Livestock Live and in Color

Welcome to the paddock move! As mentioned in an earlier post, the animals are given a set amount of square footage based upon the time of year, the density of forage and the amount of livestock. During the main season they are moved twice a day, every 12 hours, and the paddocks tend to be much smaller. If the paddock is too big, they wont eat all the grass, and thus wont utilize the space well. If it's too small they will not be happy with you, and cows are far from shy about expressing this. It's a difficult balance, but when done correctly can leave a pasture densely fertilized, while encouraging the growth of topsoil as well as the biodiversity of grasses and plants available for them to eat. Through this process, Eric has been able to restore fertility to these once heavily-farmed crop fields, while even bringing back native grasses that have not been seen on the farm for decades. Amazing what an hour of work a day will get you.

One other noteworthy bonus to keeping the cows and lambs together is that they do not share parasites. In fact, the lamb serve as a dead end to cow parasites and visa-versa. Also, the presence of the cows helps protect the sheep from predation. Symbiosis in motion

Darla is the brown one with the horns––rest in peace, my love.

Note: If you listen closely you can hear Eric's call. It's what we use to get their attention, and it works like gangbusters. Guesses as to what it is?

Slow Food

<---- Flood line on barn. The window on the right is my room.

I remember the day we got the pigs––I mean, are you kidding, I was pumped. It was a memorable week all around, really. The flooding in Nashville wasn't limited to Nashville––many of our farming friends in and around our little wonderland in zone 6 were effected. One friend lost all the topsoil he'd ever built––something akin to losing your life's work in a weekend. There was 11 inches of water in my room in the barn and I kayaked for the first time that day, directly out of that barn. That next week we got the pigs.

We raised the pigs in what will become the 2012 garden for the majority of the summer, then moved them into the forest to finish them on acorns, hickory nuts, roots and whatever slop we had around. I spent a lot of time with the pigs, preparing their slop with the help of fermentation, and trying not to get too attached to them––a grave mistake I made with the turkeys. The pigs and turkeys both have wonderful stories, and I will get to those in the coming months. For now, however, onto the eggs...

The hens are out on pasture, they follow behind the cows and lamb in the Management Intensive Grazing System, similar to that outlined by Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The idea is that you keep the livestock in small paddocks to help concentrate their manure and move them to new grass often. If left to their own devices, cows will happily eat only the grass they like––the candy and ice cream, as Salatin describes it––and hang out in the shady treeline where they will drop their manure and fertilize the living daylights out of their lounge spots, not the pastures. In our system, we limit the space they can fertilize with electrified netting, and move them every 12 hours. Every 3 days we pull our chicken shacks (a roost, a feeder and an egg-mobile) behind. The chickens then spread out the manure in search of nutritious, buggy treats, and we collect the eggs daily.










The plastic on the high tunnel was put up this summer, and it was an intensely hot project. Once done, we plowed and tilled it, then planted spinach, chard, carrots, kale, radishes, etc., and kept it cultivated. What irrigation we need comes from a gravity fed pump, and there is no additional heating. I can't say enough about how amazing this project has been, though––not much is growing these days, but I picked my spinach on Monday.

The last piece to this puzzle is the english muffin, which came from Whole Foods, the uncontested birth place of the english muffin. Naturally.

I guess you could call this a summary. A very extreme summary. A small look at the things it took to make my breakfast this morning. The reality is that this sandwich was no less than nine months in the making. Despite how hard the work is, and how hard it is to justify taking the life of a pig (a very controversial topic within myself), I did my best to do all of that justice. If working on a farm did one thing to me (and it did many), it was give my breakfast a story, one I can't help but think about every time I eat absolutely anything,


Breakfast: a sausage, egg and spinach sandwich on an english muffin. But that doesn't tell any sort of story, now does it?