Drying Hay

We bought the rest of the hay that we will need for winter on Saturday. It is very nice hay, grown without chemicals, for a good price. This is the third cutting which means that it was cut when the plants were still young and tender. A lot of farmers in this area are still making second cutting which is too ripe for good nutrition and palatability.

The only problem with this hay is that it was baled a day early. Instead of baling on Friday, my preference would have been for it to have been tedded on Friday and baled on Saturday. Because it was baled early, it is pretty moist. It needs to be dried out a little bit or it will spoil (mold) inside the bales. In a worst case scenario, wet bales could heat up enough to combust. We decided not to put it ino our hay mow beacuse there's not enough ventilation up there and the bales would sit there and cook.

The top photo shows some of the hay stacked in one of our barns with a large fan blowing on it and a door open behind the stack to circulate air. It is stacked on edge and the layers of bales have been salted. Our neighbor, who helped me stack the hay, loaned us the drum fan.

The lower photo shows more hay stacked in another barn. You can see that it, too, is stacked on edge and we left spaces between the bales to permit good air flow. This barn has doors at both ends and one in the middle so there is a good flow of air whenever there is a breeze.

We'll probably leave this hay stacked in this way for about a month or so before we restack it closer together.

Farming and Climate Change

Otter Farm in the U.K. is farming with an eye to climate change. Here is a quote:

we're aiming for climate change harvests mostly new to england - including the only english orchards of almonds, pecans, sharon fruit, along with apricots, walnuts and artichokes...and now the olive grove

And another:

so much of our food comes from abroad with all its associated food miles, and while it may take government intervention to address the madness of overseas produce on our shelves when seasonal british is available, there are some foods that we dont produce - and we're simply not about to 'undiscover' tastes like olive oil

but what if climate change meant that those 'foreign' foods became viable here...might we sustainably exploit the new conditions and help contribute to arresting them in the process?

I'm intrigued by this. Mostly because I've never thought of it before. What might farming in humid temperate USDA Zone 5 look like in 20 years? 40? 60? I don't know and I suppose no one else does either. The Otter Farm folks may be onto something. The experiments they are conducting are certainly worthwhile.

Argiope aurantia

They're back. You know, there are some creatures that give me the creeps but spiders aren't one of them. These black-and-yellow Argiopes inhabit our pasture and prey on flies, mosquitoes and other pesky insects. This particular one has taken up residence right beside our main pasture gate.

In the late summer, the female lays her eggs in a sac covered with a tough, brown, papery cover. Then she dies. The baby spiders hatch in autumn and overwinter in the sac, emerging in spring. This spring I saw hundreds of these sacs in our pasture each with hundreds of baby spiders for a grand total of... lots and lots of spiders.

Here's an interesting bit of trivia: Apparently, spider web material is insulative because we have one of these Argiopes in our pasture that built its web between an electric fence wire and the ground. If the web was a conductor, I don't think the spider would have stuck around.

Industrial Organic Agriculture

Or: Why I Don't Sell Chickens

This post may ruffle some feathers (no pun intended) but that's never stopped me before so let us begin with some quotes from the August 2006 issue of The Stockman Grass Farmer, "Allan's Observations," p. 32:

Personally, I think an industrial agriculture is the natural end result considering where the industry started.

American organic agriculture has never had Nature as its model.

For the most part, all organic certification has done is to change the brand names of the inputs.

Crop farmers have no livestock. Organic livestock farmers grow no crops.

Such production segregation is totally unnatural and always results in weeds, pests, parasites and high costs.

Organic corn farmers rotate to organic soybeans just like conventional farmers and use expensive tillage to fight weeds and manure from industrial confinement feeding operations to drive their soil fertility program.

And, the same thing has happened to ruminant agriculture.
...
The current organic dairy prototype [non-seasonal, grain-supplemented, confinement] is neither fish nor fowl but a hybrid that requires the costs of both confinement and pasture.

The reason it is so popular is that is allows us to drag as much of the past with us as possible.
...
If we use Nature as a guide, we see that the incorporation of multiple years of grazed pasture is the only truly sustainable system because it can actually heal the soil and make it better than it was.

When we talk about sustainability or permanent agriculture (permaculture), we are talking about a closed system. The animals that eat the grain, hay or pasture also fertilize the fields that grow the grain, hay or pasture with their manure. When a farmer sells a feed sack full of grain, he is selling the fertility of his farm.

To get back to my sub-title, we don't sell chickens because we don't produce the food they eat. We do raise some chickens and eggs for our own use and we sell a few dozen eggs a week but we don't raise more than we do because to do so would be to buy the fertility of someone else's farm. In our case, we are net gainers because we are adding fertility to our farm at at the expense of another. We choose not to do so, however, because it does not make for a healthy, sustainable agriculture.

I'm not sure exactly how to put it together yet, but I've been thinking lately about rotating crops through our field. The recommendation in the article I quoted from is five years leguminous pasture rotated with three years of crops. We would have less overall grazing but more overall production because we would add more poultry and a few pigs to our livestock mix. The ultimate in sustainability would be to use the Fukuoka method. I'm not sure if that's ever been done in the west but it would be really cool to try.

The Bookman Cometh

I received a couple books today that I had ordered from Amazon, Natural Sheep Care by Pat Coleby and The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. The former is the updated American version of Healthy Sheep Naturally which I have written about on this blog before. The latter is a book that I have intended to buy for a long time and finally got around to it.

On the subject of herbs for livestock, we have begun adding garlic powder to the dried seaweed meal and salt that we offer our sheep free choice. Garlic is a general herb for good health, a strong immune system and fighter of internal and external parasites. We finally had to worm our lambs and two of our five ewes this week after a period of very hot and humid weather contributed to the population explosion of the dreaded barber pole worm, Haemonchus Contortus. Barber pole worms cause anemia and, in severe infections, death. It is easy to check sheep for anemia - simply pull down their lower eyelids and observe the color of the membrane there. Bright red is best (no anemia) and pure white means the sheep is near death from loss of blood. I consider it quite an accomplishment to have made it to August without having to worm and I credit the mineral supplementation, especially copper sulfate, and good pasture rotation and grazing practices. My hope is that the addition of garlic, and perhaps wormwood during hot and humid weather, along with adding cows to our pasture will enable us to eliminate worming altogether from our farm in the future.

On the subject of cows - we want some. We like beef and we also think that having cattle and sheep on the same pasture would help to combat the parasite problem since cows and sheep don't suffer from the same worms. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just going to a livestock auction and bringing home some feeder calves. Oh, it would be that simple if we didn't care about the way the calves were raised prior and didn't care about whether the genetics of the calves was appropriate to grass feeding. But we do care about those things so that brings us to two possibilities: 1) We buy cows or heifers of known genetic backgrounds and breed them, or 2) we find a source for feeder claves from a herd of cattle and a farmer that we trust.

Number 1 above is undesirable because our farm is quite small and we really don't have room for brood cows and calves and yearlings. Plus we would have to use artificial insemination because there's no possible way we could find room for a bull. Number 2 above would be fantastic but also darn near impossible. It seems that most people in this area who raise grass fed cattle are finishing them and selling them as beef rather than as feeder cattle. I don't blame them since that's where the money is but I would be willing to pay a premium over auction prices for weaned calves of known genetic background from an organic (not necessarily certified) herd raised on forage only.

More On Water

Last week, I posted about rainwater harvesting and included a photo of our cistern. I didn't describe the cistern much in that post. It is undergound right along the crawlspace foundation of our kitchen. It is perfectly round and made of bricks and mortar.

At some point in the distant past, there was an artesian well and a springhouse in the vicinity of this cistern. This is according to our 80+ year old neighbor whose grandparents built our house in 1890. She doesn't remember the exact location, just that it was on the east side of the house. The cistern is likewise on the eastern side and so I wonder if the cistern was used to store water from the spring.

A springhouse was used in the days before refrigeration. For those farmsteads blessed with a flowing spring, a springhouse was built to direct the springwater through channels or troughs built into the house. Milk, cream, butter, etc. could then be put into the water and kept at a constant 50 degrees or so.

At some point in the history of our home, one of the previous owners (who was perhaps the most shortsighted human being to ever draw breath in Morrow County, Ohio) tore down the springhouse and bulldozed the artesian well. What a treasure it would be to find that spring, dig it out and get it to flow once again!

Butchering Day

I butchered the roosters from our flock of White Rocks today. I think the pullets are glad to see them gone, the randy bastards. This was our experiment in raising heritage purebreds as opposed to hybrid broilers for a meat and layer flock. These roosters would have been 4 months old next week and they yielded less meat than the hybrids at 8 weeks. They are much hardier and healthier, however. Out of 50 birds we had one death loss and one escapee who was never heard from again. The jury's still out on what to do next year. It's going to come down to taste. I butchered 18 roosters today plus 2 more a couple weeks ago. We have 28 pullets left.

Since we don't raise meat birds for sale, we can't justify the expense of buying or building a plucker and the truth is we don't typically roast a whole bird anyway. So I use a butchering technique called "breasting" that I learned in a wild game cookbook. It's a very simple and fast way to process chickens that doesn't require the removal of feathers or guts. Here is the step-by-step process with a photo below:

1. Kill the chicken.
2. Cut off the feet. It makes for a better drumstick eating experience if you cut the skin around the joint and pull as many of the tendons as possible out of the leg, leaving them attached to the foot.
3. Cut a hole through the skin only along the breast bone.
4. Peel the skin back, completely exposing the breast, leg, and thigh meat. Be careful not to open the crop. I like to hold the bird in my hand while I do this and let the weight of it help to pull of the skin. With the feet removed, the skin can be pulled off the end of the leg inside out.
5. Cut out the breast meat. This is a lot like filleting a fish.
6. Pop out the hip joint and cut off the leg/thigh quarter.
7. Rinse the pieces of meat and cool in ice water bath.

My daughter took this photo. She's a little short to get a good perspective but this shows the exposed breast, leg, and thigh ready for cutting out.

There are some obvious pros and cons to this technique but for us the pros outwiegh the cons. It seems like there is a lot of waste but let me tell you, in the spring of 2008 this "waste" is going to the richest compost on Liberty Farm. Not having skin on the meat is a con - if one enjoys eating chicken skin. We don't. In the spring, summer and fall we eat most of our chicken barbequed and in the winter we eat it baked with some sort of sauce or gravy or pan-fried.

Rainwater Harvesting

This is a photo of the inside of a cistern we have on our property. Our household water supply comes from a hand-dug well. The water is quite hard (400+ ppm calcium) and 2-3 ppm iron plus some oxidized iron. We have a water softener to treat the well water but our barns are plumbed directly from the well. I'm not sure this water is the best thing for our animals to drink. My interest in achieving a high level of health for my sheep through proper mineral supplementation may be thrown out of balance by giving them drinking water like this. I'm also wary of using too much well water for the garden so my latest interest is in rainwater harvesting.

This cistern is approximately 1500 gallons. I pumped it out back when we were having water problems in our cellar thinking that perhaps the cistern was leaking through the foundation but that turned out not to be the case. As you can see in the photo, though, water is getting into it from somewhere because it's about half full. The water that I pumped out of it had the slight look and smell of graywater. I'm not sure if that's the result of being stagnant for so long or if there's a drain dumping into it. I need to pump it out again and do a closer inspection.

Besides the cistern, I've got four 55-gallon and six 32-gallon food-grade plastic drums that a friend gave me. I have plans to plumb these together and harvest the rainwater from the greenhouse roof and the white barn roof. If I can get some more clean containers for the right price I can also collect water from the red barn roof. The barn roofs will primarily be used to water livestock and the greenhouse roof will be used for watering the garden, along with the cistern.

That Was Then

Here are some photos of newborn lambs in May compared to what they look like today. The first is one of our unnamed ram lambs. The earlier photo was taken during his first nap immediately after his first meal. I am really impressed with the length of this ram - lots of tasty rib and loin meat. He's also got an impressive set of horns from a dam and sire with small scurs.

The second is one of our ewe lambs, Sonja. She is probably the only lamb we will keep as a breeder. Her distinctive pattern is called badgerface. We like this ewe because she has been fast growing, outpacing her twin, and because of her valuable, naturally colored fleece. These lambs are 13 weeks old, give or take a few days.