May 23rd – May 30th

Rye in the Flat Field

Though my data set is awfully small, and my training is certainly not in climate science, on the ground, our weather patterns feel different than those of my memory. It feels to me like we’ve lost some of the middle ground, some of the time when things are moderate, mixed, gradually changing from season to season, a little bit of each. It seems now that we take these leaps from one end of spectrum to the other, skipping the middle ground entirely. In the first week of May I wrote about cold wet weather, detailing several storms that passed over the farm and dropped more than five inches of rain in total over about ten days. Then, all of a sudden, it was summer for a few weeks, with very dry weather and several days with temperatures near or over ninety degrees. Despite the spring melt and the rain that started May, our forest fire danger rating was at High for a good part of May. Now we’re back to the cold and wet, with temperatures Friday maxing out in the fifties, which is forty degrees colder than our afternoon high on Wednesday, and rain forecasted to fall through Monday of next week. The high on Saturday set a record for the lowest high for that date. Though I’m sure the actual data will show a pretty typical progression for this spring’s build towards summer, out on the farm this pattern has felt pretty tumultuous, and I have been yearning for those days where I can feel the chill of early spring behind me, the heat of summer ahead of me, and the two mixing a bit all around me. 

We hosted our final spring day trip for visiting students on Wednesday, and despite the heat of the afternoon, I think that we all had a really great time on the farm. The students from Fayerweather School in Boston brought a palpable and inspiring sense of curiosity to the farm, and pushed all of the farmers and animals to provide the experiences and answers they were looking for as they really squeezed everything they could out of their quick visit. We got a lot of work done, spent a lot of quality time with our livestock, and this was a perfect way to finish up our spring season of visits. We’ll take a couple of weeks to get the farm into tip top shape, clean and prep the bunkhouse after more than a year out of the action, and do everything that we can to be ready to start summer programming in the second half of June. I think that we’re all really looking forward to having kids back on the farm for extended stays this summer, and we’re all a little nervous about how we’re going to make it all work with evolving COVID guidance from the state and such a long time since we last ran over-night programs. 

Tall-grass-grazing with the beef herd

The beef herd had been parked in the Circle Pasture complex for about ten days, but on Tuesday it was time to move them along. The Circle Pasture area is more than six acres of good forage, and I think that the herd could have stayed there for a few more weeks actually, but we are trying to move them over all of the pastures to keep everything in reasonable shape, so we decided to pack up and hit the road. Because of changes in our pasture plans to accommodate increased hay production this summer, we had to drive the herd over the full length of the Runway Pasture to reach their next grazing area, and this proved to be a bit of an adventure. Runway, as the name implies, is a long thin pasture that stretches for about a quarter of a mile north/south between the Maggie’s Farm area and the start of the Waslaske hay fields at the south end of our farm. The western edge of Runway is a nice wooded area where the cows can get out of the sun on hot summer days, and they got themselves all mixed up and turned around in there while we were trying to push them down toward Marshmallow pasture and fresh grass. Dave bravely walked into the woods behind the cows to see what was going on in there while Taylor and I carried on ahead calling and trying to lead them in the right direction. There was plenty of bellowing and crashing, cracking wood and trembling trees, and the herd came pouring out of the woods from every spot, kicked up their legs, and rushed past us up the pasture. They wheeled back into the woods and disappeared, Dave went in after them again, and we repeated this whole process over and over again as we slowly worked our way south. I’m not sure what got everyone so fired up, whether it was the long delay since their last move or the excitement of getting into the woods after a long stay in a pasture with no cover, but the whole episode was way more agitated than was really necessary, and the herd, tearing past us, hoofs flashing and dirt clods flying up behind them, the ground shaking as they passed, reminded us of their incredible strength and power. There are only about ten full sized animals out there, with several yearlings and calves mixed in, but their thundering sweeps out of the trees, down the open pasture and back into the trees were breathtaking nonetheless. Everyone finally reached Marshmallow, tore around that pasture for a bit, gave a few final calls, and put their heads down to eat. They emptied the water trough a few times that afternoon.

Our three egg mobiles are up at the top of the farm.

Taylor and Dave are putting the finishing touches on our pigs summer area out in the woods, and we hope to move those girls out of the piglet yard next week or the one after. They’ll have a nice big deck with an automatic feeder and water, and a long trough for milk from the dairy. Beyond the feeding deck, they’ll have a large electric fenced area that stretches out into the woods, and our hope is that they will spend most of their time out there hunting and rooting for some of their own food. They head in for processing in late fall, so they’ll have more than four months to eat, explore and grow out in the woods. We never put the pigs in the same forested area two years in a row, though we have been leaving their deck in the same location for a few years now. The pigs are super rough on the environment that they root through, and parasites can become established if the pigs return to the same spot for a few years. We rotate areas, giving everything three or four years to rest and regrow before the pigs come back over that ground, and that model has worked well for us. We have dreams of establishing smaller more mobile groups of pigs that we can use strategically throughout the farm, moving them onto areas that need some real disturbance to break some kind of negative cycle, but we have not been brave enough to try that yet. 

May 16th – May 23rd

The garlic has been growing nicely.

The cold rainy weather of the first half of May is starting to feel like a really distant memory as we move definitively into a hot dry stretch of summery weather. Temperatures have been flirting with ninety degrees just about every afternoon this week, and we have not seen any measurable rain in quite some time. Once we have animals out grazing on pasture, I am grow super attentive to the rain, past, present and future, since it is such a dominant ingredient in the quality and quantity of forage out there for our animals. It seems like it has been a long time since we have had a grazing season with the right volume and timing on the rain, and last year certainly stands out as a challenging dry time when we had to stop the grazing rotation over several extended stretches. Right now, our pastures are flush, having put on some remarkably strong growth through April and the first half of May, so I am reassured to know that we’re looking at dry weather with a well stocked larder for now. 

The piglets are learning about their electric fences and automatic water dish.

Ten piglets arrived on the farm last weekend, picked up and brought home from a producer up in New Hampshire. We went all the way up there for the purchase because we really wanted to raise some heritage breed pigs this year, rather than the conventional pink pigs that are so available in our area. We work hard to give our pigs nice wooded acreage to spend the summer in, and we want to raise pigs that will do some work as well, rooting and hunting through their area for some of their own food. The pink pigs we’ve raised in the past, bred with a more indoors confinement life intended for them, seem to have a tendency to post up to the grain feeder for most of their lives. While this has lead to some remarkable growth to be sure, we are always eager to partner with animals that can express and live out behaviors more in keeping with their traditional origins. We have found that heritage breed pigs of any kind, pigs with some color to them, with long curly tails, with ears that hang down over their eyes a bit when their heads are down, pigs with some character, will usually show more of a tendency to root and hunt, to develop wallows in the mud and nests under the thorn bushes, and to thrive in our model of management. So we were happy to find some heritage breed pigs available this spring, and to make the long trip up to New Hampshire to get some for the farm. 

Despite the dry weather, the pastures are still growing pretty nicely.

The dairy herd completed their first rotation over their entire grazing acreage this week, having started the last week of April, so taking nearly a month in the trip. This was an accelerated rotation for sure, as we aimed to pass them over all of the pasture as fast as we could so that we could clip the paddocks behind them to keep the Bedstraw from going to seed. The plan seems to have worked pretty well, though the new brush-hog has been a head-ache to keep operational, and I am eager to see how things grow back in response. I really wish that we were getting a bit of rain, so that we could observe this new approach in more positive growing conditions, and I expect that the dry weather will have a real impact on regrowth that we’ll have to consider as we evaluate our work. I have always subscribed to the belief that a diverse, lightly managed pasture, allowed to grow in its own way and as naturally as is possible, will be the strongest, healthiest and most resilient environment that we can sustain for our cows and the ecosystem of our farm. I have resisted clipping pastures, even when the tall grasses going to seed and turning brown up above the new growing green clover look rough and unkempt to my eye, even when the Multiflora-Rose is flowering white against the green forage below it, even when things are starting to look a little rough. However, the Bedstraw has forced us out of this approach, and now we’re mowing paddock by paddock, and I am interested to see how the pastures, and the life they support up and down the food chain and across every species, will respond. 

We processed and bottled milk twice this week, and delivered to both the Mission Hill School, and the Orange Food Pantry on Thursday. This dairy project was always intended to support visiting school communities as well as local food access organizations, and it was gratifying to be able to serve both this week. We are still only milking two cows at this point, with several more due in July and August, and we’re getting somewhere around eight gallons of milk per day. Eclipse and Pickle are producing like champions right now, and I am proud and grateful for the hard work that they do all day turning good pasture, and a tiny bit of grain, into fresh creamy milk for the bulk tank. Eclipse is also raising a beautiful heifer calf this spring, so her work is doubly impressive. I am looking forward to the time when we have a few more cows to milk every day, when their milk is added to the bulk tank as well, and to see what level of processing, bottling, and distribution we can achieve. 

New starts get some shelter from the pests under row-cover.

The irrigation system has been in operation in the Flat Field this week, giving the newly planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplants the moisture that they need to make a good start for the long growing season ahead. These plants actually really benefit from the hot dry weather, and our ability to irrigate them means that they can be kept in just about ideal conditions for their success. However, the hot dry weather has not deterred our usual Flea Beetle and Root Maggot invasion, and those pests, so interested in our brassicas, have been a real challenge again so far this year. Adult Flea Beetles eat little holes in the leaves of brassicas like cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower, and if they are present in high enough numbers, they can do significant damage. Root Maggots, as their name implies, are the larvae of flies, hatched in the soil and feeding on the roots of plants. These guys can be hard to see, since they’re doing their business underground, but like the Flea Beetle, they can be really destructive in high numbers. The strawberries have been doing some strong growing up at the top of the farm, and they have put on some tiny green fruit already that they’ll grow up to be big delicious red berries in a few weeks. 

May 9th – May 16th

Pickle, through the barn window

Our calf Pretzel’s story came to a sad conclusion this week when we had the vet out for a third visit, this time to put the calf down. Pretzel was not making any improvement in his condition or behavior, he was not gaining any weight, his twisted leg seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and our concern about his level of suffering was growing. Our hope had been that with some nutritional support to energize and fill him up, and with a splint on his leg to straighten out the tendons and joints that had been twisted in utero, that Pretzel could catch on to life and start taking strides under his own power. This was just not happening, and we grew more and more worried about tube feeding him for every meal that he was getting, and about how much suffering he was enduring. In situations like this, we have to weigh an animal’s suffering against the hope that they will be able to return to something of a self-sufficient life among their herd or flock-mates, recognizing that providing an elevated level of care continuously is just not sustainable or responsible in a production farm setting. In Pretzel’s case, after more than two weeks of pretty intense care, it became pretty clear that the scales were not tipping in the right direction, and that the humane choice was to end his suffering. The vet first sedated Pretzel, then administered an overwhelming dose of medication through an IV which quickly stopped the calf’s heart. Because of the presence of these chemicals in the calf, his body had to be buried. 

Pretzel’s mother Pickle had seemed concerned about her calf all along, and she does not seem much surprised that he is gone. Though her milk production did dip a bit this week after Pretzel disappeared, she has continued putting lots of milk in the can twice per day, and we were able to accomplish our first bottled milk distribution this week. Thirty half gallon jugs of pasteurized milk went into the delivery van on Thursday for distribution, along with eggs and veggies, in our Mission Hill School food support project. This step was a long time coming for us, and finally putting the bottler to use in filling milk jugs, putting labels on the jugs, loading them into milk crates, and all of the other little nuts and bolts needed to make it work, was really gratifying. I hope that we can increase production, bottling and distribution in the coming weeks and months, and start sending milk to our local community meals and the Orange Food Pantry as well. This bottled milk will also be used in our kitchen and dining room when over-night programing resumes, so there will be plenty of demand if the cows can keep up with the supply. 

An apple tree in flower in the Maggie’s Farm orchard

I have mentioned before that our dairy pastures are being overrun by Bedstraw (Galium Mullugo L.), and this situation has certainly progressed along the same path this growing season. The dominion of this plant, relatively new on the scene here in North Orange, is ever expanding and strengthening all over our dairy farm acreage. However, with the purchase of a smaller used brush-hog, and the repair of the PTO mechanism on our smaller tractor, we have undertaken an effort to clip the dairy paddock after the herd grazes them, in an effort to fight back. So after the cows have been moved to the next paddock, I zip into the one they’ve just finished, set the brush-hog at six or eight inches off the ground, and do my best to clip the tops off of every remaining plant that the cows left behind. I follow this with some targeted weed-whacking under the fence lines and in the corners, to get anything the tractor missed. Our hope is that if we can keep the Bedstraw from going to seed we can slow its spread, and that by promoting the plants that we want in our pastures through annual seeding, we might be able to beat back this rising tide. Bedstraw goes to seed earlier than anything else in the pasture, and makes more seed than anything else, so it has some advantages that we are trying to even out a bit. The plant is actually quite high in protein, and can be a good forage for animals that have learned to get past it’s bitter taste, but we are trying to avoid the development of a mono-culture of Bedstraw in our fields. So far the clipping has been accomplished as we’d hoped, but we’ll have to observe this whole growing season, and next, to see if our plans are having any effect. 

The peas are coming up, and the trellis is ready, in Flat Field East.

Garden beds in the home garden and the long rows in the Flat Field are quickly filling with little veggie starts as the weather warms and we move things from the greenhouse to their homes in the soil. With the fruit trees all over the farm in full blossom, and pollinators swarming thickly around them in their annual buzzing frenzy, we seem to be stepping out of the cool damp of spring into a much more summery time of year. The first two weeks of May have been unseasonably cold and windy, with dawn temperatures still down in the thirties most mornings last week, but things seem to be trending warmer and warmer. The Mayflies, put off by the cold weather, finally made the scene in all of their horrible glory this week, and they certainly know when the weather is warm enough to begin their annual invasion. The ten-day forecast shows some day-time temperatures around eighty-five next week, and some nights in the sixties, so it appears that summer is on its way. My yearly panic about the rain; when it fell last, when it will fall again, and how much, has now begun in earnest, and I can report that there does not appear to be much hope in the ten-day forecast, but that the five inches we got over the first two weeks of May is keeping my mind at ease for now. 

May 2nd – May 9th

Half-gallon milk jugs, ready to fill.

I picked up three-hundred half gallon milk jugs and caps from a local producer this week, we got our milk label stickers in the mail, and with the new bottling machine setup and ready in the creamery, I think we should be able to package and distribute bottled milk next week. This is a big step for us, and something that we have been working towards for a long long time. I am really excited to see our new delivery van roll down the road packed with milk produced and bottled on the farm for families that need support. We only have two cows producing milk right now, with a few more scheduled to come on-line through the summer, but we are getting about five gallons of milk per day. That is just enough to keep the system going, and if we save milk every day, we should be able to keep up with demand. When summer programs start, five gallons per day won’t be enough, but we should have more cows making milk by then, and I am hopeful that production will be able to keep pace with increases in demand. 

The Flat-Field is coming to life.

The little calf Pretzel, whom I wrote about last week, has reached the end of another rough week, and the vet came out to see him again on Thursday. Starting with the good news, we removed his splint on Wednesday and he is using that leg properly now. However, the scours continued all week, and they have caused almost all of the hair on his back-end to fall off as his skin back there has gotten quite irritated and raw. The vet gave the area a thorough cleaning, and applied an anti-biotic ointment over the whole thing in the hope of stopping any infection from developing. We are now cleaning regularly, and applying baby diaper cream to reduce the irritation and discomfort and make the area a bit more resistant to the regular scours baths it has to endure. We had stopped tube feeding the calf, thinking that our addition of extra fluids was just fueling the extravagant scours situation, but the vet advised that we should restart those feedings to make sure that the calf has the electrolytes he needs to survive. We were also feeling a growing sense of worry about little Pretzel’s level of suffering through this period, with a growing concern that we were making him endure more discomfort than was worth it. The vet encouraged us to carry on with treatment, with the belief that the calf will recover eventually. So, the Pretzel project rolls on, and I will keep you informed as the process develops over the coming weeks. 

I think that some of Pretzels apparent discomfort was worsened by the remarkably rainy weather that passed over the farm this week, and the wet shivering calf certainly did not instill confidence in the care we were providing. Three inches of rain fell on the farm between Tuesday night and Thursday morning this week, which was on top of the inch-and-a-half that fell last week. These totals have really soaked the landscape, and local rivers and streams have really gained steam and are pushing up on to the top of their banks. We have several pretty flooded pasture areas, and we have had to adapt this weekend’s grazing plan for the beef herd to get them over some wet areas unsuitable to house them currently. The dairy herd has chewed up their last couple of grazing paddocks as their little pointy feet have torn up the soft wet ground. The sun finally came out beautifully by the middle of the day on Thursday, and the week ended with some really wonderful weather that I know is going to finally get our pastures growing fast. 

The beef herd is grazing hay field perimeters.

Both cow herds are moving daily now, grazing onto a new paddock of fresh growing forage every afternoon in a gradual sweep over the landscape. The laying hens are moving weekly, and we are trying to get them over some of our worst bed-straw infestations before that plant has a chance to go to seed and expand its dominion over our pastures. The goats move once or twice a week as well, and they are carefully picking over every hedgerow shrub as the new leaves emerge. So we are moving along in a pretty summery way these days, while still working out the kinks and details of these systems that are hopefully going to keep our livestock happy, healthy and growing through until frost again in the fall. We are scheduled to pickup piglets next weekend, and the meat-birds should move out to pasture pretty soon too, and then we’ll be up full strength as we head into summer. With the hoop-houses full of spring greens, hearty crops like cabbages, onions and chard already transplanted out in the fields, and seeding rolling on in the greenhouse, our veggie operation is going full speed ahead. Garlic, planted last fall, is looking beautiful out in Flat Field East, and the strawberries on top of the hill have flowered. The ten day weather forecast shows a gradual warming trend ahead of us, so it seems like the growing season is ready to keep moving along. I’ll let you know how it all goes.

April 25th – May 2nd

Pretzel and Pickle

Pickle’s new calf hasn’t had a very good week, and we had the vet out to the farm on Tuesday to take a look at him. I mentioned last week that he was born with a bit of a twist in his front left leg that we had expected, like every calf born with this condition in the past, to straighten out over a few days. This little guy, named Pretzel by the Chicken Coop students, didn’t really seem to have much get-up-and-go, and he wasn’t moving around enough to put the use on the leg that would have been needed to straighten it. Since his leg limited his mobility, he wasn’t able to keep up with his mother, and his milk consumption was really restricted. By Monday midday he was looking pretty rough, so we called Dr. Ledoux, who came out to the farm on Tuesday to check him out. Dr. Ledoux’s examination showed that although Pretzel did not have a temperature, he was significantly under nourished, had a pretty bad case of scours, and that his leg was not really improving. We started an aggressive and regular course of tube feeding, trying to fill Pretzel’s little belly with a warm mix of nutrients and electrolytes, and we put a splint on his twisted leg to hold it in the proper position. We tube fed three times Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and now we’ve cut back to once per day. The calf is nursing a bit, and we are really hoping that that activity can increase and take the place of the tube feeding regimen. We also kept Pickle and Pretzel in the calving pen through the week, hoping that by restricting their area we could increase the time that Pretzel had access to his mother’s milk. We gave them a couple of hours out on pasture with the herd on Friday afternoon, and they went out again Saturday morning. The leg splint seems to be working pretty well, and the little guy gets around with a rough rolling gait as well as he can on it. We will take the splint off every few days to check how things are going and to replace it with a clean set of wrappings. 

Our rain gauge got a work-out.

Pickle and Pretzel, resting comfortably on the deep straw bedding of the calving pen, missed some pretty ugly weather out on the farm Wednesday evening and through the day on Thursday, as a large, windy, rainy mess of a storm slowly slogged from west to east over our region. About an inch and a half of rain fell all told, and winds on the back side of the storm Friday were strong enough to knock out the power for a few hours. We had been pretty dry here this spring, so this was a welcome contribution of moisture, and I expect that our pastures are really going to grow vigorously with this added watering. Rivers, streams and ponds in the area are looking super full this weekend.

Seventy five meat bird chicks arrived in the mail Thursday, and they braved the heavy rain for the quick trip from the post-office to their cozy brooder. They are all moved in, lounging under the heat lamps and enjoying some organic chick starter mash, with a ready supply of fresh warm water at hand whenever they are parched. The brooder really is a lovely space at this time of year, and I take real solace in spending a little extra time in there at every chore, watching the chicks enjoying themselves under the red lights and heaters while the tumultuous weather of spring howls and bangs and chatters outside. These little birds will grow quickly, and they’ll spend a few weeks closed in the brooder, a week or two in the brooder with the door open to their yard, and then their remaining seven or eight weeks out on pasture in little mobile daily-move houses. They will only be with us for about twelve weeks, or until the last week of July, so the whole process is plenty of work but is pretty quick. 

Both the dairy and beef herds are on pasture now, and the beef herd is scheduled to move away from the barn full time starting this weekend at some point. The dairy herd returns to the barn twice per day for milking year round, but the beef herd cuts their connection to their winter barn and starts their slow and steady march through their grazing paddocks, going round and round four or five times before grazing season ends again in October. The grass has been growing nicely so far this spring, so I think we are looking forward to a solid start to the season. 

Ice-cream joined the beef herd this winter.

We ordered a mechanical milk bottler a few months ago, and the machine arrived in the mail this week. It is a simple table-top device with a large metal disk that holds bottles and spins around a vertical post. As the disk turns, we fill the bottle, then use a plunger to snap on the cap. The state mandates the use of mechanical bottling and capping for milk sold to the public, so this device is going to allow us to meet those guidelines as we bottle milk to distribute to local partners. We plan to start bringing milk to local and regional hunger relief organizations that we are partnering with in the next couple of weeks. 

Ten Acre School sent two groups of students out to the farm this week for day trips, and Wednesday and Friday were busy days with that old Farm School feeling and sound around the dairy farm. We had really nice weather Wednesday, but Friday was definitely a bit challenging without much sun and plenty of wind. A day trip does not leave a lot of time to get much work done, but we were really happy to have these kids out on the farm enjoying the open spaces, getting to meet and spend time with our animals, and getting their hands in the soil. We have another trip planned for next Wednesday, and several more throughout the spring and early summer.