[Kristin]

Matthew-

I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with the comment about marketing in northern new york. Our members are a big ecclectic mix of professionals, retirees, blue collar workers, and lots of young families. We’ve had a waiting list for a year and a half. In our experience, the market is out there now. And there is more land than qualified farmers in our part of the world; there are even people willing to have you farm their land for free. We leased our place for free, including buildings and equipment, for four years before buying part of it. The landowner got ag property tax exemption, stopped having to pay someone to hay it for him, and we increased the value of it for him by being here and working it. It was a good deal for everyone.

I think you have to be creative when looking for a place to start out on. It’s not a matter of just scanning the real estate listings, unless you have a big fat trust fund, in which case you should ignore everything I’m saying. Stay away from debt, even in the form of a mortgage, until you gain experience and know what you truly love. That’ll sharpen the focus of your search and set your budget. Does size matter? Of course, but only to a certain extent. We have a friend who is building a farming business in Vermont with no land at all, borrowing barn space and pasture for his two milk cows, raising chickens and baking bread in his friend’s parents’ back yard. He’s saving money, and meanwhile he’s gaining skills and experience, seeing all sorts of farms and farmers, figuring out who/what to market (to), and building important relationships and friendships. He’s living rent free and pocketing all his farmer’s market profit to buy the right piece of land when it comes along. I thought that seemed a pretty smart way to go about it.

all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

Lisa –
thanks for this info. I’m ordering the grazing booklet and will post about it when it arrives.
all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

Nice to hear from someone else in our neighborhood. Come down and see us when you have time. We’re in Essex, not far from you.
all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

We are experimenting with stockpiled forage this year for our beef herd. I think we’ve reached our limit now. We got six or eight inches of snow this week and they are not pawing through it very well. It might be because we’re at the end of a rotation and the forage is not worth the energy it takes to get to it. They’re starting to eat brush and for the first time they look a little hungry. We considered rotating them onto our last stockpiled pasture, which has a lot of fescue, but decided with cold weather expected this week we ought not to push it. So we are loading up the wagon for the first time today to take them some hay. It’s the second week in February and we’re in northern New York. Last year we started feeding hay in November and I figure we’ve saved roughly $4000 in hay plus a lot of labor, but we’ll have to see how the calves look in the spring before we decide to do this again. Would love to hear from others who are stockpiling winter forage since we’re new to it.
all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

Thanks, Plowboy and Jean. If anyone from our area (NY) is going out to Mt. Hope in March with a trailer and might be interested in hauling a team back, would you let me know? Jean, we are already on the list for the GMDHA auction but thanks for your offer. We’ve been lucky on equipment at that one.
best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

I’ve finally posted some pictues of Jet and other beasts under ‘other farm animals’ and ‘working horses.’
all best,
Kristin

@Biological Woodsman 524 wrote:

Hey Kristin,

Would you post a photo of your dog on the other farm animals spot in the photo gallery. We would enjoy seeing a farm animal other than our draft working stock.

Yep equipment is always the bottleneck for all of us trying to live gently from the land in an economy that is about casual consumption of everything.

Plowboy is in New York State.

[Kristin]

Thanks for the ammo, Maryrose. 🙂 Rod, we are in NY and they cattle are not black but they are very furry (scottish highland cattle) and so the worst season for them is spring, when we’re into hot weather but they haven’t fully shedded out yet. I like the idea of a shade paddock. We have woods adjoining most of our pastures. But as usual it’s a balancing act — can the farm afford the time in the busy spring to move animals two extra times per day? Or can you simply fence the shade paddock into your rotation and let the animals come and go at will?
all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

Great thread! Here’s a question. We have an ongoing “discussion” at our house about shade in summer for the grazing animals, especially the beef herd. Obviously they want it. Do they need it? What’s healthiest for them, and for the pasture? There’s the issue of concentration of manure in shady areas, and I know Salatin solved that one by building his shade-mobile, but our herd is too big for that. What do you all do?
-Kristin

[Kristin]

It’s a tiny minority that asks these questions. I figure 98% of people are just quietly dissatisfied in their work, and never even imagine that they can make a change. Ironically, I never knew what security felt like until I left the city. There was something shockingly simple, and profoundly comforting, about realizing that as long as we were growing our own food we’d never be hungry, and as long as we could cut wood we’d never have to be cold. I’m OK with the fact that I’ll probably never have a new car or a house that looks the way I’d like it to or a pile of money to blow on clothes. I like clothes, but not enough to work forty hours a week for them at a job I am not crazy about. Luckily, I’m married to a person who would find a way to be happy living on a park bench, so we’re not pulling in opposite directions. Will we have enough cash to send our baby girl to college in eighteen years? I don’t know. I hope that if she wants to go to college she’ll be talented and resourceful enough to find a way to do it. And I hope that we can make up for what we won’t be able to give her in material things with the things we can give her, including a farm-centered childhood with happy parents who really love the work they do every day. Hope that doesn’t sound self-righteous. I know everyone has different priorities, responsibilities, debts, and resources. I just feel awfully lucky that I get to do what I love at a relatively young age and wish the same for others.

[Kristin]

Such great responses here. I especially enjoyed the various opinions on bits. It’s interesting to note that the runaway that caused my broken hand happened on a day when the team was tired, and so I’d put the lines on the curb position on our slower horse instead of one notch down. I was spreading manure, the slow horse spooked and without the leverage (and because the spreader has an awful seat with nothing to brace against) I couldn’t stop him and the situation got out of hand very fast. The lesson was that the slow horse was also the more reactive, less trustworthy horse. I shouldn’t have moved the lines up on him while doing something as potentially freaky as spreading. Our other team has never shown an inclination to run. They go on mild jointed snaffles and freaky things tend to make them stop instead of go, which is a much nicer option. At the Tunbridge event Lynn Miller said something like ‘I don’t want to know that I trust my horses, I want to trust that I know my horses.’ I have thought about that a lot since then.

all best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

Carl, I like your ‘go big’ idea. So much good stuff happens when you get all these people who do the same weird thing in one place. I have always thought horse powered farmers were the fringe of the fringe, but lo and behold, here are all these people wanting to learn about it!

On the subject of workshops generally, it seems they’re most useful if they either A) serve as an introduction for raw beginners or B) cover limited, specialized topics for those with more experience. I think farmers (who are generally short on time and money) want to know they’re going to acquire some real skills for their investment in a workshop. They want to come home knowing how to do some useful new thing. I know I’m stumped at the idea of starting a green horse, and that’s a skill I’d like to work on, so Donn, if you do that workshop, I am so there.

Regarding price, I just got the flyer for this year’s workshops from Fairwinds Farm, and I liked that on the price sheet they wrote something like ‘we don’t want cost to be a limiting factor’ for people wanting to take the workshop, so talk to us if you want to make special arrangements. That’s similar to our policy at our CSA. We ask a pretty hefty price but we have a sliding scale for lower income members, so we don’t have to exclude anyone. It works pretty well for us.

-Kristin

[Kristin]

@Plowboy 580 wrote:

Kristin we are in Central New York about half way between Binghamton and Albany… I would like to know where the breeders are though. I tried to locate them on the Internet but there aren’t too many around. …

Hi Plowboy –
When the time is right here’s a breeder to look into. I think this is your neck of the woods. I would love to have one of her pups and I plan to, soon as I can convince Mark that we actually *need* another dog around here. It is a war of attrition and I shall hold out.

best,
Kristin

http://www.farmcollie.com/Dogs/torenssuzy.htm

[Kristin]

@Donn Hewes 545 wrote:

Hi DAPPERS, Kristin It is “our” Intro to farming with Horses Workshop!

But YOU did all the work!!
-Kristin

[Kristin]

Can any of the grazing experts here comment on stockpiled forage? We have a herd of 50 grade Scottish Highland cattle, and after learning a little about this method, we decided to try it this year. I was highly skeptical, but I have to say I’m a convert. Last year I believe we started feeding hay to the beef herd in November. It’s the end of January now, and we haven’t fed out a single bale yet, and the animals are in excellent condition – at least as good as this time last year. So we’ve been thumping our foreheads as to why we didn’t do this earlier. We have a few things going for us, like a lot of land for the number of animals we raise, plus a hardy breed, and all the cows are bred to calve in late spring, so they’re not in heavy lactation right now. Also it would be a different story if we had four feet of snow on the ground. Still, I’m kind of amazed at the amount of money and labor we’ve saved.

We’ve always hired out haymaking, so it’s been done mostly with tractors until now, with about 8,000 bales a year going into the mows. We have done some of the mowing and raking with our teams, and would love to eventually convert entirely to horse power and also improve the quality of the hay. Loose hay is a dearly held dream, if we can make it work. Feeding out less hay makes it seem more feasible.

I’d love to hear if others are stockpiling forage, or from anyone with expertise in this area, since as usual we’ve jumped into it without too much knowledge and are learning by the seat of our Carhartts.

All best,
Kristin

[Kristin]

@goodcompanion 308 wrote:

There is a lot of energy centered around better grazing (thanks in part to the vital work of Lisa McCrory and others!) and also plenty of labor-intensive vegetable operations, but what about the intermediate scale crops? Particularly grains and roots–the real staff of life foods.

A few thoughts. We’ve been slow ramping up grain production for human consumption on our farm because the tools required are complex. To get from wheat to flour you need either specialized machinery or a heck of a lot of labor. (We are lucky to have a neighbor who is willing to combine small amounts of wheat for us.) We’d love to provide our members with rolled oats, but again we have been stumped by the machinery. Corn, though, has been a hit. We grew a quarter acre of Mandan Bride this year, and harvested it by hand. We run it through a hand-cranked antique sheller that someone loaned us, and grind it fresh every week in an electric mill. We can provide corn meal for 75 people this way without ridiculous amounts of labor. The members are crazy about it and I love the nutty taste of it so much that I think I’ve eaten johnnycake every day for the last two weeks.

On the marketing side of things, I think staple crops are underrepresented because they tend to be less visible to the consumer, and so there is less demand. Vegetables are the sexiest-looking things, and people associate them with healthy eating and organics, so they get all the attention, even though they provide only a tiny percentage of the calories for most people. I do think that will change.

Roots were less intimidating than grains for us and we’ve ramped up production over the last four years. We now have a horse-drawn potato planter, hiller and harvester in operation. We brought in six tons of potatoes this year. We also had record beet and carrot crops, and are feeding excess to the dairy herd and to the horses. This coming season we’re going to plant mangels for the first time.

all best,
Kristin

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