From Flesh to Meat

A couple of months ago we had the work and pleasure of butchering two pigs here on our farm. The work part of butchering may be evident; the emotional and physical reality of taking two living breathing 200 pound pigs and doing all of the killing, cleaning, cutting and wrapping. The pleasure aspect (especially for those who have not harvested their own meat) may seem a bit harder to comprehend.

When I really allow myself to ponder why I love farming it is as simple (and as complicated) as being part of daily transformation. Every season, every day, every moment a farm is really about the transformational exchange of energy that is happening between the farmer, the weather, the land, the plants, the animals, etc. When we harvested our pigs I took great pleasure in knowing that my hand had been part of the process from start to finish. I had cared for these pigs and their flesh would become delicious and nutrient dense food for the people in our community. Our pigs would not be taken to a warehouse to be handled by unfamiliar hands, to end their lives in an unfamiliar place. Instead their death and our participation in it would become a beautiful celebration of what it means to eat close to home.

And we truly did celebrate. Each person that had bought a share of meat from us was invited to come to the farm to participate in the butchering process. Each person could experience where their meat was coming from and how a carcass becomes all of the familiar cuts that we see in the butcher case. This also allowed us to share the work, which is extensive when you're talking about almost 300 pounds of meat. So much of what happens on the farm is solitary and seems sometimes to happen in isolation from the end product. Our customers are not with us when we sow, weed and harvest but I think that farming is much more enjoyable when there is an element of community that is allowed to enter into the equation. When a hard day's work is shared by many hands and hopefully ends in a delicious meal.

What we eat is more than the nutritional or caloric content of our food. When we are allowed to experience our food by fully participating in its procurement I believe that this nurtures us in a way that is more deeply satisfying than anything that can be bought on a shelf.

Many thanks to Kelly Shelton for his sharp knives and butchering expertise, Brandon from Farmstead Meatsmith for sharing his knowledge about farm-scale butchery, and all the folks who came out to participate in our first on farm pig harvest.

First Frost

We had out first hard frost two nights ago, it got down into the 20s. This resulted in me waking up to a beautiful, white crunchy landscape and the official end of our greenhouse peppers. The brassicas that remain in our garden were covered in ice crystals and all of our water spigots were dripped over night creating crazy icicle patterns on the grass.

All of our animals made it through okay although we'll be putting up heat lamps to make sure everyone is snug and comfortable over the winter. Our pigs are growing every day and we are getting ready to schedule our first butcher date. John and I are excited to butcher the pig marked for our own freezer and to get a chance to do some home meat curing and sausage making now that we finally have a place to call home.

The summer went by in such a wild blur of milking, cheese making, sowing, growing and harvesting. I don't think I could have asked for or expected a better first season on our new piece of land.

Thanks to the lovely folks at Fiddlehead Farm we were able to get our cover crop planted and tilled in before the rains came. They lent us their 12 hp BCS walk-behind tiller allowing us to do a bit of tilling every day without having to pay huge rental fees. An acre doesn't seem like much but when you don't own a tractor working up the soil can be a large time investment.

The cover crop is starting to come up. It looks fairly even and so far doesn't seem effected by the frost. Because of my indecision on the matter we ended up going with a five seed mix from Naomi's Farm Supply. The mix contains vetch, bell beans, crimson clover, austrian field peas and triticale. I've never worked with triticale or crimson clover as over-wintering cover crops and hope to do more research on the matter this winter so I'm not so flustered by the myriad of options when cover crop planting time sneaks up again next year. I planted crimson clover this summer but wasn't very happy with how slow it grew. We have too many weed seeds in our soil at present to work with such a slow growing cover crop. It was interesting to see the difference between the beds that received a buckwheat cover and the crimson clover beds. The buckwheat beds were almost weed free whereas the clover beds were rife with amaranth. I also put the goats out on the cover crop right as the buckwheat was beginning to set seed and they munched it down to stubble!

I am also excited to announce that we are starting to sign up members for our 2014 CSA program. There are many delicious extras you can add on to your  basic produce share with delivery available in SE and NE Portland or pickup on our farm. Follow this link to see what we're offering in 2014.

When words fail me....

Well friends it has been quiet a while since my last post, and I have good news........ we are living on the farm! That's right for the past 2 months we have been living and working on our own piece of land aka Flying Coyote Farm. Since moving my days have basically had the same routine: eat, work, yoga, sleep. Or work, work, work, sleep.  And it's been amazing. New animals, renovating fencing to create a pasture and garden, lots of cleaning and just settling in and nesting hard. It's funny to think that I moved from a 120 square foot cabin into a 2500 square foot house. Suffice to say our house is very empty or minimalistic depending on how you look at it. There are so many things that I would like to post about but I think today I'll let the pictures do the talking. Oh and before I go we now have raw goat's milk from our two new La Mancha Does, Yarrow and Juniper, it is delicious and I am drinking almost a quart on my own a day...no I'm not joking!

Next comes the many iterations of a greenhouse!

Where I spend my mornings and evenings.

The Waiting Game...

It has been about a week since we had our first inspection on the house and what a tense waiting game it's been. I don't know if you've ever had an inspection done but the inspector is like a house detective/doctor, trying to find anything and everything that might be wrong with the house. It was a very intense process and after four hours I wasn't quite sure if the house had 'passed' or 'failed.' There were plumbing issues (think black irrigation pipe used for residential plumbing), drainage issues (moisture in the crawl space), electrical issues (no grounded outlets), and cosmetic issues (weird sinks, outdated windows). But the inspector, even after identifying all these problems, said that for a 1950s farmhouse he thought the place was in great shape! Whew! What a relief! I hate to admit it but I'm already in love with the place and have spent a ridiculous amount of time fantasizing about 'my new home'. Even though the house was deemed in great shape we decided to get some estimates for the work that needed to be done. This meant hours spent on the phone calling drainage contractors, chimney contractors and plumbers, scheduling estimates and biting my fingernails hoping that we're not looking at thousands of dollars in repairs.

On a more positive note I've also been spending a huge amount of time thinking/dreaming and alternately trying to not think about spring and this property and all the things I want to do...(think goat, bees, huge garden, chickens, ducks, guinea hogs, etc). In fact (and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this) I've already placed my seed orders and put down payments on two goats! Yes that's right I finally dusted off the old seed catalogs, updated my current inventory and placed my orders, all while eating ice cream and drinking tea (Ayurveda philosophy would not approve of this dietary choice but hey I love them both!) I decided to buy as much as I could from four local seed companies: Wild Garden Seeds, Uprising Seeds, Siskiyou Seeds and Adaptive Seeds. Smaller seed companies don't always have the most uniform germination, and/or genetics and their varieties are often more suited to gardens opposed to production farms. For this reason some people tend to shy away from them but I also know that all these companies are run by small diversified organic farmers (just like me!) so hopefully they're selecting for traits that will be strengths in my growing situation.

When planning this years market garden its a relief to know that John and I have a great community of friends in Portland who already buy our eggs and meat and many of them have verbally committed to being part of a CSA next season. Our CSA would offer veggies, pasture raised protein, eggs, and raw goats milk. As I mentioned above I put down payments on two goats (I know it probably seems a bit premature but if you want a good goat you've got to act fast). The first doe is named Perilla and she's an Alpine bred to a Boer buck so her kids (that's right baby goats are called kids!) will be great for meat. She's coming from Greene Herb Dairy outside of Eugene and is due to kid March 14th! The other doe is a La Mancha from Alder Rose Farm, in Corvallis who will have already kidded. Two does = lots of milk = lots of cheese!

I attended the North West Oregon Dairy Goat Association Conference yesterday and took a class from the owner of Greene Herb Dairy all about kidding. The class was a bit intimidating. I've never had a pregnant Doe before, so this is all new to me and there are many different perspectives about the best way to kid. I want to be raising my goats without antibiotics, or synthetic medications (I don't use these things so why should my goats?) Goats are very receptive to herbal/natural remedies but when you're new to something it can definitely be tempting to go the route that most people in show goat/dairy production use (which is vaccinating kids the day they're born and bottle raising them.) I don't want to vaccinate and I want the kids to be on their mom for the first two months so that they will have healthy little rumens and strong immune systems. Breast-feeding in humans is so important for immunity and bonding so it's hard for me to imagine denying my goats this oh-so-natural process. It was also recommended in the workshop that I begin milking the day Perilla kids. This is because she's so productive (over a gallon a day)  and there will be way more milk then her kids can drink. I'm not sure how milking twice daily starting March 14th fits into my early morning/late evening Yoga Teacher Training Schedule? I guess I'll finally have to teach John how to milk (ed. note: John claims to know how to milk, just not very confidently)!

I also attended an amazing workshop on aromatherapy and goats taught by Katherine Drovdahl, of Fir Meadows Farm. Her approach is so in line with my thinking around husbandry practices. I bought her book and can't wait to start developing recipes of my own. It seems like you can pretty much replace any 'conventional' drug or supplement with herbs, you can even feed most of these products to your pigs and chickens and even your cats and dogs. Some of the tips I picked up from her workshop were her top three Essential Oils for Goats: Lavender, Eucalyptus and Lemon. For many applications you are not using orally but dermally diluted in olive oil (1 drop per 20lbs) rubbed right on the skin or as a spritz. She also had a lot of great advice about nutrition in her book. Specifically I'm interested in the use of kelp, flax, nettle and nutritional yeast as supplements. I grow a lot of flax and will be planting nettle, anything that can be grown on the farm is always something I'm interested in trying! Another great resource for those new to (and even experienced in) goat husbandry is Fiasco Farms. This website is a treasure trove of information and even includes recipes for cheese making. There's also a ton of info on the use of herbal based supplements and dewormers. Well as you can see I've been a busy little bee these past few weeks! Hopefully the next post will be written from our new home....

'til next time, LT

so much excitement it hurts

Well friends the moment has come..... we have made an offer on a property!! I know, we can't believe it either. So here's the story. Last week I noticed a listing on the craigslist real estate section that advertised an 'Adorable 3-acre farm in Sandy, OR. I clicked on the link, saw that the property was close to town (1.7 miles to be exact), that it had a sweet little red barn, a 48' greenhouse, a detached shop and a large garden. "Hmmmm," I thought, "very interesting". I google mapped the address and what I saw was even more intriguing. So I called the owners and scheduled a viewing for the coming weekend. All week John and I went back and forth about whether or not it was even worth it to go out and look. The property is a forty-five minute drive from Portland and we were feeling a bit disheartened about the last couple of places we had seen (when some people say farm what they really mean is field of blackberries, or 5 acres of trees in a gulch.) The property was also smaller than what we have been looking for and a bit out of our price range. We didn't want to be move to the country only to be surrounded on all sides by neighbors with no sense of serenity and privacy. But despite our misgivings we went out to meet the owners Kristi and Jason and their six kids (and no, that is not a misprint.)

When we showed up to the house I think John and I both started to get pretty excited. Their dairy goat was wandering around the backyard like a true domesticated pet, and the chickens were right at home on the back porch searching for bugs in the wood pile. The barn was even more adorable (and functional) looking in person with a hay loft and milk stanchion, with plenty of room for a couple of goats. The three acres gently sloped down to the west behind the house and had great sun exposure. Their was only one neighbor whose house immediately bordered the property and the folks to the south had a little pond right across the fence line, adding to the lovely view off of the large back porch. The house was totally livable and charming, unlike some of the manufactured homes that we had run across. In fact manufactured homes were such a huge part of our house hunting reality that I had somewhat resigned myself that I would be forced to live in a plastic box to realize my dream of country living.

So we left feeling pretty elated, drunk on possibility. Next came the volley of emails back and forth about the price and the process etc. Then today after a couple sleepless nights I spent about two and half hours on the phone going over logistics with my mortgage broker, calling my parents for support and finally getting the go ahead from John. The mortgage broker explained to me that my first step was to make an offer, then if the offer is accepted we will sign a purchase agreement stipulating the various aspects of the purchase (inspections, appraisals, well tests, is the riding lawn mower staying with the property etc.) Next we will put money into an escrow account which is basically a show of good faith, like 'Hey we're so serious about buying your home we're willing to put some money on it.' Apparently the word escrow comes from a French word escroue, which means a scrap of paper (the deed) that a third party would hold until a real estate transaction was completed. Glad to know that we are participating in what are ancient customs of private property transferal (note a hint of sarcasm.) Next we will begin the inspection and appraisal process. Does your head hurt? Because mine does! Whew.

Mostly I'm excited. I've been pretty sad about spring, weird, I know. But I'm a gardener and spring without late night tea and seed catalogs (also know as seed porn) is just down right depressing. In fact my Fedco catalog which has always been a favorite late night read has been sitting unopened on the bed stand because I just can't bare the thought of all those varieties and no where for me to plant them. We will keep you updated as things progress...wish us luck!

We used to be a farm without a blog, now we're a blog without a farm...

This is my first attempt at blogging, something that I've always considered was for people who were far more outgoing then I. That being said I hope this blog allows people to connect to our farm (dream) and causes a bit of inspiration for other people who are self proclaimed garden geeks.

So to explain a bit more about our farm (dream). I have been gardening and/or farming in some form or fashion since I was about 16 (and I'm turning 28 in a month, so you do the math!) The first time I lived on a farm in southern Oregon I new that I had found it...the thing that I was meant to do. From that moment on I've spent the better part of the last eight years trying to gain the skills, confidence and gumption to start my own farm business. Now at 27 I am finally at a place where it might happen. It is from this wish, this little seed of a dream that Flying Coyote was born. My hope is to build a farm that raises pasture raised meat (rabbits, goats and poultry), and specialty vegetables coupled with a bunch of projects to satisfy my inner garden geek (think bees, small orchard, IMOs, compost tea etc.) There's pretty much no aspect of small scale farming that doesn't interest me which is why the thought of land and business ownership has always seemed so daunting!

Last year my partner John and I raised honey bees, milk goats (Nubians), meat goats (Boers), laying hens, meat birds (Freedom Rangers), Pigs (Hampshire X) and a market garden. This experiment in diversity made me realize many things about myself as a farmer. Foremost was my love of working with animals, a carrot will never ask you for a scratch or nuzzle your thigh when you give it some fresh water. As much as I love growing veggies the opportunity to try something different was very personally satisfying, and also very challenging. I'm comfortable with vegetables, they don't require shots and vet visits, nor can they be dangerous if mishandled. There is also so much about animal husbandry that compliments and enhances annual production systems (think of all that fertile poop!) And after 11 years of vegetarianism and many years of trying to figure out how to be an ethical meat eater, there is nothing more satisfying to me then knowing the meat I eat. It was from these musings that a farm business idea actually began to take shape. I am planning on participating in the Growing Farmers:Successful Whole Farm Management course through OSU this spring, so hopefully that will continue to solidify the business plan taking it from possible dream land to possible reality. In the mean time I am taking a 200 hour yoga teacher training course through the Bhaktishop in SE Portland, and spending my free time voyueristically searching the craigslist real estate pages and meeting with realtors, tax accountants, mortgage brokers and land owners...

'til next time, LT