Community-Supported Agriculture for the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont
Whoops - Lambs!
January 10, 2012
I heard from a friend a few weeks ago that her flock had unexpectedly started lambing over Christmas. “Ah, rookie mistake,” I thought to myself, feeling no small measure of pride that I’d survived my rookie years without any such mishap.
So it was only fitting that, when I went out to feed the ewes on New Year’s morning, I saw a pair of small, black ears sticking up from a pile of shavings in the corner, ears that were attached to a dry and well-fed lamb that hustled away from me as I approached. It’s never too late for a rookie mistake.
By now, we have a half dozen lambs cavorting in the barn, all having survived their births quite nicely despite the sometimes sub-zero weather. I’ve been giving an ample ration of grain to the mothers to make sure that there’s plenty of milk available to keep the little guys and gals well fed and warm. The lambs are a hoot – no less fun and energetic for having been born in the cold depths of winter.
We left the un-castrated ram lambs in for too long last summer, it seems, and are now reaping this unexpectedly early harvest. This helps explain why the magnificent Dorset ram we bought last fall seemed less busy than I had hoped. Fortunately, the bulk of the flock was not affected, and we still seem to be on track for normal lambing in March for everyone else.
Beyond that, all is quiet on the farm. Most of the action is in front of the computer, where the budget for 2012 and the seed order are taking shape. That and in front of the wood boiler, where even more heat is being generated. Details about the CSA and meat offerings for the coming year will be up shortly.
Chuck
The Master Butcher
November 15, 2011
We had a master butcher at the farm yesterday to teach us how to butcher lambs. We spent all day cutting up 7 carcasses, and at every turn, the butcher said, “Wow, this is some of the best lamb I’ve ever seen!”
The meat was tender, lightly marbled, and a deep crimson color. The loin chops were so thick and delicious-looking that I don’t think I was alone in wanting to pop one into my mouth as-is. Though I did pause when the butcher said that chops of such quality would sell for at least $28/lb at a retail store.
Despite this triumph, the event was imbued with sadness for me, because it felt like we were witnessing the passing of an era. Both the master butcher, and a local butcher who stopped by to help out, talked about how so few people know how to buy and cook meat these days. The average customer in the 1970s in Vermont knew more about which cuts to order for which recipes than almost any customer today. This link in the chain between humans and the earth has been severed.
And is likely to stay severed, in part because we can’t legally sell you this meat. And it isn’t just us. Neither the USDA nor the Vermont Agency of Agriculture allows on-farm slaughter and butchering. If you want to buy our lamb, we have to truck it to a slaughterhouse, stress the animals to no end, potentially mix their meat up with meat coming from many different farms, and have a guy cut it up who’s making $8 an hour and probably doesn’t know an eye round from a chuck roast. All in the name of public health. And all under the watchful eye of a USDA inspector, hopefully not the same one who oversaw the bulldozing of live animals at the St. Albans slaughterhouse a few years back.
Back at the farm, meanwhile, the scene was just about as magical as you could imagine. Animals that had died suddenly and unexpectedly at our hand, out in the sunshine and just a few steps from their home and hearth, were being carefully cut up inside a bright and airy barn to the sounds of intense concentration and conversation.
I had thought that a lamb was easy to butcher and that there were only a few choices to be made. Wow, the world of lamb! Take the hind leg: you could have a bone-in roast, bone-out roast, butterflied, sirloin steaks, top roast, bottom roast, eye round roast, shank, or stewed. What does the slaughterhouse offer? Just whole or butterflied.
I’m pleased to report that Norah and I and our families will be enjoying some of the best lamb that the earth can produce this winter. And deeply regret having to add that you won’t be.
Call your state rep. I know I will be.
—Chuck
Farm Stats, Old and New
November 9, 2011
Sunrise Fans:
Here are some interesting stats, old and new, from the summer just past and from some summers very much past.
First the history: In 1850, Sunrise was 80 acres cleared and 20 acres of woods. Livestock totaled 3 horses, 4 cows, 4 oxen, 2 pigs, and 100 sheep. Sales for the year were 300 lbs wool, 500 lbs butter, 200 lbs cheese, 50 lbs maple sugar (not syrup, take note), and 25 lbs honey. This is from the first Vermont Census of Agriculture.
Ten years later, in 1860, the farm had grown to 125 acres cleared and 50 acres in woods. (They cleared an average of nearly 5 acres per year during that period - ouch! I’m tired just thinking about it.) Pigs were up to 4 and sheep to 125. Wool came in at 400 lbs, butter at 300, cheese at 150, and honey at 20.
Fast forward to this year, 2011: 20 acres cleared and 75 in woods; 37 sheep, 12 pigs, 600 chickens; 22,000 lbs of vegetables, 3,000 lbs of pork, 3,000 lbs of chicken, 650 lbs of lamb, 95 gallons maple syrup. And one tractor. Trading horses for a tractor is undoubtedly the biggest change on the farm in the last century and a half. Electricity comes in second.
And here are the results so far from the CSA survey, for those of you who’ve asked about it. Sixty eight people have responded so far, a touch more than half.
*Free choice: 58% love it, 30% are fine either way, 12% prefer the set menu. Based on this, I’m planning to continue with the free-choice approach next year, tailoring our planting schedule to take advantage of what we learned this year and to add smaller quantities of less-usual vegetables for those who like them. The most-requested new items so far: edamame, mushrooms, and artichokes.
*Price. Great Value: 11%; Just Right: 65%; A Little Too Expensive: 24%; Poor Value: 0%. Too soon to say what next year will hold, since we haven’t closed the books yet on this year. My goal is to pay our hourly folks between $10 and $15 an hour and to pay Norah and myself between $15 and $20 per hour. (Norah and I split what’s left after all the bills are paid.)
*Quantity. Way too much: 2%; A little too much: 13%; Just right: 55%; Too little: 25%; Way too little: 5%. Lots of great comments here, and lots of room for improvement on our end in 2012. The new cooler is online and has passed its initial test run. This is going to make a huge difference as we work to optimize the free-choice system next year, especially for you folks who come late in the day when we were sometimes out of things (and when some of the veggies looked like it was late in the day!)
*Info. Plenty: 98%; Not Enough: 2%. We did better on this than I had thought… seemed like more than 2% of you go lost on the way to the fall raspberries!
*Chicken. 90% or more of you said good or great on size, quality, taste, and price. Packaging was the weak link, with 20% saying just OK. (Sixty percent said good or great.) We’ll see what some options are for improvement.
*Not chicken: 17% vegetarian; 40% too expensive, 24% prefer not to pre-order; 10% sold out; 9% too big. We can’t help on the too expensive part, I’m afraid, as much as I wish we could. We can compete on price for veggies but not for meat. It has to be all about taste and quality. That said, for those of you who were shut out or would prefer to buy a la carte, we’ll be expanding our flock again next year and hope to have more birds for sale.
That’s it from the farm for the year. If you have an hour or two and are looking for a place to take a walk, do come by and walk around the field and the adjacent trails. (Bring an orange vest or hat.) The farm is gorgeous at this time of year - quiet and still, like a ship lying at anchor. The details of production have given way to the beauty of the land itself.
—Chuck
2011 Year-End Update and Survey
Hello Sunrise CSA-ers:
The Sunshine watermelons and Sungold cherry tomatoes feel like a distant memory today, with 3 inches of snow on the ground this morning. Norah and I adjusted the schedule and planted next year’s garlic last Monday, a week ahead of schedule, and that seems to have been a good bet. Only the sheep seem a bit put out by the early snow. They’re pawing down for green grass out in the big pasture.
This is our annual year-end email and member survey. If you have 5 minutes, we’d love your feedback on some of the details of the farm operation. We’ve set the survey up on Survey Monkey so that your answers are anonymous… follow this link:
(link removed from web posting - look for it in your email)
Overall, Norah and I are feeling very good about how the year went. The addition of two new perennial crops was a big highlight… yay asparagus, yay fall raspberries! Some of the old standbys did very well, too, especially the tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots. Some crops that didn’t meet our expectations were the sweet onions, which came in small and didn’t store too well, and the fall greens, which were victimized by a combination of flooding, seed that was too old, and farmer malfeasance during the dog days of August.
On the plus side, we grew better beets this year than we ever have before.
We do wish the spring had gone better, since we basically lost a week to the variable weather (first too cold, then too hot.) We are finishing up our walk-in cooler this week, which will largely solve this problem next spring. If the heat threatens the broccoli or spinach, we’ll be able to harvest them at the peak moment and hold them in the cooler. Overall, we think the cooler is going to be an invaluable addition to the farm next season, and I’m sure we’ll soon wonder how we were able to farm for 12 years without it.
Of course, the biggest change this year was moving to the “free-choice” style of pickup from the “take one of each” system. Most of you seem to have liked this move (and we’ve asked specifically about that in our survey) because it meant more customization and less waste (no more moldy, unknown greens at the back of your home fridge.) Those who preferred the old system missed the bulging surplus table, which we didn’t use much this year since the choice system allows us to distribute a crop that otherwise wouldn’t have been sufficient to feed everyone. Overall, a higher percentage of the crops made it into the official share this year, which increased the value of the share overall, though a few of you who made good use of the surplus table in the past undoubtedly took home fewer vegetables this year.
Unless we hear a loud outcry in the survey, we’ll continue with the free-choice system going forward. We learned a lot this year about which vegetables people like and don’t like based on what was left at the end of each day, and we’ll use this information to modify our planting quantities going forward. For example, nearly everyone chooses sweet mesclun every week that it’s available while only a few die-hards choose braising mesclun. We’ll probably plant 90 percent sweet and 10 percent braising next year, instead of the 50/50 we’ve done in the past.
We weren’t able to accurately calculate the store-bought-price-equivalent of the share this year because everyone’s share was different. (Our goal has been to be at least 30% less than store-bought.) However, given that retail vegetable prices are up about 3% over last year, and that we added two high-value crops (asparagus and fall raspberries), and that the choice system helped overcome the missing week of spring, we think we should still be right in the ballpark on shareholder value. If you think otherwise, do let us know in the survey!
That’s about it – I guess I’ll end it here. (I could go on about farming at some length, especially when the alternative is going out into the snow to do some actual farming!)
Thank you to each of you for making this a successful and memorable season at Sunrise, and thanks especially to Norah, who has worked with me for 5 of the 12 seasons of Sunrise Farm CSA, all of them the best years. We’ve spent many thousands of hours together over that span, and whether we were thinning onions in the driving rain, trying to salvage hail-damaged vegetables, or setting barn footings in two feet of mud and snow, I’ve enjoyed every hour together, a feat that would have seemed impossible had it not just happened. Good luck, Norah, and don’t be a stranger!
—Chuck
PS: I’ll email each of you again in early March with details about the upcoming season.