Bryn Athyn Bounty Saturday 16th: special cup offer!

On August 16th, we will be selling our meat at Bryn Athyn Bounty Market in Bryn Athyn, PA.  We are really excited to provide our customers with healthy, delicious, humane grass-fed beef.  This Saturday, we have something really special to offer in addition to our beef: handmade porcelain cups thrown by Normandy Alden and decorated with cobalt lines drawing by Alanna Rose. Our farm, these cups, this vision we have for our land and animals at Cairncrest Farm is truly a collaboration. These cups will be $50 at our table on Saturday, but FREE if you pre-order 100 lbs of meat or more. Email cairncrestfarm@gmail.com for information about pre-ordering. We are looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!

-Normandy

-

So Many New Faces

There are a few new faces around here. I heard that a grass based stocker operation near us (stockers are weaned beef cows that are sold to people who want more animals when the grass is abundant) had a number of steers available at a price below what people were paying at the auction. I thought it would be interesting to compare our new Kerry/Angus crosses with these pure-bred Angus cows through a growing season or two. After looking at their age and weight charts we decided on these two because they were middle of the road. One of them has a Simmental for a great-great grandfather, so even though he is Angus from every other side, he still wound up with a white face like his ancestor.

These steers were weighed before they mounted the trailer on their way to us. We don't have a cattle scale (yet), so the other perk of them coming was getting to guess the weights of our own animals of a similar age based on their numbers.

The other new faces are our brand new calves out of the robust Mr. Winchester (pictured in the background below). In fact, Garth walked in as I was writing this to tell me Vona just calved. These are the first crosses to be born here. It's hard to say how they differ in apperance with our pure bred Kerrys when we don't have any pure bred calves to compare them to, but their features will grow starker as they mature. 

We are naming the heifer calves after counties in New York. There's a different scheme here every year.

The biggest surprise was that a cow we didn't think was bred gave birth to a heifer calf. Sibley, who was herself the accidental product of an evening rendevous with her own father, had been small from the start and very slow growing. We attributed that to her onerously inbred genetics. She was the size of last years calves even though she had 8 or so months on them, and so we slated her for the slaughter house and fed her with the young stock over the winter. Low and behold, she too had gotten in with Mr. Winchester without our supervision and now we have a cow we didn't expect to. Not too shabby. It also changes Sibley's future here, at least in the short term. We are eager to see if her calf expresses unbridled hybrid vigor, coming from the combination of such a limited gene pool with a much broader and unfamiliar line. 

The season began badly, but thankfully it wasn't a foreshadowing of things to come. Garth saw something strange hanging from the back of Acorn one evening. She wasn't having any contractions and the herd was not displaying the same anxious excitement that usually accompanies a birth. Garth took a photo and we called the vet. We sent him the image and he called us right back. He thought it looked like an unhealthy placenta and that we should go out and look for a dead calf. Garth scaled the pasture and finally found a dead heifer calf over the hill. Acorn was having trouble cleaning so we gave her some Caulophyllum in her water (a homeopathic remedy that is meant to encourage uterine contractions) and perhaps that helped. She seems fine now. 

And now a great mystery has come to my attention. Garth tells me minutes ago that Butternut, last year's calf born here on 4/8/13, just gave birth to what looks like another heifer calf. That means that she was bred at 4 months old while she was still nursing under her own mother. We had been told that was impossible. What are the fertility gods doing around here? Her calf is up and nursing. This worries me though. We didn't separate the bull from the very young stock last year for the reason I mentioned above (it's not meant to be possible) and so what if all these babies have babies on us? Do they think it's some kind of animal farm over here? Oh my. I don't know what we are in for.  

- Alanna

Thaw On

Although the world was white again on the morning of April first with a fresh inch on every surface, the sky was just playing us the fool. The thaw is officially ON.

Look, they are barely wearing coats.

The well water to the farm house has greater allegiances with the stream than it does with our comfort or preference. As the stream goes, so goes the well. When the stream is churning brown, we pour tea colored baths. Cleaning the toilet doesn't offer the same satisfaction when dark water stares back at you. Judging from my view out the window, it should be clearing up soon.

And water isn't the only thing clearing out. We've seen several living examples that 'spring cleaning' is no cultural artifice. Everyone and everything has something to do away with this time of year. Garth mentioned to me a week or so ago that the field mice had simultaneously decided it was time to clean house. They broke through the icy crust and neatly piled the winter's poop at the snow's edge. Evacuation en masse. Hole after hole in the snow, each with it's own waste at the door. Even the soil is heaving unwanted contents up for the taking - bones, rocks, detritus, a civil war era medicine bottle. I joined the crowd by giving several ill-fitting shirts away. 

The full inscription reads: DR. WISTAR'S BALSAM OF WILD CHERRY, PHILADA 

Birds are making faint noises in the early morning now, too. I heard them a month ago on one occasion and then they fell silent as the last wave of cold nights swept in. But now two Robins are bouncing off the ground in a tryst with hoards of grackles looking on, covering the bare trees like leaves.

Maple sap is only just running. Mud creeps in between the cows' 'toes.' Bare earth lies everywhere. Spring, you have kept us waiting.

-Alanna

Polar Vortex Returns

We, like many of you, felt the Polar Vortex lift off for a few days, only to return again in earnest. But the cold brings with it several benefits that you in the city or suburbs can't appreciate. The first is that freezing temperatures discourage the hatching of flies. We had only five consecutive days when the thermometer read above freezing - 43 being the highest it soared - and the effect on the latent in-house fly population was immediate. I decided to kill and then count the fly carcasses from just one average size window in this house (although I must admit it is in the running for most productive) and the results were unsavory. After just three warm days I had confirmation of more than 162 flies dead and stopped counting. That is just one window downstairs. We are not even talking about my upstairs studio. I get all crunchy inside, killing so many flies and witnessing the futility of my actions. I know there will be 50 more to contend with the next time I look. Arden, on the other hand, has just become sensitive to the miracle that flies are. She likes to reach and touch them as they walk up the living room window, and in a sharp twist of character I find myself assisting her - holding her up to see them, gently nudging them towards her open fingers. At least someone's enjoying them.

The few days of sustained warmth had other obvious effects here, namely the thaw en masse of vast amounts of accumulated snowfall. I was nursing Arden on the couch in the late afternoon when I heard something shift - a subtle elevation in white noise - and I looked behind me just in time to see this begin.

The stream had inches of ice on its surface which had been covered by around 18 inches of snow. I presume the wind helped this along by blowing more into the hollow of the stream bed. On one of the warmest days we sustained heavy rains and Garth and I were waiting to see what would come of it. We got our answer in the above image. An ice dam somewhere upstream must have cracked under the pressure and sent this dark and frothing 'frosty' hurling. I have never seen such a thing. It kept up for around an hour.



This is the aftermath. You can see where the water plowed the edges of the stream's snow bank.



And thankfully now the Polar Vortex has returned, which is no surprise to you, reading this, as you are, in your blanket and hat. It left long enough to give us a taste of what's to come, and I'd be lying if I said we didn't like it. But the upside is that the flies are less enthusiastic (although still coming by the handful daily). At the very least you now have proof that we don't spray for flies or use other insecticides, apart from our own hands.

Lastly, I am grateful that Garth takes Arden to do the afternoon chores, regardless of the Vortex's whereabouts. She doesn't complain, and if it is really blowing we do keep her in. 

- Alanna

Deep Freeze: Farmhouse Fallout

This morning Garth and I were up early, as is customary these days - 4:30 or so - and I noticed that the pressure from the tap was low on both the hot and the cold. Nothing in the house was running, like a toilet or shower, that would have caused that. It has been VERY cold here for weeks and we don't have much snow cover, so Garth suspected that the buried line from the well to the pressure tank had frozen. He switched the well pump off at the breaker so that the motor wouldn't die trying to pull water that it couldn't have, and put a heater on in the basement. 

There had been ground hog invasion down there during the late summer. They dug under the porch and hollowed out an area of the foundation, pushing a lot of new rocks and dirt up around the pressure tank. One of the upsides of summer is that there is no reason to go to the basement. We wouldn't have known they had burrowed in if they hadn't also happened upon a decade old empty bag of dogfood and begun making a raucous. My mother-in-law, Dorothy, first heard it - a loud plastic rustle, too loud to be a mouse or even a large rat. I later saw the red bag lurch to the base of the stairs making the same telltale sound. Groundhog, surely. Garth bravely went to investigate and found the basement as I described it. Their having exposed the pipe from the well to the pressure tank had no doubt contributed to the freeze. Garth and I considered the pros and the cons of our situation over the next few hours.

Con - The well pipe is frozen. We don't know if that heater will solve it.

Pro - At least we have a stream where we can fetch water.

Con - There is 4 inches of ice over the surface.

Pro - We have an axe, a few buckets, and Garth is a strapping and motivated man.

Con - It's -12 out.

Pro - Yeah, but now we will really be pioneers!

Con - It's still -12 out. 

Pro - We have a Berkey water filter, so drinking stream water will be A-okay. 

Con - I am cloth diapering and this is going to get messier than it already is.

Pro - It's meant to get up to 34 here in four days.

Con - That's four days away and it might not be warm enough to thaw the water line. 

This went on. 

I went outside to get more wood as the light crept into the cobalt world. There were turkeys gobbling and hens clucking in the distance. What? Why now? Two deer were standing and looking at me on the porch from Don's field. That's when I heard Garth say, 'Did you hear that!?' from the basement. It's bad when you can discern your husband's voice from the basement while you stand on the front porch. This farm house wasn't insulated well now, was it? The turkeys' calls were consuming the silence, and so I had to step inside to hear more from Garth. He had flipped the breaker again and the hydrogen peroxide pump spontaneously began cycling. The hand-dug, 15' well for the farmhouse is sulfurous and pumping hydrogen peroxide into the pressure tank dissipates the odor. It works some of the time. Anyway, this meant we had water flowing from the well again. The heat had worked its magic!

I've had moments when I've wished everything in my life were different, and today it was so nice when everything remained the same. 

Just think; if those ground hogs hadn't excavated that pipe, we couldn't have delivered the heat where it was most needed. We'll thank them later. Maybe I'll buy some new dog food and hurl it down the stairs. 

I still don't know why those turkeys were talking so loudly. I guess sometimes it's just as well not to know what the animals are up to. 

- Alanna

Farming Futures

So, this is about as much of the farm as I see on a day to day basis: Arden in the foreground with Garth heading out to do chores as the backdrop. I can't complain. It was -17 degrees out this morning and Garth gives me a full report when he stops in again to deliver an egg or two, or an armload of wood. And it's more of the farm than either Ed or Normandy get to see lately. They are spending their last winter away, as Normandy will complete her masters degree in ceramics come Spring. Thankfully, their absence is primarily physical. Edmund seems to be constantly thinking of the farm and the next season specifically. Hardly a day passes without an e-mail or three from Edmund on various farm related topics. And what's stranger still is that his thoughts track with Garth's in real time. I sent Ed an e-mail asking if Garth had shared his latest idea for using excess whey, (which was mixing in barn lime to neutralize the it and then applying that to our pastures as fertilizer) and Ed's response was that he was about to send us the very same idea. So the farm evolves, despite our limited man power at the moment. There is water running beneath the frozen surface of the stream, so to speak.

.

And where does that take us? Who knows, but here are a few of our ideas.

We loved raising heritage turkeys on pasture last year, and judging from the feedback we got from those of you who bought one or two of them, the results were good too. Wonderful even! We are aiming to do roughly the same thing this year. Our heritage turkeys (probably Standard Bronze again), will be given free range on pasture and offered organic grains. The only difference in our management of them from last year is that this year we intend to raise pigs (PIGS!) and our feeding system for them might benefit the turkeys in one way or another. We hope to source whey to feed our pastured pigs as an energy source. Whey is a waste product from butter and cheese making and there is still a lot of nutrition to be had in there, but it's mostly lactose in a probiotic slurry. The grass and other forages they'll eat will provide them with protein and fiber primarily, and they'll need some carbohydrate to balance that all out. If we do find a reliable whey source, there is a chance the turkeys will get to pick through the solids at the bottom of the tank, if they are interested. I imagine we may also seek out un-sellable vegetables and other food waste from local organic growers to offer our pigs, and we'll inevitably produce a fair amount of that ourselves with the reliable abundance of our growing season. 


At any rate, this is all to say that we would like to offer you heritage turkeys raised in this manner at the price/pound we did last year ($9.00 delivered, $8.00 locally) and may even get to reduce the price further if our feed costs come in well below what they were. (Last year grain prices were hugely inflated because of the previous year's widespread drought and dire corn yield. Story has it, the world saw an unprecedented bumper crop this last summer, and perhaps we will see the effects of that in the marketplace this year. That is yet to be seen.) We will raise as many turkeys as there are buyers, and will place an order for poults with these numbers in mind soon. If you would like a turkey from us, or have questions about any part of the process, please send us an email:

cairncrestfarm@gmail.com

I let the cat out of the bag earlier by saying we were intending to raise pigs this summer. If you are interested in buying our pork, you can also send the farm an e-mail at the address above and we will put you on our list to receive updates about the products we have on offer as the time approaches. I am sure you will get to read about the pitfalls and successes here on our blog as the events unfold. 

This spring we will see the first grass-fed Angus/Kerry crosses out of our new bull, Mr. Winchester. It will be a few years before we arrive at a verdict on them (better than purebred Kerry alone?) but it will be fun to see how they behave on pasture. We will be sending a few steers at some point this summer, so again, please e-mail the farm if you would like updates on the availability of our beef and are not on the list already.  

Thank you for your ongoing support and your enthusiasm for what we produce. We were so happy to deliver actual goods to you last year. Garth said he finally felt like a farmer, rather than someone who obsessively moves cows around as a hobby. We excited to have more to offer this year. 

Spread the word. Spread the love! We're farming!

-Alanna

Thanksgiving Delivery

This is just a reminder that we will be delivering our heritage turkeys to Bryn Athyn on Tuesday, the 26th, along with our 100% grass-fed and finished beef. We have a fair amount of ground beef still unspoken for, but only a few individual cuts left. If you haven't yet ordered any and would like to please send an e-mail to cairncrestfarm@gmail.com. We will respond to your personally with all the details you'll need. Cheers!

-Alanna