Goings On

A Brief Meditation on Gratitude on Thanksgiving Morning

We here at Manyfold have so very, very much to be grateful for: we’ve lived through our first year of farming on our own, our ewes are happy and healthy, our chickens are productive and funny as can be, I could sit down with our three dogs and have a whole conversation with them about how grateful I am for their work; the egg business is booming, even as winter approaches; so many good people have helped make our farm sucessful this year, to name a few: our parents who came out almost every week to help with chores in the dead of summer heat; our friends who buy our eggs, come out to workdays, and get excited about what we’re doing; our neighbors who come out and lend a hand, buy eggs, and tell us how much they can’t wait for lamb and cheese; our community without which we could not have cut our hay, built our chicken houses, re-roofed the barn, or rescued two of our dogs (Carter W. and Chip N., I’m looking at you!); our customers who keep coming back for more, and especially to our co-producers who inspire us every day. Without these farming folks this whole endeavor to provide good, clean, and fair food to people would be an absurd task. I am so grateful to call you among my friends.

As I write this, I see that building a farm creates a feast of gratitude, from the people around us to the food on our plates: it is all conncected. We could not make food without the people who help us, and we would not have people to help us if we did not have food. If Garrison Keillor is right when he tells us, “gratitude is the deepest way we are happy,” and I believe he is, then we have had a year of unbelievable happiness.

So, as you sit down to your bountiful meal today, consider for a moment how this food came to be. Consider the people around you and how they came to be among you. Focus your minds eye on all the connections present at your table and take pleasure in it. It will make you happy. I promise.

I leave you with the words of Wendell Berry,

Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

I wish you all the deepest pleasure of gratitude this Thanksgiving. Be well and eat well.

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Press Clippings

I’m so thrilled! Apparently, a writer for the Atlanta Creative Loafing nabbed some of our eggs and decided to write about them. Glowingly. All I’ve got to say is that it’s not us, it’s the chickens. If you let these birds be themselves, then that’s all you need to make a good egg.

If you’re in the area and want some of these “creamy, dreamy” eggs, you can start buying them the week after Thanksgiving at The Local Farmstand ,at Bella Cucina, or, through our CSA program starting up the first week of January.

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What We’ve Been Up To

After the past few more intelectual/political posts I thought it was high time for just a plain old update as to what in the world we have been up to over the past few weeks. Here’s a quick run-down:

Haying. Making hay came late this year, so we only took one cut from two of our pastures (Southfarthing and Little Pasture). This took about a week longer than expected because about five passes in, our mower bit the dust. After taking it to the shop to see if it could be salvaged, it was pronounced dead, so, we needed a new mower. Trouble is, a new mower will run you about $7000 and after a litany of start-up costs this year, with still more essential stuff to get hold of (see below) we decided to put that expense off as long as possible. Fortunately, a neighbor down the road cuts hay and came out to mow for us for a tidy $175. Problem solved! Of course, the delay in mowing put us dangerously close to some rain. As the freshly cut hay sat in the field to dry, I heard little pitter-patters on my roof. For the second time in my life (the first being last year when so many farms flooded from an excess of rain), I prayed for the rain to stop. It only rained off-and-on for about 6 minutes. Blessedly.

It took us a grand total of four nights to pick up and store all the hay. In that time, we also broke the arm of the tedder by hitting a fence post, the rake by running one of the hydraulic hoses through the PTO, and the bale thrower through one of the belts coming loose. We were able to fix everything without problem, but my goodness were we delayed. Thus, we baled into the night. Fortunelty, we had some help. The first night, Tim, one of our neighbors came by to watch the process and got wrangled into driving the truck with our trailer behind it so that RJ, our trusty employee (see below) picked up the bales and stacked them. We finished that first round swilling beer by starlight, filthy, tired, and deeply satisfied. Another week or so went by before we finished up, again, with Ross and RJ working into the night slinging and stacking bales into the hay barn.  Ross came home that last night after so much hard, hard work and simply said as he beamed at me, “we brought the harvest in.”

Finding a good employee. With Ross’ day job and my work on our local charter school, plus the day-to-day of keeping a house, we quickly realized that we needed some help on the farm to keep things moving. Somewhat dreading the process of finding a person and training them, I was happily surprised that help came almost immediately in the form of RJ, a former Serenbe Farms intern who has spent the last few years travelling around working on all sorts of farms in all sorts of situations. He’s worked on livestock farms, vegetable farms doing pretty much every type of farm work imaginable, plus, he has tractor skills. He has been a total godsend.

Eggs. While we’ve been working on building our flock of sheep, we’ve also been maintaining a flock of chickens whose eggs keep the cash flowing for the farm. Sort of. We’ve been developing relationships with restaurants, retailers, CSA customers, and farmer’s markets to make sure our weekly output of around 52 dozen eggs get sold. We hold a candling license, which involved going to a one day class and taking an exam that they gave the answers for (ask Ross about it sometime). Each week, we wash and pack eggs, label the cartons, and carry them off to market. It takes about two months worth of egg sales to pay for their certified organic feed, but they do, along with a touch extra to pay for the overhead of raising them, housing them, and paying RJ. The markets are a lot of fun. It’s wonderful to be putting our name out there, getting positive feedback about our plans, and hearing how much folks appreciate access to pasture-raised eggs. It makes me feel like a real farmer, actually feeding people real food.

Infrastructure. This has been huge. A farm, however small, needs a certain amount of infrastructure to function smoothly. This is a long, slow process. The main infrastructure projects have been fencing, water, equipment, and structures. The fencing early this year came pretty quickly. Ross already had some good fencing expertise and was able to pick a good fencer to work with and we knew pretty much exactly what we wanted. Water, on the other hand, is still in the planning stages. We’ve got pretty much no experience in hydrophysics, so we went to our county extension agent for help. Unfortunately, we live in a county that is a whole lot more urban than rural, so our agent really lacks in some of the deeper areas of farming. So we hit the Internet and have been developing what we think is a workable plan. This is really what farming is about so much of the time: you’ve gotta be an expret in pretty much everything, and if you’re not, you’ve gotta learn and make d with what you’ve got while you’re learning. Our “make do” for water has been the use of a 200 gallon water tank strapped to a small flatbed trailer and a whole lot of pasture pipe that we use to fill the ewe’s 40 gallon tank about 5-7 times per week (depending on the heat). For much of the summer, we made use of our hilly landscape and ran the water through the pipe with gravity, which is easier said than done. We spent a silly amount of time getting the pasture pipe to lay just right to get flow going, and eventually, after spending sometimes as long as 45 minutes getting water to flow, we broke down and bought a small pump and a car battery and I tell you what, a little bit of technology can go a long way to save time and relieve stress. It only takes about 10 minutes to fill the ewe’s waterer now. Hopefully, soon, with a little more planning we will have a system in place that will keep us from having to spend any time on watering at all. Hopefully.

Alongside these two major projects we’ve been slowly working on getting the farm’s structures sound. Our 150+ year-old barn got a new roof and a few new floorboards, joists, and rafters. We’re working on putting new doors on so that we will be able to use it this winter in case of any early lambs. The hay barn also needed some roof repairs, and was completely filled with the junky detritus of old wood, random bits of metal, plastic, and various other items that invariably collect on farms in the name of the noble and industrious, if not flawed intention of “you never know when you might need it.” The barns have been cleaned out in several rounds. We’ve taken about 4 dumpster loads (20ft-30ft) of junk out of the two of them, making room for our tractor, bush hog, and bailer, as well as about 500-600 bales of hay and room for some indoor animal housing.

Flock management. This takes up the bulk of our time on the farm. We rotate our sheep on pasture more-or-less daily, picking up portable electrified fencing and setting it back up in a new spot and calling the ewes to come enjoy the fresh grass, which is so much fun to watch as they eagerly trot into the new paddock, pronking, and baaing their little hearts out. This is the essential feature of our management. It works to keep both the pastures and the stock healthy and happy, but it takes a bit of work. These portable fences, while dead useful for management intensive grazing systems like ours, are also insanely frustrating to use. The slightest mistake in how you set it up or take it down can cause tangling, sagging, and twisting that can sap you of your time and sanity. Eventually, we plan to have a system in place akin to what many of the New Zealanders do. Once we are at full stocking capacity and have a sense of how we want the sheep to move across the pastures each season, we will set up permanent and semi-permanent fencing for paddocks that we won’t have to set up at all. All they would require is opening a gate. . . someday.

Planning the creamery. A good chunk of our time has also been devoted to figuring out our creamery. We’ve been working with a gentleman in Wisconsin to help with design as we’ve studied the GA regulations, conversed with other cheese makers, and formulated recipes for some 5 or 6 different cheeses. It’s a hell of a lot to think about all trying to balance out anticipated demand (how much cheese we can sell) with anticipated production limitations (how much cheese we can make) with overhead and capitol costs (which are rather a lot). We don’t want to be too small and have to spend extra money later to expand and replace already expensive equipment, but we don’t want to start out too big in case we overestimate our production capacity and/or demand that would keep us from paying the bills. We’re at the point now were we are nailing down or floor plan and equipment lists, but it will still be some time before we are fully confident and ready to break ground. I’m looking forward to getting the ewes in milk this spring and starting to get familiar with our recipes, our milk quality, and our milk quantity. This will really be the litmus test for the farm: how good is our fertility and can we do what it takes to sustain a really good milking flock?  If we can do that, we can proceed, but until we do that, it’s all a massive leap of faith. Fingers and toes crossed, prayers said.

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sheep wrangling

Owen and Christine of Anthony-Masterson photography are an amazing couple who volunteer their skills to benefit the movement towards sustainable farming in Georgia. They’ve been out to the farm a couple of times now, and most recently, got some awesome footage of Ross wrangling our sheep for hoof-trimming. As we don’t yet have a proper handling facility built yet, this process can be a little crazy, involving electric mesh fencing as a crowding pen and a shepherds crook. As the video below attests, this makeshift system has its problems, but such is the way of things in a farm’s first year… humility and patience is the name of the game.

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Live Animals!

Backstory: The sticker came off the crate in which our guardian puppy Gemma flew to Atlanta. Found the lamb exactly like this during afternoon chores a few days ago.

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first night

Early Spring Evening Sky

Tonight’s the first night on pasture for our animals. Before this, our chicks have been safely enclosed by four walls and our sheep penned behind the barn. Now the chicks have become pullets and are in a chicken house in our smallest pasture. The sheep and one of our guardian dogs, Franklin, are enclosed in an oval of electric net fencing. In a few days time, they’ll move to another patch of grass, then another and another all throughout the spring and summer. The rotation has begun, and I know that I have so, so much to learn over the coming months.

I turned through Wendell Berry’s collection of poems, A Timbered Choir, and without going very far found some words to capture the feeling right now:

The pasture, bleached and cold two weeks ago,
Begins to grow in the spring light and rain;
The new grass trembles under the wind’s flow.
The flock, barn-weary, comes to it again,
New to the lambs, a place their mothers know,
Welcoming, bright, and savory in its green,
So fully does the time recover it.
Nibbles of pleasure go all over it.

— Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, 1982, III

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zen and the art of keeping chickens

Over the past few weeks we have been raising up our first flock of chickens. The little balls of fluff that arrived in a cardboard box at the Palmetto Post Office on a cold Sunday afternoon (the postal worker told me I had to come get them before 4:30 because she had a cake in the oven and had to get home to take it out–- how much do I love living in a rural community?!) and just last weekend we moved them out of the brooder house (i.e. garage) and into their permanent portable chicken house out in the pasture. They have just exited their awkward semi-feathered stage and are entering full-blown pullet-hood.

These birds are so much fun. I’ve spent an unusually large amount of time just watching them. I can watch them for hours, given the chance. I find myself saving chicken-related farm chores for the very end of the day so I can take my time with them and just watch them. It’s hard to describe the mesmerizing effect they have on me. It’s not that they’re doing anything particularly interesting, I mean, they’re chickens, not The Bourne Identity, and yet somehow, I find them just as riveting. So when I came across this article by Peter Lennox titled Pecking Order at the Times Higher Education website, I began to understand their hypnotic power over me. Lennox writes,

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

It’s really, really true. There is something about watching these feathery creatures that clarifies the human condition. These birds elicit a zen-like inner calm. It’s as if the chicken, a creature so utterly and helplessly in-the-moment, transfers a part of its most central nature to its watcher; this central nature, is bound up in the fact that,

Humans got the mental wherewithal to try to control everything; the chicken’s future rested on being tasty. Chickens are thus relieved of an enormous responsibility, making their lives simpler. They don’t have to organise the whole world, or attend meetings to discuss policies “going forward”; they don’t have to invent the future continually – it just comes when it comes.

It is therefore a serious relief to watch chickens. They serve to remind me that the great responsibility of “inventing the future”, which is precisely the thing I am finding myself constantly engaged in as I build this farm, is all a bit silly. The “I’m running a business here” mentality I have been know to affect melts away in the chicken house as does (quite blissfully) the time I could be spending doing other things. When I watch them, I am learning, among other things,

competition without co-operation is nonsense; you can’t win by simply eradicating all the opposition – that’s a pyrrhic victory. In life, winning really isn’t everything – it isn’t even anything. Taking part is all.

Reward and risk go hand in hand. The top cockerel has to take the biggest share of both. A flock can manage without a cockerel, but a cockerel without a flock is nothing.

A flock can keep you warm, inform you about dangers and advantages, and provide you with companionship; but you have to work at it.

Everyone should have a place in the pecking order. Strive for your place in life, not someone else’s. Someone else’s bread isn’t necessarily tastier than your own. Envy will cost you dearly.

Don’t let “flock-think” smother your own opinions; give yourself space to be an individual. Common sense is useful, but it’s not always right. The society you’re in may prompt you to behave badly, but only you can change that.

I can’t wait to start entertaining requests for hosting corporate retreats at the farm with required chicken watching. . . Go read the article and start spending time with chickens. It’s good for you and it’s good for business. And of course, in the meantime,, you can enjoy watching them here:

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chicks!

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if you can’t explain it with a crayon, it’s too complicated

The farm phone line has been ringing off the hook for the past couple of weeks, getting our ducks in a row on everything from a tractor and livestock trailer to getting electricity running properly (we’ve had to move an electrical pole!) to meeting with architects for the creamery to trying to pin down where all the sheep are coming from in the Spring. In the plus column right now is that our chicks are coming and fencing is starting on Monday. We also got our farm truck, which is very, very exciting because now we can move stuff around! However, despite all of the intense excitement, one thing sent my adrenals into hyperdrive: money. Getting hold of it, and understanding what the heck to do with it is just a massive, essential, pain-in-the-ass. We’ve been using GoogleSpreadsheet to develop a 4-year cash-flow for the farm. While spreadsheets are a fantabulous tool, we found that sometimes they add too much complexity to the situation. We got to the point, about mid-week last week where neither of us were at all sure anymore of how the farm was going to support itself. Panic ensued. We moved numbers around, tweaked things here and there on the model, only to realize that all of a sudden we had unknowingly increased the number of sheep we needed to be sustainable to 600! We totally exceeded the capacity of our land. In all our projections, we lost sight of the ground itself. We totally lost control.

This red-flag brought Ross to say, “you know, if I can’t explain it with a crayon, it’s too complicated.” So, we had what we dubbed The Crayon Meeting. We closed the computer, grabbed a marker, a white board, and a calculator, and ran our cash-flow.

We both felt better. We know, completely and totally that these numbers are generally very unlikely to be anything close to what is really going to happen, but what it did tell us is that we aren’t crazy and that the business can run without dying: it’s possible. We always knew this intuitively, but the numbers had to reflect this intuition on some level. They do, and I feel like I can breathe a little easier. It was, however, a big wake-up call to the reality of the potential loss if this doesn’t work. It’s a terrifying thought, one I can hardly entertain. But for me, that was all the more fire underneath me to see to it that is doesn’t. I’m carrying Joel Salatin’s words around with me like a talisman: you will never regret self-abandonment. Lines from Wendell Berry’s The Wild Geese flow through my mind:

Geese appear high over us,
pass and the sky closes. Abandon
as in love or sleep
holds them to their way clear.

It is abandon that will hold me, that will help me to find the way though this. Abandon, according to my trusty dictionary, in its most literal sense, means to give up control. There is such an element of all of this that is totally out of our control. Project and run numbers though we might, we will be wrong. But that is in no way a reason to panic or a reason to say no. This may be the biggest leap of faith I will ever undertake. I could turn inside out with nerves. But underneath the nerves is this unyielding sense of purpose; a kind of unseen, unknown, totally felt thread that I am following in the dark.

This month’s issue of Culture Magazine offers a short little story that calms and soothes me when I’m feeling frayed. It is totally sappy, totally the stuff of a Hallmark Family Movie of the Week, but it works, and I see myself inside of it, and I feel better:

Cindy Callahan:
sheep farmer, cheesemaker, employer, mother, grandmother, former attorney, nurse, and co-fonder of Bellwether Farms in Sonoma Co. California.

I live on the ranch. The alarm goes off at 4:45. I get up, get my clothes on, brush my teeth, fill my carafe with coffee, and head down to the milking. I’m not a people person; I’m an animal person. We have 34 acres. We used to live in a very large house in San Francisco. One day my husband saw an ad for a piece of property in Sonoma. So we drove out to see it.

It all started with a crazy idea. People thought we had a business plan, but we didn’t. In the beginning, we thought we’d raise steer because we like beef. A livestock advisor came out to visit and said that for every steer you could raise five sheep on the same land. I’d never even seen a sheep, except in pictures.
With the ram, nature took its course. I sold lamb to friends until the number got to be too much. I called up Chez Panisse. They were our first commercial customer. . .

People said, “that crazy woman from San Francisco thinks she can milk sheep.” They’d come in from the fog –we get a lot of fog down here– and they’d stand in the milking parlor and just watch. “I had to see it to believe it,” they’d say.

I used to be a clotheshorse in Manhattan. I was a single nurse, living on the East Side. I spent my days off at Bonwit Teller and Lord & Taylor. . .

I always say I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I say if you have a dream, pursue it. . . I was 51 years old when I did this.

(copied with apologies to Culture Magazine and Cindy Callahan of Bellwether Farms, you’ve inspired me, I’ve only copied part of the story, please don’t sue me)

I say I’m 26. I’ve been a scholar and a teacher. I’ve seen lots of sheep live and in person, herded them, worked with them, sent them to slaughter, and sold them. I know what curd is supposed to look like before you cut it. If Cindy Callahan could do all it takes to be in this business at 51 with what experience she had, I’ll be damned if I can’t do it too.

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temple gradin: the movie

This evening, after supper, Ross came running out of the bathroom yelling “oh my god oh my god!” I thought he had broken an arm or something the way he was shouting. Turns out he had been reading the most recent copy of Vanity Fair and came across an add that neither of us ever expected we would in a million years see:


Holy frijoles, folks! The coolness is of the extreme. Temple Grandin is one of the most amazing people I have ever known about. Her writing has deeply influenced my relationship with animals and has grounded me with sound reason in the feeling I have always had about how we ought to treat animals. She is as close to Dr. Doolittle as we have yet gotten, and thousands of times more profound. She is one of a very small number of people who has actually accomplished real good in the difficult path to ease the suffering of animals, especially the animals we eat. She has done so, not through the angry, sometimes violent, or else sappy, paths of arguments based on cuteness, but because she has provided the world with an inescapable rationale for why ending the suffering of animals is important. She has written many books. I highly recommend all of them.

Apart from her amazing work, she has lived quite an amazing life; one I will be glad to get a picture of in this upcoming film. From the trailer, I’m hopeful that they’ve done her justice.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
This work by Rebecca and Ross Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.