AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: As Mark and I have learned more and more about what livestock require to flourish and (awful though it may sound) taste good, we have become increasingly aware that it is not simply what animals are fed, but also what they do that makes the difference in flavor and texture. So we have been working on various ways to get our critters to exercise more, and we are anticipating some very good results. Only time will tell. We learned some time ago that, despite their reputation, turkeys are actually quite teachable. So we have worked up around a hundred small treadmills in the hayloft and rigged them up with a corn dispenser that drops corn kernels just ahead of the turkeys’ next step on the mill. Carl, one of our part time farm helpers, is quite mechanically adept and figured it all out. Mark and I then spent many hours and a lot of patience training the turkeys to get onto the treadmill, and the corn did the rest. Although, I must admit, turkeys do have a short attention span, something that sorely tried our patience. Mark had to be restrained from shouting at them several times. The Spanish Blacks, we noticed, seem to be faster learners than the Narragansetts. And the Bourbon Reds the real dumbos of the flock. Once we had a hundred or so turkeys doing a special kind of Turkey trot (and enjoying it apparently from the googley noises they were making ), we determined this was just too much energy to let go to waste, so we had Carl hook the treadmills to a generator, and now our barn water pump and electricity are turkey powered. We at Turkana Farms are beginning to feel technologically quite avant garde. But the downside is that it only works during daylight hours since turkeys go to bed, as they say, with the chickens. Anyway this turkey power is turning out to be a real energy bonanza. And I think we are anticipating very tasty turkeys for Thanksgiving.
Getting our lambs to run and exercise more was our next big objective. We knew we could get them to run if we really scared them by shouting loudly, or waving a big piece of fabric, or shooting off a gun, but decided such an approach was not really humane. We also feared that this kind of stress might spoil their flavor. So instead we put our heads together and designed a kind of running maze on the model of a teeny weeny golf course: with curvy tracks, little up and down hills, hurdles to jump, streams to leap and turnstiles to go through, the picturesque route punctuated with little grain dispensers, which, of course function as the bait that drives them on. The sight of twenty- some little black lambs frisking through our track running, jumping, and leaping is, indeed, a wonderful sight to behold. We are beginning to wonder if it might attract paying spectators. The other day, as we saw the turnstile spinning wildly during one of their runs it occurred to us (actually me) that we have yet one more possible source of free electricity, this time for our electric fencing. While it is comforting to feel that we are saving on energy, we really can’t wait to taste the lamb. As we turned to dealing with our rather shiftless beef cows we were a bit stymied. After all if I weighed between 800 and 1800 pounds I probably wouldn’t want to move around much either. But we could not see excluding them from our new farm regimen. After all, what would their beef taste like? If it were a choice between just plain grass fed beef and really buffed grass fed beef wouldn’t our customers choose the latter? So I did some thinking and I remembered something from my childhood that made a light bulb go on: Hey diddle diddle, The cat on a fiddle The cow jumped over the Moon…
Yes that was it…”jumping”. I put that thought together with my knowledge of the cows’ passion for apples. And so we set to work erecting a series of hurdles the length of the back pasture, like they do in track meets, and Carl invented a device that dropped apples on the opposite side of the hurdle as the cows approached, whereupon they jumped over the hurdle, triggering an apple drop on the opposite side of the next hurdle, and then the next, and the next, and so on, and so on-- all the way across the pasture. And back again. I thought that was enough for one session, not wanting to bring on heart attacks It was exhilarating, to say the least, watching at least five thousand pounds of beef flying through the air. Mark speculated that with the muscle tone they were going to get we could probably label our product “Kobe beef”. With the turkeys trotting away on their treadmills in the hay loft, the lambs frisking madly around their miniature track, and the cows leaping hurdles the length of the pasture, you probably think we have enough going on at Turkana Farms. But given our success thus far, we felt ready to tackle what we fully realized was our most insurmountable problem—how to get our pigs to exercise. As they apparently see it, if there is food, water, hay, and fresh bedding straw at hand “Why bother?”
Carol Clement of Heather Ridge Farms, across the river, shared with us her method for getting pigs to roll over—she tickles and rubs their bellies. Using this technique, we thought we could maybe get them to do a few body rolls and maybe even a somersault but no matter how much we tickled and rubbed their bellies they just lolled back and squirmed and squealed with delight. What, I pondered, would pigs move heaven and earth to get to? And then it came to me: a “mud wallow”! On a warm, sunny day there is nothing they want to get to more. So between their pig pen and the wallow we had Carl build a step ladder with very big steps leading to a platform at the top and a steep slide leading down to the wallow. The slide, as we set it up, is the only way the pigs can get to down their wallow. Sure enough on the first warm day, Jane and Eyre, our two sows, Vernon, the boar, and Monroe and Marilyn our two piglets began to ascend the steep steps, laboring and lumbering all the way. As they paused and sniffed the air with their upturned snouts, poised to make their maiden slides, we stood close by, near the bottom of the slide, cheering as they made their descent.. Whoops! Merde! Apparently we were too close! After we had showered and changed our clothes, we met to review our mistakes: for one, not standing too close to the wallow next time, and, for Mark, remembering to keep his mouth closed. While the experiment was a little hard on our farm wardrobe, the pigs have really warmed to the idea. And like little kids at a playground slide, they can’t get enough of climbing to the top of the steps, and whizzing to the bottom. Chalk up another success—fully exercised pork—for Turkana Farms! Mark has become so excited by these triumphs that he has come up with the idea of bringing up his Pilates teacher, Anthony Phillips, from the City to devise posture-appropriate regimens for our geese and ducks. But my advice to him so far has been to: “Save it for APRIL FOOL’S day." For the complete archive of past AgriCulture blogs, click here.
