www.JackrabbitCheese.com
We’ll be milking ten goats this year– more than we’ve ever milked before, but not enough to keep our equipment busy. So we’ve been looking for a cow dairy from which to buy milk for making other varieties of cheese.
This week, we came to an agreement with a dairy out west of us. It’s a huge facility with state of the art equipment– and the owner has a reputation for doing things right.
Here’s a look at how a large but ethical dairy does things.
(Suellen Hockey Photo) We Got Snow!
How much does a batch solar heater cost? That’s a question I can answer, because I built one for use in our cheese facility. I started with a tank from a doscarded 30-gallon propane hot water heater. Freecycle is great for stuff like this. I stripped off the exterior metal and the insulation, wire brushed [...]
(Builditsolar photo.) So, how does one build this “miracle” of solar heating: the simple and cheap “batch” heater? It turns out there are plenty of plans out there. For starters, a simple “solar shower,” in which water in an inner tube or bucket is heated for personal use, is one of the simplest forms. But [...]
(ByExample.com image.) A couple of weeks back, I posted that our experiments in renewable energy had been expensive. I also voiced a desire to find projects that are not just renewable, but cheap and reliable as well. Here’s one: the “batch” solar hot water heater. “Batch” simply means that the water is heated in a [...]
(Euclid Van der Kroew photo: Farm equipment burried by the dust bowl, c. 1935.) “Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on [...]
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Here’s a little video we made that promotes local food as a diet with much lower greenhouse gas emissions. For a look at where the numbers come from, click here. No professional actors were injured in the making of this film, since none participated!
(News Tribune photo.) “When Whatcom Land Trust stewards needed help with a blackberry infestation on Kelsey Preserve, they didn’t turn to herbicides or hire people to chop them out… ‘Blackberries are a non-native species and we’re trying to manage the land in its natural condition,’ says a rep for the land trust. ” Instead, they brought [...]
During the summer months, there’s a lot of “green” waste produced: yard trimmings, downed tree limbs, fallen fruit, and so forth. Most of this ends up in the landfill, undergoing anerobic decomposition, which produces methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than CO2.We’ve taken to picking up such waste to feed to our goats. [...]
The Cheesemaker is our favorite source of cultures and supplies for making cheese.
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