Ramarama!

You may have heard that farming is cyclical. This is most definitely true. The seasons take on a certain resonance when the variety and type of work you do, the worry that tugs you awake at night, the hopes and sadnesses, are intimately connected with them.

For us, each season has its own "issues". Winter is about waiting it out, about hidden life growing in the bellies of the ewes, in the earth, in suddenly prodigious fleeces. Spring is lambing, an anxious, joyous, busy time. Summer finds us working to ensure the flock flourishes, worrying about parasites, chasing cute little lambie escape-artists back into the fold, rotating and rotating those scant pastures.

Fall...? Well, fall is about harvest, yes. Thanksgiving and all that. But it is also about sex, or at least, as we shepherds prefer to call it, "breeding". This is the time when we appraise our flock (Those that did not fall victim to the "Harvest" part of the season) and plan for spring lambs.

Before last year, there wasn't much of this "planning" to do. We had one single (nasty) ram, Gus. He was our breeding program, all of it. Last year, there were three eligible batchelors in Maggie's Farm's version of "The Dating Game", Charlie, Harry, and the adorable Mr. B. This year, Harry has gone on to other pastures, but we have added his offspring "Chance" and also happen to have acquired Rahm, another ram lamb with a whole other pedigree.

So we've been thinking a lot about these four gentlerams and the qualities they might pass to their offspring....

Charlie Bucket, the handsome guy at the top of this post, is the number one ram around here. He is huge and massively horned, but Charlie is a cautious soul who doesn't push his weight around much, an important trait in a ram. We like his build and his genetics as well. Oh, and Charlie is very resistent to parasites, an excellent, excellent quality.

Then there is Bombadil. This guy is a real sweetie, personality plus and not in the least aggressive, even when our crafty puppy Luka sneaks into his stall and scarfs down his meager grain dessert. Also, he brings a different set of genetics, a nice gray black fleece and a long-bodied build. He isn't the largest ram in the land, nor the most parasite resistant, but we like him anyway. Lots.

Chance is a recessive little guy-- a spotted solid moorit, carrying the genetics for the badgerfaced pattern as well-- with a really nice fleece. He has potential, and we'd like to see what he can produce with Copper and Daisy, our big, solidly built ewes.

And then there is Rahm. Rahm is 3/4ths AI from Jager Farm. He has an excellent meaty build and a nice thick fleece. He is (so far) calm as the day is long. A pretty cool cat all around. On the down side, he's got some scurs going, scurs we hope can be offset by breeding to some cleanly-polled beauties. This is a picture of Rahm, on the day he arrived. He's a bit dirty and burr-full but a real looker nontheless.

In short, fall is not all harvest and heartbreak around here. It's also about long-range planning. Long range planning and a whole lotta hope.

And so, without further ado, here are the Maggie's Farm Fall 2008 breeding groups:

In Pasture #1... Charlie with three lovely ladies: Leela, Cedar and Acorn. (Yes, Acorn is polled. But as her lambs were scurred last year, we thought we'd try her with the strongly horned Charlie in the hopes of keeping some of her superfriendly lambs in our horned flock.) Leela has a beautiful fleece, but less than stellar build. So, hopefully, Charlie will improve that aspect in her offspring.

In Pasture #2... Bombadil is hanging with the lovely Caroline. Yes, we know Caroline is horned, but she is a ewe lamb and we are hoping lambing will be a bit easier for her without the hornbuds to worry about.

In Pasture #3.... Chance with Copper and Daisy, two lovely and quite assertive ladies. Okay, Chance is not thrilled with this arrangement. The girls aren't showing him any love as yet. In fact, they are downright mean. But they are also terrific mothers and well-built genetic powerhouses, so he'll have to stick with them long enough to impart his offspring with fine soft fleeces. Also, Chance's recessive little self will tease out any latent color in these two white ewes. Copper may be homozygous for white as she has never had any lambs that were NOT white. But we know Daisy can produce solid moorit. What are these two ladies hiding? Chance will tell us.

And finally, in Pasture #4... the stolid Rahm (Yes, we did name him after THAT Rahm...) with our lovely and quite cleanly polled Penny. Rahm will also serve as our "Clean-up Ram" as well.

Here's to fall's high hopes!

Ten Bags Full

Shearing day.

You gotta love it, always hectic with herding dogs herding (or trying to anyway) kids underfoot, spur-of-the-moment gatherings (Always seems to happen somehow...) and lots and lots of sheep wrestling. And in the middle of it all, Andy the shearer, as calm and cool as a guy with an upside-down sheep in his lap could be, separating animal from mineral (or fiber anyway).

What a scene! At first, the sheep look so skimpy and strange without their fleece!

Here is Penny before shearing:

Here she is after:

Not so stately, eh?

But if you're looking for raw skirted fleece, we have some nice ones. We'll be sending them off for processing in a few weeks, so let us know.

The Sound of Wonder

Earlier this year, we hatched several "homegrown" eggs in a borrowed incubator.


As advertised, it was a great experience for the kids. The humming box in the corner, forgotten for most of three weeks all of a sudden became the object of intense interest as scattered pips and taps were heard within it. The first chick, "Peeper", hatched while we were getting ready for bed. But by the time the second chick kicked its way out, the kids were thoroughly engaged. And lucky for us, Dan's penchant for technological innovation and a homemade tripod resulted in our capturing this, the sound of absolute wonder (Along with a lot of extraneous family stuff):

The 8 chicks that resulted from this experiment are adolescents now, freeranging about with their cousins, aunts, uncles outside:

Scary

A week or so out from that horrible day at the slaughterhouse, we have a freezer and a half of meat, a bit of hay money, and a little less hard feeling. Distance does that to you. Thanks to all those who offered a few kind words. I really appreciated your encouragement and wisdom.

I'm sure I'll think (and write) quite a bit more about this in the weeks to come. But it's the end of October, and my thoughts turn, quite naturally to other scary stuff:

Halloween, for one thing. The Maggie's Farm crew had a happy one. Micah, determined to be scary at all costs, morphed into "Zombie Micah". Joe, became a "spooky dude" and Anna, interested in space, the universe and everything these days, was an astronaut. Dan was a ram, or-- depending on your cultural reference points-- a refugee from Mad Max. Here they are setting off to trick or treat:

Election Day is another scary fall thing. I'm trying to be relatively apolitical here on the farm blog, but I am not keen on another 4 (or 8!) years of Republicannonsense (VERY scary indeed!) So I'll be up in Keene, New Hampshire helping get out the vote for Obama on Nov. 4th.

Have a good one, whatever your political persuasion.

Hard Harvest

Yesterday, we took another step-- a giant, uncomfortable, yucky step-- in the direction of "real farmness": I brought a vanload of sheep to a slaughter facility in NH.

Now, I knew it'd be a hard thing. But I had no idea just HOW hard a thing it'd be.

These animals were not pets, but they had names, a history with us, distinct personalities. And so I faced the drive with trepidation, reasoning with myself all the way. Self, I said, We can't afford to keep 21 sheep,the money and food from these sheep will ensure that we can afford the others. What's more, these animals, by virtue of health, build or all-out spookiness, are not suitable for breeding and keeping, and we can't, in good conscience, sell them as such. Furthermore, we've given them good, carefree lives, better by far than those of the animals in supermarket freezers and this is just part of the process...

Oh I reasoned alright.... but this helped my reluctant self not a bit. I drove the two hours with a heavy heart, barely able to look back at the make-shift pen behind me.

And when I arrived at the USDA facility (USDA sounded a lot fancier on the phone than the scattered warehouse the place turned out to be) I began to tear up immediately.

What I really wanted was to turn around and go home. I wanted to, but I didn't. Some of these lambs had been presold for meat, and so meat they would be. Besides (here's some more rationalization...) Keeping this bunch would add close to 10 dollars a day in hay expenses, a burden our farm, and family couldn't bear. So I opened the back of the van, and helped the handler shoo my little group into a holding pen.

I didn't say good bye. I didn't even dare to look at them. I went into the small office and went through the paperwork; I checked off which cuts, which parts. Then I went out to my empty van, put it in gear, and cried for about an hour. Really. It thoroughly, thoroughly sucked.

I sat in a bagel store parking lot for another hour, re-justifying. Checking off all the reasons why this was the right and logical thing to do, and I felt like crap about it just the same. I thought about going back to retrieve my sheep-- WAIT! Never mind!-- but once their feet touched down in the dirt of the "facility" they couldn't return to the farm to transmit whatever bacteria and illness they might have com in contact with. It was done. A done deal.

I had planned to go to work after the drop off, but this was overly hopeful. Honestly, I didn't know what to expect, didn't know the day would be so out and out miserable.

Perhaps "real" farmers are used to this process, and bringing animals to slaughter is just like any farm chore for them. But It's caused me to question the whole farm premise.

When we began this enterprise, we hoped to grow good quality wool and breeding stock, and perhaps also some meat to feed our family. The trouble with this model is that meat is the farm product people want the most. We have had no trouble selling meat lambs, and if we had 20 more, we'd probably be able to sell them as well. Local meat, with good reason, is in.

Wool, however.... wool is slow going, expensive to produce, hard to market and such a specialty product. Ditto for roving. Our wool is beautiful, knitters love it, but there are a lot less knitters than meat-eaters out there.

And breeding animals? Well, we've been able to find breeding homes and fiber homes for some of our lambs but we had 11 this year, and the economy's in the toilet and several big Icelandic Farms have dispersed this year, so... nope, not sustainable.

Before yesterday, meat seemed like it might be a way to go, but I'm feeling pretty shaky-- okay, REALLY SHAKY-- about that now. Dan and I like to joke that the sheep are our retirement plan (This is a joke because the sheep COST us a heck of a lot of money each year and have yet to break even close to even.) But we cannot continue to pour money into the farm without the sheep at least earning for their own keep.


But the meat idea is a lot more real for me today than it was a week ago. I do not want to get callous about death. Yesterday,I talked the one of the young handlers at the slaughterhouse while picking up the hides of the animals I'd dropped off. The conversation went something like this:

Me (blinking back the day's ever present tears): "It must be hard, what you do..."

Him: "Oh yeah. It's not easy to get the cuts right. People think they can just do their own. Like my buddy who got a moose yesterday. I told him it ain't so easy"

Me: "No, I mean the killing part..."

Him: "Oh, THAT. That's easy. We do 250 animals a day. That's the easy part..."

When you go to the supermarket or buy local or order a deli sandwich at subway, somewhere, somebody has unloaded a bunch of scared animals off a truck into some ugly warehouse and asked somebody to kill them. That reality was pretty abstract for me, until yesterday. Even locally grown, free ranging meat is not a pretty thing to contemplate. At least not right now. Perhaps if we had a traveling butcher who'd come and do the slaughtering right here on site... perhaps at the new, "state of the art" facility opening up a few towns over this year, one designed by Temple Grandin to minimize stress... Or perhaps, I'll go back to the primarily vegetarian diet of my 20's, win the lottery and and buy hay for our growing flock like nobody's business....

Or, perhaps things will look different in a day or two.

If you've been involved in this process, or plan to be, I sure would appreciate some advice or feedback on this.

Goodbye Gobbles

The turkeys went to the butcher today. It was tough to see them go, but not quite as tough as it might have been; I have had it up to here with their troublesome wanderings, their voracious--expensive!-- appetites, their tearing up the lawn something fierce. It was a chore and a half to coach them into the barn at night (We'd sort of given up on it at the end here, leaving the flock to take its chances on the pasture fence and on the ground beside the water pump.) And I could have offed the group of them myself the day I returned home to find the whole flock up on the porch pecking at our freshly picked bins of apples and leaving a tremendous mess behind... So yes, the turks had outstayed their welcome.

But somehow-- there's always a catch isn't there?-- I miss them already.

Turkeys are kind of cool in a clueless, show-offy, wholly unexpected way. They are drama kings, prancing and sighing, sneezing and gobbling, and fighting-- oh the fighting!-- all the time. I'll miss the spectacle of our slate gray tom, smaller but full of game, bumping up against the bigger bronze toms. I'll miss "Blinky" who had some sort of neurological issue, listing and lurching in circles, bumping into trees and calling after her buddies. Blinky was so obviously in need that even our puppy Luka, nudged her in the right direction sometimes. I'll miss the gaudy colors, the toms' skin going from red to blue at the whim of some internal barometer, their comical snoods, the way the flock gathered around as I picked apples, toms gliding around at my feet like schooners at full sail. There might be a hundred apples on the ground around them, but turkey wisdom dictated that the only good apples come from the hand of a weary human.

I will miss them-- I DO miss them-- but it was time. (Long past time, according to Dan, who is right this minute cleaning out the tremendous stinky, turkey-fied mess that is our barn.) And I can console myself with several weeks worth of home-produced dinners and the chance to supply a farm-fresh, wholesome well-raised food to friends and co-workers. I choose to focus on this aspect today, the day our first turkeys went to the butcher.

And a Good Time Was Had By All

The Greenway Celebration was our initiation into a new world, a world chock full of interested customers who wanted to know a little bit about Massachusetts' rural heritage, small town living, apples, wool, sheep and chickens. 30,000+ interested customers as it turned out.

The build-up and market day were some of the busiest of my life, and also the most productive. I baked and peeled apples and organized yarns and apple crisps and whatnot. Dan developed a lovely banner, brochures, business cards and labels, Micah made some beautiful signs. We were all up late into the night readying for the big day. Saturday morning found us up at four packing the minivan, waking Micah (who chose to come along for the day) and driving the two and a half hours into the heart of the big, B-i-i-i-g city to sell our wares.

Now, at past events, we barely had our "stuff" together; we set out a card table and hung around chatting. It was lots of fun, but part of the fun was our sheer, amateur-ness. We considered these small events a chance to meet other vendors and learn about the whole process of marketing.

This Greenway Celebration, however, was the BIG TIME. And we were (more) prepared. We had a brand new canopy and our professional looking banners, and we even brought a cash register... well, it was our kids' bright red toy cash register.... But you get the idea. A friend of mine made cute soaps to help fill our table and we also offered, baked goods-- Apple flax blueberry bread and apple flax walnut bread, apple oatmeal bread and apple crisp, and Dan's homemade peach, plum and blueberry jams. We also offered plain old apples to the hungry folks who came by and fresh cider. None of this has to do with our primary business, but we were advised to have food to offer.

We also offered yarn and roving, and I brought a few of my hand-crafted items, hats and scarves, to demonstrate what a person might DO with all this wonderful stuff.

We figured there'd be lots of other small family farms at the farmer's market, but mostly there were small family businesses: a cookie company, a bread company, a jam company, a coffee micro-roaster, etc etc. Businesses with inventory and a few employees and such. So once again, prepared as we were, were were, achem... out of our league once again. (It may say something about the state of Massachusetts' rural heritage that the Greenway Farmer's Market had so few small farms.) The Rodale Institute, the event's sponser had a really neat passport system to help get customers and farmers talking and also gave us free canvas bags that we could offer to customers with a $10 purchase. These were great ideas and the event organizers have our thanks and gratitude.

Anyway, being out of our league turned out to be an advantage of sorts because people were really interested in what it was like to work a genuine small family farm (They were surprised to learn that we had to work full-time jobs to support our rural lifestyle, for example.) Micah showed pictures from our farming album and answered questions. (One couple asked her if she liked having chickens and she said "Sort of. Because when you have chickens you can never go out barefoot"!) Luminaries came by; Thomas Menino, Mayor of Boston, and Caroline Kennedy sampled the apple oatmeal bread. It was really fun to "talk sheep" with so many new people. (I love to "talk sheep" any time, any place!). Micah managed to take a few pictures for us and she was quite the soap-seller, explaining exactly why that the goldfish soap was great for kids. (From the moment our feet hit the pavement, Dan and I were generally too busy to BREATHE so it was great to have our own photographer along!)

I ended up selling one of my scarves and a felted hat, although I hadn't planned on it. (I have a long way to go before I am skilled enough to set up shop) because the customers insisted on buying the items, flaws and all. I wasn't prepared for the lump in my throat as I watched by cool, reversable lizard/goldfish hat walk away on someone else's head. But I was also happy it was going to a new home where it was obviously loved and appreciated. Here it is:

So it was a beautiful, busy, joyous day. We sold out of breads and crisps and also sold a lot of yarn and roving. We met a lot of wonderful people and gave out every last brochure and business card, arrived home exhausted at 11 PM, slogged out to take care of the animals in the dark, put our zonked daughter to bed and collapsed on the couch.

And for some crazy reason, we hope to do more of this sort of thing in the future!