Our primary purpose for our visit, however, was that I was speaking on “Agvocacy: Using the Web to Promote Your Farm.” The presentation was about an hour long, and we had a great group with lots of questions, so we ran over by a few minutes, but as it was the last session in that conference room for the day, that was A-OK! It is always exciting to meet others who recognize the value of using the Web to connect with customers and others who are interested in their farm. It’s simply not possible to teach anyone the technical skills required to build a website in an hour’s time, but hopefully our attendees were able to glean helpful information to launch them into getting that accomplished, whether on their own or by hiring someone to get them started.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, I recommended the use of Content Management Systems — with my preference being WordPress — to build their websites. The great thing about WordPress and the other CMS products out there is (1) they are Open Source — meaning community-driven, free-to-use software and (2) once the framework is in place, it’s so easy to update your site using the WordPress Dashboard. You login to the Dashboard through your browser, and adding Blog Posts or Pages is done using a word processor-like interface — no knowledge of coding required! I discussed this in a bit more detail on our other website, Trasentino Consulting, last month. Visiting there will show you a screenshot of what that interface looks like.

We had a really pleasant time, and came home last night to get our chores done. Three of our Guinea Fowl decided to stay out for the night, instead of in the chicken coop. I get so nervous when they do that, but I was relieved to find them all alive this morning, and desperate to get back inside. It’s been raining pretty steadily all morning, and they were soaked.

I’m having a slow start this morning; I drank quite a bit of tea yesterday, and consumed some of it too late in the day, clearly, because I woke up at around 1 AM this morning and didn’t get back to sleep until just after 4 AM. Needless to say, I really want to go back to bed for a bit, but I still need to get outside and milk. I’m sure our herd is getting quite annoyed, because they are used to being milked about…oh…three hours ago.

So, I should sign off for now! If you attended the class yesterday — first of all, thank you! If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to email me. My address is trase@ the name of this site, omitting the www. portion. Or you can use the contact form located here, which will also give you an idea of what I meant yesterday when I said to make use of that type of form instead of publishing your email address on your site. If you’d like to download a copy of my presentation, here it is: Agvocacy: Promoting Your Farm On The Web

Have a great day, everyone!

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We had an exhausting weekend. It was hectic, with quite a lot of driving around, and yesterday, we unloaded part of our winter hay supply. We were really grateful; our hay supplier loaned us his hay wagon to transport it in one fell swoop. But wow, it was a lot of work. And I only staged bales on the wagon for George to move into the barn, so I feel like I barely contributed. But still, I’m quite sore.

I’m busy getting ready to travel with George to Grand Rapids tomorrow afternoon, where I’ll be speaking on using the web and social media to promote your farm at the annual American Dairy Goat Association convention. This year’s theme is “Grand Adventure.”  I’m going to be sharing what I’ve learned in our adventures of promoting our farm on the web with others, and hope that it will be well-received.

One of our girls had a date last night! Ginger was quite clearly in heat when we went out to milk yesterday morning, as evidenced by Maryman’s rapt attention paid toward her. So we visited our friends at Paw Paw Farm and Ginger successfully mated to their buck Hercules. So, we will have babies from her sometime around March 16th. (Goats have a five month gestation period.)

We are trying to stagger out our breeding schedule this year, so that we will not have to stop milking in the winter. We will be giving each doe the last two months of her pregnancy off, so that she has the energy and resources to dedicate to the kids — who grow the most during that time.

Well, today has flown by, and I need to get started on dinner — there’s a pork belly in the kitchen in need of cooking! See you back here soon.

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On a more serious note… $7000 for a couple of goats? Can they cook or do laundry or… just… wow. Petroleum companies just have way too much money to burn, apparently.

So, they talk about how bad an idea it is to use corn for fuel. I heartily disagree. Why?

1. The world has a finite amount of fossil fuel. If you do some reading on “Peak Oil”, you can see that we don’t necessarily have such a great grasp on what is left in the tank called “Earth”. What we do know, however, is that there are more of us today than there were yesterday.

2. Corn, while used to feed humans, usually takes the form of HFCS and a bunch of other not-so-good things for us. The prices of many of the crappy foods we eat will go up. I’m not so sure that is the worst thing ever. I’m looking at you, America, with the “obesity epidemic” being what it is.

3. Corn, while used to feed animals, is foolish. Ruminant animals, such as cattle, goats, etc. aren’t designed to live on corn. Big-Ag uses corn for feed because the animals gain weight. A lot of it. And very quickly. Also, they can bring the food to the animals? Result; less space needed for a given number of animals. Awesome, right?! No… wait… that’s a CAFO.

4. Brazil has *zero* need for foreign oil. Why? Ethanol. They do, however, use sugar cane instead of corn. We use what we have, and that is corn. I’m not saying it’s ideal, but I like it better than the idea of blowing large holes in other countries and taking the oil we find. Also, up until the time of Prohibition (and what a crock of crap that was), cars ran on either gasoline _or_ alcohol. Farmers used to make their own fuel themselves. However, you can’t make a shit-ton of money in the oil industry that way.  So, I’d like to take a moment to give a nice redacted to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil.

I didn’t write this post to be inflammatory or cause consternation. I wrote it to be thought provoking. It is too easy to read something and agree with it, even though it may not totally fit with your ideals.  I would rather see corn go into my fuel tank than watch it be used to make more junk food or as a “cheater ration” for livestock. I am sure there are plenty of people (some who may be smarter than me) that could find flaws in some of what I’ve said. I invite them to try. And I do not say this with any sense of superiority; I truly ask to be shown where I’m wrong. Just be polite about it.

Our son loves his time here on the farm (he is only with us part of the time) and looks very much forward to taking our little herd out for adventures around the property. This year, he’s tall enough to reach the lower hanging branches on our Maple trees, which he brings down to goat-level so that they can enjoy one of their favorite treats. If you ever visit, you’ll probably notice that the lower parts of our Maple trees are stripped bare!

Winter is right around the corner, and we just read recently that the meteorologists are predicting a particularly harsh season this year. However, we also just learned that an old farmer’s rule was to watch the wooly bear caterpillars — specifically, the width of the brown stripe on their bodies, and the wider it is, the milder the upcoming winter should be. There are some scientists who say that this actually indicates what the previous winter was like, however. Which has left us a bit baffled, because all of the Wooly Bears we’ve seen around our property have a lot of brown this year, and last winter was terribly harsh. It will be interesting to see what actually happens this year. We are hoping for mild, but preparing as best we can for frigid cold.

This weekend, however, we are just enjoying the sunshine and autumn colors, and hope that you are, too!

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Veronica wanted to say “hello!”

I’m having a day of gratitude. But first, you need to know some back-story. It’s been a rough week, frankly, fretting about our resources around here. Any small business has a lot of rough bumps in the road to navigate, and especially so in farming. The past several months, in particular, have been quite challenging for us. While it might seem to some that we should be getting rich from the farm products we sell, nothing could be further from the truth. Providing animals better living conditions, better food, more attention — all resulting in better food — costs so much more than it does to produce anything within the industrial food system. It is impossible for us to compete with their pricing, or come anywhere near it without implementing the same practices that they do, and at that point, why bother? We are so grateful for everyone who has purchased eggs and herd shares from the farm so far, and we know that there are those who, like us, recognize that sustainable, humanely produced food has a higher price tag than that put out by BigAg.

So did Gidget

Despite that, it’s still been a struggle, and even though the farm is now contributing toward its own costs, George’s paycheck from his full-time job off-farm still has to help subsidize our operation here. If you’ve only been reading for awhile, you might not know that I had a full-time job in IT when we initially moved out to the country, but I was downsized out of my position due to my ongoing health issues. So to say we run a tight ship is an understatement, and a laughable one! But we are trying to hard to continuously maintain and improve our animals daily lives, despite our limited resources, and that’s why, back in May of this year, I posted up a Wish List of items we need for the farm. I explained that we would barter for these items, either with eggs, or jewelry-making supplies, or our technical skills. It’s kind of been sitting dormant ever since, but I remained ever-hopeful.

Aw, heck, *everyone* wanted to say “hello!”

And as it turns out, that hope was not misplaced. I was delighted to receive an email from a couple who had some sections of fence to offer us, and they requested some eggs in return. We have those! They even delivered the sections last night, and they are such nice folks. We were delighted to meet them! We now have some more fencing in order to expand our goat’s pasture area. They really are friends to the farm, helping out like this.

As soon as we can get some posts, there will be a caprine celebration due to their additional (unsupervised) outdoor space. Why do I specify “unsupervised?” Because we take our goats on walks, you see. It’s a Balki Bartokomous thing. But we do have a vision of large fenced pastures, with separate paddocks, so that we can do rotational grazing.

Yay! Fencing!

So, thank you so much, D&B — I’m keeping you anonymous here, but you know who you are. We said thank you last night, but I’d like to say it here again: thank you so much, and we really hope that you enjoy the eggs! It is experiences like this that can really bring some brightness to an otherwise stressful week.

As a side note to that stressful week — if you tried to visit the site on Tuesday and were unable to reach it, we do apologize. You see, our internet service was out due to some squirrels chewing on the line (yes, seriously) and it took a few hours to get that remedied. We had been hosting our websites out of the house, but those have now been moved to an outside location, such that if our service is interrupted again, we won’t suffer a website outage. We appreciate your patience and persistence in coming back to find us!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Click on any photo to embiggen

The major project we had to accomplish was improving the duck’s outdoor portion of their housing. Ducks adore mud, in ways I never realized until becoming the caretaker of this flock. If there is an opportunity to create a mudhole, they are going to seize upon it. And so they did, as you can see in the “before” photo.  This meant we would have really dirty ducks, and dirty eggs, too. Even though we have nestboxes lined with clean straw available for them to use in their house indoors, there are always a few jokers who like to lay outside. In the mud. I suppose it is what they’d naturally do in the wild, so I shouldn’t be so annoyed with it, but I am. They have luxurious nest boxes! Why would they not use those? But I digress.

We bought a yard of pea gravel from our local landscaping supply (their last yard of the stuff, I might add!) and went to work. Well, mostly George went to work. Between my asthma (which is severely triggered by cold air) and my legs not cooperating with me very well of late, I was only able to scoop some with a one gallon bucket, but he did most of the work with a shovel, as you can see.

Of course, the past two mornings, we’ve gone out, expecting that we’d find the plethora of duck eggs all laid neatly and nicely inside the nest boxes. Instead, we’ve found…none. Yes, zero. Which is disheartening, of course. We were getting 12–18 a day! We are hoping it is just the shock of their new, cleaner outdoor flooring that has caused a temporary interruption, and they will resume in a few days. Of course, we have no shortage of duck eggs — we have many dozen in our egg fridge! So perhaps a brief intermission is not a bad thing right now.

There was some extra pea gravel, and so George worked on another project while I walked the goats on pasture. Our entry door into the chicken coop frequently ends up with a big mud puddle in front of it, which can create a slipping hazard (and has, on more than one occasion). So, he framed the area right in front of it in, and it is now also adorned with pea gravel. (We’ve become huge fans of this stuff!) It will make things a lot easier in the winter, too, because when we go through a melt/freeze cycle, there was often an ice slick to traverse, which should no longer be an issue.

It’s difficult to wrap my mind around it being October already. I’m going to be speaking on Using The Web To Promote Your Farm at the American Dairy Goat Association Grand Adventure 2011 Convention in Grand Rapids, MI, on the 18th, and it’s coming up fast! It’s been awhile since I’ve had the need to create a presentation, but I’ve certainly done it plenty in the past. I love that I can create it within OpenOffice Impress - did you know that there is a free office software suite out there? You might want to check it out. I’m not paid to endorse it, I’m just a big fan of Open Source software, and OpenOffice is one of the best. I figured it’s worth mentioning for anyone not already aware.

Well, I’m off to eat my lunch! Hope everyone is having a good Monday.

Watch next week for a new section on the site for recommended reading — which is also where you’ll be able to easily access the affiliate link in the future, so you don’t have to go searching for this post.

Thanks everyone, and have a fabulous weekend!

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You know that it is more than an isolated case, too, when you see a retailer as large as Costco demanding that higher standards must be met for the produce being sold in their stores. But is the creation of more rules and bureaucracy for large-scale growers of produce the answer here?  Or should we be zooming out even further to examine why we have large scale growers in the first place?

The farm that the affected cantaloupes have been traced back to is Jensen Farms, in Holly, CO. Now, I’m not saying that they are nefarious people at all — they obviously did not want people getting sick. What I am looking at is the farming system of which Jensen is a part. The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund posted a link to this site on their Facebook page yesterday, and it’s quite telling. Check out this map showing the huge population of CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feed Operation) in the area where they are located. Prowers County, where they are located, is categorized as “Extreme,” and so are five out of the six counties that border Prowers — with the sixth being “Severe.”

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So, what does that mean? Well, so many CAFO’s in an area means that there are a lot of animals. And with a lot of animals, there comes a lot of poop. Dealing with animal poop is something every farmer must do. When there is an appropriate amount of animals for a grazing area, nature is quite efficient at taking care of breaking it down properly. In fact, the poop can really benefit the land, becoming a soil amendment that provides more food for the microbes and the  green stuff growing, which in turns, nourishes the animals, who in turn, nourish us. And that’s how it should be.

But not so in a CAFO. In those operations, animals poop in a small area, and it builds up. Often, flushing systems are used to wash the poop into what is known as a “lagoon” — basically a big storage tank for poop. It’s usually store there for months, where it starts to break down and creates harmful gases during that process. These lagoons can rupture and flood, and sometimes, even a heavy rainstorm is enough to cause an overfill and subsequent contamination of the surrounding soil and water.

Sometimes the manure is shipped to neighboring farms that are growing produce, and used on the fields as fertilizer. But these CAFO operations produce more poop than the fields can ever absorb. Furthermore, most states don’t require any treatment of animal waste — which would be fine, if it was managed properly, but it’s not. So it’s easy to see a multitude of possible means by which pathogens from animal waste could end up getting on fruits and vegetables being grown near a CAFO.

I’m with Joel Salatin. I think we aren’t asking the right questions. I think instead of pondering “How do we make CAFO’s and industrial farms safer?” we should be asking “Why are we doing things that way when we know it’s unsafe and unsustainable?” I think we should be asking “Why are we trying to produce food on an assembly line?” I believe that we should be reshaping our thinking about eating seasonally. I think if we did, and we all got to know where our food is coming from, I mean really got to know that, we’d change the way we do things. I think the local food production is the answer.

I don’t think that we should be eating tomatoes from China year-round. They should come from our own backyards, or the neighbor’s, or a local farm when they are in season. They should have a real flavor that was brought about by ripening in the sunshine, not because they were picked green, put in a shipping container, and ripened artificially with ethylene.  And in the winter, they should come out of a Ball canning jar, because we put them up when they were in season.

Are these unreachable ideals? Well, perhaps lofty, but not impossible. Yes, it’s hard work. But I think it’s also worth it, to know that we have a safe, life-giving (instead of death-bringing) food supply in our pantries and chill chests. We are working hard to make that a reality here. We’re not 100% there yet ourselves, but we are making changes to get there. Have you started changing and improving your own food supply? If so, what kinds of things are you doing? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

To read more about the problems with animal waste management on CAFO’s, please visit the Sustainable Table website.

I wonder if they are so twitchy because they think they’ve spotted a Gelfling?

Guinea Fowl are a great addition to your chicken flock. Why? Well, for one, they are excellent at alerting you to predators and intruders. If they see something out of place, like, say, a hawk, a dog, or a fox, they are quick to sound the alarm, and you can hear it from quite a distance. This alerts not only you, but the rest of the flock, so they know it’s time to get to safety. Of course, the Guineas’ vigilance extends to things like small planes and helicopters flying overhead, but their periodic cacophony through the day is a small price to pay for knowing that you have an extra safeguard in place.

On top of that benefit, they will also help control the insect population, including the deer tick that spreads Lyme Disease. Because they are such voracious devourers of insects, they also don’t require as much supplemental feed. Those bird bellies are already full of ticks, Box Elder bugs, grasshoppers, and flies! We’ve really enjoyed watching them seek out the bugs. We’ve also read that they will attack and kill snakes — definitely a bonus, because you don’t want those coming after your baby chicks or eggs. We’re kind of savoring the opportunity to watch them take out a slithering would-be thief.

They do fly quite well, and we’ve been fortunate in that ours have stuck around so far. But we know from the experiences of others that they do sometimes take extended leave from the coop. In fact, sometimes they’ll go hatch some keets (that’s the name for a baby Guinea) and come back to the coop with their brood in tow. You thought they had left for good? Nope, they’re like Tusken Raiders. They’re easily startled, but they’ll soon be back, and in greater numbers. 

“Who the duck are these crazy looking new neighbors of ours, and why won’t they stay off of our roof?”

Guinea Fowl like to roost in trees. So far, ours have been satisfied roosting on the perches in our coop at night, and sometimes, during the day, they like to fly on top of the duck enclosure and raise a ruckus. This has caused a great bit of  consternation amongst the ducks. Despite this, they are laying eggs like champs — we are getting between a dozen and almost two dozen a day! So if you are in need of some awesome duck eggs, please get in touch. If you are a baker and want to purchase more than a dozen at a time, let us know, and we can work with you on quantity pricing. Buying local will mean you are supporting your local small farm, and it will also save you money in comparison to having them shipped! It will also make these duck hens proud to know that their eggs are being enjoyed.

Well, it’s time for me to eat some lunch and get moving on the rest of my day. Happy Wednesday to all!