The Wonder of a Blow Torch

All the chores get harder right before we bring the animals back to the barn for the winter. Thankfully, these last few days it's been a breeze just walking across the barnyard with a few buckets of water. The cows are in the pasture behind the lower barn and the sheep are cozy in their straw inside.

Before all this happened, however, there were days of frozen buckets, frozen faucets, frozen valves and frozen water troughs. We spent a frustrating week driving the monster truck (an enormous, red behemoth with two 50 gallon tanks on the back) out to the cows. The trick was to leave the tanks empty and the valve open at night so that it didn't freeze shut. One night, however, we discovered that our vigilance just wasn't enough. Caught between needing to get to an engine mechanic class and the approaching darkness, there was only one answer to the frozen pipes. The blow torch.

We spent a chilly few minutes while Theo heated everything up until it worked. This was after the chilly thirty minutes spent looking for the blow torch in the first place.

But, the cows got water, we got dinner before our class, and the blow torch got a new permanent home where we always know where it is. Success!

Jersey: The Dramatic Cow

I apologize for the poor quality of this picture, but it's worth pointing out that Pride, our dairy cow was thrashing around so much it was impossible to get a good shot. Our vet, Dr. Ledeoux, was showing us how to give an IV which is an important skill for a farmer when the vet is either too far away or unavailable. We tied Pride's halter to a post and he put a small needle in her jugular. All hell broke loose.

I admit that getting shots is not the greatest thing in the world. However, it's not as bad (I imagine) as being eaten alive by rampaging tigers, which is how Pride was acting. She immediately dropped to her knees and, hanging by her halter, began to flail around as if she was dying.

Dr. Ledeoux assured us that this was completely normal behavior for a Jersey and something about their breeding causes them to put on a show like this.

Goodbye and Good Luck!

Our Head Grower, Nate is leaving us to start farming in Northampton, Ma. We're very happy for him and very sad since he's a great teacher and great friend. In the best way of saying goodbye, we drank beer, ate s'mores and burned brush. We're looking forward to getting to know our new grower, who will join us this winter and hopefully we'll have a great season together!

We Are Not Deer!

Hunting season is going strong in Western Mass and sometime you just need to stick dish gloves in your pockets to keep from getting shot.

Chicken Love!

How sad that we're culling chickens. How nice that they love each other.

This moment actually happened during a dissection (gross). Caitlin and I went to get eggs, not being cut out for sheep insides. Taking pictures of chickens was much preferable.

Also, This Happened

I found this on Brian's facebook page: www.factoryfarmmap.org

10 Days...

So 10 days is a long time to go without writing anything. There's not even a good excuse: no illness, no cow escapes, no dire internet outage. But I have lots of good stuff coming up including water: it freezes, how tractors and animals are completely the same, hunting season clothing, fire, blowtorches and more! Stay tuned!

Meat CSA

If you ever want to become even colder during late November, pack up the meat CSA. It's a chilly job.

We run a CSA (community supported agriculture) of meat through the winter. It's 12 pounds of meat once a month for five months. We try to give a good variety of the lamb, pork and beef that we raise and, as you can see, folks lucked out with some bacon this month.

The whole CSA versus farmers markets conversation is very interesting (right up there with meat versus vegetables). On the one hand, in a CSA you are paid up front by your customers and deliver your product later. You have a stable income before even beginning the farming process. The downside is that if your turnip crop fails (horrors!) or your freezer doesn't work, you've lost the product that someone has already paid for. Farmers markets offer a bit less stress, since if you thought you'd have 50 chickens and only have 45, you haven't lost five customers you've promised chickens to. However, you then have to move all your meat/veggies/whatever out the door with no guarantee that you'll be able to sell all that you've produced.

So, as ever, the conclusion is that you'll never make much money farming. At least I'll always have something to eat!

Find the Turkey!

Can you spot the turkey? Did you even know turkeys could fly that high? Cause we didn't.

Hannukah

What did you do today? Because in honor of our Hannukah celebrations (it helps to have our very own Rabbi), I made a menorah out of purple top turnips. Can't wait for latkes and applesauce for dinner!

Yummy!

We successfully turned this:

into this:

And let me tell you, it was delicious.

The Great Sheep Mistake

As the fall draws to a close, we're sending the last few animals to slaughter before we have to feed them hay, which is expensive. We spent a morning loading the first six lambs. We backed the trailer up next to their fence, then created a second pen encompassing the trailer. We lured the flock with grain so that they would walk into the back of the trailer and we could send the ewes out the side door while keeping the lambs we wanted inside.

Everything was great and fine and Olivier pulled the trailer out of the field into the barnyard, readying for the drive to the slaughter house. We were set to start cleaning the hay barn (a dusty task, let me tell you) while he took them away.

Luckily, Andrew looked in the trailer and noticed that instead of six lambs, we had five lambs and a ewe. Whoops! We all trooped back into the field to release the ewe from an untimely death and Justin and Olivier captured a new, white lamb. We're really, really glad that Andrew stopped by right then!

Lambs ready to go:

Hauling the new lamb to the trailer:

The ewe escaping her fate:

The good old days

It has sadly come time to say goodbye to our original groups. We've been split into two groups of six for the last two months, but upon returning from our thanksgiving break this morning were informed that the jig was up. I've officially switched from group b to group a and we've been shuffled around to work with new people. Things just won't be the same...

Next up, the transition from bird to dinner, a close up look at turkeys and did we really send the wrong sheep to slaughter? Or did we catch it in time? Stay tuned!

Chainsaws!

Let's just start by saying that chainsaws are TERRIFYING. I'm amazed that the people I know who use chainsaws are still alive. I would never, ever, endorse chainsaw use without being trained and wearing protective equipment. I would even go so far as to say that I would not be in the presence of someone using a chainsaw without training or equipment.

The guy who trained us (and made us a mushroom) did a good job impressing that you can be completely safe, in control of the situation and experienced and make one mistake (or not even- accidents can just happen for no reason with huge things like trees and limbs under tension) and you're toast.

We spent three hours hearing about both professional lumberjacks and amateurs who had gotten a kickback by touching just the tiniest tip of their saw to something and had 50 stitches across their face, or spring poles (small trees caught under a larger tree) that threw them 100 feet. Bill (or Chainsaw Bill as we like to call him) recounted a few horror stories of his own and they seemed to all happen right when he thought everything was fine. Not in rain, or snow, or in a seemingly dangerous situation, but when he overlooked something that seemed simply normal.

So, with all this in mind, and sure I was going to drop dead at any moment impaled upon a tree limb, we headed into the woods.

We ended up learning how to fell trees (I did two!), take the limbs off and chop the trunks into firewood (or what would be split into firewood). We learned a technique to fell a tree exactly where we wanted to put it and practiced hitting a flag with the crown of branches. Very cool.

So yeah, chainsaws = scary if not used correctly. The damage it can do is not worth being unsure or untrained.

This little piggy...

These little piggies went to slaughter. This little piggy came home as bacon and ham.

Actually, not quite yet but we're waiting for our delivery from the slaughter house. Most of the meat will go to our meat CSA while one whole pig will be for us.

It was a bit strange to load up the animals we had been feeding and taking care of. They went off into their green trailer to return to us in vacuum sealed boxes. I miss them a bit, especially how excited they were to be fed. Luckily, come this spring, we'll have piglets!

Chicken Slaughter part 2

So there are a few ways to slaughter a chicken. You can cut off their heads which allows you to know for sure they're dead but requires quite a bit of force and coordinated effort. Or, you can slit the two veins on their throats, but theres a slight delay between doing the first and the second and there's no way to tell how much pain Mr. Clucks might be in during that.

We were told that when we go to do it, we had to be very sure and very ready because the worst thing you can do (and I do believe this is worse than killing them) is to maim or wound them. You can't hesitate at all once you start. For our first few birds we each did, we had an instructor next to us with their own knife which was reassuring.

I finally stepped up to the plate and chose the throat slitting method (later I moved to the decapitation after I had practiced on a dead chicken and knew I could do it well). I think the worst part of the whole process was lifting the chicken into the cone. It was flapping and trying to get away as I held it by the feet. Once inside, it calmed down, except for judging me with its beady little chicken eye.

I took a few deep breaths and then picked up the knife and slit. The moment was a lot calmer than I had anticipated, followed by the chicken body flapping and kicking.

We didn't know if a sad or happy picture was appropriate so you can just look at whichever one you choose.

I cut off its head once it was done bleeding out.

The next step was scalding them. The trick was to leave them in the hot water long enough their feathers loosened but not too long they started to cook.

Next, we strung them up and plucked their feathers into trashcans. The chickens we raised were meat birds (the gross kind that can't walk since they grow so fast- next time we've asked for more normal birds) so they were bred to have easy to remove feathers. We slaughtered a rooster as well and he was much harder to pluck.

After plucking, we cut their feet off and and their necks. We scooped their organs out of their body cavities, keeping the hearts and livers. That was the only part I didn't do since I don't do so well with body innards.

As we moved through the morning, we accumulated a number of heads, guts and feet which we then took to the woods and dumped.

And, finally, we were done. Two days later, we had chicken pad thai. Delicious.

Chicken Slaughter part 1

Chicken slaughter was quite the day. We went down to the tool shed where killing cones, buckets, a pot with hot water for scalding and a long table for evisceration were all set up. It was a bit strange to see our barnyard transformed during breakfast. I had also just given the broilers (called that to distinguish chickens between layers for eggs and those that we raise for meat) breakfast and water before heading down to slaughter them.

We started by talking about a bit about what it meant to kill an animal for food. We were all pretty nervous (and pretty nauseous, at least in my case) and it was nice to take a moment before we started. Betsy, our resident rabbi, spoke a little about the cycle and rhythm of life and death and after that we were all a bit calmer and felt better.

We sharpened our knives while the water continued to heat (it had to be 160 F to properly scald the chickens so the feathers were easy to pull off). Reid, who was showing us knife sharpening, had just shot a pheasant that morning so he pulled it out of his truck and showed us, pheasant style, what we were about to do.

Below is pheasant sans innards:

Once we were properly trained and grossed out, we went to get the first few broilers. We put them in this nifty chicken box and they happily sat there clucking while we took out our first victim...

A Milk and Cookies Kind of Day

Today was alternatively grotesque, violent and morbid.

We started by slaughtering chickens this morning, picking through moldy squash this afternoon and splitting wood this evening.

So a big warning: my next post, once I get all my pictures together, will be of the chicken process. Not for the faint of heart.

The good news is that so far I'm a natural at finding rocks for stone walls and splitting wood: it must be genetic.

Can't Wait

I'M SEEING MY CATS TODAY! And Rebecca and Anthony and we're going to have a fabulous weekend. Can't wait!

Also also...

We pressed cider today! And I forgot my camera!

Cider pressing is incredibly easy (with the right tools) and really fun. We made 9 gallons in an afternoon and had loads of fun climbing the apple trees to shake down the fruit.

Also...

Also, this happened. I'm refering to the part about spraying molasses all over the grass. Lee, my fellow farmer friend, is blogging as well. She, however, can add captions and borders to her pictures, making them look much cooler. I'm very jealous.

Chores part 2

The other side of daily chores is the weekend chores. We have a rotation where we each do it every six weeks and I just had my first weekend. Emma and I did all the animal chores two days in a row which was pretty intense. That said, if this was my own farm, I'd do that every day. Of the year. Always.

Weekend chores are supposed to be low stress but the animals decided to play jail break on Saturday. The day began with moving the sheep. We have this electrified net that is set up in a pasture and a second one that's set up for them to move into in the morning. We normally lift up the panels that are close to each other and they scoot through to the fresh grass. We don't really know what went wrong, but a number started getting tangled in it that morning. It ended up, after much sheep herding with the ram and a lamb on the outside of the fence.

Sheep when separated from their flock go a bit crazy and try to get back with them. Not so easy for us, since they were only a few feet away eating yummy grass and didn't realize they weren't with the rest of the sheep. As I wrote a few days ago, there are a few friendly sheep like number 60. Then there are sheep that want nothing to do with up. Emma and I spent 10 minutes walking after the ram and lamb as they walked away from us. Very frustrating.

It ended up with Emma running back to the house to get grain and some reinforcements. While lured towards the grain, Emma and Sophia tackled the lamb and wrestled him to the ground. We dragged him, one each on his front legs, towards the fence and shooed him in.

The ram was much tougher since we didn't feel comfortable tackling him and not getting hurt. He also has one thing on his mind and it's not food so he was not all that interested in our grain bucket. Needless to say, after much stress, coersion and herding, we got him back with his ladies.

The rest of the weekend was better. The cows had escaped a number of times the past week and we convinced them to stay in their pasture with much extra hay. Luckily I have a few weeks until my next weekend responsibilities!

Nightlife

Besides attending local football games, there's not a whole lot to do out here. Luckily, we make our own fun. We: do laundry, make dinner, knit, play music, draw, read, make yogurt, make cheese, make cookies, clean up the dead mice the cats leave us, have campfires, have craft nights, having singing nights, dehydrate various foods in our dehydrator to see what they come out like and go to bed around 9 pm. It's all very wholesome.

If all else fails, there's a night club in Orange. Hopefully it never comes to that.

Rabbit the Ram

We had some excitement the other day when our ram showed up. His name is Rabbit and we found out that it's probably because he doesn't walk: he hops. Actually, getting him to hop is an improvement over dragging him by his halter a quarter mile to the ewes. We realized that that just wasn't happening and got a great lesson from Josh, the bearer of the ram, in how to flip a sheep over. Sheep become very docile when on their back, a fact that came in handy this weekend when two sheep escaped and we had to tackle them under the guise of giving them grain.

Post ram flip:

Dragging Rabbit:

Giving up on dragging Rabbit and loading him into the truck:

Rabbit securely in the truck, ready for his trip to the ewes:

Harvest Celebration

On Saturday we celebrated the end of the harvest season. We invited everyone who works on the ridge top with us as well as some friends and family. Most everything was cooked in our wood fired bread oven. We also ate some delicious road kill. A few weeks ago, a deer was hit by a car and lay dying in our swiss chard patch. One of our neighbors came out to dispatch it, rather than let it linger in it's state. We had it butchered and served the back strap, or tenderloin with dinner. So. Delicious. We don't eat much meat here so a piece of juicy deer like that hit the spot (this came after the discussion Emily, Justin and I had if it was ethically right to eat animals).

Andrew supplied a wild turkey that had also been hit by a car and he killed and brought back to the farm. He brined and roasted it. Better than any turkey I've had to date, so I'll have to see how Thanksgiving matches up.

Theo made mozzarella, Sophia made feta, Justin made pizza dough, Emily made brownies, Emma made scalloped potatoes and Bradley brought hard cider (I did chores and lots of dishes).

It was so nice to have everyone sitting together down to dinner, plus children running around the house and delicious food from the farm.

Chores part 1

Every day, pre breakfast at 7 am and post work at 4:30 pm we have a lovely part of our day. The first week I was here, I was on horses/chickens and pigs. There was a lot of grooming, feeding and egg collecting. The next week I was milking and taking care of our beef herd which is the most intense chore and I was really glad when it was over. After that I had sheep which involved moving their pasture in the morning and playing with them at night. This past week and this current one (due to the rotation switching and having new partners to work with) I have house chores which means cooking breakfast every morning and cleaning the house in the evening.

Chores aren't really that bad, though they all have their perks. Except cows, which drains your soul of energy between milking in the morning (I have it down to 30 minutes! woo hoo!) and moving their fence at night. The horses, chickens and pigs are fun since they're quick and there's nothing like seeing pigs eat. Sheep is great since it's a breeze in the morning and the evening involves simply petting them so they're used to humans. Number 60 bit my leg one day but I've forgiven her since she's the friendliest. House chores are kind of a pain since it's a bit stressful to cook breakfast for 15 people every morning but it's really nice not to have to go outside and to sip coffee and keep warm so early.

Black Radish Man

This is Black Radish Man. He likes to remind you to eat your radish juice. Sadly, he's getting old and wrinkled as Black Radish men don't have very long life spans. Eat your black radishes!

Driving Horses

Probably one of the coolest things we've learning so far is how to harness, hitch, and drive a team of horses. We spent two days in Brattleboro, VT working with Jay and his eight horses. I was really glad to have ridden before since it is quite complicated and Jay has high standards for his horses and for us.

We started off each pretending to be a 'horse' with our eyes closed and bailing twine hooked over our thumbs. The twine was held by our partner who was standing behind us and we walked around a series of chairs, tables and a wood stove (the scariest when your eyes are closed and you can feel it getting hotter). It was really neat to see how a horse might feel and how little pressure you needed to get your point across to turn left or right.

We then got out the lines (not called reins) and looped them around a post to practice gathering them up and our hand position.

Only after that could we go down and get the horses. We led them through figure eights around buckets until they were bored and we were dizzy. The point was to practice asking them to move slowly and take one step at a time, and for us to learn how to keep them behaved and communicate with them.

Jay and his wife served us a wonderful lunch from their farm and took us out for a drive in the afternoon.

We also practiced walking behind them steering which was incredibly hard.

The next day, in the middle of a storm, we took them out driving which was awesome. The wood stove came in handy for frozen fingers and we spent the afternoon practicing harnessing. All told, it was fascinating and incredible to have learned so much in two days!

And perhaps the best part... Jess the six month old foal:

Black Birch

No presentation on Black Birch is complete without some Birch Beer (high fructose corn syrup included!)

Timber Framing part 2

Boring machine? Not boring: awesome.

Chiseling? Also awesome.

Our beam is starting to look like a beam, complete with a half finished tenon, three mortises and hopefully correct measurements.

Timber Framing pt 1

We're building a timber frame shed for our saw mill (ironically using the saw to mill the timber for it's own building... it's like a meta-shed). Upon hearing this news, I wanted to reply that I had built stairs for Savoy and timber framing would be no problem what-so-ever.

Instead of power tools and the measure once, cut five times mentality that I'm used to, we're doing as much of it by hand that we can. If we had time, we would probably turn the logs into post and beams by hand as well.

The saw mill is equally awesome and terrifying. Timber frame days are quite cool and while perhaps not completely focused on farming, it's nice to know how to do all this for when I buy a farm with a broken down barn.

Manure part 2

While parasites in farm animals are quite a headache, there are luckily a few ways to manage them. Besides rotating pastures, de-worming and keeping healthy flocks and herds, animals themselves create what we like to call a 'zone of repugnancy' around their own manure (you'll notice this if you ever drive by a field that has been grazed and there are lots of tufts of beautiful grass that have been left behind). Naturally, many jokes have ensued since it's an amusing topic.

To counteract these 'zones', we harrow them which is basically dragging a huge metal rake across the whole pasture to spread everything out. Strangely, my lacrosse stick is from a company named Harrow.

Harrowing is incredibly fun and we got a chance to do it both on the tractor and with our team of horses, April and Ruby. Theo and I helped Olivier harness them and attach the driving seats. Riding behind horses is akin to being on a roller coaster and harrowing a sloped field with them is as good as a trip to Six Flags (without the dippin dots, cotton candy and 64 oz. sodas).

After the horses were done for the day and back in the barn, we took the tractor out to finish. Earlier in the day we turned two manure piles and added the contents of the chicken coop to the newer one. I'm getting quite good at the tractor as long as it involves driving it in straight lines and doing fun things with the bucket.

Manure!

Yes, folks. This is what I'm doing with my Penn education.

We spent an afternoon at a neighboring farm spreading compost from his oxen (enormous creatures! not at all what Oregon Trail prepared me for. these would never drown in a river) in exchange for all the blueberries we can eat come this summer.

America!

How pastoral: sitting around after a long day of harvest eating apple pie (you'll have to turn your head but it's decorated like Hobbes). The real story? We made pie early in the evening when we still had energy and baked in it in the bread oven. By 8:30 we were all exhausted, laying on the couches and wondering how much longer we had to stay up. Five minutes post-pie and we're crawling into bed, ready for chores in the morning.

Tacos!

Tacos! For lunch!

We're in the middle of our gloomy last harvest day. There's nothing quite like hacking cabbage stems apart in a 70 degree downpour in late October. Sadly today is Nate, our head grower's, last harvest before he leaves us for a new farm near Amherst. We're making the best of it by cleaning out the lower barn all afternoon and having lots of fun in the mud.

Friday Night Lights

After one weekend spent in Athol, I was prepared for the lack of nightlife and another evening spent on the farm. Luckily, inspiration struck in the form of the Athol High School football game. Go Red Raiders! We pulled out a win against the Red Hawks (hometown unclear) and didn't win the 50/50 raffle while drinking hot apple cider. Can't wait for the next home game!