Sugar Creek Farm

A typical, blustery March day in Iowa. I hate wind, but in March I try to be grateful for windy days. They help thaw out, dry out, and warm up the garden.

Not much going on around the old homestead. Two more dumptruck loads of woodchips came this morning. I think they’re bringing us more than last year. Matt said people are less willing to take them after realizing that sometimes the trees they’re made from are diseased. People spread the chips as mulch around their own trees, and end up spreading the disease.

Madeline and I watched our Canada geese on the creek this morning. They were swimming around and dunking their heads in the water. (Brrrrrr) Were they bathing, or eating? I haven’t been able to get out there with the camera and get a shot of them yet. Every year we have a pair stop on the creek and hatch their young. Do you think it’s the same pair each year? I felt so sorry for them last year. After they had their eggs layed the inundating rains began. We had the worst flood we’ve had on the creek and their nest just washed away. Once the waters receded they walked around so piteously, looking for their nest. After a week or two they gave up and headed on north.

I’m heading on south to Ames for class in the morning. Our friend Andy is going to come and help Matt castrate the baby pigs. Then we’re having my family over to supper for Rafe’s birthday. (And no, those 2 activities aren’t related. No rocky mountain oysters here!)

It’s that time of year where things just seem to be accelerating and won’t wind down again until October. It’s exciting, but I get tired if I think about the months to come so I try not to.

I’m really itching to start my vegetable seeds, and probably will next weekend. Our friend Jeff is building me a really cool seed starting rack . This year I’m starting 7 varieties of tomatoes (but not 300 plants like last year!), cabbage, egg plant, green peppers, jalapeno peppers, and tomatillos. I might also start seedless cucumbers, zucchini, and watermelon. We’ll see how the weather goes in April, and whether I’ll be able to get in the garden early May or late May. Still deciding whether to do a spring planting of broccoli and brussels sprouts, or just a fall planting. I need to get busy with the graph paper and plan the garden layout for this year. Madeline will probably start flower seeds for her 4-H horticulture project. I love seed starting. It’s like having spring inside the house, even when Mother Nature isn’t cooperating outside.

What else is on the Homestead To Do List?

1. Baby chicks arrive April 7th! I need to get the brooder ready (aka giving up my heated garage), sanitize the feeders and waters, and purchase feed and bedding.

2. The baby chicks will go out to pasture on April 30th. Matt is going to build a hoophouse for them this year. We’ll leave one end of our hoophouse open so the chickens can free range within the safety of the 160′ of electrified poultry netting we use for protection from predators. We’ve purchased the materials but haven’t started on it yet.

3. I’m trying to purchase a used freezer, so that we can proceed with obtaining our food warehouse license. This will enable us to sell our meats right from our home, instead of people having to take a quarter or half of beef, half or whole hog, or whole broiler chicken, and have it processed by the locker.

4. We also need approved food labels, in order to be granted a food warehouse license. We need to work with our processors to get that in place.

5. I have several promotional things I need to work on – a new logo for the farm, a new brochure, business cards, the yearly newsletter sent to our customers, getting our farm linked on websites that connect people with locally grown food, and a website for the farm. One big hangup is that the domain name “sugarcreekfarm.com” is already reserved but not in use, and the domain name “sugarcreekfarm.org” is being used by a family farm in Michigan. So what to do? Change our name, or come up with some other domain name? Ideas, anyone? I’d also take ideas on a new logo. Our current one is just a cow, but I want something that incorporates our new chicken and pork ventures, and probably some kind of future produce venture, too. I’m trying to get my artsy mom to help out on this one.

6. Complete an evaluation of adding produce to the farm, most likely berries and asparagus.

7. The business plan! I haven’t been able to spend much time on it yet this week. (Hopefully Penny isn’t reading this!)

8. We need to meet with our insurance agent and discuss our liability coverage, product liability, and all of that un-fun stuff.

9. We’re probably going to file the farm as an LLC. More paperwork.

10. Obtaining one or more purebred Large Black breeding females.

That’s an even 10, I think I’ll stop there! Happy weekend, everybody!

Rafe Henry is 3. Or “free”, as he says.

My baby – though when I say that he replies,
“I not a baby, I Rafe!”.

Happy Birthday, buddy.

We got a couple more dumptruck loads of woodchips today, and it was an early out of school for the girls. So as soon as Matt got off work they got busy making more piles for the cows. As soon as I got off work I got busy taking pictures of them.

The weather is still cold here, and the ground is still frozen, which is good for hauling woodchips to the pasture. The tractor won’t tear up the ground when it’s still frozen.

Yep, that’s our house in the background, half blue and half green. Hopefully we’ll have the funds this summer to finish it all green.

Hard work and cold, fresh air. The girls ought to sleep well tonight!

Today when I went outside on my lunch break the heifers and Fudge were sunning themselves on a pile of woodchips. They’re pretending not to notice me, but see how they have their ears turned backwards towards me? Silly girls.

Woodchips have been a huge godsend to our little farm. In Matt’s work as a lineman he does a lot of tree work during the winter, cutting down dead trees now so that they don’t come down on power lines during summer storms. The trees are sent through a chipper, and the woodchips are free to area residents for the taking.

The woodchips make excellent beds for the cows. This time of year the corral area gets very wet and muddy. The woodchip piles are dry, they warm up nicely in the sun, plus they generate heat from underneath where the bottom layers are starting to compost. They are the cows’ favorite place to birth their calves.

Mother Nature sure enjoys toying with us mere mortals. Almost 40 degrees colder today than yesterday, with light snow and 30 mph winds. Great day to stand around outside and buy farm machinery. (Not!)

I wanted to take more pictures, but the other farmers were already looking at me funny enough just for being a girl at a farm sale. Even though the weather was miserable it was still fun. (Don’t tell Matt I said that.)

I’m always eavesdropping on the conversations going on around me. They’re usually about the most mundane things, and yet if you listen carefully they can reveal a lot about the “culture” on this square of the planet. Today I noticed many conversations that go something like this:

“What are you up to today?”

“Just down here killin’ time.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Now I know better. Farmers always have a To Do list 10 miles long. They definitely don’t have a need to kill time. So to me that response is really about:
(A) It’s an auction and they don’t want to seem too interested, or
(B) They’re here because auctions are social events for farmers but they won’t admit that.

This is the prize we came home with today – a hay rake. Matt assures me it’s a great rake, despite its “rust”-ic appearance.

Sunday was the first day to hint at spring, almost 70 degrees and sunny. The 6-day-old piglets found their way outdoors, and in the sun we could see copper-colored streaks in their hair. My brother says that may be some Duroc in their bloodlines coming through.

They were funny to watch. Sarah would only let them stay out so long before grunting at them to get back inside. Some of them have more ginormous ears than others, some of their ears have yet to come forward, others’ ears stick straight up in the air making them look like a pig version of Dumbo.

The chickens really enjoyed the warm sunshine. They would stretch themselves out so that as much of their body area was exposed to the sun as possible. Couldn’t catch any of them on camera in that pose, though. The red one is a Production Red and the white ones are White Rocks.

Our boar, Winston, is a purebred Large Black. Large Blacks are listed as “Critical” by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy . This means that there are fewer than 200 annual North American registrations of these pigs, and it’s estimated there are fewer than 2000 of them in the global population.

The Large Black breed is an orchard pig, developed in the 1880’s in England where they enjoyed a period of popularity until about 1960. There were some importations into Canada in the 1920’s, and into the U.S. in 1985 and 1998, but there has never been a large North American population. Even today in their native England they are listed as “Vulnerable” by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust , meaning there is a population of less than 300 in that country.

They are a large pig, just slightly smaller than Yorkshire’s. Originally bred as bacon pigs, they have good body depth and length. The shoulders are smallish, but the sides and hams are larger and lean. They have a good amount of intra-muscular marbling, which makes for a moist, juicy and flavorful meat.

Large Blacks are suited to being raised outdoors in a wide range of climates. They are hardy, and good grazers. The sows are known for their mothering ability, milk capacity, and ability to raise large litters on modest rations. The breed is extremely docile, perhaps attributable to the vision impairment created by their lopped ears. All of these qualities make them ideal for the small farm.

I started this blog to capture both the ups and downs of our experience on this little farmstead. In yesterday’s post I waxed poetic about the ups. And it’s all true. But I was giggling to myself a little, thinking if they only knew . There are big setbacks and little setbacks, but I’m finding it’s not so much the individual events as it is the cumulative effect that gets me. Two steps forward and one and a half steps back.

So back to the cow. We bought her last fall at the sale barn, as part of a group of four. You know how it is at any auction. They throw something that won’t sell well in with some more desirable items. The two Hereford cows Matt wanted were grouped with a nice Simmental plus this cow. But she didn’t look sick at that point, just really laid back.

A few months later she’s losing weight and looking sickly. We talk to my brother, who works for our vet, and he says it could be a really heavy parasite load or it could be Johnes disease. So we treat her for parasites, but it’s pretty obvious that’s not really it. Johnes disease is basically chronic diarrhea and the animal just slowly wastes away. More common in dairy cattle than beef. It’s kind of like Crohn’s disease in humans. Incurable.

The best case scenario was that she’d have her calf – which would be worth $200 as soon as he hit the ground – and then we’d sell her at the sale barn, probably for about $400 less than we paid for her. Worst case scenario was that they’d both die and we’d be out the $750 we paid for her.

She lost the calf last Wednesday. So much for best case scenario. The plan was to take her to the sale barn Monday evening to be sold on Tuesday. But she beat us to the punch and died Monday morning. Worst case scenario.

Now I have a lot of passion for our little farm, but admittedly I can also lose focus at the drop of a hat and at lunch Monday I was kvetching to Matt about losing the cow and the $750 we paid for her. “$750 would have bought me a new camera and a lens, and I would have had something to take pictures with instead of a carcass.” I can be real whiner.

Fast forward to supper time, when he comes in to say Sarah’s going to have her piglets. I, not having regained focus yet, replied, “You’d better get Winston out of there now! If she has those pigs and he eats them, that might be what sends me over the edge to buying a house in town.”

After all was said and done Matt’s take on the day was, “See, if that cow hadn’t died I would have been traveling to and from the sale barn tonight and I wouldn’t have been here to help Sarah have those pigs. If I hadn’t helped her we might have only had 3 live instead of 9.”

Call it what you will – fate, serendipity, God’s plan. Whatever it is, it’s the same thing that paired me up with this man. He helps balance the scale against my tendency to hit all points on the emotional spectrum (often in the span of a single day). I’m amazed each day that the two of us are still together, and there are days when I wonder if we will remain so. The situations this farming thing puts us in often push us to the limits of our affection. So why do we do it? See yesterday’s post, I guess.

Despite the above evidence to the contrary, this ag entrepreneurs class I’m taking has helped me be less emotional and more analytical about such setbacks. We have to try and simply look at the situation, find what lessons we can in it, and move on. In this case, we’ll make it a goal to not purchase future breeding stock at the sale barn. We went the sale barn route initially because we didn’t have much money and we were having a hard time finding the stock we wanted around here. I’d still say it’s a good way to get started, despite the risks, especially if you’re starting small as we did. But for us it’s time to learn and grow, and to have a new plan.

Plans-R-Us these days, thanks to the class…”if” plans, “when” plans, “how” plans. Matt says he’s perfectly happy to leave this as a hobby. Of course I have to remind him that three head is a hobby. Twenty-one head is either an addiction or a business.

That’s what we named calf #2. His mama’s name is Carmel, so I was thinking carmel sundae…fudge sundae…and there it was. Fudge.

All of the porcine and bovine babies are doing well today.

I had the nicest email last night from a gal who somehow stumbled into my little blog and was taken back to her own childhood growing up on a farm. She ended her email with the words “You are truly blessed.” Thank you for the reminder, Laura.

We are blessed indeed, though it’s easy to lose sight of it some days when the cow has died, the truck needs a new what-cha-ma-giz-it, and the well runs dry. (Okay, only 2 of those 3 things happened this week. I shouldn’t even jest about the well running dry.) And since starting the agricultural entrepreneur class I’ve of course been hyper-focused on the business side of things – profit and loss, business plans, industry trends.

So I need to be reminded occasionally why we started all of this, 3 years ago with 4 bottle calves – for our kids. We want them to have the experience of growing up on a farm and all that it entails. Life and death, stewardship, self-sufficiency, hard work, appreciation for the simple things life offers. The experience of watching piglets being born (“I didn’t know that’s where they come out!” ~ Madeline). The experience of burying the dead cow. The experience of eating what you’ve raised and grown. There’s nothing wrong with treating this farm like a business. Lessons in entrepreneurship are worthy, too. We just have to remember when all things are considered to consider the intangibles as well. Those things that don’t have a place on a balance sheet – the beauty of chickens running about, of eating a large green pepper you’ve grown, of being able to run in the grass in a big circle screaming your head off just for the fun of it – need to be given the weight they deserve.

So you go for that 20 acres, Laura. Sit under that tree with your babies. Teach them all the wonderful things you know about growing vegetables and raising livestock. Their souls will be so much the better for it (and yours, too).