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Regenerative Agriculture and the Dawn of Planetary Engineering
Regenerative agriculture is the dawn of planetary engineering. And that’s great news for the future of the planet. Here’s how I know. We have five hay fields on our farm. They are the kind of rolling, green, and gorgeous fields that are typical across Vermont’s pastoral green mountains. All five of the fields have been…
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Poem: The Farming Father
This poem is, of course, a (poor) tribute to Wendell Berry’s “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.”
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First Videos of First Successful Haying for the Year
Despite Saturday’s rain, we were able to dry the 11ish acres of hay we had down. It turned out to be thicker than we expected and cleaner than we hoped for after the rain. Overall, it was a successful haying: clean hay, no machines broke down, and no one got hurt. With the help of…
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Two Videos of our Baby Chicks and Spring Lambs Springing
July has swept over the farm and everybody is running around like crazy. We’re picking weeds, sowing our last crops, mulching the gardens, preparing for hay (if the weather ever cooperates, we’ll cut soon), mowing the lawns, selling the chickens, feeding the animals, chasing after Angus (our 1-year-old son), and so on. Even the chickens and…
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Our Season’s First Lacto-Fermented Garlic Dill Pickles
Holy crap I love pickles. I don’t care if Portlandia made it funny and fashionable to bash the brine lovers of the world, I wear my pickle pride … with pride. And so, when I saw that Cousin Lisa had crates of cucumbers for sale at the Dorset Farmers’ Market last Sunday, I blurted out, “Holy crap…
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Want to get to 10,000 steps every day? Farm.
Back in my web programming/marketing/design days, I sat. A lot. Almost all day, in fact. The things that you would expect to happen, happened: I got fat. I got slow. I had chest pains and leg pains and problems sleeping. I was angry a lot. I was addicted to beeps and pings and bright screens—the brighter…
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Farm Tours; and We’ve Got Chicken, Yes We Do…
With two incredibly successful batches of chickens under our belt for the season, our freezers are packed to the top with some of the happiest, healthiest, most-carbon-sequestery chickens Vermont has ever seen. We’re incredibly proud of the work these birds did for the land while they were with us, and we’re just thrilled with the…
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50 Sheep Added to Our Hayfield Restoration Program
For a few years now, Cally and I have been tossing around the idea of bringing sheep here to the farm to compliment the work that the poultry is doing in our pasture (soil) rehabilitation program. The advantages were clear: But, because we’re incredibly careful people—and despite thoughtful encouragement from elders we trust—we hadn’t braved the plunge…
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How We Raised Pastured Pork in 2014
Last year, as one of our early pastured meat experiments, we raised four Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs from Hidden Nest Farm in Argyle, New York. As we strive to provide any animal we bring onto this farm with a full, safe, and interesting life, we circled a 1.5 acre hillside—complete with an old horse stall, trees,…
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Hayfield Restoration With Chickens: The Exciting Results Can Be Seen From Space!
It is March 18th here in Vermont, and while all the bitter dispositions of Vermonters are slowly warming, the temperature outside is decidedly not. It is an 18° Windsday today—the wind is cutting straight through wool, beards, and bone. It turned out to be fortunate, however, that the weather is so bitter, because had it been pleasant—and had I…
