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 DaviesNote: 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.
