I subscribe to a number of food industry newsletters because I edit a monthly digest of farm and food news stories for the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. One of the weekly newsletters I receive is about new equipment and supplies for industrial meat processors. This week’s hot topic is automated smoke stick loading robotics [...]
It’s Monday morning, the sky is grey, and it smells like autumn. A patch of leaves here and there are going from green to peach and the tall summer weeds are getting woody. I have a conference call at 11:30, the washer and dryer are full and waiting, and there are dirty dishes in the [...]
When we started farming, one of the things Chet and I realized was how repetitious our life had become. We always wrote notes to ourselves. But on the farm, we found ourselves writing the same notes over and over again. So eventually we wrote permanent notes and kept them handy in the kitchen where they [...]
Trim the goat’s hooves, brush-hog the pastures, take out the compost, clean the barn, muck the holding pen, clean the nesting boxes, muck the chicken coop, get the broken hay ring out of the pasture, put the new hay ring together in the pasture, fix the fence in the south pasture, weed the vegetable garden, [...]
Moon is eleven months old and I am struggling to train him to come when I call him. If I have a pocket full of treats, he is very attentive. But if I don’t have a pocket full of treats, or if he is too far away from me to see that I do, he [...]
In the morning after chores I feed Moon, and while he is digesting his food, I meditate for twenty minutes. This morning as my brain was twinkling, the chickens screamed in panic, Moon barked and ran to the door, and I very reflexively jumped out of my meditation and ran to open the door for [...]
Memorial Day weekend I had a gathering of friends from the city who had all heard about Violet’s demise and wanted to visit her, so we went for a walk in the woods.
I am still reflecting on the amazing power of salt having recently finished the book, Salt by Mark Kurlansky, and having recently cured sheepskins with salt, and having recently eaten a fellow gourmand’s homemade prosciutto (ham dry aged and cured with salt). FYI — one of the things it says in the book is that [...]
I just finished reading Salt: A world history by Mark Kurlansky. Following the evolution of societies and nations as they exploit one of the most common minerals on earth — salt — Kurlansky tells the story of local economies becoming regional and ultimately, global. Unfortunately, with the salt business came exploitation of the environment, the [...]
I am trying to teach Moon to speak chicken. My previous dog, a 150-pound bullmastiff named Henry, spoke perfect chicken and he taught me how to hear it, too. There is a difference between the cackling of hens laying eggs, the decoy screeches as they run across an open space without air cover, the social [...]