01.02.2010: Outlook on the New Year

As P&CW Organic Farm, Inc. enters this second decade of the Twenty-First Century, we pause to take stock of our situation. Incorporated as a farm business in the State of Tennessee for nearly a year now, we are delighted with our lifestyle and seeking to make it a paying proposition. We enjoy the benefits of our limited self-sustainability and enter the new year with a resolve to eat ethically as well as locally. The animals on this farm make our lives richer, albeit our coffers lighter: alpacas are easy on the budget (after the initial purchase) but multiply slowly; dogs multiply too quickly then grow (to eat) even more quickly; cats and chickens pay their own way; and we hope for goats to pay their own way in the not-too-distant future. Veterinary care is a necessary expense and we minimize it by learning to manage some tasks ourselves and/or finding low-cost alternatives. We have grand plans for our farm in the coming year, beginning with providing for ourselves where possible.

Our self-sustainability includes eggs and milk, and—in summer—some fruits and vegetables. We cannot recall the last time we purchased eggs and have lost the desire for the less-tasty eggs found on supermarket shelves. The fresh milk our goats produce is far preferable to any commercial product we have tried; however, we have yet to time our breedings to ensure ample milk production through the calendar year. As we enjoy the last of Marcie-the-Saanen/Nubian’s milk stored in the refrigerator, while she builds up stores for her imminent kid(s), we are eagerly watching two of our Nigerian Dwarf does freshening and hoping that our records predicting mid-February due dates are inaccurate. (Mid-January would suit us just fine, thank you.) As the mid-winter seed catalogs pile up in the mail, we dream of the coming year’s harvest, plan what and where to plant, and try to solve the problems of animals wanting to share the plants (let alone waiting to share the harvest). My prize blackberry patch was cropped down to practically nothing last year, and this continued even after I thought we had protected the plants from our animals. What we don’t produce we purchase.

Where possible, we try to eat locally and ethically. Last year we learned our way to several local Farmer’s Markets, and by asking which products the farmers had actually produced (versus those they purchased for resale), we were able to eat locally. This year we’ll be more careful to ask about each farm’s production methods; not only do we prefer organic for the health of our bodies and the earth, but also we now appreciate that chemicals, pesticides, even peat moss and potting soils may be trucked in from distant corners of the continent (and so defeat one purpose of eating locally). In an effort to support our local economy, we favor local markets and roadside stands; that our state has a handy website to help us in this endeavor—Pick Tennessee Products –is an added bonus. Lastly, ethical meat eating was brought home to us through reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals (Little, Brown and Co., 2009) and its examination of the cruel and unsanitary circumstances of factory farming and butchering (or processing). A benefit of living in the agriculturally-centered state of Tennessee is that finding meat products from family farms is relatively easy. Recently we purchased a goat through Starry Hill Farm and had the processed meat delivered on Christmas Eve. We have enough in the freezer to take us through the winter and well into the spring (without butchering an animal we had come to know individually). We derive pleasure from living in concert with animals that we do not plan to butcher.

The animals provide a state of emotional well-being not found in city apartments. We love our sweet, fuzzy, gentle alpacas and the luxurious fiber they produce annually and we plan to continue breeding them this year. The dogs bring great peace of mind through their work as guardians, but we’ve had the females we’re keeping spayed (at Fix for Life, the local low-cost spay/neuter clinic) and will not be breeding again until we see fit to acquire another AKC-registered female. For all their doggy-lovingness, growing Great Pyrenees just eat too much for us to support many of them for long. The cats more than earn their keep by reducing the population of grain-stealing rodents, and the chickens carry their weight by both producing eggs and reducing the population of pesky insects. (When we distribute the Spaulding Labs Fly Predators around the pastures, we take great care to keep the cocoons from serving as avian treats.) This spring we will have goats to sell as well as goat products (beginning with goat-milk soap) and hope that the sales will offset some of the cost of maintaining our herd. Finally, we know only too well how quickly veterinary bills can get out-of-control, so we are learning to perform veterinary parasitological evaluations (fecal tests) with the help of our local vet, to give those shots the law allows, and to purchase and insert microchips into our own animals. I trim the goats’ hooves and the dogs’ dewclaws, and will take on alpaca hooves as soon as we have a safe containment system for them. Although I am not eager to do it, I imagine I’ll learn to draw blood myself—to deliver to the vet for testing. The animals are an integral part of P&CW Organic Farm, Inc. and we’re very glad to have them here.
All-in-all, we are in fine shape entering this new year, and we are eager to experience all the joys and challenges coming our way. We invite readers to join us on our journey through this web-log and promise to work at the brevity so carelessly overlooked in the writing of this entry. For those of you who do not have time to read the jottings herein, we urge you to at least bookmark this page. Then, please run your Google searches from the search-box at the top right of this page and shop Amazon through the search-box further down in the right-hand column. With your help, all of the animals will continue to eat well this year. Thank you!