Adventures in Farming: August 2008

Another skill I have been learning since moving to the farm is butchering of our livestock. While we take our full size hogs to a local USDA certified butcher to process I have been culling some of our pigs as sucklings and weaners, since we have more pork out in the field than we need if we allowed them all to go to market weight.

I previously butchered two of our piglets, in both cases by bringing them in from pasture to a small pen besides the barn before dispatching them. I only needed to carry the first one a couple hundred feet, from one side of the barn to the other, and since he only weighed 32 lbs this was not much of a problem. The second was after we had already moved them out onto the back pasture, and it was a tiring and humorous (after the fact) struggle to drag that 75 lbs pig up to the barn.

Since our pigs are significantly bigger now I needed a different plan. The best way would probably have been to setup an electrified run between the pigs and the barn, sort the pig we wanted into the run then coax him up to the pen. I decided not to do this since the pigs are currently a couple hundred yards from the barn and running that much fencing just to move one pig seemed ridiculous.

I decided that I would just drop him in place when I fed the pigs their breakfast. This may sound crass but it turns out that this is how a lot of small scale farmers do things and as I will tell you below his fellow pigs did not seem to care in the least. I selected out our smallest male pig and before feeding them while they were greeting me at the hog panel marked his head with a sharpie. This way when they were going crazy running from food bowl to food bowl to make sure they weren't missing out on something better I would not mistakenly kill the wrong pig. The cull went surprisingly well. I just tossed their food bowls in as normal, grabbed my .22 rifle and walked up to the unlucky pig and with one shot between the eyes he was down. The other pigs did not get spooked by the gun shot nor seemed upset by their fallen comrade. I then grabbed the pig by his hind legs and dragged him out of the pig pen and into the small trailer behind our tractor and took him back to the house. He was hard to get into the trailer and I estimate that he weighed well over 100 lbs.

Here is the pig hanging while I scrape the hair off.

The gambrel and hoist I picked up last deer season made it easy to get the pig hung at a convenient working height. I gutted and quartered the pig that day and put it in the fridge to chill and age.

Here is a front quarter ready to go in the fridge.

Yesterday I began the actual butchering process. To date I have been pulling the tenderloin and cutting off the hams and shoulders into convenient sizes, but have not done much in the way of real butchering. By that I mean cutting the meat into "cuts" that resemble what one would see in a grocery store. I downloaded some cut sheets from a cool website on barbecuing, so that I had something to work from. I ended up using a hacksaw to cut off the baby back ribs and to make some pork chops from one of the front quarters. This is a case were having the proper tools would be a huge help. I know that real butchers have a band saw to make these cuts and to say I was envious would be an understatement. The hack saw did an adequate job, I used it on Sunday to split the carcass in two, but it was difficult to hold the carcas and cut at the same time. It probably would have been easier if I had partially frozen the carcas to stiffen it some. After cutting the chops from the one quarter I just decided to make a bone in loin roast from the other. When all was said and done we had two fresh hams, two shoulders a couple racks of ribs as well as loin roasts and a bunch of chops in the freezer. Of course two thick chops did not make it to the freezer as they were needed for quality control purposes and were grilled up last night.

Things have gotten away from me again, so this will be another whirlwind update of what I have been doing on and around the farm.

Summer is always a hectic time around the farm, crops to plant, weed and harvest; animals to feed, water and move; etc. Every once in a while my real job also gets in the way. Late July I had to go out to Keystone Colorado to give a talk at a nanotechnology conference. Now that does not sound like a bad thing considering how beautiful Colorado is and all, but with CSA deliveries, Emily's birthday (more on that latter) and generally not wanting to be away from the kids for too long of a time, what could be an enjoyable trip turns into flying out Wednesday to talk on Thursday and flying back home Friday morning.

On the way back to the airport on Friday I took the scenic route over Loveland Pass and got these photos of the sun coming up over the continental divide.

Unfortunately, my original 10:20 am flight home from Denver is canceled and I am re-booked on a 7:30 pm flight. As you might imagine the prospects of hanging around the airport all day and getting in to Dulles airport after midnight are less than appealing. Luckily I am able to connect with the ticketing agent for the 12:10 pm flight and he pushes me up to the top of the waiting list. I physically got the last seat on that flight, last row window seat. This means that I get into Dulles at a much more manageable 6:30 pm and I am back at the farm sometime around 8 pm. The kids are happy since we get to do dinner together and I am happy to unwind.

This was particularly important since my oldest, Emily turned 11 in July and we had a pool party/BBQ for her the following day. Danielle roasted up a farm raised turkey from last year and I BBQed up a huge pork shoulder from one of our hogs. There were also deep fried potato chips from our Red Nordland potatoes made to order and great rolls brought down from New Jersey by my parents. All of the pork and at least half of the turkey went, and I think everyone would still be there eating the potato chips if I was willing to keep frying them.

Doesn't she look all grown up with her new haircut!
Happy Birthday Emily.

Bella (our Jersey cow) is doing well and has seemed to settle in to the routine here on the farm. I am still getting used to how much grass she eats and figuring out how and when to move her to new pasture. She is fairly easy to move in that she respects a single strand of electrified polywire at nose height, but the dance of rotating her with the sheep and the laying hens can get complex. We try to follow Bella with the hens so that they can scratch apart her cow patties and destroy the pathogen cycle. This works ok, but we have not figured out a good way to get her to the upper part of our large pasture and still have a convenient method of watering her. Considering how much water a cow drinks in a day having a close by water source is a must.

My other continual chore is constructing shelters for the animals. In the picture above you can see some poultry shelters fabricated from cattle panels and tarps as well as the store bought canopy Bella uses for shade. A commenter asked how sturdy the canopy is since her cows tend to rub against anything and everything. At the time I mentioned that it was holding up fine. Well two months later and Bella has broken the canopy and I am now in the planning stages for a permanent run in shelter. At first it will just provide shade but I will eventually put three sides on it to provide some shelter in the winter months.

The kids and I went to our first minor league baseball game. They were so excited to go, they even made a homemade t-shirt to support the Hagerstown Suns our local team. Once the hotdogs and ice cream were eaten and the other team got up 7 to nothing with little more than a hit by the home team the kids thought otherwise and decided they had had enough. This was the in the fourth inning mind you. The highlight of the night was that while walking through the parking lot back to our car a father and son who had been collecting the foul balls gave one to the kids to take home.

As I mentioned in a previous post our potatoes have done excellent this year. On top of the 470 lbs of Red Nordlands I harvested 82 lbs of Russian Banana Fingerlings. Corn, my other large crop has not fared as well. The plants themselves have grown tall and strong, however the ears are not getting fully pollinated. Another problem is that someone else is helping themselves to the corn. Lots of ears were pulled off the corn stalks and were lying on the ground after being eaten. The guilty party was trapped this past Sunday. We are in the process of preserving his pelt so that Julia can make something out of it. Originally she was going to make a coon-skin cap for Sam but I am not sure that is still the plan. While we are on the varmint front I was able to get another of the groundhogs who have been raiding our gardens. There is at least one more that I have seen -- shot at and missed in fact. Hopefully the trap or the .223 will take care of him soon enough.

Well that about sums up what I have been doing, except that somewhere during all this I managed to get shingles. For those of you that don't know, shingles is the chicken pox virus playing hide and seek in your spinal cord. As it turns out the virus never goes away but just lies dormant until it decides to come out along a nerve and create a skin rash and a large amount of pain. It is not fun but it seems that I have a rather mild case so that is good.