CurtBlog

There has been a ton of stuff going on this summer related to our research into farming and trying to learn new things.  I'm getting behind on blogging about it, so here are a few highlights.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited our friends James and Esther our in Boulder Colorado.  They work as one of the "live on the farm" couples for Haystack Mountain goat dairy.  Haystack Mountain is a pretty well established cheese producer, having products in Whole Foods and other national stores.  They make all of their fresh cheese at their main cheese factory and they buy much of the goat milk for that from various sources.  James and Esther work on the farm where the artisan cheeses are made from goat milk produced right there on the farm.  These include raw milk cheeses that are aged anywhere from 2 - 6 months or more.  We got to help out with a fairly large cheese make on Memorial Day, Kristin and I were up to our shoulders in the curds and whey for awhile.  We helped out with making the Red Cloud and Queso de Mano.  You can see all the cheeses here.

We also got to visit a restaurant we've seen featured in some cooking magazines called The Kitchen.  They are one of the most eco-friendly restaurants in the country, reusing or recycle almost 100% of their various types of garbage and sourcing about 80% of their food locally.  They have a community night where you sit around a long table and eat family-style with about 60 strangers for only $35/person.  It's pretty amazing and we got to meet some cool folks.  We also visited the Boulder farmer's market, which has some pretty amazing people producing some cool food.

At home, we had the opportunity this year to dig up the backyard of our friends and neighbors Keith and Joni and create a small garden.  While it could use more sun for best results, we finally have a small plot of ground to grow some veggies and herbs.  We prepped the ground, some of which was under an old sidewalk that we had to break up, using a deep bed concept.  We put some composted cow manure and mushroom soil, along with some blood meal and organic fertilizer in the soil as we prepared it. It seems to be working pretty well for the most part.  We also added a bunch of our worm compost a week or so ago and noticed a big growth spurt in a lot of the plants, particularly the tomatoes and squashes.  We also have several varieties of peppers, several types of basil, a lettuce mix, a mesclun mix, beets, chard, oregano, rosemary, thyme, leeks, beans, sunflowers and some other flowers to attract beneficial insects.  I'm probably missing a few things.  All in all, quite a nice mix for a small urban garden.  So far the only thing we've harvested is some salad greens.  We got a bit of a late start and also started a lot from seed, so we're still waiting for some things to really get started.  This is mainly an experimental year, so we are learning a lot about how much sun things need, starting plants inside, fertilizer needs and so on.

We are also participating in a CSA this year with Scotch Hill Farms.  We picked them partly because they also do goats and grow a number of herbs as well. It's been a bit of a rough start to the season with all the rain (they are just south of Madison), but we've been getting some good stuff and eating a lot more vegetables which is always good.  They drop off at the Southport Green Market which is just south of us.  They are a fairly new market and still a bit sparse to be honest, but it's great they are trying to do something in that community.  A few weeks ago I got to meet Bob and Jenny from Harvest Moon Farms, another couple who are professionals from Chicago who just started farming a few years ago.  So they are kind of a few years ahead of where we might like to be.  They grow a lot of organic vegetables, including 15 kinds of garlic and plan to start doing pastured beef soon.  They also represent a number of other farmers in the Madison area, so their stand at Southport has items from other farms like cheese, maple syrup, whole organic chickens and so on.  We are planning to go up to visit them and help out on our way to a college reunion weekend with a bunch of Kristin's Wheaton friends in July.  That should be a wonderful trip as we'll get to visit a couple farms and see a bunch of our favorite people.

So I've gotten really behind on my blogging, my current project schedule isn't very conducive to blogging.  I often blog on my lunch break, but I've only been taking a half hour lunch lately so I can leave work early enough to beat most of the evening traffic rush.

Anyway, the second farm we visited on our Urbana trip was Prairie Fruits.  We were super excited to see their operation as they were the first farmstead goat Grade A certified goat dairy in Illinois.  They sell their cheese at the Green City Market and also some Chicago cheese shops and restaurants.  We got to hear a lot of stories about the travails of getting a small dairy certified, the current USDA system is just not built to really address the smaller sustainable farming operation.  This is something that is ultimately going to need to be fixed if this country is ever to move away from the factory farm system. 

Here's a prime example.  Typically you have your large factory farm dairy operation with hundreds of cows.  The milk is supposed to be tested for antibiotic residue, but due to the volume it really doesn't happen.  They just do samples.  And yet an operation like Prairie Fruits has to test every batch of milk they do and they don't really use antibiotics in the first place.  They ended up getting their own license and certification as a lab so they can do their own testing because it's such a hassle for a small producer otherwise.  Another bit of weirdness, you have to have a license to transport milk.  So normally, a milk tanker truck pulls up to the farm and carries it off to wherever, sometimes a cheese factory.  Since they do everything in the same location, they need the same license to move the milk from the milking parlor to the cheese make room and the two rooms can't share a wall.  It's just ridiculous. That's Illinois, who has little experience with farmstead cheese making.  Not sure if it's quite that bad in other states.

Visiting this farm was a pretty big deal for us, with a lot of firsts.  First time to milk a goat for both of us.  First time Kristin got to bottle feed baby goats.  First time to use an automatic milking system.  We also learned about small batch pasteurizers and some of the other necessary equipment.  It gets pretty expensive.  So I think we figured out a couple of things on this trip.  One, we do really like dairy goats and a lot of the work involved with raising goats.  Two, it's a huge time and money investment to get a real artisan farmstead cheese operation off the ground.  So we need to do a lot more thinking about that.  I've told a couple of people I feel like we learned more from that one day than from reading a book.  There are a lot of practical things you really just have to see, like how goats are fed and housed, how long things take to do for a particular herd size, that sort of thing.

So actually a lot has been going on in our ongoing research of all things farming, organic and gardening.  We are learning a lot, but there is still a lot to process and I don't want to do too much thinking in public. But I can at least talk about what we've been up to and what we have learned so far.  I'll have to do a bit of catching up.

A few weeks ago we took a trip down to Urbana to visit a couple of farms.  We drove down on a Saturday morning and spent the day with the Millers on Rush Creek Farm.  We met the Millers at a slow food event on the farm where the heritage turkeys are raised that we have purchased for the last couple of Thanksgiving dinners.  They both work pretty much full time, but also raise Kiko meat goats on about 10 acres of pasture.  They also have some pastured poultry and a horse.

Some more pictures are here.

I've been talking to Kristin about chickens a bit on and off because I really want to have some fresh eggs even if we just do a small hobby farm.  And maybe some fresh pastured chicken to eat as well.  I grew up on a commercial chicken farm and I have no desire to do that, but heritage or specialty breeds on pasture does interest me.  Kristin has never been around chickens and doesn't particularly like birds as a species, so she was skeptical.  When we got to the Millers, we found out they had about 60-80 chicks about 8 weeks old in their garage.  They were planning to move them out to a pen to get them ready to go on pasture, so we got to jump in and help them catch and move chickens.  Kind of a trial by fire for Kristin, but she gamely stepped up and did it and it wasn't as scary as she thought it might be.  It was really cool that she got a chance to hold some chicks and also just watch their behavior, which is fascinating.  They are such funny creatures.  Within about 5-10 minutes of being out of the garage, they were foraging around the small pen, scratching and pecking around and having a good old time.  It's pretty obvious when watching chickens that they are really made to be wandering around plenty of pasture, finding worms and grubs and eating vegetation rather than being stuffed in a pen (or even worse a cage) hardly able to move.

As far as the meat goats, they aren't bottle fed and so they are tolerant of human contact, but don't exactly seek it out.  The kids were playing up a storm though and reminded us of some extreme sports show as they played around on an old set of concrete steps.  Meat goats are certainly not as loveable in general as dairy goats, but they are also quite a bit less work as we were to find out when we visited Prairie Fruits the following day.  So the jury is still out for us whether we would ever go that route, but it was good to see what was involved even from just a practical standpoint, such as fencing, cost and type of feed, how they are pastured and so forth.