Prairie Heritage Farm

The 2011 Season (Year 3 of ?)

2012-01-03T06:45:00.022-07:00

The way the farm season felt sometimes.

I'll start this with the obligatory acknowledgment of it being that time again to reminisce about the past year's farm season. It's that time again.

Our winter months were dominated by our little girl, as we navigated the new terrain of parenthood. When I have a moment to reflect, it's remarkable to me that we somehow know how to take care of a baby, with no prior experience. I suppose it's a lot like our farming adventure. We've done our fair share of research, but so much of what we do, we do without a clue. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We're raising plants and a kid, but in farming, the season is less than 12 months, then you get to start all over the next year and correct your mistakes. For our child, the season is a lifetime.

In May, I quit my job off-farm job. In January and February, my lovely wife and I struggled to figure out just how I was going to work a full-time job an hour away (plus multiple-day trips for meetings), raise a baby, and work a diversified farm. She was able to find part-time online work. We went out on the open market to look for health insurance and despite the awful experience that was, we found a plan that would cover all three of us (but not for cheap). And finally, we decided to have the farm pick up our house rent and the health insurance. Up until then, the farm had only been paying for itself with very little overlap into our personal finances (it pays my cell phone bill and our internet). With those three pieces, I was able to give my 2-week notice in May, just in time for spring planting.

It's been extremely tight for both the farm and our household each month, but I think we made the right decision. If I were still working the off-farm job with the great benefits, it's unlikely we'd be able to operate the farm, which is the real benefit.

The CSAs and Crops

As our little girl Willa grew this season, the relationships among the house, the farm work, the family, and the rest of daily living changed along with her. As she crawled about, she picked up anything she found and promptly put it in her mouth. So, we couldn't let her roam the farm while we worked. She also needed multiple naps throughout the day. With nowhere to put her down on the farm, we ended up either keeping her home with Courtney, or Courtney would drive out in the car where Willa would fall asleep. We'd leave the car running with the air-conditioning on until she woke up. Courtney and I started out the season thinking we'd share the labor of the farm and of taking care of Willa, but it quickly shifted to her doing most of the Willa-care and me doing the bulk of the farm-care. Both jobs are more than one-person jobs.

No skunk problems here.

So, though I tried to keep up with the weeds in the vegetables, by mid-season, there were some vegetables swallowed and some on their way to being swallowed by weeds. We had some part-time help, a vegetable CSA member and friend who traded her labor for her vegetables, but it just wasn't enough. On and off throughout the season we had friends visit, who usually ended up helping for the day or two that they were at the farm, and that was surely welcome. At one point in the season, I was so desperate for help hoeing the corn and milk thistle that I tried to hire high school kids at $10/hour. Nobody showed up.

This year we dropped the farmers' market and we didn't regret it. We no longer had to get up at 3:30am on Saturdays, spend the majority of the day at market, and come home with leftover vegetables. That allowed us to increase our vegetable CSA membership, gave us our Saturdays to work or take the day off, and generally increased our quality of life. Despite the lack of labor and prolific weeds, we delivered our shareholders fresh vegetables weekly, without fail - a real success.

Our 100+ turkeys did well. We again lost far too many - some to a dog and a few to coyotes - but the survivors were healthy and ultimately very tasty. We have much to learn in turkey care and we have to find that balance of still being able to learn and develop a solid enterprise while growing to meet the demand. As it stands, a little over 100 turkeys is about all we can handle, especially when it comes time to butcher them. This year we had about a dozen friends help us the Saturday and Sunday before Thanksgiving, but they were long, arduous days and if we raised more turkeys, we'd need at least one more day to butcher. That's a lot to ask of our friends.

Our field crops this year had some successes and some absolute failures. Our emmer did well (what we're now calling Prairie Farro, "farro" being the Italian word for emmer). We planted our buckwheat and chickpeas very late when the soil had dried after all those spring rains. The chickpeas produced a crop, but just enough for seed for next year. The buckwheat flowered, but froze out at first frost in early September. I had also planted a northeast heirloom flint corn. It struggled all year and never produced a crop. The milk thistle I planted was doing very well, but when I flood irrigated the field, I accidentally killed it, not knowing that milk thistle doesn't like standing water. The roots rotted and my entire crop was wiped out.

We will be delivering our Grain and Seed CSA shares this coming January or February to our 30 or so shareholders. We have also been in contact with a number of co-ops and grocery stores around the state who have expressed interest in carrying our grain. A brewery and a restaurant are also interested in using our grains.

This year we also continued to sell the bulk of our farro to a wholesaler, while keeping a few hundred pounds for ourselves and our Grain and Seed CSA members.

While expanding our vegetable enterprise by increasing our CSA membership, and increasing the number of turkeys we raise are fairly straightforward ways for the farm to grow, a less straightforward and uncertain way is with of our grains. Nationally there is a growing demand for local staple crops such as wheat and barley. Simultaneously and often coinciding, is a demand for heritage and ancient grains, such as the farro or the Sonora wheat we grow. We can see a huge potential in focusing on our grains, but it's not as clear cut. It's one thing to grow the grain, but one also has to successfully clean it, store it, and above all, market it.

We've quickly realized that we are too small a scale to get our grain cleaned by someone else (unless they are also buying the bulk of the crop), yet we grow enough grain that we need specialized cleaning equipment. Because we feel our heritage and ancient grain have tremendous potential, we spent the latter part of the year focusing on our grain processing infrastructure. We successfully applied for and received a grant and are currently in the process of procuring cleaning equipment. We will likely set it up in one of Courtney's dad's buildings, 15 miles south of the farm. Since we don't know where we might be in two years (when our lease runs out on the farm), it didn't makes sense to try to set it up on the farm where we have no stake, or rent a building in town in case we don't end up near Conrad in two years. We at least know that Clyde will be on his place for the foreseeable future.

The Farm Search

Over the summer we continued negotiations to take over all or part of the farm. In the early spring, I sat down with our local loan officer with the USDA Farm Service Agency. I've visited with him before, and he's always been very good to work with, despite his obvious incredulousness at what we're trying to do. I filled out a beginning farmer land loan application for the farm's 80 dryland acres. But at some point in the summer, we decided that maybe just purchasing bare ground might not be the best route. But there was no sense in stopping the application process. We decided to let it run its course, allowing us another option should we need it. Like many government agencies, the USDA moves very slowly and I put the application process in the back of my mind.

Sometime mid-summer, after visiting with a local bank to find out what sort of home loan we might qualify for, we made an offer for the second house on the farm, most of the outbuildings, and the 20 acres we're currently leasing (there are 2 houses on the property - one in which the owners live and one that is part storage and part office). In subsequent meetings, the four of us talked about the difficulties of such a scenario (shared domestic water, a shared driveway, and other things), but in the end the timing just wasn't right and there were just too many complications.

Since our FSA loan process was still going on in the background, I decided to call the FSA to see where they were on it . Turns out we were approved for the 80 dryland acres. My thinking shifted and I started trying to figure out what it might mean to live and farm on 80 bare acres. The first issue was water, of course. The farm has a certain number of water shares from the canal company, that are tied to specific acres, but they can be transferred within a farm. Any transfers have to be approved by the canal company and they would have to occur before we bought the land. We again sat down with the owners and proposed purchasing a few acres-worth of water shares for the dryland. They agreed it would be possible to transfer 10-20 water shares to the dryland acres, though they had concerns about what it might do to the value of the remaining farm ground. So, if it worked out, that would leave us with 60 dryland acres and 20 irrigated acres, more than enough for vegetables, turkeys, and specialty grains.

Another piece to the puzzle was power for irrigation since the dryland is uphill from the canal and watering vegetables would require power and a pump. And yet another piece was the living arrangements. Conceivably we could build a house, but a house needs power, domestic water, and a septic system. I visited with our local sanitarian about a septic system, the power company about power lines, the canal company about water shares, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service about pump systems, and friends and family about the idiocy of this idea.

In the end, between transferring water shares, getting power to the property, installing an irrigation system in the canal, building a house, and farming, it was pretty clear that it would both be very expensive and time consuming.

Not long after, and coincidentally, we came across an opportunity to lease with the possibility to buy a small farm southeast of where we are now. We visited the place and it was pretty remarkable: a wonderful old house, a great shelterbelt, good buildings, 30 or so acres of dryland farm ground, good domestic water with the ability to irrigate vegetables and close to our current customers. In the end, the timing wasn't quite right. There's still a chance, but we'll have to wait and see.

In a homemade chicken snow globe, when it rains glitter, it pours glitter.

In both instances of opportunities fallen short, we can understand the position of the other and certainly don't fault them for the issues they have to consider. When out of frustration, Courtney and I go to the internet to look at farm listings in the area, we wonder how in the world we'll be able to ever go through traditional channels and mortgage a property for what some are asking. Sometimes it seems our best or even our only chance at putting down roots and building up a farm is through landowners who are willing and able to work with us.

Though there was the opportunity to lease more of the current farm (which would necessitate scaling up our equipment), we've decided to continue with what were currently farming and not tackle any more. I think if the possibility to ultimately own the entire farm were more real, we would consider leasing a bit more each year.

Right now, there doesn't seem to be a clear path forward. We have two more years on our current lease. The plan is to see that lease through and continue to rent the house in town during that time. After that, we are not sure what we'll do. At five years, we will certainly have put in our time on temporary ground. Ready as we are now, we will be that much more ready to set down roots and turn a house and farm ground into a homestead. This sense of rootlessness has surprisingly been one of the greatest mental challenges in all of this. Any advice, dear readers, would be much appreciated.

Next year, I think will be the year of the grain for us. I also think it will be the most difficult for us in a lot of ways. Willa will be nearly 2 years old, we will be trying to expand enough to pay our bills and farm expenses, we will owe the most on our debt to date, we will likely have to spend money beyond the grant funds to set up a modest seed cleaning facility, and we still have no secure labor.

As I look back on what I've written, I realize that it sounds like a lot of struggle and anguish, but there is a whole lot of pride and joy that went with the season, too. But as an unsuspecting blog reader, you lucky souls get to be the sounding board for the nitty gritty of what we're experiencing. And for taking on that role, I thank you.

Stay tuned for a 2012 full of farming misadventures.

Grain and Bean Share Update

2011-12-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

We are still taking subscriptions for the 2011 shares. Click here to see the full brochure, get pricing information and even print off a handy sign up sheet that you can send in now with a deposit.

Darling 2011 Grain and Bean Share Customers,

Now that turkey butchering, delivering, and eating is safely behind us, it's now time to turn our focus to your heritage and ancient grains.

It was a season of success and failure (as any season will be). Our Prairie Farro was a great success while our Calais Flint Corn withered without rain. Along with the Prairie Farro, you will receive our Bronze Barley, Sonora Heritage Wheat, and Petite Crimson Lentils.

Currently we are waiting for two of our grains to be cleaned. They should be done sometime near the end of December. Our plan is to make deliveries the first half of January to the following cities: Great Falls, Helena, Bozeman, Missoula, and Whitefish. If you would be willing to host a delivery location in one of those cities, please let us know.

In the meantime, just to get you excited, at the link below are a few great recipes from Ari Weinzweig, the author of Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, writing in the Atlantic last year:

Fresh Recipes With an Ancient Grain: 4 Ways to Prepare Farro

And, in a recent post on NPR's food blog, Allison Aubrey includes Farro as part of her "Tips For Three-Course Meals On Less Than $5.00."

Go Farro, go!

Awesome Post and an Article

2011-11-28T11:34:00.005-07:00

Here is a great post by my lovely wife about the story of Thanksgiving.

And here is a good article about farming and rural communities. And, it includes a photo of our turkeys.

Post-Thanksgiving Bliss

2011-11-27T09:04:00.012-07:00

After traveling nearly 700 miles and delivering 1300 pounds of poultry, we here at Prairie Heritage Farm are thankful to be done, done, and done.

The awesome t-shirt designed by our friends Mandy and Cale.

And yes, it was one helluva mutha plucka.

Nate and Mandy doing their thing.

With the indispensable help of over a dozen intrepid friends, we spent the Saturday and Sunday before Thanksgiving butchering 98 turkeys and 9 geese. No surprise, the temperature went from the 30s and 40s the days before butchering to single digits above and below zero. It makes chilling the turkeys easy, but not wading elbow-deep in the chill tank to dig out a turkey for bagging. To those who helped, a hearty thank-you: Nate and Donna S., Nate M., Byron, Skander, Hannah, Caroline, Sam, Erin, Jill, Clyde, Julie, and Mandy. Skander captured some excellent photos and posted a great blog post about the weekend (warning - every step of the process is illustrated) here.

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the Prairie Heritage Farm family hit the road with the birds, stopping in 4 cities, setting up at friends' houses, and delivering pasture-raised, organic turkeys to grateful people. This was the first year we were able to meet many of our customers, since we did the delivering ourselves.

We got home late Wednesday and I don't think we've fully recovered yet. It'll be a few months before the next batch of birds arrive in the mail and after we've long forgotten what a November on Prairie Heritage Farm is like.

Here is a good article about the turkeys we raise.

How to Cook Your Heritage Turkey

2011-11-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

We're delivering 90-something turkeys to customers across the state in the next few days. If you're one of them (customers, not turkeys) here are some tips on how to prepare that beautiful bird.

Cooking your hertiage bird is a bit different than cooking that old Butterball. First of all, don't overcook it, as one chef said last year on NPR: The bird has already been killed once, don't kill it again.

After the jump, you'll find some of our favorite recipes for your Thanksgiving turkey.

A Few Heritage Turkey Recipes

Roast Heritage Turkey
This recipe is from Chef Leonard Spampinato of Aromas Fine Catering. These are his roasting guidelines: 6 to 16 pounds, 15 to 20 minutes per pound. Over 16 pounds, 12 to 15 minutes per pound. Do not cover the birds with foil, he cautions, or they will steam, not roast.

For the turkey:
1 12- to 15-pound turkey
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 large sprigs fresh thyme leaves, coarsely chopped
3 large sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
1 bay leaf
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Stems from 1/2 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley

For the pan sauce:
4 to 5 tablespoons cornstarch
5 cups chicken stock

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. Rinse the turkey and pat dry. Melt butter in a small saucepan. Allow butter to cool to room temperature.
2. While the butter is cooling, season the turkey. Rub the minced garlic over the entire turkey, including the underside. Brush butter over the entire bird. Then season with thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper. Place the bay leaf and parsley stems inside the cavity. Put the turkey in a roasting pan and place in the preheated oven to roast for 30 minutes.
3. After 30 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 250 degrees. Roast the bird for 3 hours and 30 minutes to 5 hours (see roasting guidelines above), or until a thermometer registers 165 degrees*. Be sure to place the thermometer into a thigh and avoid touching the bone.
4. Transfer the turkey to a platter and let it rest for 30 minutes before carving. While the turkey is resting, prepare the sauce.
5. Preparing the pan sauce: Dissolve the cornstarch in one cup of cold chicken stock. Pour the fat and juices from the roasting pan into a container. Let the juices settle to the bottom and skim the fat from the top. Place the roasting pan on top of the stove over medium heat.
6. Add the juices back to the pan along with the remaining 4 cups of chicken stock (about 1/4 cup for every pound of turkey).
7. Bring the liquid to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan to release the browned drippings on the bottom. Thicken the sauce by whisking in the cornstarch-stock mixture. When the sauce returns to a boil, reduce heat and let simmer for about 5 minutes.
8. Adjust the seasonings and strain through a sieve. The sauce is now ready to serve. Carve the turkey and pass the sauce.

Roasted Heritage Turkey
By Sandra Kay Miller
She says, "Besides the fact that most old fashion Heritage turkeys are also raised the old fashioned way – with plenty of grass and sunshine – they need to be cooked quite differently than their modern, factory-farmed counterparts. This tried and true recipe (which serves 10-12 people) will make the best of your Heritage bird this year. "

Ingredients:
15-pound fresh heritage turkey at room temperature
Kosher or sea salt & fresh ground pepper
4 cups giblet broth (see recipe below)
Rosemary Maple Butter (see recipe below)
Oiled parchment paper

1. Rub turkey inside and out with salt and pepper.
2. Loosen the skin around the breast with your fingers and insert Rosemary Maple Butter between the meat and the skin as well as on the inside of the bird's cavity.
3. Set bird in deep roasting pan. Use a wire rack to lift the bird off the bottom of the pan.
4. Add the giblet broth to the bottom of the pan. Using a sheet of oiled parchment paper, tent the roasting pan with the oiled parchment paper. Any type of cooking oil can be used. Brush it on both sides with a pastry brush. The parchment paper is easily affixed to the roasting pan with a strip of foil on each end or you can use clean, oiled wooden clothespins.
5. Remove parchment paper and the last 30 minutes of cooking to develop a crispy, golden skin.
6. Pre-heat oven to 425F-450F. Roast the bird until the thigh temperature reaches 140F-150F*.
7. Let the bird rest 10-15 minutes before carving to let the juices settle.

A word about basting
Quick roasting at high temperatures means the oven temperature needs to be maintained and frequent basting defeats that purpose. By adding butter under the skin, the bird is self-basted. Baste the bird when you remove the parchment tent. If there is not enough liquid for basting, add either more water or wine.

Giblet Broth
2 cups white wine (a deep, oaky chardonnay lends a wonder taste)
2 cups water
Giblets & neck
Bay leaf

Simmer everything in a small saucepan for 15 minutes. Discard bay leaf and neck. Giblets can be discarded if they aren't your type of thing or they can be finely chopped and added to the broth.

Rosemary Maple Butter
1/2 pound butter
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon fresh minced rosemary
Bring butter to room temperature and whip all ingredients together.

Simple Heritage Roast Turkey
This one is from the November 7, 2007 New York Times and the one we used last year. It was delicious.

Time: 2 to 3 1/2 hours, depending on size of turkey

1 12-to 18-pound heritage turkey such as a Bronze or Bourbon Red, thawed, with giblets and neck removed
3 tablespoons kosher salt
1 1/2 tablespoons black pepper
4 tablespoons butter, cut into four pieces
1 medium onion, quartered
2 stalks celery, cut in two or three pieces each
1 medium apple, halved
8 sprigs fresh thyme
2 cups turkey broth, water or a mixture of half water and half apple juice.

1. At least four hours before roasting, rub turkey inside and out with salt and pepper; refrigerate. Remove from refrigerator 45 minutes before roasting. Heat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Set turkey in roasting pan fitted with a V-shaped rack. Slip your fingers under skin to loosen it. Rub butter over breasts. Stuff vegetables, apple and thyme into cavity. Tuck wingtips under bird.
3. Pour broth or water into pan, around bird. Put turkey in oven and roast, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 325, baste turkey with pan juices, cover with a foil tent and return to oven. Cook for another 30 minutes. Remove foil, baste again and place foil back on turkey. Cook for 30 more minutes. Remove foil.
4. When turkey has roasted for a total of two hours, insert a meat thermometer straight down into fleshiest part of thigh, where it meets drumstick. Check a second spot, then remove thermometer. (Do not let thermometer touch bone.) Thigh meat should reach no more than 165 degrees*. Juices should run clear. (If bird is larger than 14 pounds, keep foil on longer and begin checking meat temperature at two and half hours.) To assure perfectly cooked white and dark meat, you may remove bird when meat thermometer shows thigh temperature at 155, then remove legs and roast them separately for another 15 to 30 minutes, depending on size of bird.
5. When bird has reached desired temperature, remove from oven and let rest for at least 30 minutes, covered in foil and with a damp towel on top of foil, to retain heat and allow juices to return to meat. Remove foil and towel and serve.
Yield: 8 to 12 servings.

*Note: The Department of Agriculture recommends an internal temperature of 180 to 185 degrees, tested in the thigh, while many cooking experts say 165 degrees is safe and results in a moister bird.

And … one side dish idea I couldn't help but to add:

Cheesy Bread in a Pumpkin
Thanks to Ruth Reichl, editor of the now shuttered Gourmet magazine. This dish is such a divine way to serve a pumpkin. See it here at Streaming Gourmet. I heard Reichel describe it on Fresh Air and had to have it.

Serves 2-4

Ingredients:
1 7-inch piece of baguette
1 3 1/2 lb pumpkin
3/4 cups half-and-half
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1 1/4 cups Gruyère cheese
1 Tbsp olive oil

1. Preheat the oven to 450˚F (You may choose to reduce the part of the way through the pumpkin baking time, but I’ll get to that later).

2. Cut the baguette into one-inch slices and cut those into cubes. Lay them on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven until golden brown, about 7 minutes.

3. Mix the half-and-half, broth and nutmeg together.

4. Cut the top off of the pumpkin and scoop out the seeds and stringy pulp. Place a layer of bread on the bottom. Layer about 1/3 of the cheese on top of the bread and pour about 1/3 of the chicken broth mixture on top. Repeat with two more layers. Place the top back on the pumpkin and brush the outside of the pumpkin with olive oil.

5. IMPORTANT: Place the pumpkin in a baking pan (to catch possible cheese drippings that leak out the bottom) sprayed with nonstick cooking spray and place in the oven. Bake for about an hour, maybe 1 1/4 hours. The pumpkin should get charred a little bit. Don’t worry. But if you think it’s overcharring, reduce the heat to 350˚F and just keep on baking until time is up.

6. Do a few extra scrapes of nutmeg on the grater to garnish and serve immediately.

Turkeys. And a Skunk!

2011-11-16T13:03:00.008-07:00

The anticipation of this weekend's final major farm task - turkey butchering - is killing me (there's a joke in there somewhere). After the first real snow hit us this past week, my gut tells me to hunker down and get cerebral, but that's not going to happen until after all the birds have been processed, bagged, and delivered. I. Can't. Wait.

As an aside, on October 31st, we had some skunk problems by the house. Thankfully, we were able to distract it with a pretty flower.

Don't be fooled by the cute little skunk. She can have one stinky tail.

A fast skunk makes for a blurry photograph.

Oooh! A flower!

Hmmmmmm!

The Race Against Winter

2011-11-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

This is also posted on Courtney's blog, Life, Cultivated

This weekend, we got our first snow. And then, we turned back the clocks.

Our race against winter has ended.

I'm not sure we lost, but it certainly doesn't feel like we won, either. I'm guessing it never does.

The last two months have been an impossible scramble to put up as much food as possible, glean as much as we can, harvest, market, disk, plow, pull and prep and then just the frost imps -- as my little Goddaughter calls them -- to do their work.

We harvested our last crops last week and then we *took off,* on a big trip to see Jacob's brother get hitched. As we drove away from the farm -- the first time since February we'd left it for more than a weekend -- the transition was palpable.

Because so much of what we do is determined by season, by sun and snow and frost and daylight we are forced to completely re-think our daily lives each time we turn from summer to fall, from fall to winter, winter to spring and spring to summer.

This particular transition, from busy summer to busy fall to slow, cold winter can be excruciating.

It happens so gradually, and yet so suddenly.

The last deliveries are made, the last harvest is in, the last jar of tomatoes is on the pantry shelf and even the last of the frosty beets are dug.

The farm drifts to sleep, leaving us to wonder now what should we do?

Then, we spend then next two weeks trying to shake the feeling that we forgot something. Jacob paces around the house and I try to assuage his concerns, all the while know that we're both dealing with a constant ringing in our heads of: There must be something that needs to be done right *now.*

But there isn't.

I'm so glad we spent that first week of transition traveling. We had a lot of time to talk about the season -- what we did right and what we did wrong, and we had time to reconnect -- even *gasp* talk about topics other than the farm.

And, we also got our hearts totally warmed, twice, by two spectacular accolades this last week -- accolades that make us feel inspired, humbled and honored.

First was the Sustainable Agriculture Award from AERO - the Alternative Energy Resources Organization. It's hard to describe what AERO is sometimes. It's not hard to describe what the organization does.You see their work all over, whether you know it or not, from community-based weatherization projects to the Abundant Montana local food directory, to farm and energy tours to specialized training for farmers and ranchers. But, what AERO is is harder to describe.

Both Jacob and I have served on the board. I'm on the board now, as a matter of fact, and I joined purely because I wanted to have these people in my life and in my work. I wrote and recorded a commentary on just this subject for Montana Public Radio (read the piece here.)

It's an organization that flies under the radar a little bit, which I really like. It's not flashy and press-conferency (and I saw a lot of those in my days as a journalist) and it's not combative or negative. It's all about positivity and solutions and support for good work. And, because of that, it attracts a unique membership. The group is intimate and yet welcoming and made up of passionate, selfless, caring, creative and truly, some of the most courageous and innovative people in the state.

That's a long way of saying, we were so, incredibly honored to get that award, and presented by two of our best friends no less. We drove away from the annual meeting with our framed award and it took both of us at least 50 miles to stop talking about how we felt we didn't deserve it. But goodness, the fact that those people in that room, people we respect so much, thought we did deserve it, will keep us inspired and working for years.

Thank you.

Then, we were featured by Farm Aid, another great organization working on behalf of family farmers, as "Farmer Heros" -- along side some pretty amazing people (Will Allen, MacArthur genius). You can read the profile here.

Talk about putting a (turkey) feather in your hat.

Meanwhile, from the adventures of Willa the farm kid, here's a Public Service Announcement on being bear aware this fall.

The Days

2011-10-25T13:16:00.009-06:00

Well, it's happened again. The blog got neglected while the farm work forged ahead. It's been well over a month, so here is another lame attempt at catching up our loyal followers:

The Prairie Farro (emmer) was harvested and delivered.

The Prairie Farro straw was baled.

The bales were picked and stacked with the help of our good friend Byron.

The insects did their work.

The tomatoes turned.

The heritage grain trials were harvested by hand.

The turkeys grazed.

The garlic was planted.

The chickpeas were swathed and harvested.

Oh yeah, and we rolled up the drip tape, dug all the potatoes and carrots, stored the onions, and generally slept well at night.

A Threshing Bee and a Successful Prairie Farro Harvest

2011-09-18T17:03:00.007-06:00

Little Miss Crusty Nose chews on a piece of straw.

Willa and I traveled southwest to catch the annual Choteau Threshing Bee. Besides a homesteader shack, a one-room school house, a blacksmith shop, and cool old tractors and combines, they thresh shocked wheat with an old belt-driven stationary thresher. In a weird way it makes me nostalgic for a time I didn't even exist in.

Speaking of threshing, we successfully harvested the Prairie Farro (emmer) with only slightly more modern equipment. It's in the truck now, just waiting to get cleaned.

Prairie Farro being swathed.

Prairie Farro being picked up with the combine.

CSA Appreciation Day and Recipes!

2011-09-13T13:13:00.002-06:00

Saturday brought the most perfect fall day for our CSA Appreciation dinner.

We ate and talked and squawked at the geese and enjoyed the bounty of a summer well-spent.

Thanks to all of you who came and thanks to all of you who put your faith in us to grow your food and all of you who put the community in community supported agriculture.

Set up was, as were most other things, a family affair. (Man, our parents are awesome.)

And, Willa was a big help herself, looking all hillbilly and whatnot. This is what we call her Willabilly look.

And now, the recipes (click the name for each recipe):

Bronze barley with cucumber dill dressing (By Mark Bittman)
Prairie Farro (our brand of Emmer) salad with basil and tomatoes and zucchini (This was a slight variation on the Bluebird Grain Farm recipe the link goes to.)
Black chickpea salsa (Substituting black chickpeas for the black beans, of course and in the party dish, I used half tomatillos and half tomatoes.)
Lentil hummus (only I added about a 1/2 Tablespoon of cumin)
Cabbage crunch
And, the heritage turkey

Today! 2nd Annual CSA Appreciation Day!

2011-09-10T12:32:00.000-06:00

We are so excited to see you this Saturday for our 2^nd annual CSA Appreciation Day.

When: Saturday, September 10, 4:00 p.m.

What: Farm tour, music, delicious all-local food. Picnic-style dinner served shortly 4 p.m. Bring picnic chairs and/or blankets and a hearty appetite.

Where: (click here for the map) 165 Sunrise Lane: (From Conrad): Turn west on 4^th Ave (at the only stoplight in Conrad), travel about 1.5 miles, then turn RIGHT onto HILLSIDE Lane. Travel another 1.5-or-so miles, past a dead end sign, and you'll see the greenhouse and the hoop house on the left. Turn LEFT onto SUNRISE Lane and look for us.

The menu will include:

Prairie Farro (Emmer) salad with tomatoes, basil and zucchini

Bronze Barley with cucumber dill dressing

Lentil hummus

Roasted heritage turkey

Black chickpea salsa

Jacob's whole wheat sourdough farmer bread

Hope to see you there!

Your Farmers,

Jacob, Courtney and Willa Cowgill

Frost? Really?

2011-09-04T11:02:00.002-06:00

Squash got squashed.

Yes indeed, we had our first frost. Two nights ago it frosted slightly and just got the tips of some leaves. Last night, when they were calling for warmer nighttime temperatures than the previous night, it frosted again and took out our squash and tomatillos and outside tomatoes.

Grasshoppers and Barley

2011-08-29T18:58:00.011-06:00

I think the grasshoppers really like my barley trials. I have about a dozen different heritage barley varieties that I'm trialing and a couple of the varieties are either knocked over or the heads are completely missing. As I walk by them, a zillion grasshoppers take to the sky which is what gave me a clue. Grrrr.

Bent barley.

Eaten Barley.

The remains of a head of barley.

One variety was close enough to harvest, so I did so with scissors. The other variety getting annihilated is still really green so there is not much I can do.

Harvested heritage barley.

Mid-August

2011-08-12T18:35:00.001-06:00

A mid-August truck farm.

Whitefish Farmers' Market

2011-08-11T06:41:00.004-06:00

The Farm headed west for our first Whitefish Farmers' Market. We're experimenting this summer with setting up at farmers' market and peddling our organic heritage and ancient grains.

It was a good trip. We met a lot of curious people and a few even bought some of our grain. There is such a buzz around both local grains, and heritage and ancient varieties, I think it'll just take bit of time before people get to know us and get to know what we have to offer. We'll head back over the divide in two weeks - August 23rd.

Beauty

2011-08-04T11:43:00.006-06:00

We can't forget about the beauty in what we do.

Summer Squash:

Cabbage:

Carrots:

And a happy child with her chard:

Check out more vegetable portraiture at our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/prairieheritagefarm.

2011-08-03T08:03:00.003-06:00

An apology to our Great Falls shareholders. We were in such a mad rush last Thursday that we didn't get a chance to get you your weekly newsletter. So here it is:

Dear Shareholders,

Lookey here! The winter squash is flowering in a trumpet-like fashion, as if it say: Bum bum bum bum! We're here! You WILL have butternut after all!

And, just to warn you, the zucchini – the green, the 8-ball, the Magda and the yellow, they're coming. And they're coming in large quantities.

In time, dear garden watchers, in time.

For now though, our favorite way to get rid of a lot of that kale in your bag:

Kale Chips

1 head kale, washed and thoroughly dried
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt, for sprinkling
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees F.
Remove the ribs from the kale and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces. Lay on a baking sheet and toss with the olive oil and salt. Bake until crisp, turning the leaves halfway through, about 20 minutes. Serve as finger food.
Enjoy!
Your Farmers,
Jacob, Courtney and Willa Cowgill

P.S. Don't forget...
Saturday, August 13: Volunteer day

Saturday, September 10: 2nd Annual CSA Appreciation day

P.PS. Don't forget to follow along on our blog at www.prairieheritagefarm.com and follow us on Facebook by liking our page: www.facebook.com/prairieheritagefarm

Another Loss

2011-08-01T17:15:00.010-06:00

You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you move something from the win column to the lose column (don't count your chickens before they hatch).

Thursday morning I wandered out into the milk thistle to see if the ground was dry after the flood irrigation session the week before. About 15 students from the University of Montana's PEAS Farm program were coming for a visit and Farmer Josh had promised his students would put in a couple hours of work. I was dreaming of them swarming the milk thistle and weeding it clean. Turns out all the plants were dead.

Never ever ever flood irrigate milk thistle. They do not like standing water. Their roots will rot and they will die. I walked the entire 960 foot length of the field saying, "no no no no no no". I would have cried if I'd allowed myself to. Instead I lay face down in the grass at the end of the field and just mourned. It ate at me for days after and it wasn't until Sunday late in the day that I finally accepted it.

I was looking for the win in the situation and couldn't find it. So then I looked for the silver lining and all I could come up with was I won't have to harvest the seed which is labor intensive. So I won't have to worry about that anymore.

Today on my way to the milk thistle, I stopped by the spot I'd planted milk thistle two years ago where some volunteer plants had come up this spring. I weeded around them since they are my best hope for any seed and they actually look great. There are not a lot of plants, but some. Then, in this year's crop, I found that many of the plants that I thought were dead, may not be. They are very much set back and may not actually produce any seed. Their bottom leaves are brown, but there are some green leaves on top and some with a seed head (though probably from before the irrigation disaster).

Back to the students - we did not go out into the milk thistle. I didn't even tell them about it. Instead I set them on the onions which desperately needed weeding. After they'd clear out the beds in a matter of hours (what would have taken me days), the poor onions looked so sad and tiny and droopy, if they were there at all. Too little, too late. Another loss.

I have to admit I'm ready for winter. I was pretty optimistic this spring, especially after quitting my job and dedicating myself to my family and the farm. Now, I'm far less optimistic and I just want to start over. But one can't do that in farming. You have to fight it out until then end, like walking up a fast moving river.

There will be wins this year, and even some that I don't see right now. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

2011-07-26T20:03:00.009-06:00

My motto this year and mantra on the tough days is, you win some, you lose some.

For example, I've been struggling to understand why my flint corn is so sad looking.

That's mid-summer corn?

I was so excited when I planted it with the 4-row corn planter. I cultivated it with the tractor thinking I'd just saved myself a bunch of hand weeding. Not so. A duckfoot plow is very different from an actual row crop set-up. I couldn't get too near the plants otherwise I'd tear them out or bury them (which I did on some). Row crop cultivators have shields around them to protect the plants. And you can get really close to the crop. So, I still had a ton of hand weeding to do (and still do) and of course, got to it late (and am still getting to it), and couldn't find any help (and still can't).

So for a long time I thought the weed pressure was causing my corn to suffer. But, the milk thistle next door, also row-cropped, didn't seem to be too bothered by the weeds. Then I thought it was the fact that despite the wet spring, there just wasn't enough water in the soil for the plants. But that didn't explain the decent looking corn on the north end of the field.

Nice plants.

Finally I dug up a stressed plant and discovered the roots running laterally across the block of soil rather than down. That probably means they couldn't get through a hard pan of soil, so instead traveled across those first couple inches looking for water where there was none. So the plants on the north end were able to push through the soil down into where the moisture is. As for why there is a hard pan to begin with, I'm not entirely sure. It certainly has something to do with our clay-clay loam soils, and it might have something to do with timing of plowing or method of plowing (I used something called a rod weeder at one point).

Corn roots looking for water.

All of this to say that I'm not sure I'll win with the corn this year. But I will with the milk thistle.

Flower head forming.

And the garlic.

A gorgeous garlic scape.

And the black chickpeas (hopefully).

And the buckwheat (also hopefully - both were planted late).

Whenever I get down on myself for some disaster, I stop to remind myself of what is going well. I also remind myself that though there is work for 4 or more people, we're pulling it off with 1 1/4 people. You win some, you lose some.

A Puppet Showed up to the Festival

2011-07-20T06:02:00.011-06:00

Dancing.

The business of farming, and in particular the business of being a greenhorn agriculturalist, is awfully tiring and can get discouraging with your head in the weeds day after day. Days like last weekend wash away the worry, the frustration, the questioning (why are we doing this?). Four of our good friends - Bryan, Genevieve, Kiki, and Sarah - paid a visit. On Saturday, we attended the first annual Timeless Festival at the Timeless Seeds cleaning facility in Ulm, near Great Falls. Lots of familiar faces were there. We ate food like pulled pork and Indian corn casserole, local beef hamburger and lentil burgers. We drank things like Jamaican lemonade, iced coffee, and organic pale ale.

In the evening, our Conrad rock star friends fired up the amps and got everybody on their feet dancing while a storm rolled in from the southwest. We all helped get all the music equipment into one of the large buildings before the deluge of rain. It passed and the band plugged back in and kept going.

Slim Cognito.

Then, just to top it off, a giant puppet showed up to the party.

That guy sure is tall.

Puppet.

On Sunday, back in Conrad, it was an appropriately slow start for the crew. But they had vowed to put in some work before they headed home, and work they did. We knocked out a couple rows of milk thistle and it made me very happy. I cannot fully express how their support, both physical and verbal, emboldens me, so I'll just leave it at that.

Weeding very long rows.

Baby on the back.

Some worked more than others.

Farmer Bread's Biggest Fan

2011-07-19T17:21:00.001-06:00

When we're in the kitchen, Willa loves to crawl around and dig stuff out of the cupboards. One of her favorite things to do is to open the bread box (which is admittedly, not well positioned right at her level) and pulling everything out of it. Today, her Nana and I found her with half a loaf of Jacob's Farmer Bread (which we make from our Sonora wheat and sell as part of our Bread CSA). By the time we caught her, she had managed to gnaw half of it down with her two bottom teeth. Daddy's bread is that good.

Treading Water

2011-07-16T06:25:00.003-06:00

The flurry continues. I'm just barely keeping my head above water. But it rained a couple of days ago, so I guess my head was below water. Oh well.

The wheat and barley trials are heading out.

A full moon over the high tunnel.

July

2011-07-06T05:58:00.000-06:00

The garden in July. More green than brown.

Catch-up

2011-06-24T05:55:00.008-06:00

It's going to have to be one of those blog posts: lots of pictures and very few words. Let's just say we've been busy lately.

First, events without photos:

Our friend Liz came for a visit. She helped weed the chard, kale, and cabbage. Much needed and much appreciated.

I expanded the turkey brooder to give them all more room to roam. They're getting big.

Planted the black chickpeas in the field.

Weeded, weeded, and weeded. Still more weeding to do.

Transplanted broccoli.

Seeded bush beans.

Got interviewed by the local paper. I hope we sound like we know what we're doing.

Feeling absolutely overwhelmed. Nothing new.

Now to the photos:

Volunteers transplanting lettuce - super-CSA members Phyllis, Dad, and Mom (not pictured).

Mowed rye and pea for living mulch.

Tomatoes transplanted into the mulch.

Cultivating between the rows of milk thistle and flint corn.

Row cropping.

The rows of flint corn.

Flint corn seedling.

Milk thistle seedling.

A Harrowing Experience

2011-06-15T07:05:00.007-06:00

Yesterday evening, after dinner, I begged my lovely wife to allow me to head back out to the farm to harrow the emmer. The reason I have to beg and for her to allow, is that I am equal (well, maybe not quite) caretaker of our daughter and equal (well, maybe not quite) caretaker of our rental house in town. Usually evenings include a crazy whirlwind of sweeping the floor of dog hair and dirt clumps that will end up in our daughter's mouth, putting away toys, washing dishes, rocking said dog-hair-dirt-clump-eating daughter to sleep, and collapsing on the couch. It's a two person job. Or it's a one person job if the other person has had a day full of those activities and desperately needs a break.

Well, my lovely wife gave me the go-ahead so I went back out to the farm. Now, at this point I need to mention that my friend B was out earlier that day and we knocked out a bunch of work, so I was riding high on our accomplishments.

I should also mention that I was harrowing the emmer to pull up the tiny weeds growing amidst the crop. The harrow generally beats the hell out of the crop, but doesn't uproot it. The idea is to time it such that you harrow when the crop is well-rooted and the weeds are still quite small and pop out of the ground when the harrow's teeth drag over them. It scares me because it looks as though I've destroyed a perfectly good crop.

Un-harrowed emmer.

Harrowed emmer.

So, since I was riding high and feeling like no job was too large or too difficult, I got arrogant and I got lazy. I made one pass then took the corner too tight on the second pass and managed to run over one of the cables on the harrow causing it to ride up and over the wheel and to crumple up against the tractor.

I'm an idiot.

I immediately stopped and shut off the tractor, sure I'd hear the hissing of air escaping from the tire (just a $700 or $800 replacement). I was lucky. All the idiot move did was break the large pipe at the top of the harrow, which I was able to cobble back together with a chain.

The broken harrow.

Fixed with a chain.

I humbly finished the field and went home to a crying baby and an exhausted wife.

The Stress of Community Supported Agriculture

2011-06-09T22:35:00.001-06:00

This week marks our first week of deliveries for our vegetable community supported agriculture (CSA) program and only fitting, we made all four drops in sopping, pouring, downright miserable rain.

We decided not to do Farmer's Market this year, which is both sad and totally liberating. We're sad to miss out on the festive feel of early Saturday mornings, the smell of kettle corn and grilling kebabs mingling with coffee and bedding plants. We'll certainly miss the camaraderie we felt with other vendors and the feeling of community standing there under a canopy watching the town walk up to our little stand for vegetables, gardening advice or just a little chit chat. For these reasons, before Saturday came -- which would have been the first market -- I was feeling a little glum about not being there.

But when we woke up that morning at 6:30 instead of 3:30, I knew we'd made the right decision.

The market is an hour's drive and it ends up being a 10-12 hour day for us. Also, we've expanded our CSA -- doubled membership actually -- and more and more, we think doing exclusively CSA sales is maybe the way we'd like to run the farm. We still sell wholesale to markets, restaurants and grocers (You can get our produce at Mountain Front Market in Choteau and at Gary and Leo's IGA in Conrad), but CSA is where it's at for us for direct sales. (We offer CSAs for vegetables, grains, turkeys and bread now.)

The CSA model is just a great way of doing business. It gives us much-needed capital to get going in the spring, it connects customers with the source of their food, it keeps local economies strong and most of all, it creates an important bond between eater and farmer -- a bond that benefits the health and wellbeing of the food, the community, the farmer and the eater.

But, this time of year, it's also really stressful for the farmer. When shareholders sign up, they know they are getting into something bigger than just buying vegetables. They know -- and if they don't, we tell them -- that they are signing up for both the bounty and risk of farming.

But that doesn't make it any less nerve wracking for us when the chard just isn't flourishing and the lettuce isn't growing the way we'd like it to. Or, when the weather isn't quite cooperating or worse yet, when a river threatens its banks or a hail storm moves through.

Our shareholders put their trust in us and although they and we know we can't control the weather or, well, much of anything on the farm, we do work hard to mitigate whatever we can whenever we can to make our customers happy that they did put their trust in us.

So, it's all a dance -- like always -- of trying your best to manage the chaos that is farming.

And as we watch streams swell across the state and friends' fields flood, or hear about another hail storm ripping through, we feel simultaneously sick and relieved, knowing that in farming, no matter how much you study or experiment or plan or care, sometimes, it all comes down to luck.

This is also posted on Life, Cultivated.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

2011-06-09T07:08:00.005-06:00

One soaked garden.

Farmers have to have something to complain about.

I want the rain to go away. Until we need it.

High Tunnel Update

2011-05-28T07:57:00.001-06:00

I may be the only one who cares, but who cares? I love what goes on in the high tunnel. So if only for me to spout off to myself on the wonders of the rye and peas in the high tunnel, here is an update:

The rye and peas in the back left-hand corner has been untouched since it was planted last fall. The rye and peas on the right-hand side near the back was mowed April 22nd and what you see is the regrowth since then. On the left-hand side foreground, the rye and peas were mowed May 8th. My plan for this section is to use it as a living mulch by mowing it once or twice more very close to the ground, and transplant tomatoes and peppers into it.

Here is a close-up of the three stages:

The peas are doing well within the rye:

They're even climbing the stalks:

And the rye is heading out:

Now who's as excited as I am?!!

Working With Water

2011-05-26T06:13:00.012-06:00

A couple of days ago I "ordered" water from our ditchrider to fill the reservoir in the far south corner of the property. The reservoir water is where all of our irrigation comes from for our vegetables. It's a gravity-fed system which is primarily why we use all drip irrigation.

The water originates in the Rocky Mountains which feed various streams and rivers which flow into Lake Frances just 15 miles to the north. Then the water is released into the main canal from which much of the farm ground around us is irrigated, including our little farm.

Dam.

When I order water, the ditchrider sets boards across the canal to back the water up to where our turnout is (a metal gate which opens to turn water into the farm's main ditch). He then opens that metal gate and the rest of the job is up to me. At this point, I can choose, by selectively damming parts of the ditch, where I want the water to go. In this instance, the water's natural inclination is to head east, so I set a dam right inside the turnout so the water heads west toward the reservoir. There is one gate between here and the reservoir which I leave open, and one on the other side of the reservoir, which I board up so the water will back up and flow into the reservoir.

There is something that I enjoy about working with the water as it comes out of the main canal. Maybe because it requires me to try to know it; to understand why it flows the way it does. It also reminds me how much we humans have manipulated water and to not take it for granted. There is no switch that I turn on and let water flow from the tap like magic.

While yesterday's task was a simple one to fill the reservoir, the farm's main fields are flood irrigated which requires a more nuanced use of dams and gates. I once thought that flood irrigation was the brute force method of irrigating (just soak everything in water!), but now believe it can be low-tech elegant and thoughtful. And here's how I will learn how to effectively work with it:

The 1955 Yearbook of Ag: yet another wonderful book on my bookshelf that needs to be read.

Lydia really likes it when I work with the water, too, because we drive by the field that so many gophers have decided is home. All Lydia wants to do is knock on their front doors and say hi. They usually don't answer.

Knock, knock.

Lydia looks about.

Days Gone By

2011-05-20T06:42:00.007-06:00

Since "retiring" from my full-time paid job with benefits to volunteer on Prairie Heritage Farm, there has been relentless work to do. With the early crops in the high tunnel come the early weeds, so put weeding on the list. Turkeys and geese need daily care. The beds need to be prepared and lettuce, kale, chard, cabbage, and onions need to be transplanted out into the field. And the drip irrigation needs to be set up to water them once they're in. The tomatoes need to be transplanted into 4" pots. We need to start more seeds in the greenhouse. The emmer needs to be seeded in the field as does the chickpeas, flint corn, and milk thistle. And the potatoes need to get in the ground.

Transplanting kale.

Remarkably, in the past week and a half, we've done all that. Maybe that's why my back and shoulders ache and my hands are cracked and dry. Maybe that's why it doesn't feel like a week and a half, but rather a month and a half.

I borrowed a corn planter from a neighbor and what a delight it's been to use: drive the tractor from one end of the field to the other and voila, 4 rows of corn planted. I'll be able to set up the cultivator on the tractor to weed between the rows when the time comes, severely cutting down on time and labor later in the season.

My savior.

I really wanted the same setup for the milk thistle, but the planting plates in the corn planter are set for corn, not the much smaller milk thistle seed. I even tried mixing the thistle seed in with pea seed, but the planter still put down too much milk thistle seed. So instead, I drove the empty corn planter on the spot where the milk thistle was to go to mark the rows, then came in behind with the walk behind seeder. It wasn't easy pushing that thing through the stubble, but it'll be worth it later when I'm tractor cultivating.

Me circa early 1900s.

It is supposed to rain today and I hope it does. I need the break and the seeds need water.

They're Heeeeere...

2011-05-16T06:39:00.006-06:00

Yes, the turkeys have arrived. And with them all of last year's anxieties. I think the hatchery throws those in for free. They are no less cute than last year's, chirping mightily and sprinting around in their new home.

We also ordered 10 Chinese geese and they came in the mail the next day. Our plan it to experiment raising the geese and turkeys together, and using the geese as guard birds. I hear they can be mean.

The goslings are even cuter than the turkeys. We gave them a full day to find their feet before introducing them in with the turkeys.

Once together, I realized just how huge the goslings are relative to the poults. It made me nervous, especially when one gosling went after whichever poult was nearest, grabbing its wing and chasing it around. They eventually settled down and now the goslings are a hot commodity when it comes time to hunker down for the night - they make a nice toasty bed.

In It to Win It

2011-05-11T19:47:00.000-06:00

Well, hello new life!

(Cross posted from Life, Cultivated.)

Remember that little (and by little, I mean big) problem I was talking about a few weeks ago? The one about Jacob working full time, me working part time and both of us farming and parenting full time?

And, how maybe, we might not be able to keep up?

And how maybe, just maybe, something might explode?

Well, we fixed it. Lickety split.

Here's how we did it:

a) I started a new off-farm job on Monday (Managing Editor of this very cool site. But, I'll continue to contribute to New West and the Daily Yonder too.)

b) Jacob quit his off-farm job on Tuesday.

And just like that, problem is solved.

Obviously, there is still much to figure out and much (maybe even more) to juggle.

Basically, Jacob just simplified his life and I just complicated mine. But, the thought is that we'll start to spread out our complications evenly between us and that will simplify things for both of us -- him taking Willa part-time, me lightening my farming load, both of us sharing more daily chores, etc.

It's all an effort to focus on the farm, keep all of us closer to home, play a bigger role in our community and spend more time together.

And, while we will certainly miss Breadwinner Jacob (and in particular, his health benefits), we rather prefer Farmer and Daddy Jacob. He's certainly less stressed and definitely happier.

There was much hand-wringing about this decision going on in the background, all of which I'm sure I'll write about later (A preview: you should know by now that health insurance companies suck and for farmers, off-farm jobs -- and whether to take them and how to juggle them and who should work them -- create an inordinate amount of stress and time.) but for now, just to summarize, a few of the emotions rolling around this morning, the first day of the rest of our lives:

I feel grateful that I can telecommute to awesome jobs doing things I care about,
apprehensive about balancing all these roles (and about becoming the breadwinner again), but
so, so, happy to have my parenting and farming partner back at my side, and not commuting and traveling and scrambling, (This morning, he and Willa went for a run and I took a shower. A shower. Like, in the morning, and not with a baby in my arms. I washed my hair and conditioned for the full three minutes before rinsing. A girl could get used to this clean, bouncy hair, let me tell you.)
hopeful that this will mean we will have more time: more time for each other, more time for our friends, more time for our families, more time for our community. If I've learned anything about time though, I've learned that it expands and contracts in unexpected ways, so even if I think we might have more time, we might not. But, there's nothing wrong with being hopeful.
nervous, but excited to be relying, even just partly, on the farm for our livelihood. We are, as my friend Jennifer says (yes, you Jennifer), we're in it to win it now and that's a great, terrifying thing.

Sometimes though, you just have to hop on and push off, you know?

Wouldn't it Be Easier to Just Eat the Seeds?

2011-05-03T18:39:00.002-06:00

(Note: This is cross posted from Courtney's new blog, Life, Cultivated.)

We're a little behind in the greenhouse. Luckily, Willa is excellent help.

See here Mama, it says basil can be started indoors 4-6 weeks before last frost. But I say we get a start now by putting the seeds directly in my mouth.

Basil is quite possibly my favorite crop. I love to plant it, I love to harvest it, I love to eat it, I love to sell it.

But, it can also be sort of tricky. So, here's a few tips I've gathered over the years:

Keep seeds warm during germination. One mistake I made my first year was starting too early in the winter and then getting increasingly frustrated when germination was slow. It was because, among other things, the soil wasn't consistently warm enough. Keep that in mind.

Prune. Once you have at least two sets of "branches" on your plant, start pruning to keep the plant bushing instead of growing tall and leggy.

Some people wait to harvest big long stems but I like to harvest young, tender leaves. This does the pruning I mentioned above while giving you nice, bright, tender green leaves ready to toss into salads, pasta and well, in our house, just about anything else.

Don't let it flower. Like most others, the minute the plant starts putting its energy into seed production, the leaves get bitter. Another reason to stay on top of the pruning/harvesting.

Keep the frost imps at bay. Basil will be the very first thing in your garden to blacken at even the threat of frost. When in doubt, cover.

When preserving, don't be shy with the olive oil. The best way to preserve basil is to process with olive oil or make pesto. If you're doing either, put a nice film of oil on the top of your container -- that's what will seal the green in and keep the black out.

My favorite varieties are your standard sweet basil, sweet thai basil and Genovese basil.

I'm dreaming of the first harvest already.

Of Peas and Parks

2011-05-02T06:09:00.006-06:00

The peas are fixing nitrogen.

Well, it's still too wet to plant anything outside. We're about a month behind at this point and I'm getting antsy. So, I'll just post another entry about the green goodness beneath the high tunnel. The rye is developing heads which are in the boot: forming in the leaf sheath, and the peas are fixing nitrogen.

Pink nodule where nitrogen-fixing bacteria live.

Meanwhile, even though there is plenty to do around the farm, like weeding the asparagus and strawberries, mucking out the turkey brooder, and cleaning up the potting shed, Willa and family went to the park where she told me to stop taking her picture.

Rye You Gotta Keep Talking About This?

2011-04-26T05:59:00.005-06:00

Pre-mow rye (get it?).

I know, I know, I can't seem to stop talking about the rye in the high tunnel, but it's just too gorgeous not to. And besides, it's really the only thing growing right now. We can't work the field because it isn't dry enough, so I'm going to keep blabbing on and on about the rye until something else distracts me.

Mow rye (get it?).

I mowed down the remaining west half of the high tunnel. I'll rototill it in then plant more greens, hopefully tonight.

I'm in love with the rye.

Post-mow rye (nothing to get here).

Water Unclogged

2011-04-17T06:28:00.001-06:00

Green, green, green.

On Sunday, after hauling my auction loot home (see here), Clyde was out at the farm to help me figure out the water conundrum. I hooked up the air compressor to the hydrant by the valve and very quickly, air backed up and leaked back out, which seemed to indicate a block and not a leak somewhere. Also, given how quickly the air back up, the block seemed to be very close to that hydrant. Before I go on, I have a bit more explaining of the water system to do.

As I said earlier, the water line comes down from the reservoir to a valve which controls the greenhouse hydrant after running through a loop in the quonset. But before the line gets to the valve, it branches off and a line goes to the brooder. For this, there is no valve or exposed pipe, so this line has water in it all year round. Now back to Sunday.

Since there was still no water to the greenhouse or high tunnel, we bought 350' of 3/4" black plastic pipe to run from the hydrant in the brooder (year round water, independent of the stupid loop in the quonset) to the hydrant by the high tunnel. We connected this line to the actual high tunnel hydrant, opened it up, turned on the brooder hydrant, and essentially back filled the pipe that is blocked. In this way, I was able to use the drip irrigation setup I had in the high tunnel. As much as I enjoyed the hand watering, I was glad to turn a couple of knobs and let the drip tape do its work.

The things we do and the expenses we incur.

Yesterday evening, in order to get the tractor into the garden, I had to turn off the hydrant in the brooder and disconnect the black plastic pipe from the high tunnel hydrant. When I peeked in the high tunnel, I noticed the water was still flowing, which indicates the line to the greenhouse and high tunnel appears to be unblocked and working again. Hallelujah.

Drip, drip, drip.

Hey now, humm-a-na humm-a-na, SOLD! Take 2

2011-04-13T06:11:00.011-06:00

Sunny, muddy day.

A couple years ago, I went to my first auction (see this post) and was too nervous to even raise my hand once. All these old guys were confidently sticking one finger up or nodding ever so slightly, back and forth, back and forth, as though they had pots of gold in the backs of their barns.

I had another chance last weekend just north of Conrad. It was a smaller auction and fewer pieces of farm equipment, but two items immediately caught my attention: an old John Deere manure spreader and an A.T. Ferrell Company No. 27 Clipper fanning mill seed cleaner.

Early in the auction, I bid on a little garden cart then dropped out. I figured it served as my warm-up. When the auctioneer got around to the manure spreader, my heart was racing. How high should I go? Who will bid against me? Will somebody be willing to pay top dollar so they can park it in their front yard and plant flowers in the box? Or put a mailbox on the end of it? What is the maximum I'm willing to shell out?

After observing the auctioneer selling off the previous items, I knew that he would start high, wait for somebody to bid, then drop the opening bid. This is what happened and when he dropped the opening price, I threw my arm in the air. Somebody countered, though I couldn't see who. We went back and forth in $25 increments until he quit and it was left to me. "Going once, twice, sold to the young man right there. What's your number son?" Bidder number 80 wins the spreader and I won it for far less than I thought. That was almost too easy. I have to admit, I felt a little cocky and walked with a bit more strut. Never mind I just won a 1930s or 1940s manure spreader that nobody else wanted.

Poop distributor.

Now for the Clipper seed cleaner. The Clipper was near the end of the last line of stuff, so I had to wait through all the tractors and vehicles before we got to it. In the meantime, my lovely wife and lovely daughter stopped by to have lunch with me from our friends Steve and Lisa's hamburger stand (A Land of Grass Ranch). It was Willa's first, but definitely not last, auction. She even flapped her arm and squealed during some bidding. She didn't win anything, though.

Finally the Clipper came around and again, my heart jumped. And again, the auctioneer started high, then dropped. And again, it was just me and one other guy. And again, it didn't last long, and I walked away with an old farm-scale two deck fanning mill.

Our dirty seeds' savior?

A successful day, to say the least, and the beginning of a lifetime of springtime auctions on the high plains.

Hey now, humm-a-na- humm-a-na, SOLD!

Waterlogged

2011-04-06T05:59:00.010-06:00

Sunday I planted the first food crops in the high tunnel. The rye is small enough that it was easy to work it up with the little rototiller. I seeded beets, radishes, leeks, scallions, spinach, a greens mix, and a lettuce mix.

Then it came time to turn on the water, but first I need to explain just how we get water to begin with. On the south side of the farm, about 1/2 mile away, is a reservoir that gets filled from the irrigation ditch. From the reservoir, there is underground pipe that flows downhill to the farmstead buildings. It flows to a valve and a hydrant behind the house. From there it branches two directions. The direction I care about, to the greenhouse, high tunnel, and garden, first goes into the quonset, where many years ago it was used for something or another. For whatever reason, this something or another required the water line to leave the safety of being buried 6 feet deep below the frost line, come out of the ground, make a loop and go back into the ground, safely 6 feet deep. Ultimately it doesn't really matter how deep the rest of the line is buried, that one short exposed loop in the quonset causes all sorts of problems. It will freeze and break in the late fall, winter, and early spring. So each fall, we have to shut the water off and blow the line out so there is no standing water in the loop over winter. Come spring (right now!), we turn the water on, and hope the days and nights aren't too cold for too long.

With our new high tunnel, we now have early season water requirements, so I turned the water on and waited for it to come flowing out of the hydrant by the high tunnel. It did not. After such a successful planting session, I spent about 2 hours wandering all over, trying to figure out why there was no water. Water flowed from the hydrant by the valve, but no water was even getting to the loop. So that seemed to indicate a blockage or break somewhere between the valve and the loop, about 300 feet. It remains a mystery, but until it's solved, all those seeds I sowed need water. So water them I did, and again last night and will again today and tomorrow and for the foreseeable future until water flows again or I find a break somewhere.

The reservoir.

The pipe that delivers the water.

The complex, labor-saving irrigation system.

High Tunnel, Hi Rye!

2011-03-31T06:09:00.007-06:00

While the rest of the outside world is still brown and recovering from a long, cold winter, inside our new high tunnel, the winter rye and winter peas that I planted last fall are greening up as though it's May. When I enter the high tunnel, it's like I'm walking into the future.

Rye and peas.

Feeding Family, Friends and Neighbors

2011-03-25T07:39:00.002-06:00

On one of our farm brochures, it says Prairie Heritage Farm is about feeding "family, friends and neighbors." We really love that idea.

So, you can imagine this week that our hearts swelled a little when: 1) Willa ate her first meal grown by us (See token adorable picture of our baby above.) and

2) We got a check for a CSA from my dear childhood friend Brooke, who just this week decided to move back to Central Montana with her husband and two amazing kids (I don't mean to slight Tom, you're amazing too.)

Although every share means a great deal to us, when we get one from friends or family, it's like there's an extra vote of confidence that comes with it. When we get a signup from Jacob's parents, or when my Mom and grandma load up a bag at the farmers' market or when I make my Dad eat lettuce, or when I see my nephew pop a juicy red cherry tomato into his mouth, it's just a little sweeter, knowing we're growing healthy food for the people we love so much.

There are days -- mostly the cold, gray, dark ones we've had so many of recently -- when I'm not so sure why we chose to live or farm here (seriously, less than 80 frost-free days? Are we nuts?) but then I remember how rare it is to live someplace where you have both roots and wings -- where it's possible to have have a community that mingles family, childhood pals and new customers and friends too.

So, we'll wait for sunnier days, knowing we have friends and family counting on us. That might be enough to get me through another cold snap. Maybe.

Collapse

2011-03-20T15:18:00.009-06:00

This center pivot could be symbolic of something.

Or maybe it was just a really strong wind.

Not Waiting Around

2011-03-16T20:20:00.001-06:00

The official uniform of Team Prairie Heritage Farm.

Team Prairie Heritage Farm took a road trip to the Flathead Valley to deliver a few Grain and Seed CSA shares to new members (drummed up by a couple of our good friends) and to listen to the president of Crossroads Resource Center and food systems analyst Ken Meter present on the food system in western Montana.

A typical Grain and Seed CSA share: 86 pounds of heritage and ancient grain goodness.

Ken presented a staggering set of numbers. Currently, farm production balance in western Montana (and nationally) is lower than in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Farmers lose over $30 million to produce their agricultural products. They also spend $80 million buying external inputs for those products, for a total loss of over $110 million to the region. The other end of the food chain, the consumers, are spending $680 million on food outside the region. Ken asked, just how long can we keep this up?

I think the answer is, let's not wait around to find out. He then showed the audience great examples of projects in Minnesota and Wisconsin that aren't waiting to find out.

In western Montana and in particular, the Flathead Valley, those communities aren't either. People and groups are making things happen in the Valley like Nourish the Flathead, the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center, our friends at Ten Lakes Farm, Purple Frog Gardens, and Montana Coffee Traders.

On our drive home, we were wistful at the incredible movement taking hold in the Flathead. Two things struck us, though. While our drive over was a three-hour trip—through the shortgrass prairie, across the Rocky Mountain Divide, and into the eastern-most Pacific Northwest—I had to remind myself, despite the dramatic change of scenery, we are only one county over.

Pondera County kisses Flathead County.

The second revelation was, there are great things happening in our little rural community too, and there is no reason why they can't be as vital and empowering as what is happening across the Divide. All it should take is a little bit of not waiting around to find out, and knowing that farming and all of its associated networks can and should be a net positive on the balance sheet and to the community.

Rural Beasts

2011-03-10T05:24:00.006-07:00

The Chicken Monster.

I was in Missoula the other day, and I overheard this boy talking to his mother. Their conversation went something like this:

Boy: "Where do you think all those chicken feathers came from?"
Mother: "I think it was something that flew in; a hawk or something."

Let's contrast that conversation with one that recently occurred in Great Falls:

Neighbor against a woman who has chickens: "We see chickens across our fence and can hear them cackle."
City planning board member: "I think chickens are a rural beast. I don't think chickens belong in Great Falls."

Missoula is a city where long ago they determined that chickens in the city just might be okay - the sky wouldn't fall. Great Falls (and even our little rural agricultural town of Conrad) is a city that has recently decided that chickens are rural beasts and have no place amidst urban civility.

What gets me most about all of this, is that some seem hell-bent on separating agriculture from daily life. Food comes from somewhere else - definitely not from our neighbors' back yards. Something happens out there somewhere else, then it magically appears in our grocery stores at our convenience, neatly packed in groups of 12. Whether it's intentional or not, they end up distancing people from the source of their food. There is no reason why food cannot happen in a city, in abandoned lots, on rooftops, in backyards. And yes, chickens are part of making food happen.

And by the way, I'll fully support bans on those rural beasts in cities just as soon as dogs start laying eggs.

Early Spring Greenhouse, Take 3

2011-03-07T06:05:00.007-07:00

The chamber within the greenhouse.

Each spring it seems we reinvent everything. My lovely wife talks about what we did the past two years here, so I won't go into it. This year it seems our stop-gap solution is just as inelegant as the past two were, just in different ways. We have what you can conclusively call a "greenhouse", but of course it has no heat. So, in order to get our onions, leeks, and early lettuce on their way to the field, we had to come up with some way to heat the building. Since a little space heater won't do the trick, especially at night, yet since the space heater is all we have, we modified the space to fit the heat source.

But first, we had to assemble the structure:

Shoveling out a spot for the greenhouse.

Pa helping put up the greenhouse.

Willa and her skeptical eye.

Greenhouse walls are up.

Completed greenhouse.

Inside the greenhouse.

Back to the heat issue: I cut up foam panels (R-value of 3) to boxed off a little section of the greenhouse for the nighttime. Each day we have to take down the foam door and the foam ceiling to allow sunlight in (it is a greenhouse after all). We've already filled that space, so the next question is, will the weather shift to allow us to use the full greenhouse, or are we going to have to expand our little foam insulation haven?

Or a better question: when will we be able to buy a farm so we can build a proper greenhouse so that each spring we don't have to dream up some half-baked solution to the problem of not having a greenhouse with proper heat?

Work Season and Worry Season

2011-02-28T21:36:00.001-07:00

This was last year's starts set up. This year, we have a fancy new (to us) little greenhouse in our backyard. One problem fixed... or so we thought.

For farmers, there are really only two seasons: work season and worry season.

This new piece up on The Daily Yonder explains why right now, our lives feel like one big story problem.

Prairie Heritage Farm 2011 CSA Programs

2011-02-23T06:35:00.017-07:00

Prairie Heritage Farm is largely what is called "Community Supported Agriculture," meaning we sell "shares" of the products we produce to members. Here is some information on our three programs.

About Us
As many of you know, Prairie Heritage Farm is an organic farm based just outside of Conrad, Montana, about 60 miles north of Great Falls. It is owned and managed by us: Jacob and Courtney Cowgill. This is our third year farming in Conrad as well as our third year doing a Vegetable CSA program. 2011 marks the fourth year of our Thanksgiving CSA and the second year offering limited shares in a Whole Grain and Seed CSA. We'll get you up to speed on that later, but for now, a little bit about the CSA concept and what you can expect from us this summer:

What is Community Supported Agriculture?
Community Supported Agriculture, commonly referred to as CSA, is a unique arrangement between a farmer and customers. Customers buy shares in the farm’s crops, usually at the beginning of the season and in exchange, they receive goods throughout the growing season. By receiving money before the season begins, the farmer has much needed operating capital to buy seeds and other start-up inputs. In this arrangement, the customer shares in the benefits as well as in the risks of the farm. A CSA allows you to become more closely connected to where your food comes from, and by supporting a local farm, you are also supporting the local economy and our state’s agricultural heritage.

How Does the Prairie Heritage Farm Vegetable CSA Work?
Each week, you'll pick up a package of organic vegetables – whatever is ripe and ready for harvest that week. The CSA will run roughly from June to October, and you'll receive shares for a minimum of 16 weeks. We are working on season extenders, so we're hopeful we'll be able to offer you more but it all depends on the weather. Your first CSA share is likely to include early-season crops like spinach, radishes, peas, kale and like. By July, your fridge and pantry will be brimming with tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, greens, beets, summer squash, cucumbers and fresh herbs. Part of the beauty of the CSA is you will truly be eating in season.

Conrad-area customers will pick up their shares at our house in Conrad. This year it is unlikely we will attend the Great Falls Farmers’ Market, so Great-Falls area customers will pick up in Great Falls at a to-be-determined time and place.

Note: If there are weeks you are not able to pick up your CSA share, it is your responsibility to arrange for someone else to pick it up for you or you can request that we donate your share.

Payment:
Our shares are sold on a sliding scale of between $400 and $500. And truly, we want you to pay whatever you can pay within that range. Again this year, if it suits you, you can pay half of the full price in February and half in August. Please specify your price and your payment schedule when you send in your check.

Half Shares:
We are offering half shares this year for $275. All of that amount is due up front. This year, rather than receiving half as many vegetables each week, you will get a full share’s worth every other week.

We ask that your first payment reach us by March 15 in order to reserve your membership (2010 shareholders have first priority). We are expanding this year, but there is a waiting list, so please respond as quickly as you can for the sake of those folks languishing in vegetable limbo.

Sign up now for the Vegetable CSA by sending your payment to:
Prairie Heritage Farm
Box 914, Conrad, MT 59425

Other Prairie Heritage Farm CSA Programs

Thanksgiving CSA
A few days before Thanksgiving, our Thanksgiving CSA members receive a package of winter squash, onions and potatoes as well as an organic, pasture-raised heritage turkey. Our turkeys continue to get rave reviews, many of our customers covering their surveys this year with phrases like "tastiest bird we've ever had" and "my guests were wowed" and many, many exclamation points.

Payment:
The vegetables will cost $20 up-front for,
5-7 potatoes; 3-4 onions; 5-10 lbs. winter squash
The turkeys will cost $5.00/lb. Like last year, your up-front cost will be for an 8 lb. turkey. However many pounds over that, you will pay upon delivery. For example, if you receive a 12 pound turkey, you will pay an additional $20 (4 lbs. x $5.00) upon delivery.

The total up-front cost of the Thanksgiving CSA is $60 and a limited number of shares are available.

Sign up for the Thanksgiving CSA now by sending your $60 deposit to:
Prairie Heritage Farm
Box 914, Conrad, MT 59425

Grain and Seed CSA
With the Grain and Seed CSA, you receive around 100 lbs. of whole grains and lentils in the late fall, early winter, after we've harvest and cleaned the crop. In 2010, shareholders received:

10 pounds of Crimson lentils
10 pounds of Red Chief lentils
20 pounds of Sonora spring wheat
15 pounds of Khorasan wheat
15 pounds of Lucile emmer
15 pound of Bronze barley
2 pounds of milk thistle
Total pounds: 87 pounds.

A breakdown of costs is as follows:
$3/lb. for lentils
$2/lb. for spring wheat
$1.75/lb. for Khorasan
$3/lb. for emmer
$2.25/lb. for barley
$12/lb. for milk thistle

The 2011 share will be similar, but may include different varieties and amounts.

Payment:
If you'd like to sign up, you'll pay a down payment this spring of $100 and then pay the rest of the balance upon delivery in the fall. The remainder will depend on what the 2011 share entails. Just to give you an idea, in 2010, the total cost amounted to $229.

A limited number of shares are available.

Sign up now by sending your $100 deposit to:
Prairie Heritage Farm
Box 914, Conrad, MT 59425

We believe that small family farms nourish not only the people who work them, but the people they feed and communities in which they live. We believe organic agriculture, diversification and a robust local food system are good for the health of our farm, our customers, ourselves and our planet.

We are so thankful for your continued support, whether you're a returning CSA customer or a one of our loyal farmers' market customers considering the CSA, you've been instrumental in making Prairie Heritage Farm work.

We look forward to serving you healthy, organic food again this summer. Here's to Spring!

Warmly,
Jacob and Courtney Cowgill

Do not hesitate to call or email with questions. We'd love to hear from you.

Reach us at:
PO Box 914
Conrad, MT 59425
E-mail: farmer at prairieheritagefarm dot com
Jacob at 406-396-1291
Courtney at 406-531-4794

Pioneer

2011-02-19T17:05:00.009-07:00

I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I just wanted to let everybody know I'm a Planet Whizbang Pioneer. Yes, that's right, a Planet Whizbang Pioneer (note I was only 13 away from being something not as noteworthy).

The reason for my crowning is a recent purchase of a wheel hoe kit. This wonderful website tells you just how to build one of your own, but my decision to purchase the pieces came down to a simple calculation of how much time it would take me to source the metal, build a jig to bend some pieces, bend some pieces, be unsatisfied with how the jig bent the pieces, build another jig to bend some pieces, again be unsatisfied, give up and crawl around on my hands and knees and pull every single stinking weed by hand. I don't think I'll regret it.

As an aside, I first stumbled across Mr. Kimball about 4 years ago when I was searching for resources on how to butcher a chicken. His is one of the best websites, with great photos. It's been viewed nearly a million times. Now that's a lot of butchered chickens.

Withering Wind

2011-02-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Well dear readers, there just weren't enough of you to reign in the wind (see a previous post to get the reference). I started out optimistic, loading the entire greenhouse structure onto the trailer. That took about 2 hours. Then I headed north and watched the west wind bow in the side of the structure. After about 20 miles of this, I headed west and the wind shoved the entire greenhouse about 2 feet off the back of the trailer. I drove about 20 miles at 35 miles per hour watching the greenhouse shimmy and shake in my rear view mirror and realized that at this rate, it would take me over 8 hours to get home. Plus, my stress levels were off the charts and after 8 hours I would no doubt melt into a nervous breakdown.

Loaded and battered.

So, I pulled over next to a storage facility and began to dismantle the whole thing, something I should have done at the very beginning. This took about 3 1/2 hours. I then hit the road and got home after dark without incident. Never, never, never underestimate the wind.

Flattened.

Need More

2011-02-16T06:39:00.001-07:00

Don't we all.

Playing Catch-up Already

2011-02-11T06:12:00.005-07:00

A Case as white as snow.

Though the "season" hasn't actually started, I feel as though we're playing catch-up already. I also feel that all we ever write about is the weather or our lack of time. Well, file this post under "lack of time."

We have most of our seed ordered, but have yet to come up with a solution to our lack of a greenhouse. As we've previously mentioned, there is a rather nice, solid greenhouse on the property we're leasing, but it has no heat and it would be a serious investment to get heat to it, one which we're not willing to make since we don't own the building or the property. The first year, we were able to get away with starting our seedlings in a germination chamber under fluorescent lights at the farm, and since I was farming full-time, I could monitor them easily. The second year, when we increased our production and I found an off-farm job, we set up two metal racks in the sun room of our rental house in town. The seedlings again sat under fluorescent lights. The problem with that set up was our sun room didn't have very good ventilation nor very good sunlight, and besides, we ran out of room quickly. This year, we're considering purchasing a small 8'x16' greenhouse to plop in the back yard. That would hopefully solve the high humidity issue, the lack of sunlight issue, and it would still be close by for daily management. I'm driving the pickup and trailer a few hundred miles today to check out a used greenhouse I saw on craigslist. Oh, our convoluted decision-making process.

Why the photo of the tractor, you ask? Well, we are simultaneously looking into upgrading our equipment for the field crops as well as in anticipation of increasing our acreage in 2012. This little beauty is a Case 4490, about a 150 horsepower 4 wheel drive tractor. It would be the appropriate size for 260 acres. The reason we're looking now is 1) so we're ready come spring 2012, and 2) so we can possibly help out the farmer currently leasing the rest of the acreage (the acreage we would farm in 2012). I'm not sure how much sense that makes given that it will take time away from our operation and this post is all about lack of time. Again, farming, at least beginning a farm, warps the brain.

We are also in the midst of trying to figure out a way to successfully transfer the farm ownership over to us. The land is the current farmer's retirement, so there are no deals to be made (nor would we expect that), but we think there may be creative ways to make the transfer. At least we hope so since employing creativity will be the only way we will be able to pull it off. Stay tuned.

I just got our organic certification application in the mail today. It seems like I just finished the paperwork for last year's application. The NRCS and FSA are calling out to me to get going on their required paperwork. Taxes are due soon and we haven't even set up an appointment with our accountant. We have grain to clean for some additional Grain and Seed CSA members, turkeys to order, grants to apply for, Vegetable CSA members to sign up, aaaaaaaaaaah!

Wish me luck today: if this greenhouse pans out, it'll be sitting about 7' tall on top of the trailer, strapped down tight, with strong west winds wanting to send it flying. I'd ask all those readers west of us to take a collective breath in while all those readers east of us to simultaneously blow out when I drive through Judith Gap, one of the windiest spots in the state.

The Bucket Thresher

2011-01-30T14:45:00.022-07:00

My threshing companion.

As I've stated on previous posts, part of what I believe will make us successful here at Prairie Heritage Farm, is the specialty crops we will be able to grow. Since we farm in a sparsely populated location, we are limited in where we can market our fresh vegetables. To balance that, we also focus on Thanksgiving turkeys and heritage and ancient grains. While we tout the freshness of our grains, there is far more flexibility in delivering them to our markets. And, our markets can reach all over the state, without fear of the grain going bad as our vegetables would if we tried to sell them hundreds of miles away.

But, we realized when we started that there are not that many unique varieties of grains and seeds anymore. Whereas 100 or even 50 years ago, farmers grew what worked for their location, our nation's wheat and barley varieties have been exclusively bred for economically advantageous characteristics such as high yields, short straw, or other purely agronomic traits. No consideration has been made for a grain's nutritional profile (except for protein), unique tastes, or cooking qualities. Or, a grain's ability to thrive in a specific location.

Knowing we wouldn't be able to survive if we grew modern varieties that would be fed into the commodity marketplace, we set out to explore the hundreds and thousands of unique ancient and heritage varieties of grains and seeds still surviving in very small quantities. After procuring over 200 different varieties of wheat in 2009, we planted small plots to assess their general ability to thrive in our particular environment. Many didn't do well, but quite a few produced an abundant crop. Unfortunately, as beginning farmers with limited skills and time, the only realistic way to assess a variety's future value was, ironically, to measure its yield. To test its nutritional profile would be costly as well as take away from our limited seed supply. There was comfort knowing that any heritage variety that did well (from a strictly yield standpoint) likely had wonderful nutritional and taste characteristics since it hadn't been aggressively bred for large scale agriculture.

We harvested the plants with scissors, and after the season slowed down in 2009, we hand-threshed and weighed the wheat. Based on yields, we planted out the best varieties in 2010, paring it down to about 30 different varieties. We also started trialing varieties of barley, dry beans, amaranth, quinoa, and teff.

Today, I'm in the spare bedroom of the house we rent in town, looking at the sacks of wheat we cut with scissors in 2010. It was rough on the hands and took quite a while to hand-thresh the wheat from 2009. God bless the internet, for I stumbled upon this video of a farmer who built a bucket thresher for his grain. Instead of 2 chains, I just used one at the end of the all-thread with a bearing glued to the bucket lid so that I can raise and lower the chain within the bucket. So far, it has worked well. When the weather warms up a bit (it's currently about 2 below), I'll take the threshed grain and run it in front of a fan to blow away the chaff. Then I'll be able to weigh it and hand plant out the best varieties in the hopes that in 2012, I'll be able to have enough of a few varieties to seed with the tractor and seed drill.

The chain.

The bearing glued to the lid.

If there is one thing I've discovered in working with grain, it is that the current infrastructure is not designed for small acreage. While the trialing can be done by hand - from planting to harvesting to cleaning - once you increase to over 1/4 acre or so, there doesn't seem to be any intermediate option. We've gotten by with borrowed equipment (tractor and hoe drill), an old combine, and a borrowed fanning mill, but none of it does an exceptional job, And to hire it out, especially the cleaning, would cost us a fortune (even if somebody were willing to deal with our rinky-dink scale).

So as we develop our unique varieties of grains and seeds, and build our enterprises, we continue to explore ways in which to manage and control the process from field to plate. We will need to invest in equipment, in particular, cleaning equipment, but we need to be very careful about how we do it. We have to convince ourselves the market exists (or create the market) in order to justify the undoubtedly expensive investment, even in moderately sized equipment.

Farming, especially for beginning farmers, is as much about what to plant and where to sell it as it is about deciding what to spend your severely limited capital on, in the hopes it edges you that much closer to long term success.

The wheat before being threshed.

Ready to be threshed.

Threshing.

After running the drill for a few seconds.

Threshed seed.

The Right to Farm

2011-01-28T06:34:00.004-07:00

Every farmer should have the right to farm what and how he or she desires, as long as the land is not harmed over the long term and as long as other farmers are not harmed.

Every patent-holder should be required to control their product. If they cannot, then they should not be allowed to release it. If a widget self-replicates and the patent holder on that widget cannot control its replication, that widget should be shelved.

Any agency charged with oversight must be fair and reasonable to all those they oversee. In situations of direct conflict, that agency must err on the side of caution and maintain the status quo until concerns can be addressed and the conflict resolved. In situations where decisions may result in unknown and unknowable consequences, an agency must protect its citizens over corporations.

Otherwise, rights erode.

Holding the Bank at Bay

2011-01-26T05:07:00.004-07:00

Disk in the boneyard.

As I previously mentioned in our year end wrap-up, we were handed the opportunity to farm the full 260 acres this year. I'll spare the details, but essentially if we chose not to farm it and the other farmer who leases the land chose not to, the long-term availability of the farm land would have been in question. In other words, our landlords would have faced the very real possibility of being forced to sell the ground. Since our long-term goal is to grow to 260 acres, we figured we should just go for it this year.

My lovely wife discusses it far more eloquently here, but we sat down with our local bank, and our very nice banker did what he does best and pointed out to us all the fears he has as a banker looking at our application: specialty crops with unverifiable yields and prices (since since nobody around grows them and they're not traded on the open market), our limited experience as new farmers, uninsurable crops, and our lack of collateral. All valid concerns. We would ask for a land loan to purchase some of the acreage, an equipment loan to buy larger equipment for the increased acreage, and an operating loan. The one that scared me the most was the operating loan since when given the money, there is nothing tangible behind it. The ability to pay it back is completely reliant on successfully planting, growing, harvesting, and selling a multitude of crops.

Our visit to the banker was somewhat for show, since what we needed was for him to deny us. That is one of the requirements of the Farm Service Agency's (FSA) low-interest loans. But, the banker did his due diligence and spent a good amount of time with us, honestly assessing our application. We learned a lot, were given good reminders of the dangers of borrowing money, and were able to see the bigger picture when all was said and done.

Denied by our banker, I sat down with the FSA loan officer. I've visited with him before so he knows what we're up to. He spent a good three hours with me, talking about our plans, expressing his fears as a loan officer and generally increasing my already rising fear at borrowing so much money.

I've always believed we have to grow slowly if we are to be successful. We've only partly followed this path, as the demand for local, fresh, nutritious food seems to be far higher than we can possibly supply, even in this rural part of Montana. So, we've had to balance growing slowly with jumping at opportunities to grow and sell our diversified products. But, to go from 15 acres to 260 acres is quite the leap. One we're willing to take, but maybe not just yet if we don't have to.

Thankfully, the farmer who leases the rest of the farm agreed to farm it again this year. That buys us some time to thoughtfully plan our expansion. Not that we haven't been thoughtful these past few weeks, but it's been rushed as the planting season approaches. So, we will continue to plan on purchasing some of the acreage (so we can begin to build our homestead and live on the farm), possibly take out an equipment loan to give us time to find a solid set of implements and a tractor (classifieds, craiglist, equipment dealers, auctions), and in 2012, tentatively plan on farming the entire 260 acres.

As an aside, as I've gone through multiple scenarios with my 6- and 7-year cash flows, I've been surprised by how good it looks (on paper). Though my best-guess cash flow spreadsheets show that 260 acres, growing and raising what we would grow and raise, makes sense, I always second guess myself. If 260 acres makes sense here in rural Montana, why aren't more farmers farming this scale? Why do they continue to expand to two thousand, three thousand, four thousand acres and more? I realize what we're doing is unconventional and it requires a high degree of labor, but how can I, a beginning farmer, show success at this scale when so many others made the decision to grow by thousands of acres and not tens of acres? I honestly don't know. I'll ask myself that question again in 5 or 6 years when my spreadsheets aren't hypothetical. I just hope hypothetical agrees with reality.

Grain and Seed CSA Grinding Party

2011-01-14T06:04:00.004-07:00

Grain, grain, and more grain.

Last Saturday, Court, Willa, and I traveled West of the divide, to deliver our grains and seeds to a handful of our shareholders. The roads were icy and the pass a bit hairy, but our little car was loaded down with nearly 1,000 pounds of grain, so our back tires stuck to the road.

We brought our hand-crank grain grinder (called a GrainMaker made by a Stevensville, Montana company) so folks could turn some of their share into whole flour.

Grinding Sonora wheat into flour.

We made some lentil-barley soup, emmer salad, green salad with barley and wheat sprouts, and whole wheat sourdough Sonora wheat bread. It was noted that this was probably the most grain anybody had ever eaten in one sitting.

Eating a dinner full of grains.

All in all, I'd say this inaugural year for our Grain and Seed CSA was a big success. Our lentils weren't as clean as I'd like and we weren't able to dehull the black barley in time for delivery, but seeing the tidy bags of grains and legumes on the table, knowing what we went through to get to this point, and knowing we're giving our shareholders high-quality, nutritious staple foods, made us proud.

Emmer.

Crimson Lentil.

The 2010 Season (Year 2 of ?)

2011-01-11T07:22:00.002-07:00

Willa's wondering what she got herself into.

It's hard to believe, but it's that time of year again - when I give an incomplete summary of the farming year and what the future holds. So hold on!

Of course the most significant event was the birth of Willa Anne on September 28th. She didn’t enter this world without some hard work on Courtney’s part, but enter the world she did, pink and screaming. She’s been such a wonderful addition to our lives and she is growing so quickly. It seems a long time ago that we had to support her head when we held her. Now she does just fine without a hand on the back of her neck. She smiles a little more each day and is starting to grip things with her teeny-tiny hands. We’re so happy she’s here and can't wait for her to be gripping weeds.

This past growing season, I was able to work 3/4-time at my non-farm job, but unfortunately I won't be able to do that again this next year and will need to be working full-time. That will be quite a challenge, as even 3/4-time made for a severe shortage of hours to spend on the farm. This year we had a work-share arrangement with one of our vegetable CSA members and will do that again next year, but we will definitely need more help.

Just to add to babies and full-time jobs, there is the possibility next year that we will be farming the entire farm – all 260 acres. Though this has always been a goal of ours, it wasn’t something we wanted to tackle the first few years of starting the farm. Circumstances have thrown the opportunity at us quite a bit earlier than we’d anticipated.

The most obvious challenge to all of this (and even without adding an additional 245 acres onto what we’re already doing), is lack of time. I mentioned this earlier, but we’ll have to have interns and/or hired help for the vegetables and turkeys. For the larger scale field crops, we will likely need the help of Courtney's farmer dad.

Another challenge will be finding equipment to successfully manage such large acreage (large to us, anyway). Currently we use a 100-horsepower tractor which can pull a 12-foot duckfoot plow and an 8-foot seed drill. That works well for 15 acres, but since time is our primary challenge, it would require us to work day and night just to plow 260 acres in the spring. So, I’ve begun looking around for larger equipment, researching what is out there and how much it costs. I know that no matter what I discover, I will need to find financing somewhere. I've visited with our local FSA loan officer and will explore what the USDA offers. I’ve sat down with him before to discuss beginning farmer programs, so he knows me and what we’re up to.

This is all very scary to us. Are we in, or about to be, over our heads? Are we up for this? Are we foolish for taking all this on? Is there reasonableness in sight? Will this even work out? All rhetorical questions, of course.

Just to add to all of the above, we’re also still struggling to figure out how to live on the farm. We briefly figured out a way to rent the second house, but the timing wasn't right and the overall expense didn't make much sense, so we reconsidered moving a trailer house onto the property. But that has its own challenges, like access to water, power, and sewer. All that would have to be developed for the trailer house which is another expense lost to us after we’re done living in the trailer house. So, what we are considering now, is to simply (ha!) buy the 80 dryland acres on the farm and start building a home. Since that is our long-term goal (buy the farm ground and none of the existing buildings, building our own homestead infrastructure), why wait? Why spend all this money on temporary solutions to living on the farm when any investment is lost after a few years anyway? By buying 80 acres (again with the FSA’s help) and building a house, we’ve gained an investment in 80 acres and a house 3 miles from town. Whether or not any of this will play out as I imagine it remains to be seen. I guess the point to this diatribe is that it doesn’t look as though we will be living on the farm in 2011, a real letdown since I will already be stretched thin between my off-farm job and the farm and I don’t want to unnecessarily miss out on any baby daughter time.

Now that I’ve spent the bulk of this post on what-ifs, it’s time to let you know how everything went this past season. In short, it was a challenge, but we pulled it off. We successfully provided weekly vegetables to 24 CSA members – 15 in Great Falls, 6 in Conrad, 2 in Havre, and 1 in Choteau – and attended the Great Falls farmers’ market each Saturday morning. Using the Sonora heritage wheat we grew in 2009, each week for the farmers’ market I baked 20 loaves of 100% whole wheat sourdough bread that we called Farmer Bread. It was such a success with repeat customers, we created a Bread CSA for the winter, where we provide a weekly loaf of bread to 7 shareholders for 5 months.

We started a Grain and Seed CSA and opened it up to 12 members, who each received approximately 100 pounds of different heritage and ancient varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, and milk thistle. Just this past week, we delivered the grain to our customers and organized a grain grinding party where we offered up the use of our handcrank grain grinder, cooked a variety of dishes from our grains, and got to know our CSA members (stay tuned for a forthcoming post on the event).

Einkorn.

We also raised 81 heritage turkeys and fulfilled 21 Thanksgiving CSA shares. We had indispensable help from numerous friends to butcher the birds on the extremely cold weekend before Thanksgiving. One morning it was 19 below outside. Our turkeys ended up on tables in Shelby, Conrad, Dutton, Great Falls, Helena, Bozeman, Missoula, Lewistown, Livingston, Belgrade, Choteau, and Fairfield.

Next year, we will modify a few things to adjust for my full-time work. It’s unlikely we will continue to travel the 60 miles to the Great Falls farmers’ market each Saturday morning. Though being at the market the past 2 years has been like having a living business card – getting the word out, allowing us to experiment with baking bread, and building a strong customer base – it never really paid for itself. And, as competition increases in the Great Falls area (already 3 other growers, other than Hutterite colonies, have set up at the market), it will make even less sense to make the 120-mile trip and work 10 hours on a Saturday with little return and leftover vegetables. With our vegetables, we would like to focus on the Conrad area and 2011 may give us the chance to do so. Plus, we won’t have to wake up so God-awful early on Saturday mornings. By not having to supply the farmers’ market, we can increase the number of vegetable shareholders to 30 or possibly 40. We also won’t have any vegetable waste since we will know exactly how much to grow.

We’ll raise the same number of turkeys next year and continue our Thanksgiving CSA program. We’ll modify our pasturing system to make it more efficient and easier to manage. We bought a mixer/grinder which will allow us to make much of our own feed, helping cut one of the biggest expenses in raising turkeys.

Based on the shareholder feedback from our Grain and Seed CSA, we’ll modify and expand what we offer. We'll continue to trial different varieties of ancient and heritage grains and a variety of alternative crops such as amaranth, quinoa, teff, and fonio. This year we borrowed a small fanning mill to clean the grain, which worked okay. But I think the CSA and the different varieties of grains and alternative crops we will be able to offer will be a very successful enterprise for the farm, and it will be necessary to sufficiently clean and process the seeds. Eventually, I envision offering CSA shares to restaurants and bakeries.

All in all, I would say it was a very successful 2nd year. The next few years will be particularly challenging, largely due to unplanned circumstances, but I think we’re up to it. I stand by my belief it is possible to start and sustain a small-scale diversified family farm in rural Montana in this day in age. And for the foreseeable future, I will continue to make that statement. I look forward to the day when I can say, "it is possible to start and sustain a small-scale diversified family farm in rural Montana."

Farming: The Perfect Lesson in Surrender

2011-01-05T17:12:00.002-07:00

Because I didn't have enough to do, I've started writing a monthly column about farming and coming home for both the Daily Yonder (a great online journal about rural issues) and my alma mater, as it were, New West (the online magazine about the Rockies I started gosh, six years ago now, and edited until I stepped away last year to farm and raise babies.)

The most recent column is about surrender, which I've written about before on the blog.

Here's the link to that column.

And the inaugural one is here.

I feel so very grateful to have an outlet, let alone two, for these writings. I've always promised myself I would write again if. If I could find the time, if it were the right circumstance, if I could just relax about it and not freak out about it not being good enough, if my house were clean, if I had a place to write... you get the idea.

Well, thanks to the encouragement of a few key people (the editor at Daily Yonder (thanks Bill!), the publisher and former editor at New West (thanks Lynn and Jule!) and my mother in law (thanks Marty!), I've stopped making all those excuses and just started sitting down to write.

It feels great.

As you might know, I never planned to farm, in fact I vowed not to. But, living in the country (hopefully soon), raising little ones (Willa is asleep in the sling as I type) and writing has been my dream of dreams since I was a kid.

Ironic then, that farming is making all of that happen, no?

Happy New Year from the Cowgill clan.

And, because I can't resist an opportunity to share how stinking cute our baby is, did you know we already have at least one strawberry growing? Meet Willa, the baby dinosaur in a berry costume:

Willa the Baby Dinosaur from conradcowgills on Vimeo.

'Tis the Season

2010-12-10T05:21:00.002-07:00

It's that time of year when the days after Thanksgiving seem to blur into each other in the lead up to Christmas. Farm thoughts subside (somewhat) and we scramble around trying to figure out what to get everybody for Christmas. We do know that Lydia the Dog would like a pig friend.

Lydia the Dog and Pig

One gift we sure wish Santa would come around with is a new timing belt for our car. I was on the interstate early one morning this week and it broke, bending valves in the process. It'll be at least a $1400 fix. The car has over 250,000 miles on it so the question is, do we fix it? We certainly can't expect to find a decent replacement car at that price and at least we know the history of this car. It's sort of a funny debate to be having since we don't actually have $1400. Next year I'm planting a money tree on the farm. Actually, I'll put in a whole orchard.

The jury is still out on whether Santa thinks we've been naughty or nice.

Santa says you've been nice.

Santa says you've been naughty.

Turkey Time

2010-11-29T06:32:00.005-07:00

While the season isn't quite over yet (does it ever really end?), I think all of us here at Prairie Heritage Farm are breathing a long sigh of relief, now that the turkeys have found their way into the mouths and freezers of friends and family in nearly a dozen cities across the state.

We still need to wrap up our first annual Grain and Seed CSA, but cleaning, weighing, bagging, and delivering grains is a far cry from wrangling 80 turkeys in subzero weather.

So, here are a few images from the highly successful (thanks to the wonderful crew that came out to help) 2010 Prairie Heritage Farm Turkey Fest:

Russ the Turkey Catcher.

Kelsey the Turkey Scalder.

Mandy, Jason, and Rick - the Mothers of All Pluckers.

Heather, Erin, and John - Turkey Gutters Extraordinaire.

Recipes for Your Heritage Turkey

2010-11-23T20:20:00.003-07:00

We can't believe the community that turned out to help us get 81 birds from pasture to table this weekend. We're so very thankful to all of you who helped make it all happen: Jason, Heather, Erin, Rick, Neva, Kate, John, Nathan, Mandy, Dad/Clyde, Jennephyr, Bronco, Kelsey, Jill, Russ, Christa, David, and Mom/Julie. At one point, these brave souls were butchering in -19 degree weather. Troopers doesn't even begin to describe these people. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And, of course, customers, we couldn't do this without you. Thank you for supporting us, encouraging local food in Central Montana and for keeping these breeds alive by eating them.

Back by popular demand, after the jump (click on "more" below) are three great recipes for your birds.

Happy, happy, happy Thanksgiving from Prairie Heritage Farm, Jacob, Courtney and Willa.

A Few Heritage Turkey Recipes

Roast Heritage Turkey
This recipe is from Chef Leonard Spampinato of Aromas Fine Catering. These are his roasting guidelines: 6 to 16 pounds, 15 to 20 minutes per pound. Over 16 pounds, 12 to 15 minutes per pound. Do not cover the birds with foil, he cautions, or they will steam, not roast.

For the turkey:
1 12- to 15-pound turkey
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 large sprigs fresh thyme leaves, coarsely chopped
3 large sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
1 bay leaf
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Stems from 1/2 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley

For the pan sauce:
4 to 5 tablespoons cornstarch
5 cups chicken stock

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. Rinse the turkey and pat dry. Melt butter in a small saucepan. Allow butter to cool to room temperature.
2. While the butter is cooling, season the turkey. Rub the minced garlic over the entire turkey, including the underside. Brush butter over the entire bird. Then season with thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper. Place the bay leaf and parsley stems inside the cavity. Put the turkey in a roasting pan and place in the preheated oven to roast for 30 minutes.
3. After 30 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 250 degrees. Roast the bird for 3 hours and 30 minutes to 5 hours (see roasting guidelines above), or until a thermometer registers 165 degrees*. Be sure to place the thermometer into a thigh and avoid touching the bone.
4. Transfer the turkey to a platter and let it rest for 30 minutes before carving. While the turkey is resting, prepare the sauce.
5. Preparing the pan sauce: Dissolve the cornstarch in one cup of cold chicken stock. Pour the fat and juices from the roasting pan into a container. Let the juices settle to the bottom and skim the fat from the top. Place the roasting pan on top of the stove over medium heat.
6. Add the juices back to the pan along with the remaining 4 cups of chicken stock (about 1/4 cup for every pound of turkey).
7. Bring the liquid to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan to release the browned drippings on the bottom. Thicken the sauce by whisking in the cornstarch-stock mixture. When the sauce returns to a boil, reduce heat and let simmer for about 5 minutes.
8. Adjust the seasonings and strain through a sieve. The sauce is now ready to serve. Carve the turkey and pass the sauce.

Roasted Heritage Turkey
By Sandra Kay Miller
She says, "Besides the fact that most old fashion Heritage turkeys are also raised the old fashioned way – with plenty of grass and sunshine – they need to be cooked quite differently than their modern, factory-farmed counterparts. This tried and true recipe (which serves 10-12 people) will make the best of your Heritage bird this year. "

Ingredients:
15-pound fresh heritage turkey at room temperature
Kosher or sea salt & fresh ground pepper
4 cups giblet broth (see recipe below)
Rosemary Maple Butter (see recipe below)
Oiled parchment paper

1. Rub turkey inside and out with salt and pepper.
2. Loosen the skin around the breast with your fingers and insert Rosemary Maple Butter between the meat and the skin as well as on the inside of the bird's cavity.
3. Set bird in deep roasting pan. Use a wire rack to lift the bird off the bottom of the pan.
4. Add the giblet broth to the bottom of the pan. Using a sheet of oiled parchment paper, tent the roasting pan with the oiled parchment paper. Any type of cooking oil can be used. Brush it on both sides with a pastry brush. The parchment paper is easily affixed to the roasting pan with a strip of foil on each end or you can use clean, oiled wooden clothespins.
5. Remove parchment paper and the last 30 minutes of cooking to develop a crispy, golden skin.
6. Pre-heat oven to 425F-450F. Roast the bird until the thigh temperature reaches 140F-150F*.
7. Let the bird rest 10-15 minutes before carving to let the juices settle.

A word about basting
Quick roasting at high temperatures means the oven temperature needs to be maintained and frequent basting defeats that purpose. By adding butter under the skin, the bird is self-basted. Baste the bird when you remove the parchment tent. If there is not enough liquid for basting, add either more water or wine.

Giblet Broth
2 cups white wine (a deep, oaky chardonnay lends a wonder taste)
2 cups water
Giblets & neck
Bay leaf

Simmer everything in a small saucepan for 15 minutes. Discard bay leaf and neck. Giblets can be discarded if they aren't your type of thing or they can be finely chopped and added to the broth.

Rosemary Maple Butter
1/2 pound butter
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 tablespoon fresh minced rosemary
Bring butter to room temperature and whip all ingredients together.

Simple Heritage Roast Turkey
This one is from the November 7, 2007 New York Times and the one we used last year. It was delicious.

Time: 2 to 3 1/2 hours, depending on size of turkey

1 12-to 18-pound heritage turkey such as a Bronze or Bourbon Red, thawed, with giblets and neck removed
3 tablespoons kosher salt
1 1/2 tablespoons black pepper
4 tablespoons butter, cut into four pieces
1 medium onion, quartered
2 stalks celery, cut in two or three pieces each
1 medium apple, halved
8 sprigs fresh thyme
2 cups turkey broth, water or a mixture of half water and half apple juice.

1. At least four hours before roasting, rub turkey inside and out with salt and pepper; refrigerate. Remove from refrigerator 45 minutes before roasting. Heat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Set turkey in roasting pan fitted with a V-shaped rack. Slip your fingers under skin to loosen it. Rub butter over breasts. Stuff vegetables, apple and thyme into cavity. Tuck wingtips under bird.
3. Pour broth or water into pan, around bird. Put turkey in oven and roast, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 325, baste turkey with pan juices, cover with a foil tent and return to oven. Cook for another 30 minutes. Remove foil, baste again and place foil back on turkey. Cook for 30 more minutes. Remove foil.
4. When turkey has roasted for a total of two hours, insert a meat thermometer straight down into fleshiest part of thigh, where it meets drumstick. Check a second spot, then remove thermometer. (Do not let thermometer touch bone.) Thigh meat should reach no more than 165 degrees*. Juices should run clear. (If bird is larger than 14 pounds, keep foil on longer and begin checking meat temperature at two and half hours.) To assure perfectly cooked white and dark meat, you may remove bird when meat thermometer shows thigh temperature at 155, then remove legs and roast them separately for another 15 to 30 minutes, depending on size of bird.
5. When bird has reached desired temperature, remove from oven and let rest for at least 30 minutes, covered in foil and with a damp towel on top of foil, to retain heat and allow juices to return to meat. Remove foil and towel and serve.
Yield: 8 to 12 servings.

*Note: The Department of Agriculture recommends an internal temperature of 180 to 185 degrees, tested in the thigh, while many cooking experts say 165 degrees is safe and results in a moister bird.

Picking Up Your Prairie Heritage Turkey

2010-11-15T16:03:00.007-07:00

Saturday, Nov. 20 and Sunday Nov. 21, our turkeys meet their fate.

If you're one of the lucky folks who got in early on the turkey list this year and are picking up your heritage bird, here are the details:

Conrad-area customers:
Pickup between 3-5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21
at the farm: 165 Sunrise Lane.

Map to the farm:

View Larger Map

Great Falls-area customers:
Between 6-8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22
2509 Upper River Road (Courtney's mother's house. Thanks Mom!)
Map:

View Larger Map

Missoula area customers:
Between 5-7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22
1118 Jackson Street (our friend Jason's house. Thanks Jason!)

View Larger Map

Helena customers:
Between 6-8 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 21
1523 Flowerree St. (Our friend Kelsey's house. Thanks Kelsey!)
Map:

View Larger Map

Bozeman customers:
Between 6-8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22
544 North Rouse Ave. (Our friend John's house, across from Audrey's Pizza Oven. Thanks John!)
Map:

View Larger Map

Start 'Em Young

2010-11-10T17:23:00.007-07:00

I'll write again here someday, when I have this thing called time, which apparently disappears when you have a newborn. But, for now, to tide you over, a few photos of our new farmhand.

Here's Willa herding her first flock of turkeys. Jacob has been gone this last week, leaving Willa and I in charge of these darned birds. I'll regale you with the trials and tribulations of herding turkeys sometime but, suffice it to say that I will shed not a tear next weekend when they meet their maker.

Just look how excited she is. Or wait, maybe that's me. She's not so sure.

Here's Willa on the quilt that the board and staff of AERO, the Alternative Energy Resource Organization, got together and bought for her at the live auction at this year's annual meeting. In so many ways, the community of AERO has made what we do possible. From equipment to emotional support, AERO folks are always there for us. We just plain love these people.

Also, I might mention that in the top photos, Willa very likely has turkey poop on her somewhere. In the bottom photo, she is wearing cashmere (thanks to my friend Jule Banville, who handed this little outfit down from her adorable daughter Kate). This just goes to show that a farmgirl can be up to her elbows in both posh and poop in the same day. That's just how we roll.

Driving Truck

2010-11-03T08:19:00.003-06:00

It's been a gorgeous fall. I should be taking advantage of it by working my tail off in the garden, but I'm dragging my feet. I need to spread manure, but I can't get motivated to do it (mostly because our manure spreader is a pickup, a shovel, and me). It's backbreaking work, so I've been avoiding it.

When a friend and neighbor asked if I'd help drive truck for his harvest, I jumped at the chance. So, instead of slinging poo, Lydia the Dog and I have been driving loads of barley from the field to the bin, dumping it, back to the field, back to the bin, dump, field, bin, dump, field, bin, dump. It's easy on the back and the scenery is nice.

What I have finally accomplished is setting up the drip irrigation in the high tunnel and broadcasting winter rye and winter pea. Both have germinated and are popping through the soil as though it's springtime and not the beginning of November. It's a wonderful sight.

True Fall

2010-10-18T08:50:00.005-06:00

Turkeys pecking around under a tree.

Autumn has been gorgeous this year. Usually fall in Montana means two to three days of 60-70 degree sunny days, a hard freeze, all the leaves fall at once, and it's winter. This year, we've had a couple weeks of mild sunny weather, the leaves are changing slowly and drift to the ground when they're ready. This has made the fall farm tasks pretty darn pleasant. There is still much to do, but it looks as though we have at least another week of perfect autumn weather.

Dumping Sonora wheat from the combine to the truck.

There is still one grain crop to harvest, the turkeys still need to be taken care of, and there is plenty of clean up around the place. I'd also like to seed the high tunnel with winter rye and winter peas. But, I've gotten some clean up done and the garlic has been planted thanks to our friends Tim and Sarah.

Tim and Sarah planting garlic.

Tim and Sarah are shareholders in our Grain and Seed CSA. This is the second year that they have been out to plant garlic. While planting yesterday and talking about the season, we came up with a great idea for next year. Shareholders adopt a crop. For example, let's say as a shareholder, you adopt a broccoli crop. You play a role in seeding the broccoli seed in the greenhouse, in transplanting the seedlings into the field, in weeding the bed throughout the season, and in harvesting (and of course eating) the crop when it's ready.

The 2011 Prairie Heritage Farm Adopt-a-Crop program. What do you think, shareholders? By the way, the garlic has already been adopted.

Our Best Harvest Ever

2010-10-02T10:04:00.002-06:00

Willa Anne Cowgill
Born September 28, 2010
7 lbs. 1 oz.
21"
Gorgeous.

Why I Married a Farmer

2010-09-21T06:15:00.009-06:00

Two years ago yesterday, I did something I promised myself I would never do: I married a farmer.

I've never in my life made a better decision.

Jacob and I married in front of an historic red barn, with our friends and family surrounding us. The leaves on the cottonwoods were just turning and the air had that unmistakable fall crisp to it. The food came from Jacob's first farming experiment in Big Sandy and the flowers from my first large cut flower garden. It was the beginning of so many things for us.

After we were married, I took a short sabbatical and moved into the single-wide trailer house (the "Invader" model) that Jacob was renting on the bald prairie near Big Sandy.

Words can't describe the smell in that place. Old skunk, mothballs and shag carpet is as close as I can come. Oh, and add cheap wood paneling and yellow bathtubs, if you could smell those too.

It was the second year Jacob had lived in the trailer and I'd become used to him coming home on weekends with a bag full of clothes that smelled like the Big Sandy trailer. We had a rule: bring bag in, dump contents into washer, leave bag outside.

The smell was so pungent, so unique that became it's very own scent, as in, I found myself saying about other things: "this smells like the Big Sandy trailer."

A few days after the wedding, while I packed up my things in Missoula, Jacob went ahead to clean up the place for his new bride.

When I arrived, he carried me across the threshold. I held my breath.

His efforts were valiant. The place smelled like bad air fresheners in flavors like "light cotton breeze" or "cinnamon splendor" -- but he'd effectively cleared out most of the skunk smell, for now at least.

We made dinner and watched the magnificent sunset and I woke up happy in the makeshift bed we'd pulled together with a futon mattress and an piece of plywood. Jacob was in the kitchen making coffee and Lydia, our blue heeler, was snuggled up with me.

In a sleepy haze, I heard some scratching and commotion under the house, but didn't think anything of it, until Lydia started barking. That brought up more scratching and commotion.

Then, the smell enveloped us.

If you've ever smelled fresh skunk spray -- like the kind the comes at you from the space under your trailer house, through only a thin floor and a futon mattress -- you know that nothing, and I mean nothing, can compare.

I jumped up and told Jacob there must be a gas leak and we had to get out now. Then, we realized it was fresh skunk spray -- just as toxic smelling as leaking gas. Jacob started scrambling to close all the heater vents on the floor and I started throwing our bedding and clothes outside in a pile, where they would at least be safe from that initial spray.

We both coughed and choked as we tried to get dressed and get coffee to get over to the farm Jacob was working on. We opened all the windows and hoped when we came home that evening, maybe some of it would have cleared out.

We spent the day in the field, harvesting wheat trials and checking on Jacob's dryland vegetable crops. Then, we came home.

No luck on the airing out. We weren't choking, but the smell was back -- and bad.

But, there was work to be done and no where else to live that far out in the prairie. So, we did the best we could. I bought more "fresh cotton breeze" and cleaned and cooked and slowly, the smell subsided and went about our work.

The days in the field were long and sunburned, dusty and hot.

We were always dirty and my hands were developing callouses again. We were totally isolated and I wasn't working on my work. All of these are ingredients, I thought, for total depression. In fact, that winter I'd refused to move with Jacob full-time for the summer out of just that fear.

But as it turned out, I had never been happier than I was in that single-wide. Jacob and I worked side by side in the hot field, talking about everything, interesting and not, and when we got home, we ate fresh salsa and chips and sat out on the few pieces of wood that made up an overgrown porch and listened to the fall bugs buzz in anticipation of the coming sunset.

We sat in the paneled kitchen and sketched blueprints for our dream house and for our root cellar and for our perfect turkey processing facility. We talked about our kids growing up on a farm, how important local agriculture could be in revitalizing rural communities and what a food revolution could do for Central Montana.

About a week after I arrived in Big Sandy, we got a phone call from a friend who said she may have found us a place of our own. A few days later, we were in David's kitchen working out the lease on his 260-acre place near Conrad -- the farm we're on now.

As some of you know, I didn't go lightly into this farming thing. Neither did Jacob, but what I mean to say is that having grown up on a farm -- a farm that failed -- I brought baggage, serious baggage, to the decision. And, I wasn't really sold on the idea even when we got married.

Until, that is, those hot days in a wood-paneled, single-wide trailer shared with a family of skunks.

It made me realize that I didn't need all these things I thought I needed to be happy. I could be isolated and working like a dog, smelling like mothballs and skunks and peeling skin off my hands and be utterly blissful.

All I really needed to be happy was this amazing man I'd been smart enough to marry. With him by my side, we could take on anything, and be inspired while doing it.

Later that summer, the farmer were were working for told us that for about a week after our first night in the trailer together, both of us left a trail of skunk smell where ever we went.

We never noticed.

Perhaps that is was marriage is all about.

Flurry

2010-09-16T05:08:00.006-06:00

It's been a flurry of activity around Prairie Heritage Farm. Frost is now old news, Farmers' Market is nearly over, the plastic is on the high tunnel (finally!) due to the help of some very good friends, the barley has been swathed, the storage crops are rolling in, and the greatest crop of all (not for sale) is presumably days away. So here is all that, but in a much prettier format:

Putting on the plastic.

Glorious high tunnel.

Swathing barley.

Pumpkin barrow.

One big onion.

Onion barrow.

Baby undies.

FROST!

2010-09-03T16:30:00.006-06:00

Yes, FROST! deserves the all-caps and exclamation point for both the anguish it causes and the relief it brings. Our winter squash needs (a lot) more time, yet I'm so tired. We'll assess the damage when the tears (of sorrow, of joy) have dried. It happened early this morning. Guess what tonight's low is supposed to be: 50 degrees.

Lentils Are In

2010-08-29T13:55:00.028-06:00

The Lowery Family Massey Ferguson 510, bought new in 1976.

Since not all the pods on a lentil plant mature at the same time, it's a balancing act to know when to swath and when to wait. If you cut too early, you may not get as many lentils. If you wait too long, the early pods may be bone dry and shell out onto the ground. Also, generally speaking, the early pods will hold 2 lentils per pod while the later pods may only have one lentil per pod. So, you want the early pods to be ready, but not overly dry.

A week ago I swathed the lentils and it was only a matter of waiting for the swath to dry. Lentils are poor competitors with other plants, so my swath also included quite a bit of volunteer emmer, wild mustard, some alfalfa, peas, grass, and lambsquarter. The whole swath pile needs to dry down before picking it up with the combine. We had a couple of nice hot days last week - in the mid-90s - but were faced with unruly weather for the weekend - cold temperatures and rain. My father-in-law Clyde had a break in his harvest schedule, so he came over on Friday to help me get the combine ready. It took us most of the morning and part of the afternoon, but we managed to loosen rusted parts (the combine probably hadn't been used in 15 years or so), fix a fuel line, and adjust the sieves and concaves. By early evening, I was in the field picking up the swath and watching the lentils fall into the hopper. It was pretty satisfying and I feel we've come a long way since last year on our grains and seeds.

Picking up the swath.

I've said this before, but one of our challenges as small-scale farmers growing grains is the equipment needed to handle them. We're piecing it together and will only get better and better at it. Our next challenge is to successfully market our specialty crops directly to customers. We're too small for most seed handling facilities to bother with (i.e. seed cleaners) and given our scale, it makes no sense to sell to the local commodity elevator where farmers get pennies per pound for their crop. Besides, were not growing undifferentiated commodities, we're growing high-quality, nutritious food.

Dumping the crop into the truck.

I harvested the first variety, Red Chief, and dumped it into the truck. After harvesting our second variety, Petite Crimson, the chain on the unloading auger broke, so the lentils had to sit in the combine hopper until the next day when I could fix it (and only a few hours before it started raining). The truck with our lentils is now safely backed into the quonset waiting to be cleaned, likely the subject of a blog post since it's bound to be an adventure, as I discover just how effective our little seed cleaner will be in removing all but the lentils (is it folly for us to try to accomplish the entire grain chain - plant, grow, harvest, clean, package, and sell?).

The harvested field.

Peas, alfalfa, mustard, emmer, and yes, lentils.

On another note, if you notice in the photo, our lentils are rather bland looking, unlike the bright and beautiful lentils you find in the grocery store. The reason for this is because ours contain every part of the seed. Many lentil varieties are decorticated, where the outer skin is taken off. This reveals their bright color and helps them cook faster. Unless a part of the seed is toxic (as is the case in quinoa seeds which are coated with the chemical compound saponin that has to be washed off before eating), removing something also removes important nutrients. There is good reason why whole-wheat flour is nutritionally superior to white or all-purpose flour (which also explains why white flour has been "enriched"). Our goal is to grow good food, not grow good food only to strip away half its nutrients.

Next up: bronze barley, black barley, Sonora wheat, and Khorasan wheat.

True Food Shall Set You Free

2010-08-25T21:31:00.003-06:00

A note from one of our bread customers:

Yes, it is true.

The Days

2010-08-24T06:43:00.004-06:00

Lentils ready.

Lentils swathed.

Swath drying.

Turkeys gobbling.

CSA Shareholders eating (more later).

Garden growing.

My lovely wife with baby growing and due very very soon.

A Lion of a Tractor

2010-08-12T05:55:00.004-06:00

My mother dug up one of my brother and my old childhood toys and brought it to our baby shower. It's a big one, I'd guess 250 horsepower, with an articulated back end. The funny thing is, though I'd forgotten about it until I saw it again, it's the very kind of tractor that I've been thinking a lot about lately, as we try to figure out if we'd be able to farm to entire place in the future (260 acres - we're currently farming 15 of it). It's too bad she wouldn't let us play with a real 250 hp tractor when we were kids. Then she could have brought that to the baby shower. And if it came with a doe-eyed lion to help out around the place, even better.

Heading to Pick Up the Pickup Header

2010-08-04T20:38:00.016-06:00

The header heading home.

Last Saturday after the Farmers' Market I took a bit of a trip. I drove about 230 miles and never left the Golden Triangle. I borrowed a trailer in Dutton, cut across to Carter, picked up some kid with a pocketful of change trying to get to Fort Benton, drove down into Fort Benton on the Missouri River, drove north to Big Sandy and loaded a pickup header from a farmer. I then drove to Tiber, over the dam, and connected up to the Ledger Road just north of Conrad. For hauling something on a trailer, it was remarkably painless. There were no problems on all the dirt roads I traveled, and loading the trailer was easy with the header fitting perfectly. I'm guessing I will be hauling many a piece of equipment in my lifetime as a farmer (and I can only hope it will be a lifetime). We may only get one flawless haul during that time, and I'm worried I just spent mine.

Some farmer in the middle of nowhere harvesting winter wheat.

One big sky.

I traversed some incredible country - wide open, huge sky, vast expanses (read This House of Sky and High, Wide, and Handsome by Ivan Doig and Joseph Kinsey Howard, respectively). Some places I drove by, Lewis and Clark walked past over 200 years ago. In particular, the Marias River was one notable landmark for the confusion it caused the party (was this the Missouri or a tributary?). Silly explorers - I knew exactly where I was.

Tiber in the background.

The Marias River after the dam - nothing like what Meriwether saw.

The pickup header will fit onto a 60s-era Massey-Ferguson 510 diesel combine. As opposed to a straight-cut header, which cuts the grain standing in the field, a pickup header is narrower and picks up windrows that have been left behind by a swather. I expect to swath again this year since there will be some green material in my fields that will need to dry down before I run them through the combine. I asked the farmer I got the header from what he wanted for it and he said nothing. I offered him my first born (only 7 more weeks!) but he said no thanks, he has enough kids. He said to donate the profits from our grain to poor people. That will work out just fine. I can just donate those assured profits back to us.

The Sweetgrass Hills in the background.

The Generosity of Friends

2010-08-03T05:39:00.010-06:00

Our good friends Patrick and Abby drove out from Wisconsin for a visit. They put in some good hard hours at the farm and we got a lot done. Essential work, actually. I can't even fathom accomplishing what we did if they had not come. In addition, on Saturday they helped us with the farmers' market. Patrick is a talented photographer. Following are a few of his photos.

Baked bread Friday evening.

Bread and hands.

Opening up the greenhouse before sunrise.

Abby in the window.

Loading the pickup for market at 4:30 in the morning.

Lydia sharing my breakfast on the drive to market.

Chard.

Squash.

Market table.

All Hail Hail

2010-07-21T07:23:00.006-06:00

Hail doesn't think about who has been good and who has been bad. Hail may decide to wipe out your neighbor's fields, but leave yours untouched, or vice versa. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for where hail hits and how much damage it does. Sometimes it's a benevolent God and other times a wrathful one.

We've been fortunate this year. Hail has wiped out friend's gardens in Lewistown and ripped through greenhouse plastic and shattered windows in Bozeman. Other areas in Montana have been hit just as hard. We avoided it until a few weeks ago when it started to hail and all I could do was pray that the teeny-tiny ice balls bouncing on the ground didn't get any bigger or come down harder. Thankfully, they didn't.

Ice ball daintily resting on a leaf.

A couple evenings ago, when our friends Patrick and Abby were visiting, we were standing outside our rental house in Conrad admiring the dark clouds swirling overhead when it started to rain...then hail...then hail harder...then hail larger. We all ran out to the car to drive to the farm, because as Court noted, if it's going to destroy our crops, we may as well get to watch it. We started to drive, but I got worried about the car's windshield, so we waited briefly under a tree before heading out to the farm. By the time we got there, the hail had stopped. The damage was thus: a few holes in a few leaves. Once again, we'd dodged a bullet. Or a few hundred thousand bullets. Thank you, God.

Bean leaf window.

Chard with more ventilation.

Weeds? What Weeds?

2010-07-16T19:43:00.004-06:00

We've got weeds. Or, more accurately, the weeds got us. Most days it's too much for two people, or even three or four, depending on our help. Plus, we easily prioritize other things over weeding and this is the result:

The garlic. Yes, the garlic.

The garlic, after crawling, pulling, cursing.

Some beds are better than others, but nobody can ever say we don't grow a good crop of wild mustard, lambsquarter, and mallow.

A July truck farm.

Field Crop Update

2010-07-06T05:58:00.006-06:00

Just a quick field crop update.

I plowed down the peas yesterday evening. Despite the fact it looked like a field of mustard, I did plant peas and they were there underneath all that yellow. They hadn't yet flowered, but it was a matter of either waiting for them to flower (and maximize the amount of nitrogen they would fix) and let the mustard go to seed, or work the field before the mustard goes to seed and get whatever nitrogen the peas had fixed up until now. I chose the latter. There will still be some good nitrogen, and look at all that plant matter!

Disked peas.

The lentils are starting to flower. It's been cool recently, so we've been lucky. If heat hits while they're flowering, it'll be hard on the lentils.

Lentil flowers.

The Sonora wheat is tillering nicely.

Sonora wheat.

The barley is beginning to form heads. When you slice open the stalk, you can see the beginning stages.

Baby barley head.

A Shot in the Arm

2010-07-02T17:20:00.006-06:00

Eric harvesting vegetables in his handy-dandy bullet-proof vest and combat helmet.

Our good friend Eric over at Groundworks Farm was shot yesterday while harvesting vegetables for his and his wife Audra's CSA members. Some idiots were "hunting" gophers (were they planning on eating them?) and apparently fired multiple shots with their semi-automatic .22 rifles into Eric and Audras' high tunnel. There were numerous people at the farm, including children, yet somehow the trigger-giddy failed to notice. The bullet entered and exited his arm around his elbow, luckily missing any nerves or bones. When I spoke to him this morning, he was out harvesting for farmers' market. Now there's a warrior.

Access to land, capital, equipment - beginning farmers face numerous obstacles. Dodging bullets and access to flak jackets certainly wasn't on my list.

The Staff of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Small Farm Viability

2010-06-22T21:18:00.018-06:00

This year we begin to market our grain and seeds in earnest. We've created a grain and seed CSA where customers will receive close to one hundred pounds of a variety of different grains and seeds. Our goal is to provide them with heritage and ancient varieties; varieties that hold the genetic intelligence to adapt to specific environments and changing climate conditions, and that contain the genetic characteristics that we will need for our future. Many of those very important characteristics have long been forgotten in the mad dash for higher yields, more drought tolerance, and other attributes that contribute directly to the bottom line. Nutrition (besides protein) has been given a back seat.

This year our grain crops look beautiful. I recently rolled the lentils (to press any large rocks into the soil since we will be swathing the plants) and harrowed the grains to tear out the tiny weed seedlings. We aren't signed up for disaster assistance and we don't have crop insurance, so we hope our crop makes it to harvest. There have been numerous hail threats, with one storm dropping the hard white pellets just 3 miles north of us. A tornado struck eastern Montana. A tornado. In Montana.

Today I hauled last year's emmer crop to be dehulled and cleaned. I found somebody who was able to dehull it (an issue with some of the ancient hulled varieties like emmer, spelt, and einkorn) and who was willing to buy it - Timeless Natural Food. I will buy back what I need for our Grain and Seed CSA and for baking. Most farmers in this area can haul grain in their sleep. For me, it was significant. It signified another step in the process of providing ancient and heritage grains directly to customers. It signified the potential for grain in the pursuit of small farm viability. It signified the old and the new in cohort - the old 1957 International truck hauling the thousands-year-old grain to the modern grain handling facility to be sold in a modern marketplace.

Dumping the emmer into the pit.

The emmer.

In addition, earlier this spring, I cleaned the Sonora heritage spring wheat we grew last year and have been baking wild yeast sourdough bread with it. It has proven to be a success at the farmers' market. The way I've structured my schedule, I'm only able to bake 16 loaves for market each week. My home oven can fit 4 loaves at a time, so I bake 4 sets. With one loaf for sampling, the 15 loaves have sold out the previous 3 weeks. I'm going to try to bake 20 loaves this week.

Despite the dominance of commodity grain (organic or conventional), I believe that grain will find a role in the direct-market, small farm.

Sonora Farmer Bread.

100% whole wheat Sonora Farmer Bread: stone-ground flour, starter, water, salt.

The Clouds are Either Half Full of Moisture, or Half Full of Delay

2010-06-17T08:57:00.006-06:00

The other day, Jacob pulled me into the greenhouse. "I want to show you something," he said. "Look at all of this. Look at what we've accomplished. Look at how much work we've done."

He was referring to this:

I laughed out loud. Just the day before, I took a moment to fully survey the greenhouse and got a little despondent thinking about all the work we had ahead of us. "All of this," I thought, "Has to be in the ground in the next few weeks."

So, the greenhouse is either half full of accomplishment or half full of work, depending on your vantage point.

Luckily Jacob and I have a knack for balancing each other. On days when I see work, he sees accomplishment. On days he sees a to do list, I remind him of all we've caught up on. That's what marriage is all about, right?

But back to the greenhouse. There are two main reasons it is still so full this late in the season:

Nights are still dipping down into the mid-30s, leaving us a little leery of transplanting things like tomatoes and peppers and the likes. Last Saturday, as a matter of fact, we got our last (knock on wood) frost and it got a few of the tomatoes we'd just put out to harden off. (They'll survive though.)

And, with all that cold is coming lots and lots of rain, which has hampered our efforts to get into the field to work beds and transplant.

But, as a kid who grew up on a dryland farm I'm never going to complain about moisture, no matter how much it's pushing us back. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that just when you think something is not working for you, like all the rain, you turn around and see that it's just what something else needed, like our emmer and Kamut and lentils:

Just look at that pretty stuff, popping up in nice little rows.

We delivered our first CSA shares this week and despite our worries about not having enough yet, we filled bags with lettuce and spinach and kale and radishes and our customers walked away happy -- some even overwhelmed with the bounty. We have so much spinach that we're delivering our first order to the local IGA tomorrow. So, the weather has been good to us in some ways, and bad to us in others.

There's the lesson.

The truth is, farming is an exercise in surrender. Surrender to weather and pests (we've stopped losing tomatoes, by the way) and schedules that are not your own. We control very little on this little patch of land and sometimes, that's just as it should be.

Now That's a Mouthful

2010-06-06T21:53:00.001-06:00

Saturday kicked off our second season of the Great Falls Farmers' Market and as it always is, it was an exhausting, exhilarating day.

It's so heartening to see so many people interested and involved in food. The crowd was decent and the weather was perfect.

But, because it's been such a cool, rainy spring, we only have spinach, lettuce and a few perennial herbs (thyme and sage) in the PHF produce department at the moment. That meant we pushed our first CSA delivery to the second market (June 12.) By then, we hope to have a few more things to offer.

We weren't alone. Other producers at the market were light and bemoaning the chilly nights as much as we were.

But, the early season sluggishness is helped by a few greenhouse goodies. We brought a few tomato and herb starts and those always sell well.

And of course, Jacob's Farmer Bread -- whole-wheat sourdough artisan bread made from our wheat, cleaned on our farm and baked in our kitchen -- was a huge hit.

Our notes on last year's first market mentioned we were light on spinach. "Plant more spinach!" one of Jacob's little notebooks read.

This year, we heeded our own advice, apparently too enthusiastically.

We sold out of lettuce and bread fairly easily, but came home with a good amount of spinach and that means, it's spinach for the Cowgill clan for the week.

Here's Jacob getting an early start:

Mouse Wars, (Or Are They Birds?) of 2010

2010-06-03T10:37:00.011-06:00

You labor over these guys for months and months, all the while trusting that they will, someday, bear fruit -- in the truest sense of the phrase.

But, then something, you're not sure what, decides to make them an early snack instead.

About a week ago, I noticed the heads of some of our tomato plants had gone, well, missing.

Mice! I thought. So, I surrounded the fortress with mouse traps. See how much good that did. Here we are a few days later:

At least 100 tomato plants, quite a few peppers and some of my precious basil are gone and no evidence of what did it.

Then, a few days later, the squash got it:

I've now started covering all the plants at night, thinking, maybe it's a bird? My newly transplanted snapdragons outside met the same fate and out there, there were no signs of mice or deer or any land-walking creature. But, in the greenhouse, there was one little clue:

And, would a mouse pull up a tomato plant and drop it some 10 feet away, like so?:

Whatever it is, it is really screwing with my chi. At first, I tried acceptance: "There's nothing we can do. This is nature. We work with it, and we work against it."

Then, after a few more plants lost their heads, I turned to pure rage. I even had a fantasy at one point of punching a little mouse in the face. Oooh. That would feel soooo good.

But, now comes the tough stage, the "universe-doesn't-want-us-to-farm" stage. The headless plants are only part of it. The weeds, the mice, the dying turkeys (it's been a rough spring for our young flock) -- I see them all now as signs telling us that this whole thing is ridiculous and futile.

This is what a cold spring can do to a farmer. The cold air and lack of much growth in your field breeds self-doubt. For months, you labor and get nothing in return. You don't eat from that field, you don't see your customer's face when she picks up a bright green head of lettuce. You're alone in the greenhouse for days, without anyone reminding you that you're doing something important. It's just so easy to forget why you do what you do after a cold, dreary spring.

But, hope is on its way. The sun is coming out more often and this weekend is our first farmers' market in Great Falls. While we won't have much -- tomato plants, pepper plants, spinach and a few herbs -- it will be great to see familiar faces and remind ourselves that people care about what we're doing, even if the mice, the birds and the weeds don't.

Lentils, Wheat, Barley Up

2010-05-27T19:16:00.006-06:00

The lentils, wheat, and barley I seeded in the field are up. As Court and I were driving down the road, we noticed nice neat rows of green. I had to get out and stomp through the mud to take a look and sure enough, 10 days after planting, my grains have popped through the soil.

Though the recent weather has prevented us from getting to a lot of things in the field, it's been pretty perfect for the things we already have seeded. We had moisture, heat, and now more moisture. Heat is sure to come. Then we get to watch everything explode (including the weeds).

Red Chief lentils.

Sonora wheat.

Playing Catch-up

2010-05-24T12:23:00.007-06:00

I'm once again playing catch-up, on farm work, on blog posts, on sleep, on just about everything. If I play catch-up long enough, I'll get further and further behind until I loop back to the beginning and I'm caught up. Besides, I think playing catch-up is the new caught up.

So, catching you all up, here are some images of our recent activities.

A couple weekends ago, we had multiple visitors (Byron and Steph on Friday; Tim, Sarah, and Asa on Saturday; and Rick on Sunday). With their help we knocked a lot of work out, in particular transplanting the onions and leeks. I forgot my camera some of those days. Here's Saturday:

Tim, Sarah, and Asa help transplant billions of onion seedlings.

Tim stood on the drill while I seeded the one acre of lentils. Since that's not much seed, it's helpful to have somebody filling the cups in the drill while somebody else drives the tractor. It would make sense if you saw it.

Asa "drove" the combine cutting wheat. The wheat happens to be Court and Sarah. Cutting the wheat! Cutting the wheat!

The turkeys are nearly one month old and showing off how high they can fly.

The plants wondering when they can get outside.

My tired, pregnant wife.

Turkeys, Wind, Row Covers, and Seed Cleaners

2010-05-08T07:23:00.008-06:00

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. As is their usual, the turkeys arrived amidst a snow storm and a power outage. They've wasted no time in stressing us out. They sure are cute and easy to forgive, though. That won't last long as they get uglier every day.

*chirp*

With the snow came very strong winds. It did things like blow an entire roll of row cover into the big field. I'd even weighted the roll down, but a strong wind laughs at those sorts of efforts.

This is our vegetable field at the beginning of May. At the beginning of May, I said. Or did I take that photo in January? I'm not sure anymore. You'll see my lovely pregnant wife in the middle of the photo cinching down the row cover over our seedlings.

The field in May. I think.

This little guy is kale. If it can shake off the snow and grow tall, we'll know just how super kale is.

Kale and snow.

Besides blowing a roll of row cover into the field, it also whipped around the stuff we had covering our seeded beds. I'm guessing the constant back and forth action rubbed the surface of the bed, filling in our rows of germinated radishes. All I can hope for is those plants to find their way to the surface again.

Radish wondering where everybody else went.

Despite major delays in seeding the big field (I did get the green manure winter peas in before all this), the upshot is, we've had time to knock out some of the indoor work that usually gets put off in the mad dash of the spring onslaught.

One such task was getting the seed cleaner up and running to clean the milk thistle and heritage wheat we grew last year. Our scale is too small for any custom cleaner to bother with, so we have to clean it ourselves. I've accumulated a couple of cleaners that don't work yet, but I also borrowed one that I finally got going. Here it is in action yesterday. I can't even express how excited I am by this. So, I'll just leave it at this: I am so excited.

The cleaner.

Milk thistle seed bouncing across the screen.

Chaff being blown out the back.

Clean seed!

O Pioneers! and Grounding to Ground

2010-05-06T10:47:00.007-06:00

Note: I posted this piece last year about this time and as spring comes to the farm again, I am reading O Pioneers! to celebrate. I thought it fitting then, to repost this. Now, after a year behind us, we're a little wiser, yes, but also perhaps a little more harried. So, I'm hoping to find solace again in the words of Willa Cather as I did last year. And, especially as our conversations move forward with our landlords, these thoughts are good for grounding us to, well, the ground -- leased, owned or otherwise.

A few years ago, my friend Brooke, with whom I share a deep love for literature and empty spaces in which to read it, told me I must read Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, but to do so in the spring.

"It's a delightful book for spring," she said -- or something to that effect. Brooke sometimes speaks like the heroine in one of the novels she's devoured. It's one of the many reasons I love her.

So, this week, I happened to find O Pioneers! in the one box of books I've brought in from the garage.

I read it fervently and tonight finished the final chapter, the beauty of which I always forget. It was, as it is every spring, gorgeous and complex.

But this year, now that we're farming, I brought an entirely new perspective to the book. And because of that, one passage in particular sang for me.

Last fall, when Jacob and I first started talking to David about leasing his land, he had a surprisingly unsentimental take on the future of the place. I don't mean dispassionate. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It was just a sense of practicality and no-nonsense. I can't remember exactly how he put it, but what he said had something to do with him not being the first one on the land, nor the last one. No one really owns their land in the first place, he said.

It's not a novel notion – but it is one I've heard mostly from the mouths of academics or environmentalists. Try it on a farmer who's been on his land for 50 years and his family for three generations and it's not going to fly. That's why coming from a farmer -- especially one staring down the reality of handing his land over to someone else – the idea held a tremendous weight.

I know a thing or two about the more sentimental approach to land ownership. For the better part of six years, I've cried every time we flash past my childhood farm on the interstate. The thought of another family there, of another farmer's plow in those fields … somehow, I felt robbed. Something that was mine was no longer.

David's place is 15 minutes from that farm. I now pass the old place at least twice a week. When I remember, I glance over at the profile of the homestead – to see if the trees are still growing on the edges, if that depression near the turnoff is still sinking. But, I don't cry anymore.

Maybe it's that the old farm is no longer “the farm.” Now, “the farm” is our farm, Jacob's and my farm. Or, maybe I am just finally able to intellectualize that the farm was never really mine to begin with, that what I was mourning was a childhood, innocence and an unscathed family, not a piece of ground.

Or, maybe I just knew it would be a waste of moisture – so very precious in this eastern front wind – if I had to cry every time we passed the farm.

Regardless, now that I'm digging in our dirt, which is actually owned by David, but technically still owned by the bank, and before that, owned by his parents and before that by someone whose name I don't even know, I see what David was talking about: It's about being able to see farther back than yourself or even your parents or grandparents and farther forward than your children or even their children.

Or, in more eloquent terms, it's about what Alexandra Bergson explains to Carl Lindstrum in that final chapter of O Pioneers!:

"Suppose I do will my land to their children, what difference will that make? The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will there be in fifty years? I might as well will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, the land is always here And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it -- for a little while."

My Favorite Farm Tool

2010-04-28T13:31:00.014-06:00

A diversified farm needs diversified equipment. With so many specialty crops and each needing its own tool, I feel very lucky to have one piece of equipment that -- with just a little alteration and imagination -- can do most jobs.

I picked this up a few years ago. I'd been admiring it since I was a kid on the farm and finally, I grabbed it. The last few weeks, I got to put it into action.

First, it was a manure spreader, shoveling manure out of the pickup as I drove across the field.

Then, later, it was a bed maker:

Look at the great beds it makes! It even plants them! Get ready for beets and carrots!

It digs ditches!

And, if you didn't think it was versatile enough, it's also a record-keeping system!

Most of all, "it" is a great husband.

Someday, we'll be able to afford a manure spreader, a bed maker and a ditch witch. But, for now, as is the case with most small farmers, all we have are strong backs and tough hands. That's enough for now.

Progress, and the Long View of Farming

2010-04-16T14:42:00.006-06:00

I'm always amazed at how quickly they grow up. In the last few weeks, we've gone from this:

to this:

We're having some problems with spotty germination (I know, sounds like a personal problem) but other than that, our little greenhouse in our *actual* house is working thus far.

Today, I moved a handful of these flats out to the real greenhouse, where we'll still have to use some additional heat, but we're nearing the day when all these little ones can be in the greenhouse without worry of frost. (Fingers crossed.)

We're T-minus six weeks from the first farmers' market, CSA delivery and hopefully, last frost. That means the seeding is in overdrive around here as we scramble to get everything started on time.

I have a love/hate relationship with the discipline that all of this necessitates. One the one hand, no one is here telling Jacob and I what to do. Our farm time is ours and that's one of the reasons we do this. (Both of us have always been keen on working for ourselves.) But, on the other hand, these little plants and the unforgiving schedule of a farm can end up being more of a heavy-handed boss than either of us have ever known.

I could take a break from planting, for instance, but that would mean one less harvest of lettuce or basil come June. We could skip that late night planting spinach, but then, it wouldn't get in before the snow and that would mean less spinach to harvest for that first CSA delivery in June.

As a modern society, we are so used to the immediate. For me personally, in my online work, every action has an immediate reaction. It's easy to get accustomed to that kind of immediate gratification or dissatisfaction.

But in farming, what you do right now does not have consequences tomorrow or next week. It has consequences three months from now. And, while that can be a somewhat difficult concept to grasp, it's a valuable exercise. It teaches us patience and perseverance, two qualities we don't take enough time anymore to foster.

So with that, I'll plant another flat of basil, that isn't likely to germinate for a few weeks and which I won't likely enjoy until the end of June. But I'll be dreaming of that pizza with every seed.

Beauty

2010-04-12T22:26:00.006-06:00

Mocho de Espiga Quadrada

I'm often struck by how beautiful what we grow is. I don't mean what we here at Prairie Heritage Farm grow, necessarily. I mean what we small, diversified farmers who take the time to notice, grow. The way a leaf is shaped to draw water down its stem to its roots. How a seed straps on a parachute to carry itself far and wide. This is a photograph of a heritage wheat variety called Mocho de Espiga Quadrada from Portugal, one of the heritage grains we trialed last year. Why eat anything ugly?

Our New Greenhouse!

2010-04-07T06:01:00.009-06:00

So we totally splurged and bought a ready-to-plant-in greenhouse. It was delivered yesterday and we were in it and planting right away. It's really pretty:

Inside of the greenhouse.

Outside of the greenhouse.

Okay, so that's not true. This is a beautiful church in New York City. I was visiting my good friend Kevin a couple weeks ago and his apartment overlooks the Trinity Church and its cemetery. Alexander Hamilton is buried there.

Here is our "new" greenhouse, sans stained glass:

Since we've run out of room in our sunroom, we recently moved our onions and scallions out to the farm and put them under these hoops and row cover in the existing, unheated greenhouse. There's a space heater on the end of each hoop structure so when it's 15 degrees outside at night, it stays a cozy 40 degrees under the hoops. We peel back the row cover during the day so the little seedlings get lots of good light. It's a few extra steps but it's what we have to do and it works.

I ran the tractor over our vegetable field with the disk last weekend and it looks so nice and soft. I want to plant myself in that field.

The field.

Brown Gold to Green Gold

2010-03-21T13:07:00.007-06:00

Little guy green.

This little guy is going to need some nutrients once he gets his little root-feet in the field, so my lovely wife and I recently spent a day distributing some composted brown nutrients, aka aged poop.

Manure spreader.

This is our manure spreader: a tractor, a pickup, a driver, and a shoveler. Oh yeah, and poop (two "poops" in one post, no three!). Court drove while I shoveled out the back of the bed. When I woke up the next morning, I made note that top on my list of used equipment to procure by next spring is a real manure spreader. My back, arms, and shoulders felt as though they'd been trampled by the cows all that poop (4!) came from.

Wifey-poo (5?) in her new bib overalls.

I'm pooped (6!).

Duh

2010-03-18T06:33:00.005-06:00

An update on the tractor tire: it's been fixed. I'm more than a little embarrassed to say that my first reaction upon seeing it flatter than a pancake was to call in the experts. I called Ron the tire guy and he said he'd come out and look at it, and depending on what was wrong with it, it could cost over $300 to repair it or over $1,000 to replace it.

When I told my father-in-law Clyde about the tire, he asked me, "did you try to pump it up?" Uh, no. Why do that? It makes too much sense. I just hope the winter froze my brain and it hasn't thawed yet, and it's not an indication of some larger personal ineptitude. As a so-called farmer, that should have been my first thought - pump it up. So Clyde came out the other day (on his new leg - see this post for an explanation), pumped it up, discovered the valve was shot, replaced the valve, pumped it up, and there the tire sits, plump and happy. As for me, I think my brain has a flat. Now who can I call to fix it?

Ouch

2010-03-14T10:24:00.007-06:00

This is a reenactment of what I came upon at the farm the other day:

Something sure does seem off.

Yep, something is definitely off.

The Case is crooked.

Why is it crooked?

Uh oh...

I knew it.

Ouch. This is not going to be cheap.

Farming on the Front Porch

2010-03-09T05:43:00.004-07:00

First I have to give credit to the title of this post to my good friend Jason (see the fan-man in the photos).

Yes, we're making do, and we're also making decisions and remaking them daily, and sometimes it seems hourly. I guess that's a nice way of saying I feel rather wishy-washy at times. We decided to hold off on the greenhouse we bought. We've gathered (i.e. bought) most of what we need to put it up, such as the plastic, inflation fan, and wire and channel to hold the plastic in place. But what we haven't sorted out yet is the propane and power. While both of those shouldn't be too hard to set up (though they do cost money - which we're trying to dole out sparingly), we were feeling a bit too much pressure to get this thing up and running in time to start planting. So we backed off. Nothing lost - we have the necessary supplies to put up the greenhouse at some point, but at our leisure (ha!). The ground is still frozen, so perhaps sometime this summer we'll find the time and crew to put it up in anticipation of spring 2011. For now, we have our nice little "greenhouse" in our rental house in town, which makes daily watering and care much easier than if all our starts were out at the farm.

More pictures from that day:

The greenhouse.

Master setter-upper.

The farm's biggest fan.

Front porch farming.

Serenading seedlings.

Pretty ladies and dog butt.

The audience.

Dog.

And away they grow.

Making Do, Part II (Or: How to Be a MacGyver Farmer, Part I)

2010-03-03T13:45:00.016-07:00

Last year, about this time, Jacob posted about "making do" with what we have, in the way of tools, equipment, buildings etc. And, since then, we've been doing a lot of "making do."

We both believe that when you can, make do with what you have -- a philosophy that's familiar to many a small business owner and almost second nature to any small farmer.

Luckily, both Jacob and I are pretty good at it.

I've spent the last five years building a small independent media company and I used to joke that I was good at the whole "start up" thing because I grew up fixing most problems with duct tape and bailing twine on the farm. (In the beginnings of NewWest.Net, my office was in the bathroom of the extra bedroom in my business partner's house.)

This time of year, those make-do skills come in handy. During the summer, we're farmers. During the spring, we're MacGyver farmers.

And, this year will mean even more "making do" than last year because Jacob is now working a full-time job in town and that creates a whole new situation for us. We're going to have to get really good at efficiency. We're already thinking constantly about work-arounds, not only to our sometimes less-than-ideal set up and equipment, but to labor as well.

We're starting early. Here's the first example of us "making do."

One of our big hamstrings, if not the biggest (other than both of us having to work outside jobs for now), is not living on the farm. In the summer, it's a big issue, but in the Spring, it seems bigger because driving 6 miles roundtrip three times a day to check on the dampness of baby seedlings seems ridiculous.

So, we set up a greenhouse in the sunrroom of our house in town. Now, my office is about 10 feet from our onion seedlings and I can monitor every hour if need be, the conditions.

Someday, we'll have the money and time (yeah right?) to create the perfect set up for this budding business. And, by then, we'll be able to articulate exactly what would work better. My only fear is that, and I have personal experience with this, is that if you make do for too long, it becomes habit and engrained the culture of your business or in your family in this case, which is something you don't want to happen. With every McGyver project, you have to remind yourself that this is only temporary, that someday, you'll be able to do it right. Because if you don't, pretty soon, you've got a mess of duct tape and bailing twine you can't unravel. "Making do" becomes your standard operating procedure.

But for now, we're doing just fine by making do.

And, nothing quite matches the feeling you get when you've fixed a big problem with few things laying around and some ingenuity.

Just look at these onions germinate:

Do any of our fellow farmer friends out there have interesting stories of how you've made do with your operations?

We Bought a House

2010-02-11T05:37:00.010-07:00

A greenhouse, that is. Actually, just the skeleton. Now we have to round up the organs and make the thing come to life. My good friend Craigslist told us about a bunch of greenhouses for sale just 2 1/2 hours south of the farm. So, I drove the empty pickup and flatbed trailer down on a rare free Saturday to check it out. And what a scene it was. It's acres of greenhouse skeletons, abandoned vehicles, sheds, shacks, and peeled-paint houses. There are piles of pipes and plastic and large covered buildings filled to the gills with fans, racks, and knick-knacks (I think I might have a rap going here - backbeat anybody?). There was everything including the kitchen sink (I even asked about it - triple, stainless steel - not for sale).

I was too much in awe of the place to get any photos that capture it as a whole, but I'll likely head back that direction to pick up some greenhouse tables and who knows what else as yet to be discovered in some pile somewhere.

Dan admiring the geometry.

This place was a century-old nursery that fell on hard times. The current owners are four years into the process of cleaning it up. The story is, as told by Mike, the very friendly bearded man who helped me out, the family who owned the nursery all those 100+ years experienced a messy divorce, owed lots of money (including to Syngenta) and lost the place. The current owners bought it from Syngenta ("this little German chemical company", as Mike put it) and are now selling off the acres of greenhouses. What you get when you buy a greenhouse here is essentially just the hoops and a natural gas heater. I also picked up a fan and exhaust. The structures are 100-140 feet long and you take as many hoops as you want to make the length you need. I took 13 hoops for my desired 30x50' greenhouse. My good friends Dan, Kim, and Kelsey helped deconstruct it and load up the hoops and equipment. We had to rent a propane weed torch to melt the ice that had cemented the bottom of the hoops to the ground posts.

Kim and Kelsey load the trailer.

When all was said and done, it seemed like an awful lot of time and energy for a handful of galvanized pipes, a fan, a heater, and exhaust. And we still have to reassemble it, get plastic, pull power out to it, determine if we can convert the natural gas heater to propane, get propane to it, and numerous other tasks as yet to be realized. All in the adventure that is Prairie Heritage Farm.

Greenhouse in a trailer with little girl snowpants as a flag.

Back on His Foot

2010-01-25T12:26:00.007-07:00

Many of you following this blog or, in general, following the Prairie Heritage Farm story know how important it has been for us, and for the farm, to have my Dad so close by.

He's done everything, from fixing our machinery, to helping fashion a greenhouse within a greenhouse, building a brooder for our turkeys to driving a combine more than 30 miles to get our Emmer crop in.

He was a regular fixture on the farm -- sharing his bologna sandwiches, his cream soda, carrot sticks and his vast -- and I mean vast -- knowledge of everything agriculture.

That's just the way my Dad is: He's always there for you when you need him, whether you're his crazy daughter and son-in-law trying to start an organic farm, an old lady with a broken water heater or a stranger stranded on the side of the road.

In so many ways, my Dad embodies everything society romanticizes in a "farmer." Clyde is the ultimate farmer, not because of his ability to grow food or fix machinery, but because of the way he gives -- the way he is as a neighbor and a friend.

Which is why it was no surprise these last few weeks to see the community, the strangers, and the family my Dad has given so selflessly through the years, come out in full force to support him through a trying time.

The first week of December, Dad was burning trash out at my uncle Joe's farm -- the farm my Dad grew up on -- which had recently been sold after Joe's passing. Something in one of the burn barrels exploded and caught my Dad's feet, which were standing in some sort of accelerant -- oil or gas -- on fire. He was able to get one boot and his coveralls off, but the boot on his right foot shrunk up around his ankle. He was able to put himself out and luckily, found his phone nearby to call his girlfriend Toni. Toni rushed him to the emergency room and the doctors there immediately put him (and me) on a plane to Salt Lake City to the University of Utah Burn Trauma Center.

He had second and third degree burns on his right foot, ankle and calf, but luckily was spared elsewhere. All that was left of his coveralls was one bib button and a little of the strap. The fire was still burning the next day when Toni went back to get his pickup.

After a month and a half in the burn center, and five surgeries and and skin grafts, the doctors finally decided that they'd tried everything to save his foot, to no avail, and so last Thursday, they amputated his foot, just below the knee.

Steve and I brought him home on Saturday and you've never seen someone so excited to see their own house. Toni and the dogs there to greet him, Dad looked better than I'd seen him look in almost two months.

For a farmer, for a guy like Dad, sitting around indoors for a month and a half is pure torture. Add to that the intense pain of a severe burn like his, the lack of sunlight and for weeks staring down the possibility of losing his leg and anyone but my Dad would have been surly and feeling sorry for himself.

But, instead, he was calm, hopeful, kind and funny, as he always is. The nurses there cried as he left. They all cried when the doctor told him it was time to amputate. Each one -- and each doctor -- came to see him off as we wheeled him away early Saturday morning. He just has an effect on people.

All week, I heard:
"Your Dad is amazing." "I can't believe how nice your Dad is." "People are just drawn to your Dad. He's helped quite a few of the other patients here."

During his stay, Toni kept him supplied with these 3-D wooden puzzles to put together and by the time we left, he had 15 or more displayed outside his room. He had the nurses lining up scissors, tape, glue, anything that he could use to put these things together. He horded all kinds of medical supplies - in case he needed to fix something. The guy is a MacGyver. He's already planning to make his own prosthetic.

The puzzle making made him a celebrity on the floor. He took one 9-year-old patient under his wing and the two of them put together a few puzzles. It took the little kid 45 minutes to say good-bye to Clyde and when he left, he left Dad with half his get-well balloons.

Dad is already talking about going to the local elementary school to teach them about prosthetic limbs and maybe volunteering to help others deal with possible amputations or severe burns.

He donated his puzzles to the burn unit and they're going to auction off several of them to raise money for the camp they put on for children burn survivors.

Even when he is in extreme pain and turmoil, he is giving.

One wall in his hospital room was literally covered with cards and letters from the communities he's a part of back home. And, so many people were dropping by the local bank with money for him, one bank employee finally called me and had me set up a benefit account.

To which, my Dad said, "Well jeez, I don't need all that." He said people didn't need to put up all that fuss.

I told the banker about Dad's reluctance to do a benefit and she just said, "Well then, tell him to stop being so gosh darn nice."

I told him this is what Karma is. It's all payback. You're good to people, they're good back to you.

That's what community is all about. And, that's exactly why Jacob and I moved back home.

Dad has a long road ahead. It will be a while before they can fit him with a prosthetic and even then, it's going to take some serious work getting used to walking on it. And, his job doing construction is going to be all but impossible for a little while. So, he needs all the help he can get. Luckily, he's got a bank of people wanting to help in whatever way they can.

God bless the power of small town and God bless the "farmer" in all of us.

Prairie Heritage Farm

The 2011 Season (Year 3 of ?)

Grain and Bean Share Update

Awesome Post and an Article

Post-Thanksgiving Bliss

How to Cook Your Heritage Turkey

Turkeys. And a Skunk!

The Race Against Winter

The Days

A Threshing Bee and a Successful Prairie Farro Harvest

CSA Appreciation Day and Recipes!

Today! 2nd Annual CSA Appreciation Day!

Frost? Really?

Grasshoppers and Barley

Mid-August

Whitefish Farmers' Market

Beauty

Newsletter

Another Loss

You Win Some, You Lose Some

A Puppet Showed up to the Festival

Farmer Bread's Biggest Fan

Treading Water

July

Catch-up

A Harrowing Experience

The Stress of Community Supported Agriculture

Rain, Rain, Go Away

High Tunnel Update

Working With Water

Days Gone By

They're Heeeeere...

In It to Win It

Wouldn't it Be Easier to Just Eat the Seeds?

Of Peas and Parks

Rye You Gotta Keep Talking About This?

Water Unclogged

Hey now, humm-a-na humm-a-na, SOLD! Take 2

Waterlogged

High Tunnel, Hi Rye!

Feeding Family, Friends and Neighbors

Collapse

Not Waiting Around

Rural Beasts

Early Spring Greenhouse, Take 3

Work Season and Worry Season

Prairie Heritage Farm 2011 CSA Programs

Pioneer

Withering Wind

Need More

Playing Catch-up Already

The Bucket Thresher

The Right to Farm

Holding the Bank at Bay

Grain and Seed CSA Grinding Party

The 2010 Season (Year 2 of ?)

Farming: The Perfect Lesson in Surrender

'Tis the Season

Turkey Time

Recipes for Your Heritage Turkey

Picking Up Your Prairie Heritage Turkey

Start 'Em Young

Driving Truck

True Fall

Our Best Harvest Ever

Why I Married a Farmer

Flurry

FROST!

Lentils Are In

True Food Shall Set You Free

The Days

A Lion of a Tractor

Heading to Pick Up the Pickup Header

The Generosity of Friends

All Hail Hail

Weeds? What Weeds?

Field Crop Update

A Shot in the Arm

The Staff of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Small Farm Viability

The Clouds are Either Half Full of Moisture, or Half Full of Delay