Peeps

We got our chicks on Thursday - 50 Cornish X Rock, 15 Barred Rock pullets and 10 Buff Orpington pullets. Our homemade brooders are made from bales of straw and ripe hay arranged in a hexagonal pattern. We made two because the hybrid broilers grow so much faster than the purebreds. We hope to have them outside within two weeks.
Here are some gratuitous cute kid and peep pics.


For the record, I'm predicting (based on udder development) that Bunny will be our first ewe to lamb. My guess is April 10th. We'll see.

Spring Clip 2007

Today the ewes got haircuts and pedicures. I was disappointed with the quantity of wool we got. It's mostly going to the compost pile. Here are the ewes - notice they're getting as far from me as they can within the confines of the fence.

We had a sort of multicultural St. Patrick's Day dinner after finishing the shearing. Leg of Icelandic lamb (homegrown of course) and cabbage rolls and tall glasses of real milk. And in celebration of the finished job, I'm drinking a bottle of Canadian lager.

Sunny Sunday Afternoon

I spent mine productively. Jennifer and Katie went to a ballet in Akron with Katie's Brownie troop while the boys and I worked. I would have liked to post pictures but the camera as with the girls.

First, we got out our LP burner and tanks and our syrup making gear and cleaned it up. Then we put out 8 taps in maple trees on our farm. When I left for work at 11:15 this morning, the first sap was boiling merrily away.

Next, we built a cold frame in the garden. It's made out of straw bales and old windows. This morning the chickens were intent upon destroying the straw bale sides so Jennifer will have to move their fence today to keep them off of it.

I also made a good start cleaning out one of the barns. Still a long way to go there. I have plans to add a second 4-foot sliding door in the side of the sheep pen and built a series of sorting pens outside it. Also in the works is constructing a couple more mobile hoop houses fro pastured poultry - more on that later.

OEFFA Conference Highlights

Wow. I was hoping for a good OEFFA conference but it exceeded even my hopeful expectations. The keynoters on both days were excellent and I learned a lot at the workshops. One of the best things, though, was just being there with so many like-minded people. I met neighbors who are doing some really cool things and we've got some tentative plans in the works to start up a local OEFFA chapter in the Morrow-Crawford-Richland county area of Ohio. I've already decided that next year I want the whole family to go.

I'll leave you with a quote from Weston A. Price Foundation president, Sally Fallon:

Totalitarian governments have recognized that the one enemy to their system is the prosperous, independent, yeoman farmer spread out over the whole country thinking independently who doesn't need anything from his government. That's a big challenge to totalitarian governments - how to get rid of all these people. In Russia they starved them, in Ethiopia and Cambodia they shot them and in the U.S. and Europe they just pass health laws.

She went on to say that the single largest reason that America farmers have ceased to be independent and prosperous is the law requiring mandatory pasteurization of milk. She announced then that the WAPF is in the process of setting up a legal defense association modeled after the Home School Legal Defense Association. Farmers, herd-share owners and consumers will be able to join this organization and will be provided with free legal defense when the government regulators come trying to shut them down. Look for more information on that around July 4th.

One Hogget Left

All but one of our hoggets (yearling ewes) are reserved for May slaughter. If you want the last one, call or email us to reserve! The price is only $2.90 per pound on a carcass weight basis. I expect weights to be in the 60-65 pound range.

On another note, Liberty Farm has gone high tech. I'm sitting at my parents' house blogging on my new laptop connected to their broadband internet through the wireless router that I just installed for them. I'm going to get spoiled and then have to go home to my 28.8 kpbs dial-up. I'm checking almost daily for new WISPs in my area.

Update: Sold Out! One of our lambs for next October is already spoken for but I don't want to take any more orders until all the lambs are born and we see what we have. I'll post details in May. Thank you to all our customers!

Animal Age and Flavor II

(This started as an update to the previous post but I decided to make it a new one).

In thinking about this topic some more, I think that artisanal food producers (of which I hope I am one) will likely revolutionize the way some (many?) people eat. Beyond the obvious categories of "grass-fed" and "organic" are many niches that may reawaken cultural eating.

I don't have my copy in front of me but in the preface to The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes something to the effect that the food culture in America is schizophrenic. This is evidenced by things like the Atkin's Diet that have people giving up time-honored staple foods like bread and pasta.

Slow Food is definitely on to something. I hope the organization continues to grow and flourish.

Finally, in the last issue of the Stockman Grass Farmer there was a report from the grass-fed dairy conference held recently. Jonathan White of Bobolink Dairy reported that people buying his cheese are not looking for consistency - they want to taste the grass.

Animal Age and Flavor

I had a conversation recently with a customer about the ewes that we intend to slaughter in May. She pointed out to me that technically meat from sheep ceases to be called "lamb" when the animal reaches a year old and wanted to know what to expect regarding the flavor and tenderness of the meat. I had to confess that I didn't know the answer to her question. This will be the first time we've slaughtered a sheep older than 6 months. Since this is something of an experiment, I decided to discount the per pound price of the animal that this particular customer was ordering.

Well, this has piqued my interest and I decided to look into the relationship between age, flavor and sex of livestock. Here are some things I've found out regarding sheep, cattle and hogs.

Castration
Regarding castration, it is something we have never done at Liberty Farm and our 6 month old ram lambs have had no hint of "buck" flavor. Walter at Sugar Mountain Farm has blogged about his experiences eating meat from uncastrated boars. He's up to 6 months old without any effect on flavor and a friend of his has eaten them considerably older than that.

Sheep
Ewes between the age of 1 and 2 years are called hoggets. So there are three categories of sheep meat: lamb, hogget and mutton. Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall of River Cottage in the U.K. writes, "the best sheep meat I have ever eaten has come from animals over a year old." And also:

Today, mutton and hogget barely exist in the mainstream meat market – and have the reputation of needing very slow cooking. This is a grievous misunderstanding. Sheep slaughtered in their second or third year are still young animals in the prime of life. Their meat is quite superb, and can be roasted and served pink, like the best cuts of prime beef.

In fact, it is in comparison to beef that mutton may be best understood - mutton is to lamb what beef is to veal. The key, of course, is that to reach its full potential, mutton does need to be properly hung – like the best beef, for at least two weeks, ideally three...which is why you don’t find it in the supermarket!

Cattle
The Stockman Grass Farmer often has articles about finishing beef on forage alone. In a typical situation with cool-season perennial pastures, this takes 2 years. So true grass-finished beef is typically 8-10 months older than grain-finished feedlot beef. In a past issue there was an article about the French preferring older beef. In the most recent issue, the editor responded to a letter with the following:

Many French breeds are large and late maturing. This is why grassfed steers typically are four years of age and weigh nearly a ton at harvest.

Most Americans would find grilled steaks from these chewy and bland because the French do not prize marbling as we do.

Grilling is not the major way beef is cooked in France. Cooking it at low temperatures for a long time is much more common.

The majority of French beef comes from five-year-old dairy cows. There is a strong correlation between butterfat content and beef tenderness and their cheese breeds are prized for their tender beef.

The best flavored steak I have ever had came from a nine-year-old French Alps-raised dairy cow.

After reading all of this I'm really looking forward to trying the meat from a hogget this summer. If we don't sell them all I may even wait until later in the summer and let one of them get even older. Perhaps next year we'll be charging a premium for this meat from older sheep.