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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/21/10 at 03:36 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Cassis-Making Season at Maison Turkana

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/10/10 at 12:32 PM • Permalink

Our Incredible Shrinking Pond and Other Alarming Signs

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:

It’s Too Damned Hot!  Cole Porter got that part right.  It’s also too damned dry.

I feel like a contrarian, but looking at the weather forecast and seeing a straight row of cloudless bright yellow discs fills me with a dark dread.  What a Chamber of Commerce tourism official might celebrate as “classic” summer weather, perfect for poolside afternoons and fireworks-studded evenings, looks more to me like an incipient drought.

This is not just my lack of a sunny disposition.  There is an objective basis.  Since June 13, we’ve had just one third of an inch of rain.  In the first two weeks of June, we had less than one and one-third inches. (The historical average precipitation in June for this area is closer to 4 inches.)  Combine that with this week’s 90 plus degree heat, and you have a potential flood of misery.

The consequences of low rainfall and heat may seem readily apparent and simple to address—water the garden, each bed in its turn, from 8 in the morning until late at night, moving our low-flow sprinkler every couple of hours; mulch the vegetables; let the lawns go brown. And how much can we water without depleting our well? Do we soaker hose the raspberries that are beginning to shrivel?  From the livestock perspective, moreover, there’s a virtual torrent of implications I never would have thought about, mostly involving more work.

First, there’s the challenge of keeping all the animals hydrated.  They, like us, drink a lot more when it’s hot.  The five gallon water tower that might last 50 chickens a full day in cool weather may need refilling twice on a brutal day, so chores take a lot longer and (because you’re hauling water out to a pen in the pasture) are a lot harder.  As the grasses dry up, the sheep and cows get less of their water from grazing, so more frequent refills of their tanks are required.  The pigs need not only drinking water but also mud to wallow in to keep cool.  Because they lack pores, they do not sweat. More water delivery, lengthening chore time yet again

Where do you head in the heat?  The shade.  So do the cows, who have a lovely, cool, shady spot, and the sheep, for whom the only good shade in the most brutal heat is the barn.  So just when we’ve cleared the barn of all its accumulated hay and poop from the winter, we find ourselves back to having to muck out more poop in the heat.

Then there are the containment issues.  In the summer we like to graze our young ewes on the front lawn and its adjacent small pasture to the west.  When they’re near the house, they get used to relating to us which makes them easier to manage as they get to be adults.  We get the additional pleasure of watching them graze the lawn in formation, a sort of munching chorus line, as we eat dinner on the porch.  This arrangement requires a barrier between the lawn and the flower beds and vegetable gardens for which we’ve relied on stock fencing running up to our pond.  But as our pond level sinks (it’s presently down at least four feet), a gap develops.  Peter has already moved the fence twice, but each time the pond recedes further we find the ewes once again enjoying a salad of ornamental flowers by the back door.  Moving reluctant ewes back where they don’t want to go is not my idea of fun hot weather activity.
 
The electric fencing we rely on for the main pastures is equally problematic.  As the ground dries up around the iron rods that serve as subterranean grounding, the fence begins to lose its potency.Our cows have relatively generous grazing land.  But with a weaker pulse in the fence, if they see a greener spot on the other side, they are less and less deterred from crossing it.

Longer term, of course, we wonder whether a prolonged drought might drive up feed costs.  Last year’s incessant rains made the pastures grow copiously, but they also made for a miserable hay season, driving up prices.  This year, farmers may have the opportunity to “make hay while the sun shines,” but if the weather pattern does not change soon, there may be much less grass to cut, at least for the second cutting, which animals much prefer through the winter months.

How pervasive the need for water, how basic an element it is, how dependent we are.  As the children’s rhyme goes,

If all the world were apple pie
And all the sea were ink
And all the trees were bread and cheese
What would we have to drink —Mark Scherzer

For the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/05/10 at 12:46 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Beware the Downey Mildew Basil Blight

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:  Just the other day I was looking on the bright side of the rather dry, hot spring we have been having here in Columbia County. At least, I thought, these weather conditions will prevent the late potato (and tomato) blight that wiped out our tomato crop last year. But my ears pricked up several days ago when Michelle Norris on NPR’s All Things Considered (who grew up in Chatham) announced that a basil blight, a very aggressive fungal disease named downy mildew, is now plaguing the Northeast and South. Wanting to know more, I googled “basil blight”  and was disturbed not only to learn that downy mildew is well established in our region but, much to my dismay, that there is a good chance, in spite of our very different weather conditions this year, that potato (tomato) late blight will be returning as well. Do we, I now wonder, face a summer without both locally grown tomatoes and basil?

I won’t repeat the information and advice on the late potato blight offered in my earlier bulletin “Tomatoes With Trepidation”, but refer you to Rural Intelligence’s archives should you want to review it. And I also suggest you look at the update provided by Meg McGrath, associate professor plant pathology at Cornell:  So far, 33 New York State counties have reported late potato (tomato) blight infections, but up to now Columbia County seems to have escaped, Ominously, Dutchess County to the south and Rensselaer to the north have not.

But let’s look at the other fungal threat, this one to sweet basil, the mainstay herb of summer. We were late getting our Genovese and Thai basil planted this year, so we are still at the seedling stage and have nothing to examine yet. But those of you further along should examine the upper surfaces of your basil leaves for faint yellow bands, and the undersides for tiny grayish, almost purplish specks. These symptoms show up two weeks after the initial infection. Once the symptoms appear, it is not long before the leaves turn yellow, brown, and grey, making them unappetizing in appearance. It is important to be especially vigilant on your garden rounds during periods of heavy rains and high humidity.

The home grower can control the disease by daily examining the plants and carefully, so as not to shake loose the fungal spores,  removing the diseased leaves, which should be bagged to prevent dispersion.  It is by wind-carried spores that the fungus is most commonly spread.  Some advise harvesting the entire plant at the first sign of infection and bringing it to table or processing it for pesto (the disease is not toxic to humans). For large scale growers the logistics of containing the fungus are, of course, much greater. There are already cases farther south in which farmers have had to destroy entire crops. Affected growers are replanting and turning to organic fungicides, and vigorously culling any infected plants.

There are some preventive measures that we can still take this summer. According to McGrath, organic fungicides have limited effectiveness. But there are other things one can do. Basil grown in open, sunny areas is far less vulnerable than plantings in shadier beds with poor air circulation. And a constant supply of basil is possible, even in these adverse conditions, if one plants basil in waves every few weeks in different corners of the garden. There are also varieties of basil which seem disease resistant, but unfortunately, not the sweet basil or Thai varieties. Lemon and purple basil seem more resistant, and two varieties, pepper basil and spice basil, don’t seem affected by the fungus at all.

Apparently now that we have the late potato blight and basil blight in our region, we can expect annual visitations from now on. Climatic conditions and the degree to which we are all vigilant in containing the infections will determine the degree to which our future crops will suffer. It seems strange that things we have always grown, vegetables we have always taken for granted as sure-fire producers, are becoming so vulnerable. It seems that globalization is one of the primary factors in this change. The basil blight was first reported in Uganda in 1933 and not reported again until 2001 in Switzerland, and now in 2010 it is at our doorstep. How has downy mildew made this incredible journey? Not only is the downy mildew spread by wind born spores, it is also, unfortunately, capable of infecting seeds.

Up until now I have been admiring the growth of my tomatoes from afar and have taken the emerging rows of basil completely for granted. But on my next visit to the garden I’ll be giving these plants a special scrutiny.  —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/27/10 at 05:15 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: No, We Are Not The Fabulous Beekman Boys

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:

...but our chickens are very tasty.
It started around three weeks ago, when Ronda Goldfein, a lawyer friend in Philadelphia, hearing from me on a decidedly non-agricultural matter, responded by telling me about a book her husband had given her, The Bucolic Plague. She said she was certain it had to be about us until she looked a little closer.  Since then, in the wake of a New York Times book review a couple of weeks ago, a review of their television reality show in the last week, and an interview on WNYC, I’ve endured a virtual avalanche of inquiries about whether we were aware of the Beekman Boys (right) and their project.

Having not yet read the book or seen the show, I can’t much comment on or compare us to the Beekman Boys.  Sure, there’s the obvious similarity of an urban male couple embracing the agricultural life in the form of a small upstate farm of organic orientation, with one member of the couple still tied more full time to a city job and the other more full time on the land.  But there are the differences: We lack a farm manager to assume most of the burden of running the operation, and we are older than they are.  And, if the Times is accurate, we don’t share their taste for public bickering as a comedy schtick.  If we were ever to bicker (I would say we don’t—Peter would disagree), I would not think of it as very entertaining for the public.

Yet without even seeing at first hand what they’ve done, I sense one major difference—what impelled us to write and share our activities publicly.  The Beekman Boys have actually managed to transform their farm experience into a different type of agricultural product, a literary one.  There is a growing genre of farm-oriented literature and entertainment now, and some segment of the public seems as hungry for it as they are for the produce itself.  Many agri-lit consumers, I think, are vicariously living a farm life they have romanticized through this literature.  The Beekman Boys have joined that stream of commerce, and I do not intend this as a criticism.  Like agri-tourism, it is a way of deriving extra value from farming when the farm itself must struggle so hard to make a profit.  If they have figured out a way to do that, more power to them.

Our weekly essays serve somewhat different purposes, none, unfortunately, involving literary agents, advances, or royalties.  Through these essays we try to create a sense of community with our customers, who want to connect with and know how their food is raised.  Writing these essays enables us think through issues and to learn, too, from your responses. Sometimes the essays are an outlet for creative urges.  But mostly, quite frankly, it’s a way to promote sales of our farm products.

In that spirit, let me report that summer production is in full swing.  Not only is the vegetable garden almost fully planted, but we’re now feeding over 450 creatures, the vast majority of whom are intended for culinary enjoyment.  And our great chicken experiment, comparing French Freedom Rangers with Cornish crosses, is well underway.

Neither of these breeds of birds, as it turns out, is a heritage breed.  Both were developed specifically for the purpose of human consumption, as opposed to egg laying.  According to an article in The Modern Homestead, The Freedom Rangers were developed in France in the 1960’s by the Hubbard Corporation to guarantee a high-quality bird that could be raised within a pastured or free-range production model, thus satisfying “Label Rouge” standards. (The French Label Rouge certification is similar to America’s Animal Welfare Approved program. It promotes traditional free-range poultry raising methods for the benefit of both the birds and the people who consume them. Started by grassroots activists, Label Rouge now commands 30% of the French poultry market.)  The Freedom Rangers have become a popular restaurant chicken in France.  They are slow growing (12 weeks to get to 4 to 5 lbs) and are known to be excellent foragers and to enjoy grazing, thus making them much more fun to grow.  Some detractors say their texture is on the chewy side, but their high culinary reputation is built on their flavor.  Ours are now fully feathered and go outside tomorrow.

The Cornish crosses are much faster growing (7 weeks) and much more interested in grain than grass.  Some growers complain that they are too lazy even to move to water in the heat, leading to huge die-offs in heat waves, but we’ve discovered that if you keep them shaded and make the water convenient they do fine.

Cornish crosses dependably produce the lushly large white breasts so many of us have come to crave.  Though I’ve read some articles describing them as taste-challenged, I would personally dispute that assertion.  We’ve enjoyed the flavor of ours immensely, as have many of our loyal customers. I would be willing to bet that if those growers dissatisfied with the flavor of their Cornish Crosses were to switch to the rich, varied sort of organic feed mix we get from Lightning Tree Farm they would be singing flavorful praises soon enough.  Perhaps best of all, because of their efficiency in converting grain to meat, we can offer the Cornish Crosses for less than the Freedom Rangers.

The time to test will come soon enough.  Our first batch of Cornish Crosses go to market in mid-July, while the Freedom Rangers follow in early August. Want to participate in the grand Turkana chicken experiment?  Order one of each and compare. We will be sending out our reservation forms in a few days. If you’d like one, just let us know at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/23/10 at 06:31 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Ancient Lore and Allure of the Fava

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:
 
It’s spring, folks—time to Fava!
 
Our favas have suddenly burst into full production, presenting us with one of the best crops of these quirky beans we have had yet. Some of you may know them as “broad beans,” the common designation in the U.K., “broad” actually being a direct translation from the Italian “ fava.” Strangely, despite their popularity in the U.K., fava beans have not entered generally into American cuisine. Instead they are savored in various ethnic pockets, particularly among those of Greek, Italian, Turkish, and Arab descent.
 
My earliest memory of the broad bean or fava is as a child in Wales sitting at table opposite my grandmother who would pronounce cheerfully, “Lovely broad beans today!”  I was not as enthusiastic as she. But then, her broad beans were simply boiled, peppered, and salted in the plain English manner. And I was not, of course, of an age to appreciate vegetables anyway.  It was not until I was in my early twenties and living in Turkey, where I encountered fava beans braised in olive oil and fava bean purees, that I began to think fava beans “lovely.”
Seredipitously, my enthusiasm for the fava started close to the bean’s place of origin.  The fava, which has a long tradition in Old World agriculture, originated in North Africa. Along with lentils, peas, and chickpeas,  favas became an important part of the eastern Mediterranean diet around 6000 B.C., possibly earlier. Today, they are a major national dish in many parts of the region: in Egypt ful medames,  in Iran bghalee polo, in Greece skordalia, in Ethiopia baqueela nifro and injera, in Portugal bolo rei , and in the New World, habas saladas in Columbia and Peru, and the habas con chile and antojito snacks of Mexico. Interestingly, there is a long history of favas as part of the cuisine in southwest Asia, too, where it now forms the basis of Sechuan dishes such as doubanjiang .
 
As with all such ancient foods, the fava is rich with religious, superstitious, and folk associations. In ancient Greece and Rome fava beans were used as food for the dead at festivals such as the annual Lemuria.  According to European folklore, planting beans on Good Friday or during the night brings good luck. But it is also believed that dreaming of a fava bean is a sign of impending conflict; conversely, some believe that eating them causes bad dreams. Some cultures use fava beans as a medium for divination, casting them on the ground in order to interpret the pattern they form. In Sicily, the fava has special significance because, in the distant past, there was a famine in which all crops failed except the fava bean, which saved the population from starvation.  In gratitude,  thanks were offered up to St. Joseph, which is why favas appear on Sicilian church altars on St. Joseph’s Day. Farther north, in Rome, on the 1st of May, families traditionally picnic on fresh fava beans with Pecorino Romano cheese during their excursions in the Campagna. But up in Northern Italy, fava beans traditionally had been fed only to animals. Some elderly people still frown on human consumption.
 
The fava is also the center of a welter of medical claims. Pliny believed they act as a laxative. But in Belouchistan (eastern Iran/western Pakistan), elders generally restrict children from eating the beans raw, believing they cause constipation and jaundice-like symptoms. Moving closer to real science, there is evidence that those with a certain hereditary condition (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency) can, because of certain compounds in the fava, develop a potentially fatal condition called “favism.”  Favas are rich in tyramine, thus should be avoided by those taking monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, powerful anti-depressants.  In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lechter boasts that he once enjoyed the liver of a census taker together “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”  As a psychiatrist, he must have known he was naming the three “forbidden foods”  for patients taking MAO inhibitors: liver, favas, and wine..
 
On a more positive medical note, favas are rich in L-dopa, a substance used medically to control hypertension and treat Parkinson’s disease. And some use fava beans as a natural alternative to viagra, citing a link between L-dopa production and the human libido.  Interestingly, the fava bean originated in malarial areas.  Studies suggest that favism, the disease induced by favas, while potentially fatal itself, actually protects against malaria.
 
Fava beans have the reputation of being easy to grow. Not our experience.  On the positive side, they are amazingly cold resistant, surviving temperatures down to the 20’s.  So, in our climate, they can be set out in the early spring, long before the threat of frosts has passed.  In Italy’s milder climate, they are planted in November and winter over to produce beans very early in the spring.  Unfortunately, while cold resistant, they are extremely averse to hot weather, even more so than peas.  If we do not start them in the greenhouse, then move them out to the garden very early in April, they are unlikely to produce before it gets too hot in late spring.  Our plants rarely survive into early summer. And in this climate, they seem to be prone to fungal diseases, particularly chocolate spot (botrytis fabaea). Last year, because of the weather conditions, our fava harvest was very disappointing.  This year, for reasons we have yet to understand, we have a bumper crop.
 
Most of the fava bean recipes we have come across use only the bean itself, not the pod. But at present the pods of our beans are tender enough to be edible (and they are delicious). The Turks and the Brits are the only two groups I know who eat them this way. Last weekend we gorged on Turkish-style favas (beans in their pods) in olive oil (see my recipe below). This weekend we look forward to a stew of braised fava beans, artichokes, and green garlic, all ingredients home grown.
 
In a week or so, the fava bean pods will become too tough to be edible, and it will be time to shift to eating the bean alone, braised or in purees. When the beans reach their mature stage, still later, we will have to peel them twice: first to remove the pod, then to remove the skin of the bean itself; which, otherwise, ruins the texture of purees.  Some people are allergic to this skin.  If after all this, you still want to try cooking favas yourself, here’s a link to another recipe that sounds as if it is similar to the wonderful fava/chicory puree from the New York restaurant I Trulli, which specializes in the food of Italy’s Puglia region.
 
My recipe for TURKISH STYLE FAVA BEANS IN OIL

1 lb. favas in pods (string them as you would green beans):

1/3 to 1/2 cup of olive oil

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/2 onion, chopped

the juice of one lemon

1 T. sugar

strained Greek yogurt

chopped dill

Heat oil a cast iron skillet or heavy enameled pot with a tight fitting cover over a medium flame.

Add garlic and onion. When they are soft, add the fava bean pods.  Toss in the oil to fully coat

Turn heat to low, cover the pot tightly, and cook in the oil (stirring once or twice) for 10 to 15 minutes, until pods begin to yellow

Add boiling water to barely cover, the lemon juice, a tablespoon of sugar, and salt and pepper to taste.

Simmer uncovered over a low flame for about 1 to 1 ½ hours, until the beans are soft, and the liquid has turned syrupy

Serve warm or at room temperature, garnished with chopped dill and a dollop of yoghurt.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 06/14/10 at 07:46 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Sex and the Barnyard

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

He was displaying already in early April, a brilliant, luminous arc of blue and green, virtually enfolding in his vibrating tail feathers the sole object of his desire—our dainty white pea hen. Troilus, our resident peacock, and Cressida, his mate, began their rite even before the weather warmed, making them one of the earliest heralds of spring. Troilus’ beautiful tail feathers, lost in last year’s late summer molt, had taken almost eight months to grow back, but the glorious tail was once again the farm’s most elaborate courting costume,  the main attraction of the most ritualized and prolonged courtship at Turkana Farms.

His courtly display will continue to go on for hours every day until finally, at the end of July, his tail feathers, once again drop one by one to the ground. Throughout the lengthy courtship, Cressida, like all pea hens, will affect a cool indifference, pecking nonchalantly on a piece of lettuce, or looking off, lost in thought, in the opposite direction,  sometimes even walking off to another part of the pen on some errand, seemingly oblivious to the magnificent daily feathered spectacle enacted for her. But eventually, but very eventually, the pair will connect.

In complete contrast to the aristocratic refinement of the peacock pen, is the very common, plebian world of the chicken coop where sexual gratification comes fast and furious with no courtship, no elegant rituals,  and no post coital lingering. With no preliminaries the strutting rooster will, without a howdy do, jump a hen, push her roughly to the floor, and have his way with her. It is over as quickly as it started, and he is gone.

It seems to me sometimes that the chicken coop is nothing more than a venue for serial rape. While there is no come hither courtship, there is sometimes a kind of crafty guile as a rooster pretends to find something tasty, makes the clucking sound of pleasure associated with a food find, and then, as the hens come running,  jumps one, seemingly at random, and has his way. Did the thousands of years of domestication, I wonder, erase whatever sexual rituals chickens once had?

The contrast between these two worlds set me thinking about the sexual antics of the rest of our farm menagerie. Our turkey toms, for instance, come in second after the peacock in terms of their elaborate display of feathers, and the pride they seem to take in them. Once they reach puberty the toms daily gather together into a dense, milling flock, their tails beautifully fanned out, and strut about resembling nothing so much as a disorganized Shriner’s parade. But the strange thing is that the male display seems more for the other males, and for us their keepers, than for the tranquil turkey hens who tend to remain apart, hanging out together like a forgotten harem, waiting patiently for the male’s display to finally turn their way.

Besides fanning their tails and strutting, the excited toms, their red wattles, snood, and neck engorged with blood, will break into a strange, restrained, stomping dance very reminiscent of flamenco, accompanied by partly open wings kept close to the sides, which quiver as they sweep lightly along the ground. These elaborate rituals seem to have more to do with establishing the male pecking order, and maybe turkey pride, than it does in exciting the hens. But could it be, perhaps, that the seemingly indifferent hens are only biding their time, coyly watching—and calculating.

Our karakul sheep, I have noticed, have their own unique rituals which in our herd seem to take place only in the fall, once the summer heat has passed.. When the mood strikes him,  Suleyman, our suddenly randy ram (center), will sidle up beside a chosen ewe, rubbing against her seductively, making plain his desires by curling back his upper lip, revealing his full set of teeth, meanwhile stretching his head forward and arching his neck up. To respond, the ewe, of course, must be in heat and receptive to him, which she indicates by squatting with her back to him and urinating. Apparently finding this irresistible, the ram wastes no time in mounting her. Once bred, the ewe vanishes into the anonymity of the flock, and the ram proceeds to the next conquest.

A ewe is not, however, always entirely passive.  For instance, a ewe has been known to jump a fence, pass quickly through a field containing rams not to her taste, only to jump yet another fence, to join a ram that has obviously struck her fancy. Perhaps, it is only when she is confined with only one ram available to her that she is so undiscriminating. However, the ram appears to be always undiscriminating, though a pattern is emerging that suggests the favoring of a certain order in his choices.

Of all our animals it is the pigs that in matters of the heart seem to be closest to us—to humankind. With them, apparently, there is no special season for love. Our lusty boar, Vernon, is always ready and never bashful about showing it. He will seem to smile gleefully, and playfully bump up repeatedly against Patty or Laverne or Carmen or Miranda—indeed, anyone who is available to him. He will playfully nudge the chosen sow, rub sexily against her, even give her playful love bites on the jowls or maybe an ear. Meanwhile he vocalizes continuously with snorts and grunts and what we call “oinks” in a seductively good natured way.

But whether things go any further is the sow’s decision, and, if not in heat or not in the mood, she will enforce her rights with a counter attack ranging from gentle to ferocious. The sows, it seems, are actually more loyal to each other, and readily pair off, apparently for life, as in Carmen & Miranda, and Patty & Laverne, the boar’s visit being only an occasional exciting interlude in what seems like a porcine same sex marriage.

But we have seen an instance in which it was actually the sows who initiated the rites of Priapus. But only once. When, a few years ago, Patty and Laverne, still snow white virgins, we thought, were introduced to our new young boar Barbarossa, also a novice ,  the sows made no effort to conceal their pleasure, excitement, and anticipation, and proceeded, like brazen hussies, to lavish him with attention, assiduously licking his genitalia while expressing unmistakable squeals of pleasure. Barbarossa was not slow in picking up on the lively cues, and penetration was not long in coming. For this rite of spring, apparently the wedding night of a ménage à trois, there seemed to be absolute unanimity. —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/30/10 at 06:26 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: How to Fatten a Goose

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:
 
I’m skating onto thin ice here (as befits such a warm May day) by even mentioning a highly controversial product:  foie gras.  I can readily imagine a deep split in our customer base and readership between those for whom the rich luxury of a pâté based on fattened goose liver is a transcendent experience, and those who are convinced that production of fatty goose and duck livers through forced feeding is inhumane. 
 
I’m going to try to skate right through that one.  I’ve followed the efforts of the Humane Society to shut down Hudson Valley Foie Gras (first, on the grounds that it is adulterated food; more recently, with greater success, that it violates the Clean Water Act).  Before I researched it, I had found something repugnant about any forced feeding.  Now that I’ve read a little more, my position has shifted to “still queasy, but reserving judgment.”  But why am I contemplating the topic at all?
 
It’s all a matter of fattening the goose. At Turkana, we have the turkey-chicken-guinea fowl side of our poultry production down to a successful formula.  We are satisfied with our product.  But waterfowl, both ducks and geese, continue to frustrate. They generally end up smaller than we and our customers would like. Over the past three years,  we’ve tried several different feeding regimens and are still in search of an ideal one.
 
The fundamental problem, as far as I can determine, is that geese, in particular, far prefer eating grass to eating grain. They also drink a lot of water. Indeed, pick up a gosling and it feels like nothing so much as a fuzzy hot water bottle.  Humans, on the other hand, far prefer eating fatty, meaty birds that were fed on grain. You’ve all heard about the virtues of grass-fed beef, and, in the case of cattle, we’re happy to restrict their diet and let them take two years to get to market size.  But you rarely hear about grass-fed poultry (pastured, yes, but never purely grass fed), because, it seems, without grain, the birds would not get to an edible size within a reasonable time.
 
Indeed, I deduce from a history of foie gras I found on a Canadian website, that the reluctance of geese to eat what we want them to in order to become the product we want them to be was a well-recognized dilemma for centuries before anyone even thought about producing a pâté de foie gras.  The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all force fed their geese.  The ancient Roman practice was continued in medieval Europe by Jews (who had comprised 15% of the population of the Mediterranean basin in Roman times).  The Jewish goose farmers were not trying to produce fatty livers, but simply wanted more fat—schmalz—as a cooking medium.  The fatty livers that resulted from the force feeding of geese in the last weeks of their lives were a happy byproduct of this practice.  Now, the livers have become the reason for it.
 

Naturally, we’d rather fatten our geese without force.  Even if I thought it were a humane way to feed them, Even if I thought it were a humane way to feed them, who wants to grab 35 geese three times a day and crank feed down their throats? Hence the search for a feed program that would get them to ingest grain voluntarily.  Our research to date has been frustrating, because it is so full of contradictory advice.
 
Remarkably, even the “scientific” cooperative extension programs of the various states do not seem to agree with one another.  The website of Virginia Tech recommends starting geese on a very high protein turkey starter feed, although we were told early in our goose raising days that such a high protein content would adversely affect their wing development.  The Minnesota and Missouri cooperative extensions, in contrast, recommend lower protein chick starter feed in pellet form, because the geese apparently like pellets. Unfortunately, we can find neither local nor organic pellets we have confidence in.  A couple of the websites I consulted had truly unusual suggestions, such as a dog food mix.
 
Thinking about goose enthusiasts led me to consult our Hungarian cookbook, because goose is such a big part of Hungarian cuisine.  (In America, where herbicides have replaced geese as weed control mechanisms for many crops, goose consumption is miniscule.) The cookbook reported that Hungarian farmers mix a grain mash feed with vegetable oil, which the geese apparently love and which makes it easier for them to swallow (remember, they have very long esophagi).  I think we’re going to try that, but are having trouble deciding what the proper oil should be.  Perhaps a neutral polyunsaturated oil such as canola.  Certainly not extra virgin olive oil, which I could see driving up our prices into the $50 per pound range.
 
My current favorite solution is in a book that we recently found, Successful Duck & Goose Raising, by Prof. Darrel Sheraw.  He suggests that the best overall feed for waterfowl is whole wheat, which is high in protein and rich in nutrients (way better than corn on both counts).  Wheat is the preferred fattening medium in Canada for pigs, and Dr. Sheraw suggests that wheat, in combination with grass, could be a perfect diet for geese either on its own or in combination with oats.  We’ve been trying the whole wheat out on our little goslings (above), and they do indeed seem to gobble it up.  So the plan for this year, as it now stands, is to give them options—mash plus oil, whole wheat kernels, and, of course, grass, which we intend to inter-plant with clover in the areas they graze, perhaps with whole corn cobs thrown in during the last several weeks. Whether this will do the trick we shall see come fall.  In the meantime, if others of you have hit on magical solutions that don’t involve sticking long tubes down their very long throats, we welcome you to share your knowledge. —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/24/10 at 09:48 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture:  Separating the Bad Seeds from the Good

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Seeds have been very much on my mind of late. Largely, it would seem, because of the hours recently spent in the greenhouse painstakingly inserting them into peat pots and flats of potting soil. Planting seeds, to me, smacks of something magical. Is it too much to say that gardening requires a faith in seeds?  While much is made in these technological times of the amazing amounts of information stored in tiny computer chips, a technological feat admittedly deserving of our respect, I am actually much more in awe of the unbelievable wealth of information, the awesome energy, and the life force that is encapsulated in a tiny seed.

And I am fascinated by what seems to be the infinite variety of forms seeds take. While seeds all basically serve the same function, propagating the parent plant, they are amazingly unlike one another in size, shape, and coloring.  There are, for instance, the easily recognizable seeds: the yellow or white kernels of corn, the black, brown and white beans, and the oblong black and multicolored seeds of sunflowers, these recognizable to us because it is actually the seeds of these plants that we eat.

But there are the seeds that are not immediately recognizable:  the tiny ball bearing-like seeds of okra and cilantro, the bone-colored tear drop shape of the cubanelle pepper seed, the flat elongated, bi-colored seeds of fennel, the flat oblong, bone-colored seed of the cucumber, the very irregular, roughly circular, craggy brown-and-bone colored seeds of chard and beets, the minute oblong brown seeds of bibb lettuce, and the tiny matchstick-like, bi-colored seed of the marigold. Indeed there are far more variations in the appearance of seeds than there are words to describe them. And there seems to be no relationship between the size or shape of a seed and the kind of plant it will ultimately produce.  The seeds just described are not immediately recognizable to us because they propagate vegetables whose leaves, root, or fruit we eat, rather than the seeds themselves.

While I was once rather undiscriminating about my source for seeds, I have become much more selective as my understanding of the advantages of heirloom varieties has grown.  This has been accompanied by a growing awareness of how industrialized even seeds for the home gardener have become. A few seasons ago, I was puzzled by some bush beans I had grown, which, to my surprise, produced a cluster of beans identical in size and shape, all maturing at the same time, then ceased production. Obviously, it came to me, these are industrial type beans programmed to meet the rigorous, uniform standards of the supermarket, and to be harvested all at once by machine. Of course, I never tried that variety again since my preference is for bean varieties developed for their flavor, texture, and productivity.

Burpee I now regard as the General Motors of seeds, with all the negatives that implies.  Instead, I favor small seed producers such as Fedco Seeds, Cook’s Garden, and New England Seeds, producers who are not just in business but are also imbued with a mission—propagating and preserving valuable seed varieties, helping to preserve what is best in the plant gene pool, and ultimately what is best in our food. Unfortunately, these small seed producers are becoming themselves an endangered species as the larger corporate seed companies are steadily buying them up, or attempting to capture their market share by seeming to offer similar products. The only thing we can do to protect the small seed suppliers is to patronize them. As in everything else, the “corporatization” of seeds can only lead to a mundane uniformity, the narrowing of choices, and the sacrifice of quality and value to the sacrosanct bottom line.

An even more insidious threat to our supply of seeds also emanates from corporate America, in particular the behemoth Monsanto. Our agricultural seeds, whether they be vegetables or grains, have come down to the present as largely manmade creations. It is through centuries of selective breeding that mankind has painstakingly produced a vast panoply of plants to serve its food needs.  Now with the new practices of genetic modification instituted by corporations like Monsanto and Aventis, we are beginning to produce seeds of a very different kind. Seeds are for the first time in history being genetically engineered rather than produced through selective breeding. As animal and even human genes are randomly inserted into the chromosomes of plants, fish, and animals, our corporations are beginning to produce transgenic life forms, what we might call “frankenfoods.”  Now farmers can order seeds with such chilling names as “Roundup Ready Soybeans.” Of course, a recent New York Times article reported on the emergence of superweeds resistant to Roundup, and a subsequent editorial strongly discouraged such heavy reliance on the herbicide.  But the effort to modify seeds to all sorts of different agricultural goals is likely to continue.  For instance, Monsanto’s new RoundupReady seeds propagate the parent plant but with a difference.  As a result of several gene alterations, plants from these seeds now have an immunity to the herbicide Roundup, thus enabling its liberal use in ridding fields of weeds. Now farmers can order seeds with such chilling names as “Roundup Ready Soybeans.”

Since the effects of genetic modification have not yet been carefully studied, we are entering into an uncharted world fraught with human health hazards, environmental hazards, and socioeconomic hazards. The nature of these hazards is discussed and documented at great length in such books as Food, Inc. edited by Karl Weber and The End of Food by Paul Roberts.

Even more disturbing, not only are transgenic seeds beginning to dominate huge swaths of food production world wide, but many of these seeds have been patented, giving the ownership of these new varieties of seeds to their corporate creators, who forbid farmers from collecting seed during their harvests to be used for future crops. In this new age of patented seeds, farmers must buy their seeds each season—from the owner of the patent, Monsanto.  Seeds in this Brave New World cease to be part of the “public good,” which is how they have always been viewed. Instead, they have become intellectual property, something that can be rigidly controlled and managed for maximum profit.

Should a wheat seed, the product of mankind’s selective breeding over the millennia, become, after a one-time genetic modification, the intellectual property of a corporation? Our Supreme Court apparently thinks so (but then Justice Thomas, who wrote the opinion, apparently served with Monsanto before taking his court seat).

Speaking of courts,  I am reminded of a court case a few years ago for which, in my capacity as an authority on kilim rugs, I was asked to serve as an expert witness. Two pillow- and rug-making companies had used virtually the same motif in their lines. One had copyrighted what it called its own “tribal motif” and was suing the other for infringing on the copyright.

The problem, from my point of view, was that the design at issue was obviously an ancient motif.  In fact, I was able to trace it back over 800 years to a tribal group in Central Asia, The motif had probably existed even longer than that in Outer Mongolia.

Should a weaving company, by making some minor alterations in the palette and design, rightfully claim to hold the copyright on a motif that had evolved over the centuries, the product of the hearts and minds of thousands and thousands of anonymous women in a nomadic tribe?  To me seeds and tribal motifs are both part of our collective cultural heritage and hence in the public domain, where they should remain in perpetuity.

As I perch on my stool sorting through seeds in the tranquility of the greenhouse, I, in my old-fashioned way, prefer not to think of seeds as mine…or yours…but rather ours.
— Peter Davies 

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/18/10 at 02:56 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Non-contributing Members of Farm Society

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:

Perhaps it’s advancing age, but sometimes these days I find myself focused on ideas or phrases I learned in the distant past.  Most recently, I’ve been dwelling on the French distinction, in its days as a colonial power, between “L’Afrique utile” (useful Africa) and “L’Afrique inutile,” the parts of the Continent deemed useless because they produced less revenue than it cost to administer them.

At the time I first heard of this distinction, it seemed evidence to me that France was among the most obnoxious of the colonial powers, particularly because I thought the categories implied an attitude not just toward the land but also toward the people inhabiting it.  While France was more willing than the other colonial powers to integrate indigenous Africans from l’Afrique utile into its educational system and society, those unfortunate enough to be inhabitants of l’Afrique inutile were largely abandoned. 

The reason I’ve been thinking of the phrase lately is that I’ve found myself thinking about the animals on the farm and our farm products in similar categories, the useful and the useless, and trying to grapple with what to do with those in the useless category. Abandonment does not seem an option

We have accrued a considerable number of creatures whose functional utility is questionable.  There’s the pair of four year old Chinese ganders who, because of their noisy aggression, we thought would make great watch animals.  For a while it seemed to work, as they protected the young turkeys and the Toulouse goslings we raise every year.  But after a predator took the goose they lived with, their aggression began to turn on more than just alien intruders to include us and our guests.  After getting “goosed” a few times (including the time Peter turned in the mud to kick a goose away, flew up in the air, and landed on his back, resulting in a trip to the emergency room) we decided to confine them in a pen where they could not attack us, but which thereby renders them totally useless in almost every way.  We’d be happy to give them away, but if no one would like them, what should we do? 

We also have what I call the dowager sheep, the ewes who bore lambs year after year but are now just too old, it seems.  Unlike the geese, these ewes can depend on a reservoir of affection from us in thanks for their years of faithful service.  And we can rationalize keeping them and even the ewes who have never borne offspring, because of their wool.

Shearing the wool has always seemed like a mixed bag, because we generally produce more than we can sell, and are storing at least 40 bags right now (perfect wool for felting, for all of you felting enthusiasts out there).  But fortunately this week a new use for it emerged.  The Times reported on a charity, Matter of Trust, which is collecting donations of wool, as well as dog clippings, alpaca, human hair and pantyhose, to be used for soaking up the massive oil slick from BP’s Gulf of Mexico wellhead explosion.  Even though this is a donation and not a sale, the old wool has become “utile” again.

But what about a cow that has never calved?  Too old for good beef, she’ll never milk, and she just eats.  This one is a topic for debate, as are the lately non-farrowing sows whose fate may hang in the balance of whether they produce piglets this season. We are waiting in suspense as there are signs of potentially imminent births, but we can’t be sure. 

There are animals that never were productive or expected to be so—like the white drake and the Rhode Island Red rooster that strangers have dropped by in the last few months on the assumption that this might be a nice place for those animals to live.  We don’t seek these donations out, and can’t afford to become an animal sanctuary, but we seem always to find reasons for exceptions.  I’d like to think that keeping “inutile” animals has its own value—the reward of a humane environment that does not treat the animal as a commodity and recognizes that it may have a social place in the world of the farm that should be respected.  That, however, may not be the economically wise approach, and a farm that is not economically sustainable is not going to be a farm for very long.  Rather, it seems, we must seek the utility in each creature. 

So when a few weeks ago one of our older hens began to develop an insatiable appetite for eggs, we began thinking practically.  At first, we took some of the eggs into which she had pecked holes, mixed the contents with cayenne pepper and Coleman’s mustard, and put them back in the boxes.  The unpleasant shock of ingesting that combination seemed to deter her for a day or two, but after these brief pauses she always resumed her marauding.  Finally we fixed on a way to make this hen “utile” again, and ironically it was a very French solution:  coq au vin. 

Utile indeed.    —Mark Scherzer 

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/08/10 at 12:27 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: May Day! Turkana Farms Goes to Pot

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:

Our turkey poults, Bourbon Reds, Spanish Blacks and Naragansetts, have arrived from the hatchery and are in the hayloft of the sheep barn under heat lamps until they feather out. What Peter calls their “eternal slumber party” has begun as they run hither and thither, eating, drinking, socializing and pecking virtually 24 hours a day.  They are such an engaging presence that I think they’ll always be the centerpiece of our farm’s production.  But, because farming is a business, we must always consider whether our product mix is right and whether we’ve struck an economically viable balance, if there is such a thing in farming.

I’ve lately been considering whether we should consider adding a new product that has considerably greater potential profit margins. The one that has come to mind recently, should the opportunity arise, is medical marijuana. Don’t get excited, I said MEDICAL marijuana.

The idea took on a more serious aspect when I had the chance this week to chat with one of the legalization bill’s authors and chief sponsor in the New York State Legislature, Assemblyman Richard Gottfried. The medical marihuana bill (yes, that’s how they spell it in the NY statutes) can be found at the State Assembly’s website.  It has passed the Assembly in prior years, and is likely to again.  It has already passed the Health Committee this year.

Many a progressive measure passes the Assembly year-after-year and goes nowhere. This year, however, the bill has real legs. The State Senate is now seriously considering passing the measure too. The reason is not just the change in leadership there. It’s also budgetary. The Senate sponsors have proposed charging significant license fees to producers and users, estimated to generate $15 million a year in revenue.

Critics have pointed out that we don’t tax drugs in New York State, and that the imposition of these fees undercuts the notion that the “weed” is being raised as medicine. The proposed bill would, however, restrict use of the marijuana far more strictly than is done in California.  Only people with serious medical conditions would be able to buy it, and the use would truly be medical.  Given the State’s budget crisis, that $15 million may very well carry the day.

If the bills do pass both houses, Governor Paterson, who has admitted to having “self-medicated” with the drug, would seem unlikely to veto the measure. And I have it on high authority (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) that the federal government will not prosecute marijuana growers who operate with state licenses, so that we would not be risking confiscation of the farm.

Should we do it? There are still some serious questions. Of course, we’d have to see just what the license fees are and how much we’d have to grow in order to make a go of it.
We’d also have to see if we could get licensed.  Through an apparent drafting error, the current version of the bill does not seem to require that producers show they are of good moral character, with clean records for drug dealing, though everyone else in the supply chain seems to have to do that. But that will undoubtedly be corrected.  Presumably, we would make the grade.  The bill does require that producers have “appropriate expertise in agriculture,” but this does not seem too difficult a standard to satisfy.

Finally, we’d have to consider whether this crop fits with our farming model. There are at least three reasons it might not:

First, we believe that consumers should have a personal connection to the farm, but the law prohibits direct sale of marijuana. The “weed” has to go through a registered distribution organization.

Second, we try to focus on growing older, less industrial varieties of both animals and vegetables. I suppose the “brand names” I remember from college, like Acapulco Gold, might be considered heirloom varieties by now. But I wonder if the distribution organizations will want small specialized productions at all. They may, instead, be looking for specially developed new strains of cannabis that have particular medical qualities or certain percentages of active ingredients. These strains might be genetically engineered, for all we know.

Third, and perhaps most difficult, would be concern for how the farm environment might have to change. This product is associated with a lucrative illicit market, as well as with teenage users, who would love to find a free source right at hand. To get licensed, you have to show how secure your facility is.  What might we have to do to secure the crop from wholesale pilfering?

You may think this is an exaggerated concern, but agricultural theft is not unheard of even with significantly less sought after items. Last week, Marina Michahelles of Shoving Leopard Farm in Red Hook wrote to Rural Intelligence to report that their flock of 18 hens and one rooster had been stolen from their coop earlier this month. Based on a tip, she believes the theft was perpetrated by a “known chicken thief” who comes onto people’s properties and brings the livestock he rustles to auction. The hens were of a considerable range of varieties (from Araucana to Rhode Island Red to Wyandotte). If anyone has information on the theft, she asks that they report it to Officers Plass and Van Wagner in the Red Hook police department (845.758.6780). And, of course, she suggests everyone secure their coops against human marauding.

If a “motley flock,” as Michahelles describes it, is so at risk, what can we expect for an heirloom marijuana patch?

On the other hand, the idea of an easy, highly-profitable crop would entice any farmer.  Ask the Afghan poppy growers or the Colombian coca farmers.  But are the problems we’d invite worth the trouble?

PS:  If we decide to do it, we probably won’t tell you. —Mark Scherzer

PLEASE NOTE: 
On the morning of April 20th, the Harrison family of Red Hook suffered major losses when their barn, housing more than 100 animals, was destroyed by fire. The losses included livestock, tools, equipment and feed. Additionally, several of the animals that did survive required immediate and on-going medical attention. The Town of Red Hook Agricultural Committee has worked with the St. John’s Reformed Church to establish a relief fund to help offset these costs for the family. Those wishing to assist the Harrisons are asked to send donations to St. John’s Reformed Church – Harrison Fund, 126 Old Post Road North, Red Hook, NY 12571.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/04/10 at 07:34 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Tomatoes with Trepidation

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

While the livestock side of the farm is burgeoning (3 piglets, 2 calves, and our 18th lamb so far this season, as well as 125 turkey poults and 40 goslings arriving next week), it is now the garden side of the farm that is coming very much to the fore. Last week we planted seven flats of heirloom tomatoes, including Brandywine, Black Krim,  Amish paste, Principe Borghese, and German striped, in our greenhouse, as well as about six varieties of peppers and a couple of eggplants. To make room, we moved out to the garden our fava beans, peas, lettuces, cauliflower, broccoli, and lettuces, heavily mulching the plants to shield them from cold winds and frosts.

Usually it is with great enthusiasm and anticipation that we start our tomato plants, but, given last year’s tomato disaster, it is instead with a sense of trepidation. Up until recently tomatoes had seemed to be a fail safe crop. I have been growing them since I was eight, and I cannot recall a single season until last year in which there was not a very good return on the tomatoes.  But, now, apparently, delicious summer tomatoes are something we can no longer take for granted.

Fortunately, we do not have the extremely wet, overcast conditions that facilitated the emergence and spread of Phytophthora infestans, the fungus-like pathogen that causes late blight in tomatoes and potatoes. Apparently our weather conditions last year mimicked the climate of Ireland, where late blight decimated the potato harvests in the 1840’s, creating the Great Famine and precipitating the Irish Diaspora.

This spring, fortunately, our weather conditions are, so far, on the dry, sunny side.

But this, apparently, does not mean that we are entirely safe. In fact, we just came very close to doing something that could have re-infected our garden with the deadly spores. And this is after we thought we had taken all the necessary precautions. At the end of the last growing season, we carefully gathered up all of the tomato plants and spoiled tomatoes and fed them to the pigs. Since then we have learned that the spores cannot survive in dead plant materials, or in seeds, but only in a living host.

Which brings me to our close call. A month or so ago, I noticed that the remainder of our potatoes from last year,  even though stored in the cool darkness of our basement pantry, had begun to sprout. Perfect, I thought, we can use these as seed potatoes. I was unaware that, in the Northeast, infected potato tubers are usually the main source (the living host) of the pathogen.  We were lucky to have a long list of higher priorities that had to be accomplished around the farm before we had time to dig the potato bed.  The delay saved us from introducing a veritable Typhoid Mary into our garden.

What finally saved us was that, puzzled because I was not seeing anything in print or hearing any discussion about the likelihood of tomato blight this season, I finally googled “tomato disease” and came up not only with late blight information relevant to 2009 but also updates on 2010, much of the information coming from Professor Meg McGrath, plant pathologist at Cornell University Agriculture Department.

Now, instead of using our sprouting potatoes as seed potatoes, we are following Professor McGrath’s advice and sealing them up in a plastic bag, setting it in the sun for a few days to kill the spores, and then safely disposing of the contents (by maybe boiling them up for the pigs). We also, as instructed, will do the same with any “volunteer” potatoes we find still in the ground or sprouting in the garden. While doing this removes the immediate threat, there is still the possibility of infection by way of air-borne spores coming from other people’s gardens or commercial nurseries, which is why it is important that we all destroy all potential sources of the blight.

While the above advice deals with destroying the remains of the pathogen from last year, there are also preventative measures Professor McGrath suggests for handling our tomatoes this year. For one, there are varieties available (and some hybrids being developed) that are blight resistant.  A source for such seeds is Territorial Seeds.

Our dilemma is that we usually grow only heirloom varieties, many of which fell into abeyance precisely because they were not as disease resistant as newer hybrids. None of the tomato varieties we have planted this year fall into the “excellent” or “good” categories of blight resistance; only Black Krim and Brandywine fall into the category of “moderate” resistance (neither variety survived last year).

Our concern is that in shifting to blight-resistant varieties, we would be giving up the quality and flavor of the heirlooms and backing off from our farm’s stated aim of helping to save excellent varieties of vegetable plants from extinction. One alternative we are considering is to add a blight resistant variety to our tomato patch as a back up, should the blight return and wipe out our heirloom varieties.

Following are McGrath’s guidelines for preventing or controlling the blight:
1. Keep the tomato plants dry (drip method irrigation as opposed to overhead sprinkling)

2. Be vigilant; inspect once a week, looking for dark brown lesions on stems and for leaves with white fungal-like growth.  Remove infected vegetation immediately and dispose of it properly (see #5)

3. Act quickly.  If removing foliage doesn’t work, safely dispose of the entire plant

4. Immediately inform near neighbors and the Cornell Cooperative Extension if you have an outbreak

5. Dispose of plants properly.  Ideally, remove plants on a sunny day, after the leaves have dried.  If you do not have these conditions, don’t delay.  Seal plants in a plastic bag and leave in sun for a few days, then bury plants deeply or put them in the trash.

6. Keep an eye on related strains of plants: petunias, tomatillos, and certain weeds, such as hairy nightshade and bittersweet nightshade.

7. Use fungicides (Chlorothalonil and copper-based products) and spray preventatively.

We plan to follow these guidelines this summer (with the possible exception of spraying preventatively with fungicides, something we do not ordinarily do).

And we are hoping this summer to have delicious tomato plates drizzled with olive oil and garnished with slices of mozzarella and parsley, tasty tomato sandwiches, even tastier bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, refreshing gazpacho, heaping tomato salads, and soothing tomato soup. And we are hoping to freeze at least 60 pounds of tomato sauce, as we usually do, to see us through those tomato-less winter months. —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/24/10 at 12:32 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: A Round Trip To and From the GreenHouse

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Well, sad to say, the value-added farm products described in our April 1 bulletin were only a wonderful fantasy. Alas, we at Turkana Farms have no chocolate flavored eggs, no alcoholic melons, and not one single hanging lamb chop. We were gratified, however, to receive a few orders for these mythical products from a few hopefuls,  as well as some very strong encouragement from a few imbibers to actually try raising infused melons..

The mythical chocolate eggs and projected other exotic flavors were suggested to me by my experience with yoghurt, to which I was introduced in the early sixties when I lived in Turkey. There the only choices were between sheep or cow yoghurt and home made or bought yoghurt. We mostly boiled raw cow milk (to deal with tuberculosis), put it in a clay pot with a dollop of yoghurt culture, wrapped the clay pot in a towel,  put it on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and waited a few days until it was formed. Sheep yoghurt we bought from the street sellers (left) who, in those days, strolled around the Izmir neighborhood with a yoke over their shoulders from which were suspended two copper yoghurt pans. Their cry “Yohrrr Jou ou ou!”  (‘Yoghurt Seller!’) was one of the most distinctive sounds of the day.

When I returned to the U.S. in the mid sixties, yoghurt was not readily available, still being a specialty at health food shops. I was excited and pleased when, eventually, it began appearing in supermarkets. But I quickly became disenchanted as, like our fabled Turkana eggs, yoghurt began to undergo a strange metamorphosis, becoming available as cherry flavored, pineapple flavored, chocolate flavored,  vanilla flavored,  ad nauseum. And I was really appalled when occasionally I could not find unflavored yoghurt at all, the shelf stocker insisting that vanilla-flavored yogurt was the natural unflavored yoghurt I was looking for.

As to alcohol infused melons, this actually is practiced by Kurdish farmers along the Euphrates in southeast Turkey. But, sadly, Turkana has yet to try this experiment.  Before we can go on to that, we have to master producing a really nice melon. As to the hanging lamb chops, there actually was such a query from a woman living in California, but it was something we read about rather than experienced. We are still awaiting that magical sheep mutation.

At the risk now of not being believed, I note that we are beginning to get greenhouse grown artichokes. This is the one exotic thing we seem to have going for us right now. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough to sell.  Originally, it was not my intention to produce greenhouse artichokes; I simply wanted to over-winter the artichoke plants (perennial in milder climates)  in the greenhouse a few season ago, and then return them to the vegetable garden in the spring. To my surprise, before I could move the plants back to the garden, they began, in April/May, to produce abundantly. We were amazed at how tender and tasty these artichokes were compared to the rather disappointing California-grown ones we find in our supermarket. So discovering that artichokes transplant readily, producing happily in a greenhouse, we have continued the experiment.

We have also discovered that once killing frosts approach, we can similarly move other vegetable plants from the garden to the greenhouse. We have successfully reestablished spinach, Swiss chard, lettuces, arugula, cutting celery, chives,  parsley, coriander, rosemary, and other herbs. These, together with the straw-covered leeks, carrots, parsnips, and the weather-hardy Brussels sprouts over-wintering in the vegetable garden, as well as the potatoes, onions and garlic we stored in the basement pantry, have virtually fulfilled our vegetable needs throughout the winter and early spring.

Given the price of bottled gas, the cost effectiveness of growing vegetables in the greenhouse throughout the winter remains to be seen. Probably not.

But we have taken a few measures to mitigate the heating costs. Applying a practice from colonial times, we have been partially heating with chicken manure, of which we have aplenty. The colonial practice, as we learned, was to dig a foot deep wide trench as a planting bed, then to spread about six inches of chicken manure, and over that about six inches of topsoil. The heat emanating from the manure warms the soil and the air immediately above it. This system of heating, of course, works even more effectively in a low cold frame, which is what was used in colonial times—less so in a domed greenhouse like ours. But, when we ran out of bottled gas on one of the coldest nights of the winter, enough heat was being generated to preserve our greenhouse garden
With some modifications—putting cold frame-like structures inside the greenhouse; switching to a solar-powered heating unit—we may be able to make our winter greenhouse vegetable garden make sense economically.  For now, it gives us enormous pleasure to sit down to our own vegetables and salads during the winter months. And to be able to wheel our shopping cart quickly through the supermarket vegetable aisles, stopping only briefly for fruits and an occasional vegetable.

But now the vegetable traffic flow is going in the opposite direction—from the greenhouse to the vegetable garden. We have already gambled (there is always the danger of a killing frost) and set out the more cold-hardy seedlings that we started in the greenhouse in early March—peas, fava beans,  broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuces. These newcomers join our garlic, already peeping up through the mulch, as well as clumps of young sorrel, burgeoning rhubarb, and the scallions, parsnips, carrots, and leeks that survived last year.  We are moving from a season of satisfying only our own vegetable needs to once again supplying those of our loyal customer base. —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/16/10 at 02:35 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture:  The Compleat Farmer, At Last

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark recounts the final stage of his embrace of farming.

Picture this: a gray-haired lawyer in overalls on a soggy raw early March day, crawling at full speed for the third or fourth time into a steamy metal pig shelter and lunging forward, splaying out flat in the mud, but managing to grasp the back feet of a recalcitrant 200 pound pig.  He triumphantly screams “I’ve got him, help me,” and pulls the pig back far enough out of the hut for his partner to help rope its back legs, wrap the rope around a bar in the back of a waiting trailer, and heave and hoe and winch this last pig foot by foot to its destination.

That lawyer was me, my partner a Ph.D.  In situations like this, we liken our amateur efforts to Laurel and Hardy. When the trailer door was finally barred shut, I gasped for air and accustomed my bruised and filthy self to standing upright again.  I met the kind, crinkly eyes of one of my favorite local characters, George Atkinson.  George is a Livingston dairy farmer who has “retired”  to, among other things, transporting large animals in his “Critter Carrier,” often from farm to slaughter house.  He was positively chortling.  “Mark, if your clients could only see you now.”

This happened several years back, when it was time for our first mixed litter of Ossabaw pigs to go to market.  It was before Peter figured out how to configure our fencing into a loading chute, and before we realized how much easier and less traumatic it would be to coax the pigs into the truck with a pail of apples. It was before it dawned on me that it was not the hallmark of a farmer to be caked head to foot in mud and poop; that, indeed, the farmers who knew what they were doing seemed always to have impeccably clean jeans and even clean boots.

While George was so amused, I was reveling in the elemental rush of it all.  If my mother or grandmother, who had shrugged off as light eccentricity my passion for vegetable gardening, had been alive to witness my disheveled state, they would have shaken their heads in dismay. It had come to this, after all the sacrifices the family had made so my good education could assure me a high-status desk job.  At Passover, we celebrate the realization of a new freedom in every generation, but if I were to tell them that this was a step toward liberation for me, they would have been convinced of my descent into abject goyishe madness.

And how do I explain this late-in-life engagement with livestock raising?  As with gardening, it wasn’t my idea.  It was at Peter’s urging that we initially acquired turkeys and sheep and chickens and almost every other species we’ve accrued. 

And as I had done with Peter’s gardening years before,  I watched the animals from a safe distance.  I perceived our first four sheep as living lawn ornaments, and disappointing ones at that.  It seems they spent the first several months depressed at being shipped away from their old home, lying about on the front lawn like woolly blobs.  I was happy to stay away from them, and they from me.

It had never occurred to me that I might actually have to touch one at some point.  When I began to realize that having animals meant having to handle them sometimes, the thought frankly terrified me.  If a chicken got where it wasn’t supposed to be, I chased it ineffectually.  I would get the bird cornered only to have it flap its wings wildly, making me shrink back, at which point, I would inevitably call for Peter to help.  While I continued my ineffectual efforts, Peter actually caught them.

It should come as no surprise that eventually a chicken got out when nobody else was around.  I swallowed hard, caught it by doing what I had seen Peter do, and it was like a Temple Grandin moment:  a gate had opened. I had acquired a new skill, which made me very proud, but much more to the point, my reluctance to touch was shattered.  Then, when the ewes started lambing and we needed to move them to better shelter (the barn not yet having been reconstructed), I learned to handle them as well.

Overcoming my fears of handling these strange creatures was a necessary, but not sufficient step to a sustained interest in caring for them.  What followed was far more important. Once I began to interact with them, I gradually came to know them as creatures with something in common with me.  I saw evidence of their individual variations in behavior, emotions, characters, and relationships.  This shook my world view.  Admitting that they had consciousness and were part of our world forced me also to recognize that we are part of theirs.  At a very late point in life, I came to see that we are more animal than we care to admit, our exaltation of morality and philosophy notwithstanding.

Of course, one can’t know fully what’s going on in any other creature’s mind, human or animal.  But it pleases me greatly to observe our menagerie in what I perceive to be a state of contentment, what I’d call an animal contentment.  Throw a basket of weeds to the chickens and you will hear a low murmur of clucks that draws other chickens from all over the yard, each getting busy picking through the weeds for what most appeals to them.  Fill the mangers with hay on a winter morning and you can sit in the barn’s south-facing suntrap and listen to the industrious sound of 40 sheep quietly munching while the younger lambs play around them.  These are moments of contentment.  It resembles human contentment, but seems to differ in its innocent, unreserved quality, apparently unpolluted by suspicions of motive, anxieties about the future, or the other reservations that prevent humans from knowing pure joy.

I’m the sort who never forgets that upsides always come with downsides.  For me, the ability to not only witness but also induce such unmitigated contentment makes livestock care particularly compelling.  It’s not a chore, it’s a pleasure. 
—Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/05/10 at 04:31 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Can Value-Added Products Save the Small Farm?

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes: 

Well, you heard about our “Virgin Birth” at the farm in last week’s blog. Yet another unforeseen consequence came our way last month. You may remember that a year or so ago, when we were experimenting with a more suitable feed for our Ossabaw Island Pigs, we explored various sources for second grade nuts as a substitute for corn. We even hired a nut broker (yes, there are such people) and he arranged for Hershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylvania to send us a huge crate of their almond remnants. It never occurred to us that the almond bits might also come with traces of chocolate, not quite the ideal diet for pigs inclined to put on 4 inches of back fat at the drop of a hat. So we never did feed it all to our pigs, and left some in storage, but some time towards the end of winter our chickens, always the busy opportunists, somehow found their way into the grain storage section of their coop and, unbeknownst to us, began gorging themselves on almonds and chocolate.

The totally unexpected result is that they have been producing darker brown eggs than usual with a subtle chocolate flavor, with, in some cases, a hint of marzipan.  Mark says a hint of almond, I say marzipan.  We were, as you can imagine, quite surprised that our Rhode Island reds could do this, but, as they say, you are what you eat.

Chocolate flavored eggs might seem at first to be an acquired taste, but we have grown rather fond of them, and have begun sharing a few dozen or so of them with a few of our best customers—at $8 a dozen. We are now at work experimenting with putting essence of strawberry and lemon and lime in their waterers, and, we are pleased to say,  are anticipating getting mouth watering results. We are hoping to have a whole range of flavored eggs in time for the Easter rush: pomegranate, banana, coconut, pineapple, cherry, vanilla—the possibilities seem limitless. We think Turkana Farms may be on to a real bonanza,  one that could bring in at least enough cash to pay for some badly needed fencing.

But not all our discoveries have been accidental. I must admit that the following idea was not original with us, at least, not entirely. While traveling in southeastern Turkey in the Diyarbakir area a few years ago, I discovered that farmers along the banks of the Euphrates River were infusing their watermelons with raki, a kind of potent anisette, which is the Turkish national drink. When the melon reaches near maturity, these enterprising farmers cut out a tiny plug, pour in a good dollop of raki, put the plug back in, and let the melon go a few more days before harvesting it.  The raki infused melon has proven to be a very popular dessert in Turkey.

Last summer we thought we would experiment in our own melon patch with drinks more to American tastes. We, of course, had to keep all of this experimentation secret because we weren’t sure if growing alcohol-infused melons was against New York State law.  So we only shared our first crop only with our closest friends, who thought our scotch and gin melons were real hits, and our vodka-infused melons awesome. Mark thought Stolichnaya produced the best results.  I favored Ketel One. Some of our dinner parties went on very late into the night.  This summer we are thinking of trying to grow a margarita melon.

Some of this experimentation may seem far fetched, but as Gene Logsdon, author of The Contrary Farmer, has pointed out: most of the real innovations in farming come, not from established life-long farmers but from those, like us, who have come into farming from other backgrounds.

Some of our experimentation has been inspired by special requests from customers. A few years or so ago, for instance, we got a really sympathetic letter from an elderly lady in San Francisco (a frequent visitor to this region) who loves lamb chops but feels very uncomfortable about having to be indirectly responsible for the death of such an adorable critter to get them .”Couldn’t you,” she suggested, “get lamb chops without having to kill the poor, dear lamb?” This set us to thinking.

And then, as is often the case at Turkana Farms, something serendipitous happened, a rare mutation— a “sport” as they call it in the animal breeding world. We found ourselves with a eweling with tiny, almost vestigial, lamb chops hanging from her underside. Was this, we wondered at first, a one-time thing or would the lamb chops once harvested grow back? We were thrilled to discover that after a month or so a full rack of lamb chops had grown back. The lady from San Francisco was ecstatic and ordered a year’s supply. 

We, at first, congratulated ourselves on having an endless source of lamb chops, but quickly realized that unless we could breed more of such sheep, this painless lamb chop production would simply be a blip on the screen, a momentary fluke. And then, as is often the case with us, another serendipitous thing happened. Almost like an answer to a prayer, a sheep raising friend in Delhi, across the river, e-mailed to say he also had a lamb with hanging lamb chops, this one a ramling. “Bonanza!” I thought.

So when our ewe and his ram reached breeding age, we immediately mated them, and, sure enough on, April 1, the first naturally-produced lamb with hanging lamb chops was born.  We called it April Fool. —Peter Davies

Note: The external, dangling chops were inspired by a reference in “Salad Bar Beef” by Joel Salatin, farmer and guru of intense rotational grazing, to a customer who once asked him if he could provide lamb chops without killing the lamb.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/29/10 at 10:24 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Animal Behavior 101 Styles of Mothering

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Since most of the “how to farm” animal care books we have consulted seem to treat animals as objects, or mere commodities, and thus ignore much of their behavior, we have been left to learn through our own day-to-day observations how their minds work. The thrust of such books is essentially how to raise farm animals to get the biggest dollar return on them, and they somehow overlook the obvious—that farm animals are living, sentient beings that we need to understand, if we are to satisfy their needs and contribute to the quality of their often very short lives. What follows is not a systematic study, rather these are random observations that, bit by bit, are forming our growing body of farm knowledge.

I’ll start with our karakul sheep, since after almost ten years of caring for them, we understand them best. Our ewes, when they are ready to give birth, seek the security of the barn, where they were born and raised. Not all of them manage to make it into the barn, but most do, and those that don’t get pretty close. The experienced ones seem to know that they and their newborn will be moved into the luxury of a birthing pen for the first days,  and have a sense of entitlement about extra grain treats.

The rest of the herd respectfully keeps its distance during the birthing. Once the lamb is born, the ewe tears off the birth sack (and sometimes eats it), severs the umbilical cord, and licks the lamb clean of the birthing fluids.  The lamb is immediately up on its long legs, fully coordinated and strong, ready to go. The ewe and lamb are inseparable in the first days. The mother recognizes her lamb not by its appearance, apparently, but by sniffing its behind, which she checks out quite frequently.  A ewe will not share her teats with another ewe’s lamb. This we saw as a hard-and-fast rule until, in this last birthing go-around, two ewes and their lambs ended up sharing the same birthing pen and, to our surprise,  began co-parenting. How much this is an exception to the rule remains to be seen.

If a ewe has given birth to twins and for some reason is having a problem with her milk, we have discovered, she will reject one of them and exclusively feed the other. Nothing, in our experience, will make her nurse the rejected one. If a ewe with a single lamb loses it, she goes through a very human-like grieving process that seems to last at least a week, during which she may isolate herself in a corner of the barn and show no interest in eating or rejoining the herd. The ram, by contrast, seems oblivious that he has had anything to do with producing the lambs and evidences no attachment to them or interest in them.

We have come later to breeding cattle and, therefore, know far less about them. While on our various farm ventures, we usually try to stay at least a chapter ahead in our understanding, we actually were forced by unforeseen circumstances to start learning about cow birthing even before we had intended to. This was what we now call the “Virgin Birth,” a bizarre event that took place a few years ago, before we had started breeding our own cattle, when we had only cows and no bull.

One late afternoon in August as I sat in the shade, resting like God on the seventh day surveying his handiwork (but unGod-like relishing my cocktail), I looked down into the cow pasture and noticed the cows scattered about, each separate,  in an odd formation, not in their usual cowy herd. Not long after, Mark came running up from the pasture (it was Sunday,  his turn to do chores), excitedly announcing the birth of a calf. I was thunderstruck!  A calf born to a herd of cows with no bull in evidence anywhere—this was one for the Guiness Book of Records! Or maybe the Bible!

After some intense speculation, we remembered that we had boarded the herd the previous winter at a farm in Tivoli because our pastures had run out early, and we had not yet constructed a winter shelter or them…and, yes, there was another herd with a bull on the property, supposedly in a separate pasture. Apparently, we finally deduced, the deed was done there.

Having to improvise as we did in this case, our assumption was that what we had learned from going through many birthings with our sheep would apply. But, from the beginning, we should have realized that things were going to be different. The cow, for one, accepted the pasture, not the barn, as the place for the birth.  And, while giving the birthing mother space, it appeared that the rest of the herd stationed themselves individually around the pasture, seemingly as sentinels on guard.

Once the mother recovered,  she seemed, to our dismay, to abandon the calf, going off to graze with the rest of the herd, leaving it sleeping in a clump of tall grass. Unlike lambs, the calf did not get to its feet and trot after its mother. Concerned, we went down to see if we could move the calf to its mother, but even a newborn calf is big and amazingly strong and has a mind of its own, and we could not, despite all of our efforts, bring the calf to its mother. Instead, when she saw our attempts, she came and moved him to another, more secure spot (from her point of view), and went off to graze again, returning periodically to nurse and check on him. And then we began to realize we were seeing a pattern we had previously only associated with deer, whereby the fawn is secreted in a secure spot and the doe comes and goes—behavior unthinkable for a responsible ewe.

Pigs are something else, in good part, probably, because of the numerous piglets in a litter. Just prior to farrowing, sows begin to act on their nesting instinct. They begin moving hay, grasses, twigs, whatever is at hand, into their huts carefully putting together a birthing bed. They meticulously grind up with their teeth and feet anything the piglets might get trapped in or tripped up in,  and pack down the various materials they have assembled creating a warm, secure place for the piglets. And then, when the time comes, after making these housewifely preparations that are totally foreign to cows or sheep, they stretch out in their nest, and the piglets one after the other begin to emerge. Our record so far: thirteen in one litter.

Unlike a cow or sheep, the sow’s mothering is not, however, entirely predictable. A first-time sow may, we discovered to our horror, become confused and eat her own,  or a sow perceiving defects in the piglets may also do the same—something unimaginable with sheep and cows.

With the high number of piglets in a litter, the kind of individual attention and identification of mother to offspring typical of sheep and cattle is obviously not possible,  Nor do sows seem to have the kind of exclusiveness in mothering that sheep and cattle have.  A few years ago, for instance, Patty and Laverne, our purebred Ossabaw sows, shared a hut and farrowed a week apart, and as far as we could determine, happily raised their piglets in common.

The competitive world into which piglets are born seems to have given piglets very different instincts. While access to nipples, given the sows’ rows of them, is not a problem, the nipples at the front of the sow are the more productive and so highly favored. Instinctively the A-piglets choose and take possession of the front nipples, the runts being left with those in the back. And once this choice has been made, the piglet has exclusive ownership of that nipple.

Unlike lambs and more like calves, piglets are not ready to be up and on the move from the beginning, but spend the first days in a comradely heap, snuggled up against the warmth of momma not far from that chosen teat. While the sow is ferociously protective of her piglets, she soon develops a curiously laissez faire attitude about them as they begin making their frisky forays out of the hut and, inevitably, outside the protection of the pen itself.  Momma sow makes no effort to keep them with her, and they soon seem to lose the need to be continuously with her, and very quickly begin living more and more independently.

If she sees them in danger, momma sow will come charging to their defense, but does not seem to feel that keeping them safely close to her is part of her motherly role. Unlike the long-term attachment of the ewe and cow to their young, the sow’s bonds to her piglets seem to fade away quickly as the piglets become less and less offspring and more and more competitors at the trough.
—Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/20/10 at 04:04 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Making of a Farmer, Part 2

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes: 

A couple of weeks ago, I described arriving at young adulthood in a state of profound alienation from the natural world.  How did I find my way to the realization (or is it a delusion?) that raising vegetables and animals is not merely worthwhile, but also deeply fulfilling?  It would be simple to write a single sentence summing up the entire process:  “Peter taught me.”  After thirty-one years as a member of a tight dyad (to use Kurt Vonnegut’s term), it would perhaps be surprising if I had not absorbed something of my partner’s most compelling interests.  The credit (or maybe the blame) is his, and you could say I am simply following in Peter’s muddy footsteps.
That’s the truth, but truth is never that simple. I was no Paul on the road to Damascus.  I had no single epiphany that transformed me overnight into Peter’s disciple. It was more an evolution from resistance, to reluctance, to just going along, and then, to a large degree unconsciously, to total embrace. 

My resistance to the rural life when I first met Peter was evident in my complete lack of interest in joining him in the country.  We met in New York City in the fall of 1978, were living together most of the time by the next spring, yet when the following summer Peter left for his old Berkshire haunts, I joined him for only one weekend the entire season.  For me, the “wildlife” of sultry summer nights in the City was far more enticing than a free place to stay in the bucolic Berkshires.

Peter had no problem convincing me, as our relationship progressed, to join him in subsequent summers in Sag Harbor, on Long Island’s East End, but, to my mind, that was the beach with farm-stand amenities, not the country.  And when we bought and began to restore a house there—The Ephraim Niles Byram House, an 1852 Italianate Cottage in the irregular style—and Peter established the picturesque gardens (shown here) he saw as the proper context of the house, I became a most reluctant collaborator.

Thanks to Peter’s research on Andrew Jackson Downing, whose pattern books had inspired the house’s design, I recognized that historical authenticity required a particular type of garden setting for the house (top photo). I appreciated the beauty of the outdoor environments Peter created.  But I’d have to admit that, at first, I took both his work and the resources he devoted to the garden entirely for granted. And being something of a puritan (Peter would say Philistine), when I did begin to recognize how much was involved, I was horrified.  I am sometimes reminded of one of the many Saturday mornings we journeyed to the local nurseries and Peter, as always, began loading up a cart with perennials.  “Do you really need that?” I asked, each time he added another plant to the cart, until I pushed his patience too far and was banished to the car, like a sulking teenager, while he completed his shopping.

And yet, and yet, slowly a sense of what constitutes a garden crept into my psyche.  Not just the final product but the process, the work of getting it there.  House and garden tours are a staple of East End entertainment, and after spending enough time touring, I was able to discern which of the gardens had been purchased at the nursery and installed the week before the tour, which ones were formula gardens contracted for with landscaping professionals (exterior decorators, I’d call them), and which were the products of a creative vision and constant shaping over time by an individual gardener.  As with any endeavor, appreciation of the craft can sometimes be the route to appreciating the object, and I began to seek out real gardens to observe the infinite variety of horticultural creativity.

Equally important was helping Peter with the garden work.  Something about the digging and planting and weeding, I discovered, gave me a sense of tranquility.  Being a lawyer is all about sitting in a chair and engaging in highly intellectual contention.  Garden work offered a contrasting combination of physical activity and a sense of brain-rest. I call it my Zen time.  With my only external stimuli being the rays of the sun, the breeze, and the feel and smell of the earth, my mind could meander, undirected, or simply blank out altogether. No matter how mentally or emotionally exhausted I might be, no matter how much sleep deprivation I’d suffered, I could get down on my knees and weed by hand for several hours and emerge from the process restored. 

Applying my emerging gardening skills to a vegetable garden satisfied yet another need – to feel that what I produced was tangible and of real value. As pleased as I might be when achieving a legal victory or writing a fine brief, I have always felt a certain sense of unease about my occupation.  I have tried to work for the “right side”, but most disputed legal fights involve moral ambiguities.  Some clients, while legally and even morally entitled to what I fight to get for them, are people whose values and goals I would prefer not to have advanced.  The production of a carrot or a cabbage involves no such ambiguity; eating is a universally esteemed good.  And I, a particularly avid appreciator of food, could happily work full time growing vegetables.

By the time we left Sag Harbor our days there were almost fully occupied caring for our intensively cultivated little acre. Morning to dark, March through November, we virtually lived out of doors, generally ate outside, followed each meal with a walk around part of the property to observe and plan projects.  We were also engaged community activists, but even that activity seemed to involve a steady stream of comrades in arms dropping by to meet in our garden.  In the winter months, when garden work was impossible, we frequently hiked for miles in the Long Pond Greenbelt, a string of kettle ponds running from the ocean to the Peconic Bay.. And thus, the urban nihilist had been transformed into someone who did not feel right unless many hours each weekend were spent outdoors.

Does this history fully explain my embrace of farming?  Obviously not.  In this entire account you’ve heard not a word about animals, yet caring for livestock is now our main farm endeavor.  Arriving in Columbia County, I had still never laid hands on, let alone spent time with, a chicken, cow, sheep or pig. In fact, I would have been queasy about touching any of them.  The evolution from avid gardener to someone who cares for livestock is its own separate process, carrying its own rewards.  I’ll write about that transition next time. —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/15/10 at 09:47 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Sheepish Grins and Other Barnyard Metaphors

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Having a farm does revive one’s sense of metaphorical language.  While slopping the pigs I have sometimes, as I watched the disgusting activity at the trough, caught myself thinking, “You eat like a pig,” and then I catch myself and realize that they are, in fact, pigs and that they are, of course, eating like pigs. They are being “piggish.”  Or should I say, “hogging it?”  I really can’t say to them, “Don’t eat like a pig,” because that’s exactly how, of course, they will and must eat—in a “piggy” way.
 
The first time one of our Chinese geese crept up behind me and nipped my behind, I realized that I had been “goosed,” in the true sense of the word. Yes, their standard mode of attack is for the goose, once your back is turned, to extend its neck very low, parallel to the ground, and to silently approach you snake-like, and craftily reach up and nip you unawares in your unprotected nether region.
 
There is something about the helter skelter hysteria of my chickens some days that makes me want to call them “dumb clucks.” When they panic and flap about squawking, I realize they are just “chicken.” There is something about chickens’ capacity for defecating on almost anything and everything that makes me understand why the common expression, “That’s chicken shit.”
 
I have learned that when I arrive at the barn and find the sheep quietly huddled together, their heads dolefully hanging down, they are looking, you guessed it, “sheepish.” A few of the bolder, more cynical ones might, instead of hanging their heads in contrition, respond with a “sheepish grin.” They have, I realize, even before I see the damage, been up to something naughty—either breaking into the grain storage bin, or tearing up hay bales stored for safety, or eating my straw hat.  Having the intelligence of three-year-olds, they do have a sense of right and wrong, and seem to feel contrition. Or something like it. This is when they look “sheepish.” When I pick up a tiny lamb, and see how quiet and calm it is (especially compared to shrieking, writhing piglets), I have to stop myself from thinking, “Quiet as a lamb.” When the sheep are in a combative mood, I see the meaning of “butting heads.” Or when mating season is upon us, I understand the sense of “ramming” it through.
 
I have noticed that my ducks splashing around their little pond do actually look “ducky.” There is something about the line of their beaks, which gives them a perpetual smile.  This together with their placid, easy going, seemingly self-satisfied nature creates the essence of “duckiness.” And so I come to realize why calling something that is pleasant and nice “ducky” makes sense, and why referring to a special someone as “my duck” is a form of affection.  As for “sitting duck,” I first realized the metaphorical sense of the term several years ago after a flying predator carried off a duck two nights in a row. I, thereupon, moved my “sitting ducks” in at night to safety.
 
After being in the cow pasture and almost stepping into a huge cow plop, I understand why a really big lie is often met with “bull shit.”  Seeing the herd crowded at the manger explains why one might say someone is “bulling” his way into a situation. When I reach out to stroke a cow’s muzzle, and it quickly draws back and lowers its head, I realize that it is being “cowed.” And as the cows stand in the pasture contentedly chewing their cud, I, of course, see them as “cowy”.
 
I don’t have horses, but when I see horses capering about the paddock in the nearby International Stud farm, I know that they are just “horsing around.”
 
Just before Thanksgiving, when our turkeys graduate to the mating stage and the toms are parading about, flamboyantly displaying, gobbling loudly, viciously pecking at each other, and, in general, milling about in chaos,  I know they are just being turkeys. As in “Oh, you turkey!”
 
Finally, to return to geese, when I am driving them into their night pen, and see the same goose each time unable to find where the door is and, as usual, running in the opposite direction, I cannot help but think “Silly goose!” —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/09/10 at 09:26 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: From the Start, at Two With Nature

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:

A few weeks back, Peter wrote about his lifelong passion for growing things, one which quite naturally led to an involvement in farming. When I was casting about for a topic to write on this week, he suggested that I might explain why I like to farm too.  In my case, it’s a bit more of a challenge. 

An interest in farming did not come naturally to me.  Mine is the enthusiasm of a convert.  In fact, you might say my early life was characterized by a profound alienation from the natural world.  I’m not sure I understand my own transformation, but perhaps it might help as an initial step to describe just how distanced from this world I was.

My early childhood was spent in a six-story apartment building in the Bronx.  There were some single family homes down the block, with tiny squares of grass and a tree or two, but the view from our window was overwhelmingly of concrete and asphalt.  The same could be said of my nursery school and kindergarten, and of the walks to and fro.  I’m told that when I was an infant and my parents placed me on the swath of grass in the middle of Pelham Parkway (in the nearby neighborhood where my mother’s parents lived), I cried every time I made contact with the strange surface.

From an early age, I did come in contact with a rural environment of sorts, but I think you could fairly say it was something I had touched but not been touched by.  We spent summers at Warman’s Bungalow Colony, owned and operated by my grandfather and his brothers and sister, in Swan Lake, NY—the Catskills.  It had once been a dairy farm, but its former agricultural features had all been transformed to new uses: the barn to the “casino,” site of circuit-riding borscht belt entertainments, bingo games, and itinerant dress sales; the annexed utility rooms to my Tante Jenny’s grocery store and apartment; the chicken coop to the laundromat.  And the pastures were populated by bungalows (“kuch aleyn”, or “cook on your own” in Yiddish).  The one open area, at the far end of the property, was the baseball field.

The life of the bungalow colony was more or less that of an urban neighborhood plunked down in the country.  I gravitated between Jenny’s grocery, where my beloved great aunt would indulge me with chocolate marshmallow twists from the freezer, the “lake,” a former cow watering pond where we swam, and the tables set up in the cool shade in front of some of the older bungalows, where I would contentedly listen to the click of the tiles and calls of “one crack, two bam” as my mother and grandmother played endless games of mah jongg. (This was a matriarchy where the fathers appeared to great excitement Friday night and disappeared again on Sunday.)  There was a farm that still operated up the road, but we never went there.  Nor did we kids explore the surrounding woods, which seemed dangerous and forbidding.  I only occasionally played baseball.  Standing far out in right field (for I was a terrible player relegated to where I would do the least damage), I experienced nature principally as the unpleasant buzz of swarming gnats in the hot sun. 

The only time, indeed, that I can remember venturing on foot into the “country” was to accompany my grandmother to a large scrubby field across the road full of high bush blueberries.  I have vivid memories of the heat, the crescendos of katy-dids. and the scratches to our arms and legs as we filled large enamel cooking pots with the berries. Our discomforts were forgotten when we sat down to one of our favorite summer suppers, blueberries and sour cream.

When I was part way through kindergarten, my family joined the exodus to the suburbs, in our case northern New Jersey.  You might think this would have introduced me to nature and the outdoors, but in 1950s New Jersey the grass only existed to be mowed. We had no vegetable or even flower gardens, just the classic Ozzie and Harriet foundation plantings.  The nearby woodlands, which had not yet been bulldozed for housing tracts, were not particularly dark or deep.  While I did at times play there, I don’t think I ever distinguished one tree or bush from another.

Not until high school and the late 1960s did I begin to spend a significant amount of time out of doors.  While I began to appreciate nature in a fashion, there was still a distance between me and my surroundings, viewing them as I did through the lens of an aspiring suburban hippie; that is to say, through a haze of marijuana smoke. “Grooving” on plant life is a pretty narrow way of relating to it.  I naively fashioned myself an anarchist, whose ideal was to live in a self-sufficient agricultural commune. Yet even on the verge of leaving home for college, I could not have told you what a string bean plant or a beet in the ground looked like.

Leaving my suburban cocoon for college first made me aware of how constricted my relationship to the world of growing things had been.  It was a revelation to visit the home of my best friend, George, and be sent out to the asparagus patch in his back yard to pick spears for dinner.  I had never before tasted asparagus, let alone known how it grew. 

While I reveled in some of these discoveries, the encounter with other young people who seemed comfortable with the natural world, veterans of Outward Bound or members of the hiking club, made me entirely ill at ease, giving me a tremendous feeling of inadequacy.  My protective response was to adopt the persona of a staunch urban nihilist, espousing only half tongue-in-cheek a “pave the world” philosophy.  Certainly I had the conventional appreciation of beautiful gardens and country landscapes, but only as a foil for what really mattered—the City and most of all New York City.  And so I arrived at young adulthood, still alienated from nature, and a most unlikely future farmer in every way. 

I will leave my story here and in the next installment try to explain how I became transformed from antagonist of the country into a true believer in the virtues of the agricultural way of life. —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/01/10 at 08:48 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Remembering Daisy

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Not all farm stories have happy endings. They may, at first, seem to, as was the case with Daisy, our poor young cow, whose harrowing birthing experience was recounted in a May bulletin last year.  For some time I have felt I should tell the full story, but I like happy endings as well as the next person, and like most people, I prefer to hide my failures. But a recent inquiry from a friend as to how Daisy was doing prodded me into revealing directly to at least one person that poor Daisy is dead and has been since August.

I think you last heard of Daisy as she managed to regain enough strength to get up and rejoin the herd grazing on pasture. The last image I left you with was of her snuggled up against her mother, who had her head protectively draped over her. I felt they had resumed a relationship that seemed to have ended with weaning.

Now all of this concern for a cow’s welfare may seem sentimental, if not maudlin, to some. But Daisy, of all the herd (a very friendly bunch) was special. Since she had suffered health problems ever since she was a calf,  she received a lot of individual attention from us. During her first summer, delivering the medication she needed for a leg condition required my full bag of tricks, sidling up to her to jab in the syringe . I rubbed her down daily with organic Fly Off to keep her free of flies. And slipped her apples when the rest of the herd wasn’t watching. Daisy had reciprocated to all of these attentions by goofily nodding her lowered head back and forth, rolling her eyes, and extending her huge tongue to give me a big juicy lick.

The Daisy who returned to the herd after her traumatic birthing experience was bone thin, almost emaciated, but we had hope.  I sensed, however, that Elaine Tucker, our vet, was unusually guarded in her prognosis. As much as we wanted to see improvement, we had to acknowledge after a time that although Daisy continued to graze along with the herd, she remained pitifully thin and forlorn. The leg problems that had plagued her as a calf returned. Once again, she began to separate from the herd. Finding her missing, I would, after a search, discover her hidden amongst the bushes along the edge of the pasture, and drive her back up the hill to rejoin the herd.

Then one day,  I was not surprised when she seemed to disappear completely from the property. Only after an intensive search did Mark and I find her standing forlornly in the most remote area of the woodlands near the wetland preserve.  In fits and starts, we managed to coax her through the woods almost to the edge of the pasture, where she stopped and stubbornly refused to go any further. And this is where she chose to stay.  Unable to do anything more for her, we decided to wait until morning to see if there was any improvement. But from this point on, her deterioration was rapid..

The next morning I arrived to find she had barely moved from where I had left her, even though there was nothing for her there to graze on. I had carried with me some hay and a bucket of water for her. And as if grateful to have not been forgotten, she gave me a fulsome lick, but not accompanied by her usual goofy head bobbing. The lick seemed all she could manage.  She was appreciative of the water but not the hay and could barely walk without staggering.. At one point, to our consternation, Daisy began to stagger around in circles. Not long after, we found her on her side, unable to get up. It was obvious that she would never get up again. My fear was that she would end up being eaten alive by coyotes, and so I once again called the vet.

There was a thick silence in the growing darkness as Elaine and I found our way to Daisy. Neither of us relished what was coming next, and so there was none of our usual bantering. I knelt down and stroked Daisy behind the ears to calm her, as Elaine opened her bag and prepared the syringe. After the injection, I continued to stroke Daisy behind the ears in an attempt to give her some comfort in her final moments. But there was no real change, no sign that the injection was taking effect. A second one was required. Then, as I resumed gently stroking her, I could feel the life quickly draining out of her. The movement from life to death was so swift, so palpable. I can feel it still.  Daisy slowly let out a long exhalation, and it was finished. Next day, Daisy was buried in the spot she had chosen. —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/23/10 at 11:36 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Inside Story on “Animal Welfare Approved”

A friend recently asked that we write something about “Animal Welfare Approved” (I’ll call it AWA), a certification that has begun to appear around the region. I had seen their certificate at Hilltown Pork, the Canaan facility where most of our cattle, lambs and pigs are slaughtered.  Although I didn’t know exactly what it stood for, seeing the certificate in the office sure made me feel better about taking the animals in.  So I liked the idea of investigating what it is all about.
 
Peter and I have very different views about certifications, rules, and prescriptive guidelines.  Peter has an ingrained aversion to them.  Where agricultural certifications are concerned, his deep skepticism derives in part from going to a workshop several years back of the New England Heritage Breeds Association, where about 10 local pig growers were trying to agree on pig-raising protocols, only to find that while they were all working for the same aims—organic, humane, sustainable, etc.—they each had developed by trial and error quite individual ways of doing things and simply could not reach consensus on one standardized path.  Peter had no doubt that each was doing the right thing in his or her own way and came away thinking that the effort to standardize a protocol was futile
 
His suspicion of detailed sets of prescriptive rules was deepened, as all of ours has been, by government regulation of the term “organic,” which permits organic certification of industrial scale agriculture, the kind that uses intensive inputs and is not necessarily kind to animals or workers. 
 
As a lawyer who grew up a “good boy,” I always want to know what rule I am supposed to follow.  In fact, I seek them out, and sometimes follow them at the expense of the broader principles they were created to advance.  In this way, I am more like the Turks Peter describes, who follow the letter of the law, rather than its spirit.  Since the Koran says of alcohol, “Let not the first drop touch your lips,” many Turks dip their fingers in their drinks to flick the first drop to the ground, then heartily down the rest.  Peter is a spiritual person of pantheistic bent; whereas, I have a more Talmudic leaning.
 
So, for me, going to the Animal Welfare Approved website was, you should excuse the expression, Talmudic hog heaven.  Boy, were there rules.  Dozens of them.  And naturally the questions arise:  Are these the right rules?  Were they formulated by people who understand the challenges of farming?  Were they adopted for the right reasons?
 
I’ve concluded that the last question can easily be answered.  Yes, the rules were adopted for the right reasons.  This is not a government program aimed at enabling big corporations to consolidate their market positions. Nor do they appear to have the secret agenda of eliminating the raising of animals for food.  A long-standing national non-profit organization, the Animal Welfare Institute seems to be acting from good motives.  They appear to be intimately familiar with what happens on farms and seem to understand many of the challenges farmers face.
  
The Animal Welfare Institute created the AWA program of farm certification to allow consumers who patronize certified producers to be sure they are eating humanely raised food.  Which should, in turn, promote farm animal welfare.  With few exceptions,  the AWI will only certify family farms, and, of those, only those where the family members themselves provides the bulk of the labor and have daily contact with the animals.  They emphasize small scale (limiting the size of flocks, for example), pasture-raising of breeds that are appropriate to the farm’s climate. They require that animals be given meaningful access to light, space, shelter, heat, food, bedding, water and social life. All these general concerns are absolutely appropriate and sensible.  The program has endorsers such as the revered Michael Pollan (left), Pig Perfect author Peter Kaminsky, and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.  It passes muster for good intentions and integrity.
 
And at first blush, the certification process seems reasonably simple. Certification is by species, so a farm could, for instance, be certified for sheep but not for chickens. The farmer answers a few basic questions about the breed he raises, where the breeding stock comes from,  how they are raised and certifies that the farm complies with the detailed set of rules for that animal..  The AWI then sends an inspector who audits the farm operations and, if it passes, proclaims the farm Animal Welfare Certified.  Unfortunately AWA will only certify species native to North America, so our guinea fowl, native to Africa, are not eligible.  Also, they will not certify breeds that have undergone genetic selection to the point that their welfare is negatively affected.  It’s not clear to me whether certain heritage breeds, like our American Karakul sheep (the product of selective interbreeding of Central Asian Karakul and Navajo churro) would be prohibited.
 
It’s when I got to the specific rules, which are quite detailed, that I developed some uncertainty.  As we currently operate, we probably are already in compliance with 90 to 95% of them, but that last 5 - 10% may go farther than we do.  For example, in their night time sleeping porch, our turkeys perch on round, steel bars, similar to the round apple branches they perch on during the day.  The AWA rules for turkeys require flat perching bars with rounded bottoms. That configuration would require that they be made of wood, and we wonder if wooden bars could even sustain the weight of our flock as they mature, since their weight already challenges the metal bars.  The emphatic insistence of the rule makes me want to investigate.  Maybe we should switch.  But we have never had a problem with the convenient, screw-in round perching bars that we’ve been using for years, and it’s hard to imagine that we are adversely affecting our turkeys’ welfare by using them, since wild birds worldwide seem to gravitate to the rounded perches man and nature provide.

There’s also a question about the proper time to castrate.  We castrate our piglets as soon as their mothers will let us near them.  Our vet does it, and the piglets generally do not seem traumatized by the experience. (They seem more disturbed by being picked up off the ground than by the surgery.) Our “Small Scale Pig Raising” book suggests castrating four or five days before weaning—when the piglets are several weeks old.  But the AWA standards for pig castration require that it never be done later than the first week of life.  Since sows are ferociously protective of their newborns, we doubt the wisdom of this strict rule.  And since, at Turkana, farmer welfare is equal with that of our animals, we don’t relish getting attacked by an angry, protective sow, while invading her hut to retrieve her piglets.

Sometimes, to prevent an explosion of rodents in the barn and chicken coop, we resort to rat poison   But such is AWA’s dedication to the welfare of all animals that they prohibit using poison.  The only permissible rat control method on certified farms is catching them in live traps (like Hav-a-hearts), followed by a painless, instantaneous death. While I’d be happy to have a humane rat slaughtering operation nearby, I’m not sure I’m ready to operate one myself. Peter jokes that it only makes sense if we’re to eat the rats ourselves or market them.

Many of the AWA rules are obvious imperatives to anyone aspiring to humane animal raising.  Others are not as obvious, but when I read some of them I thought to myself, “We really should be doing that.”  The rules serve as a valuable template for how we might be more humane.  And I’m sure that any facilities in the area with the certification—there seem to be at least half a dozen farms in the region that have it (for a list visit Animal Welfare Approved)—can be relied upon for meat and poultry that have been humanely raised.  But will we actually be willing to pledge conformity with each and every rule?  I don’t know, and Peter says, “Probably not. . —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/15/10 at 12:14 PM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Mysterious Impulse to Garden

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Peter writes:

Recently we mailed off our very ambitious vegetable seed order to Fedco and expect to wait the usual two weeks or so for delivery. Unbelievably, it is almost time to begin planting again. Certainly time to start leeks, scallions, and lettuces in the greenhouse. When, several years ago, we were lucky enough to have inherited a greenhouse, we began starting our own seedlings, thus gaining more control over the varieties of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, etc. we grow. We prefer to try heirloom varieties (the plant counterpart of our heritage animals) but are not averse to also, now and then, trying a new variety that seems to have a lot going for it.

We have also extended our season by wintering over a vegetable garden in the greenhouse. In late fall, we move in lettuces, Swiss Chard, herbs, and artichokes to supply our table during the winter. Artichokes, you say? Yes, last spring we ate artichokes regularly from the plants we moved in the previous fall and hope to do so this spring. Delicious artichokes, far superior to what passes in the supermarket as such from California.

Now that we have the farm and the greenhouse set up, it would seem we have no choice but to grow things. But where, I have been thinking lately, did this original urge to grow things come from? My family, puzzled by my enthusiasms, has often questioned the origin of my green thumb, something they do not share. Certainly, my desire to grow things was not hereditary or because of family influence. The two branches of my family I know best have no farmers in their background: one branch going back to the seventeenth century, possibly beyond, with a fairly continuous line of master mariners and an occasional artisan in the jet-stone trade; the other line, barristers back to the eighteenth century. And it was certainly not my immediate environment, first, a terrace house in urban Cardiff in Wales, followed by suburban houses in northern Illinois.

My earliest memory of plants and planting is from when I was around five or six. Our tiny walled garden in Cardiff did not have much space for planting since it was dominated by our Andersen air raid shelter, a corrugated domed structure half buried in the ground. But in a tiny strip along the garden wall, there were some plants—freesias, I think—that I took to caring for since no one else did. I cared for them in a very loving way. Other than the bay tree in the back corner, they were the only green, living things in the yard.

My next foray into caring for plants, this one an unsuccessful one, came when we got our first Christmas tree. I was seven. During the privations of the war years in Britain, there were no Christmas trees available. The only one I had ever seen, other than in pictures, was being carried into an orphanage nearby on Cowbridge Road. Someone obviously had bequeathed an annual tree to the orphanage, and not even the Nazis could prevent that bequest. Seeing the tree go in the door was the only time I envied the orphans.

But with the end of the war, grocers at Christmas began hanging rows of tiny cut Christmas trees on the fronts of their shops. And we got one. But since our family ornaments had been destroyed in a bombing raid that took the roof off the house, and since there was nothing like ornaments available yet in the shops. I set to work and, using tin foil wrappers, painted paper, and wads of cotton wool, cobbled together enough creations to decorate the tree. I was very involved with this tree so that when it was time to take it down, I could not let it go.

“It will never grow. It has no roots,” my mother and aunts said, as I dug a deep hole and carefully planted the tree next to the bomb shelter. I was absolutely convinced it would grow; no one could convince me otherwise. I watered it faithfully every day. But in spite of my will to have it live, this was not to be, and it soon, to my great sadness, turned brown. It was not until after trying to plant the next Christmas tree a year later, with the same sad results, that I finally, reluctantly accepted failure.

But the impulse to grow things survived and has continued to the present, finding its way over the years into perennial flower gardens, roof gardens, vegetable gardens, and now Turkana Farms. It is a mysterious impulse that seems to have grown, rather than waned, over the years. —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/10/10 at 08:15 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: Which Chicken?  The Fatty or the Funster?

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes:
 
I promised a couple of weeks ago to come back to the issue of chicken. I love the taste and texture of the plump Cornish cross chickens we raise, and attribute these qualities to the very healthy and beautiful chicks we received from the Giese Family’s Northeast Pastured Poultry Association Hatchery, and to the grass and the Lightning Tree Farm organic grain they are raised on. Many of you have expressed similar enthusiasm.
 
Raising these chickens, however, is the one way we deviate from our “heritage breed” principles. Peter has often commented, regretfully, on their lack of personality and sociability. Their voracious appetite (he calls them feathered pigs) seems to be their predominant character trait. He swears that if he were to accidentally fall into their pen, close enough so they didn’t have to walk too far, he might very well be gobbled up in a matter of minutes.
 
I’ve resisted moving away from these easily managed and fast-growing chickens because they take relatively little work, compared to all our other animals, and the product is tasty. But reading The End of Food has made me think again about raising these perfectly round—indeed zaftig—incredibly efficient birds.
 
As Roberts points out, beef cattle convert grain to protein with the same efficiency as a Hummer converts gasoline to forward motion. Chickens far outperform them, and our Cornish cross breed is up there with the most efficient varieties, a sort of Prius of grain-to-protein conversion. Roberts calls these genetically refined birds “walking meat machines”—some grow so fat, they can barely walk and occasionally a number will die of heart failure. They are twice as big as the typical bird raised in 1975, with huge breasts that reach “this sumo-like stature with freakish speed.” He makes them sound like the industrial turkeys we have long disdained.
 
Roberts also points out that these birds were bred this way to process easily in massive numbers (slaughterhouses must process 1.25 million birds a week in order to break even). All to satisfy America’s insatiable desire for white breast meat.
  
Not that our birds suffer from all the problems that industrially-raised chickens do. Perhaps it is because they live outdoors and move to fresh pasture every day. But we have not encountered “pale, soft, exudative (PSE) meat,” which makes the bird crumble when cooked and leads many producers to pump the meat full of salt and phosphates to make it retain water. This water “enhancement” can make up 10 to 30% of an industrial bird’s weight. 
Nonetheless, we have begun to debate whether we shouldn’t at least try a slower growing (10 to 12 weeks vs. 7), older breed, with a more even distribution of light and dark meat and a more sociable, less eating-machine personality—one that actually takes advantage of and enjoys the pasture we provide. A bird that we will enjoy being around. Some fellow farmers have mentioned a number of other varieties that may fit this profile, such as French Freedom Rangers or Kosher Kings, and they swear by the taste. Can we afford to jump with both feet in that direction, when we and so many of our customers quite like the birds we are growing now? Or should we do a controlled experiment, half and half, so that we can all compare the results? Are there varieties that you suggest we try? Let us hear from you.
 
A note of sadness: Those of you in the Hudson Valley undoubtedly heard of the death this week by suicide of Dean Pierson, a respected Copake dairy farmer who, before he took his own life, shot and killed each of his 51 milking cows. You can link to the article in the local newspaper, The Register Star or the New York Times.  We did not know Mr. Pierson, and would not presume to pronounce on his motivations. But those who spoke to the Register Star and to the Times invariably commented on the tough times currently facing dairy farmers, with wholesale milk sales early in 2009 fetching 1970s prices and farmers having to spend $1.50 to produce every dollar’s worth of milk they sold. Even after government supports were increased later in the year, milk producers continued to operate at a loss. News reports alluded to Mr Pierson’s personal problems. We can be sure that the pressures on a farmer running a losing operation, apparently carrying the entire burden of the work himself, could not have helped.
 
The aspect of the story that drew even some national press attention was the killing of the cows. Because he killed only the milking cows and not the calves and heifers, the assumption has been that Mr. Pierson wanted the milking cows to be spared the pain of going unmilked in his absence. To those who would suggest that there were less extreme and destructive means of sparing them that suffering, including distributing them to fellow dairy farmers, it must be pointed out that a man who sees suicide as the only way to overcome his problems may not be making the most rational judgments. No matter how distorted his decision-making, one has to see it ultimately as an act of mercy and caring for the animals in his charge, founded perhaps in a perception that he and these animals were alone with each other in this world. With sadness, one must appreciate that these deaths were infused with a sort of love.
 
A note of correction: Two weeks ago, I misquoted The End of Food as saying that the average American eats 220 pounds of beef a year. Eagle-eyed Rural Intelligence editor Marilyn Bethany questioned this mind-boggling figure, and she was right to do so. We each eat just about 220 pounds of meat a year, including not just beef, but also pork, lamb and poultry. Still, by world standards, an incredible quantity of meat. 
 
A note of caution: Following up on the issue of e-coli in beef, Tom Levine of Longmeadow Farm in West Cornwall, CT, sought reactions to a more recent article by a Texas history professor citing studies to suggest that that no matter what environment it might have originated in, the O156:H7 strain of e-coli could as readily be found in grass-fed beef as in the grain-fed product. Whether this represents agribusiness disinformation (Peter’s opinion) or is an unbiased report on credible research requires further investigation. We’re not opting for well-done beef, but each person must establish his/her own risk-benefit balance. Stay tuned. —Mark Scherzer

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/02/10 at 10:57 AM • Permalink

AgriCulture: The Road to Turkana, Part IV

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY.  Given the tragedy that has recently befallen a local farmer (see Media Matters on the Home Page), Peter, who wrote this week’s blog, was quick to point out that the following litany of complaints (written before the tragedy occurred) seems trivial.  Nonetheless, it would be unfair to readers seeking the full story of the difficulties Peter and Mark have dealt with to leave these aspects of their story out.

As promised, here is Part IV of the Road to Turkana Farms (but warning,  this stretch of the road comes with bumps):

Well, as they say: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And so we did, not realizing the number of problems we would face in establishing a farm. As we should have realized, a farm cannot function as an island unto itself, but requires a particular context to survive and thrive.

I guess I thought Columbia County would be that context. But when we moved here ten years ago, I was coasting on my memories of the county during the early 1970’s, when I lived in Great Barrington and occasionally passed through on my way to the Hudson train station. As is usual with me, I assumed that time had stood still.  It was a real jolt to realize that the county I knew in the 1970’s, a largely agricultural (but poor) place, had really changed.

It was my assumption, because of my outdated understanding, that finding skilled farm helpers (possibly even a farm manager) would not be a problem.  In fact, one of our mentors, who usually gave as very good advice, even assured us that once we got under way, finding the help we needed would be no problem. We had visions of advertising a position, interviewing candidates, and choosing the best. Not to be. While puzzled at first by our inability to find good, hard working, knowledgeable help, we bit by bit realized, after talking with the various farmers around us, some of them from families involved in farming here for generations, that this was actually one of their greatest challenges.

It seemed to be the consensus of our farmer neighbors that virtually no one these days in Columbia County is interested in farm work. And no wonder, given the ever-increasing cost of living in the county. With current house and rental prices, we have to ask ourselves, who can afford to do farm work? And until recently, there was the attraction of higher paying jobs that don’t require working out in the elements. Even kids from former farm families, it seems, are not interested, probably, in part, because of their memories of the hardscrabble lives their parents endured. The American expectation of really cheap food together with the competition of large-scale industrial
agriculture has had the effect of grinding down and virtually wiping out a centuries old farming culture.

Stymied in our search for help, we limped by as best we could with a string of, for the most part, sadly unmotivated teenagers, halfheartedly doing piecework.  So we continued to look, putting in inquiries at the Ag Department at Cornell College and at SUNY Cobleskill across the river, offering internship positions, but we received no applicants.  We left job descriptions at the placement office at Bard with the same results. How on earth, we wondered, was everyone farming around us getting by? As the farm expanded, the burden on us, given our other responsibilities, was becoming more than we could manage.

From what we could see it was undocumented immigrants who seemed to be filling the farm labor void. But the draconian, ever-changing government rules about hiring such workers made us uneasy about going down that road. It was a good thing we had a good sense of humor, as for almost ten years, we have endured a dizzying array of ill-suited “helpers.”  Several were discovered after the fact to be on probation, two of them for acts of arson; one thought a hammer was the best way of dealing with weeds; another perversely reburied the kind of weeds that would easily regenerate as a way of ensuring more future work, and one could not work if it rained, snowed, was too cold, or if his mother didn’t drive him. Apparently the farm worker version of the sunshine patriot!

Finally, this past spring, only through a fluke, we happened on that rare commodity—a motivated, energetic, sincerely interested, reliable farm helper. But this was Kismet, pure and simple. In May, while taking our excess eggs to the Hudson Food Bank, I happened to mention our needs to Kathy, the director. And lo, and behold, Kathy led us to someone she happened to know, Darlene, who now works for us part time while holding down other jobs. We could, however, use one more person like her in the busy season. But, we wonder, will fate strike again?

But farm help is not the only obstacle we and other farmers face. It would appear that in the past few decades almost the entire county farm infrastructure has withered away, to the point that it cannot be taken for granted that, when needed, there will be a place to take poultry and animals to slaughter. Regional slaughter facilities are few and far between, and those that are left are frequently booked solid.

Though we’ve finally found some reasonable local choices, in some cases you practically have to book a slot the moment the animal is born. Before we found our current arrangements, we found ourselves driving our turkeys, ducks, and geese to a processing plant near Oneonta, about a 3 hour drive. And we had been forced to move to that one because the one we were using that was closer to home seemed to have ever-diminishing hygiene and undependable machinery. Once animals are slaughtered, getting satisfactory butchering done is also a constant challenge. And then there was the mysterious disappearance of a quarter of one of our 1200 pound beef cattle at a newly opened slaughterhouse up north. The slaughterhouse claimed to have put all of our beef on the truck; the trucker swore not. Apparently, as the nursery rhyme goes, part of our cow jumped over the moon.  Complaints from other farmers, who feel they are not getting back their entire animals from the slaughter houses, or are getting back someone else’s inferior meat, seem endemic.

The lack of slaughter facilities mirrors the problems orchard owners face.  Those of us in animal husbandry have to deal with the high costs, difficulties, and delays in processing our animals. apple growers are prevented from fully profiting from their harvest because there are no longer local cider mills to process their second grade apples.

Even getting a full range of animal feeds, whether it be grains or hay, cannot be taken for granted, particularly if you are looking for the organic version. The Germantown Farmer’s Cooperative bottomed out and closed during our second year. As an indicator of the times, Agway, once a farmer’s cooperative, has now been pretty well reduced to a pet food and garden store. It no longer seems that attuned to farming needs.  But all is not lost—at least, not for those who willing to struggle.  Through constant searching, we have managed to cobble together sources for grain and hay, but it has been a long slog. In some cases, it takes a two hour round trip drive to get the grains we need.

The lesson we’ve learned at Turkana Farms is that farms cannot exist as islands. It will take more than just setting aside and preserving farm land to bring sustainable agriculture back to Columbia County. The farm infrastructure must be rebuilt, something that cannot be achieved by farmers themselves. To do this would require the leadership and resources of our government.. But, we wonder, are the various levels of our government really focused on the needs of the small family farm?  —Peter Davies

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 01/25/10 at 12:31 PM • Permalink