Mangalitsa pigs harvesting turnips for their dinner.

January has been all about Mangalitza pigs.  The month started off with the processing of 10 of the last 14 from the original group for a customer.  It turned out to be more complicated than anticipated and turned into a full week process.  At the end of it we had no big pigs on the place. Along the way, we discovered DeVries Meats of Coopersville, MI, who did an excellent processing job. 

 The next project was delivering the pigs to Oliviero Colmignoli of Fiorucci Foods in Virginia.  Read the rest of this entry »

Jill

Post a Comment

There’s nothing like watching a pig do what it’s meant to do.  These Mangalitsa pigs are fun to watch, too, because they are so different from the standard hogs we’ve raised before.  They are like the heritage layer chickens we have compared to the broiler chickens.  The Mangalitsas are growing nicely on forage feed with only small amounts of grain thrown in to balance their diet.  They love going out in the snow to dig turnips.  And they eat acorns in the daintiest fashion imaginable.  The hogs in the pictures are nosing around for good acorns–no empty hulls or moldy ones, thank-you.  Then they’ll pick up that solitary acorn, crack it in they’re back teeth like a nutcracker.  The hull will pop out under his snout and they’ll happily munch the acorn nut while nosing around for another one.  These are all things that hogs were originally meant for.  Think feral pigs and you’re close to how these guys are able to not only survive, but live well. 

Mangalitsa hog pursuing a frozen potato.

And now the first group of them is off the farm.  We said our goodbyes, clicked our heels in the air,  and waved them away.  Mark went along with them to ensure they were safely and securely tucked in at the processors.  They have an amazingly calm disposition such that a trailer ride doesn’t upset them much and they settle into new surroundings without fussing.  They are  very easy going fellas, such that if they are handled gently, they don’t get “stressed out” about changes.  That’s good news as the government requires a USDA supervised kill in order for the next guy to transform them into proscuitto hams and such–a low stress kill situation is possible with good handling and the Mangalitsa’s laid back temperment. 

We still have two batches of hogs on the farm.  They are happy, healthy fellows who are enjoying life as pigs were meant to live it.

Jill

Post a Comment

What does “family farm” mean?  I suppose to some it means, “the farm that’s been in the family for so many years.”  To others it’s a farm worked by a family–Dad, Mom, and kids.  Sometimes it’s both at the same time.  The week after Christmas brought home to us how much of our “family farm” is the second meaning–especially the “kids” part. 

The kids went with their grandparents to the family “cabin” in Canada for the week after Christmas.  Mark and I split their chores, which wasn’t such a big deal.  Where I ran stuck was realizing I had to do the 15 or 20 minutes of chores with a 4 year old and baby in tow!  I’ve done it before and plenty of women have done and still do it, but I’m spoiled now.  I’m used to having older children to leave Jim with.  Those same kids can fill in for my chores if need be, or help me make dinner, or do the whirlwind house pick-up at day’s end.  They also contribute invaluably in processing the chickens from squawk to freezer.  They watch out for each other, like the day Dorothy packed up Jim and she, Keith, and Rachel pulled him in a sled down to where Joe and Sam were working on their cabin.  We work together, play together, dream together, drive each other crazy together.  Not every farm is like that.  There are farms around us that use Manpower to hire their employees and that don’t employ their children.  We figure they’re missing out.  Our family is an integral part of our operation.  Our children are the “family” in “family farm.”  Nothing like a vacation to bring that home.

Jill

Post a Comment

“Everyone can cook!”  So said Chef  Gusteau in the movie Ratatiulle.  It is true.  We received a fantastic cookbook for Christmas, Cook’s House by Eric Patterson and Jenifer Blakeslee.  Chef Eric makes the point that “extraordinary food comes …through hard work, passion, and above all else, great ingredients.”  Their cookbook offers delicious recipes and menus, while walking the reader through a holistic experience in which food is a celebrated medium. 

It was appropriate timing as an incognito chef, Dave Hovest, has been venturing down from Cherry Capital Foods once a week to partner with us in turning great ingredients into fantastic food.  Under Dave’s tutelage we’ve been learning some of the finer points of food preparation–things that chefs develop into second nature but we didn’t learn from our “home ec” teachers.  The main thrust is to develop recipes for chicken that have superb flavor (first, middle, and lingering) and are very usable by chefs.  The chicken breast, usually the most salable cut, has some possibilities, but the cut we’ve been playing with most is the dark meat.  We initially tried 8 different sausage/seasoned patty recipes, then narrowed it down to 4 very different ones which we’ve tried out on several subjects for feedback.  We’re using that input to refine further and then launch the products onto the public.  Dave is also working with us to develop our modest little shop into a more productive establishment.  Mark made some changes to the processing line that he’s wanted to do for some time that accomplished two things: doubled our processing speed and separated the shop more clearly into a processing side and a packing/refining side.  Dave’s helped to arrange and outfit the refining side so it will enable us to produce value-added products in an efficient manner.  He brings his chef’s kitchen expertise into

Seasoned chicken breast

the shop to make the possibilities realities. 

 I understand that as of this week some of these yummy creations will be showing up at the main Oleson’s Food Store in Traverse City, courtesy of Cherry Capital Foods.  Check it out!

Jill

Post a Comment

Have you ever had a “real” turkey?  If you’ve only had the Thanksgiving special sale turkey,  you haven’t had a “real” turkey.  This year we provided turkeys from like-minded growers on request.  One of those growers is the Duerksons from Mancelona.  They raise pasture fed turkeys on a “clean” feed and hand process them as we do with our chickens.  The result is a turkey that is as superior to a Butterball turkey as our chickens are to a Tyson chicken.  They still have some big fowls running around, and now would be a great time to give your body a break from all the sweets and highly processed food (including, if you’re a label reader, the average store meats you’re eating) and eat a lighter-on-the-body, no-nasty-stuff-included chicken or turkey.  We’ve only heard good things about Duerkson’s turkeys: tasty, moist, good texture.  And that from people who wouldn’t claim to be Julia Child.  Our Duerkson turkey is slated for New Year’s dinner.  We’ll miss the old turkey shoot routine, though they offered to send a live turkey if we wanted it!  I’m sure John, our Cherry Capital Foods wonderdriver, would enjoy that one. 

SO, the upshot is, we raise our chickens and Mangalitsa pigs, but we can procure other fantastic meats as well and if turkey appeals to you, Duerkson’s is the best local turkey around.  Just let us know how many you want!  “We can do that!”

Jill

Comments (1)

We watched Food Inc. this weekend.  A lot of what we saw was not new to us, but reminded us of why we do what we do.  It’s a very good movie to view if you haven’t yet.  One of the words used to describe many of the animals in the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) systems was “money.”  One fellow with Tyson chicken barns stuck his head out his pick-up window and said, “Smells like money to me.”  His neighbors smelled something else.  The way he described how Tyson works with their farmers reminded me of the sharecropper system wherein the farmer owns or leases the land, but he can only sell to the “boss” and has to accept whatever the “boss” will pay–less deductions the boss sees fit to levy.  He said, “Sometimes you lose money, sometimes you make money.  Sometimes.”  That’s very true of farming in general, but  especially so in the “be happy with what we’ll pay you” system rather than a more free market type of system.  Another tidbit was that of all the variety at the grocery store, there are really only a handful of producers–large corporations who act as brokers for growers and buyers, thus lining the pockets of only a few. 

The movie also talked about processing.  Chicken processing is near and dear to us,  so this was notable.  Commercialized food is primarily about dollars, not quality and safety.  The many recent food scares with meat, spinach, and peanut butter recalls underscore the fact that safety is about dollars, not actual safety.  This morning I caught a short piece on NPR (just over 2 min.) that discussed chicken.  From the radio station description: “A recent Consumer Reports study finds that two-thirds of whole broiler chickens tested across the country harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter. Urvashi Rangan is the author of the study, and tells host Liane Hansen which chickens made the good and bad lists.”   Interestingly, the safest chicken was organic, air cooled birds.  The worst offenders: Tyson and Foster Farms.  The national chicken council defended itself, saying that all raw meat may contain bacteria that will die in the cooking process if cooked properly. 

Hmmm… It’s why we do what we do.

Jill

Post a Comment

Mangalitsa pigs love potatoes.  Not as much as acorns, but more than turnips.  These are the young group of Mangalitsas.  They made a miraculously easy move (when they race ahead to go exactly where you want them, it is nothing short of a miracle!) through the yard from the original pasture to the turnip pasture.  Here is where they will winter.  Since we want them to grow slower, they are getting very little grain and have mostly vegetables to eat.  They are growing well and we’ve seen many advantages to this feeding system.  This particular field was planted in turnips and radishes in August.  The turnips aren’t sweet until they’ve frozen a couple of times, so about November or December they become tasty.  (Last year the goats really liked them in March as the snow melted.)  These guys love potatoes, though.  Northern Michigan has several potato producers and, since the pigs don’t mind dents and bruises, these potatoes provide a good food source.  One of the big advantages of potatoes is their water content.  The turnips alone can provide a good share of an animal’s water requirement.  Potatoes can nearly stand alone as a water source.  As we watch the mercury drop and the snow float down, anything to making watering the animals easier is welcome.

Jill

Post a Comment

Deer season, that is.  In honor of  this momentus time of year, Joe the Skinner wrote a poem:

Jill

Post a Comment

Oh, has November in northern Michigan ever been nice.  My Canadian aunt has been listing the things she’s still enjoying fresh from her garden.  Our own garden has been producing little bits yet.  I’ve gotta cook up some pumpkins and squash that got a bit too cold last night, though.  Sam stuck a frost ball down his brother’s back this morning, proof of a frosty November night.

Mark’s let the broiler birds out to wander in the sun.  They camp out in the sun and the cold wind doesn’t bother them at all.  There isn’t any grass to eat, but they get alfalfa in their food and sun on their backs and think life’s good.  We’ve been processing some very nice birds, so the system seems to be working well.  Last night, in fact, we had a fresh 6# bird for dinner.  I roasted it with unrefined sea salt, tyme, garlic, rosemary, and savory rubbed inside it.  I thought a 6 pound chicken would leave enough leftovers for chicken salad as today’s lunch.  I thought wrong.  There’s enough meat and broth left for one or two bowls of soup if I add plenty of veggies. 

The little pigs are enjoying the sun, too.  They actually sleep out all night.  They line up like sardines in a can and don’t stir until the sun steams the frost off them in the morning.  They’ll eat the last of the truck load of pumpkins today.  I think Keith has the apples under the tree almost cleaned up and fed, too.  Potatoes and turnips are the next filler feeds. 

With the advent of deer season, our foraging days are on hold, even though the weather would still allow it.  We ended up with plenty for finishing the few wooly pigs for this year.  Keith  was able to “bathe” in some of them–until the others started raining acorns on him.

Jill

Post a Comment

This week we are waving our last goodbyes to a grand old lady.  I’m not so sure about the last goodbye part–she will live on in the lives of those of us left behind–goodbyes are messy like that.  I don’t know that it’s right to think of her as “dead” or “gone” either.  I think she’s merely transitioned to another way of living, leaving behind a tangible part of herself but continuing to live in essence.  The tangibleness of Margaret Emily Clark  is what we are laying to rest this week. 

She was born and raised a farm girl through the Depression years.  Her folks tried raising ginseng for extra money–unfortunately something happened that the market collapsed  just as they finally had a crop to sell.  That’s farming.  She stayed in town during the week, coming home for weekends, in order to go to high school.  When a tag-along baby brother showed up, she stayed home from her junior year of high school to help her Mom so her older sister could finish her senior year with her class.  While in nursing school she met a dapper fellow named Keith and got married.  She was able to keep it quiet and continue in school until her first child was on the way, forcing her to quit school.  In order to find work, Keith had to travel to California while Margaret went back to her folks on the farm.  He made it back just in time for the baby to arrive.  They lived in town for awhile, adding 4 more children in quick succession.  The story goes that when one of the boys picked a lovely bouquet for his mother, consisting of all the neighbor’s flowers, she decided her family needed to be out of town and found the farm that they then called home for many years.  They raised 5 kids there, grew their meat and vegetables, had a milk cow who generated lots of stories, and had a work horse and various other animals who also generated lots of stories.  Was my 90 year old Grandma really once a young mother of many children like me, trying to keep up with the house, so many busy, dirty children, a garden with it’s weeds and produce, and a busy husband? There’s pictures to prove it!  Grandpa had a couple different businesses and I just recently learned that it was Grandma who kept his books and was the office help for many years.  Her faith and her family were the priorities of her life.  She taught her daughters and granddaughters the practical skills needed for making a home–and did it with class.  She was always a lady, teaching us that a lady is made by her attitude and behaviour.  She was kind, generous, and loving–though she possessed an undercurrent of strength to make her a good match for her strong-willed husband and energetic children.  She was the kind of lady who went fishing in the Canadian wilderness with bright red lipstick, looking like a movie star while catching trophy fish. 

Grandma was a farm girl who carried herself like a queen and treated everyone like lords and ladies.  May her legacy live long in those of us fortunate to have been touched by her.

**Please feel free to share your stories and your thoughts about Margaret Clark with her family as a comment (your contact information is not displayed).  There’s also an article in the “articles” tab that several of her grandchildren wrote for her to honor her 90th birthday this summer.

Jill

Post a Comment