turkey.

turkeys are peculiar creatures. at the farm, we have the joy of herding the little ladies out to pasture on a daily basis where they happily feed on sunlight, grass and farm-fresh air. until thanksgiving rolls around.

rather than raising beautiful heritage breeds, we rely on the good graces of cargill, who graciously grace us with 100-odd turkey chicklings (poults), as well as donating their bedding and supplemental feed. thank you corporate kindness.

papa ghana: turkey man of the year 2008.

enough of my pastoral ponderings . . . and back to down and dirty farm life (note the farmers in charge of the farm's turkeys!). this morning, herdsman raymond mcgee/mcginnis small gathered and guided our friendly fowl to their pasture plot. like the dumb domesticated beasts that we all are, they were soon distracted (probably by some shiny object) and thundered full-speed in my general direction. if you've never seen a turkey run/waddle-at-full-speed, they rev their engines like turbo jets prepared for take-off but remain ground-bound due to their bountiful bosoms.

rodeo wrangler:
turkey man of the year 2009

well, in their great rush, only lovely lady got her dinosaur feet stuck in a mud puddle. and flap as she might - her flappage was all in vain (turkeys are suckers for pathetic deaths). i hopped the fence just as her scrawny neck went limp and her beady head turned blue. so i said a prayer - asked the great herdsman to carry her to the processing house for final rites. after a cup of coffee.

1. sharpen knife.



2. hang bird.



3. slit throat. (those americorps members can do everything!)




4. skin and eviscerate.

i am grateful to know the sunlight and air that nurture our food to life. to know the green pasture and garden soil that feed us. and to share the bounty with each other over a bonfire. rather than view death as the end, we see new life. i suppose there's a parable in there somewhere.

rather than think too much, we give thanks. and dream up new possibilities for something that could so easily have been discarded. i guess that's what the dream's all about. let's not waste it.

Farm grown beef on its way!

Hey, for all you meat-lovers out there, here is some great news for you! Coming this next week we will have our very own beef to sell from our freezer. After she enjoyed several months of grazing on our lush winter pasture we took our first heifer to the butcher. She weighed in at over 1,000 pounds! So, if you are interested in some really great beef, you should come by the farm and check out what we have in our freezer.

Along with that we will also have goat from our farm including goat sausage. The sausage was a really big hit last time and so we are bringing it in again.

Thanks for stopping by our website and I hope to see you out at the farm this weekend!

Why Your Hamburger is Increasingly Becoming a Moral Dilemma

This has been in the news for a couple of weeks but just in case you missed it here is a quick editorial from the NY Times that points to the light recently shined on the recent, and ongoing, happenings in the meat processing industry. Suffice it to say that if you have a weak stomach, a sympathetic bone in your body, any shred of decency, or the merest glimmer of a soul don't click on the video they provide. No, on second thought, if you have any of those things you should by all means click on that link, because as awful as the reality that these things are happening is it is AT LEAST equally shameful that we turn a blind eye to them and by our choices and lifestyles we passively (yet decidedly) both support and encourage them. We sell locally produced, grass-fed beef here at our farm and would love to sell you some as an alternative to purchasing beef that comes out of the soul-less conventional industrial meat processing complex but if you don't buy it from us, buy it somewhere and struggle with us all as we attempt to see beyond the bottom line and into the reality of the ethical dimensions that encompass something as mundane as a burger and fries.

If you want more info on what conventional meat production looks like this interview with Michael Pollan is a good place to start and you can check out our previous post here.

Update: Don't say we didn't warn you

Meat Has Feet

Just a quick heads up on a nice piece in the NYTimes' Week in Review by Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, entitled "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler." As you might guess it focuses on the current state of meat production and consumption in America and in doing so raises a number of issues that we are concerned about here at WHRI. Here are a couple of quotes of note:

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States. . . .

Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. . . .

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”

One of the ideas that we seek to both practice and preach around here is the global reality that meat is a luxury in most cases and that when it is eaten it should most often be a side dish - a tough concept for most of us Americans to come to grips with. For that reason meat doesn't make many appearances at our community lunches and when it does it is meat that we have raised, butchered and cooked ourselves. It is also one of the things that we emphasize in the meal preparation portion of our LOTOS program. The concept that animals have intrinsic worth totally disconnected from the utilitarian value that we place on them is one that we think visitors to the farm should wrestle with and in this case quite literally. If they want to eat meat with their LOTOS meal then they have to decide as a group to do so and as as group they have to go through the process of catching (usually a chicken), killing, butchering and cooking the animal. Groups always point to this process as being one of the most powerful of their experiences because it impacts them on so many levels: the reality that every time they choose to eat meat it involves both an animal losing its life and a person bearing the burden of taking that life; the recognition that in most of the world people are much more intimately connected to their food and where it comes from; and for many the ethical struggle of realizing that if it were incumbent upon me to kill all the meat I think I need to eat then I probably couldn't do it and therefore should I be eating so much meat - all of which are good, hard things to work through.

Anywho, give the article a read and then if it makes you depressed at the current state of affairs come visit our animals here at the farm and see what a contrast there is in local food production. Oh yeah, and for those meat eaters amongst us who are looking for a little more conscience in their burger or steak keep checking the blog and website to see when we'll have our own grass-fed beef for sale in the next month or so!


Also worth a look:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.
The Meatrix - can not be explained, must be experienced.