Priorities

Wow – a year and a half since the last post, back in July 2016.  This is horrendously long, but with more than a year to catch up on, hopefully you’ll give me some slack and find some time to skim through.

Truthfully, although I drafted a couple of posts during that period, I never published them and now I have turned a corner in life they don’t seem as relevant.  However, I wrote a post back in the spring of 2017, excerpts of which I will share here since it wasn’t a bad effort at describing my state of mind last year (winter 2016/spring 2017).

To begin then:

Winter seemed endless this year.  When I look back on the period from Thanksgiving (October) to Valentines Day (for which we still had snow on the ground), I cannot remember doing anything farm related at all, apart from minimal chores for the laying hens.  Not because there was nothing to do.   I was, frankly, in a bit of a funk.  Last summer stretched me beyond where I could really stretch.  I was exhausted, struggling physically and mentally with the challenge of fitting an enormous list of things to do into small chunks of available time.  I could feel myself stressing about farm activities when I needed to focus on family matters, and knew that my priorities were off kilter. Once all the meat was sold or in the freezer, I came to a grinding halt, farm-wise.

I should have been waging war on the blackberries, winterizing the brushcutter, cleaning out the brooder, mending fences, bringing in the electric fence from the pig run, and all manner of other small but necessary tasks – but I didn’t do any of them.  The pullets came into lay just before Christmas, just as planned, and we quickly went from being eggless to being seriously overstocked with eggs.  Getting them cleaned and into cartons seemed like a monumental job that I dreaded each evening.  As they filled the egg fridge and my cool storage and customers were slow to come back on line after three months with no eggs, I began to believe that even keeping a laying flock was a bad idea.

Not mentioned in that post, I can say now that at that time I had a lot of medical appointments, tests etc stretched out over about a year, and the stress and fear of what they might indicate were absolutely a major part of what I called “a bit of a funk”.  On top of that, other members of the family were dealing with stuff in their own lives, and our family dynamic was changing…

Talking to my husband about this, he reminded me that our primary farming goal back when we first moved to the farm 18 years ago was to produce as much of our own food as possible, selling any surplus to cover costs.  That was it.  For the first three years, that was as big as we wanted to get with farming.  While my dreams were always much grander than that, and we even created an ambitious farm plan based on them, the reality of small children, no money and a part time library job meant that I needed to keep my head below the clouds.  What happened this past year was that I mistakenly thought that with the girls basically all grown up now, and husband super busy with his business, it was now time for me to get going on that old farm plan.  Except that now I work full time at the library and it turns out that almost grown up kids and overworked husbands, while far more independent in many ways, are still very much in need of being kept high on the priority list.

So I did some deep thinking about priorities.  And it was clear that farming as a lifestyle, as an occupation, as a business is only a priority to me.   We all enjoy home grown food, we all enjoy the space around us that living on a farm provides, but I’m the only one who enjoys the “work” of farming, who gains satisfaction from investing personal time and energy into animal husbandry or veggie production.  And I don’t have that time and energy, because I have an off farm job that I enjoy, and it fits far better with family and spouse priorities than farming does.   And at the end of the day, given a choice between a healthy family dynamic or pursuing my personal priorities, family wins, hands down.

When I started developing some health issues and struggling with low energy, and sought help with the farm chores from kids and hubby, they were all happy to pitch in with day to day stuff like collecting eggs or shutting in birds, but no one wanted to commit a weekend morning to mucking out the brooder or pulling up electric fence and storing it.  They saw such jobs as low priority and treated them accordingly.   At the same time, they were all willing to tackle more housework and meal preparation.  So the message was pretty clear.  And if my family is my first priority, then this is kind of a no-brainer. But I really struggled with letting go…

And why do I want to farm anyway?    It’s something deep in my gut.  I usually say that I was raised to it, but that doesn’t really fly, firstly because countless farm kids over the millennia have been “raised to it” and couldn’t wait to leave.  And in point of fact, my being “raised to it” was a relatively short period of my life – about 6 years from age 8 to 14.  Certainly I come from a family of farmers on my father’s side, but almost anyone can say that if they go back far enough in their family history.  Perhaps it is as simple as the fact that I just feel right when I’m working on a fence in the field, or struggling to catch chickens in the wee sma’s on butchering morning.  I am immensely satisfied by the sight of animals – relaxed and content because I have given them the living conditions that make them happy.

I’d love to not have to put a cost on my why.  How can you put a price on contentment, peacefulness and fulfillment?  But the reality is that raising your own food costs.  It costs time, energy and money.  Every minute of time spent spreading manure on a field is time not spent on some other activity.  Every ounce of energy spent moving pasture poultry pens on the field is energy not spent in some other way.  Every dollar spent on animal feed is money not spent on other things.  Maybe it’s all good value, but it depends on what you value.

Which is to say that if I had worked at farrming as my full time job, the money would have mattered a lot more; as it was, it remained a part time occupation for me.  The real issue was the return on the amount of energy and time expended.  And even now, with a massive shift in our farming activities (ie we no longer do any farming), we still keep laying birds because in our area, selling eggs is an easy profit, which we need to help maintain our farm tax status…so money is even now a factor.

 

Obviously, efficiency can mitigate a great deal of these costs.  And selling surplus eggs, meat, veggies can cancel out the cost of feed and bedding, perhaps even create profit.  To a point, economies of scale matter if one wants to farm long term.  It’s all very well to prefer to do things by hand, the slow way, spending all of your time and energy on farming.  There won’t be much money, but if this is the lifestyle of choice, that may be OK.   But you better be sure that if you are doing this with a spouse and/or family, that they are 100% in it with you.  That you and your spouse both believe it will be nothing but good for your children to grow up with their days revolving around the rhythms of the farm.

Clearly we were not all 100% in.  I’d actually known this for years – back when we’d created the farm plan when the girls were tiny, the plan had acknowledged that my husband would be working off farm and not engaged with farm work in any way, and we were both happy with that as part of the plan.  But as we juggled family life, jobs and priorities over the years, I came to realize that Joel Salatin’s wise words, emphasized throughout his book “You Can Farm“, were absolutely correct…

You think Joel Salatin is having one of his exaggerated over the top moments when he says that if you’re going to make a success of farming, you better forget Little League and ballet lessons?  Think again.  Something will have to give.  if you place a high value on extra curricular activities for your kids, that will take time and money and energy from you and your farm.  In an attempt to make it work for all of you, you may well end up compromising your farming values – perhaps you will choose to keep your pigs in the barn instead of on pasture so you don’t have to worry about them getting out while you’re at the ball diamond 3 nights a week through June, even though in your heart of hearts you have always believed they should have the opportunity to root and dig and wallow in a shady pasture. What if you spend 40 hours of your week off the farm, not counting commuting time?  That 40 hours certainly represents dollars coming in, but it also represents time and energy going out – and for me at least, my best energy of the day.  Moreover, that 40 hours is nearly always during daylight hours, which are coincidentally pretty valuable for farming.   And there’s a real danger that you’ll become so focussed on getting to work on farm projects in your “spare” (aka time not spent at your off farm job) that you will have no time to spend on fun or relaxation or time with your family.  All work and no play – that’s a real danger.  Maybe you are able to get your family out there with you, all working together on the various things that need doing and maybe you’re the kind of parent who can make that kind of fun.  Way to go.  But bear in mind that when you get home from that off farm job, most of the family is ready for down time just around the time you are ready to get the blue jeans on.  So they go off for a walk at the beach, without you.  Or you decide to go with them and skip moving the pig fence, putting off the well being of the pigs in favour of your kids. 

I have always been impressed by the example of how the Salatin family lives out work/life balance – of engaging the kids of multiple generations in meaningful farm work while still providing fun and family time.  There were times when we seemed close to living in alignment with the Salatin family’s example…

My family have always 100% supported my farming endeavours.  But they have never been 100% interested in being farmers.  Over the years, they have helped build sheds and shelters, they’ve lugged hoses and water jugs, feed and bedding.  They have been up at the crack of dawn catching broilers for butchering or fetching chicks from the post office.  They have collected eggs, held fence wire, emptied rat traps and held flashlights while we try to secure tarps in a windstorm.  They are as preversely proud as I am that we have not bought chicken from a store in more than 10 years, nor pork in the last 5.

But make no mistake – that balance the Salatins have achieved in their family is a result of one very fundamental priority – that they identify as a family as farmers first.  This one priority is the benchmark which affects other decisions they make regarding extra curricular activities like travel or clubs or other jobs.  In our family that benchmark priority has never been farming, whatever my own private priorities might have been…

My husband and I have placed a high value on education and the broadening of character that comes from travel and similar opportunities.  I have always felt strongly about volunteering and participating in the community.   For all that I love farming, I love my family more, and over the years I have happily prioritized family over the farm.  As a couple, we have felt that our money, time and energy are best spent on family goals.  So yes, our girls were in Girl Guides, church youth group,  and school extra-curricular activities.  While they were both paid for farm work in their teen years, as they took on some major responsibilites while I was at work off-farm, they both looked forward to the day they could work at other things, which has come to pass.  We have travelled quite a bit throughout the girls teen years – and the’ve done trips without us as well.  My husband’s business has grown to the point that he no longer has time or energy for farm tasks.

Family trips overseas, missions trips for each of the girls, RESPs providing for the girls post-secondary education if they wanted to pursue it, extended health benefits – those things were all achieved through my husband’s business success and my off farm job.  While we could have enjoyed a fulfilling life as a family of farmers, and that would have provided it’s own opportunities (and was the path I dreamed of taking), it would have been different financially.  Or not.  We’ll never know, because we took the path we took.

Joel Salatin has said that farming is much easier when you work with Nature instead of against her.  If you take Nature as being something much larger than the physical acres and animals that comprise a farm, it becomes true of the people that live there as well.   I think that a paraphrase of this maxim might be true for more of us than admit to it:  Energy flows best when it’s going in the right direction.   The last few years when I struggled to balance work off farm, involvement with family and grow the farm – I struggled.  Like uphill, upstream, against the wind struggled.

I’m 55 this year.  I’m apparently not one of those people who ages gracefully.  I’ve come to an awareness of the process with denial, stubborness and ultimately a somewhat grudging acceptance.  5 gallons of water feels heavy nowadays.  I am not up for lugging bales of hay any distance.  I take breaks more often if I’ve been on my feet for a while.  If my energy is on the wane, then I wamt to spend it wisely.

And now?  Well, last summer I told everyone these were the last pigs.  I thought I’d feel bitter and resentful about that, but instead I felt peaceful, and relieved.

Which brings me to now, nine months after I wrote out all this internal turmoil.  I’m 56 now, and all the medical tests that began in spring 2016 culminated last May (2017) with a diagnosis of “high risk for MS”, which is a doctorish way of saying that I have some of the symptoms of MS, but not enough to be formally diagnosed with the disease, for which I am supremely grateful.  I have some (not a lot) demyelineation, which is when your body attacks the myelin sheathing that protects your nerves.  This means my feet are more or less numb, one leg has noticeable muscle weakness, and I get fatigued sometimes – tired to the point of finding it difficult to move smoothly, so tired that I am weepy and cranky.  MS is an auto-immune disease, and there are more people diagnosed with it in Canada than anywhere else in the world, which is thought to be related to the fact that one cause of the disease is believed to be vitamin D deficiency, to which Canadians are typically prone living so far north as we do (which makes me wonder about Scandinavia and Russia, but anyway).  Not uncoincidentally, stress is probably also a factor, as it is with other auto-immune diseases, and there is no question I found 2016 to be a very stressful year, in no small part because of the whole work/family/farm balance thing.

So it’s just as well that I came to this relatively peaceful place in my mind about farming without knowing the diagnosis – because I’m absolutely stubborn enough that I would have likely been determined to prove that I could still do what I wanted despite physical limitations.  Not a good reason for farming and probably not possible anyway.  I miss the satisfaction of farm work, but truthfully I’m relieved not to be driven by that never ending “should do” list.   Nowadays, I still work full time at the library, but I go to yoga twice a week, I have upped the quantity of leafy greens I eat by a huge amount, I take a fairly hefty dose of vitamin D daily and I see the doctor more regularly than I ever have except during pregnancy.  I also have seen more movies with my husband, had more family games nights, had long morning coffee chats with our eldest daughter, and gone craft store shopping with the younger daughter.    My husband and I had a fabulous summer getaway on a nearby island staying in a cob house on a working sheep farm.  The elder daughter and I went to a women’s retreat together in September, and the younger daughter and hubby and I spent a few days geeking out over dinosaurs in Alberta in October. It’s a little sad that it took the risk of an auto-immune disease to make me wake up and recognize my priorities for what they were, but I’m there now.  And I’m loving it.

Part time to Full time Farming

Fooling around on the interwebs tonight, I came across a recent video of Joel Salatin that I hadn’t seen before, on a topic he’s really just begun to expound on in the last year or so.  Maybe that’s not quite accurate – much of the content of the video is well known to anyone who has read Salatin’s books or seen other video clips, or even heard him at a conference.  But putting some of the information together under this one topic heading made a difference in the way I looked at it.

Some points(there were many, these are just a few) that hit me during his talk:

• all the expertise needed to run a farm cannot fit on one torso.  A farmer needs to be a mechanic, a salesman, a carpenter, a bookkeeper, etc, as well as being able to handle animals and grow crops.  Everyone has skills lacking out of the total package, and needs to surround themselves with people who can help in those areas.
• bundle chores.  He pointed out that a farmer needs to make sure there is time in the work day for making progress.  If the whole day is eaten up doing chores, the farm will never get ahead.  So get efficient with chores, find ways to cut time spent on routine, mundane, repetitive jobs.  Don’t allow chores to take more than 4 hours of the day.
• Time and Motion studies.  This is old Salatin stuff.  60 seconds to move a broiler pen.  30 seconds to gut a chicken.  He’s got plenty of examples.  He challenges all of us to know this stuff for ourselves.  How long does it take to put eggs away (I think this means once they’re collected, so basically to clean them, box them and store them)?  How long does it take to feed, water and move the broilers?  etc.  We need to know these things so we know how to improve.  This obviously ties in with bundling chores.
• Scale.  He spent quite a bit of time talking about the egg mobiles, another well known example from Polyface.  He describes the evolution of the eggmobile from 40 chickens to 800 chickens and the amount of energy, effort, time, fuel, etc that it take to do both, and why scale can make a huge difference for the farmer.  This comes up again in the Q & A near the end, and the answer is worth listening for.
• Margins.  There are a lot of middle men in farming.  Processing, marketing, distributing, etc.  That’s where a lot of the money goes in commodity farming.  The more of that part of the industry that a farmer can keep for himself, the better.  A small farmer needs to wear more hats.  I find this particular point a little at odds with the first thing he talked about – which was leveraging expertise around you, but that might be because both are probably my weak points.  He went on to elaborate that margins are also about value adding, finding ways to make every possible part of an enterprise contribute to the bottom line.  Even chicken necks and backs.

So with that little summary, I want to credit the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who put on the conference at which this speech was recorded, and who have some great resources for all kinds of farmers.  I first learned about them from Ethan Book of The Beginning Farmer, who is an enthusiastic member.

Here’s the video:

30 years a farmer

Thirty years ago today, Joel Salatin began farming full time, having quit his job as a news reporter just before the weekend.  Everyone told him he was crazy, you couldn’t make money farming, etc etc.

Guess they were wrong.

Look at him now.

Happy 30th Anniversary, Joel!

Future Farmers

Joel Salatin & Michael Ableman

For some time now, I’ve had simmering in the back of my mind a comment Michael Ableman made when he was introducing Joel Salatin in the workshop I attended in June. I didn’t write down his exact words, but the gist of it was:

You always hear that if you want kids to grow up to be farmers, you have to raise them in town.

Michael’s adult son, who grew up on the farm, has gone on to do other things with his life, and his younger son is only 10, so it’s hard to say what he’ll do.  One of the things that Michael found most interesting when he heard about Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm is that Joel’s son Daniel grew up on the farm – and stayed there.  Daniel now runs the daily operations of the farm and is as passionate about holistic farming as his Dad.

Michael disguised it with a grin and a laugh, but I think there was a tinge of envy and wistfulness in this remark.

And it’s made me wonder ever since:  how true is the truism? My own children have no desire to farm.  They”ve lived here most of their lives.  They enjoy country life to an extent, they can see themselves having veggie patches in their backyards when they’re adults.  But not chickens or livestock.  No anxieties about crops getting rained on or parched dry.  No fence mending.  Definitely no mucking out.  They want to be able to go camping spontaneously, travel without worry.  No egg washing or late night chicken butchering.

And yet…an old schoolmate of mine is a third generation farmer, and his son is just back from Ag college, full of plans for local grain harvesting and raising turkeys on the side.  Fourth generation farmer at the age of 19.  Cool.  A classmate of my older daughter (17) lives on a 40 acre sheep farm with his family and owns part of the flock with a view to building his own farming enterprise.  Another classmate, in the poultry 4-H club for years, has begun a breeding business, raising quail and partridges, and is “raking it in” as his buddy told me at the feed store the other day.  The son (age 25) of a friend of mine is a third generation farmer, and is leasing 2 acres to grow organic raspberries and raising a half dozen hogs, while helping his mum with her berry farm.

So why these kids and not Michael Ableman’s son?  Why are my kids not interested, but yours are?  I know there are a number of factors at play, not least among them farming practices, finances, the high value placed on post secondary education, and of course parenting styles.  There’s also the whole nurture vs nature thing – some kids are just not wired to want to grow food, some kids are.

Am I disappointed my own children are not interested in farming?  Not with them.  Truthfully, we did a lot of things in terms of modelling and training and exposure that pretty much guaranteed that they would lean in a different direction.  A little disappointed in us as parents, perhaps, that we didn’t get on the same page about this kind of thing early enough.  That’s more about us than them.  And it’s OK, really.  They understand what goes into creating food, what it takes to grow good meat, and that’s important.  It will make them the kind of consumer that supports farmers.  And maybe they’re wired to for something else entirely anyway.  Besides, my brother grew up yearning for an urban life and now owns a John Deere, has twice the number of layers than me, and is president of the local Agricultural Society. Seeds can lie dormant for a long time and sprout when you least expect them to.  Whatever path my children end up taking, I hope that they find fulfillment and challenge and satisfaction in it.  And if, like my brother, they come back to the land later, well, that’s good too.

I think it really comes down to vocation.  Many of us, in my generation at least, were encouraged to quell any sense of vocation and instead pursue “practical” paths – most of us were pushed in the direction of post secondary education or trade school, our ticket to financial security.  Something our parents didn’t have available to them.  It’s natural to want a better life for your kids.  But I think it’s wrong to view vocation as unimportant.  I think it’s our job as parents to give kids permission to listen for their calling.  Of course we cannot but help shape their experiences by our own lifestyle choices, but within that, we must give them room to discover passions and interests, to explore what makes them eager to get out of bed every day, what makes them feel like they really accomplished something good.  We have to watch for those little sparks, those lights in their eyes, when they suddenly switch on.  It doesn’t take 10 different sports or clubs to find those glimpses of interest and passion.  No, it’s true, your child growing up in the woods may not discover his or her innate talent for surfing.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I mean the thing they’re going to do out in the world that is their contribution, their part of the greater whole, how they make their way.

Even if we’re the best kind of parent raising kids on the best kind of farm, they might not be hearing anything that calls them to nurture the land specifically; instead they might be hearing something that tells them they love to build, or heal animals, cook good food, manage a forest, fix machinery, paint pictures, care for people.  Or not.  They might really feel a call to grow plants for food, raise animals, improve soil…you know, farm.

Salatin as succinct as ever

Broiler chickens on pasture

I thought I’d share a couple of pictures of the state of the pasture after the broilers have spent a day in one place.

There are 65 birds in this pasture pen.  We move it late afternoon every day.  In Pastured Poultry Profits by Joel Salatin, he moves them in the morning.  That’s great if you don’t work off farm, but for us, it’s always worked better in late afternoon – right after work on work days, right before I start supper prep on the days I’m at home.  It takes about 20 minutes from start to finish.  It takes Polyface something like an hour to do 60 pens, which means my system is a “little” inefficient, or I don’t move fast, or both.  That’s OK, 15-20 minutes works for me.  If it’s just the actual moving of the pen, then I probably am up to speed, I think it takes me about 2 minutes…it’s all the other stuff – changing the water, topping up feed, putting the lids back on, that take time.

Why do we do it this way?  First off, to get some poop on the ground! We want the fertility for the soil.  Chicken manure packs a wallop of nitrogen.  Second, the birds actually eat a surprising amount of grass, given the chance.  For the first few minutes after a move, all you can hear is the chirruping noise they make when they’re happy, and the ripping sound of grass being torn off by 65 beaks.  Since you are what you eat, and chickens are no exception, this is good news for those who eat our chicken:  these chickens are getting fresh air, sunshine, protection from predators and a fresh patch of grass and bugs every day.  It absolutely makes a difference to the meat.  A good difference!

Take a look at how much of this they’ve actually eaten, not just trampled or pooped on:

They’ve been on pasture almost 2 weeks, you can see where they’ve been.  This will be a big strip of green about 3 weeks from now, right through to next year:

These birds are almost full grown.  They go up to the processor in just over a week.  It ain’t over till it’s over, but right now, they’re looking pretty good.

Joel Salatin Workshop – final notes

Joel Salatin and Michael Ableman at Foxglove Farm

I thought of calling this Part 4, to match all the other Part 4 posts I did (grin) …but this is the last one, just to wrap up the tail end of Joel’s presentation, and what I gleaned from the Q and A session afterward.

-Gerald Fry writes about genetics.

Grass Fed Beef – with regard to taste/texture there are several factors that make up a pie chart:

-Brix (sugar), genetics, maturity (should be ¾ dam’s weight minimum), stress, handling/loading, Calpone/enzyme and hanging time, minerals fed, cooking.  Ratios vary, but should make up for each other.  There is said to be terroir in grass fed beef (like in wine).

Calpone – enzyme that needs slow cooling time after processing so it can soften connection tissues.  Processors are set for fast cooling, which toughens the meat.  Supplement with calcium (in feed) to overcome this.  Applies to rabbits and chickens too – rigor mortis.  Freeze 6 0r 7 hours after they’ve been dead .  OK to use chill tank, no ice till later.

Minerals – pigs and poultry get it in their balanced ration feed.  Cows get a box of mixed mineral, they can access at will.

The farm is portable.  You do not have to own land, or a tractor or a big barn to be successful at pasture farming.  You can do it with 2 cows or 200.  It is a scaleable model.

The single biggest topic during the Q and A at the end was around hay, sileage and hayleage.  Up here in the PNW, haymaking can be challenging as our damp weather, especially in the last couple of years, has been carrying right through the traditional time for first cuts (mid-May through June).  We had a couple of dairymen in the crowd, and a couple of guys raising beef, one originally from Alberta, where things are much drier for haymaking.  The basic question was not so much a question as a defence, I think:   we need to make haylage or sileage here because it’s difficult to make good hay – but easy enough to make good haylage.  The cows seem to prefer the haylage, the protein content is much higher, but if it’s bad to feed fermented hay to cows because they are walking fermentation tanks, what are we supposed to do?

Joel’s response:  put the cows on the hay field, and graze it instead of cutting it for hay so early.  That will delay the first cut to a period when the weather is better for haymaking.

Dairy guy:  I’ve put gloppy gooey haylage and dry hay side by side in front of my cows, and they pick the haylage first every time.  Doesn’t that say something?

Joel:  If I put a Snickers bar and a piece of broccoli in front of you, which one are you going to eat first?

I don’t think the dairy guys were completely convinced about the idea of grazing to delay the hay.  And when you’ve been doing it one way forever, it’s hard to wrap yourself around a new concept – there’s a lot at stake.  What if it doesn’t work and you have to buy in hay later – a huge cost?  What Joel is implying is hard to visualize from a conventional/traditional point of view – to keep on top of that grass growth in May with our ideal grass growing conditions (damp) – you need a much higher stocking density.  The problem then is that you need a lot more hay to winter them over with, but you don’t have it because you had them grazing the darn stuff.

Joel has obviously run into this one before.  And he acknowledges that his climate and growing conditions are quite different from ours, but he staunchly maintained that it’s a paradigm shift more than anything climate related.  He also allowed that it’s quite possible the grass would get ahead of the cows during the fastest growth curve, and might not be ideal hay, but made the point that it would be better than hay spoiled by mold or damp, and that you would still derive the benefit of delaying a significant amount of grass growth for hay by grazing.

I haven’t broached any of this with Hay Guy yet – but we here at Tyddyn-y-morwr are convinced that the intensive grazing model will benefit our land, our grass, and our income, and we will still be able to make the hay we need for the winter.  We will still need Hay Guy’s services, which is a good thing – he’s been cutting hay here for more than 30 years.  Though he has a very conventional mindset with regard to farming, he used to have a small dairy herd when he was younger, and I know we will rely on him a lot when we get started with four wheel drive fermentation barrels.

That’s the end of the Joel Salatin Workshop series of posts.  Take away messages?  Farming is portable.  It’s about healing the land.  Stacking enterprises is beneficial, economical and more productive overall – cows graze grass, chickens sanitize pasture for cows, and provide eggs, cow patties and chicken manure fertilize fields, grass grows better, cows grow better, more beef, etc.  Sound farming models are scaleable – 2 cows or 200 cows.  Don’t get locked into infrastucture or thinking that confines you.  Go out and grow some food.  And as Joel always finishes every talk:  May your children rise up to call you blessed.

p.s.  As I was getting ready to post this, I found out that Polyface experienced a twister on the weekend, destroying 30 broiler pens out on pasture, and an eggmobile.  As bad as the pictures on the Polyface Henhouse blog look, the only loss of life was some chickens; others in the area were less fortunate.

Joel Salatin workshop part 4 – Cattle, poultry and more

Polyface Farm has many enterprises going on all year round.  In spring and summer, most animals are out on pasture, in the winter, most are brought in or processed.  This post looks primarily at stocking density for cattle, the various poultry enterprises on the farm – eggs, pasture sanitization, broilers and turkeys, and a few words about Daniel Salatin’s rabbit enterprise.

Cattle: stocking density – this is rough, depends on grass quality, animals, climate, season, etc…
-300 head: 1 1/2 acres/day
-100 head: 1/2 acre/day
-2 head: 200 sq ft/day

-brix levels are highest in the evening, one reason Joel moves his cattle around 4pm. Also why people cut their hay in the late afternoon.

– farmers always talk about Average Daily Gain (ADG) as the the indicator of success, but it’s not actually what they get paid for – what they get paid for is Gain per Acre (GPA). If ADG is high, GPA will be low, and vice versa, so the trick is to find the balance.

-stockpiled forage – looks terrible, late summer grass. 100 head on 1/4 acre, they eat it and tromp it in, still builds soil.

-water systems:  Polyface uses full flow valves, 18″ cutout contains the hookup (frost free).  Polyface has a lot of ponds, building more.  the water system for all the grazing areas is from the ponds.

-ponds:  build them.  Joel is a big fan of ponds – when he’s ready to build a new one, he hires a guy with a digger to come and dig it out for him.  He doesn’t use these to catch groundwater, but rather rainwater.  He also doesn’t tap into the small river on the farm, feels river water is for everyone, he can’t justify putting a pipe in it.  By harvesting rainwater, he is able to beat droughts, and the local ecology benefits.  Since the water is used for animals, it goes back in the land anyway and makes its way to the groundwater.

-If you’re making a pond and it won’t seal, put pigs in and let them wallow.  They could probably seal a pond built in gravel (Joel Joke).

-12 feet is plenty deep for a pond.  Have the system set up so it takes water from 16″ below the surface (best water) – have the pipe come through the wall of the pond through a pond collar, and then up in the middle of the pond – hold the pipe vertical with a float of some sort.  Use flex tubing for the vertical pipe.  You will need a filter even though pulling water from below the suface.

Eggmobiles:  his first prototype was built on bicycle tires, 6 x 8 house, nest boxes over the wheels.  It held 20 hens originally, then went up to 50.  He had a hinged fence with 6 panels and 4 popholes on the house, so he set the fence up from each pophole till the area had been done, and then moved the eggmobile.  He originally did the eggmobile as a way to house a laying flock cheaply, but when he accidentally had them near the cattle and saw how they tore into cow patties, he had a eureka moment and the eggmobile idea took off.  Today he is taking advantage of economy of scale – has 2 eggmobiles hooked together (like a train).  800 birds in each.  He gets 200 dozen eggs/day from these two eggmobiles.

-with the early, little eggmobile, he didn’t feed the birds, just relied on them ranging.  With the higher density system he does feed them.

-eggmobiles are land extensive – need at least 50 acres to free range the birds, or else they’ll go to the neighbours or back to the barnyard.  They are perfect for pasture sanitization – the main advantage, the eggs are a side benefit.

-Polyface also has commercial scale pastured eggs, called the Feathernet – shelter is an A frame with scissor braces, 16 ft wide, on 3″ pipe skids, roof is 32 ft long, 20 ft wide.  1000 hens, 1/4 acre enclosed with electric net, moved every three days.  They keep guard geese with the flock to minimize predation by hawks or vultures.  Also livestock guard dog.

-In the winter, hens all come inside – hoop houses – bedding is 18″ of wood chip to start, gets added to over the winter season.  Inside some of them are 4 x 8 slatted tables with nest boxes, chicken feeders and waters.  Small pigs are on the ground, chickens are free but need the ability to get up onto the tables if need be (once they get bigger, pigs eat chickens).  Some houses have rabbits in cages up on racks in the hoop house, with chickens scratching around underneath.  The bedding is composted by the pigs and taken out to the fields when the hens are put back out on pasture in the spring.  The hoop houses are then used for veggies.

Rabbits – Daniel Salatin, Joel’s son, began with a pair when when he was 8 and has been line breeding from that pair ever since – he is now 30.  The rabbit enterprise brings in about $8000, sold mostly to restaurants.

-line breeding was a controversial topic of discussion during the workshop, but Joel pointed out that it accentuates both weakness and strength, and that Daniel culls accordingly.  In nature, animals are not picky about next of kin.  Daniel had 50% mortality rates for the first 5 years of his breeding programme – which worked out ok for him because he had a friendly banker (Joel), and was also very young.  That mortality rate might have been harder to take as an adult.

Turkeys:  brood 1 turkey poult with 5 chicks, so if you have 25 poults, put them in with 125 chicks.  Poults do everything they can to die until they’re a few weeks old, but the chicks will show them food and water which significantly improves their chance of survival.  Joel, like most of us, thought turkeys and chickens couldn’t be mixed because of blackhead, but his daughter in law’s family had always done it that way, so he gave it a try and it works. (as an aside, my hatchery catalogue recommends the same practice). At 7 weeks, put the turkey poults out on pasture.  If they go out before that, they can get through the squares on the netting and just ignore the shock.

-the Gobbledy Go house for turkeys is a portable shelter 32 x 12 ft, and holds 500 turkeys.

About half the audience had some experience with cattle, most had chickens, and a few had raised a couple of pigs, so the type of questions led to some interesting discussions.  The slide show that went with the whole livestock presentation was wonderful.  To get some glimpses yourself go to Youtube and search for Joel Salatin or Polyface farm – many videos are by people who went to field days and you can see many of the enterprises mentioned above.  As usual, the challenge for me is to be creative enough to scale some of this down – 800 hens in an eggmobile is not going to work on 14 acres for example.  But I met a lady who has 50 birds in 3 small eggmobiles – she can push them by herself around her property. She went to this model because of predator issues, and I can totally see that working here.  So one of the big benefits of the workshop was hearing how other people do things.  Which is one reason I like reading farm blogs – there are some great ideas out there!

Joel Salatin workshop part 4 – Pigaerators

Pigaerator Pork is Joel’s term for the pigs he uses in a couple of ways on his farm. Joel is famous for his use of “stacking” various enterprises on his farm, and the pigs are a classic example of how he does this. If you break the word down – “pig” and “aerator”, you pretty much know what their primary function is on Joel’s farm – I should end the post here! But I’m not going to – I have plenty of notes to share:

– Polyface buys weaners (piglets to be raised for meat) and raises them to about 300 lbs
-their first function is to aerate the bedding pack after the cattle leave the hay shed in the spring and go back out on pasture. This is accomplished by adding corn to the bedding pack when they are adding more carbonaceous material. The pack can get as high as 4 ft.  The hay gate is on pulleys so it can be raised to accomodate the bedding pack.

-120 days before the corn in the bedding ferments into nothing.  If you put it in the pack in January, you have to get the pigs in there by the end of March.  70 lb corn per cubic yard of bedding (note:  this seems like a lot to me – any input anyone?).

-a dairy farmer in Ontario using pigaerators grow long stem barley, harvests it with the seed head left on, bales it up like that.  Uses it for bedding, and when the pigs go in, they’re after the grain.  The farmer gets 800 bales/acre of 8ft tall barley.

-10 pigs for 3 ft deep bedding.  Give them an area of about 200 sq ft for 30 days.  They don’t get other feed at this point.   If the area is larger, you can use more pigs, but you have to break them into groups with pipe gates or else only a few do the work and the rest lie around.  When they can’t find more grain, they start to lie around a lot, and you have to move them out.

-deep bedding needs  to be at least 7″ deep to start.  The active biological community layer that makes deep bedding so beneficial starts when the middle is about 3″, with the top and bottom layers, 2″ each.

– Carbon:Nitrogen ratios are important.  Wood chips in the summer have a C:N ration of about 200:1, in the winter, they’re about 350:1.

-about 18″, the biological commuity kicks in and starts to ease up the carbon issue (when you first start, you have to keep adding carbon frequently, as it seems to absorb so quickly).  Don’t open it up – the microbes will exude antibiotic qualities.  Open it up after the animals have gone out on pasture.

– if building a structure that will have deep bedding, design it to accomodate 4ft minimum (wood wall will rot quickly).  Concrete tilt up panels might work (idea from audience). Pipe gates are very handy – to make chutes, to make temporary pens.

– leverage the resources you have.  If you have a woodstove, put wood ash in the spreader with the bedding going out to be spread.  Do the same with minerals that you’re adding.

– be creative with structures – bylaws vary.  Polyface built a hunting camp to accomodate their interns, because a hunting camp was permissible, while a living accomodation building wasn’t.  Someone mentioned that building without permits can be risky in this age of Google maps and aerial views – a definite issue in BC and Washington state.  Joel agreed, suggested painting the roof in camo – someone yelled – “Stealth barns!”.  Big laugh.

-When training pigs to wire to prepare them for living in the woods, use 10,000 volts.  For the woodland paddocks, use 2 wires and physical non-wire gates – once trained to hot wire, the pigs won’t go near a wire gate.  Polyface uses polyprop rope to tie to trees and loop around the electric wire.

-pigs benefit the forest by clearing undergrowth, fertilizing, disburbing the soil.  Joel showed several pictures of areas where pigs had been that were now grassy meadows, thanks to the pigs disturbing the dormant native grass seeds that may have lain there for who knows how long.

-Polyface uses a 10 pigs/acre density in the woodland paddocks – they are in a paddock for about 3 weeks, 1 time a year.  They aim to put them out there when they’re 200 lb – they’re easily controlled with a single wire then.  Everytime they eat the 2T feeder, they get moved.  Grow them out to 300 lb – takes about 2 months

-in addition to the cow shed, pigs are used in the hoophouses after the hens are out.  In some cases they can be in with the hens, but the pigs have to be small for this, because as they mature, pigs are happy to eat chickens.

For more info, the role of pigs on Polyface Farm is mentioned in practically every book by Joel Salatin, also in the many video clips of Joel Salatin and Polyface in Youtube.  Head Farm Steward over at Chism Heritage Farm has written a few great posts about raising pastured pork on a smaller scale.

In summary – I’ve always thought I couldn’t really use this part of the Polyface model -we don’t have woodlands, we will never have the cattle shed set up that they have – but discussion during this section opened up some possibilities.  Joel mentioned that one of the neighbouring farms they have an arrangement with is a horse stables…and he’s always thought it would be great to have the horses on deep bedding, rotate them through stalls and then have a pair of pigs follow in the rotation to churn up the bedding, ready for composting.  Turns out an attendee from Bellingham area does just that – she joked that it’s because she’s too lazy/too busy to clean out the stalls properly, but Joel was thrilled, and so was I, because my barn is set up with stalls from when we boarded horses in my childhood, and I was stuck in my head with the scale of the Polyface model.  But of course it can be scaled down.  Lightbulb moment.

Joel Salatin workshop part 3 – Grass

Joel Salatin, centre – break time

On Thursday the 21st, Joel spoke for 6 hours on Pastured Livestock.  To keep things to a reasonable length, I’ve broken that very intense day into a couple of posts.  Here’s what I jotted down on the subject of Grass and Grazing:

-grass is 95% water, 5% soil.  Earth is supposed to gain weight (a reference to building soil).

-grass grows on a sigmoid curve.  Joel refers to the bottom of the curve as the “diaper stage” – the grass is too watery for good nutrition, too fragile to withstand grazing impact.  The steep, upward curve of growth on the graph is called the “teenage stage”, grass in this stage is good for grazing, it regrows quickly, has lots of nutrition, is resilient.  When the curve levels off at the top of the graph, before it curve down again – that is called the “retirement home stage” of growth.  The grass is mature, growth has slowed down or stopped.

-Grass tastes best, is at it’s most nutritious at the sweet spot – the transition point on the curve between teenager and retirement home growth stages.

-the goal of intensive grazing management is to maintain the teenager growth stage, without violating the Law of the Second Bite.

-all the deep soils of the world were built under prairies because the metabolic cycle of grasss is faster than that of trees, though the growth curve is similar.

-grasslands build soil, but  do require soil disturbance – historically in the form of burning (either wildfires or human induced), and mob grazing – often influenced by predation.

-the University of Nebraska has a 2 acre prairie that they manage with fire, the grass is 12 ft tall.  The reference in Little House on the Praire (was it actually Plum Creek?) to Ma’s worry that the girls would get lost in the tall grass is a reference to this type of grass, not what we think of as tall grass today.

-It is a human mandate to use herbivores to prune grass properly, to stimulate more biomass production than would be stimulated in a static state.

-animals always eat dessert first, so continuous grazing means unpalatable species will eventually become dominant, and the others will disappear.

-Grazing management uses bio-mimicry, copying the predator/prey relationship.  Electric wire is the predator.

-The three M’s of grazing:  Mobbing, Mooving, and Mowing.  (personal note:  please see Redemption Farm’s excellent summary of the three M’s).

Mobbing:  cows only “work” (eat) for 8 hours, they spend the rest of the time ruminating (lounging, while they regurgitate and chew their cud).  Mobbing encourages them to eat everything evenly.  What they don’t eat, they will trample, which will still create biomass.  We want them to eat eagerly and efficiently, but not stressed, and to maximise their ruminating time.  It takes 2 months for cattle to learn to graze aggressively, if they’re not born to it.

Moving:  (Joel joke – mooving) – wild beasts (bison, buffalo, etc) move daily – predator pressure, fresh grass, to get away from flies attracted to their manure.  If they stayed, they would violate the Law of the Second Bite, and prairies would not build soil.  Use electric wire to mimic this movement.

Mowing:  cattle are great big fermentation tanks with four wheel drive.  Feeding them food that has been fermented already (sileage, haylage) makes their stomach environment too acidic, and therefore a breeding ground for things like e coli.  Their stomach is designed to do it’s own fermenting, from fresh grass.

-need to design a landscape that attains the the 3M’s.  On most farms, there will be unalterable features – access lane, house/buildings, ponds, etc. Use electric fence on both sides of the access road, allowing at least 16 ft for the lane, because of the cattles fear of the wire.  This will be a route to move the cattle up and down the land without going through pasture.  Use landscape features by surrounding them with permanent fence.  Between these features and the access road, you can create homogeneous paddocks with temporary electric wire.  Put gates in corners, even though for equipment you would prefer to put them about 10 feet away from the corner.  If you do that, calves will bunch up in the corners and panic and not go through the gate -so put gates in corners.

-there is starting to be a trend toward taking advantage of older forage (stockpiled grass) toward the end of the grazing season – this is grass approaching or in early retirement home stage.  It looks terrible – tall, yellowing, gone to seed, but can extend the grazing season without the cattle losing weight.  Every day you don’t have to feed hay is good.

That’s it for grass/grazing notes – I have more that I’ll post in a day or two related to stocking density, watering systems, etc.

For detailed info on what I recorded above, read one of Joel’s earliest books “Salad Bar Beef“.  Stockman Grass Farmer is a journal all about grazing practices.  Youtube has some great footage of Jim Gerrish (electric fence/paddock set up) and Greg Judy, another huge grazing guru in the farm world.  The original that the others all derive from is Andre Voisin’s “Grass Productivity” – it’s pretty scientific, ie don’t choose it for bedtime reading, but it’s information dense.  “Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence” by Bill Murphy is a much easier read, and might be easier to find through your local library.   This was the kind of stuff I went to learn, so you’re welcome to seek clarification on what I wrote, but I probably can’t answer questions requiring expertise or experience! If you have a favourite print or web source of grazing info, please share in the comments!

Tomorrow is pigaerators…aren’t you excited?