I moved pigs this morning from their training paddock—where a second fence contains any pig that goes through the electric fence—to the open pasture. From now until they go to processing, they'll get moved to a fresh paddock every 2-3 days. The pasture in the photo was last year's open-pollinated cornfield. The strips are different cover crop mixes broadcast into standing corn last summer (the darker strips) or frost seeded over stalks in late winter (the lighter strips with more oats). I left half an acre of corn standing. More than two thirds of my Reid's Yellow Dent was still upright after its first birthday. I wanted to turn the pigs out into cover cropped corn and let them knock down the stalks themselves, but weather delayed me so many times that I had to mow the cover crop, and thus the stalks, before things grew out of hand. As they graze and root in the paddock, the pigs squeal and grunt every time they find an ear of corn under the clover. They still have access to ground feed, but they are eating less right now, so the corn on the ground is making up for some of that.  Encouraging pigs to forage and rewarding them with something to find makes happy pigs (and tastier pork).

    The fenders on Dad’s 3020 Utility have concave tops, perfect seats for riding. When I saw another 3020 Utility up close recently (they’re rare), I realized that the fenders are supposed to be flat. I don’t know if all the riding that my brother and I did on that tractor dished the fender tops, but I spent hours of my childhood there.

   Going with Dad was a treat –riding on a tractor in the field or riding with him in the truck doing errands. I watched, tried to absorb, and yearned to be old enough to do real work someday. Those “grown-up” moments came incrementally: raking hay at age eight, shuttling wagons by nine, actually running the baler by ten. Despite occasional adult responsibilities on a tractor, I was still a grade-schooler.  When I rode with Dad and we ran into neighbors or stopped by the dealership for parts, someone would usually and ask me, “Are you helpin’ Dad today?” in that mildly patronizing tone.  Heart-attack serious in my John Deere cap snapped down to the last hole, I  answered with an annoyed, “Yeah.”

    By age fourteen, I was old enough to work full time in the summer, and work ruled the day. Truck trips with Dad were to the field to get me “lined out” on a piece of machinery before he drove away to work elsewhere. Hay baling—stacking wire-tied, 80-lb squares at blitzkrieg pace on a rack wagons pulled behind the baler—remained our family’s team sport. Dad was in his 50’s but could still crush men half his age on the rack wagon. As we grew strong enough, my brother and I became his primary rack riders (we sometimes fought over who got to stack —driving the tractor was less-esteemed than an earned place on the rack). A good rack team makes sure the paid-by-the-hour barn crew never waits for a loaded wagon.  At sixteen, I finally developed the finesse and endurance to ride the rack with dad all day—a record-breaking, twenty-load day (avg 80lbs/bale x avg 90 bales/load x 20 loads = 72 TONS of hay. 36 tons stacked by each rider). I felt like I’d crossed the first threshold into manhood.

    After graduating college and becoming a Marine officer, I only came home only once or twice a year.  I’d ride along with Dad in the truck to catch up and see what had changed, no longer constrained by the puritan guilt that both of us should be working –coming to the farm was my vacation.  I still jumped in when there was work to do. I noticed that whether fixing tile or fixing fence, we didn’t talk much about the work because we didn’t have to; he trained me, but we also approach things similarly. Something else had changed as well. We worked side by side as men. Though ever the student, I’d reached the point where I occasionally had something to teach him.

    Looking back, most of the time I spent with Dad while growing up came through work. He taught me not just how to drive a tractor but how to finesse a machine, to improvise on the fly, to think about efficiency, and to consider the long-term impacts of what we do—qualities that served me well from farm field to battlefield and back.

    Almost ten years ago, I was home for fall harvest, the first time since college. When the combine broke down, I went to the dealership with Dad for parts. A woman, whom I didn’t know, looked at dad and asked, “Jack, is that your younger son?”  She leveled her palm to the height of her desk, “Why, I haven’t seen him since he was this high.” 

   She looked at me, “Are ya helping dad today?” in a tone that gave me flashbacks to age seven. 

   Did she really just say that, I thought. I’d recently finished my second tour in Iraq, capping off  a ten-year career as a Marine infantry officer. I’d just spent the last three days running and wrenching machines from early morning until ten at night. Across two and a half decades, the same seriousness and pride welled up. 

I smiled.  “Yeah, I am.”

Happy Father’s Day

In the past week, I’ve had a few completely new customers order a whole or half hog for the fall.  

If I add those new customers and deposits to the returning customers who said they will order another whole or half hog for the fall of 2017, then I need to order a couple more feeder pigs to meet the demand.  I don’t want to leave anyone hanging.

Many of you have sent deposits to me already. Thank you.

If you intend to order a whole or half hog for the fall, please send your deposit soon so we have an accurate count and I will source more feeder pigs if needed.

For more details, see: Ordering a Whole or Half

For our friends who order 25 lb boxes, please confirm how many boxes you will want (no deposit, of course) by emailing or texting me. These add up quickly as well.

Thank You Very Much for your support.

Ryan

    Planting two acres of corn with 1940’s planter and a BCS may look like an Ewok’s fart against the Death Star, but it’s my tiny strike back against the seed empire.

   I only plant open-pollinated (OP) corn. OP corn predates the hybrids that were first developed in the 1920’s. Hybrids are crossed several times to achieve certain traits of the parent plants. The first hybrid corn varieties gave much better yields, giving farmers more corn out of the same acreage. The uniform stands were also easier to harvest mechanically. Hybrids’ yield and uniformity soon made OP corn an anachronism.

    Hybrid plants won’t produce seed true to the plant. Try replanting hybrid seed and you get a throwback to one of the many parents. Hybrid corn made farmers seed consumers instead of savers or producers. Today, farmers pay several hundred dollars for a fifty pound bag of seed that contains the intellectual property of some global corporation. Many small farmers are going back to OP corn as a way of opting out of the seed company racket.

  OP corn varieties produce seed true to the plant—the seed you harvest is identical to the one you planted. With OP corn, farmers can select and save seed from the best ears and stalks for the following year. Over time, individual farmers can develop strains of OP corn varieties that are adapted to their specific climate and farm. This is what every farmer who grew corn used to do.  There are other reasons to grow OP corn.

   OP corn varieties have higher nutritional value than hybrids. When I’ve dumped equal piles of organic yellow corn and OP corn to hogs, they prefer the OP corn. OP corn gives me the feed quality I want for my hogs and give me the freedom to replant my own selected seed very year. In my limited personal experience, OP corn also tastes better when ground for cornmeal.

   The challenge to keeping corn pure (GMO-free) is that corn pollen can travel for miles. To prevent GMO contamination, organic (or GMO-free) farmers must plant much later than their neighbors so that the genetically modified corn has finished shedding pollen by the time the organic corn tassels.* Taking these precautions puts the organic farmer at a disadvantage. I’m planting two weeks after I would have liked to. That will change.  

I just planted a quarter-acre of OP corn that has the PuraMaize gene. PuraMaize is the industry name for a pollen-blocking trait from popcorn called gametophyte factor. Next year, I should  have enough seed that I can plant my OP corn when the conditions are best and I don’t have to worry about cross-contamination.

The name of the OP corn variety with PuraMaize?         

                                                                                                             Rebellion.




*Not everyone takes these precautions. The owner of a popular pastured-pork brand once told me, “We plant non-GMO [seed].  I can’t guarantee that the feed is non-GMO. You know how it is."

    “Do you think you could teach a class that relates The Odyssey to the modern veteran’s experience?” Our friend Evelyn, a high school English teacher, asked me three years ago.

    “Sure,” I said. I re-read The Odyssey and realized that I didn’t identify at all with Odysseus. He doesn’t seem motivated enough to get home, he doesn’t delegate anything or trust anyone, and he eventually gets all of his men killed. Still, several aspects of his journey still resonated with me, and I discussed the parallels I found with Evelyn’s English class in May 2014.
 
    It must have been ok, because I taught the class again last week. Between teaching those two classes, I started Odyssey Farm, which has given me another perspective on the journey.   I’ll spare you the class outline for now because the most interesting learning point—for the students and for me— came from the students’ questions:
 
    “How did you work through your struggles after returning home from the war?”
 
    First of all, the assumptions behind these kinds of questions annoy me. Several times over the years that I did presentations for the Farmer Veteran Coalition, I had strangers who didn’t know my military background tell me, “you need to heal,” or something to that effect. They meant well, but the general assumption I hear in that statement is: Veteran = Broken.
 
    “I didn’t have any PTSD or nightmares,” I explained. I stayed in touch with fellow Marines up and down the chain of command. I made new civilian friends when we moved back to Seattle. I got into woodworking and ultra-running. Sarah and I biked, backpacked, and kayaked throughout the Pacific Northwest. I came home to a great network of family and friends. I was happy as hell to be starting a new chapter in my life.
 
    “So what do you mean by ‘struggles’?” I asked the class.
 
   One young man in the front row clarified their question: “Did you have trouble making the psychological transition from combat back to civilian life?
 
    I explained that after leading a rifle company in Iraq, nothing I did felt as challenging, interesting, and important enough to throw myself into as a vocation. My ultra-running was a great challenge but it only served me. Woodworking served me and a few others at best.
 
    I started thinking out loud. “The real struggle was that I had to find new struggles.” Now they were drawn in. Or maybe I just confused them with the mental hairball that I’d coughed up. “I mean, I need to struggle,” I said.

    I explained to the students that Odyssey Farm is thirty-two acres and that I do most of my work with a walk-behind tractor or by hand —such as hand-picking corn. (Another teacher, whose husband had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the National Guard, laughed out loud, “Oh, you are a Marine.” Compliment taken.)

    After combat’s life and death decisions and counterinsurgency’s complexity, nothing else has satisfied my need for combined physical and intellectual challenge and a sense of purpose as raising food in partnership with nature to feed my family and my community. I enjoy the challenge and the process of farming this way.
 
    My answer about taking on farming as my new struggle inadvertently reinforced some of the parallels I’d already drawn to The Odyssey:
 
—Transition is harder than it first appears: Odysseus’ ships are within sight of Ithaca when his men open the bag of winds which blows them all the way back to Aeolia. I integrated very easily back into civilian life but struggled to find a calling that felt equal to my challenges and rewards of leading Marines. And I’m just beginning to go down this new path.
—The need for a mission: Odysseus turns several events of his return trip into battles. I don’t go around picking fights, but I do understand the desire to take on a “mission” —some larger purpose that engages me fully.
—Arrival is a temporary state: Odysseus finally makes it home only to leave again. Every time I accomplish something that I’ve been working toward, it becomes a stepping-stone to the next thing I need to learn or want to do.
 
    “I think we all need to struggle in our pursuits,” I told the class.
 
    I’ve since learned that my gut response about struggle is backed up by the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. According to Csikszentmihalyi, we achieve our greatest satisfaction when we engage in something that perfectly matches a high level of challenge to our own high skill levels. He called that perfect match of challenge and skill Flow, what we often think of as being “in the zone”.
 
    Selected struggle isn’t just for wacky-former-Marine-infantry-officers-turned-horseless-Amish-farmers (or the ancient Greeks). We find our best selves in that sweet spot where bringing all of our knowledge and skills is just enough to meet the challenge.

     The best cornbread I’ve made begins a few steps prior to most recipes. I start by shelling corn.* I’ve grown Hickory King, Reids Yellow Dent, and a few others in my quest for good cornmeal (and when it’s not the best cornmeal, it’s still great hog feed). Gene Logsdon wrote that some people found their favorite cornmeal came from popcorn. I only grow open-pollinated corn, old varieties from which you can save the seed and replant (if you plant hybrids, you have to buy seed every year from seed companies).

    Since I can’t get much separation on 15 tillable acres, I had some cross pollination between our Pennsylvania Dutch Popcorn and our Reids Yellow Dent corn. The kernels are popcorn-shaped, a mix of white and yellow throughout the ear. It doesn't pop well, so I shelled and ground some yesterday and made cornbread. It's excellent. The cornmeal has a much stronger flavor and aroma than most cornmeal I’ve tried.

   I often fall down the rabbit-hole of small-scale, labor-intense production, but the discoveries are worth it at times—the eating down here is wonderful.

    I use a King Arthur Flour recipe for cornbread.


    I’ll have some cornmeal for sale at the Madison chapter’s Weston A Price Foundation meeting tomorrow night in Monona. Details Here.

--Video of the hand-cranked sheller in action.

*Actually, I start by building soil with cover crops before I even prepare ground for planting. That may seem like a long reach back, but the point is to raise animals and crops with the best flavor. As mentioned in the Underground Secrets of Nutrition post, flavor begins with soil.

    “You are what you eat eats.” In six words, Michael Pollan nailed a profound truth about health and nutrition. We eat plants. We eat meat from animals that eat plants. Healthy plants are key to our own health. What makes for a healthy plant? In, The Third Plate, Dan Brown explains how the best tasting and the healthiest food comes from the richest, biologically dynamic soil. Here’s my quick takeaway from Part I, Soil:

    In 1942, a time when people’s food still came from close to home, Dr. William Albrecht, a scientist at the University of Missouri, studied the state's military draft rejection rates. Albrecht created a map of recruit rejections for ill health. The highest rejection rates came from the state’s diluted soils of the southeast while the mineral-rich soils of northwest Missouri produced much healthier men. 
    Albrecht understood that soil microbes “dined at the first table,” and that soil lacking minerals could not grow healthy plants. He warned that the nation’s declining soil fertility would lead to a health crisis.

Fast forward sixty years. Not long after chef/author Dan Brown sets up Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant connected to its own farm, his farm manager tests the Brix of two carrots. Brix measures the percentage of sugar in plant matter. One carrot comes from rich soil that had been a dairy pasture for decades. The other carrot is from an organic farm in Mexico. While the sugar percentage, not surprisingly, correlates to taste, it also indicates mineralization in the soil and the biological activity to make those minerals available to plants. The carrot from the former dairy pasture measured 16.9 Brix, meaning 16.9% sugar, an amazingly  high number. Brown explains that a good, sweet carrot might have a Brix of 12. He describes the 16.9 carrot as “astonishingly delicious.”
    The organic carrot from Mexico? Zero, as in a reading of 0.0 Brix. It’s organic, but in the industrial sense—raised in a monoculture where the farmers are adding inputs (though organic ones) instead of building the soil.
    Several studies over the years point to the same loss in vegetable nutrition that Albrecht predicted and that Dan Brown’s farm manager measured between carrots.
   Albrecht noticed in the 1930’s that cattle could get a balanced diet by grazing pastures grown on well-mineralized soils. However, when cattle were confined to a barn and fed grain, their bodies tried to compensate for the lack of micronutrients by overeating. They got fat, but not necessarily healthy.
  John Ikerd, a professor emeritus also from the University of Missouri, connects Albrecht’s findings to the contemporary American diet based on cheap, processed grains, and the obesity epidemic: “The lack of a few essential nutrients in our diets might leave us feeling hungry even though we have consumed far more calories than is consistent with good health.”

    So what can you do? Buy local vegetables when you can. (I know, this is Wisconsin, that’s not easy for much of the year). Buy them from a farmer you trust. Our mouths may tell us as much about our food as any laboratory test. Really tasty, fresh vegetables are likely to be more nutritious.

    What’s this mean for me? I need to stay focused on building soil fertility with diverse cover crops and less tillage that destroys soil life. I need to grow even more of my own feed for the pigs. Healthy soil=healthy pastures and crops=healthy pigs. Soil building is my obligation to the land, to the animals on the land, and to you, the consumer.

    Some foods come with a regional pedigree and an experience that can’t be replicated elsewhere. Hofbrau Dunkel beer tasted the best best when I was drinking it with two thousand raucous Germans at a beer garden in Munich. I’ve gone out for Middle Eastern food several times since returning from Iraq, but restaurant hobus (flatbread) has never had the mildly crisp outside, doughy interior, and slight smokiness of the bread that Iraqi women handed to us straight from their outdoor mud ovens.

    Sarah and I eat out to experience flavors that we can’t create at home, but our home cooking is the gateway to flavors--and a satisfaction—that no chef can give us.  Sarah made carbonara last week with guanciale that she cured, bacon that I smoked myself, and eggs—with sunset-colored yolks—so fresh they were still warm from the nest box. Food historians debate the origins of  carbonara, but I think the intent behind the dish was a quick-to-make meal with ingredients commonly available to Italians at the time—fresh eggs and cured pork. You can debate the authenticity of carbonara made in a Wisconsin farm kitchen, but I think ours is truer to the dish’s intent (and tastier) than one we could order in a local Italian restaurant anyway.

    It’s the same with cassoulet. The French can’t agree on what makes a proper cassoulet. Julia Child says as much in Mastering The Art of French Cooking: “The composition of cassoulet is, in typical French fashion, the subject of infinite dispute… arguments about what should go into this famous dish seem based on local traditions.”

  Restaurant cassoulet might be tasty, but it won’t be true in the spirit of the dish. In The Third Plate, chef Dan Barber admits that even farm-to-table restaurants like his are guilty of “cherry picking ingredients”.   Cassoulet was a peasant dish, a one-pot meal. Having grown up around more than a few frugal farm cooks, I think the real tradition behind cassoulet was about the cook making a good meal by making do.

    Making a cassoulet with beans and whatever meat you have on hand can give you a delicious meal, truer to the dish's origins than any restaurant version.

    Sarah’s version uses three kinds of pork because that’s what we had in our kitchen freezer. The recipe is a guideline, not a rule.

Sarah’s Cassoulet (AKA clean-out-the-refrigerator)

• 4-5 slices of bacon, cut into bite sized pieces – large bites
• 1 pound pork butt, cut into ¾ inch cubes
• ¾ pound Italian sausage (You could also use any leftover poultry meat still on the bone -chicken/turkey/duck leg or thigh. You would only need one or two pieces. Buying specific cuts for cassoulet misses the point.)
  
• ½ pound of dry great northern beans (navy beans). Soak them overnight. Then cook them until just tender). Canned would work too. Likely 4 cans, drained and rinsed.
• Garlic  (I had about 8 cloves of roasted garlic, raw and chopped would work as well -just use a bit less)
  
• 2 Medium Onions, chopped
  
• ½ c red wine
• 2 bay leaves
• some dried thyme
• olive oil
• salt & pepper
• tomatoes (somewhere around 14 oz – mine were roasted from the garden last summer)

         In a large dutch oven:

• Cook the bacon, remove from the pan, keep the fat
• Cook the sausage. When the sausage is still slightly pink, add the pork butt, salt it, add pepper.  (I pushed the sausage to one side and cooked the pork butt in the middle of the pan).
• Brown pork butt on all sides
• Add the onions. Don’t drain the fat.
• Add the garlic, cook until golden
• Generously add ground pepper and salt
• Deglaze the pan with wine, scraping up the delicious browned bits from the bottom of the pan
• Add tomatoes with juice.
  
• Add the bay leaf and thyme
• Add the beans and some of their cooking liquid.
• Simmer until beans are completely tender.

    Julia Child recommends that you make cassoulet in stages as you have time. Like so many stews and bean dishes. this one is better when it's cook a day or two ahead of time and then reheated before serving. The flavors well meld over time.

    I’m about to read Dan Barber’s The Third Plate—Field Notes On The Future of Food. My wife, Sarah, enjoyed the book and gave me a partial report, enough that I’m looking forward to reading it and learning. The book gets great reviews for interweaving science, culture, agriculture, and food. A good story helps you see your world differently. When it comes to food and farming, that world is my backyard. I wonder if this is one of those books that changes my outlook on what I do, or a part of it. If so, will that cause me to change how I farm,  raise food, or eat?
    While delving into this stuff is plenty interesting as a solo expedition, I think it'd a lot more fun with a few other people. After a couple one-on-one exchange visits with other farmers and attending a book club last night, I though it might be fun to read a food/farming book in a book club.
    I don’t have the time to schedule/host/moderate a regular book club—especially this time of year, but I’m interested how many other people might be interested in reading The Third Plate during the next month. The book has 450 pages divided into four sections. Reading a section a week should be pretty easy even if your only reading for the day is at lunch (as it usually is for me).
    If you are interested in trying this, comment on this post, drop an email or hit me on the Odyssey Farm Facebook page. If there is enough interest, then we can figure out the rest from there. Though the internet has astounding reach, I’d enjoy gathering in person with any local readers in May for drinks and discussion.
Takers?