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When rainy days aren’t office days: A day in…

  • December 17, 2020December 19, 2020
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman
Blue rounding up the sheep to show them the barn. Not pictured: cold rain.

Let me just start off by saying that getting to spend our days toiling to leave the ground better than we found it, care for critters and work amongst a team of people who also pursue such as life calling is pretty awesome. Please also indulge me to add the following: If you are ever interviewing for a farm job at Reverence or anywhere else, pretty much the worst answer you can give to an inquiry as to why you want to work on a farm is “because I really want to work outside.”

I guarantee you that any farmer hearing that is going to think of days like yesterday and struggle to maintain composure. On days like yesterday (34 degrees and raining in sheets with just enough of a breeze to make it interesting), we work outside because our work is outside. Outside is not an attribute.

Our goal, every farmer’s goal, is to get our outside work done when the sun is shining and it’s pleasant-enough. The day before yesterday, I was walking the farm with Niti Bali and I distinctly remember informing her what a miracle it was that we were getting to enjoy a beautiful, crisp, sunny winter day. My dream of doing desk work on rainy days and outside work on amazing days has a way of not always aligning. I guess I had a premonition that the following day would be the kind during which my hands could somehow simultaneously be both numb and very painful.

A perfect day

Anticipating the incoming freezing rain, two days ago, Hue, Jake and I sorted some heifers out of a group across the creek from the dairy barn so that the 35 ewes with the ram and the heifers could get in the hoophouse. The heifers have been hogging the shelter during recent inclement weather, and we knew yesterday was supposed to be particularly nasty. We ended up peeling 8 yearling+ heifers out of that group and had a very pleasant walk over the creek and through the woods to reunite them with the main herd. It was the kind of farm day that dreams are made of. (Hue even carried me over the creek, which was spontaneous and amazing, because I wasn’t wearing my tall boots.)

8 heifers cross Hobby Creek from the Austin Quarter side of the farm to the Haw River side.

Yesterday’s walk to the barn started off easy enough. Just feeding our 25-yo horse, Shauna, with Viv, and straight back to the house, I told myself… Didi (the 3-legged pit mix) and Dolly (the Blue Tick Hound) — our normal 7a companions to the barn — elected to stay home. Dolly wouldn’t leave the porch even with a coat on.

While Vivian was with the horses, I decided to take a look at the 50 or so sheep in the market group — they are apart from the main group on a separate property so that the ewes in the group don’t get bred to the ram, as these are sheep that haven’t made the grade as breeding stock and will become part of our grassfed lamb program. They were in the rain. They didn’t look terrible, but nor did they look especially content. We had specifically given them access to what we call the Long Barn (a run-in shed where we store equipment and straw but that also dubs as shelter) for weather like this.

Okay, I thought, it’s time for you guys and gals to learn that the barn really is accessible to you, even though the entrance appeared obstructed by one of our mobile shade structures. Blue — the rescued Border Collie who is not a perfectly trained sheep dog but whose instincts are pretty dang good — and I successfully had the sheep down to the barn in two minutes. And then we waited.

The sheep could get in this barn, but they’d rather stay in the rain. Why? Lots of folks think sheep are stupid, but we just don’t see what they see… The only area around the shader has a puddle, and puddles reflect light in a way that is often scary to livestock. With the water continually hitting the puddle from the roof, it can appear like a hazard to them.

When working with livestock, it’s best for them to move along in their own will. When you start forcing them to go where you want them to go, you better have good handling equipment to keep them contained. We rarely do, and we mostly rely on good stockman-ship, which is better for everyone anyway. Just because you can force livestock doesn’t mean you should…

Sheep have their own notions

They wouldn’t budge. Blue was perfect and twice went out to bring back an escapee on his own, no words from me. Clearly the shade structure was too much of a visual barrier.

So now I’m going to move the shader. No problem, really. It’s super easy to move with our UTV. But then one of the poles got stock on the barn post, and so now I need a second person to hold it back while I drive it out. No problem. Fred happened to arrive for morning chores at the same time Hue came out to help, so now I have two sets of hands. Easy. Then the UTV lost it’s little bit of charge while I was waiting for them (we are in process of repairing it’s electrical connections). Farming…

So now we connect it to the truck, get the shader out, and planned to just get it backed into another barn so we are ready for the next impending ice storm. But turns out the shader’s wheel base wouldn’t fit in the barn unless we re-organized the barn, which I’ve been meaning to do anyway, yet it’s still 34 degrees and raining, and now I can no longer feel my hands.

This was a sunny-day project

Fred and Hue ended up backing the shader into the barn by hand because double-axeled wagons are really challenging to back up with tinted-windowed trucks in the rain into a really tight space. My job was to prevent the shader poles from getting stuck on the barn posts on the way in (yellow arrow, below) — for which I was about 50 percent effective, because by now the only time I can feel my hands is the acute pain when they try to hold something. I had not worn gloves as a hopeful measure to prevent any kind of unnecessary activity at the barn that morning … so determined I was to come right back inside!

It’s now 10a and the barn is clean and I’m spent. I should have just given myself a 30-min respite and TLC, but now I’m several hours behind on office work and so I foolishly pushed ahead and got myself feeling pretty tired and overwhelmed, an unwelcome friend that pursued me until 10:30p last night when I finally collapsed after making some soup. We did have a fire, and the soup was amazing.

Truthfully, I didn’t need to put the shader in the barn yesterday (although it did need to be moved out of the other barn). It could have waited for another pleasant-enough sunny day. But sometimes it’s worthwhile just to get something done so you don’t have to come back to it, because 14 other things will come up in the meantime, and when an object is in motion, it’s best to just keep rolling. Some of it was just stubborn persistence.

Can you see the canine? Blue is proudly looking over his good work. You’re a good boy, Blue.

Lesson? When the sheep weren’t going in the barn at all, even when it was just a little crummy out over the previous 7-10 days, that was the time to listen to the quiet inner voice that said, “I wonder why the sheep aren’t using the barn?” The next pleasant-enough day would have been a perfect time to move the shader and reorganize and clean the barn, instead of lamenting that I was looking at spreadsheets when it was 60 degrees and sunny.

The other, and bigger, lesson? Like Eisenhower said, planning is indispensable, but plans are useless.

Days happen. Farming happens. Acceptance and surrender are really powerful tools. And gratitude, always gratitude.

Things to be grateful for from this life in the dirt: three cast-iron pans full of vegetables from people I know, butter that I made from our own cows’ milk, chicken stock from birds that graced our pastures, tomatoes grown by Doug and canned by Oci as a gift, radishes grown on our land by Doug, celery from my friend Howard at Faithfull Farms that Viv and I traded for beef bones, turnip greens that were a gift from my friend Tiffanie at Machaven Farm, Swiss chard from my friends Stephanie & John at Dinner Bell Farm that we traded for milk, rutabaga from Open Door Farm (purchased at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market on a Saturday morning trip with Vivian, and the only purchased ingredient, besides onions and spices from the Saxapahaw General Store). Every ingredient has a story. We ate love for dinner.
farmer woman herding sheep

What is Reverence doing?

  • September 13, 2020September 14, 2020
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

We closed the cafe. We closed the farm store on Hwy 87. We said we are “moving back to the farm”… What does that even mean?

Well, a lot of things. We are working on an honor-system store on the farm, where in the next couple of weeks you’ll be able to stop by unannounced and buy eggs, raw (pet) milk, along with your favorite cuts of beef, lamb and pork. It’ll be open from 9 til dusk seven days a week, cash or check in the box.

This month we started our on-farm pickups of pre-orders (reverencefarms.com will remain the only way you’ll have access to our whole 150-product full offering) at the little circle of vegetables, fruit trees and flowering plants that Doug planted as a wedding present for Hue and me. (1568 Haw Ranch Rd., across from Haw Village and 1/2 mile up on the right from the Saxapahaw General Store.)

All the energy we spent managing a whole separate building with all the accompanying repairs, upkeep and dilemmas has been dramatically shifted towards systems, infrastructure and husbandry on the farm.

Before and after photos of a really muddy spot in one of our lanes
(the first was taken at sunset, hence the beautiful purple hues with Hue).

This is what we’ve been up to during our August/early September lact-cation: repairing and building fences, water lines and roads; organizing and cleaning up and selling equipment we no longer need (farms accumulate a tremendous amount of stuff, stay tuned for what we have for sale…); mowing fence lines and spreading compost; planting annuals so that our cows and sheep have high-nutrition forage available all winter; training a dozen new heifers to the parlor and getting 30+ cows and heifers bred to calve next spring (on top of the 29 we are calving in this fall); cutting down old barb wire and removing rotten fences and filling old post holes with rocks; getting our winter “camp grounds” ready with water lines, frost-free waterers (we like JUGs) and culverts for non-sloppy lanes so that we can get cows to/from their hay-feeding areas and the barns, and we can feed hay on ground that needs feeding; organizing all of our inventory towards retail instead of wholesale-sized packages that we had created for cafe kitchen needs and readying our nation-wide shipping platform (that project alone is enough to take up the whole agenda); working on convincing the regulators that no, thank you, we do not want to put powdered eggs (or some liquified egg product) in our ice cream, we want to put our eggs in our ice cream, and jumping through all the hoops therein; harvesting our own summer annuals (hay/balage) for the first time on our 60-acres of rented ground and dealing with myriad equipment failures and learning curves but managing to come out victorious nonetheless; harvesting 55 turkeys and 150 laying hens and preparing to get a new flock of 300+ laying hens; dropping off and picking up bulls on lease spreading grazing genetics to local herds and collecting our bulls to sell straws to other farmers looking to milk cows that can thrive on grass only; forging relationships with a half-dozen Alamance County farmers and engaging with their knowledge and willingness to help start a dairy farm from scratch …

That list is not comprehensive, and it just reflects our August projects.

Turkeys have incredible personality and curiosity. The farm is always missing something after they aren’t around at the end of the season. Ours graze like cows with fresh grass!

And… that’s on top of taking care of two groups of pigs (the mama/baby Ossabaws along with the rescued factory feeder pigs who finally turned the corner and started growing robustly), two groups of sheep, three groups of cattle, 10 livestock guardian dogs and a lovely Ossabaw boar that is going soon to his new home with new Ossabaw ladies. Twice a day, every day, rain or shine. We spend about 40 hours a week just running temporary fence! There are probably 100 tires on the farm that could need fixing at any given time, not to mention a couple dozen motors/engines and their accompanying vehicles.

My have they grown! These are the rescued “pink pigs” enjoying life in the grass!

The cafe was our public face, but the real engine of Reverence has always been, and will always remain, farming. The cafe was how most of you knew us, however, so I wanted to spend a little time explaining what was always behind the veil. Most of you have been served a burger and fries by my family, but many of you still haven’t been to the farm. We hope you are as committed as we are to changing that. We plan to host outdoor events for our customers and friends this fall to see and experience the beauty and the magnitude of the farm and it’s vision. In the meantime, here’s how to visit. It’s a great place to take a walk or a jog (please, just leave your dogs at home).

Rick and Hue have spent a lot of time pretty much replacing every part on the baler.

For the precious among you who have been cheering us on for more than a decade, buying hand-raised and individually-cared-for food out of my garage, off my porch and at the side of my barns since 2009, there are no words that I can say to adequately convey my gratitude. Many of you are still making an effort to procure everything you can from us, as you have been for more than 10 years: you are the backbone of our business — our reason for being what amounts to a really large homestead producing beyond our family’s needs — and why we get to keep going. Thank you.

Jami and Doug processing turkeys on the farm last week. They are available for pre-order.

For three years we ran a grand experiment: Could we prepare and serve food without compromise on a country highway in a rural Southern county overrun with a food culture of quick, fast and cheap — living a couple of generations away from the traditions of raising hogs and harvesting sweet potatoes and corn as a community and then all getting together to feast —while still having enough margin for our family to still run the 400-acre farm that produced every bit of beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey and eggs we served? As it turns out, no. It was a high calling and a noble purpose, and it succeeded because we now know all of you, and the experience we took away.

Along the way we gained a lot of wisdom about remaking the food system from the ground up — something that the radicals have been talking about for a couple of decades and now the need for which is abundantly and plainly obvious even nestled in a convenience culture where there is plenty of money to be made on our dis-ease.

For starters, it all starts with really good soil. And in that soil is the seeds of hope, community, peace, justice, abundance, mercy and truth. We are building soil every day, and your participation, support, love and continued encouragement spurs us on. We believe that real food belongs to real people, and we have the highest standards of what constitutes real food that we know of. And for us, “real food” is also produced with an abundance of love. Was your food loved? Does it matter to you?

We’ve been farming right in Saxapahaw for a decade, visible, but only if you look, because most of the work of farming happens out of the places of commerce. The stability and resilience of solar-based systems carries people and communities through uncertain times.

Suzanne from Reverence Farms and Howard from Faithfull Farms

Back to basics and onward to the new agriculture

  • August 6, 2020August 6, 2020
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

When we opened a cafe almost four years ago, it had a simple premise: real food belongs to real people. We still believe that. The economic reality of putting the kind of food that we eat at our own table on a table to share, and paying those serving it a living wage, in a rural county, was every bit as challenging as we imagined. We opted to close rather than compromise on our food or our labor values. Neither opening, nor closing, was a decision that we regret. We loved serving food that we believed in to our friends and neighbors — especially our fellow farmers, who appreciated the depth of care and mountains of logistical and regulatory obstacles that had to be navigated to provide it. 

The decision to close the brick-and-mortar retail farm store on Hwy 87 was a simpler one: we determined that utilizing the space for the duration of our cafe lease as a farm store still stretched us too thin, and it didn’t allow us to do what we most desired: welcome you to the farm, to partake in its beauty, and to share in its joys. Sometimes doing what is right and what makes sense requires us to give up some things, including a retail space and a commercial kitchen. It’s a bit awkward in the transition, but it’ll be worth it. Connecting people to their food so that all may prosper is our highest calling. We can’t do that honestly at any place other than the farm itself. 

A2 jersey grass-fed dairy cows grazing in field at sunset

Closing rather than compromise was the same premise, actually, that almost prevented me from farming commercially seven years before, when I brought my first two pigs to the processing plant, walked them into “the box” and watched them die in fear because the plant didn’t follow the procedures that were on the wall and for which they had third-party certifications. The horror I saw for the six sheep (not mine) that followed them is forever etched in my mind. I thought to myself, I don’t need a USDA stamp that badly that I’m willing to compromise who I am to these animals — I had nursed Mr. & Mrs. Pig back to health as piglets with hourly drenches of yogurt after they had fallen behind at another farm. Dying, like living, is an art to be done well.

pastured pigs in a homemade shelter from the elements
Mr. & Mrs. Pig, in a dry shelter during the winter months.

A meat-handler’s license was required only if I wanted to sell to the public. I had been homesteading and was happy to go back to it again. I was willing to trade scale for ethics, so that animals could die in peace, never knowing what was coming to, often with their head in their favorite snacks as I told them, “Thank you for your lives — the ground you walked on will be forever altered for your having lived. Go in peace, back into the peace from which you came.”

But callings have a way of calling you, whether you agree to the fine print, or not. I was able to find two plants that handled the slaughter portion of the processing with the respect with which I had raised the animals. (We use those two plants to this day, driving an extra distance. That said, God willing and the creek don’t rise, we will be able to have the animals die on the farm under USDA inspection within the next couple of years. No animal should have to leave home in a trailer to give it all.)

When I started using managed grazing to feed my first cow, Greeley, I realized that agriculture could be a regenerative act. Freely, this revelation of beauty and truth was given to me, and freely I wanted to share it. It’s not enough for me to eat well and for my backyard to be bountiful. Malnutrition — and its corollary, obesity, the same problem just with an abundance of calories — anywhere is a threat to nourishment everywhere.

Yet, how does one market food without parallel in a marketplace that values sameness? Where is the sweet spot so that the people raising the food can also afford to purchase it? These are big questions.

I’ve spent more than a decade trying to answer them. We haven’t totally cracked the nut yet, but we are getting closer. 

baby Ossabaw piglet. pastured pigs
Ossabaw piglets. These guys are actually 1/4 Pot-bellies, because some wondering boars bred their purebred Ossabaw grandmothers. This generation is starting to look more Ossabaw.

How do we reach people in a distracted, glossy, convenience-obsessed culture? How do we meet people where they are, when many don’t even know that the predominant food culture is actually killing them slowly?

The cafe’s premise was that we could cook it for them. Never cooked a pork shank at home? No problem! You can still enjoy eating it, or so the idea went. We closed the cafe right before Covid-19. What already had made itself manifest to me from a marketing perspective, the pandemic has laid bare: people can only afford to choose one “luxury”: food without comprise or “food” someone prepares for you. Convenience almost always wins. Many can now choose neither. There’s precious little overlap, and we salute those food business who are doing it well.

Living in the tension between three things we were unwilling to compromise about — how food was raised, how food was prepared, and how people are paid — was not sustainable for us as a farm, which was and will always be, our first love. We were trying to both farm and cook without compromise. Doing one alone is difficult enough. 

What is rejuvenating is checking our very pregnant Jersey, Tulip 715, before the sun came up the other morning (every day we think that baby is going to be here!), after prayerfully and tearfully saying goodbye to four fat, healthy Red Devons, long before sunup, that had arrived a couple of years ago needing some TLC. They wouldn’t have all survived the feedlot, where they were otherwise headed. (We had to treat a few of them for minor issues that wouldn’t have been minor in that environment.) They shined up and shined on and left the soil better than they found it. They will go on to nourish people, a worthy calling.

Bulls and steers grazing. New Zealand Red Devon and South Poll steers, Jersey bulls.
A New Zealand Red Devon looks at the camera while a Jersey bull (Lester-PP) and a South Poll steer grab some breakfast before a hot summer day in the shade.

The highest honor you could give them, from my perspective, is to buy their meat by the quarter or eighth, cook it for your family, your neighbors and someone in need, and then bring the bones back to our compost pile (1568 Haw Ranch Rd., find the white “compost here” sign near the big pile by the barn), and complete the cycle for the soil. Seeing the bones from Left Bank Butchery and the scraps from the Saxapahaw General Store on our compost piles always makes my soul smile. This is how I want to relate to my community. 

hiking and road map of Reverence Farms
This map adorns the farm entrance at 1568 Haw Ranch Rd, just 1/2 mile up the road from Saxapahaw proper, and across from Haw Village. The farm hugs 1 mile of the Haw River.

Want to know a little secret? Part of the reason I wanted to own a cafe is so that I could own the waste stream… true story. What happens at restaurants is that same thing that happens in most homes: organic material, meant to nourish the very earth that sacrificially produced it, by hands and bodies that bleed and sweat and toiled for it, is instead thrown into a landfill to putrefy and create a liability for everyone (air pollution) where an opportunity once beckoned (creating top soil that sustains all of us).

We are what we do with what we throw away. There is no “away.” If we are willing, what we consume and what we discard can all be done reverently, and in the Great Economy of our Creator it is all increased in the giving. Compost applied to the land continues to capture carbon from the atmosphere many years after application, and in an exponential way. That’s grace. Let’s start participating in that economy, together.

Thank you for coming along for the ride. In the meantime, stay tuned. A new agriculture is emerging, and it’s going to be wild and delicious and nourishing and reverent. We will see you on the farm.

Howard Allen of Faithfull Farms, who also happens to have been the first chef at the cafe, came to the farm the other morning to look at the transformation of the soil from a barren wasteland a few years ago to a verdant eden today. He brought me a bounty from his intensely productive farm, including this amazing celery — that tastes like, celery… Celery is supposed to have a taste! We talked about how we are going into a new agriculture and his prayer is that we go willingly. The new agriculture is going to be collaborative, restorative and full of grace and truth. Willing or not, we are going, because the old isn’t serving.
Grazing Jersey cows at Reverence Farms in Saxapahaw NC

Real food doesn’t scale quickly

  • May 30, 2020May 30, 2020
  • by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

(or, why you can’t have all the milk you want)

You are literally beating down our doors for milk. In the past week, it seems that we have done little else at our humble farm store on highway 87 except answer your increasingly desperate requests for us to save you milk. I’m not exaggerating. The entire work week of two people has been filled with calls, emails and visits trying to procure raw pet milk. What is going on? I suspect it has something to do with word getting out that the lactoferrin in milk has been shown to be an effective immuno-stimulant and perhaps people think it could prevent Fido from getting Covid-19.

This isn’t news. The idea that pasteurizing milk denatures proteins, degrades vitamins and destroys immunoglobulins has been around for quite a while. Fear of pathogens caused raw milk to live in the shadows for a long time, something I started writing about in 2007. Now, greater fears of a virus are causing fears of pathogens to pale in comparison. Everyone wants raw milk. (And just to be clear, we will NOT sell it to you for you to consume. It is illegal in the state of North Carolina to sell raw milk for human consumption, and says so in quite big letters on our bottles.)

Nothing about raw milk’s health properties have changed. Nothing about our generalized state of ill-health in this country has changed, except maybe gotten worse. Yet now, everyone it seems, is waking up all at once. Or at least that how it feels at the farm store. I’m here to tell you that we can’t possibly sell all of you pet milk. And we are actively trying to figure out the best way for us, and the fairest way for you, to distribute it. Please bear with us.

For those who have been buying our milk and meat for years, we recognize and appreciate you. And for those new to the table, welcome. One of my favorite parables in the Bible is about the workers in the vineyard, and the vineyard owner chooses to give the workers who came late in the day the same wages as those who came early. When the workers who came early grumbled, the landlord said, you agreed to work the day for a denarius, and that is what I gave you, adding: “Why should my generosity make you jealous of them?” I understand that the parable doesn’t translate fully here, because now that so many are coming to get pet milk, those who have faithfully been making the trek for this milk for years are finding themselves in a pinch. We understand. And we are doing our best, and we will have the fairest solution we can as soon as we can. But I think some context is important here.

When I first started farming, I was an evangelist. Disinterested parties were forced out of social convention or literally by being trapped with me at a table at a dinner party to hear endless monologues on how Cows Save the Planet, and other tales… “two chickens in every yard reduces landfill waste by 25 percent and ends factory egg production tomorrow; the byproduct of bacon should be restored landscapes; real food is our first medicine and what passes as food in our culture is actually killing us; we are literally consuming the story of everything we eat, spiritually, physically and aesthetically” … All true, all irrelevant in a country awash in its own prosperity, convenience and entitlement.

About a decade ago, I realized that certain individuals may be ready for the gospel of soil, but the world certainly wasn’t, and I had sufficiently distilled complex concepts into my own consciousness to no longer need to discuss them. Living it was so much more peaceful. And it was peace that I fervently sought, and still find in cows using their tongues en masse to rip grass a perfect 4″ from the ground. I was content to quietly toil away at my vision for how we could instead live in abundance with the simple decision to eat well. So I built fences, moved cows, ate like a queen, collapsed in bed, repeat.

The notion of blood, sweat and tears shed for a dream has been bantered about many times more than I suspect than they’ve actually been poured out. I’ve had the distinct privilege to see them pour on the earth, more often than not from my own flesh, sometimes all at the same time. A worthy sacrifice.

Real food belongs to everyday people. It’s not for special people, or rich people or enlightened people or the culinary elite.

One day, I thought. One blessed day, my rag-tag band of other people’s worn-out bovines, through selective breeding and a heaping measure of grace, would have milking daughters capable of eating only forage and be able to feed their calves, put milk in the bucket and have sufficient energy left to breed back and do it all again. (If you want to learn about service, talk to a cow, who spends her entire adult life either pregnant or milking, and 80 percent of the time doing both concurrently.)

Of course, the worn-out land — tired from a century and a half of cotton, tobacco and continuous grazing by cattle — would need to be improved too, and it was, by the hard work of those cows, constantly just getting by with minerals and energy from a bag instead of from the plants that should have been getting it from the soil. (In that time, the farm moved twice, once by expansion, once by force. Repeat work of regeneration, times three.)

Their daughters did better in part because they were bred to be better equipped for a life outside — more anatomically able to eat a high-fiber, low-starch diet of grass — instead of having ground-up candy, stale bread and pig blood fed to them in a bunk feeder in confinement (true story, this is what milk in the grocery store is made of), which is what their grandmothers were bred to do. (My energy source to keep these cows alive while we together pursued the dream was beet pulp [almost certainly GMO], organic flax oil [which I bought in 50-gal drums and stored in a friend’s walk-in cooler 10 miles away] poured on alfalfa pellets, and for cows that really needed it, organic grain. I was not willing to sacrifice my cow’s ability to survive on the alter of a religious conviction that cows weren’t meant to eat corn — which they aren’t — but those cows had been bred to do just that, and they had to get energy from somewhere.)

The land was actually improving with the daily labor of these cattle, and my daily labor of moving them with portable electric fencing to imitate the herd effect of roaming bison on the prairie. The land was starting to provide more than just the bulk of their diets, but now also the living nutrition they needed to thrive.

My dream was that by the time I had a herd of cows who could do what they were created to do — turn sunshine into butter — enough people would emerge who were willing to go out of their way for it and pay what it was worth.

I didn’t even really care at that time if my original investment was paid back, or the innovation rewarded, or anything that our economic model does to recognize entrepreneurs was given its due recompense. (Cows have a long return on investment: 5-8 years, and every year you expand the herd — read: every year since we’ve been farming — the ROI is kicked down the road.) I just wanted to make enough money to keep doing it, because it was the only thing I knew how to do to make the world more beautiful. And it’s how I wanted to live.

Real food belongs to everyday people. It’s not for special people, or rich people or enlightened people or the culinary elite. So much does my family believe in this principle, we dedicated a restaurant to it. We closed after three years when we realized that we couldn’t prepare food at a price people in our community can afford without compromising our food values or exploiting our workforce, or some combination of both. Unwilling to do either, we opted instead to focus with laser-like intensity on our unique ability: producing A2A2, 100% grass-fed milk from Jersey cows without compromise, and tending to the ecologically compatible enterprises that surround them: laying hens to scratch through the cow pies, pigs to dig in the dirt and massage the land back to health, and sheep to mow the grass that isn’t as tender as the cows prefer.

If you want to buy milk, we need you to also buy beef. And pork, and eggs and stew hens and lamb. It’s all part of it. They are all part of the ecological symphony that allows us to produce milk without compromise.

Without compromise means that means every calf born on our farm gets a mama — her, or even his, own. (Bull calves are dispensed with quickly in the commercial dairy industry and even on the vast majority of small, pastured dairies because they take the precious milk that is rightfully theirs, and our culture’s treatment of milk as a commodity doesn’t allow farmers to make an honest living.) Following that biological and moral imperative that milk belongs first to baby calves means that we collect a lot less milk out of every cow. Combined with the fact that our cows aren’t pushed with starch, it means even less milk.

Baby Dub (a first calf heifer out of our cow, Dub) and her son, James Bond (007 will be his number, as he’s the seventh calf born in a year ending in a zero).

We get, on average, about 1.5 gallons per cow per day over the course of their lactations, and the rest goes to their calves, who get their mamas 24/7 for the first six weeks (and they are small enough to leave some milk for us for the first four), and then from 9a to 5p every day until weaning, which for the heifers is at 10 months, and the bull calves at 6 months. (At that age, the young bulls can start breeding their sisters and need to graduate to the bull herd.) Commercial calves are usually fed milk replacer and weaned at eight weeks.

The milking herd on pasture with the calves, yearling heifers and 2-yo “springing” heifers.

We are milking about 20 cows right now, and getting about 17 gallons per day, because most of the milk herd are in the tail ends of their lactations. In August we will dry off about 2/3 of those 20, and in late September and October, we will calve in about 20 cows and be milking 30. So, maybe 25 gallons of milk a day in October and November. Keep in mind, it’ll dry up to almost nothing in August, as the hot weather makes cows not want to eat much and 2/3 of the milking herd will be resting from the parlor while they finish growing the calves in their bellies.

Seventeen gallons a day. That’s with the work of, on average, about three highly skilled people per day. Granted, the work of those three people (some days it’s four or five) also covers the bull and Devon steer herd, the dry cow and Devon heifer herd. And granted, the work of those people, and the equipment, feed and supplies involved, is also spread out among 40 one-to-two-year-old heifers that will join the milk herd in the next couple of years. They shine like new pennies, and represent 4-5 generations into the dream. (Remember about that 5-8 year return on investment on cows. These 40 heifers will finish repaying our investment in them and start making money for the farm starting in about 2025.)

We also have other enterprises that spread out those costs. Which is kind of the point of this article:

If you want to buy milk, we need you to also buy beef. And pork, and eggs and stew hens and lamb. It’s all part of it. Those enterprises pay the bills while we are growing the next generation of milk cows.

More importantly, they are all part of the ecological symphony that allows us to produce milk without compromise. Even veal is part of it. Yes, the beef from a young dairy animal, still drinking milk. I know that may offend some, but the alternative is that those bull calves are sold down the proverbial river in a supply chain that cares nothing for their bellowing for their mamas, nor their mamas’ even more heart-wrenching bellowing for them.

Why can’t the boys just be allowed grow up to maturity, you say? Some are, and they sold to other dairies as breeding bulls. The rest would be steers, and dairy steers take an additional 1-1.5 YEARS to get fat compared to a beef steer, and produce 30 percent less ground beef. (Translated: beef at least 30% more expensive.) Their mama’s were bred to make milk and not put flesh on their bones, and their sons come with the same genetic ability, albeit without udders. Their calories don’t just magically appear on their ribs when their mother’s have been bred to put it in the tank.

Can’t afford our meat, you say? Understandable. The predicament we find ourselves in is both wide and deep. For the past half century we have collectively sent almost all of our dollars outside of our communities via entertainment, convenience foods, and disposable goods and unwittingly filled the silk-lined pockets of people and corporations that have no vested interest in the welfare of the communities where we live. This isn’t a political statement. This is a a fact. Half of the world’s total wealth is now in the hands of 1% of the population. In ten more years, it’s predicted to be 2/3. In the context of exactly zero political philosophies does this situation lead to a free and just society. It’s why Thomas Jefferson wanted us to be a little d, little r, democratic republic of agrarian farmers.

The path from partial to total annihilation of our ability to feed ourselves well is paved with exploitation — of people, of land, of animals and ecosystems — but we line that path ourselves with the stones of convenience, irreverence, disconnectedness and food taken out of its ecological context. I will not ever condone violence, but it is quite logically and the historically confirmed reaction to disenfranchisement and an inability of individuals to be heard, and the nearly inevitable conclusion of lack of agency in one’s own life. Our primary agency in our own life is how we, and whether we can, feed ourselves.

The way we eat has the capability to sequester carbon, end droughts, reverse desertification, prevent floods and give our children a living future, connected to place, in harmony with their neighbors, free of degenerative diseases and ready to transform our destruction into regeneration. Nothing less is on the table.

It’s going to take all of us, working across socio-economic, political, class, rural/urban and every other “otherness” we can contrive, to turn this thing around. And for our farm, it starts by not separating milk from its biological context. If you are going to buy our raw pet milk, we are going to ask you, in some way or another, to economically participate in the wholeness which goes into producing it.

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