Pigs!

Our pigs have arrived!

Two Old spots and one Old spotxTamworth cross. Colin from Hog Wild Farm delivered them in the back of his pick-up truck while he and his family were on their way to a wedding at nearby Glynwood Farm. They are tinier than we expected!... only having been weaned from their mama for 2 days. Right now they're a bit scared of us, but offering them whey and food scraps is allowing us to get close enough to give them a scratch behind the ears.

The dominant Old spotxTamworth cross gave us a scare last night in the middle of our 6-course fundraiser dinner for Hudson Valley Seed. As Jason was closing up the animals for the night, just as it was dark, he heard some small grunting near the chicken coop. Strange. The pig pen is not next to the chicken coop. So he moved the flashlight to just under the brush and found our little piglet strolling around, not in its hut, but outside of the electric fence and about 300 feet from home. Jason came down to our dinner and recruited 3 friends. The other guests heard the sounds of people running through the woods, breaking branches, falling, sometimes a pig squeal and saw flashlights bopping around in the woods. As I came out with the dessert course of hot rhubarb crumble topped with communaly-whipped cream we heard a final squeal and then some cheers. Hurrah! They got him... he was spooked and ran right into the arms of our friend, Dutch. Now that's a farm experience.

Eating leek greens

Most recipes and the French have always called for the "white and pale green parts" of the leeks only. But then what do you do with those leek greens? Please cook with them! You can chop them up and cook them as you would onions. They add green to your dishes. They are great with eggs, in risottos, on pizzas, in soups and many other meals that start off with the classic carrot, celery and onion sweat (in place of the onions). If you have a juicer, you can also juice the greens and use them as a base to a delicious salad dressing or marinade. Just another step to reducing food waste...

Enjoying flowers for more than their beauty

Yellow kale flowers

We can all agree that flowers are beautiful, but many of us don't know that they can also be delicious.

When a vegetable plant flowers, wanting to "go to seed," the tiny flowers are a delicious garnish to salads, soups, potatoes, eggs or anything else. Scallion and leek flowers taste oniony and add a teeny-tiny crunch. Arugula flowers are peppery. Kale an other brassica flowers are spicy and mistardy.

So don't throw them away or pass them by! Enjoy them on your next meal.

Making minds meet

On May 3rd we convened a group of friends on a Saturday to discuss daunting issues related to the sustainability of our ecology, our economy and our health.

We started from the premise that we all accepted the idea that the way the great majority of us currently live is unsustainable, and that continuing on the same course without deep change will leave a world behind for the next generation that is increasingly unhealthy, unhappy, unequal, and unable to sustain a growing human population. 

We have become impatient waiting for scientific or political consensus on the exact degree to which we are in trouble, and believe together we must begin the work of envisioning a more sustainable and joyful way of life at both the individual and societal levels.  

And so we turned to our friends to join in this work. 

With just one day planned for talks, we invited a small group of people across different disciplines to talk about where they and their worlds fit into these issues. With representatives from the fields of research, environment, public health, law, social justice, media and journalism, food and agriculture, landscape architecture, planning, design, art and culture, and politics, we sat together with family and engaged in serious dialogue for eight hours. Each talk was inspiring, imformative and eye-opening, some even revolutionary. (see the speakers and topics below.)

Now that we've met, exchanged ideas, gotten the ball rolling, we have to keep the momentum up. We can't let these ideas fizzle in the summer heat. So we'll start acting and reporting back on some of our progress.

~ ~ ~

Inaugural convening of "Meeting of Minds"

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Agenda:

Abrupt climate change or abrupt societal transformation? Which comes first?
Radley Horton, Research Scientist, Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University

Reversing the reversing trend in life expectancy: Corporate and cultural responsibilities in promoting the public’s health

Jocelyn Apicello, Farmer, Longhaul Farm | Educator, William Paterson University and Bard College Prison Initiative

The opportunities and limitations of ethical consumption

Dahni-El Giles, Attorney | Social entrepreneur

The reality of making a living in the sustainable food system

Pablo Elliott, Farmer, Marble House Project

Walking the mundane - towards a productive urban landscape

David Seiter, Principal, Future Green Studio

News organizations today and the shift towards sustainable communications

Ned Rauch, Environment Reporter, The Journal News

Art & social activism: From the farm to Sao Paolo

Cannon Hersey, Artist | Organizer

Undamming the mass movement: Exploring barriers to sustainability progress at the government, community, and individual levels

Jason Angell, Farmer, Longhaul Farm | Advocate

The chickens and the crows: A love story

I can't begin to explain the wonder I feel when I think about the relationship that is going on between our chickens and the crows.

Let me back up a bit... we live in hawk country. I mean HAWK country. Herds of them, flying overhead, sitting in our red pines, swooping right down into our backyard to pick-up a field mouse (you should see Seneca's impression of this). And worst of all: attacking our chickens. They just do it for sport... spot them, swoop down on them, pin them, and peck them enough to kill, but not enough to enjoy a meal. It's cruel, but nature.

And the strangest part about these hawks praying on our laying hens is the wild crows' reactions. When a hawk perches itself on a low branch, just above our chicken coop, ready to take any bird oblivious enough to be taken (i.e., any of them), a pack of crows starts cawing. Loudly. And they begin to dart at the hawk, not scaring it, just annoying it enough because the chickens scramble to the underbrush and the hawk has now to deal with 3 to 4 screaming crows in its face. We even see the crows chasing the hawk in thy sky, mid-flight, darting at it as it glides away. And now whenever I hear screaming crows, I throw Seneca on my back, slip on some boots and run outside to make sure our layers are ok.

I am not quite sure why those crows protect our chickens. But here's my theory: the crows love our compost piles, we love our chickens, so the crows protect our birds. And now we love the crows, too.

Brooding baby chicks

We've got week-old Freedom Rangers out on pasture, foraging in the grass and soaking up sunshine. These future broilers are already showing happy signs of life, fighting over food, playing and sometimes ruffling their feathers at one another. Jason has built a proper home for them where we can control the temperature with heat lamps, secure them from predators, and be sure they have enough space to grow. Seneca is enjoying bossing them all around, although she'll be surprised in just a few weeks when this flock of 30 becomes adult-sized.

2014 April Work-ation

Thanks to all who came out for our 2014 April Work-ation!



The power of many hands helped us prepare 33 beds for planting, dig a new bed for asparagus, haul 13 loads of horse manure, innoculate 40 logs with mushroom spores, build 2 raised flower beds, sink 3 berry fence posts and begin the daunting task of cleaning up our new West field. And thanks, too, to all who helped in the kitchen, with washing up, with picking up rocks and building compost piles.

Please send along photos you wouldn't mind having me post on our site.

Here's to a successful season...

Is Food too Cheap?

It’s not easy getting behind the idea of purposefully making food more expensive.  Industrialized food production, global transportation networks, and the concentration of food distribution into mammoth corporations have made food cheaper than ever in developed countries. 

This can only be a good thing, right?  Particularly for poor people, who have to make every dollar stretch as far as possible.  But with endless articles about the new American farmer movement and the need to build a “sustainable food system”, we have to wonder if food is too cheap to make being a small-scale organic farmer financially sustainable.

China and the Coming Urban Waste Crisis

China is currently undertaking an unprecedented effort to repopulate 250 million people from rural to urban areas, with the goal of creating a “more sustainable” economy driven by urban consumerism rather than large-scale state investments.  Beyond the scale and state-orchestrated nature of this urbanization program, the plan is not particularly surprising: the world’s wealthiest countries are all primarily urban with economies that are driven by domestic consumption.

For the first time in human history, the majority of us live in cities.  One hundred years ago, 2 out of 10 people lived in cities, as of 2010 just over 5 of 10 people live in cities, and it is projected that 7 out of 10 people will live in cities by 2050.  One could say both positive and negative things about this development, but regardless of what you think of urban life, it is undoubtedly here to stay for the near future.

The process of urbanization has largely been caused by the transition from agriculture-based economies to modern economies based on manufacturing, technology, and services.  As farms have become largely mechanized and consolidated into large-scale operations, farmers without work have moved to cities to find new jobs.  This process has repeated itself in developed countries throughout the world.

From an ecological point of view, the urbanization of society presents a real dilemma. Humans need a fair amount of basic resources to survive: adequate food, fresh water, and homes with basic heating and sanitation.  At a Western standard of living, these needs greatly multiply.  Urban areas consist of great concentrations of people living in small geographic spaces.  These concentrations of people cannot produce the resources they need to live from within the area where they live, so they must be brought in from outside of the city. All of these needs must be met with resources and once used all of these resources produce waste.

Why Buying American Could Help Solve Our "E Problems"

What started first -- our addiction to cheap goods or the exodus of American manufacturing jobs overseas?  It’s hard to say, as each feeds the other: the more cheap goods we buy, the poorer we become and the more demand we create for cheap goods.  If left unchanged, this dynamic must inevitably trap a growing number of Americans in a low-wage economy and accelerate our environmental problems (the “E” problems). 

Most of us don’t think about the story behind each thing we buy. This is not surprising, as the story is both complex and it’s often not in the best interest of the producer to tell it to us.  A recent National Public Radio initiative, “The Planet Money T-shirt Project”, attempts to unpack one of these stories by following an order of 25,000 t-shirts from cotton farm to manufacturing to final delivery.  The project goes a long way towards explaining how our current consumer culture supports an unsustainable global economy.  

In a forthright interview, the CEO of Crystal, the Columbian company that makes the women’s Planet Money t-shirts, sums up the operating principles of modern production concisely: 

"There is a saying that is going to sound horrible," Crystal's CEO, Luis Restrepo, told me. "Our industry follows poverty." It's an industry "on roller skates," he said, rolling from Latin America to China, to Bangladesh — wherever costs are lowest.

The garment worker commute in Bangladesh.

Spring's first salad

One of the hardest tasks for me is "thinning."

I've spent many minutes sowing delicate little seeds into our homemade-soil blocks. I read the germination rate on the seed package and sometimes sow extra seeds in each hole to be sure at least one of them germinates. Then we wait, trying to maintain optimum soil temperature and humidity.

And the plants start to come up.

But then that sad day comes when I have to thin the seedlings, when I have to terminate the life of the seemingly weaker plant so that the stronger one can have the space and nutrients to thrive. Those cute, perky little kale and collard green starts look so fresh and so hopeful - but some of them have to go. In previous years it had been so difficult for me to thin that I just didn't do it. And what we ended up with were two spindly seedlings in one tiny space whose dense root systems were ripped apart upon transplant. Not good.

Spring's first salad

So I've reframed our art of thinning this season for peace of mind: spring's first salad.

Sausage stuffing

That fine-looking 5-lb-capacity sausage stuffer had been staring me in the face for too long. Despite the long winter, we hadn't yet attempted to transform our ground pork into the delicious thing we call sausage. But the time had come... spring was here, the snow was melting, a good friend was in town to join in the festivities, and we had planned an over-the-top stuffed leg-of-lamb dinner for the weekend that called for Mexican-style chorizo.

So 11 pounds of ground pork went through the processor and we mixed up 4 flavorful sausage stuffings: a classic Sicilian-style sausage with fennel seeds; a garlic sausage; a luganega sausage that included freshly grated orange and lemon zest in it; and, of course, the chorizo, which had ancho chile pepper, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cloves, pepper, bay leaf, nutmeg, cinnamon, paprika, cayenne, garlic and salt in it. We got our hands dirty, deep in pork fat and spices. We mastered those natural pig intestine casings (how cool to see them expand under the faucet water as we rinsed them of their salt preservative). We figured out the timing and pressure on the sausage stuffer. And we froze about 50 sausages for the future.

Best of all, we had a delicious dinner in front of the fire, trying each kind, and really appreciating the art of sausage making.

On the first day of spring

On the first day of spring, my true love gave to me a beautiful day to be working outside.

I saw ground for the first time on our vegetable beds. The snow melt from the mountains is now gently trickling down our seasonal streambed. We pruned our fruit trees with a great friend of ours visiting from overseas. We tidied up the greenhouse, anticipating being able to put our tomato, eggplant and pepper starts out there in just a few days. We unloaded the 2000 pounds of organic potting soil we bought from a local farm. We trekked up to the compost pile for the first time in weeks. And back inside the house, we made some delicious homemade sausages (more on that in a later post).










We are officially delayed in our planting now (usually we get the peas in the ground today), but I feel hopeful that it will start soon. We've adapted to the weather and we're anxiously enjoying our last few days of "vacation."

In the greenhouse

We've moved into the greenhouse. Well, the seedlings have moved in (although I might like to, too... it boasts temperatures in the 90s during mid-day with the sun).

This will certainly be a learning curve for us. We're using heat mats to keep soil temperature around 70, but daytime temps can be over 100 degrees and nighttime temps dip to near 32. It's amazing the wide temperature range one structure can produce. So we're using our go-to technique of "hooping up" - we put greenhouse plastic tunnels over the seedlings at night to trap in heat and moisture.

After this week's forecasted snow (?!) passes, we're hoping more spring-like weather will settle in, so water sources can be turned on, the ground starts to thaw and we can get our shovels in the soil.

The season begins

This snow is getting depressing. We've still got a foot of it covering our fields, and today's 48-degree temperature forecast made me smile until I looked at next week's and saw that we will again barely climb above freezing during the day.

But the seeds must start. Our beautiful new greenhouse is just waiting to be put to use - and once nights don't drop too far below 32, we'll be able to move all of our starts out there.

Holy homemade bacon

This is one of those times when you try something and you really, truly know you will never, ever go back to the way it was.

We cured our fresh pork belly last week with sugar, blackstrap molasses, salt and pepper, following this recipe, and just cooked some up this morning. Wow. It was so delicious. We were planning on smoking the slabs, but have decided against it because it is just too darn good. This stuff won't be for sale, friends... we are keeping it for special dinners (like tonight's V-Day homemade pizza-by-the-fire), lazy Sunday mornings, and maybe a lucky Supper Club or two.

Rendering

With 20 pounds of leaf lard in our freezer from our pigs, I decided to render the lard. Leaf lard is, at room temperature, very soft and oily, almost spreadable. But there is still a bit of muscle in there, so it has to be rendered at a low heat to be able to strain out impurities. So I chopped about 3 pounds up, put it in a baking dish, and baked it at 300 for a little less than 2 hours, following a simple "recipe" from Flying Pigs Farm. I strained the lard into ice cube trays for freezing and some into the small mason jar that is ready to use tonight for sauteeing vegetables, making pie crust, roasting potatoes, frying an egg, or for pretty much any other dish you'd use bacon fat in.

We'll offer some to our pork customers - save money by not having to buy butter, which goes for about $5 per pound for organic unsalted (and, believe me, doesn't cook up savory dishes as flavorfully).

Your not-so-standard Super Bowl fare

So, it was an underwhelming Super Bowl game on Sunday.

But we spiced it up with some non-traditional tastes. Making room in our chest freezers for all of our delicious pork, we thawed out 40 chicken feet and one pig's tail. Think: "buffalo chicken feet" and "brined, braised, broiled tail."

It was a lot of work. Chicken feet: clean, clip off claws, boil for an hour, bake to dry out, deep fry and toss in buffalo chicken sauce. Tail: brine for 24 hours, braise for 3 hours, rest for 8 hours, broil for 30 minutes.

And it didn't taste all that great. But it was so worth the adventure (and the extra square foot of freezer space).

How to put a price on our pigs?

We purchased our piglets from a local farm. They were born to two happy, healthy parents who grew up on that same farm, foraging in Hudson Valley woods, living in spacious huts with access to plenty of sun, shade and water. When the piglets came to our farm, we gave them the same treatment. They had their own house and fresh forest ground to root around in for acorns and insects. They roamed and slept and pranced around all day in our woods. They had fresh water every day. We made mud pits for them in the summer heat so they could cool down. We fed our pigs grain and supplemented it with delicious table scraps that came from our kitchen and yours. When it came time, we brought them to a clean, family-run facility that prides itself on its humane practices and attention to detail.

Now, we have their delicious, carefully-raised meat to share with you. If you’ve only ever eaten pork from a grocery store, you will be utterly shocked by the difference in quality and taste. The meat is redder and flavorful. The fat is melt-in-your-mouth.

We’re a small operation. We were able to keep track of every expense we put into raising our two pigs. The price of our cuts reflects the price it costs small, sustainable growers to raise meat in this country.

The intensive pig farming that happens in the U.S. which raises domestic pigs to slaughter weight indoors in massive structures, on GMO-corn-feed, with antibiotics to encourage growth, and with few, if any, opportunities to be a pig raises animal welfare concerns. This is the standard way that we raise meat to feed our nation. And this is the standard meat that a majority of us feed to our families. Learn more about it and consider trying humanely, sustainably raised meat. You’ll pay more in dollars. But you may decide it’s worth the benefits.

Pork sale!

Good news! Longhaul Farm now has pork available for purchase. You might have seen our happy pigs foraging or roaming through the woods of our farm this past season - this is as local as it gets. All cuts were flash frozen at their peak freshness. Available cuts and pricing are listed below.

We will be “open” to sell pork this Friday, January 31, from 11am to 7pm and Saturday, February 1, from 9am to 2pm. Just come on by.

Enjoy some breakfast sausage patties in the morning… cook up some delicious pulled pork or loin chops for Superbowl Sunday… enjoy a slow Sunday roast… or stock up your freezer for an upcoming party…  and we have delicious recipe ideas to share.

Pork cuts (size of cuts)	$/lb
Loin roast (4-6 lbs)	9
Pork butt roasts, boneless (3-5 lbs)	9
Rib roasts (4-6 lbs)	9
Shoulder roast (5-8 lbs)	9
Ham steaks (1-2 lbs)	9
Pork loin chops (1-3 lbs; packages of 2)	10
Fresh pork belly (1-2 lbs) *	6
Fresh ham (10-12 lbs)	9
Fresh hocks (2-3 lbs)	3
Breakfast sausage, pattie-style (1 lb)	7
Feet (3-4 lbs)	3
Tail (1-2 lbs)	3
Leaf lard or fatback (3-6 lbs)	3
Neck bones (2-4 lbs)	3