Category: Blog

Here we are nearing the end of 2018.

We are grateful for this year, and especially for YOU.

We know it’s the time when lots of folks look around and find gratitude in the things they have, which is wonderful, and something we all should do much more of, and not just in the six weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

As we’ve trucked along this summer, particularly starting in April and May with our on-farm events, we have had so many reasons to be inspired and thankful and grateful and hopeful about what our farm is growing into, and what it means for you and for us.

We have a vision to “create food, family and farm in the heart of Vermont”.  Yes, OK, that sounds like a canned tag line in some ways, but it’s the absolute truth.  We love food.  We’ve strengthened our existing family and found new family through sharing, cooking, and competing in food.  Farming in the way that we do, caring for the land as an ecosystem and a place for connection and education, allows us to create an outdoor classroom for students of all ages.  Our farm is simply the embodiment of the idea that home is where your heart is. For us, that’s literally the Heart of Vermont, Randolph.

In 2018, we set out to test some ideas about sharing this vision with more people, and new people.  We want to grow the family!  And people responded, like:

• Deb & Gary who saw an ad for our grilling class in the local Front Porch Forum listerv and just thought it sounded like a fun thing to do.
• Kathi, Al and Mary Lou who were each looking for a short getaway from an ordinary evening at our on-farm BBQ dinner.
• Sue and Jenny, who came to our pop-up Village Idiots concert and BBQ dinner.
• Barb, Billie Jo, Cat, and Didi, who shared teaching and learning and digging and looking at soil through magnifying glasses at our Land Listeners workshop.
• Keegan and Isaiah, who came visiting as Randolph students, and are coming back as friends and farm helpers.
• Rob and Gus and MB and Susan and Dave, who all came to help with farm tasks and events.
• Ellen and Stuart who brought their grandson to see the lambs at our Lamb Open House, and Lori and Sarah who walked FANCY up the hill from our overflow parking area.
• AND non-event friends who just wanted to see the place and what we do, like Siva and Darshon and Stephen and Francie and Dave and our guardian angel, Doug, who keeps an eye on sheep and the wildlife on the lower 40!

We love you all.

We tested all sorts of events this year, trying to offer a variety of cooking, eating, and educational experiences.  We are grateful that each event brought old friends and new, and that everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves and feel welcome.

As we look toward 2019, we’re dreaming up a new schedule (with dates to be finalized early in the new year).  Lamb Open House will kick off the events season in the spring, with bouncing baby lambs from Lovey, Dot, Dulce, Brady, and the rest of the crew. We’ll be offering at least two grilling classes, with one focused on tailgate foods and one aimed at building women’s confidence in grilling (with a special award-winning female grillmaster!). We plan to host at least one on-farm dinner in mid summer, possibly a plated Saturday dinner or a Sunday asado.  If all goes well, we’ll host at least a couple of farmer workshops around livestock and land management.

Do you have requests for particular events, or ideas about how we can better serve YOUR food, family and farm needs?  Do you know someone you think would enjoy attending an on-farm event?  Please encourage them to sign up for our email list, so they can be in the know about farm happenings!

Thank you all so much for the kindness, community and appreciation you’ve shown us this year, and we are looking forward to more fun, hugs and great food in 2019.

Jenn and Chris

P.S. AND watch for news about our 2019 yurt crowdfunding campaign, coming soon! 

I feel like a whole bunch of people I care about are hurting right now.  All around, our community suffers from grief, confusion, aimlessness, emptiness, loss, and pain.  Be patient, friends.  Have faith.  Have faith in each other, in our human community, and in the bright and beautiful future ahead. Ask for help, and trust each other.

Let me share an example of faith and community.

Five years ago this month, we moved into a little rental house in the village of Randolph, after selling our house of close to 16 years.  In order to sell that house, we did some cleaning, threw items in storage, got it listed with a realtor, and made a handshake deal with our next-door neighbors. Larry, Sr. looked around, nodded his head and said, “yep, most likely going to buy the place”.  That was May.  We didn’t talk about it again until September.

In the mean time, we moved forward.  We threw out eight(!) heaping pickup truckloads of old boxes, trash, books and toys for the thrift store, and built a mountain of scrap metal and items to leave by the roadside for neighbors to take freely.  At a particular moment in the summer, we had to decide whether a modest windfall from Chris’ job would be used to buy our winter wood (the usual choice), or we would have faith that the house would sell and we could invest the money in other bills and other places.  We stepped off the cliff without the net of firewood for the winter.  It created a hard deadline.

We had no idea where we would be able to rent, and we had no idea where our sheep would live. We thought we would be in a place just temporarily while our land sold and we moved to the new farm we had picked out as *the* place (it wasn’t).  I investigated several options for the sheep to move elsewhere; nothing fit our budget so we decided to keep looking for a different option.

If you are reading this blog and have followed our story at all, you know we ultimately found the right farm, and are working diligently to share a space of home and family and community and good food and lively music with the person reading this post, and more people like you.

This post isn’t just about good things happening in our particular life, it’s about having faith in humanity and community, and believing deep down in our hearts that things will be OK.

Our move from the old place is a shining example of that.

Our neighbors honored their handshake on an “as-is” property, which totally could have gone sideways. An acquaintance of 20 years connected us with her husband’s rental opportunity (and we grew closer by sharing some very pivotal life moments together). A friend of my dad’s from high school came to join us in painting the rental house, just because he was between painting jobs and had time.  Our son had the support of his friends as we bounced between awkward living situations.  Our family squeezed itself into a teeny rental to celebrate Thanksgiving as we collapsed after a marathon move.

Turned out, we didn’t didn’t need the wood, but we did need all the help we could get, and were grateful for it.  There were plenty of slips and slides, but in every case, someone stepped in to help in some way.

That pretty much describes our experience in finding and buying the Tilton farm as well, except that we stopped denying our faith in the future and started asking for help on the heavy lift of our life’s dream.  At first it was so hard to ask.  That’s not the way we were raised, except that community *is* a way of life in rural Vermont.  That’s how farmers got harvests in.  It just was, and there was no shame in asking, especially when people or animals would starve otherwise.  Community can’t happen, can’t grow, can’t build success…unless someone asks, “can you help me?” and someone else answers, “yes, what can I do?”.

So, as awkward as it was at first, when people asked if they could help move or paint or truck animals, we said yes.  We asked for help with a financial shortfall—something we would *never* have dared do before.  Every time we asked for help and someone did, we helped build their faith in people, too.  See, helping people is what builds community over the long term.  Helping other people makes US feel good.  I’m coming to learn that not asking is a way of robbing someone *else* of feeling good.

This morning, I remembered a particular example to illustrate this last point.  Several years ago, we met a new barbecue friend.  He saw me hauling heavy equipment out of the trailer and rushed to help me.  See, his parents raised him to always offer help, especially to a lady (his words).  Me, I pushed away his help, because I saw myself as a strong farmer and an independent woman.  Who won out of this situation?  No one.

I hurt my new friend’s feelings by rejecting his kind offer, and I was more tired than I would have otherwise been if I’d accepted his help.  It took me some time to see it, but I’ve learned that accepting help is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of openness and a way to help others feel useful and appreciated.

If you are hurting or struggling, my experience has been this:

The most powerful act of faith we can exercise is to let our community help us.

The most powerful action we can take to build a positive future…is to ask for that help.

Thanks for listening,

Jenn

Plenty of people love to eat meat, but are concerned that they shouldn’t, because of negative stories that they see about animal products. The environmental impacts of flooding manure lagoons; pictures of animals being treated poorly; the long distances food is trucked to get to our plates; and simply not knowing (or trusting) the companies or agricultural system where the animal came from.

I totally get that.

In college, I joined an animal rights group because I felt strongly that animals should be respected and treated well.  I remember sitting in our second or third meeting, feeling a tremendous disconnect from the group’s organizers, who were vegan and proudly wore plastic shoes instead of leather ones.  “How is it that plastic is a better choice than a natural product like leather? Shouldn’t we be connected to how our food affects the environment?”, I wondered. I left the group and found a more practical way to improve animal welfare.

Looking back, that was the very beginning of my path toward being a more responsible eater, and eventually, livestock farmer.

Along this path, I’ve been gathering reasons about why we should actually feel good (and not just NOT bad!) about supporting livestock farmers and buying products made from animals.

1. We care. I’ve come to understand first-hand that people who do not care about the animals that they partner with, depend upon, and ultimately gather food from (in one form or another) don’t last long as livestock farmers. This isn’t just a job that we can decide not to show up for, or call in sick to.  It’s an intense and delicate balance to care enough to be willing to be tired, hot, wet, cold, stiff, muddy, and (name your discomfort) while pushing yourself to put the animals first.  And then caring enough to end an animal’s life quickly, when they are sick, or when it’s time to harvest them. Last winter I had to euthanize my two oldest ewes, and I bawled like a baby, but it was the right thing to do because they were suffering.
2. We manage the land and the animals well. All of our management is focused on keeping the land and animals healthy. We pay attention to where manure builds up, how much rain is soaked up by the land and stays there (instead of running off to cause floods and damage), and give the animals fresh food every day.  Our goal is to be part of a sustainable system that brings more wildlife onto the land, and grows more kinds of food on the same land.  A great example includes the apple trees we have been pruning, which now bear more fruit, and attract the tasty, nutritional venison-producing deer! I spend time every day watching and documenting how the land is changing under our management, because I am out on it.
3. We let animals have a life and express their natural behaviors. Pigs root, and sheep graze, and turkeys wander and fly. You may not realize, but pigs are great nappers.  Much like us, they only get out of bed for a good reason (like breakfast), and they’re quite fond of a Sunday afternoon snooze (every day).  They love to explore the world through their noses, and are quite easily bored.  A small fenced area with a concrete floor doesn’t really allow a pig to be a pig in its fullest way.  Poking around the roots of trees, finding nuts and berries, laying down in a warm patch of sun in the winter, or mud in the summer—these are signs of a pig at its happiest.  They make little grunting sounds.  That’s what happiness sounds like, and we want them to feel that right to the last moment.

   

    

4. We know (so you know) where the animal came from, how it was raised, and how it died. Some years ago, we bought the Spring piglets from a farm that didn’t raise their own; they shipped them in from Canada. I’m sure the folks in Canada did a fine job, but I really wanted to KNOW where the pigs had come from.  I wanted to have a relationship with a person I knew, and be able to count on our relationship well into the future.  I think it might also be worth mentioning that those pigs always seemed perpetually stressed, and nippy, throughout their lives.  Was it breeding? Was it early life experience?  Was it just that batch of piglets?

   I’ll never know, because since then (for over 15 years), I’ve bought piglets from the same extended family, who live a couple of towns over.  It’s not just that these folks are old friends and adopted family at this point, or that we (through our customers’ support) are helping to maintain two other small farms in addition to ourselves, or that these pigs are blue-ribbon winners at the local fair and are used to help kids get involved in 4H and caring for livestock themselves…NO, it’s about taking some of the mystery out of where our food comes from and adding in some trust.  We trust that our friends raise great piglets (and they do).

5. Meat such as lamb is nutrient dense. There are good reasons humans have been eating meat for thousands of years, well before the beginning of formal agriculture. Registered dietician Diana Rodgers spends a good deal of time talking about the nutritional benefits of eating meat, and how not all types of meat are equal, either.  According to Diana, “grass-fed lamb has a better than 1:2 ratio of omega 3’s to 6’s, where roasted chicken has a ratio of 1:8. It’s also has twice the iron, 3x zinc, and a 3oz portion of lamb contains 2.2 mcg of B12 compared to chicken which has only 0.3. Lamb is simply superior to chicken, nutritionally speaking. Also, for those looking to cause “least harm,” one lamb can produce a lot more meat than a chicken, and an animal raised outdoors on pasture has a much better life than one raised on 100% grain indoors under artificial lighting for its entire life.”

6. Some meat production is GOOD for the environment (and not just NOT bad). I know I’ve spent time and blog space above waxing poetic about the pigness of pigs, but the true animal heroines of land management are ruminants. In our case, the sheep. Ruminant animals like cows, sheep, goats, deer, and buffalo, are something magical.  They can eat things we can’t eat (like grass), and gain nutrition from them.  They have a multi-chambered stomach that acts like a giant beer vat, fermenting fiber to release proteins and sugars that are usable by the animals.

   This is a process we humans are simply not designed to do, and it’s a big reason why nomadic people like the Maasaai of Kenya, and folks living in the Swiss Alps are able to survive in very harsh environments; ruminant animals can create food in places that we can not.

   I will talk about what “good” grazing management means in another blog post, but the really important thing to understand about grazing animals and the environment is that the ecosystems of Earth co-evolved with animals.  Grazing animals helped sequester carbon in the soil through plant roots, kept land open for nesting birds, built deep roots to hold soil in the Great Plains, and encouraged a wide variety of species from spiders and insects to wolves and bears.  What we do now using portable fence is recreate what Nature did for millennia before we got involved.

   

    

7. We honor meat all the way to the plate. This is a big one for us, as foodies and cooks. We want to take good care of an animal and give it a full life, but we also want it to taste good.  If we invest our time for months or years to raise an animal, and you invest your money to support us and the animal we raised on our farm, we think you should have the best eating experience possible.  We want to help you understand how to cook meat properly and enjoy it to its fullest.  With every “Stewie” steak and “Tennant” stew, we are grateful for the lives that they share with us, but also it’s an extra way for us to honor them by helping them taste as great as possible. We think the greatest way to honor a life is to lick the plate!
8. Being a responsible eater means being connected to the life and death that we are part of. Our goals as farmers and good stewards are to minimize and prioritize how much death is involved in our choice to eat. It’s been said, “everything eats and is eaten.” It’s true that something has to die for us to eat, whether you eat meat, vegetables, grains, or other foods.  What might be interesting to know is that what’s the most obvious (above-ground animals) must balance with the less obvious (below-ground animals) in any food system.We simply can not assume that nothing dies when we eat.

   It is true that a sheep dies and we eat it.  But that sheep lived on grass that housed Orb Weaver spiders, ground wasps, grubs, and dung beetles.  Under the soil, there might have been up to 14 tons (per acre) of bacteria, worms, insects, and fungi. In our pasture system, the soil has not been tilled for many years.

   Tillage breaks up the soil “housing” microbes, worms and insects.  Exposure to air releases carbon into the atmosphere, starving the microbes living there.  Tillage is involved in the production of most common vegetable crops, and it is arguably responsible for more death per acre (by number or body weight) than any livestock farm. The path of greater life surviving, and a healthier farm ecosystem, means that the above-ground animal in the system must be harvested. And these concepts about life and death through soil management really put a different spin on whether our food choices are “sustainable” or not.

9. It tastes really, really good. Chris and I spend a lot of time eating meat, and it’s the star of the show, as it should be. When you feel a deep connection to a food, and you prepare it well, and the flavor knocks the park out of anything you can find in the supermarket; well, it sure feels like all the pieces have fallen together, just right.

If you’ve felt in your heart like buying local and pastured meats are the right way to go, I hope that by sharing some of my own reasons to eat meat, you’ll be better equipped to handle questions and comments by other people.  And that you’ll in general have a better understanding of what sort of life you are contributing to and investing in: the farm, the animals, the soil, ours, and YOUR OWN.

Thanks for reading,

Jenn

There’s a little something extra special about Vermont in August.  Maybe it’s the fact that things slow down a teeny bit (seems like everyone takes a few days off sometime in August!) or that we cling a little more tightly as the evening starts to arrive a little earlier.

It could be I’m speaking a little too much about my own place in life, but August reminds me of the “middle age” of the year. The fresh excitement of May and June has yielded to July, and then August comes on to remind us to value the warmth before winter comes.

What do we love?

• Parties—Chris and I have August birthdays as do a bunch of our family members…this leads to a host of family parties, tournaments, visits, and hugs. Oh sure, there’s plenty of house cleaning, cooler schlepping and Monday-morning exhaustion to go along, but We Regret Nothing.
• Family—I can’t explain why, but August is the month we take the time to see people that we don’t see most of the rest of the year. Our family is a tangled delightful mess of birth, marriage, friendship, job, and adopted relatives with lots of friend-family mixed in.  August is THAT perfect excuse to take a Friday afternoon or be sure to go out to hear a Wednesday night concert, because we know family will be there.
• Blueberries—This farm is a classic reminder that our actions aren’t as much for ourselves as the ones who come after us. Those who knew Otis Tilton tell us that he was glowing with pride over the blueberry bushes he tended. We absolutely understand why.  They were the first farm crop that greeted us just days after we closed on the property and have become a source of joy and anticipation for us each summer.  Someday we’ll figure out a blueberry-related farm product (any ideas?), but for now they are mostly going into our freezer and the mouths of on-farm visitors.
• Smoked meat—OK, we love smoked meat all year (Who doesn’t? Even chicken and fish are fabulous smoked!), but in particular so many of the events we attend or host are potlucks. It seems like crispy, caramelized, smoky, tender ribs or chicken wings generate the smell and the taste of summer instantly. Sharing meat with people we love is pretty much what we’re all about.
• Golden days—I was just talking with an old friend who described August as the “golden days” when goldenrod comes into bloom, and farm fields are spread with the deep rich hue that pretty much embodies late summer. I was out moving the sheep yesterday morning and found myself stopping to linger and gaze around at the spots of late-summer sunlight scattered across the pastures.  Goldenrod might be a sign that summer is on the down side, but it’s just as much that reminder to stop and enjoy it while it’s here.

That’s truly what we love most about the summer…taking a few minutes to stop and enjoy it!

Speaking of valuing warmth before winter comes, if you are getting an itchy feeling about the oncoming fall, zip me an email!  I just got back a nice batch of smoked hams and slab bacon.

Jenn

It’s been more than eighteen months at the new farm, and there is much to share.  After the emotional roller coaster of finding and making the right location happen, we spent the fall of 2016 rushing around to get ourselves and the animals settled before winter.  And then we mostly collapsed.  Most of our friends and family forgave us for the withdrawal, and even came to share a little woodstove-and-chat time.  The door is still open (and will continue to be) for all.

Times of great change happen.  I think the past several years have been times of great change for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons.  Our extended family has had tragic losses and some (one might even say, sacred) reemergence, healing and transformation.  The farm has helped us heal and grow roots–already–that we never seemed to have developed at the old place.  Maybe it’s the regular wind up here on the hill; we must develop those deep roots to stay upright. A good lesson on so many levels.

In 2017, we spent much time just experiencing the farm through seasonal changes.  There’s so much more to understand about the wildlife and the forest and the farm’s potential, but it was a good start.  I wrote a whole bunch (270 days) of haiku.  We tried a Kickstarter campaign, which was ultimately unfunded but absolutely successful in other ways.  I wrote a three-part series about our fifteen-year journey to the farm for On Pasture.

We hosted the first of our annual Lamb Open House events to meet neighbors, moved sheep every day through the grazing season, picked a ton of blueberries, cooked up barbecue for our adjacent buddies at the Jacob’s Court mobile home park, and held an end-of-season farm workshop & dinner.  And we’re finally back into raising pigs!  All along, 2017 was about testing parts of this new life to see what fits and what doesn’t.

We have many plans for 2018, including events spread from June to October that showcase different aspects of our skill sets and the farm’s offerings.  We are building a pig roasting pit and starting to develop a gathering area around the pond.  The sheep flock is expanding and we’ll be running water pipe around the pastures to increase our capacity to include cattle in the mix.  We’re documenting everything that we can.  We’re still not sure whether 2018 is Yurt Year, but our aim is to really start digging in and sharing the farm in new ways to new people.

Much to do and say and love about the changes afoot.  My recommendation: subscribe to our newsletter to keep up!

Jenn