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.

Starting a Family

To prevent a barrage of angry comments, I’ll get to the point as soon as possible.  Shae and I are not having children yet, but we are planning for kids!

On our trip back to San Diego during Christmas, we fell in love with a 6-year-old Nigerian Dwarf Goat named Essie, and couldn’t resist the urge to bring her back home with us.  Lately we’ve been thinking very seriously about getting a dairy animal of some sort.  We go through a lot of dairy and frankly we have to limit ourselves so we don’t ruin our food budget.

It’s fair to point out that neither of us are particularly enthusiastic about goat’s milk, and we had been trying to justify spending the thousands of dollars it takes to get a milk cow.  However, very slowly (and serendipitously) friends and neighbors began to allay many of our concerns with goats.  As it turns out the “goaty” flavor of goat’s milk is a function of several factors including the presence of a buck, the breed you are milking, and the freshness of the milk.  My dear friend Galen from Polyface sealed our fate when he told me about his experience with Nigerian Dwarf Goats and how their milk is the most similar to cow’s milk and even has a higher butter-fat content (yippee!).  If Essie’s recent exposure to a buck is as productive as we hope, Essie will be giving birth in May.  Her breeder gave us the exciting, although perhaps daunting, news, that we can expect 3-5 kids and roughly 2 quarts of milk per day once she hits peak production.  Coming from a goat that is no more the two feet tall, I am reminded of the adage about big things in small packages.

However, we didn’t stop with Essie.  A few weeks back, Shae and I visited TLC Ranch in Santa Cruz.  They have sadly gone out of business and we were interested to see what experience and perhaps equipment we could gather.  We spent most of our time talking with Jim and Rebecca, the farm’s owners, and getting an eye-opening lesson on the challenges they faced when trying to get a long-term lease on any piece of land, hiring reliable labor, and keeping up with the regulatory BS that saturates agriculture.  However, all that aside, we learned that their farm/family dog, Iris, wasn’t going to be able to come with them on their next adventure.  Iris is an Australian Shepherd and a true outdoor farm dog that needs not only plenty of space, but also a sense of purpose.  While Shae and I weren’t quite planning on getting a dog in the near future, it has been a goal of ours.  We talked about the cost of caring for her, where we’d put her, and all the practical topics that a responsible young couple should, but we overcame our lingering reluctance when we learned that none of TLC’s neighbors had room for Iris.  We couldn’t be happier with our choice.

Iris is an amazing dog.  She is well behaved, loves strangers, other animals, and scares the coyotes away at night.  She even gets along with Essie (…even though Essie doesn’t quite get along with Iris).  We are still working out the details, like my allergies, but we are thrilled to have such a well-trained dog/coworker helping us out.

As the last few hours of 2010 roll away, Shae and I are particularly grateful to find ourselves healthy and in good spirits.  In 6 months our lives have changed dramatically.  However, through all of it our excitement to share our lives with all of you has not diminished.  From the peepers, to Essie and Iris, to Shae and I, we thank you all for your support and enthusiasm and wish you a very Happy 2011.

Yin and Yang

As we've moved into a Winter schedule, a lot has changed.  There are so few outside and traditional farm jobs to do.  These normally fall into my domain and all through the season I enjoyed being the masculine lifter, cutter, builder, hauler, and wrecker on the farm.  It was very satisfying to feel like the success of the farm was literally being carried on my shoulders.

However, now that those jobs have disappeared, I realize how many other jobs there are the farm...and more importantly who has been doing them!

My wife, Shae Lynn, is the answer, and she is sensational...not to mention beautiful.  From sunrise to well after I've fallen into bed, Shae Lynn was the force that keept me and the farm going at the pace that let us meet all of our 2010 goals.  I don't want to bring the honesty of this post into question by assigning an undue or unrealistic amount of kudos to her, but the fact is I would not have achieved on my own anything close to what we did together.

In addition to doing chores with me every morning and evening, Shae Lynn managed our business, marketing, customer contact, inventory, dealing with feed and equipment suppliers, the construction of our website (which should be ready soon), sales, the home laying hen flock, the food at home, the data we collected on the animals, designing/refining our mobile livestock shelters, and handled the bulk of the research and work we did for the non-profit land trust PLANT! that we work with.  It fills with me with such a deep sense of pride to be able to share this because I'm just now seeing it clearly too.

To top it all off, just recently Shae began work on getting our bread business off the ground, which will hopefully help get us some income through the chickenless winter months.  After talking with the people at Pie Ranch and working out an agreement where we could use their wood-fired brick oven, she rushed out, bought her supplies, mixed the dough, and spent a day baking 150 loaves of simply delicious artisan bread as a pilot program (I particularly liked the roasted garlic and butter ciabatta).

I don't want this to sound like I am gushing, but it is just so easy for the blog I predominately write to seem a bit one-sided.  Maybe when Shae Lynn stops doing so much work she'll have time to blog!

P.S.  I am not sure how many of you subscribe to Gentry Magazine.  I assume roughly 80%.  I am more Pleb Weekly type.  Regardless, I also should note that Shae Lynn will be featured in a piece on women in business in the January issue.  Here she is during her photo session where the words "make love to the camera" were, in fact, mentioned.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

The production season is now at a close, and boy was it great.  We really learned a lot and are thrilled about diving in again next year.

Thanksgiving was a lot of fun and was just the celebration we needed.  We were invited by our neighbors Donna and Gene to come have dinner, and while we had our reservations about leaving the house at all (when we were in the thick of processing we promised ourselves that we’d recover by staying in our pajamas for a month and eat ice cream), the dinner was spectacular.   We had an Early Bird Turkey, and I was quite proud and impressed. 

The turkeys ended up being absolutely huge.  In addition to just excelling on the pasture and expressing that as physical growth, we received so many requests for processing dates closer to Thanksgiving that we let the birds go an extra 10 days while they were at their peak growth rate.  All of this will be taken into account next year, but what blew me away was that the large size of the turkeys did not diminish their tenderness or flavor.  Email after email from customers, as well as our own dinner at Donna and Gene’s, showed us that customers with the same concerns ended their Thanksgiving suppers satisfied and fighting with their guests over who got to have the leftovers.  That said, we still have a 28 pound turkey in our freezer for anyone looking to host a minor diplomatic gathering or very complete family reunion.

I don’t think I’m going to say much more today.  Shae and I are overcoming our obligatory “we can finally rest now” colds and I’d much rather be under a blanket right now (admittedly, though, I’ll probably do some farm finances or something while I’m there).

I’m not sure how often we’ll be posting on the blog over the Winter.  I suspect we can keep a once-per-week pace up, but that all depends on us having interesting things to say.  We’ll do all we can to be fascinating!

Have a great Winter.  Happy Everything!

Tread Softly...

I certainly don’t want to tempt fate by counting my turkeys before they are processed and sold, but with winter approaching it’s time to start making some plans.

Having a seasonally-driven schedule has some significant disadvantages, but it allows us to reset our minds and use the “off-season” to play around with projects and see how we can improve or expand the business.  This year has been truly wonderful to us and while we are still a little ways away from paying for the broiler and turkey business and rebuilding our savings, we have a few projects that we are planning for the winter that we’d love to share with all of you.  Your input, critiques, ideas, and even help are all welcome and encouraged.

Our winter planning board!   See all the ideas?

Rabbits- In 2011 we are planning to start a small rabbit enterprise on the farm.  Many restaurants and customers we’ve talked to have been disappointed at the availability of local and especially pasture-raised rabbits, and we are thrilled that we might be able to help fill the gap.  The project would likely be quite modest as rabbits don’t scale easily.  However, on a small-scale they are wonderful and can potentially bring in a nice supplemental income for the farm.

We are thinking of breaking from the Polyface Raken House (It really should be spelled Racken House) that combines Rabbits and Chickens on a composting floor to eliminate the dangers of concentrating rabbit waste.  Instead, we are considering combining the rabbits with a worm composting structure that will keep our hens out on the pasture and control the rabbits’ waste while creating some really valuable compost for our garden.
Garden- So this one is a bit of a pipe dream, but it’s an important one to me.  I have very limited gardening experience, but next year I’d like to produce 75% of the vegetable calories Shae and I consume.  In fact, I’d like to produce a heck of a lot more… like comfrey for the rabbits to eat and herbs to sell with chickens.  However, I think this is possible.  I am a devoted student of Steve Solomon (look up his books on gardening!) and I’m surrounded by truly gifted vegetable growers and a near-constant supply of manure.  Additionally, ShaeLynn’s father and mother are both now experienced gardeners, and would be amazing resources.  If I can’t get them out here to help by offering chickens, I’m willing to try luring them with grandchildren.

Bread Baking- A big challenge that we have to overcome is that our cash flow ends in the winter.  This is not completely terrible, but it does put some hefty pressure on the other seasons.  In the next few weeks Shae and I will be talking with some local farms and seeing if we can team up with their CSAs and provide them with a steady supply of artisanal breads baked in a wood-fired brick oven.  Sounds pretty great, huh?  Shae is an accomplished baker now and her curiosity and devotion to the craft are really exemplary.  In the end of 2009 and the beginning of this year she worked full-time baking these sorts of breads in New Jersey and frankly we haven’t been able to find anything like them out here.  The time commitment is quite serious, but as a winter business I think this is a great fit.  I can’t imagine Shae will be too unhappy in front of a roaring oven during the cold wet months and I can’t think of a single customer that wouldn’t be interested in fresh hearty breads to enjoy with a warm bowl of soup this winter.

Soup and Chicken Stock- As I am not one to brag, I’ll simply say that the stock we make from our chickens is downright stellar.  With the rich and nutritionally-dense fat that our birds put on eating grass and clover, we can produce a stock that is thick, flavorful, and wonderfully healthy.  The best part about stock and soup is that it is a great way to add value to the chickens and empty our freezer (that is in cahoots with PG&E to destroy our budget).  Producing chicken stock or soup would be a great winter business as well and help to distribute or income a little more evenly.  Further, it would be a great way to cooperate and build relationships with the local vegetable growers whom I am sure would like to see aesthetically unsalable vegetables get purchased and used to feed people.

Slow Growth Broilers- The last project (although the list goes on) that I’ll put out there is that we’d like to begin experimenting with new breeds of meat chickens.  I love the Cornish Crosses that we raise.  They are efficient growers and produce at a low cost a meaty bird that we hope lets more families eat wholesome and local food.  However, they are not the only meat bird out there.  Other breeds bring other assets to the table and many of our customers have been interested in the slower growing breeds.  These birds take longer to produce and have mostly dark meat, but as a result are usually quite flavorful.  One of our big ambitions is to see if we can actually start a self-sustaining flock of these guys that we breed and raise on the farm.  Over time, this would allow to us experiment with breeding a meat bird that is specially suited to unique climate and pastures of the Cloverdale Valley.  Pretty exciting!

We’ll see how all of this develops.  Our model for growing this business is to expand the diversity of the farm rather than the size of any one enterprise.  We are also looking into getting a dairy cow (my cheese making skills are in desperate need of practice), starting a grass-fed lamb operation, and beginning to raise pastured pigs, but these enterprises might be too capital-intensive to begin in the winter and may have to wait until spring.

All that said, 2011 looks like it’s going to be a pretty formative year for the business.  As I mentioned above, we’d love to hear ideas, encouragement, warnings, or anything else any of you are willing to offer.  We really can’t thank all of you (friends, customers, family, and blog-readers) enough for helping us start and keep the farm going.  We wouldn’t have even gotten this far if it wasn’t for your cheering, advice, support, and friendship.

Happy winter!

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

Fancy Shmancy

Here we are, as promised, coming up for air.

As many of you can guess (or saw when you came by the farm), we are a little bit run down by the intensity of the schedule we’ve been maintaining over the last two weeks.  However, we've made it over the substantial obstacle of processing our second batch of chickens, and we even got enough last minute customers to bring our chicken inventory down to something that will fit in our garage freezer!

Everything seems to be going great on the farm, though. We've been a little worried to hear that two farms run by neighbors and friends of ours are closing down.  Both farm operations were run using sound and even impressive methods, but regulatory and market-based challenges made the businesses and, more importantly, the quality of life unsustainable for the farmers.  This is obviously a real concern for us.  We are willing to sacrifice to get the farm started and off the ground, but I think we are shooting in the short-term for something a little more modest than 12-14 hour days.

With that in mind Shae and I cleared our schedules and threw worries of morning fatigue to the wind and had a spectacular night out.

For the past two weeks we have been waiting anxiously to go and try the amazing ways that Flea Street Café’s executive chef, Carlos, told us he’d be using our chicken.  We haven’t had a night out in quite a while and our dress clothes were looking dusty.  When Carlos and the restaurant’s owner, Jesse, came by in the middle of our 10 day processing marathon to pick up their order and invited us as their guests to come have dinner, we accepted immediately.  In the days that followed, while we were standing in the wet and cold, covered in chicken guts, Shae and I created a wonderful fantasy of how great it would be to go out and have dinner to celebrate being done.  While it would have been enough for the dinner to have just provided us with the energy and morale to make it through 500 birds, it turned out to be an incredibly special night.

What a team!

Perhaps the most important part of the evening was meeting everyone at Flea Street Café.  Before we sat down, we were introduced to almost all of the staff and had time throughout our dinner to steal small conversations with them as they darted from table to table.  What made this so important was that Shae and I really don’t want to have traditional customer-vendor relationships.  When we look for customers, we proudly blur the line between personal and business matters.  Part of what we love about farming is that we have the ability to use the business as a means to meet new friends and develop ties to the people/community that are nourished by our food and in turn let us continue to heal the land and care for our animals.  However, all this gushing might be a little much--I’m sure many of you are interested mostly in what we ate.

The food was downright amazing.  Shae and I both get a great deal of pride from taking the time to cook delicious meals at home and experiment with different ingredients and preparations, but the food we had was just a great example of what years of culinary experience and training can produce.  The care and creativity that Flea Street Café put into their menu was really apparent.  We are usually a pretty cheap date, and as good guests we were planning to just have two modest entrees, but the people at Flea Street Cafe had a different plan.  Through taste after taste of exquisite food that they sent out to surprise us, we found ourselves a little overwhelmed, but supremely happy and satisfied.

Here’s what we had: squash ravioli with an Early Bird Chicken ragu, housemade lamb sausage with spicy peach compote, friend green tomatoes with corn relish and chipotle aioli, harpooned San Diego swordfish topped with crab, slow-braised grass-fed short ribs, pasture-raised duck with a bacon sherry vinaigrette, black mission fig bread pudding with bourbon cream carmel sauce, and chocolate almond cake with rum peach ice cream.



I meant to take a picture of the beautiful presentations, but I kept getting distracted.  Everything, with absolutely no embellishment, was awesome.

I swear it looked great.

Our wonderful waiter Steve, who couldn’t have steered us towards better choices, masterfully calmed all of our fears by reminding us that pre-industrial agricultural peoples usually needed twice the daily calorie intake that we consider normal today.  That was a big relief because it means Shae and I were only overeating by a factor of 4 rather than 8.

But here’s what really made this blog-worthy, the night was inspiring.  The time to rest was important, and the food was amazing, but meeting the staff and seeing their passion for real and high quality food reinvigorated our tired spirits.  Shae and I spent most of the night gazing into each other’s eyes… and brainstorming what breed of hogs we’d like to raise and doodling sketches for a mobile rabbit/worm compost structure.  It was as romantic you’d imagine.

So we’re back to our schedule, but things couldn’t feel brighter.  I suppose though, it’s easier for us to recover from being tired and overwhelmed.  This is the one job where the grass is greener where we are. 

This is our first slaughter spot in front and our second in back. Amazing.

Still Alive

Shae and I just wanted to check in and let all of you know that we are still chugging along.

We are in the middle of a seriously demanding processing schedule, and our aching bodies and faltering minds have just about reached their breaking points.  However, each day we are a little closer to finishing and we've been helped and encouraged by scores of friends, family, customers, and combinations therein.  It's keeping us going.

I'm writing this while we are taking a quick breakfast right before rushing out to do chores and start today's batch.  We won't be back up to our house until sunset, but I promise we'll have an update (complete with a picture or two) posted on the blog some time soon!