Adventures in Pork

Hello friends, this is ShaeLynn.  I can’t help sharing my excitement about our newly arrived pork!  The pigs in our pilot program turned out BEAUTIFULLY!  Our free-range, part wild, forest-raised, whey-fed, and acorn-finished pigs were quite the attraction at the slaughterhouse.  We received a number of compliments from all the people who handled the meat on how gorgeous (and unique!) the marbling and overall fat composition was in these pigs.  Kevin was so proud, we’ve been joking that our Son will have to hit a lot of homeruns to top that!

 Quick Disclaimer:  I am writing a food blog post, and I promise this will remain a farm blog.  I’m just so excited I can’t help it!

We just received our half pig back from Freedom Meat Locker, where they cut and wrapped it for us.  Next time we hope to embark on that particular adventure of butchering the pig ourselves, but this time around it seemed easier to take advantage of the simplicity of having someone else do the butchering.   That said, I am pursuing two pork processing endeavors that are making the house smell great:  Sausage making and rendering lard.

The sausage is pretty simple.  I asked them to grind about 30 pounds of the pork, including the pork belly (from which you would usually get bacon).  This means that the fat content on the ground pork is a little higher, which makes it better for sausage.  If I had a meat grinder at my disposal I could have ground even more fat into it, but the above-average fat in the ground pork seems to be working fine.

I used a mortar and pestle my mom got me for Christmas last year (and I even ground up some parsley she grew in her garden!), to grind some of the whole herbs, and used powdered for the rest.  The spice mixtures themselves turned out awfully pretty, especially the Hot Italian mixture (pictured here--I also made a breakfast sausage).  We couldn’t resist tasting it as soon as I’d finished, so I put some into a pasta sauce which we ate at dinner.  It was really great!  Here it is cooking… yum!



The lard has been a longer, slower process (as it should be!).  I’ve learned so much about lard in the past few days while figuring out how to make it.   Lard gets a bad reputation both because of its high saturated fat content and because most of it comes from confinement pigs.  I won’t lay out my arguments about saturated fat, but suffice it to say I’ll take saturated over the trans fats of hydrogenated vegetable oil any day!  And, of course, our pigs were not raised in confinement, and were treated to really high quality feed inputs (notably the whey and the acorns which no doubt contributed mightily to the pig’s fat).

 I also learned that there are two types of lard:  For frying (lard is really stable at high heat, making it ideal for frying) it’s best to use lard from the fat back or pork belly (if you didn’t grind your pork belly or make bacon).  This is because little pieces of skin and meat cling to the fat and no matter how slowly you cook it the lard will take on a bit of a pork-y flavor and a little browner color.  If you’re making frybread (it’s high on my list of things to make with lard), this is no big deal—in fact most fried foods benefit from the added flavor in their cooking medium.  However, if you want to use lard in cookies or a pie crust, you probably don’t want pork flavor there (“Pig” Newtons aside…).  For these types of recipes it’s best to use leaf lard, which is the fat attached to the kidneys.  Since it doesn’t have any meat or skin attached, it melts down snow white and odorless, so long as you melt it slowly.  I started with the fatback because it seemed a little more forgiving for the first-timer!

Here is the fat back as it came packaged.  I chopped it into little bits to help it melt evenly.  I found it really interesting to see the different layers of fat in each piece.

Then it was into the crock pot, to which I added ½ cup water so it would cook too quickly at first.  Here it is full of pieces.  I ladled the liquid lard into a canning jar as it melted and here it is 24 hours later.  And then here are my jars (I already started using the one on the left to make biscuits to go with homemade sausage gravy for breakfast!).

With any luck this will not be the last of my adventures in pork, but I'm thrilled with the start!

P.S.  Thanks for not making fun of my complete lack of photography skills!

A Time For Turkeys

Hello Everyone!

It’s a very special time on the farm.  The weather is getting cold and wet and chores, along with the available daylight hour, are getting much sparser.

The best part of this change, though, is that the turkeys are ready!  After 16 weeks of loyal service, wonderful grazing, and spectacular fertilization the turkeys are all grown up now and ready to be processed.   This year we raised 200 turkeys (instead of 75) and we couldn’t be happier.  It’s been a lot of work, but after all the compliments last year we really wanted to be able to provide as many neighbors as possible with these truly special birds.

The biggest change has been that these guys are now being kept in our largest enclosure yet!  Turkeys are such wonderful grazers (thus their spectacular flavor) that we decided to give them a full quarter acre every other day of completely fresh grass (that’s grass that no poultry has grazed in at least a year), and boy did they use it.  There is a particularly magical moment when they first enter fresh grass.  In just a matter of seconds all 200 turkeys begin running around picking through their favorite forages or chasing grasshoppers—it’s a consistently impressive sight that we use almost always use for tours.  Anyone that’s seen it instantly understands how important rapidly rotated fresh pasture is for turkeys.

The only downside is that once again these turkeys are far too healthy.  Even though we limited their access to grain and slaughtered them two weeks earlier than last year, these guys thrived on the fertile fields around our farm and ended up being about 3 pounds larger on average than we expected.  All in all, though, the quality of these birds is off the charts and we don’t mind slightly larger birds if they continue to taste (as one customer said) “like the meat has its own gravy!”

Happy Thanksgiving!

New Projects and Progeny

I suppose now we’ve sunk into a monthly rhythm when it comes to blogging.  I’d still prefer a weekly post, but our energy levels and access the internet have not really been conducive to such an ambition.

"I'm on the paleolithic diet.  My yoga teacher just loves it and it's
great for the hams..."

One thing that has really kept us busy is the addition of 6 adorable pigs to the farm.  As a pilot program we purchased 6 weaned pigs in the end of July as a special anniversary gift to ourselves.  The pigs are being rapidly rotated through forest paddocks where they get to graze through the forest and scrub brush.   We’ve also been giving them vegetables from the organic growers at Bluehouse Farm and whey from Harley Farm.  These guys are so pampered and with such a raw/organic/high protein diet, I’d say they are truly Californian pigs!

We also got the turkeys on pasture this month. They are, of course, loving life and eating everything green in site.  We are raising 200 turkeys this year and it’s a big step up from the 70 we did last year.  The group mentality is quite powerful and we have to be careful not to place anything tempting by the fence or else a wave of turkeys will push its way through.  They are still quite small, but already we’ve had to give them a 300’ perimeter net and we are planning to expand that to a full quarter acre (450’ perimeter) in just a few days.  We are trying to drum up the demand to raise turkeys year-round, they are so great to have on the farm.

Lastly, ShaeLynn and I have the absolute pleasure to announce that we are going to be having our first child in April!  We are psyched, especially because we now know that in about 10 years we’ll be able to have another day off when the child is old enough to do all the chores!   One point that may be hard to explain in twenty years, though, is why I talked about pigs and turkeys first in this post.  I suppose once the child understands that his or her college fund was made possible by those animals, I think they’ll come around.  Frankly I’m just so excited and it’s been terribly hard to keep a lid on the news until Shae felt it was a good time to let everyone know.  I realize that there will be some people who I have been unable to get a hold of to tell them the good news over the phone (especially those now residing in Spain…hint!), but hopefully this will spur them to call me instead.

See you all in October!

Anniversaries and Infomercials

August is off to a wonderful start.  We started this month by celebrating our 1-year wedding anniversary.  The day was wonderful!  I planned a surprise night away from the farm for us (a true luxury when we have 4 hours of chores every day and two very insistent milking goats), but kept it a total surprise from Shae for weeks.  Day after day I had to play the role of the apathetic husband telling her that we shouldn't do anything too big because there was too much work to be done.   With help from John from Santa Cruz and two of our friends, I was able to arrange a patchwork team that kept the farm running smoothly without us for 24 hours.

The anniversary was such a blast. We spent the day in town and even saw a movie.  However, the best part of the whole day was (of course) our time at Flea Street Café and with its owner, Jesse Cool.  Dinner at Flea Street Café was a truly special treat, but the blog-worthy bit came after.  We ended our night by staying in Jesse’s amazing guest house.  Nestled right in her magnificent  garden, the cottage is a dream and we savored every moment.  In the morning, Jesse, a world-class cook, knocked lightly our door and surprised us with a spectacular breakfast (much of it taken from her garden).  The whole experience left Shae and I feeling happy to be in love and quite privileged to have such an amazing network of friends.

In farm news, we have a brand new baby girl on the farm.  Our goat, Poppy, surprised me two weeks ago by giving birth to a happy and healthy romping machine named Pansy.  It was amazing to see how good of a mother Poppy was/is.  We had heard that her first birth (Tuxedo) had been quite a mess, so it was an incredible relief to see that she did everything on her own with this new baby.  The coolest thing was that she timed the birth (goats can actually choose to some degree) to be on the 1 warm day in a 10 day cold/wet period, and even waited until we had moved the herd onto fresh grass.  Pansy is such a love.  She cuddles with her brother, Tuxedo, at every opportunity and actually snuggles up against you when you pick her up.  I'm sure we'll have more pictures of her very soon.

From the business side of the farm we are in a strange good new/bad news situation.  Our feed prices suddenly jumped 30% and we’ve been seeing reduced demand now that we have a continuous supply of chickens every week, instead of an event-style once or twice every other month.  It's a crappy situation to be in, but we are looking into some extra restaurant customers and we've been learning a lot about marketing.  The lower demand is a really interesting phenomenon and it’s making me think that we need a more frantic sounding infomercial-style advertising campaign.  Call now!  These limited edition summer broilers are going fast and we cannot guarantee you'll ever see a product like this at such an affordable price again!  Supplies are limited!

On the good side of things, the chickens are stunning right now.  The new farm has so much life in the soil and the chickens always seem to be chasing a grass hopper or chowing down on some beautiful grass.  In a pretty surprising turn, ALL of chickens we slaughtered this week had that beautiful vitamin-rich yellow fat (the yellow is from the beta carotene), and just looked and tasted spectacular.

Also, turkeys have finally arrived on the farm!

It’s been so quiet and uneventful since last thanksgiving without the jolly gobbling and suicidal antics of dozens of 20 pound turkeys.  This year we are doing a mix of broad-breasted bronze and whites (what we had last year).  This mix of breeds and more timely slaughter will let us hit our 12-18 pound average for the turkeys and avoid the awkward, but delicious, obstacle of our smallest bird on a given pick-up day being 19 pounds.

Place your pre-orders soon, though, these guys actually are being pre-ordered fast and supplies are in fact limited...

Up and Running

Well we are on the new farm (more on this very soon), and things are great.  All of the animals are thriving.

The rabbits are multiplying, as can be expected, and we are really impressed by how their pasture homes are working.  We are observing some pretty considerable feed savings, in some cases upwards of 50%!  We are expecting 5 moms to give birth to bunnies during the week between my birthday and the 21st.  What a gift!

The goats and hens have taken to the move as if nothing happened.  The only noticeable change was that for the first few days Essie and Marigold spent their days bleating at all the new people they saw, but after everyone got properly introduced things quieted down.

We are trying a new rotation with the animals.  First, the hens are now following the rabbits.  This is a great combination because the hens LOVE to pick through the rabbit dropping.  Chickens being omnivores don't have the digestive hardware to tackle eating grass only, so they relish the chance to eat pre-digested alfalfa and grass the rabbits leave behind.  We are also doing a tighter rotation now with the goats.  We have scaled down their enclosure, but decided to move them more often.  This leads to a more even and complete graze, which will ultimately encourage some great re-growth.  Our organically-fed slow growth broilers are then put in the same net as the goats (right after they move onto new pasture) to clean up any bugs or small weeds.  It's great to see!

Speaking of the slow growth broilers, we just put them out to pasture 2 days ago and I can't articulate how excited I am.  They are grazing non-stop and have so uninterested in their feeders.  These guys are chasing bugs all day (something that speaks to the fertility of the new pastures we are on!).  Simply put they will be amazing.



So that's about it.  We are planning to get some pictures and videos up of the new farm pretty soon.  It's all going wonderfully, but we are obviously quite busy getting everything back up to production speed.

The Littlest Grazers

We’ve made a real effort to cram as much as possible into the past week or so.  In fact, in order to find the time to update the blog, Kevin has promised to work twice as fast while I (ShaeLynn) write.   We’re moving (more on that in the next post!), we had my family out for a visit, we’re selling the last of our chickens, we’re building another brooder—and we decided to pick this time to expand our rabbit enterprise.  Our supplier of breeding stock is a gentleman from Basque country in Spain who raises hormone and anti-biotic free rabbits in his backyard hutches.  If the significance of this find hasn’t hit you let, I should mention that in the early years of Joel Salatin’s rabbit operation, they lost a lot of their bunnies because the rabbits weren't accustomed to life free from a daily regimen of anti-biotics.  It took them years to get a heartier, and select for rabbits with a consistently solid immune system.  So we really hit the jackpot since we got to skip all that.

The main project that goes along with new rabbits though, is rabbit housing!  After they reach sexual maturity, rabbits can’t be housed together because they become very territorial and will actually kill each other.  So each adult needs its own house.  Plus, rabbits are prone to digging if left to their own devices, so open floors are challenging (though not impossible!).  We wanted the rabbits to have access to pasture during the day, but be securely closed up (including a slatted floor to prevent digging) at night—and voila!  The Bunny Scoot.

Obviously, the chickens are also quite fond of them.  During the day, the rabbits have access to both sides.  The enclosed end gives them a shady “hole” to hide in when they want, and it has a slatted floor so their waste doesn’t accumulate  This is doubly helpful because chickens LOVE the rabbit's droppings because they are just pre-digested plant matter.  The open end gives the rabbits plenty of grass to eat during the day, plus lots of fresh air and sunshine if they want it.  At night, we take the roof off the open part of the Bunny Scoot, and use it to gently push them into the enclosed area and shut them in.  That way they spend the night protected from predators, and unable to dig out.

We’re still tweaking the design a little bit, but the idea is that they will go out on the pasture near the broiler shelters, and get moved onto fresh grass each morning.

Our rabbit operation is also expanding because our babies are growing up.  Here they are enjoying their Bunny Scoot.  They are growing so fast!  We have more bunnies due next month, it's really exciting.

Last Batch for a Bit

So right away I think I should update you all and say we still haven't found the missing buck. It's not certain he's dead, but my theory that life on the outside would send him running back to us has been undermined by late rains. The farm is currently surrounded with a near-endless supply of lush succulent rabbit food, so we are getting ready to replace him. His children, though, are beautiful and healthy. In fact, it's really neat that they are doing so well because I realized today they are the first animals we've had born on our farm! We've been very lucky too because the mom they were born to has been incredibly nurturing. They are even starting to learn to eat the weeds I bring her, which is a great indicator that they will enjoy a life on pasture.

The bravest and most dapper man in town.

Our bee adventure has been progressing well too. The hives are really starting to establish themselves and it's great to see them all tending the the clover in the field and the roses by our window. I've been doing all the reading I can on beekeeping, and I even got a surprise shipment of bee books from my mom! The more I learn I about these guys, the more I realize that we do not "own" them or "raise them," we are simply enticing them to stay and work with us. It's a pretty cool relationship.

Last Friday we hosted a chicken slaughter seminar as part of Pie Ranch's educational partnership with Pescadero High School. It was a blast for Shae and I and we got to meet a lot of our teenage neighbors. All of the students were genuinely interested and caring. In addition to our talk about our farming methods and thorough exploration of chicken organs with Shae, a few of them chose to jump right in and learn in a hands-on manner where their food comes from. After the slaughter, the kids made an amazing chicken lunch with some freshly gathered Pie Ranch greens and brick oven-baked flatbreads. We were paid for our time, but as you can probably tell, it was hardly a chore!

The slightly sad news is we are coming up on our last bunch of chickens for a while. We've held off on buying new chicks until we settle onto a new farm, so we are quickly running out of broilers. It's a bit of a shame because the grasses right now are incredible, and the chickens are being pampered by all the choices they get (something that is clearly showing up in the meat!). Here’s a picture of Bowtie and Tux trying their best to graze the grass down so the chickens aren't too overwhelmed. We have one more fresh pickup day planned and then after that a couple of weekend buying club drops. I'm hoping we can get on the ground soon so there's no perceivable gap in supply.

Well, I can smell the pizza Shae is baking for dinner and it's getting hard to concentrate. Marigold is producing milk faster than we can consume it, so Shae made mozzarella and ricotta for our pizza from all the extra. There's even some chicken liver on the pizza, which I know sounds strange, but when it's seasoned and slightly browned, there's nothing quite as good.

Take care!

May Flowers

 It’s been a silly few months, but it looks like things are slowly coming back to normal.  Through all the chaos of relocating, it's been great to have all our friends and family come and visit, especially Shae's mom and dad who helped us take apart the brooders and go on an all-day cleaning/packing rampage respectively to get ready for our move.

We are thrilled to report that the search for a new farm may finally be coming to an end.  Without counting my chickens before they hatch (something we do all the time in this business), it looks like we are going to be able to team up with a local grass-fed beef producer and graze the chickens behind their herd of cattle.  It’s a wonderful fit that will benefit not just both business, but the land and animals as well.  Expect me to make a big deal once it finalizes!

The farm has plugging along too.  We had our first bunny birth last week and so visitors and friends have had plenty to swoon over.  The rabbits are all doing really well in their “bunny porches,” but there are still some kinks in the design to work out.  While we’ve cut feed consumption dramatically just by letting them have continuous access to weeds and grasses, we did have an escape yesterday.  Our one and only buck decided that a pampered life with two lovely girlfriends and regular feedings wasn’t the right fit for him and he slipped out during the night.  We are holding out hope that once he gets a taste of the real world, he’ll come right home.

We also just added two bee hives to the farm to help bolster the pasture’s health…and hopefully produce some great honey.  The project really excites me, but at the same time it’s probably worth noting I have a mild phobia of bees.  It’s been a fun mix of emotions to check on the hives and beam with delight as I see how well they are doing and then spend the next 20 minutes after I’ve walked away being sure that I feel something crawling on the inside of my shirt.

 Another addition to the farm has been our new experiment with buying club drops as a supplement to on-farm sales.  Our truly amazing friend and patron-saint, Jesse Cool of Flea Street Café, invited us to deliver pre-purchased frozen chickens to customers in her restaurant’s parking lot in Menlo Park.  In less than 24 hours after sending out the notice, we sold out of everything in our freezer and filled up a second drop day as well.  It was a great way of helping customers get access to good food and we really enjoyed ourselves.  All of the customers were genuinely excited about the chickens and even gave us some spectacular recipes to try.  We are doing all we can to work out the details so we can make the drop a more regular part of our week.

So that’s basically it.  We have a lot on our plate, but that’s the reality of the lifestyle I suppose.  We’ll keep you all in the loop as things progress!

Spring is In the Air

It’s been gorgeous on the farm and the animals are really starting to change.  We now have our meat chickens out on the pasture, and they are loving these cool-season grasses.  The new slower-growing chickens we are trying are not living up to our expectations.  They are growing steadily and we can’t stop them!  We’ve tried restricting feed, but they are grazing machines and are getting so much nutrition from the pasture (and will taste so good) that we just have to accept that they will be a bit larger than we expected.

 

The new rabbits are thriving too.  We are experimenting with a new type of mobile pasture house for them, and they are working great.  Rabbits are tough because they are solitary animals that love to dig, which makes them downright hard to rotate on pasture.  However, our new “Bunny Porches” give the access to fresh greens, and simulate a dark safe space so they aren’t tempted to dig out.  So far they are working without problems.  We are also getting ready for them to live up to their species’ reputation for rampant breeding, although they’ve had a slow start. Today was actually the first successful and confirmable breeding, so look forward to some adorable Easter Bunny photos coming soon.

Shae, Iris, and I have also made sure not to lose track of how important leisure and rest are.  In addition to a wonderful picnic lunch we treated ourselves to, it’s not uncommon to find any of sneaking a nap in when we can.

Last, our first processing day of the year is April 16, and we are already sold out.  We are experimenting with weekly slaughters, so it’s not that great of an achievement, but we take what we can get!

Visitors

We absolutely love having visitors come out to the farm, but I admit I’ve been a bit foolish and never asked a single one to write on the blog.  Well, all that has been solved!  My dear friend Tony came for a visit a few days back and helped us do just about everything, including celebrating ShaeLynn’s birthday.  His schedule is pretty crazy right now as he is traveling the country, but with enough pleading ShaeLynn and I got him to send us his blog post that he typed up on his iPhone…


Dear family, friends and customers of Early Bird Ranch, this is Tony, a long time friend of Kevin's, writing to all of you after spending nearly a week farming with both Kevin and ShaeLynn. I am not a farmer but have a passion for cooking, nutrition, and physical health. My passions are a byproduct of having spent most of my adult life pursuing a career in professional soccer and dealing with two major surgeries. Currently, I'm traveling North America by sharing rides I find with people over craigslist and hitchhiking, spending, no more than 2 or 3 days in each location. However, when I arrived at Early Bird Ranch I knew this place was special and I had to stay longer.

I've known Kevin for nearly 16 years, and I never would have thought he’d become a farmer. However, I believe it's this very fact that makes both Kevin and ShaeLynn the amazing farmers that they are. They approach each day like a child ready and eager for all the new experiences that lie ahead. However, unlike the cliché farmer, they possess the wisdom and long-term perspective to care for their land and animals in ways that go beyond simple considerations of the balance book.

Fresh goat cheese!

One of the best parts of the trip was sharing the bounty of the farm! I may have been a farmer for the week but I ate like royalty. Having a chance to eat their premier birds was an experience, as was cooking with them. We even made our own fresh goat cheese for lasagna.  Having grown up with great Spanish cooks in my family in conjunction to my own culinary experiences in Spain I must say it was a pleasure cooking with such high quality ingredients. ShaeLynn gladly relinquished her kitchen so I could cook a couple meals, which came out delightful.  The highlight was the Spanish chicken croquetas, which were made with nearly 100% farm ingredients.  One thing I learned early on in my culinary pursuits is that a chicken is not one meal but the base of many. In the case of the croquetas we used the chicken stock, left over chicken shreds from the carcass, a bit of their goat milk to make the roué and their farm eggs to dip before breading and frying. I could truly appreciate what Kevin and ShaeLynn have been doing when I was able to take a little bit of everything of their farm to make something as simple and unexpecting as croquetas into the highlight dish of our evening’s supper.

It was truly a pleasure spending the week with them working on the land and helping them prep for their upcoming batch of birds. My time with them only reinforced my love and appreciation for what Kevin and ShaeLynn do. They live a lifestyle that is good for their health and the land, and have found a way to share it with the community around the—influencing people’s lives one bird at a time.

Back to Work

 The day-to-day schedule is quite fluid on the farm and it is hard to delineate between work and private time.  However, the difference between our production season and the off-season is quite dramatic.  Over the winter we’ve had time to recuperate, plan, and experiment. It has been great.  However, while it is still the rainy time of year and we are looking at several weeks until we are back in full swing, there are signs that the pace is once again quickening.

Our Nigerian Dwarf goat herd has already expanded.  The milk is a dream.  It is so creamy and sweet, and there is none of the goat flavor that Shae and I expected we’d have to grow accustomed too.  We might be overly excited, but our enthusiasm for this breed encouraged us to seek new friends for Essie and we now have the wonderful company of an accomplished, and quite regal, buck named Bowtie and a very young and dainty doe named Poppy.  The show-stopper, though, is Poppy’s 2-week-old son Tuxedo (Notice that our males are all named after men’s formal wear.  We are praying for twins: Calvin and Klein).  Tux is adorable and a genuine pleasure to watch.  He is still learning the finer points of balance and decorum so he spends his days romping around and chasing (or being chased by) the chickens.

We also have three new rabbits on the farm!  The two females and one male come from a great backyard breeder in Woodside and they will hopefully become the Adam and Eve(s) of a modest rabbit business.  The biggest hurdle right now is working out the logisitics for how we’d like to house the rabbits.  Rabbits are solitary and have a tendency to dig/burrow, so a free-range pasture net like our turkeys receive is out of the question.  We are currently working on a couple of special pens right now, but everything is in the prototype phase so I won’t embarrass myself by going into their designs before they have had a chance to be tested.

Last, we have begun an experiment with a slower growing breed of meat chickens called Freedom Rangers.  We have 100 of them in brooder right now and they look spectacularly healthy and active.  These chickens take longer to grow than the Cornish Crosses that we principally raise and thus require more feed and labor.  However, because they are older at slaughter and bred to be wonderful foragers, they develop stronger flavors in their meat.  The tradeoff, however, is that in addition to their higher cost, the birds do not have as much white meat as the Cornish Cross and, because they are older, they are slightly less juicy and tender.  Our plan with this experiment is to feed these birds an organic feed, and after running some numbers it looks like we will be selling them at $5.95 per pound (as opposed to our Cornish Cross broilers that are fed a non-medicated conventionally grown feed and cost $3.95 per pound).  We already have a number of customers who have unofficially claimed a number of these birds (we are planning to start taking pre-orders in a couple weeks), and I expect that this experimental batch is just the start of a full-fledged enterprise for us. I think the Freedom Rangers will be spectacular and they will give the business the invaluable opportunity to offer customers two superb, but distinct pastured chicken options. I’ll, of course, keep you all up to date on how it goes!

So there you have it.  We’ll be starting up full production of our pastured Cornish Cross chickens again in the beginning of March and that’s pretty much when we go back into full swing.  We are so excited and we’ve only been spurred on by the calls we’ve been getting from our awesome customers about how excited they are too.

Food or Fiction?

Buying good food is oddly complicated today.  Aside from simply choosing what you want to eat, there are dozens of certifications, food guru recommendations, and environmental issues that can be considered before you make your purchase.  While Shae and I are certainly a part of the sustainable food world, we get overwhelmed by the swarm of choices too.  What follows is the practical wisdom we have gathered so far on how to navigate the grocery store and farmers’ market.  This is certainly not an exhaustive guide, but we have had so many people ask for our opinions on this or that food, that we wanted to share how we approach grocery shopping, and hopefully hear back from some of you on what priorities you have when buying food.

Vegetables, Fruits, and Grains:
When we are shopping for flora, the biggest considerations we have are how local a product is and whether or not it was grown organically.  With plants these two factors are of particular importance because they can go a long way towards helping us predict the safety and flavor of a food.  To us, locally-grown produce is safer.  The fewer brokers and miles a product has to be traced back through, the better.  When farmers know that they are responsible for the quality of their product and that their lettuce will not be anonymously packaged along with lettuce from thousands of other producers, they tend not to cut corners when it comes to the health and cleanliness of the food they sell.  Locally grown produce is also more flavorful.  Transportation is particularly hard on fruits and vegetables and many varieties that you find in big grocery stores are selected for how well they travel or look, rather than how they taste.  If you need any proof for this just compare a home-grown tomato with one you buy at the store.

In terms of organics, we think that plant foods are usually worth the added costs.  Organic fruits and vegetables are first and foremost not grown from genetically modified seeds.  Health concerns alone make GMOs worth avoiding, but from a political standpoint they are absolutely repugnant.  While I could spend a whole post reeling about the mistreatment of farmers and the travesty of allowing living organisms to be patented, I’ll simply leave this point by reflecting that the companies that produce GMO crops are the true standard bearers for an agricultural philosophy driven by “conquering” nature, and we choose not to support them.

The organic certification also limits the amount and types of poisons that can be used to fight pests on food crops.  Anyone familiar with the story of DDT will see that the assurances that certain agricultural poisons are safe that come out of the USDA, EPA, and FDA are at best occasionally misinformed and at worse routinely corrupted by the financial and political influence of the giant agribusinesses that produce these poisons.

    Dairy:
Dairy is a tricky issue.  So much goes into producing biologically active, delicious, and healthy dairy that I hesitate to provide a list of what to look for because things will undoubtedly be left out. 

The most curiosity about our farming experience is usually derived from our work at the dairy where we made 100 % grass fed, raw (unpasteurized) cows’ milk cheeses.  Working with raw milk was a radical shift in our food consciousness in a very positive way.  There are two reasons we like raw dairy products.  First, they are easier to digest.  The active cultures help a calf digest the milk, and that benefit is passed along to our digestive systems too.  Second, the purpose of pasteurizing milk is to create a biological “clean slate,” and unfortunately that’s very close to a petri dish.  The natural bacterial cultures in raw milk create a healthy bacterial defense that, given the right conditions, has the ability to fight off bacteria that would be harmful to us.  Pasteurized milk doesn’t have this defense, and so is extremely vulnerable to the incursion of any harmful bacteria.  That said, both raw and pasteurized dairy products have the potential to carry serious food-borne illness, and as such we respect any choice about dairy that comes from a thoughtful place.

The first thing I look for is cleanliness.  Dairymen are rumored to be the original inventors of sanitation and I can certainly understand why.  While working in cheesemaking it was obvious that what we were doing was simply manipulating and cultivating bacteria.  Dairy is full of beneficial live cultures that lend different tastes, textures, and even digestibility to each product.   A lapse in sanitation or vigilance can mean that the wrong cultures (the dangerous ones we haven’t co-evolved with) will grow in the product instead and get people sick.  As such, I look for a dairyman whose habits border on OCD.

In terms of how the animals are raised, I think 100% grass-fed is the best way to go.  It’s out there if you search hard enough, but sometimes it’s just too far away to be a practical part of your diet.  Grain is certainly not the enemy.  Many superb dairies still feed grain as a small percentage of their herd’s diet to meet the high calorie needs of their animals.  This is not a particularly terrible practice and in many ways is absolutely necessary with certain high-producing breeds.  All-in-all, I’d say look for cows that are predominately grass-fed and appear lively, clean, and healthy.

The last note on dairy is regarding rBST, also known as rBGH.  These are artificial hormones given to cows to increase their milk production.  While the official FDA stance is that these hormones are safe, several reputable studies have shown that these hormones are incredibly dangerous for human consumption, as well as devastating to the health of the cows that are given them.   While ShaeLynn and I do the best we can to buy grass-fed dairy products, the one things we do not compromise on is rBST-free.  You can tell a dairy product is rBST-free if it says “rBST/rBGH/Hormone free” or sometimes ShaeLynn thinks it’s easier to look for the “*No significant difference has been found” phrase, which the FDA requires grace the package of any product that also says “rBST-free”.

When we have a chance we’ll add some information about how we choose our meat products.  We’d love to hear your priorities, or answer any questions you might have.