Author Archives: jericacadman

We found a hidden treasure…

This month marks our 6-year anniversary of arrival at Shady Grove Ranch. Six years, in the context of farming, is hardly any time at all, and yet we’ve come a long way and done a lot of cool stuff and been through a lot of intense experiences! But boy, has it gone by fast. It’s especially fun to chat with our customers who have been with us from the beginning, and to hear them reminisce about “back when” we only had one [human] baby–and now we are nearly to four!

One of the things we’ve been working on from the beginning is to improve the state of our perimeter fences, and we are almost done. A lot of the property was highly overgrown when we arrived, and several of the fence lines were virtually inaccessible without clearing out the thorns, brush, and vines with machinery. Last year we were able to hire a mulching service to plow a fence row through most of the critical areas, and this year we are working to install the new perimeter fences along those rows.

Matt has a great helper working for him right now who is very experienced and efficient at building fence. So Matt and he were out surveying a southwest border of our ranch in order to determine a game plan when the two of them stumbled upon what appeared to be a huge man-made dam. They climbed up the hill, and sure enough, on the other side was a multi-acre basin with a stream running through it. The dam had a huge cut through the middle. It’s hard to say whether it washed out or was cut out, but the area is probably one of the main water loss areas on the property, meaning it has huge potential to be a reservoir of rainwater runoff to use for watering animals and crops.

It was an exciting and very unexpected find! What we always thought was a brushy woodland mess was really a secret pond site! Here is a photo of what it looks like from the pasture. Would you have thought to go pond-hunting in there?

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And so when I heard about this exciting discovery, I had to see it! We took the whole family out on Sunday afternoon to explore. Tevka enjoyed being escorted by Dadda. Ain’t no way her 36-week momma is carrying her up that big giant hill!

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It was quite a steep climb up to the top. Here is the view looking down into the basin from the top. You can see that there is already quite a bit of water moving through the bottom.

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It’s difficult to perceive in a picture where the cut through the dam is, but in this photo, Matt and Shevi are standing very close to the edge looking down into the cut. The dam continues just past the tall dead tree on the left and circles around to the right. We’re probably 25 feet above the bottom of the basin in this photo. It’s very deep and will make for a great fishing hole!

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And so what do boys like better than to go exploring the depths of their world? 🙂 Here is a photo of the Cad-men down by the stream.

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Meanwhile, Tevka was making mischief with the camera…

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One of our friends suggested calling it Hidden Treasure Pond. I think once it’s built, that is certainly an appropriate name. The boys were very proud of their exploration.

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There’s plenty of clearing and dirt work to be done, so it’s another long-term savings goal for the ranch. But it’s pretty cool that most of the work is already done!

When Optimism Meets 9,000 Pounds of Hungry

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Perhaps many of our readers know us just enough to know that we produce yummy meats and eggs, but not much more than that. Well, let me introduce you to a bit of our kookiness by sharing this fun story. Most of the year, our 185-acre ranch is run by Matt alone, with seasonal help through our internship program. I help with farmy stuff occasionally, with Matt’s parents serving as our wonderful on-farm babysitters and weekend chore help. I run the office and sales, answer the phone, do the bookkeeping. Matt manages the animals, orders the feed, fixes the stuff. Many people are surprised to learn that we’re not a huge operation. (It certainly feels huge at times!) We try to get some seasonal help during broiler season, and of course we’re always on the lookout for that person who is an ideal fit for year-round employment, but ranch life is not for most. All that to say, trips and vacations don’t happen very often, because it takes a huge amount of preparation to get us off the ranch for more than twelve consecutive hours.

So when Matt finalized a cattle deal for several of our friends who have decided to invest in cattle raised at our ranch, we knew the overnight trip would require quite a bit of logistical planning. He had secured a load of new heifers for our breeding herd. We are adding 17 just-weaned South Poll heifers to further improve the grass-finishing ability, heat tolerance, and general robustness of our beef herd. I have to say… these heifers are gorgeous, and we are very excited to be adding them to our herd!

What I was not so excited about was doing the chores while Matt was away. It’s always stressful to think about what could go wrong when Matt’s not here. Storms, power outages, animal break-outs, predators… The work itself wouldn’t be too hard. Since it was a short trip, Matt was able to set it up so that things would be relatively easy and I would mostly be getting a visual on the various groups and doing sundry little tasks like cleaning out water bowls. The only chore that would require real “work” would be feeding the sows.

You see, we have two groups of pigs: the growers and the sows. We basically give the grower pigs free-choice feed, which actually (despite the counter-intuitiveness of it—is that a word?) makes them eat less overall because the constant access to feed makes them feel less desperate about eating. There’s plenty, so there’s no competition and no rush. The result is leaner (but certainly not lean!) pigs, which, for the Large Blacks that we raise, that’s a good thing. They tend to get really fat really easily.

But the sows will get really REALLY fat if we give them free-choice feed, and the results are not just overly fatty meat—obese sows can be catastrophic in a breeding program, because the sow loses the agility that helps her avoid stepping on her newborn piglets whilst maneuvering around her nest. In addition, overly fat livestock tend to lose some fertility in general, meaning smaller litters and more stillborns. Heritage breed pigs tend to be extremely efficient feed converters, especially after reaching sexual maturity. They are basically fat-making machines!

All this to say that Matt couldn’t feed the sows in a bulk feeder before he left like he did with the grower group; instead, I would need to distribute the sow feed in their daily troughs. It also means that the sows were going to be pretty hungry when I arrived. Hungry isn’t dangerous until it weighs 600 pounds and starts chasing you around to speed the serving of the breakfast along. Multiply that by 16 big girls plus one little girl (that’s me), and you have an outright adventure.

My instructions were as follows: Find the feed troughs (should be close to where the 3 bags of feed were sitting). Carry a stick and use it as needed to remind the pigs to keep a respectful distance. Carry each bag of feed to the troughs, moving quickly enough to outrun the sows. Deliver feed and get out of there. Rinse and repeat a total of three times.

Outrun? Matt had asked me while explaining all this, “You can carry a 50 pound bag of feed on your shoulder, can’t you?” Um… sure? I’m just not so sure about that whole running part. Oh, and I’m supposed to be able to wield a stick, too. Oh boy.

When I arrived at the sows, they were calmly milling around, but I didn’t see any feed troughs from outside the paddock, so I decided to scope things out before attempting to carry in a bag of feed. I wanted to have a clear idea of where the troughs were before awakening 9,000 pounds’ worth of appetite. Matt had thoughtfully left me a nice, sturdy stick to remind the pigs which one of us was the dominant species. With stick in hand, I stepped over the electric net fence and walked to the left through a wooded area… and kept walking. No sign of any troughs. I went back to ground zero and walked to the right—surely he would have put the feed as close as possible to the troughs. I kept walking, and still no troughs in sight. I hated to admit defeat, but I didn’t want to waste time, plus the longer I wandered the paddock, the more the sows might realize I was there to bring food… and hadn’t yet delivered. It’s not that they are mean, exactly. It’s just that they are the size of a small motorcycle and have brains the size of a tennis ball. Ain’t no reasoning with them about why there’s no food yet.

I decided to go ahead and call Matt to get an exact location of the troughs. The paddock was much bigger than I had envisioned, but I should have expected it. After all, it did contain 16 sows plus several litters of newborn piglets. Our pig operation has really expanded over the last year! We started with a breeding pair of pigs, and now process about 150 pigs a year! Now back to the story…

Farm-sitting is so much easier with cell phones. Matt described the paddock set-up to me and said their feed troughs would be down a hill and over a log that I could step over. Easy enough. We hung up and off I went. Still in pre-feed testing mode and stick in hand, I proceeded to follow the path he had described on the phone.

I came to the hill and realized that our terminology wasn’t quite matching up. You see, this wasn’t a “hill,” according to my 5’3” definition (Matt is 6’5”). It was more like a cliff. A crumbly, steep dirt cliff dropping down a good 12 feet, and riddled with sticks and brushy rubble along the way. I didn’t know we had a miniature Grand Canyon on our ranch. At any moment, I thought I might spot a group of pack mules or perhaps some mountain goats coming up from the water hole beneath. No wonder I couldn’t see the troughs! They were in the abyss!

I was also pretty sure I had found the “log” I was supposed to step over. It was more like a large brush pile. Probably full of snakes and other small, viciously hungry animals. Considering that I was wearing sissy-tread rubber boots and have already begun experiencing poor pregnancy balance (yeah, that starts way early—you know it’s happening when you sneeze and accidentally crash into a shelf), I definitely didn’t think I could traverse this obstacle course hauling a 50 pound bag of feed at top speed with a 16-member sounder of swine on my tail! Not to mention that I’d have to get there with time to spare to be able to open up the string zipper on each feed bag. It’s hard enough to get those things to work even when you’re not under pressure of getting eaten!

I could open the bag before heading to the trough, of course, but then I have a 50 pound open sack that I’m supposed to haul *quickly* while wielding a stick which may preserve my extremities. Down a cliff and over a brush pile. While pregnant. Well, I decided I couldn’t risk having no stick. I like my extremities, thankyouverymuch. My new strategy would be that I would move the feed troughs to friendlier ground.

Thankfully the troughs are not too heavy, so I dragged all three them up out of the ravine along the clearest path I could navigate. By then the sows began to be more interested, so I tapped my way through the group up to the crest of the “hill” and parked the first trough between some brush and a tree so the pigs couldn’t shove it over the *cliff*, nor could they push it onto the electric fence (ask us how we know they’ll do this and how it results in major piggy mutiny). I parked another in a different safe spot still close enough to the entrance for my own comfort. And the third in a similar spot.

I went back over to the bags of feed, opened the first one up, and walked the couple dozen steps to one of the now more conveniently-located feed troughs. In went the feed, down went the sows, and away I went. I had hoped that this would be the end of my worries about being trampled by a hungry pig (or several), but I could immediately tell that these smart sows had learned not to squabble over one measly feed trough—they knew there would be more, and they had already started looking to the two-legged servant hustling back toward the gate. I decided to try leaving the next bag closed until I got to the trough since there were fewer sows interested now. I lined the bag up on my shoulder so that I knew where to start pulling the string tape in order to prevent any delays in serving up breakfast. Walked this next bag over, tapping a few piggy shoulders along the way, and made a successful delivery to trough #2.

Back out to the feed bag pile. This last bag had been discovered by some form of wildlife and had a moderate size hole near the top. I propped up the bag, brushed off the fire ants (that’s important when you’re carrying feed on your shoulder!), and finished tearing open a neat hole in the bag so it would be ready to pour into the last trough. A few more taps with the stick here and there, and I made my way safely to trough #3 and back. While the girls were eating, I walked the vast perimeter to make sure it was secure, and headed back home to collect my own little babies from Pap-pap’s, calling Matt along the way to make fun of his eternal optimism. Hill. Log. Ha!

Eggs from the Cookie Cutter

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We’re members of the American Pastured Poultry Producer’s Association, and part of the membership is being able to participate in an online discussion forum. A few days ago the question arose, “Where could a person find eggs that had been candled to ensure no blood spots, for a customer who was a strict vegetarian and couldn’t eat them?”

As it turns out, blood spots have no correlation with fertile or unfertile eggs, meaning that this customer’s concerns about eating an undeveloped embryo were rather unfounded, so I suggested the farmer talk with the consumer to gently educate them about what blood spots in eggs really are. Here was my comment: “I would say, that unless a producer is willing to go to the extra expense of candling all the eggs (and culling all the blood-spot-containing ones!), this would be a great opportunity for customer education. Certainly one of our biggest hurdles as pastured producers is being able to educate our customers so that they can eat “nose to tail,” since we don’t have luxury of high-volume waste commodity sales…. It’s work, but it produces the loyal, high-quality customers we need to thrive.”

You see, when folks spend their lives buying cookie-cutter meat (and yes, even egg!) products from the store, they grow accustomed to every single product looking, tasting, and smelling the same every time. But I’ll let you in on a farm secret… Real food does not come from a cookie-cutter and varies from animal to animal and year to year. Eggs, even from a single chicken, vary in size, shape, color, and texture. But think of how much work and waste goes into selling only “Extra Large Brown Eggs.” USDA grading standards even include a silhouette of the “perfect” egg shape, since some eggs are more round, some are more missile-shaped, and some are lop-sided, and must be culled because they don’t fit the criteria.

Large-scale animal production factories (“CAFOs”) can perfect their products to this minute degree because they have access to a commodity market that most consumers aren’t aware of. The eggs that don’t make the “grade A” cut, like the “peewee” eggs from young hens or the eggs with weird shells or double yolks or other harmless anomalies like blood spots, end up as liquid or powdered egg product. Nothing wrong with that. I suppose it’s good that even commercially-produced foods aren’t wasted… But the point is that this side of real production is hidden from the consumer purely for the sake of visual uniformity. So when you start buying from a real, small-scale farm, you might be a little shocked with you crack open your first double-yolked egg!

So tell me, does it give you the heebie jeebies to discover what real food is like, or do you see it as an adventure?

The Day The Chicken Paddock Became A Mudslide

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Farming often feels like feast or famine. We believe we have exited a 3-year-long drought that started … oh, our FIRST summer of production. We made it. By the Lord’s grace we made it. But the pendulum seems to have swung the opposite direction, and rain has absolutely been dumping on us this spring! It started as two heavy snows with some ice, and then turned into cold rain, and then turned into not-so-cold rain. But it left the chicken paddock in a downright mess.

All our critters are in non-stationary paddocks, meaning they are never in a permanent location. This is called rotational grazing ,or perhaps more correctly, since chickens don’t exactly graze, rotational management. It means we move the chickens every 2 or 3 days. But it just-so-happened that when the snow hit, the chickens were a few hundred yards from this big beautiful pond:

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Which was not quite so big and beautiful at the time.

Then it started raining. And it didn’t quit. For days. For weeks. Rain every day. And every night. We got like 7 inches in a day. So the pond started to overflow. And the chicken paddock became a mudslide. After the icey weather subsided, Matt was catching back up on chores, one of which was to move the chickens (remember that every-2-or-3-days idea?). Well as it turns out, the overflowing pond decided to fund some underground streams which led right to the land surrounding the chickens. And the tractor got stuck. Again. And Again. It was like a new routine item on the checklist. Try to move chickens. Check. Get tractor stuck. Check.

Thankfully Matt is pretty clever and was able to pull himself out each time using his hay fork. (Oh, if only I had THAT on camera! But alas, it was too slick to bring the kids down with me. As if I didn’t already have enough wet-weather laundry…) And for a while, he had been mulling over a new skid design for the bottom of the chicken house that would solve some issues with wheels on soft pasture. So he brought a large steel bowl down and planned to attach it to the egg-mobile. The problem was that the ground was so soft, there was no way to lift the structure to do undercarriage work without the tractor. And the problem with that was that there was no way to get the tractor down there without getting really, really stuck.

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Finally one day he decided the ground was approaching a firm enough state to drive on, but the chickens had been there so long that the ground was really slick. You see, the main reason we are committed to this rotational management stuff is because any animal, left in the same location for too long, will decimate the landscape there. To their own detriment, in fact. It had only been 3 weeks since the chickens had been moved, but every lick of grass was gone and manure was starting to cake up. Most “range-fed” or “yard eggs” chickens are often in a permanent chicken run that gets filthy and stinky and downright miserable to live in.

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The scary thing is that as far as chickens are concerned, this is considered normal. Most folks don’t have the means, knowledge, or ability to rotate their chickens on a regular and frequent basis. Sadly, it turns into a filthy mess in no time. Above is what it looked like after only four weeks. Four weeks! Chickens have a productive life span of 3-4 years! Can you imagine what it would have looked like after that length of time?

Matt was determined to get that chicken paddock moved asap!

So after a day of sunny weather, he brought the tractor down again to try to use it as a jack to install the new sink-resistant skids. But he was still up against the issue of traversing the slick mud to get to the egg-mobile. The tractor slid down the hill… and the hay fork crashed right into the tire—pop! No more tire. The hay fork had skewered it! And the ground was still so slick that there was no way to navigate the tractor to lift up the house. Plan… C? D? Where were we at this point?

Matt called our neighbor, who has a slightly larger tractor with a winch cable. The plan was that Matt would hook up to the egg mobile, and Neighbor would hook up to Matt with the winch and pull the whole assembly uphill to a new paddock.

It actually did work, but that popped tire acted like a plow and left a long, deep rut in the pasture.

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That’s what shovels are for, I guess.

The chickens are now on new, dry ground where Matt can repair the egg-mobile and move it with his own tractor. And they are happy. I can tell because I got over 3 baskets of eggs that afternoon!

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The lesson learned? Next time we’re expecting 7+ inches of rain… keep the chickens far from the pond!

Winter Photos and More

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Just for fun, I thought I’d post some photos from our snowy adventures and beyond. Here’s what we’ve been up to at the ranch for the past couple of weeks.

: The pigs just get rid of the snow. What do they do? Eat it? Smash it into smithereens? We will never know.

: We tried two methods for snowman-making–the traditional rolling method, and a new bucket method! But we only had one pair of safety glasses…

: The boys say “Hi!” And then they threw snowballs at me.

: It truly was a white-out for a while!

: The view by one of the ponds.

: The chickens got out to scratch around a bit.

: Zeke didn’t mind the snow. He’s not so white, after all!

: It really was pretty to look at.

: 185 acres holds a lot of snow! This pond even iced over a little bit.

: And right before the snow came, Matt started on a new homemade rollaway nest box project to help get fewer soiled eggs. (I don’t make it into many farm photos, so I photobombed this one.)

: The occasion called for a new power tool: a brad nailer. Happy early birthday, Matt.

: Cool design from the Green Machine Farm.

: Marking the next template in preparation for cutting.

: All the pieces ready to assemble.

: Careful cuts make it go together easily.

: My handsome hubby needed a tea break during his work.

: Here are the plans by a fellow engineer-farmer.

: A lovely snowy sunrise to enjoy despite the cold and lack of electricity!

How A Kitchen Scale Revolutionized My Baking Life

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We talk about meats and eggs a lot, since that’s our business, of course. But I wanted to share a little tidbit that I learned along my cooking journey, and that is to use a kitchen scale for baking measurements.

First some background: One of the things I especially avoid at stores is bread. Store-bought bread, though we’ve all been conditioned to think it’s so tasty, is so unlike homemade, it’s unbelievable. Real bread molds within days and goes stale even sooner than that, whereas conventional brands last weeks without going stale or moldy. It really makes you wonder WHAT is in that stuff. But you can figure it out by looking at the long (and I do mean LONG) list of ingredients besides poor little flour.

Of course there are a handful of health food brands that are ok, but they are pricey—like $4-6 per loaf! Compare that to a home-baked loaf made from premium chemical-free flours. Even using the best-quality flour, a loaf will only cost you a couple of bucks at most. Huge savings to put toward more pasture-raised meats, right? 😀 Not to mention that you have complete control over the ingredients. And that’s what we’re really after.

I know a lot of our readers will agree, and yet homemade bread remains a mystery! And a scary one at that! I know how overwhelmed I felt when Bread Day came around.

Great news. I have unraveled the mystery, and it is that all this time I was measuring my special organic, unenriched, unbleached flour by volume rather than by weight. Figuring out the ideal dough texture was SO HARD because I was trying to teach myself what to look for without a tutor or any formal instruction, but I didn’t have unlimited time or patience to spend perfecting a technique. Sometimes my dough was so runny that it wouldn’t form a loaf at all and it was super-sticky and hard to work with. Other times it was so dry that it wouldn’t rise at all and would remain a dense little lump that was more like a brick than a loaf of bread. I would spend hours standing by the mixer, sprinkling tiny amounts of flour in, waiting for them to be incorporated, and then trying to decide if enough was enough yet. Bread was a huge burden. Sound familiar?

Enter the kitchen scale.

Matt got it for me for Christmas one year (per my request). The scale, paired with the knowledge that a cup of white flour weighs 120 grams, revolutionized my life in the kitchen. I became a bread expert overnight (well, not really–but expert enough for us!). And now I’m sharing this secret with you. Whatever bread or baking recipe you’re using, just use that simple conversion and it will give you consistent, successful results every time. (Except if you underbake it. You can still mess it up if you do that. Ask me how I know. ) Of course, different flours have different measuring densities, so if you’re using whole wheat, potato, coconut, almond, etc, you’ll have to find the correct conversion for those.

A kitchen scale also works great for measuring the fat in recipes. I use solid fats for cooking, like butter, lard and coconut oil. If you’ve ever used these, you know they’re a bit of a pain to measure without dirtying yet another dish and another spatula. No thanks!

The fat conversion you need to know (or to write on a sheet of paper and sneakily tape inside one of your cabinets) is 1 stick of butter is 8 Tbs is 113 g. This works for all common cooking fats. So if a pie recipe calls for a 2 cups of flour and 1/4 cup of butter, you can just use 240 grams of flour and 56 grams of lard. Cool, huh?

All my flour and fat in recipes are measured this way. In fact, if you skim through my most-used recipes, you’d see little division brackets and conversions scribbled all over the place. (I suppose the next revolutionary kitchen tool I’ll get will be a calculator…) It’s a great idea to write down the weights of other common ingredients on your pantry cheat-sheet so you can save yourself the hassle of figuring it out over and over. Then you can save time and money not washing extra measuring cups for things like milk, salt, sugar, etc.

For those of you who are gluten-free, this will hopefully be a huge aid to you as well. Alternative flours like coconut and almond have an even greater tendency to get packed down and give unreliable volumetric measurements. This will work great for those, too. I have even taken to searching for baking recipes that are given by weight. There’s no guessing in these due to variation in ingredients, plus the recipes tend to be developed by culinary experts–they know baking must be done by weight to be done well every time.

Because of my kitchen scale (which cost like $11, I might add—pretty small investment!), we have access to fresh-baked, chemical-free bread again because it’s easy enough for me to incorporate into our busy lives.

Here’s a simple recipe for homemade bread for you to try with your new kitchen scale:

Mix 780 g unbleached, unenriched flour (about 6.5 cups) with 1.5 Tbs yeast and 1.5 Tbs salt. Pour in 3 cups of lukewarm (not hot!) water and mix thoroughly, but do not knead.

Cover and keep in a warm place for 2 hours.

Separate the dough into 3 loaves, either free-form, or in loaf pans lined with parchment paper (you can also refrigerate dough to use later). Let rise, covered, for another 1.5 hours in a warm place.

Bake at 450 for 25 minutes.

That’s easier than making lasagna! 🙂 Happy eating!

Three Things I Never Throw Away

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I was of a frugal nature before we started farming, and have become all the more so now that we are full-fledged self-employed workers of the land. We count ourselves as highly blessed, despite a tight budget most of the time. We have plenty to eat, sturdy clothes to wear, and a lovely farm to live on and work, so I’m not sure whether it’s the self-employed part or the our-own-farm part that makes me stretch every dollar or that makes me want to use every ounce of food that comes across my table. But the bottom line is that I do. I hate to see food go to waste because we’ve worked so hard to produce it, or in some cases, we’ve gone to great lengths to buy it from some other farmer, or from the best source we can find locally.

So what are three things I never throw away?

This thought process began yesterday at a lunch gathering after our church met for morning worship. We brought a simple meal for our family to eat there “on the grounds”—leftover butternut squash and grilled pork chops. Once finished, I tried to discreetly scoop up all the bones from our plates and hide them away near our things so no one would inadvertently throw them in the trash. “They’re not trash!” my inner crunchy weirdo shouted, so I brought extra plastic wrap with the intention of carrying them back home again. I always do stuff like this. Why?

Because there’s still a lot of good stuff in those bones! Even after we’d picked the bones clean of meat (and our pork chops are worth picking because the meat is soooo good!), I intended to make broth from those bones. And so I thought I’d share a few other things that I never throw away in the kitchen. Here are my top three:

Bones.

Any bone that comes across my table is broth-worthy. It’s like free food, and you’d be surprised how fast a stash of bones will grow into a large enough batch to make some broth. I just keep a plastic grocery sack in the freezer, and into there the bones and bits of veggie trimmings go until it’s full, a handful at a time. Once it’s full, I start another, and when I have two full bags, it’s time to make broth.

Other kinds of things I save for broth: Onion Scraps!

My favorite thing to save for broth (besides bones) is corn cobs and potato peelings. The flavor they add to the broth is so delicious. So as long as whatever I have isn’t rotting or moldy, it goes into the broth bag. Even after it’s made into broth, all the well-cooked bits then win their place as compost and dog food. The dogs have no problem chomping through the softened bones after I’ve cooked them for 48 hours. They turn their noses up at kibble when they have bones to chew. Every scrap counts!

Grease.

As a kid, you and I were taught clever ways to dispose of the grease that cooks out of hamburger meat, sausage, or bacon, like pouring it into a tinfoil-lined bowl and sticking that in the freezer. And of course, we were taught NEVER to pour it down the drain. Right?

But once I learned about the benefits of pasture-raised meats, my cleverness was diverted to thinking of ways to incorporate that “grease” into our diets! Yes! The fear of the fat clogging the sink should not mislead the eater to thinking that same fat will likewise clog their major blood vessels. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. At least not the right kind of fat. Animal fat. Yep. Read about it. No more fat phobia!

So now I try never to waste any fat. I save it in little containers on the counter for basting the next chicken or for greasing the egg skillet or for frying some potatoes. I even take a little pleasure in the ability to transfer the unique flavor of a particular batch of fat into some new dish. Like bacon flavoring for the chicken I’m roasting. Or onion ring flavoring for the eggs I’m scrambling. Fat is so interesting and so filling. So I never throw it away. Even when I clean out the fryer, that grainy, dark brown gooey stuff just goes to the dogs. They like it salted. Yep. Salted fat dog food. No waste.

Sour milk.

Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, we had milk cows. And it was a lot of work to get out there every morning and evening to milk those cows, on Christmas, on Thanksgiving, on birthdays, rain or shine, at 20 degrees and 110 degrees outside. So the milk became quite precious. And though we now purchase our raw milk from another farm instead of raising it ourselves, it’s still regarded as super-valuable, and you do your best never to waste it.

So when our raw milk gets to be about two weeks old and starts to turn “wonky,” as we call it, I begin to find uses for it other than just drinking. Unlike pasteurized milk, which goes truly gross when it sours, raw milk sours by transforming into buttermilk, so I start using it in pancakes or biscuits. I’ve even had great success using it in gravy and cheese sauces! It is cheese, in some sense, or at least the beginning of many types of cheese. And it will keep in the fridge as “buttermilk” for a month. I’ve used the same gallon of milk for 6 weeks! Talk about shelf life!

Here I am being excited about raw milk.

I know, I’m weird. But maybe there’s something to this. We can get a lot of miles out of a little bit of high-quality food by taking care to use every last bit of that food for something in the kitchen. Now you might be thinking to yourself, “But I don’t have grass-fed burger or raw milk. Is it safe to save the bones/fat/sour milk from conventionally raised animals?” Well. The truth is, I don’t know. It begs the question, is the protein portion safe? If the bones and fat from cheap, poorly raised meats aren’t safe and nourishing, why would the protein from those sources be safe and nourishing? But cheap protein is still protein, right?

That’s a question we all have to deal with. I dealt with it after the last time I ever bought conventional ground beef. I made spaghetti for my coworkers one summer (they were starving bachelor students, and I was newly married with a heart for cooking and a love for nourishing food). At home we used grass-fed ground beef, which was quite expensive, so I decided to go halvsies and do a chub of cheap stuff and a couple packs of premium grass-fed. I’ll never forget the stark contrast in texture of the two meats in the sauce. You could plainly tell the difference, and the store-bought stuff was DISGUSTING. It reminded me of canned Beanie Weanie. I never bought hamburger at the store again.

So I hope this article has given you a few tips to save money so you have more money to put toward the good stuff. Happy eating!

Pastured Meats and Your Health

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Report on Pastured Meats and Your Health

We recently put together an event at one of our Longview retail locations: Jack’s Natural Foods. We did a presentation on Pastured Meats and Your Health, and took the time to share Matt’s health story and some of the things we learned about food during his battle with ulcerative colitis. We shared about the Weston A. Price Foundation and Dr. Price’s findings on principles of traditional diets. We finished by demonstrating how to render lard and offered samples of simple favorite recipes like pork shoulder roast and roast chicken.

jacks presentation photo1

We had lots of fun telling our story and talking about how important well-raised meats and eggs because of their high nutrient content and digestibility. Consuming whole animal foods (organs, fat, bones, AND muscle meats) is key for reducing inflammation and restoring the body’s God-given ability to heal itself. It is interesting to note that there are few, if any, auto-immune diseases that are actually curable, not just suppressible, by modern medicine. Matt was one of the many victims of the effects of a toxic, low-nutrient diet which is so prevalent in our society. It has always been close to our hearts to share what we’ve learned so that others can work to be restored to good health as we were.

Perhaps you have never heard his story of recovery from ulcerative colitis. He went from a tall, muscular, athletic young man to a frighteningly thin, anemic, debilitated sufferer of intestinal disease. There was no explanation. According to doctors, diet had nothing to do with the disease and the prognosis was hopeless without drugs and surgery. After his second flare-up, which followed a year of his strict obedience to doctors’ orders, we became convinced that we had to take our health into our own hands. It took several years to get his guts back on track, but we are happy to report that it has been almost 5 years since his last severe flare-up and 4 years since he took any prescription drugs. So what did he do to recover? Those were some of the topics discussed at Jack’s earlier this month. And of course, a big part of his recovery was changing to a Traditional Diet.

A few of the Traditional Diets principles we discussed were consuming generous amounts of pasture-raised animal fats, like butter, egg yolks and lard. Animal fat, when it comes from well-raised animals, contains lots of otherwise lost nutrients like vitamins A, D, and K. These nutrients are fat soluble and only found in their animal forms in the fat of animals. And it just so happens that these nutrients were plentiful in the most treasured foods of traditional (aka unmodernized) people groups. Nutrients like vitamin D and K are only found in the fats of animals eating green grasses and living outdoors in the sunshine.

Other principles of Traditional Diets are the intentional incorporation of bone broth and the use of unrefined salt. We talked briefly about fermented foods, raw milk, and avoiding vegetable oils.

We discussed preparing simple foods and meals, like roast chicken and pot roast in a crockpot. Real food doesn’t need to be complicated. One of my most effective strategies for implementing real food is not elaborate planning or strict routines, but rather a simple idea: keep basic supplies on hand at all times, like potatoes, onions, ground beef, lard, and broth. Even when you’re feeling uninspired to cook, you can still put something together that is real, nourishing, and delicious.

It seems there is a need in the East Texas area to learn about what is truly healthy based on evidence because there is so much misinformation out there and so many laboratory-based products that make claims upon your health. We’ve always felt that a proprietary “food” that can’t be made or grown at home but only purchased from a particular company cannot be a sustainable way to achieve and maintain health. Yes, sure, we’re selling a product, too, but we aren’t hiding how we do it or where we got our information. You could do it, too, if you wanted to! The truth is, though, that most folks don’t mind leaving the farming to us. 🙂

There also seems to be a lack of knowledge for implementation strategies. How do you incorporate these principles? Where do you get the foods? How do you cook them? Lard is among the most bewildering foods to incorporate, not because it’s hard, but simply because contemporary food wisdom eschews the use of fat almost entirely, and, well, pork fat? Won’t that kill me dead after the first bite?

We might argue otherwise. We’ve been eating it for years! And though eating pasture-raised pork fat in the form of lard is only a small part of our overall eating strategy, we often focus on that because it has the ability to displace some very nasty conventional dietary components, including trans fat and vegetable oils. Not only that, but fat has the ability to satiate the appetite. Try eating a plate of cracklin for dinner. I would guess you’d only get through the first bite or two before your body says, “Enough. I’m full.” It’s very difficult to overeat when you’re eating the good kinds of fats.

So take this as an encouragement to start taking baby steps toward a more traditional diet. Check out the Weston A. Price Foundation and their extensive (free!) database of dietary wisdom. Would you like us to come do an event like this in your area? Let us know and we’ll see if we can fit it in between feeding pigs, moving cows, and taking care of our trio of future Cadman farmers. Happy eating!

PS—Glenn Evans at Longview News Journal was kind enough to come and cover our event. Check it out here!

How long do eggs keep?

The small ones cost more than the big ones?

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I have decided to do more blogging since Facebook is killing off business pages by trying to force us to monetize our ads, else we get seen by less than 1% of our fans. We don’t have a big marketing budget, but we do want to share farm knowledge and stories with our customers. So a blog on our own website is perhaps the next best option. Here is some knowledge mixed with a story for your entertainment and edification.

We’re back at market again on Saturdays. Some farmers refuse to do farmers markets because of the ups and downs of “speculative sales,” but not us. Going to market is ton of work, I will admit, and it requires rising at a rather unpleasant hour to start a very full day of work. But we enjoy going to market for many reasons: we can supply our regular customers with a convenient place to buy our products without having to pre-order; we can do our own locally-grown grocery shopping; and it’s a great place to meet new customers and add to public knowledge about locally- and naturally-raised meats and eggs.

But some of the folks we meet aren’t terribly keen on buying local—they’re perhaps just shopping for a cheaper option than supermarket. And occasionally we are met with outright hostility over our prices. (But I’ll let you in on a little secret—we’re not here to be the cheapest. Nor are we here to be the most expensive. We’re here because we want to be the healthiest meats and eggs you can get from a sustainable operation. And you can’t call yourself sustainable if you’re not profitable. And profitable doesn’t mean we’re greedy—it means we’re able to make a reasonable living! More on that some other time…)

For example, a lady came up to our market booth to inquire about our turkeys (which, by the way, are already all spoken for!). We are still taking some standby names, so I explained to her how pricing works this year. Large turkeys are 19 lb and over and cost $4.25/lb. Mediums are 16-18 lb and cost $4.50/lb. Smalls are 15 lb and under and cost $4.75/lb. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth frowned out the words, “So the smallest are the MOST expensive?” Then she walked off, offended at our outrageous prices.

She wasn’t exactly correct. It would still take more dollars to buy a big turkey than a little turkey, but the little ones are more expensive per pound. Now, this article isn’t about justifying our turkey prices. Instead, it is to explain a concept that perhaps many folks don’t understand—why the smallest are the most expensive per pound.

It’s called overhead. You see, each turkey will consume feed at pretty much the same rate per pound of bodyweight. But feed is just a tiny component of the final turkey price, and probably the only factor that varies by weight. There are a bunch of fixed costs that are constant no matter how big or small the bird is. To name a few, there is the cost of the poults (baby turkey chicks), the brooder electricity, the pasture pen, the feeder, the waterer, the transportation to processing, and, perhaps the biggest single overhead cost, the processing fee. It’s a flat rate per turkey. Even if all the turkeys we raise end up at 10 lb each, it still costs us the same to process them as if they were 20 lb.

All of the overhead costs are per bird, not per pound, and so the smaller birds end up costing us more per pound to produce. That’s why the little’uns are more pricey than the big’uns per pound.

So now you are a turkey-pricing expert. Happy farming!