www.JackrabbitCheese.com
(DJ Mitchell Photo) Suellen & Annie
This picture is our East view. Obviously taken during a warmer time of the year. DJ is already getting spring fever and has ordered some seeds for the garden.
“On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.”
This article in the Los Angeles Times Food Section has some interesting perspective on the current national dialog on where food comes from.
We bought our new (used) pasteurizer last fall, never thinking that it didn’t come with a manual. After weeks of internet searches, emails, and phone calls, we finally found someone who knows how it works.
It turns out the hot water (yes, thankfully it’s designed for hot water, not steam) is delivered under pressure, sprays against the inner liner to heat the milk, and collects at atmospheric pressure in a reservoir at the bottom. That means we need a second pump to cycle the used water back into the heater, else it exits through the overflow. Who knew?
“[F]armers in 1941 wanted high-value grains like wheat and corn that they could sell off the farm, [but] they didn’t yet have the mined and manufactured fertilizers needed to get high yields from those crops. Instead, they colected nutrients from large areas of land using low-value crops like grass and alfalfa, fed them to animals, and let the animals concentrate the nutrients in their manure. The manure was then used to fertilize small fields of grains.”
So says Farming magazine (Winter 2009, p. 62), reminding us that agriculture as practiced today relies on artificial fertilizers and cheap trucking, not sustainable practices. Vast fields of corn and soy are as much a symptom as livestock factory farms. Only because of cheap petroleum and natural gas derived fertilizer can we maintain a system in which crops and livestock are not dependent on each other.
Cheap petroleum is also the greatest cause of environmental destruction, through climate change. Thus farming practices may be an indicator of environmental health– and right now the indicator is generally not good.
I try to model my food intake as though we did not have cheap petroleum: buy local, avoid prepared foods and corn syrup and soybean oils, and limit meat consumption to a couple of times a week. But it’s not easy when off-season cardboard tomatoes and cheap off-the-shelf bread are available at the store…
Another glimpse into the past, this time to the fundos of Chile in 1949.
“Almost all of Chile’s arable land is in single great land holdings of 5,000 to 50,000 acres, in vivid contrast to the small farms of North America where the owner and his family do most of the work.”
True perhaps in 1949, but how things have changed! And notice the emphasis on Chile’s need for self-sufficiency, an idea no longer compatible with our desire for agricultural exports.
Made in 1948, this film discusses the post-war program to develop “The Chicken of Tomorrow”– the chickens we buy in stores today. I doubt they realized at the time that the chicken industry would be completely changed, based on mono-crops raised in confined spaces. Already, the methods displayed in the film show chickens confined, unable to exercise. In the following decades, that trend would only get worse.
Today, many small farmers are returning to “heritage” breeds because of their hardiness, personality, and other characteristics. They are slower growing and therefore less profitable, but their eggs and meat have superior flavor, and they range better than the overly-fat modern breeds. Heritage breeds do better with pasture feeding, whereas modern breeds are often unable to forage for themselves.
The United Nations FAO offers this analysis of solar-powered dairy projects. Their conclusion: It’s feasible, but not cheap. Note that, in 1981 dollars, a cheese facility of the size we’re building would cost over $150,000. That’s over $355,000 in 2008 dollars.
Using innovation, used equipment, comparison shopping, and just plain Yankee frugality, we’re putting ours together for a fraction of that.
Made in 1951, this short film produced by the Farm Journal reminds us how different agriculture was just 50 years ago. It shows the bias of its time: that electricity would solve all our problems when in fact gas is much more efficient for heating. Bigger was presumed to be better. And I’m amazed at how much extra time the family had while expanding the farm– our expansions never happen quite like that!
(Robert Bloomfield, Good Tidings, or News from the Farm, 1804.)
Another resource from Google Books: A Garden of Herbs: Being A Practical Handbook To The Making Of An Old English Herb Garden Together With Numerous Receipts From Contemporary Authorities. By Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1920).
This fascinating book discusses the hows and whys of creating an intricately designed herb garden of the traditional English style. It covers design and herb selecion, with thought toward what to do with the herbs grown: salads and other recipes fill several chapters. From p. 147:
A Brave Warming Salad for Winter: Spinnage, sorrel, lettuce, and a few onions then add oyl, vinegar, and salt, balm, pepper grass, mint, endive, young green buds of cole worts, and garlic. (Tryon: A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats 1692.)
And from page 166, under herbal drinks:
To Make a Tysand: Take borage, sorrell, endive, cinquefoil, two or three handfuls of barley, then take halfe a handful of red fennell rootes and a quantity of liquorice sugar candie, figges, dates, great Raisins; boyle all together from a gallon to three pintes and strain. The Good Housewife’s Handmaid 1588.
