Farming

Food

AgriCulture: The Changing Face of Farming

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Peter writes: “Funny, they don’t look like farmers,” said one of the painters working on the barn across the street, clearly loud enough for me to hear, when we first moved in.

By Editor

Food

The Other Turkey: Not the Bird, the Country

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: We are back from Turkey. Well traveled and all-too-well fed, and pleased that the farm came through with only a few small disasters, and in very good order. We thank Beth

By Editor

Food

AgriCulture: a Vacation From or On the Farm?

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: We are eagerly anticipating our impending vacation.   It has been three years since we’ve been able to travel together for more than a 4-day weekend. With the anticipation comes no

By Editor

Food

9/11/09: Not Just Another Friday at the Farm

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: Those of you who have spent any social time with us undoubtedly know how large the date of September 11 looms in our life story. We've undoubtedly told you

By Editor

Food

Agri-Culture: From Hardship to Bounty and Back Again

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Peter writes: Are we approaching another food watershed?  Did I say, “Food watershed?”  Well, if there is such a thing, I think I have experienced a number of them. And it may be

By Editor

Food

AgriCulture: Still Pondering "The Omnivore's Delusion"

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: When my sister sent me Blake Hurst’s article from “The American” last week, I thought it was an obscure little piece that you all would be unlikely to know about.

By Editor

Food

The Omnivore's Delusion? Agri-Intellectuals? Excuse me?

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, New York. This week Mark writes: I'm fresh from reading “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals,” an article that seems to cry out for response.  It appeared in the July 30, 2009 edition of

By Editor

Food

Agri-Culture: Talking Turkey, The Last Word

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer, are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown. This week Peter writes: I am sure you have all been on pins and needles, awaiting the final chapter on turkeys. After almost four hundred years of domestication and selective breeding, by 1900, the turkey had changed

By Editor

Food

AgriCulture: Talking Turkey, Part I

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer, are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown. This week Peter writes: At the risk of sounding like those obnoxious retailers who begin with Christmas promotions before Halloween, I’d like to talk about turkeys. This is largely prompted by our having begun letting our

By Editor

Food

AgriCulture & Academia

Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown. This week Mark writes: Peter and I are both refugees from the academic world (he actually taught -- I determined midway through graduate school that teaching, and the academic world, were not for me) so between us

By Editor

Food

Of Samba-ing Sows, an Utter Boar, and Duck, Duck, Goose

Carmen, still waiting, with Vernon, the utter boar. Cigars are in order!   At last, Miranda, one of our Tamworth/Ossabaw sows, has farrowed (‘given birth’ in pig farm lingo).  Good thing too, as she looked ready to explode. The large size of the piglets suggests that she was late.  She

By Editor

Food

Farming: The 60% Solution

Here Mark Scherzer of Turkana Farms laments never being able to get more than 60% of the farm chores done.  Yet the photographs he and Peter Davies sent of Turkana as it appears right now belies his claim that  a high degree of chaos (40% to be precise) prevails.  Makes

By Editor