Babies and Eggs Everywhere

With Kevin Jr. on the farm, the chores and projects have fallen pretty squarely on my shoulders.  He’s growing so quickly in Shae’s care and it’s not the slightest sacrifice on my part to see them both as healthy and happy as they are.

Bake on low for 15 minutes, or until done.

The farm, though, is also growing!  We received this week our second batch of Cornish Cross broilers and they are doing wonderfully.  We did have an amazing experience with a little chick who I found cold, wet, and motionless one morning.  During their morning feeding I found a baby chick seemingly dead beneath the lip of the waterer.  It appeared as though he had climbed in to play and then gotten too cold to return to the hover to warm back up.  He was sadly motionless, but instead of composting the little guy, I had the unexplainable thought to try and warm this motionless body back up.

So, in a strangely ironic twist, I put the little chick into the oven to see if I could help bring him back to life!  After a few minutes in some warm towels, there was no improvement so I gently picked him up and walked over to the compost bucket.  Right as I was about to drop him in he sucked in a big gulp of air and started to breathe!  It was amazing.  So back in the oven he went.  Over the course of the whole day we kept him in warm towels, under a heat lamp, and on a steady diet of sugar water.

Amazingly, the little guy did a full recovery and was ready to rejoin his friends for the evening feeding.  We’ve had no mortality since I put him back, so it’s great to report that he’s thriving and happy!

Ta DA!

First Early Bird Ranch Egg!

In construction news the egg mobile is almost ready!  We've had our first egg show up from the new hens and we are rushing to get them in their permanent home.  This custom built mobile coop is the most impressive structure yet on the farm and quantum leap in our infrastructure.  The coop will hold 500 hens with nest boxes, roost bars, food and water infrastructure, and will have a solar power system to control automatic doors and some predator control systems I’m excited to talk about once we get all the kinks out.  The egg mobile is a special design that will be low and squat to make it more stable, but will have an impressive inside area for the hens to sleep in at night.  We opted to build it out of steel instead of wood because it has to be strong enough to travel the hilly terrain on the ranch so it can follow the lovely cows in Left Coast Grass Fed Beef’s herd.  Because the egg mobile will also provide some serious benefits for the cows, Left Coast has generously given us a few hours every week in the schedule of their resident welding expert (Jeremiah) so he can help us make this structure a success!  

I will absolutely post pictures as soon as we are done.

I lastly want to thank everyone in our community who have been bringing us wonderful suppers each night to help us with the baby.  We have personal notes on the way, but it is just so important to me to sing the praises of our amazing community here in Pescadero.  We couldn’t do half of what we do without the help our neighbors and friends!

Spring Surprise

Hello All!

About an hour after the Spring Equinox arrived, our newly born son decided it was time to come on out.  What a farm baby!

The process was long and hard, but after 22 hours of labor my incredibly strong and wonderful wife gave birth at home to our 8 pound 6 oz (22 inches long) son.  Both of them are in incredible health.  Shae is recovering her strength so quickly and he's been absolutely no problem.  He opened his eyes and started nursing the minute he was out!  Everything is going really well here and we are zeroing in on a name for the little guy too.  We will try to be vigilant with pictures, but in the meantime I hope these help give everyone a good idea of what we've been up to.  The first picture is Shae just a few days ago at the hunter safety course we took at TomKat Ranch.  The milking picture is actually during labor, she just wanted to be up and walking and decided she could milk.  I am simply awestruck.

Enjoy!

Fruits and Haggis

Where to begin?  It’s been a long while since we last posted an update on the blog.  With the baby on the way, I’ve been excitedly preparing the house and farm for his arrival.  Shae has been handling all the silly details like what he’ll wear and eat and where he’ll sleep, but I’ve been hard at work planting.

As some of you may know (the old blog ‘CowsandEffect’ talked some about this), my first exposure to and love affair with agriculture was in orchards.  My mentor and advisor in electoral studies also proved to be my first agricultural mentor as he taught me to prune rare fruit trees while we discussed the merits of the single non-transferable vote versus open-list proportional representation systems.  All that said, I now have begun planting my own orchard around our little house, and it’s been a blast.

The first trees came to me through the largess of our friend Jack the Garden Coach whose home was too shaded to support the blood orange, Meyer lemon, Eureka Lemon, Keffir Lime, and fig he brought us.  It was wonderful to plant them right outside our bedroom window and imagine that as our son ages he’ll be able to tottle around the house with Iris and help himself to whatever he finds.  In fact, the thought was so much fun that a few days later Shae and I went out and spent our Valentine’s Day fund (and probably a couple birthday funds too) on a pluot, cherry, pear, persimmon, pomegranate, two blueberries, and two raspberries.

I’ve also been spending some time in our first garden!  Here on the new farm we’ve developed a wonderful relationship with our landlords and have been able to envision some long-term stability.  As such, as a surprise for Shae, I prepared a 25’x30’ garden and built a fence for it out eucalyptus posts and donated deer fencing from the wonderful couple that Jack the Garden Coach rents from.

The fence was incredibly easy to build (as all things are when you have the help of John from Santa Cruz), and is quite ingenious.  Eukalyptus is incredibly strong if it has a chance to stay dry, but will rot quickly if it gets and stays wet.   With that in mind, the fence is built so the posts sit atop rebar stakes that are driven into the ground to provide stability.  This allows the posts (which have a painted bottom) to sit on or slightly above the soil line and stay dry.  I really hope this model pans out, we are surrounded by these trees and they grow like weeds.  It would be amazing to do more construction with materials we have right here on the farm.

Last, we were able to revive a small tradition by celebrating our first Burns’ Supper this year in our new home.   Burns’ Supper is a Scottish tradition to celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns (our national poet) and is usually quite an event with a great deal of pomp, poetry, and ceremonial toasts.  We opted for a simple affair, but stayed true to the principles.  We had some wonderful whisky on hand, my grandfather’s copy of Burns’ poems, and Shae stole the whole show by making a FANTASTIC haggis.  We had to cheat a bit by using a combination of lamb and pig organs, but it was amazing.  Shae even ended up eating it too!  There’s truly hope for this family.

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...