milk Archives

It’s time we imagine a life more beautiful than…

March 26, 2022April 8, 2022
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Our farm recently decided to thin trees to allow more sunshine and to create a more varied, open and historically typical landscape near the river. Here’s why:

1. Our vision has long included an accessible, edible and diverse ecosystem along the river that better reflects how the land would have looked 500+ years ago and allows trail-goers a view into a regenerative dairy farm.

2. While our eyes are used to seeing a limited range of predictable landscapes — forests, fenced livestock, cropland, housing developments or shopping malls — there is an ecosystem that is far more imaginative and inviting: silvopasture — think of a cultivated savannah with more frequent rainfall.

3. Silvopastures are perhaps the most productive agricultural system and may be the only proven way of sequestering carbon while feeding large numbers of people.

4. Silvopastures create microclimates for forage species and animals that modulate the extremes of seasons and provides natural air conditioning for the cows during our hot summers and an extended growing season for plants.

5. Finding ways to create inclusive and productive food systems in the same contexts where we live and work is the only hope we have to restore balance to a planet that is showing many troubling signs of a declining ability to sustain life.

Our Jersey cows grazing on the natural gas line near the river last spring. We are thinning woods on either side of the grass, and both ecosystems need some attention. The Kentucky-31 grass contains a mold that is highly toxic to cattle, dairy cows in particular, and is not native grass to the region. Historically, the trees would have been a more diverse mix of ages and sizes, with more sunlight coming through to the forest floor to provide habitat for dozens of species of grasses, flowers and native shrubs.

The forest on either side of the cows has both native bushes and invasive privet, and our goal is to create a native ecosystem in this area that would be closer in appearance and function to the mixture of native shrubs, trees and grasses that would have been along the river during the time of the Sissapahaw Indians. Our hope is that the native grass species that we replant here will eventually spread (both naturally and with our help) over the entire farm.

Our Jersey heifers grazing in a silvopasture we are in the process of establishing. Soil is the foundation for all terranean life. To build soil organic matter, we feed hay here after trees were thinned. Instead of feeding hay in barns, we put it directly on the pastures and “waste” some by leaving it uneaten. But none is wasted! Every blade is food for thousands of tiny organisms that we call our underground livestock.

Our mission: to eat and transact in harmony with natural systems

The core philosophy of our farm is how we eat is inextricably tied to our ability to live in health and in harmony with each other and the larger community of species with whom we dwell amongst. It’s why we have built a 100-percent grass-fed, 50-cow dairy from scratch, with chickens, pigs, turkeys and sheep as co-laborers. And it’s why we deeded a dozen acres a few years ago to the Haw River Trail so that the community could begin to enjoy the fruits of our labors. (In a few years we hope to share some actual fruit: mulberries, persimmons, pawpaws, huckleberries, blueberries, muscadine grapes that we are planting both along the HRT and also on trails we are building on the farm.)

Everyday we work to rewed what has been estranged: animals and plants, farmers and eaters, living ecosystems and places of commerce. We all eat every day if we are blessed enough to do so. How we do that determines — more than any other single choice — what our world looks like.

The most ecologically light footprint we could have on the land is to all return to hunters and gatherers. Since few are discussing how to practically achieve such, our next best hope is to manage flora and fauna in ways that are in keeping with those principles.

The Native Americans that proceeded us on the Haw River had a lot of things right: they harvested their food and took in all of the sensory nourishment from their environment in the same place. Imagine a grocery store that was also your gym and your therapist and your social media feed. Imagine you didn’t need a grocery store, gym, therapist or social media feed… and all of your creaturely needs for beauty, nourishment, exercise, communion with the divine, healing and connection with all creatures (bi-peds, four-leggeds and hundred-leggeds), were all part of the same life-affirming experience.

We often see beautiful landscapes as something separate from ourselves, what Wendell Berry calls the “terrarium view” of ecology (do yourself a favor and stop reading this post and just read Wendell Berry instead). We protect parks but the places where our daily sustenance comes from have turned to wastelands. This segregated view of ecology doesn’t take into account our role as stewards. And it denies a core fact: if we eat something that we didn’t grow ourselves or connect with a person who did, somewhere a habit was likely destroyed.

At 1,000 miles away, we don’t have to reconcile ourselves with those choices. The corn and soy products that are the foundation of all the packaged “foods” we eat result in man-made deserts that stretch for thousands if not tens of thousands of acres at a time. When we eat in our backyard, we can’t escape the consequences. There is no more broccoli in Iowa — the nation’s breadbasket by and large grows feed for cattle and cars. The resulting loss of soil is perhaps the biggest non-topic affecting our nation’s future (amazing and readable and hopeful book on this subject: Perilous Bounty).

A more integrated path forward means we participate in living food-scapes

We believe that the social contract works best when we create places where people can interact in a meaningful way with the landscapes that provide our sustenance. Other than two small areas on the farm that have long been kept cleared because of the now-abandoned power lines and the still-active natural gas line, the 180 acres that comprise the creaturely habitat for our milk cows and their calves is otherwise not visible from the river trail. (The 120 acres on the other side of Hobby Creek, pictured above, is home to our young stock and sheep.)

Iris, one of our matriarchs, teaches her still-nursing calf Ilene how to eat multi-flora rose, an invasive, noxious plant.

We are proud of how we raise calves on cows, sharing milk with their rightful offspring — and the sight of cows and their frolicking babes, who grow up in a biologically normal and intact matriarchy — is something that is almost non-existent on dairy farms in modernized cultures. We get calls and letters every week from people all over the country who want to emulate these “back-to-the-future” practices. It seemed silly to us that our own neighbors weren’t able to easily see something so simple and joyful.

Our need for ruminant (four-stomached, vegetarian) animals is irrespective of our diet choices: Grasslands, and particularly silvopastures (mixtures of trees and grasses in the same ecosystem), are perhaps the only way to mitigate the atmospheric disaster of removing carbon that was sequestered below the earth’s surface in the form of oil (captured sunlight from eons ago) and burning it as fossil fuels. We desire to live in a present-day solar economy. Blades of grass are really effective solar panels, and double as antenna for carbon sequestration. Humans have yet to develop a system as elegant.

Siri is grazing a 12-seed cover crop mix that also serves as butterfly habitat. The diversity helps to build soil.

We believe animals, particularly large animals, belong in savannah as they would have been in this region for thousands of years — and those savannahs would have likely been to the river’s edge. We are leaving a 165′ to 215′ buffer from the river for riparian habitat (more on that in our next post).

We know that buffalo, panther, wolf and elk were along the Haw River in the 1700s. Journals of an early European settler, John Powell, enumerate buffalo sightings in the area, as close as Mebane, and as late as 1737. The last buffalo was killed in North Carolina in 1799, almost a century before these magnificent beasts — so vital to the sequestration of atmospheric carbon in the ground in the form of soil fertility — were wiped out of the American West.

Although most artifacts in the area point to deer and rabbit being the most likely source of protein for Native Americans along our section of the Haw, and some people doubt that there were bison near present-day Saxapahaw, the large ruminants are certainly native to the region. Large, grass-eating animals certainly were here before we were, including the mastodon, and they would have kept the areas near rivers more open than we are accustomed to seeing today. John Lawson described the riverbanks in the early 1700s as full of deer, raccoons, turkey, and even bears. In order to sustain life for herbivores, the plant community along the river would have almost certainly included many more grasses.

One of our modern-day savannah beasts, Frank, a Jersey bull. Don’t worry, this guy lives up the road from the river trail.

Using modern bison (a.k.a., cattle) to keep grasslands sequestering carbon

A savannah is an open or semi-open landscape dotted with trees and is primarily a grassland ecology that can support a diverse mix of animals. We have been working for years to open up our woods to more sunlight. Large grazing animals depend on a landscape prolific with grasses, forbes and legumes, and all of those species can exist in a treed understory, provided that sun can reach the soil surface.

Indeed, there’s tons of evidence that grasses under trees make both the grasses and the trees more productive, especially in low-fertility environments such as the Southeast (where the soil respires much of the year, thus making carbon less likely to stay in the soil without active management).

Charles, a retired Alamance County dairy farmer, spends many of his days at Reverence planting trees.

Silvopasture is the most proven agricultural system in the world for sequestering carbon. We also create it in our open pastures by planting native trees. The trees and understory grasses are symbiotic and together produce far more biomass than either alone. Furthermore, silvopastures seem to sequester carbon in the soil more permanently than even tropical rainforests, which give up the carbon they capture when the leaves decompose on the forest floor. By contrast, grasses store carbon in the soil, where it remains, if undisturbed.

“Unlike tropical forests, where the majority of the carbon is stored in the vegetation, as much as 90% of the carbon pools in grazing-land ecosystems are located in the soil, hence, it can be readily transferred into more permanent storage in the soil. Because carbon stored below ground is more permanent than plant biomass, soil carbon sequestration in grazing lands provides a long-term alternative to mitigate atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions.” [emphasis added]
Assessment of the Carbon Sequestration Potential of Common Agricultural Systems on Benchmark Soils Across the Southern Region of Climate Gradient, M. Silveira

Life-affirming landscapes and turning sunshine into milk…

We believe how we choose to eat is an extension of who we are and preserving and restoring life-affirming landscapes has far more to do with what rests at the end of our forks than how much we banter online about the abominations that abound in the world. Many landscapes will not exist into perpetuity without at least some stewardship, and grasslands cannot remain without ruminant animals. We are doing our best to steward the land on our farm. And we are cooperating with the four-footed wonderwoman, the humble cow, in order to do so.

Why? Because ruminants make more life than they take. And 100% grassfed milk, which we share with all of the calves, while producing enough milk to justify having a barn and a parlor to milk them in, requires the land to be blessed with sunshine in order to grow forage. The economics of dairy are nigh impossible, but we are doing our best to help restore family dairy to the rightful center of a whole community. Alamance county used to have 100 dairies (Charles’ dairy was one of them; and several of our neighbors from whom we now purchase hay used to run still others).

Liquid sunshine. 100% grass-fed butter on sourdough. #nofilter

Only 5% of Alamance County dairies remain …

We are down to five dairies in our county — a couple of years ago it was down to three. To my knowledge, we are the only 100% grass-fed, “commerical-size” dairy in the region. The upside-down economics of family-scale dairy nationally and the prohibition of the sale of raw milk for human consumption in N.C. couple to make new dairy ventures highly unlikely. Corporate obliteration of small farms through non-scalable sanitation laws has been destroying real food for a century, which Wendell Berry talks about in this link that I’m going to encourage you again to read. Those same realities also prevent me from selling the above-pictured butter to you. If you want to live in a beautiful world, work to legalize food.

North Carolina is now a net importer of milk, and we used to be a dairy state. We cannot separate our eating from our living. The false notion of specialization that “preserves” small, isolated patches of wild surrounded by concrete, shopping malls and housing developments is not sufficient to save other species or ourselves. We are going to have to learn to eat and dwell in the same community if we are going to survive.

Doing so amidst brokenness — of relationships, ancestral knowledge, a degraded soil resource base that precedes our lifetimes — isn’t simple nor easy, and defies quippy solutions. One of the things that has been estranged since the Industrial Revolution is our living and working in the same landscapes. There has been a lot of talk in the past few decades about women working outside the home, but the truth is that the men for the most part left homestead economies first — to work in town.

Historically, people lived, worked and ate and found community in the same place. We believe there is great value in doing so, and it’s why it was so important to me from the very beginning of my homesteading-turned-farming dreams that agriculture be deeply imbedded in enlightened commerce and remaking the proverbial and brick-and-mortar village. (To that end, this open letter from the president of the Sierra Club is worth reading. He invites us to move beyond “traditional wilderness protection, land conservation, and outings” to engagement with issues related to agriculture, sprawl and transportation and how those issues are inextricably tied to issues of race and economic justice.)

“Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed for more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.
“Even if you never touch meat, you’re costing something its blood”, she said. “Don’t patronize me. I know that. Living takes life.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

So the question is, how can we interact with life, while recognizing that we need to eat three times a day, in a way that creates more life than it takes? It’s a big question. Would you join us in answering it together?

You can help by buying your meat from us, your vegetables from Eat Dirt Farm (Jake has milked cows at Reverence for five years, and he’s delightfully obsessed with soil health), sundries from the Saxapahaw General Store and donate to the Haw River Trail. We are working on a community project to remove invasive privet down by the river; stay tuned for details.

It’ll all be more beautiful with your participation… So, how are you going to eat? Can you make beauty the byproduct of a thrice-daily communion with the divine?

“Mama Butter Churner”

June 27, 2021June 27, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

Tips for making butter, from a farm kitchen

I told Vivian the other day to start calling me “Mama Butter Churner” because pretty much all I’ve done with my free time in the past 6-8 weeks is make butter. She thinks it’s hilarious to call me that, even though we don’t have a churn, and instead use the Cuisinart (less splatter than the mixer and more surface area to touch the “paddle,” aka blade, than the blender — but all three will work).

And lately I’ve learned why making cultured butter makes so much more sense, practically. The digestive and nutritional benefits are real, too.

When I say “make butter,” I’m talking an epic amount of butter. We probably have 50 lbs of butter in the freezer, easily. I’ve started slicing it like cheese and using it commensurately. The cream from this time of year is the brightest because it has the most quantity and quality of nutrition from rapidly growing grasses, forbs, legumes and woody plants that the cows miraculously convert from difficult-to-digest vegetative matter and make them bio-available to us. Although making butter is super simple, I’ve learned a lot over the past couple of months about making it well, which is to say, in a way that goes fast and produces a good end result. This post is borne out of a desire to share a few tips that I’ve learned along the way.

Butter really does make everything better, and vegetables much more digestible. I like to think of foods as a vehicle for eating butter!

Since the cream really has to be at least 55 degrees before churning (otherwise you get a homogenized mess of milk and butter droplets, that you can press out but it takes a lot of patience), 60+ degrees is better, I’ve found that presents a unique challenge. I’ve been using food-grade 5-gal buckets to store the cream. It takes a long time for one of those to warm up at room temp (8+ hours). That would be all fine and good if I could perfectly plan what life would be like in 8 hours from now. But bulls get out, calves get lost in the woods, fireworks and tannerite get blown up at the neighbors (freaking out the guard dogs, causing escapes or entire days spent fixing fencing), and any number of things can precent me from spinning butter when my cream is at a perfect 60 degrees.

The cream comes out of the bulk tank at 40 degrees and then I usually put that 5-gal bucket in the fridge. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong or keep me from churning that butter at 60+ degrees. Right picture shows butter being washed after I’ve pressed milk out.

That’s where the culture comes in, and I stumbled upon the perfect culture and I wanted to share it in case it blessed someone else like it has me. I got it from Homesteader’s Supply, where I got my butter mold. This is not a paid ad. I just really appreciate the craftsmanship that these folks put into their products. My cherry butter mold came with a free sample of butter culture. It’s dreamy stuff!

This is the intermediate step between cream and washing the butter. This is where the milk gets pressed out of the butter. I use a colander with small holes, but not mesh, because that just makes a mess. If butter is spun too cold, this part is very challenging and takes a lot of patience and time. If the cream is room temperature, this part happens in seconds. Butter culture keeps the end product from souring.

When it’s 11p at night and I don’t have the courage to start making butter, I just add the tiniest pinch of culture and it prevents the cream from souring and instead makes a delicious cultured butter. From now on, I’m just going to start adding the culture when I take the cream out of the fridge as an insurance policy. This culture tastes so good that I don’t mind all of the butter being cultured and not “sweet cream.” In fact, I think it tastes better than sweet cream.

It’s not lost on me that having this much cream to make butter with is a situation that most people dream of, and it’s really not possible without having not just one but several cows, or a good source of non-homogenized cream. There is a sweetness to this process for me, as it’s been almost 13 years in the making. There was a time that I dreamed of just one gallon of milk from my own cow without her kicking over the bucket, getting mastitis or any number of other challenges. Believe me, I get where you are in this journey, even if you don’t have a cow at all and just dream of really good food and it seems impossible to get there. The best advice I have is to just start where you can, and be faithful in small things.

If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones.
Luke 16:10

May your butter be golden, your children’s cheeks rosy and your land be blessed with your good stewardship. Happy churning!

Dairy cows are mothers too

March 28, 2021March 28, 2021
by Suzanne Nelson Karreman

How we started raising calves on cows

Gracie, my first heifer calf, was two days old in this picture. Mama Greeley is close by.

My first calf, a heifer named Gracie, as born twelve years ago toady. Her birthday is still on my calendar. Why do I still mark this day? Partially, it’s practical. Back then, I didn’t have a dairy records management system (now we use PCDART now, which was written for DOS, but still a great piece of software, dinosaur tho it is…). Gracie’s birthday was on my e-calendar because it was the best way of keeping records. It remains on my calendar to this day to remind me of humble beginnings — and that dairy cows are mamas too.

Vivian and younger me. She was 5 months old in this picture, and our first heifer was new.

I was a new mother myself when I made this choice. I wasn’t more than 100′ yards apart from Vivian for the first 11 months of her life. How could I do otherwise for my cow and her baby? My proximity to my cow’s experience allowed me to see things from her perspective. So I let her keep her calf and milked her alongside her baby.

That’s pretty much the life we still give to our dairy heifers. (The young bulls have to leave the herd for another field at 6 months or they will start breeding their sisters…) We think it matters that dairy cows want to be mamas, too!

Why does a cow produce milk anyway?

Most people don’t stop to think about this, but dairy cows don’t produce milk for our convenience. They produce milk to feed their calves. Standard fare, even on the most progressive of dairies (the 1%ers), is to take the babies from the mamas and raise them in hutches. It’s considered the only practical and financially feasible way to milk a cow. But what if it’s not?

I always thought that I wasn’t going to be a “real” dairy farmer because I couldn’t do it — selling the calves off the farm in front of their bellowing mamas. I just didn’t have the stomach for it. For a couple of years as we were transitioning from having 12 cows to having 30+ cows, we had a nurse cow herd, so that every other mother got to keep her baby and adopted a baby from another mother, who we then milked. It was hard on the mothers at first, but they got over it, or so it seemed.

But if you really spend time with cows and observe their ways with an open heart, you can see that dairy cows want to be mamas too, even the “poor” moms usually have some past trauma around their babies being taken that makes them not as adept at being mamas anymore. We’ve dealt with this a lot. Sometimes dairy cows experiencing the first time being a mother means they always think you are about to take their baby, and they aren’t happy about it!

Enrica, of our cows who loved being a mama the most, would periodically “steal” other babies from less intensely committed mamas so we made her a nurse cow. Here she is accepting both her baby and another baby, instantly. The horned cow in the back right is gentle Gracie all grown up. She got to keep her glorious crown of horns her whole life, even after we went to a hornless herd for the cows’ safety as our numbers grew.

Taking time to observe, it’s not always as it seems…

A nurse cow herd is definitely better than hutches, but it’s still nothing like the health and well-being and peace that comes from raising all of the babies on their mothers. This is still considered wildly impractical by most “real” dairy people. But what if the way we dairy is broken? What if it needs a fresh perspective? And what if the answer isn’t milk from oats or soybeans or nuts, all of which are nutritionally less dense and much harder on the earth to grow than grass. What if we just need to find a way to raise the young and milk the mamas too? I credit our farm manager, Heidi, for giving me the courage to say let’s just raise all the calves on cows.

Little Nathan, just 10 days old, hanging with the big kids and mamas. Real milk comes from cows that get to be mothers, too. And that means bull calves also need a life worth living.

That’s exactly what we do today. This year we will milk 40 cows — interestingly enough, 40 is the threshold for what seems to constitute a “real” dairy farm for lots of practical and economic reasons, although a lot of pioneers in micro dairy are changing those assumptions — with their calves at their sides. Boys and girls a like. Because it’s what is right and true.

It’s not easy, and we don’t have it all figured out yet, and nor do be begrudge other farmers who aren’t practicing this principle. We are still working on the economic model to make it all possible, which is why if you care about this kind of change in dairy, the biggest thing you could do to cheer us on is buy our beef, pork, lamb and eggs — and raw “pet” milk for your furry friends. But I believe with my whole heart it’s where regenerative dairy is headed.

My mama holding Vivian as an infant while I milked Greeley. Motherhood is part of animal husbandry, and that means we honor all the mothers and mothering.

Giving thanks where it is due — mothering as a team

In the meantime, I want to thank my own mother who made it possible that I could let dairy cows be mamas too. She helped and continues to help raise my baby, so that I can help cows be mothers and bring about a shift in how we think about dairy to make this possible.

The picture of Vivian collapsed on the couch in her Moby wrap was how she would continue napping after I worked for hours with her attached to me. She was a lot to carry, and worth it.

My mother gave me a break so that I could keep going, and she knew that I didn’t want my baby far from me. That’s the same life we give our cows and their babies.

Supporting our farm means these are principles important to you, too. A homestead meant that we could do everything the way we wanted to. The farm is our way of sharing that homestead with you.

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.