Dinner?

My mother recommended the book Eating Animals several times over the past few months. I had been aware of the book when it was published, but I felt little desire to read it at the time. I knew that the author, Jonathan Safran Foer, was a vegetarian, and I knew the book was more concerned with factory farming than with husbandry. I assumed that nothing in the book would be news to me, that I would agree with it about factory farming, and disagree with it in a couple of other areas.

Not to brag, but these predictions were pretty dead on. But I nevertheless truly enjoyed the book. It is well written, and it is more Socratic than polemic in its approach to the morality of eating animals. An early example - Foer discusses whether we should be more accepting of eating dogs and cats. Even when he describes the atrocities of factory farming, he does so in a straightforward manner, often letting the words of slaughterhouse workers stand on their own.

Where do I disagree with the book? It does not go into great depth concerning the supposed health benefits of a vegetarian diet, and this superficial treatment in no way altered my views on what constitutes sound nutrition. I also would have enjoyed a more nuanced examination of two aspects.

The first is the ability of well managed pasture to sequester carbon, and the role this might play in offsetting the supposed environmental impact of raising ruminants. The second critique, which I believe applies to virtually every discussion of diet in relation to land use, is the failure to consider the productivity of land in the long term. What I mean by this is that, while it is certainly true that raising a year's worth of vegetarian food requires a far smaller area than raising a year's worth of animal products, this does not take into account inputs. While even perfectly managed pasture, at least here in the eastern portion of the country, will require some mineralization to stay balanced, the required inputs are miniscule compared to those needed to keep a piece of cultivated land productive.

But the book is worth reading in that it relentlessly asks questions of us that we should be asking ourselves. The food choices we make, as much as we prefer not to think about it, have profound impacts in the world. The fact that we do not see these impacts does not make them any less real, and does not make us any less culpable. Even if you, like me, think you know all about this, I would still recommend the book. If nothing else it is a visceral, rather than simply intellectual, reminder of the unsavory truth.

-Garth

Gaining

In the middle of this, my second winter tending chickens, I've been reflecting on a few changes made since last year that have offered more happiness for myself and for our flock.

In late August I purchased fifty pounds of an organic, locally grown wheat from the Gianfortes (check them out because they are really wonderful). It had been a wetter and wilder growing season than anyone would have lked, and the wheat I bought hadn't dried properly. I stored 25 pounds in a bucket with a lid in our pantry, and froze the other 25. The 25 pounds in the bucket had too high a moisture content and slowly molded.

The upside is that the grains still have enough energy within them to sprout, so I've been transforming this loss into an ecstatic pleasure for the chickens. Those apples above are unfortunate victims of an overactive refrigerator that decided to blast everything one night while we slept. I had them frozen for months, thinking I would bake something and decided to get real the other day. The chickens decimated them gladly within minutes.

I've taken up the practice of scraping the roosts and the floor clear of poop when I enter the egg mobile. There is a long running argument in my head about whether or not this is a waste of my time. The clarity I've found is in the word agriculture. This little arrangement - this house, the birds, the feeding, the watering, the cleaning, the egg collecting - would not be happening were it not for me (we) and our human interest in this relationship. I don't poop on the floor, and I don't like walking in poop in the floor. So, I've become content to let this action be a reflection of my values and let the chickens keep theirs. It feels great to have a clean house, even if it is a chicken house. I collect most of the refuse into a 5 gallon bucket that I empty into a large feed bag when it's full. A few handfuls of saw dust keep the odors down, and we intend to compost it in the spring with the manure we collect in the barn from the cows.

These are the incredible tools for poop scraping.

The dance begins again.

Apparently I am not the only one who sees the value in chicken manure. A mouse (or rat?) has now found my stash and ripped into it. What a (un?)fortunate fellow.

Lastly, I hammered some long nails into the vertical posts of the egg mobile and cut their heads off with our bolt cutter. Now I can plunge the occasional mushy vegetable from our store onto this spear, and the chickens entertain themselves at length in the pecking.

They escort me to the gate most days. Even though the bucket was emptied before them, they can't help but hold out hope for more. They're never rewarded in this, but I enjoy their company.

- Alanna

Garden in Mind

It's winter. At least it seems that way sometimes. Today it's nearing 42 F. and drizzling, with strong gusts from the South. Yesterday I stood near the egg mobile in a raking light that revealed the whims of our flock. They were scripted in lines across the snow, a visual record of their humble habits - a quick jaunt to a mound of high grass, a pause to peck at the impression left by a footstep, a new path home to the feeder.

This same light gave evidence of others' whereabouts. Of course we are cognizant of the mice in our house. How could we not be? They are louder than we are most days. 'Vermin Supreme' is what we've taken to calling the cadre upstairs. Apparently they approach our door in nearly the same way we do.

While the mice ferret away in our walls, and the chickens find satisfaction around life's edges, thoughts of our garden take up firm residence in my mind. This is where I last saw it.

(This photo is no small testament to the biodegradability of pants, by the way. I pulled this skeleton from the goat manure compost that came with the farm. David, who was diligently laboring away with us in the Fall, held them up for the photo once they'd been unearthed. Incredible. My fears of everlasting cast-offs are crumbling.)

SEEDS! Garth and I spent hours with a few catalogues this week and the lists we compiled from our last growing season. What did well? What did poorly? What did we want more of? Less? What's new? I have to give an enthusiastic round of applause to FEDCO-SEEDS. We have ordered our seeds primarily from Johnny's in the past. Don't get me wrong. They are great - proven seeds with fantastic turn around and customer service. We even ordered a number of things from them this year, but they don't encourage the whimsy gardener with their expensive small packets. Their seeds become very competitively priced once you buy 5000 or more of them, but we want to experiment in our garden. We have no idea how a new vegetable will turn out, or if we'll like them once they do, and paying a lot for a small number of seeds is not super fun. FedCo, by comparison, was perfect for us. They offer a number of open-pollinated seeds and they sell their packets cheaply. They write very informative reviews for each variety they offer (my best impersonation of their style - 'This heirloom beet was first made public by Jim Carnville (made up name) of Iowa in 1824. It outperformed Detroit Dark Red in last years growing trial, bulking up quickly, and and the taste, though milder than Bull's Blood, was the favorite in the 2011 Taste the Harvest competition in Maine. It stores well and doesn't get tough if you let it mature late into the season...' you get the gist). They offer FREE SHIPPING (shipping is often a large proportion of the cost of ordering seeds), and they give 10% off orders greater than $100. Man are they good! That said, we haven't seen how their seeds grow yet, but we'll keep you posted.

Lastly, I want to add a special thank you to Jane Ireland. She lives nearby and called me up after reading through the entirety of our blog. After consulting with her sister, who is also an avid gardener, she recommended we grow a strong smelling heirloom marigold. She told me that flea beetles (the bane of this gardener in Spring) follow their noses to our plants. Planting marigolds around the garden and amid the beds will disrupt them enough to give our plants a leg up in the world. We ordered two kinds, and I am thrilled to have the advice of someone whose fought similar battles organically in this area. Thanks Jane!

-Alanna

The Fat of the Land

As a food producer, one of my interests is the relationship between diet and health. In part, this is because I think much of the conventional wisdom concerning the healthiest way to eat is flawed, and iconoclastic positions are exciting things to hold. (Which, in my opinion, can be one of the risks of holding them.) But what I find most fascinating about human diet is the way it highlights the limits of science.

Any dietary change that can improve health outcomes, even slightly, can have a significant positive impact when practiced by a large population. The incentive for organizations, public and private, to promote healthy eating habits is understandable, and the impulse to do so based on incomplete or ambiguous evidence is also understandable, because virtually all evidence in this particular area is incomplete, ambiguous, or both.

A few examples:

1.) Many studies, even the ones that make headlines in the NYT science section, are performed on mice or rats. Often, these mice or rats have been selectively bred for a particular trait, such as a predisposition to weight gain or diabetes. Human metabolism may not be identical to mouse metabolism, particularly selectively bred mouse metabolism.

2.) It is very difficult to establish a good control, particularly with macro-nutrients. For example, in an effort to study diets with a varying amount of protein, scientists might limit total calories to 1600. One group would get 40% of calories from protein, 30% each from fat and carbohydrates. The second "control" group might get 20% from protein, and 40% each from fat and carbohydrates. This would be a particularly poorly designed study, in that all three macro nutrient ratios are different. But even if carbohydrates or fat was kept constant, the other would still have to change to keep the caloric total identical. In other words, there is no way to have a single variable.

3.) Epidemiological studies are always problematic in that the most they can establish is correlation, but with something as complicated as diet, particularly when the studies are based on recalled food intake, they approach meaninglessness.

4.) All humans, so far as I know, suffer to a greater or lesser extent from confirmation bias. Researchers and institutions that have been offering strongly held opinions are likely to discover information that supports these opinions. I certainly view all dietary writing and studies through my particular prism, try as I do to judge them based on their objective merits.

If you're like me, this is about the point in an article when you start wondering what it has to do with gardening.

As previously mentioned on this blog, we have been making an effort to amend the soil of our garden to more ideal ratios, and we would eventually like to remineralize our entire farm. In part, this is justifiable in terms of simple economics - there comes a point at which a lack of calcium will seriously inhibit the growth of a crop or pasture. Yet I still believe it is worth the time to go beyond assuring that the soil has no gross deficiencies, and to make it have as close to perfect as possible a balance of minerals.

There are numerous difficulties.

A few examples:

1.) Soil tests are notoriously variable, based not only on the lab conducting the test, but even due to changing soil characteristics from one month to the next.

2.) There is no universally agreed upon ideal soil profile.

3.) Different amendments, even when providing the same quantity of a mineral by weight, behave quite differently.

4.) Soil is constantly changing - microbiological activity binds up certain nutrients while making others available, roots tap deep mineral sources and draw them to the surface, precipitation leaches each mineral at a different rate, organic matter and mycorrhizal activity in part regulate which of the nutrients in the soil are actually accessible to the the crop or forage.

5.) In trying to translate soil amendment to health, a long, flimsy chain is forged - amend soil (was it properly amended? are the minerals truly available for plant uptake?), grow a crop or forage (what variety? how did the weather conditions alter the quality of the crop?), feed this to a human or animal (all of the issues touched on in the discussion above), and then try to extract some substantial information from the results. William Albrecht's work is the most compelling I've read, but any attempt to deal with issues of this complexity will never be as certain as the link between vitamin C deficiency and scurvy. (And even this clear-cut deficiency disease is significantly more complicated than losing your teeth if you don't eat citrus.)

To me, this is a wonderful state of affairs. Depending on your viewpoint, the world either is or is not completely mechanistic. We have certainly organized large sections of our society around the portions of the world that can easily be mechanized for the sake of huge improvements in efficiency this allows. But what I'm describing, though proposed mechanisms and causal relationships can be speculated upon and doubtless do exist for even so complex a subject as the soil/health relationship, for human purposes, is not mechanistic.

We can take our farm and try one protocol for grazing or soil amending and get great results. But there are so many variables - hundreds beyond those few I've touched on - that it is impossible to foster a delusion that we actually know in the rigorous sense of the term what is going on, to what, if any, extent our actions had a positive result, let alone whether they would have a positive result somewhere else. Certainly, scrutiny and measurement are critical to assessing the impact of an action. But so are intuition, guesswork, gut feeling - all those horribly inaccurate, quite rightly unscientific human traits - and this is immensely enjoyable. There are few areas, let alone critically important areas such as food production, in which specific, unique decision making is practiced so regularly.

I enjoy science a great deal, and I think it is singularly capable of illuminating aspects of how the world works. Even in areas as fraught as diet and soil health, the amount of useful information available is staggering, and I'm grateful to have it. But faith in science is so ingrained that it can easily lead to the assumption that answers exist when they don't. So I will keep testing the soil and amending it in ways that I believe will improve its characteristics, because I believe this will ultimately lead to healthier land, healthier plants, healthier animals, healthier, happier people. Just don't ask me to prove it.

-Garth

Endive - Winter's First Fruit

It's striking that the first emanation of new life here on the farm, in this new year, is the energy of this root. Endive is a curious vegetable.

We planted the better part of one whole bed in our garden to endive seed in the early Spring. They sprouted uniformly and grew with vigor. In the row they looked like gigantic dandelions, albeit lacking the dandelion's other defining features - the glorious yellow flower forming those weightless, reproductive orbs. Summer turned over into Fall, and they remained in place. We let them weather a few hard frosts before harvesting the roots. This encourages them to sprout readily when the time is right.

The Bubels, in their book Root Cellaring, suggest that any root larger than 1" in diameter will yield a tender top when forced . We found our roots had outdone themselves - many of them measuring 2.5 -3" at the head.

Garth dug each plant, removed the withering foliage, and packed the roots into used feed bags with some moist sand. The stuffed bags were placed next to our cage of root vegetables on the dirt floor of our basement. No, the root cellar didn't make the cut last year, so our winter storage is fumbling along below us (it's a little too warm and bright down there to be ideal).

About six weeks before we anticipated wanting fresh greens in winter, we began forcing them. Oh the relentless calender! Garth brought down his five gallon beer brewing bucket from the top of the hops barn. It has holes all through the bottom - adequate drainage. I packed 10 roots in together, cheek by jowl, and filled in the remaining spaces with sand. All the necessary energy is right there in the root, so the medium it's forced in doesn't matter at all. Thankfully Garth had just swept up a summer's worth of activity in the wood shop, just as I was looking for saw dust (from not pressure treated lumber). I moistened the wood shavings and filled the bucket to the brim. In the presence of light, endive will become excessively bitter. I put some wet newspaper over the top and stuck this whole contraption under the desk in the living room. A steady temperature of 50-60 degrees F is ideal for forcing endive.

We kept an eye on them, moistening the wood shavings every week or so, until a pale leaf appeared at the surface. It was kind of a touchy job - heaving handful after handful of musty saw dust into a second bucket, searching for the base of the plant with a knife, all the while trying not to harm its tender shoot. They emerged measuring between 4 and 6 inches. The saw dust came off quite easily under the faucet. I cut a piece of irish bacon into small cubes and browned it with a bay leaf. I then removed the pork and sauteed the chopped endive in the warm pan, adding the bacon pieces back into the mix when the leaves had just softened. We enjoyed this in the company of two other farmers who had stopped in for a night and morning. Staring out the window at the blowing snow -it was a wonderful way to appreciate a winter.

- Alanna

Mixed Bag

Life is a mixed bag.

Some of you may remember all the rain at the end of August and how hurricane Irene really walloped our egg mobile -hens adrift - poultry stress - egg laying cuts - hello, molt! - egg laying ceased.

I put a photo of this hen up last week to introduce our gratitude series and to draw a comparison between our infrequent posts and her infrequent feathers. She caught my eye because she looked so remarkably disheveled. She was one of the last to molt and seemed to have a rougher go of it than the others. Even though it has been a very mild November, it is colder at night now than it was in September.

Our flock has been turning in to roost in the early afternoon before the sun is even down. Once last week I had come in (to the egg mobile) around 3:30pm to check their feed and found them already in quiet repose, lined up along their horizontal perches with thin veils drawn over their eyeballs. This hen was the exception. She was trying to keep herself warm in the splattering of straw that lined her nesting box, looking alert and anxiously curious.

I found her dead beneath the egg mobile on Thanksgiving. I was pushing spent feed over the edge of the trough feeder and noticed a little mess of feathers through the hog fencing beneath my feet. I was worried that she had been cannibalized by the others, or mauled by some ferrel predator, but when I pulled her out it was clear that she had just died silently, ignored by her companions. Chickens are funny that way. One of them was pecking food from around her corpse. Another was enjoying a dust bath by her side. Whatever. Life was too cold for her. She didn't have her feathers. We'll just carry on. I imagine that is what the flock must have been thinking, but I realize that's just what I've been thinking.

The upshot is that after a little less than three weeks with a light bulb on a timer in the hen house (and I thought I got up early), we have our first white egg today. We haven't seen one in months. On the whole, the group has gone from looking dusty and dull to being full of vibrant life and color. Their breasts are a rich orange and gold ochre. Their forms look robust once again. A second laying season commences; life churns onward.

- Alanna

Thank You

Today I am grateful that the farm exists in my life, and that we get to share it with all of you. I feel so blessed to be working collectively on something that requires so much of us and rewards us so readily. I couldn't have imagined the stream of people who've told me how happy they feel when reading the occasional blog post from us. Some of these people have felt motivated enough to visit us here, and many of them are coming from far away. As individuals we are connected to a diverse group of people. Some who were perfect strangers to me have come here because they loved one of us well. I've gotten to eat with them, work with them, exchange ideas and get a feel for each person's unique quality. I just didn't picture this when we bought the farm. I hoped we'd see people, but I just didn't know. It's like hoping for light, and getting a rainbow. Thank you.

This is Kristina, cleaning bits of venison off of a butcher's saw we inherited when we bought the farm. Thanksgiving overlapped with the cutting and wrapping of Ed's second deer. Kristina just sailed along with us. What a hand!

- Alanna