November 15th – November 22nd

Inside the hoop house growing winter greens

We loaded five animals out of the beef herd on Sunday afternoon, and though we were all certainly sorry to see them go off to the slaughterhouse, I am really looking forward to getting that great meat into the hands of our customers. The loading process went really smoothly, and our old rickety chute performed as well as we could have hoped, even for the one heifer with a full rack of long pointy horns.

The laying hens have moved into their winter house.

We have been working to develop food support pathways with our partner visiting schools, trying to deliver meat directly to their teachers for distribution to student families that they know need the support. This feels like vital work these days, and like a really valuable use of the livestock that we’ve spent so long raising and caring for. Some of the animals that we loaded on Sunday will be used for this developing purpose. The other loaded animals have been sold as whole or half animals, and we’ve worked with buyers to complete cut-sheets that will get them the product that they really want for filling their freezers. This is another new distribution model for us, and while it has certainly been a heavy lift to set up and execute this first time, I am hopeful that it can be something to continue in the future. We now have a small herd of cows, steers and yearling remaining at the beef winter barn, and another small group of five breeding cows in with the bull at another pasture. Penguin, from the dairy herd, is in that group as well, and we’re hoping that she can get bred by the bull since we have been unable to get that job done. Once the bull gets picked up, we’ll move that breeding group up to the barn to join the others that are already there, and they’ll all spend most of the winter together there. We are scheduled to load out all of the non-breeding group animals for slaughter at the end of January, and that should leave us with bred cows, and two yearlings, as our full herd moving forward. The breeding group is made up of three younger heifers and two older cows, and anyone who does not breed this winter will probably be culled out of the herd next year. I had hoped to get the bull picked up last week, but I noticed that we had a cow in heat on Wednesday of this week, so asked the bull owner if we could keep him for another few days to make sure he had a chance to breed everyone. I am hopeful that he’ll be gone by the end of next week. 

The beginning of a sawmill slab rack

Firewood and sawmill season is fast approaching, and we have begun doing some of the work to set up good functioning yards in which to get all of this work done. We’ve been working to clean up the space around the sawmill, set up a better system for stacking up the slab that comes off of each log, and burning all the junk that’s collected in that area over the years. We have big plans for milling up the big pile of pine logs that we collected after last fall’s bomb-cyclone, so I expect that the sawmill will be a busy work space once we have things ready, and after we’ve buttoned up the rest of our fall cleanup. Firewood production is also about to get going, and similarly to the sawmill, we still have lots of logs stacked up around the farm that we need to process. We’ll have to establish a system that allows logs to flow through the process from bucking logs into rounds, splitting them into cordwood, and stacking in rows off the ground for some drying. We have more logs lying around for processing than I have ever seen here, so there is plenty of cordwood work ahead of us this winter. 

We have been working for a few weeks to put together a letter to share with our local partners describing some of this community’s work and learning regarding race, equity and liberation. That letter started going out this week, and we are excited to deepen our relationships with the wonderful group of businesses, crafts-people, farmers, neighbors and service-providers that surround and support this place. We are also eager to leverage the unique place that we occupy amongst this community to support, spread and share this work. I will include a link to our community partner letter in a future post. 

The round bales are stacked up ready for winter feeding.

Clover Hill Farm, in Hardwick, MA, delivered fifty third cut wrapped round bales for dairy cow winter feeding this week, and the bales have been expertly stacked up west of the dairy barn. We will use them one at a time throughout the winter to keep the cows fed, and our hope is that this premium feed can keep the milk flowing through the cold dark weather. We have about seventy-five more round bales on order from another local producer, and these will be a mix of first and second cut hay. This supply will be primarily used to feed the beef herd through the winter, though there is always a bit of back and forth as we try to keep both herds well fat and happy. Those seventy-five bales will be delivered to the beef winter barn, and we’ll build a big stack to use as needed down there. The dairy herd eats two or three round bales per week, while the beef herd eats about five. We set up ten round bales, in two lines of five each, for the beef, but feed out bales one at a time for the dairy. We do not have a huge supply of square bales this winter, and without sheep or draft horses on the farm, it feels like a good time to have moved away from that type of hay storage a bit. The goat herd is the only group fed primarily on square bales, and they don’t eat very much.

A rare sighting of our secret barn cat Turtle

Our bee keeping team discovered this week that our resident bees have left their hives and moved off into the wilderness. This is not a great season for bees to take this action, and we are still working to figure out why the hive decided on this course. There are a lot of reasons that bees abscond from their homes, and the strange swings of weather that we had last couple of weeks, from eighteen degrees to eighty degrees, certainly put plenty of stress on the hive. We’ve also had some skunk action around the farm, and bees are known to dislike the noise and smell that skunks bring to the environment. Regardless, the bees left behind a bunch of honey, so we’ll try to harvest that soon, and get ready to give the whole program another shot in the spring. 

November 8th – November 15th

The layer pullets, thinking about coming outside.

Our run of unseasonably warm weather finally came to an end this week, and the second half of the week has been dominated by the cold and wet conditions that are more typical around here in November. Though we have not had any night-time temperatures below freezing this week, the ten-day forecast is looking pretty wintery, and I think we’ll be back in our cold weather setups by the end of this weekend. That means heaters in animal water troughs, heat on water lines and spigots around the farm, heat in the well rooms that supply the water, and a little bit of heat in the cat hideout in the dairy barn shop. We managed to get out senior barn cat Missy adopted into a loving home last week before the cold weather set in, and I am relieved to know that she has found a place to get out of the cold and to get some well deserved rest after her years and years patrolling the farm. She has always been the first to sneak into the bunkhouse on cold days, or to ingratiate herself with a farmer living in a heated cabin on the farm, and it just felt like the right time for her to move into a more sheltered and easy lifestyle after almost fifteen years of roughing it out on the farm. 

The beef herd eating at sunrise.

We spent some time this week, just before the colder wet weather arrived, picking up and cleaning up around the farm and yards. We try every year to get things picked up and put away a bit before everything freezes and before snow might pile up on top of it all, so this week’s warm weather felt like that opportunity. We have a bit more pickup work to do at the Maggie’s campus, and I think we’ll get after that next week. This cleanup work brings to mind all of the systems that we use to try to keep track of and share the many tools, implements and pieces of equipment that make the farm function, and I think that we are going to take another look at our shops and tools as we work to streamline our work. There are few things more frustrating than being forced to stop a project in the midst of hard won momentum for lack of a tool expected to be at hand, so we are always looking for ways to efficiently share all of these items in a way that gets everyone the things that they need to accomplish their work.

 
The laying flock endured some pretty cold weather two weeks ago, but I think that they enjoyed the late run of summery conditions that followed out there in their egg-mobiles. (‘egg-mobile’ does not feel like an appropriate name any more since those hens have forsaken laying almost completely here in the middle of November. From one-hundred and seventy five hens, we got four eggs yesterday…) We moved the mobile chicken houses up to the barnyard on Monday evening, and loaded the hens and three roosters into their winter house. We set twenty five older layers aside for processing, and Tuesday morning we hosted the students from our little Chicken Coop School for some layer processing. This was a great opportunity for these students to get hands-on experience with the anatomy of a chicken, and while some students opted out of the work, and most didn’t stay for the whole morning, I think it was a solid educational project. We have been trying to find a way to include this work in the Chicken Coop School curriculum for many years, and it was gratifying to finally have the stars align to make it happen this year. 

The bull, at center with Penguin left of him, is still in with a small breeding group.

We were scheduled to load five beef animals last weekend for the trip to the slaughterhouse, but our date was delayed until this weekend. The slaughterhouse seems to be having trouble keeping their staff at work, and since they scheduled animal drop-offs with full staffing levels anticipated, they’ve been having trouble keeping up with the work. We are committed to our livestock having the smoothest possible passage through the slaughter process, and while that certainly feels a bit incongruous, we are happy to delay bringing them up there if it means that they can avoid delays and hasty handling. I am pretty confident that we overbought winter hay this fall because I was uncertain about the timing of our beef herd reduction, so I am sure that we have the feed to keep everyone content for as long as we need to while we wait for the slaughterhouse to get back up to speed. Our rented bull has been on the scene for about two months, which is the tenure that we had hoped to keep him, so we’re working on getting him picked up next week. A cow will come into heat about every twenty days, so two months, or sixty days, should give the bull three chances for breeding with each cow. We put Penguin, from the dairy herd, in with him about halfway through his time with us, so there is a reduced chance that she’s been bred. The bull can certainly eat hay, so while we have been super pleased to have him with us performing his vital and unique part in our operation, we’ll be happy to have someone else feeding him for the winter. 

Rubble has some guests while Mocha is at the dairy farm breeding does.

Almost all of our temporary cow fences have been taken down by now, and I did a bit of pasture edge cutting this week to push back some of the encroaching thorns always eager to move into our pastures. The warm dry weather that preceded our current return to winter was a really nice opportunity for this type of pasture work, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to get after this work this week. From time to time, we have these nice little unique weather events that open up a space for work that we often don’t have the time, or the right conditions, for, and it always feels good to check off a project that has been lingering for a while. 

October 1st – October 7th

The dairy herd in the lane, which will be part of their winter yard this year.

The warm and sunny weather that we’ve had around here this week has been a big change from the cold and snow of a week ago, and the preparations that we took to get the farm ready for winter now feel a bit premature. I’ve turned the heaters we use to keep water sources from freezing back off, the chicks have been allowed out into their yard, and both cow herds are moving around in their winter yards trying to stay in the shade. While day-time temperatures above seventy degrees certainly are a pleasant respite from our usual cold wet November weather, these conditions seem to me to be a troubling symptom of climate patterns that have been profoundly scrambled up. The sun still sets early by this time of year, no matter the temperature of the air, and these warm early evenings have been like nothing I think I have ever experienced. The ten-day forecast implies that this warm weather will continue for quite a while yet, deepening this uncanny feeling of having stepped a bit outside of the proper season. 

Before the dairy herd moved into their winter area behind the dairy barn, we gave them a day of grazing on the Games Field behind the bunkhouse on Thursday. I have never seen the cows intentionally put onto the Game Field in my nearly fifteen years of working at The Farm School, and it was really fun to see them on an area that we’ve always been adamant about them not being on. We tell the visiting students that the Games Field is a great place for sports and games because we don’t have livestock pooping there. Now that we don’t have kids visiting the farm for a while, we figured that the cows would enjoy the tall grass that has grown up in that area. 

Before moving into their winter yard, the dairy herd grazed the Games Field.

We sold six of our eight beef calves this week, and loaded them up for the trip to their new farm on Tuesday morning. We are trying to downsize our beef herd significantly, so these wonderful animals, now just over a year old, will be a great addition to another local operation feeding our region. We kept two steers from the group to raise up ourselves, and we’ll bring over this year’s three dairy steers as well to make up our beef production supply for next year. We have six cows in with the breeding bull right now, and the potential offspring of this fall’s breeding should keep our beef supply going strong into the future. 

Mocha went in with the does we want bred Monday morning, and he is fulfilling his duty and being a totally obnoxious stinky buck out there, pestering the does and stinking up the place. We have three does for him to breed, which I expect he will accomplish in short order, and then we’ll send him back down the road to the bachelor pad with Rubble. We moved out the younger does that we don’t want to breed this fall, so once Mocha leaves in a couple of weeks, they can move back in for the winter. Mocha is not really the ideal buck for our herd, so we will keep an eye out for a better buck kid to raise up to maturity if one becomes available in our area. Goat gestation is about five months, so November breeding should give us kidding next April. The beef breeding bull has been in with a small group of cows for about six weeks by now, with the addition of Penguin from the dairy herd last week. We hope to keep the bull for two months, giving him three twenty-day heat cycles to get everyone bred if he can. So with about two weeks to go in his time with us, I am hopeful that most of those cows in with him are bred by now. That herd has no run-in shelter, and I have been nervous about them having to endure too much nasty wet weather out of doors. This stretch of warm sunny weather is keeping them quite comfortable for now I’m sure. 

Veggie beds under cover.

We dug out the stalls and calf pen in the back of the dairy barn this week, prepping that space for more heavy use this winter as the cows try to get out of the weather. Typically, in the winter, the cows have a nice big wood chip yard where they eat hay, drink water, and lounge around chewing cud, and an inside run-in with nice deep bedded stalls to recline in when the weather outside is wet or windy. The calves have a large pen adjacent to the stalls where they are shut in every night while their mothers make an udder of milk for morning milking. It is not a perfect setup, but it has worked for us, and for the cows, over the past few years, and we did what we could this week to get the space clean and ready. 

The new hoop house is growing some winter greens.

From the veggie team: Finished pulling out or clipping last of the brassicas and removing from the field because of disease. Wind rowed it along the hedgerows and put a layer of straw on top so as to manage it to be spreadable fertilizing compost. Cleaned up peppers. Mowed the last of the crops that were done. Moved silage tarps to cover areas that need help breaking down. Left spinach, bunching kale, kale mix, turnips and celeriac. Have been turning irrigation to the Spinach hoop house off and on depending on weather and managing storage veggies at proper ventilation and temperatures. Gleaners came back again.