Miguel’s friends Jose and Irvin. Jose has let us borrow indefinitely his carnitas pot and Miguel was making a batch of carnitas when I got back.
Our new carnitas pot, full of porky goodness. That bit of orange is Miguel’s hat barely visible through the steam
Since Jose was helping us out with the pot, I let him have one of our country hams we had hanging. I can’t sell them since they aren’t inspected, but I can let a friend have one for free. No harm in that.
After taking the Mrs. to see the new bull, I came back to the house and took another of many showers for the weekend. I then put on PJs and went into the kitchen where I had a 1/4 bushel of beans, two pumpkins, a bushel of apples, and a dirty kitchen to contend with. It worked out perfectly because SWMBO already had carnitas for dinner so I was left to my own devices in the kitchen. After cleaning the kitchen, I processed all the apples and made apple sauce.
Canned home-made apple sauce
I also processed the two pumpkins and make wifely approved pumpkin pie mix, which I then vacuum sealed, labeled, and froze.
Home made pumpkin pie filling, made from our pumpkins and ready for the freezer. This is enough for 12 pies.
This is a SWMBO invention. You freeze all the pie filling then when you want pumpkin pie, you just thaw out the filling and drop it into a pie crust and bake. Nearly instant home-made pumpkin pie! Mmm, pumpkin pie.
I should mention that in all this, I actually didn’t do any farm work this weekend. Miguel and Justin both worked all day on Saturday, and Justin worked a half day on Sunday. I was the one running around doing everything else while they fed and took care of the animals. It’s a busy place on a farm.
With everything put away in the kitchen, I gave the kids each a small bowl of apple sauce and went to go sit down on the couch for a bit to watch Agent’s of Shield. I’ve missed the last few episodes since I pretty much don’t watch TV and the family was waiting on me to catch up. Three episodes later, and one whole jar of apple sauce later (small bowls were not enough), everyone was caught up. At that point, I went to lay down in the bed because I was cold. Strangely, I fell asleep almost immediately which wasn’t the plan. Another night of missed opportunity to read to the kids. Luckily SWMBO got everyone to bed.
The big award. It’s a family award so I didn’t have the farm name put on it.
I’ve mentioned here before the work we’ve done in conjunction with Wake County Soil and Water Conservation. We’ve enjoyed getting to know Dale, Teresa (and Teresa) and Matt with Wake County and NRCS. To be honest I had some trepidation the first time I did anything with them. The old “We’re from the government and we’re here to help” joke was rattling around in my head. In fact, that was actually my comment when we had our first meeting at the Keeping the Farm workshop taught that first year I attended.
However the experience has been very positive for us, and has allowed us to implement best practices that we would not otherwise have known about. The quick connect water lines we use for our mobile waterer have been fantastic. I think the grazing practices we have implemented from our own research have been a great for the folks at Soil and Water to see because we could show the before and after very clearly and first hand. After just two years on our current grazing program, Teresa Hice, our main contact with Soil and Water made arrangements for the Cattleman’s Association to have a meeting at our farm, something we were honored (and nervous) to do.
While we were hosting the Cattleman’s meeting, Teresa informed me that we had won the 2014 Conservation Farm Family Award by a unanimous vote. I didn’t know there was an award, I didn’t know we were in contention, and I didn’t know there had been a vote. I was a bit slack jawed when she told me and mumbled something about thanks. At least I hope I did. I went to the house later to tell SWMBO, who quickly rattled off about 5 questions I’d never thought to ask making me feel even dumber. Oh well, I’m just a cow herder, I can’t do everything.
This week, they had the awards ceremony and I took the entire family to the Farm Bureau building on Glenwood Avenue. I’d never been to the Farm Bureau building and had no idea it was so impressive. There were about 75 people in attendance including Elizabeth Gardner from WRAL, many local politicians, and of course our friends from Wake Soil and Water.
Elizabeth Gardner from WRAL, giving her award to a deserving group.
This was just half the room you see in the picture. It was an impressive group to get together and while we were just one of the people getting awards that night, it seemed we were the main event with our own slide show and the prime spot in the agenda. They had a lot of really wonderful things to say about us, and a slide show to accompany the speech. Wake Soil and Water graciously provided both to me so that you can see what everyone else saw.
It’s humbling and kind of embarrassing to hear someone else describe you in such glowing terms. I don’t feel that we deserve all the accolades that we received, and I feel like we have so much more learn to be half as good as they said we were but it is very uplifting to have someone from the outside say they are proud of the work you are doing. And to have this recognition in front of your family, who all think dad is crazy, was a special treat.
We spend a lot of time giving tours and helping to educate people. Receiving this award was a wonderful recognition of the time and effort spent. Of course, eating one of my pork chops or steaks for dinner is its own reward!
