Sugar Creek Farm

I think by now I’ve banished any thoughts from your head that things are all rainbows and unicorns around here. Yes, yes, many days things are positively bucolic at Sugar Creek Farm. All oinking piglets, mooing calves, and crowing roosters.

Today was not one of those days.

Don’t let those lovely eyelashes fool you.

Or those cute, floppy ears.

Or even those little pink snouts.

It was supposed to be a simple task. Move nine 3-month-old feeder pigs from one pen, through a cattle lot, to another pen. They should have been happy about it. They had outgrown their current pen and their creep feeder. They were getting moved up to the big pigs’ pen, with more space and a heated water and a 1-ton capacity feeder.

We were without our head herdswoman, who was attending a wrestling meet, watching her boyfriend wrestle. Ahem. So Matt, Olivia and I were left with the task.

We got them out of their current pen easily enough. Got them through the cattle lot easily, too. Got them moved up to the shed, and all they had to do was walk through one last gate. We’d slowly crowd in on them, gently moving them towards the pen entrance, waiting for just one to find the opening. Because if one finds it, then the others usually follow pretty willingly.

But there was one little devil in the group. We’d just get them up to the opening, get them sniffing it interestedly, and that one little devil would bolt.

And once one bolts, they all bolt.

So we’d head back out into the cattle lot and start the process all over again.

And again. And again. And again.

During the ensuing hour and a half (!) things were thrown, threats were made, the occasional f-bomb was dropped. Finally, finally, we got them all into the new pen.

About that time Madeline called for a ride home. I replied, “We just got them in, I’ll be right there, but I’m warning you…nobody is in a good mood.”

2 years ago:
Sucky, sucky day (maybe January 8th is just cursed?)

1 year ago:
Last call

I thought it might be fun to throw together a speedlink post of sustainable agriculture news articles and websites. Let me know if you like the idea (or not). I’ll give a little synapsis of the link – click through for the full text.

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Linn County farmer Laura Krouse is the 2007 recipient of the Leopold Center’s Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture.
“Krouse is the first small-market farmer to receive the award, established in 2002 to honor farmers, educators or researchers who’ve made significant contribution toward the stability of mainstream family farms in Iowa.”

More about the Spencer Award

Abbe Hills Garden – Local Harvest Listing

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Send in the Clones
“As early as Tuesday, the FDA is likely to issue U.S. food producers an approval to begin selling meat and dairy from cloned animals and their offspring… Critics find it particularly worrisome that the FDA has said it won’t require labeling for products of cloned animals and their offspring.”

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Slow Food is Cooking in 50 States
This week’s cover story from the National Catholic Reporter

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Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World
Not a recent article, but one of Ode Magazine’s “Top 10 Positive Stories from 2007”

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Loving, Knowing, and N-P-K
“I begin by talking about love and knowledge because it marks the greatest difference between agrarian or traditional farming and industrial or scientific farming… Organic agriculture, before it became co-opted by the industrial-technological complex, was a reaction against the reductionistic N-P-K model of agriculture.”

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Census Takes Farming Industry’s Pulse
We received a census. Did you?

Today I received the most wonderful package from Karl & Tabitha & The Pile. 2 sheets of various heirloom tomato, vegetable and flower seeds, grown and saved from their own garden. It just made my heart sing. I’m excited about every single seed, and especially the tomatoes. Tomatoes are my most favorite plant in the garden and I always grow a lot of them. I’ll have visions of potting soil dancing in my head when I go to sleep tonight.

Thank you, O’Melays!!!

(And yes, my mail is laying on top of hay, on top of my kitchen counter. Don’t ask.)

to The Beginning Farmer’s blog. He asked me a few Q’s a while ago, I gave him back a few A’s, and he’ll be sharing all of them at his blog over the course of this week.

Thanks for having me, Ethan!

Used to be that all fields were fenced so that cattle could be turned out after harvest to feed off the leftovers. It’s not as common a sight as it once was, and I don’t think this fence would hold in much anymore.

This is the scene these days, when Matt’s not at work or doing chores. I told you I’d created a monster!

2 years ago:
Drooling

Right before Christmas Matt & Madeline went out to do chores one morning and found a dead feeder pig. They hadn’t noticed any of them were sick, but judging by the blood around the mouth and nose it was a respiratory infection.

Within a day or two another one had started coughing. The typical course of action on conventional farms would be to simply add antibiotics to the water and treat them all, just in case.

We advertise ourselves as antibiotic-free. So to treat our whole herd would be marketing suicide. However if one of our animals gets sick or hurt, we won’t let it suffer. We treat it with antibiotics. Then we mark that animal so that we know which one got treated. This pig was marked with a pink paint stick, and soon we’ll do something more permanent like put a tag or a notch in her ear.

I don’t have a problem eating an animal that’s been treated for a specific illness, as long as appropriate timelines for withdrawal before slaughter are followed. It’s extremely rare that we even have to treat an animal. What I don’t want to eat is an animal that’s fed antibiotics daily, for no particular reason other than they’re being kept in living conditions that lend themselves to illness or they’re being fed something that they aren’t built to digest.

We either eat the animal ourselves, or we talk to one of our customers that we know doesn’t mind having one that’s been treated in this manner. However we would never slaughter a treated animal for retail sale of individual cuts. If we couldn’t find someone willing to purchase a treated animal we would sell it at the sale barn.

Today was actually a day Off the Farm. Madeline and I attended a luncheon in Ames for alumni of the Grow Your Small Market Farm program. I was there not only as an alumn, but also as the newly-volunteered chair of a steering committee which will expand upon the program and develop a state-wide business network for sustainable farmers and specialty food producers. Boy was I nervous! I don’t consider myself much of a public speaker. I tend to rattle on, repeat myself a lot, and forget half of what I actually wanted to say.

Madeline had never been to anything like this, and I think she enjoyed herself. I think she was inspired as everyone present took a turn at telling what’s going on at their farm, what challenges they’ve faced and what new things they’ve got going. She turned to me said, “Maybe I’ll go into agriculture.”

It’s a fantastic thing that farm conference season coincides with number-crunching season. The conferences renew my enthusiasm and hope, buffering the downer effect of number-crunching. Next weekend is the Practical Farmers of Iowa conference. Anyone else out there going to that one?

Looking ahead, February 1 & 2 is the Iowa Network for Community Agriculture’s 13 Annual Local Foods Conference in Cedar Rapids. Not sure yet if I’ll make that one, but they have a couple of really interesting keynote speakers lined up for it.

2 years ago:
Us versus possum, day 2

Our pumpkin farmer friends cleaned out the last of their pumpkins, squash and gourds and brought them over for the cows. Even frozen those girls go crazy over them.

This Hereford cow prefers the fancy little decorative gourds. Herefords are refined and classy like that. Except that chewing a frozen gourd with your mouth open is maybe not so refined and classy.

These girls have somehow broken a chunk of shell off a pumpkin and are scooping out the insides.

Apparently that’s one good tasting pumpkin. More cows come over for a taste. Cows do not usually share this well.

More cows join the pumpkin feast.

Finally Mr. Bull strolls over to get in on the action.

The pumpkins are not only a treat for the cows, it keeps them entertained!

2 years ago:
Commotion in the coop

1 year ago:
Road ducks

Today it was not only cold, but windy. Here’s my lunch break routine:

Fill a pail with hot water from the kitchen sink.

Bundle up. Look like some kind of vagrant. A very warm vagrant.

Deliver hot water to the hens. Take yesterday’s hot water delivery pail, which is now a block of ice, back to the house to thaw out. Repeat tomorrow, swapping pails again.

You can tell it’s windy when the cattle are hanging out in and around the shed, instead of standing around the bale feeder eating themselves warm.

2 years ago:
Book Review (Simply in Season)

1 year ago:
Tractor Girl