Better than a mower: Friesian sheep cutting grass

Here’s the thing about buying a farm property with 20 acres of pasture: the grass grows whether you want it to or not.

As spring arrived, we were in a race against mother nature. What to do about all that grass? I knew we didn’t want to purchase a mower. What’s the point of building a “sustainable” grass livestock operation if you’re running over the fields with a gas hog spewing CO2? But it would be months, if not years, before we had all our animals in place to graze those pastures. First, we needed a perimeter fence to keep our livestock in and predators out. Then we needed to start buying animals.

While still living in D.C., I called the extension service for Washington County and talked about installing some sheep on the property. The agent in charge of livestock first wanted to take soil samples. So I met him on the property. The test results came back positive: the pH level was close enough to neutral (around 6.2) that we didn’t need to lime the fields. The soil is a bit low in phosphorous. But I told the agent we weren’t interested in amending the pastures, we wanted the livestock to build the soil and bring it more into balance naturally.

The agent put a request for ewes on a listserv that goes out to sheep and goat farmers around the region. Sheep are docile and fairly undemanding. I figured a dozen ewes or so would be a good start. We’d already ordered five Dorper lambs–that’s a breed of hair sheep, meaning they shed rather than make wool–to be picked up in spring 2014.

While our request was broadcast over the internet, I continued to make inquiries locally and came across a sheep farming couple who’s well known for their flock of Friesian sheep and the cheese they produce.

Friesians are especially prized for their milk production. A German breed, they are wool sheep, meaning they will have to be shorn some months down the road. I was hoping to avoid all that with hair sheep. But now I was beginning to think it might not be such a bad thing to have two different kinds of sheep. Who knows? We might like making sheep’s cheese.

The wife was incredibly helpful when I visited their farm: she asked to see an aerial view of our property, and proceeded to draw a plan for paddocks and fencing. Then she showed me six yearling ewes that, for one reason or another, had run afoul of the lambing and milking schedule. Either their lambs had been stillborn, or the lambs had died, or they weren’t producing enough milk.

All six were destined for the slaughterhouse. The price I’d pay was “meat value.” In addition, there were two old ewes on the property–one 11, the other 14–that the owner offered to throw into the bargain as a moderating influence on the younger sheep.

We sealed the deal right there. By now, my grass was starting to get tall. I needed a mowing team fast. Our fence contractor, who was busy installing posts for the electric perimeter fence, quickly shifted gears and built a permanent paddock with woven wire fencing somewhat more than 10,000 square feet in size. That will be the area where we can house the sheep in winter if we need to, deal with lambing or veterinary issues, or gather sheep for transport.

Expert landscapers, no fossil fuels required

Yesterday, our new landscaping crew arrived in a trailer. The truck backed up to the gate, we opened the door, and the sheep trotted out into their new quarters and immediately set to work.

Chomp, chomp, chomp.

These guys eat grass practically all day long, rain or shine. As soon as they’ve trimmed one area, we’ll use portable electric fencing to move them to another. Their poop and pee enriches the soil, encouraging all kinds of microbes and tiny critters that nourish the grass and discourage weeds. It’s exactly the kind of virtuous cycle we want to establish on our farm, so that diversity abounds and our livestock flourish naturally and without a lot of chemicals, hay, grain feeds or other expensive inputs.

Next to consider: how we get these younger ewes pregnant in the fall so we have lambs next year.

Needed: a vehicle to negotiate our hillside pastures

Many readers responded to our hand-wringing over a tractor purchase and the vote was unanimous: Buy the tractor!

My sister Diane, who owned a small farm in northern Illinois with her husband years ago, was emphatic: “We used our tractor ALL the time, and we only had 5.5 acres.”

Vermont farmer and author Ben Hewitt was equally blunt: “Buy the tractor, Ed,” Ben wrote after I left a comment on his blog. “Get a horse, too, but definitely buy the tractor.”

Fellow sustainable food blogger Rob Frost, addressing our concerns about polluting with a diesel tractor, allayed our fears with his usual command of agricultural factoids.

“Even if you stick to dino diesel, don’t fret the carbon guilt. -Every pound of beef (conventional) is good for ~40# of CO2– your pastured raised beef will offset a bunch of diesel, and don’t forget the sequestering of the soil building aspects of your pasture raised beefies,” Rob wrote. He made a brilliant suggestion for fueling the tractor environmentally. We could, Rob said, “grow your own Sunflower oil (75 gallons/acre) and form a co-op to buy the press.”

“If you want to be purer run sunflowers in alley crops between rows of hybrid poplar / willow grown for fuel/hugelkultur; 1-2 acres would net you 3-6 tons of carbon/year. Have a game plan for when the SHTF, but in the mean time ‘put the mask on your own face first.’ ”

For a moment, we had toyed with the idea of purchasing draft horses instead of a tractor. Wouldn’t it be romantic to farm by hand, without fuel-guzzling machines? We could become paragons of sustainability, we thought wistfully.

Our friend and realtor Gini, who’s been farming a small homestead here for years and owned draft horses with her partner at one time, quickly quashed that idea. “Don’t go there,” Gini wrote. “Even with a background in horses it is back-breaking and you have to be committed (in more ways than one) to living with and taking care of them.”

We had calculated that buying horses would be much cheaper than getting a tractor. Agricultural equipment can be very expensive. But Gini noted that she and her partner were laying out $300 a month to feed their horses. Plus, she warned, draft horses are really big and can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. “They would never intentionally hurt anyone, but if they step on you or squeeze you against a wall, you can get hurt.”

Gini said her partner had been dragged by their horses “on more than one occasion.” Echoing that sentiment, a recent New York Times article linked by one of our readers described how a farmer’s wife had both her legs broken when their team of draft horses got spooked, broke into a run and slammed her into a fence.

At our age, we probably don’t have time to train ourselves on draft horses, nor can we afford a serious injury. So thanks, readers, for setting us straight. It looks like there’s a tractor in our future.

And guess what? We already have one in mind.

Farming on an incline poses challenges

We didn’t move to Upstate New York to spew diesel fumes, nor do we want our little slice of heaven to be forever dependent on fossil fuels. Our plan was to build a “sustainable” family farm around pastured livestock. But now that I’ve lived here for a while, I can see that farming on an incline–such as the hillside on which most of our 30 acres are situated–poses special challenges. Do we need a tractor to accomplish our goals?

First and foremost, water and feed need to be transported to animals on pasture. The feed part isn’t so critical during the growing season–the livestock will be eating mostly grass. But in winter, when pastures are frozen, hay will need to be moved from one location to another. In a rotational pasturing scheme–moving livestock from paddock to paddock with portable electric fencing–water troughs need to be filled some distance from the source. Typically, the water is moved in large tanks that are extremely heavy.

Similarly, there is timber around the property that needs to be cut and cleared. How does the wood make it back to the house in the form of firewood if not by some mechanical means?

In winter, snow will need to be plowed from a driveway that is nearly the length of three football fields. How is this accomplished, if not by a large and capable vehicle?

There’s quite a bit of heavy lifting that goes on even on a small family farm. In the age of industrial farming, hardly anyone questions to use of tractors to get the job done. After all, what is the alternative? Well, the alternative would be animal power, as in draft horses or oxen.

Before there was fossil fuel farms were managed with draft animals. In fact, a few dedicated farmers in the name of sustainability have embraced the use of animal power over mechanical convenience. The question for us–and especially at our age–is whether this is even feasible.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the role fossil fuels play in our lives as grass farmers. We can swear off confined feed lots and industrially produced grain fodder, but we still depend on a thousand other gas-fueled conveniences. How do we get to the lumber yard for materials to build our chicken coop? In a pickup truck. How do we get to the grocery store to buy the supplies we can’t grow? In a car. Where does the electricity come from that pumps water from the well and powers this computer I’m now typing on? How are mail-ordered seeds delivered from faraway sources? How are our tools made?

Think about it for even a minute and you quickly realize that in most cases, “sustainable” farming would not be possible without a significant assist from the fossil fuel industry. Even “organic” vegetable farming in most cases relies on plastics made with petroleum products. Acres of tomatoes and squashes are mulched with black plastic; irrigation water traverses the fields in plastic pipes; greenhouses are covered with plastic sheeting.

We could easily justify a tractor purchase to help manage our new farm. But we’re torn.

I wonder what readers think. Can you see us going Amish? Is there a draft horse in our future?

Or do we just close one eye, hold our noses and buy the damn tractor?

Pastured pork chop, zesty greens, fresh asparagus

The farmer’s market in Cambridge opened for the season in Railroad Park yesterday. They say  it’s the largest farmer’s market in Washington County. By D.C. standards, it’s rather small. Still, it’s not lacking. And the vendors are not just local farmers and artisans, they’re our neighbors. They all live and grow their food within a few miles radius.

What you see in the photo above is a sample from three different farms: pastured pork chop, spring greens with lots of arugula and perhaps the freshest asparagus I’ve ever tasted that wasn’t still standing in the field.

Not a big farmer’s market, maybe, but potent

Of particular interest to me was a young couple–Jared and Shannon Woodcock–who recently left a 10-acre property to start a bigger farm on 40 acres just a few miles south of us. Jared grew up on a small family homestead and studied ornithology. Shannon, originally from Nebraska, taught kindergarten. On their farm, called Taproots, they raise pastured pork, pastured chicken and duck, free-range eggs, pastured rabbit, organic vegetables, and, “coming soon,” grass-fed beef, raw milk and honey.

The couple notes in their brochure that “all of the work on the farm is done by hand.”

And they really mean by hand, because “we are currently retraining a small draft horse to help us out with the heavy work.”

“We want our children to have access to the healthiest food possible,”the couple says on their Facebook page, “and that means growing it ourselves”

I only wish I had started doing the same thing 30 years ago. But then, 30 years ago you would have had to be Amish to think of farming by hand. As far as sustainable farming goes, people like Jared and Shannon are the wave of the future. They could be models for us oldsters as well.

You can learn more about Taproots Farm at its Facebook page.

Fried pollock with sides of slaw and macaroni salad

The lilacs are in glorious full bloom here in Washington County, adding great gobs of color to the roadside scene as I tooled my way to Salem on Friday and the Knights of Columbus’ annual “Moby Dick” fish fry.

As you can see from the photo, the portions were more than generous for the $9 admission. Pollock was fried to perfection in a kitchen truck outside Holy Cross Church. The parish ladies set out a buffet of sides, including at least five interpretations of cole slaw and two macaroni salads, one with hard-boiled egg, the other without. I couldn’t help myself: I had two servings. And then dessert, a brownie with vanilla ice cream.

Was there a rule that everyone in the basement dining hall had to be retirement age? Where were all the young people? Apparently, anyone under 70 has no idea where the good food is. I had a blast introducing myself as the new guy in town and chatting up the longtime residents.

Owner Joe Messina give an evening tour of the vineyards

Then it was a 25 mile drive in the pickup to Amorici Vineyards in Valley Falls and the kickoff event for the annual Cambridge hot air balloon festival in June. For the bargain price of $10 you got three glasses of wine from a choice of the vineyard’s product, plus an all-you-can-eat buffet of cheese, hors d’ouevres and desserts. I particularly liked the chocolate mousse-in-a-cup. I took home a bottle of Amorici’s excellent dry Riesling, as well as some rose and a bottle of “apple honey port.”

Who knew they were making wine in Washington County?

This is an important week coming up in these parts as voters across New York will be giving thumbs up or thumbs down to local school budgets. Here in Cambridge, the school district is seeking approval of an $18.8 million budget, up $1.5 million, one of the largest increases in the area. The district wants to add five teaching positions. The cost of health insurance is up $348,500 and pensions will cost an extra $324,000.

Get out your checkbooks, taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the federal budget “sequester” is making itself felt even here. Should the sequester continue, according to one report, Head Start services in New York State may be eliminated for as many as 4,300 children. In Washington County, Head Start has had to cut $201,370 from the budget.

Meanwhile, all kinds of things are happening in our town of Cambridge. Local Brownie Girl Scout Troop 3627 recently visited the Second Chance Animal Shelter to donate collars, food bowls, pet food and other items purchased with proceeds from their cookie sales. The girl scouts would like to thank everyone who bought cookies this year.

The Cambridge Food Pantry, on the first floor of handicap-accessible Embury United Methodist Church, will be open from 10 a.m. to noon each Saturday, and 1 to 3:30 p.m. Wednesdays, “with few exceptions.”

Today is opening day of the Cambridge Farmer’s Market, which has moved back to its original location in Railroad Park across from the Cambridge Hotel. This is the largest farmer’s market in Washington County, open Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. during the growing season.

You can win a hot air balloon ride, sponsored by the Cambridge Valley Chamber of Commerce, by making a purchase at any number of participating stores. In fact, I was entered after buying some decaf coffee at the food co-0p this week. The winning entry will be drawn by the balloon festival committee June 6. The winner should report to the chamber’s merchandise booth around 6 p.m., or well before the expected take off.

On Wednesday, May 22, from 4 to 6 p.m., kids can “climb in, on and through” a variety of trucks and cars that work in the community. Light food and refreshments will be served at the event in Bob Durrin Memorial Park.

Students at Cambridge Central School are engaged in a “read-a-thon” in which they raise a penny for every page they independently read, proceeds to go to the school’s “family in need” program. Battenkill Books has volunteered to partner with the students.

Green Bridge Gallery is slated to open its doors in early June in the forefront of VARAK Park. The space will feature works by regional artists. “My hope is for this gallery to be a wonderful addition to the Cambridge Village,” said gallery owner and artist Meaghan Wilkins.

The town of Greenwich will be celebrating its third-annual “The Battenkill runs Through It” beach and music festival on Saturday, June 1. There will be tasty ribs from Boneyard BBQ as well as entertainment by the Roadhouse Rhythm & Blues Band.

Meanwhile, the Battenkill Conservancy encourages those who appreciate the river (said to offer some of the best trout fishing in the U.S.) to take part in the “Give Back By taking Out” river cleanup today. Battenkill Valley Outdoors, located off Rte. 313 in Cambridge, will be making canoes available free of charge to all who participate and will shuttle groups to key locations.

Don’t forget the chicken and biscuit dinner scheduled for 5 p.m. at the United Methodist Church in Salem Thursday May 23. Takeouts will be available: $10 for adults, $5 for children.

The Highland Quilters Guild was scheduled to meet yesterday at the Methodist Church in Argyle where Donna Skellie was to teach a class on “slash your stash.” Attendees were asked to bring “a bag of leftover fabric smaller than fat quarters, ruler, rotary cutter, and a clear shoe box or two.”

Friday, May 24, is the scheduled opening reception for a new art show, “In the Sanctuary of the Bird’s Nest,” sponsored by the Hoosick Art Guild at the 120gallery90 on Church Street in Hoosick Falls. The show in the 120 Gallery consists of “a series of transformed, abandoned birds’ nests from Hoosick Falls.”

Renssaelaer County Dairy Princess Lindsey McMahon reports attending an ice cream social at Vandderheyden Hall in Wynantskill. “At the event,” said McMahahon, “we manned a dairy trivia wheel that the kids took turns spinning in order to test their dairy knowledge.”

Things don’t look good for the proposed civic center in Glens Falls. The plan was to pool resources with other municipalities to fund the center. But Glens Falls Mayor Jack Diamond said he’s not sure what can be done to entice neighbors to join in and that the regionalization effort “doesn’t seem to be building a lot of momentum.”

Meanwhile, local Glens Falls film artist Michael Kazlo II was to open the world premier screening of his latest epic, “Cryptid,” this weekend at Jerry Aratare’s Cinematheque movie house on Main Street in South Glens Falls. The movie features a creature with 74 teeth, six eyes, two legs and “all stomach.”

“It’s about a creature created by a mad scientist for a shady bunch of government agents,” said Kazlo, who is also known for his vampire movie, “Blood Lust.”

At a recent meeting of the White Creek town board, town historian Marilyn Robinson reported on past activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the area. She said they “burned crosses, broke windows and frightened Catholics from attending church services.”

Robinson also noted that softball season will start Friday night.

Finally, congratulations to the Arlington Middle School Robotics Team of Arlington, Vermont, for placing first at the 2013 Botball Regional Tournament for Robotics, hosted by NASA and the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

This year’s theme, “The Mars Sample Return Mission,” challenged students to build and program two robots to collect samples on Mars for a return to Earth.

This edition of The News from Up North was culled from actual news reports in the Washington County area and is presented here for the enjoyment and edification of our readers. As always, stay alert and please drive carefully.

The morning mist creeps into the valley on little cat’s feet

Some pictures require very little description. This is looking south and east from our front porch one recent morning, toward the Green Mountains in Vermont.

Chicks look cozy and content in their shipping box

I didn’t know this was going to happen so soon.

I drove to the Agway in Salem for lumber to build a chicken coop and there in a big galvanized cattle trough were bunches of chicks of different breeds, $2.75 a piece. I didn’t intend to buy any–I was going to order some online after I finished the coop–but the lady at the sales desk practically begged me to take some. I guess they were starting to outgrow their enclosure. Chicks wait for no man.

So I ordered 30 Rhode Island Red pullets along with my lumber and they arrived on the truck the next day, along with watering device, feed tray and heat lamp. I scrounged some two-by-twelve-inch lumber on the property and built the chicks a box in the basement five feet by five feet. Conveniently, there were a couple bales of hay in the old goat shed so I spread a layer of that around for bedding.

I tipped the chicks gently out of the box they arrived in and they immediately began scrambling around their little enclosure before making a bee line for the feed and water.

In case you’re curious, we have not been able to source organic feed yet. We got the stuff right off the shelf, a 50 pound bag of Blue Seal brand feed specially formulated for chicks with extra amino acids (no animal products), vitamins and minerals. It’s also medicated, since young chicks are susceptible to certain diseases. I suppose we’ll just have to transition into our new “sustainable” farm lifestyle. We are, after all, in industrial dairy country. Better farm life through chemistry.

Chicks eat and drink all on their own

While we’re working on the coop, we just have to make sure the chicks are well fed and watered. They don’t seem to need any lessons in eating and drinking. And now they’ve started scratching in the hay and pecking at whatever’s down there, just like grownup chickens. Ain’t nature grand?

They do grow fast. This morning I got an unexpected chore when I noticed the chicks flapping their wings as if to fly and getting high enough off their bed to perch on the top edge of the enclosure. Pretty soon they’d be scampering all over the basement, I thought. So I quick cut some two-by-fours, nailed them into a five-foot square and stapled wire mesh to make a lid for the chick pen. They craned their necks and tilted their little heads to see what this new feature was all about.

Most of the time, what seems to make the chicks happiest is just laying around and sleeping under the heat lamp. In fact, you’d think they were all dead, the way they lay there completely splayed out, eyes closed. But then at the least sound they leap to their feet and dart around, watching me warily before rushing to the feed tray.

Little do they know their destiny lies in making eggs for us humans.

New house feature revealed: chimney trap

A couple of days ago we started hearing a previously unknown fluttering sound coming from inside the wood stove chimney. Since the previous owners took their wood stove with them (yet another project: find new wood stove) what we have is the butt end of a stove pipe sticking out of the wall from which you could hear the periodic fluttering quite clearly.

The cats thought this was endlessly fascinating. They would sit under the pipe end, just staring up at it.

Then this morning a plaintive chirping began. I looked inside the pipe with a flashlight and saw nothing but darkness. I figured the bird–whatever it was–was doomed. Nothing to be done for it. But at my wife’s urging (it’s going to SMELL!), I went down to the basement to fetch a screwdriver, thinking I’d try to remove the pipe where it enters the wall and perhaps find the bird there.

Once in the basement, however, the fluttering noises were even louder, up in the ceiling area beneath the stove. That’s when I noticed a steel stove pipe end with a handle on it poking out of the joists. Turns out we have a trap to the chimney I hadn’t known about.

Holding a five-gallon bucket under the trap, I removed the cap with the handle and out dropped a load of soot and one very dirty bluebird. The startled bird darted frantically around the basement, grabbed hold of a joist to catch its breath. I got the back door open and it flew to freedom without any further ado.

A mystery remains: What was the bluebird thinking when it flew into the chimney from the roof? And imagine its surprise once inside, trapped in utter darkness with nowhere to go.

Having emptied the bucket of soot in the compost pile, I’m now thinking what we need next is to clean out that chimney.

Oh, the joys of country living.

Look what comes out of the ground with new well

As another example of farming-isn’t-just-about-growing-food, I direct readers’ attention to the big piles of stone slag that came out of the ground when we had our new well drilled.

You may be wondering why we had to drill a well when our farm property here in Upstate New York came with a five-year-old house. It’s not something we had planned.

Water service to the house was provided by what is called in these parts a “shallow well” fed by a spring some distance downhill from the house. We later learned that this was the primary water source for a farm that had existed across the road, and which included our 30-acre parcel at one time. The people from whom we bought the property had encapsulated the well in concrete, installed underground pipes and a pump to deliver the water up the hill.

All good so far. But then during the home inspection prior to our purchase the water in the well failed a critical coliform test. Under normal circumstances, a bank would not make a loan if the water is contaminated. That was not a barrier for us, since we were paying cash. But since we hoped the owners would stay on the property and maintain it over the winter, we installed an ultra-violet purifier to make sure nobody got sick..

Again, good so far. This spring, however, as we prepared to move in, we called in the local well experts to talk about running water lines to our various pastures for livestock and learned there was no way our shallow well would be adequate.

What we needed was an entirely new well, new pump, new expansion tank–the works.

The drillers went to work, eventually boring down 420 feet and yielding a supply of water that will pump out 20 gallons per minute. The base standard here is five gallons per minute. “You won’t have any problem getting water to your animals now,” the well driller proudly proclaimed.

Okay, but what to do about the big piles of pulverized stone that remained where the well had been drilled? “That stuff makes great fill!” declared the maintenance man from Verizon on a recent visit.

Filling potholes in the driveway with well slag

Hmmm. I looked at the potholes in our gravel driveway. I looked at the piles of slag. A light went on. Pretty soon I was shoveling slag into the wheelbarrow, dumping slag in the driveway and smoothing out the rough spots with a rake.

And that’s been one of my projects over the last week: shoveling, moving, raking well slag. Our driveway is nearly three football fields long. I’m about halfway through the piles of slag. I’ve filled the potholes closest to the house, so my trips with the wheelbarrow are getting longer and longer.

Good thing this is a small farm.

Pork snout: the foundation of a healthy breakfast

I’m a bachelor for the next couple of months on our new farm in Upstate New York. Wife and daughter are still back in D.C. until August. That means I get to eat whatever my conscience will allow, including all the odd bits of animals that I love so well.

Imagine my delight when I stumbled across something called kiszka (aka kishka), a big, thick sausage-looking thing nestled next to the Johnsonville Brats in the meat aisle of the supermarket in nearby Greenwich.

Ingredients on the label read thusly: “pork snouts, pork, buckwheat groats, beef tripe, salt, spices. My first thought: Kiszka, where have you been all my life?

I took some home for dinner and conducted a bit of online research. Turns out in its native Poland kiszka is known as a blood sausage–also called kaszanka-- with odd scraps of meat mixed in. In other words, the perfect sausage for a winter pork slaughter. The version I found at the local Hannaford’s does not contain any blood. My guess is most Americans would not touch a sausage with pig’s blood in it. (Where can I get me some fresh pig’s blood?) My second guess is that the kiszka I purchased also is not a huge seller. But I’m so glad to know it’s there.

Buckwheat groats are a traditional Eastern European grain not much seen in American cuisine, but often sold in the bulk aisle at Whole Foods or the health food store. Mixed with the aforementioned animal protein, the buckwheat results in something like scrapple in a casing, but without the peppery bite of scrapple. In fact, I would describe the flavor of this kiszka as fairly benign, but delicious. It cries out for sides with lift: baked apple or apple sauce comes to mind; a beet salad, perhaps, or maybe even my favorite sweet and sour Brussels sprouts.

Another of my guilty pleasures is baked beans. Yes, the classic baked beans out of a can. They certainly aren’t very good for you by today’s standards–full of salt and sugar. But you don’t have to eat them all the time. I had some with half my kiszka for dinner last night. I reheated the leftovers for the cowboy breakfast you see in the photo above, smothered in fried eggs.

To prepare your kizska, follow the manufacturer’s instructions. Or sear it in a heavy skillet, then place in a 350-degree oven until the internal temperature as measured with an instant-read thermometer reaches 170 degrees. Most likely, your kiszka will be bursting at the seams at this point. The skin is actually quite delicate and totally edible.