It is spring and at the expense of tipping off the Animal Nazi’s1 I thought I would take a minute and share with you some of latest arrivals around here.
Pigs
We are currently raising 6 piglets both for our own meat and for sale. These fellas are pasture and woodland raised and will be slaughtered in the late Autumn after we have a chance to sweeten them up with apples, nuts and garden gleenings.
Cattle
Eilish is our Scottish Highland Heifer. We are hoping she will be the foundation of our future meat stock. She is little more than a yearling now, so we will be breeding her sometime later this year for a spring birth in ‘08.
Torino is our Highland/Jersey steer. He is past a year old and we will raise him 24 or so months until he looks like some fine beef. We have eaten a close relative of his and he was delicious.
The latest addition to our herd is a lovely Kerry Cow whom should be in calf. Hopefully she will throw us a fine heifer this year. She’s a tad on the wild side at the moment and we are hoping to tame her enough to be our house dairy cow.
UPDATE: We decided the price was too high in terms of cost, time and effort to round up this heifer before she had her calf. The time we should have been spending taming her up to be a milk cow was wasted in trying to lure her close enough to catch her. The farm where this photo was taken had no squeeze, or loading pen or any other means of catching cattle in the remote pastures the Kerrys were in. As wild as she is, we made the right decision. C’est la vie.
Dogs
In addition to 
Rowan, we have added a male English Shepherd to our pack–Bailey:
They are both shaping up to be fine Farm & Stock dogs, helping us take care of the cattle, the pigs, the sheep and chickens around the place.
The whole point of this is that when I recommend sourcing local ingredients or suggest eating grass fed meats, or pastured poultry I am coming from the point not only of a chef and sustainability advocate, but as a farmer as well–I am practicing what I preach and willing to eat my words–every tasty one of them. . . .
Technorati Tags: farming, livestock, sustainability, pigs, cattle, kerry cow, english shepherd, nais, usda, animal id, podchef, gastrocast, farmsteading, smallholding
- NAIS, or National Animal Id System, is getting crazy. The more states fight it the harder the USDA and individual state departments of Ag press to indenture farmers to a rigorous system of stiff laws and penalties. My own state of WA is busy implementing such insane laws that it’s obvious no one has thought them through. [↩]
Noticed in a different blog your opposition to PETA. Your opposition is
understood after viewing your photos of Kerry Cow. Kerry is obviously
under fed. I don’t like PETA either, but PETA and I probably have something
I common. We both don’t like to see starving animals. I guess organic
farming is not produing enough hay to feed Kerry. All my animals have plenty
to eat. You are doing agriculture a disservice by posting the photos
of your animals on-line.
M, Thanks for dropping in and sharing. The Kerry is obviously underfed, although the photo barely shows that–her side foreflank looks more sunken than it is because her belly is so much bigger due to the calf. From that photo, it is a leap of the imagination to think that she is being maltreated in any way. That being said, she is from a wild herd, which barely accepts human contact. We actually didn’t end up purchasing her in the end. Too wild, and temperamental to be a milch cow.
All that aside. The text accompanying the photo says she is a new addition. . .We were buying her from a conventional farm whose pastures are heavily overgrazed and due to horrid, un-seasonal conditions on both sides of winter left most of the regions cattle looking gaunt. Our own pastures are lush, full and healthy. The photos of the two Highland cattle were both taken on the same day. Do they look malnourished? We use rotational grazing through many pastures to make sure our land is not overgrazed or overstocked–the Highlands are in a sacrificial paddock to keep the rest of the pastures nice during the winter. Neither do we have to apply artificial nitrogen, re-seed or otherwise over work our land. We also carefully manage our hay and grazing to maximize both and keep weight gain optimal under seasonal shortages. We do not have to buy feed to keep our cattle fed and they always have plenty to eat.
As for a disservice to agriculture–think that dig is a bit misplaced. I’ll take grass-fed animals, even if one is gaunt but hardly starving, any day over the shit covered, silage fed dairy cattle, or beef cattle up to their knees in muck, breathing feces in a feedlot. Yet both those practices are considered normal in 90% of agriculture. I don’t need to do a disservice to agriculture, normal, conventional, factory-farm practices do plenty of that for me.