Economics of small-farm pastured eggs

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We’ll be selling eggs to off-farm customers for the first time in 2012, having expanded our laying flock to 35 hens. In past years we kept up to a dozen, which laid enough for our own household and some for workers, but this year eggs will be available to CSA members for $6/dozen. That’s higher than anyone around here is used to paying, so I thought I’d share the economic modelling that led us to this price. For reference, our friends at Happy Hollow Farm in Moniteau county came to the same conclusions, and are selling their certified organic eggs at $6/dozen as well. Our eggs are not certified organic and should not be referred to as such, though we absolutely refuse to feed out anything containing GMOs, whether chicken feed or food scraps.

Egg production & gross income
We have 35 hens, but I’m going to use 30 here to provide some slush for losses and poor layers (some of our current hens are over 3 years old).  At their peak, 30 hens laying 5 eggs a week = 150 eggs/week. This winter, when most are taking a break (which they need to stay healthy), we’re getting around 60/week. You can up this with artificial light or other interventions, but that’s not healthy for the birds and we prefer to handle them naturally. So to account for the laying curve over the year, I used three different laying rates:

20 weeks at 150 e/w = 3000 egg
20 weeks at 120 e/w = 2400 eggs
12 weeks at 60 e/w  =    720 eggs

That’s a total of 6,120 eggs, or ~500 dozen.

At our high price of $6/dozen, that’s $3,000 gross income per year (not counting any expenses, including remitting sales tax from that gross). And that’s assuming every single egg from a year’s production sells, which it certainly doesn’t (if nothing else, there are always cracked, overly dirty, or otherwise unsellable eggs). In other words, that’s the most we could possibly earn in a year on a flock our size if we had no expenses for feed, labor, marketing, or anything else.

Feed expenses
Organic chicken feed costs roughly $.50/lb here, about twice what conventional feed costs. If it’s not certified organic, it almost certainly has GMOs in it, regardless of other “natural” type labeling, and that is anathema to us. Figuring that an average hen eats 1/4lb a day, and using 40 birds to account for roosters and poor layers, we get this:

40 birds * 1/4 lb = 10 lb/day
10 lb/day * $.50/lb = $5/day * 365 days/year = $1825 annual feed cost.

Now, this is almost certainly reduced by the birds being on pasture and fed lots of farm scraps, so let’s reduce that quantity by 1/3, making annual feed costs around $1200 (not accounting for the time & labor of acquiring and handling the feed). This doesn’t really account for the fact that organic feed is difficult to acquire here; we have to have it special-ordered from Wisconsin through a local feed store, as does Happy Hollow, but that’s what it takes to avoid GMOs in Missouri.

So far we’re down to $1800 in net profit annually, before labor or other expenses.

Labor expenses

This is the other big one. Labor involves visiting the chicken house twice a day to check feed and water and collect eggs, any fence-moving to keep them on fresh pasture (which we do often, even in winter), cleaning & inspecting eggs, packaging eggs for sale/distribution, dealing with any health/management issues within the flock, remitting sales tax to the state on any egg sales, and so on. Any accounting for labor should also take into account the reality that we (or an employee) have to be here just about every day of the year, in any weather, to manage the birds’ pasture access, water, and food. Overall, my basic daily chores take about 15 minutes; I’m going to double that to account for all the rest which is harder to track, and I still think that’s a low estimate.

30 minutes/day roughly equals 4 hours/week, or around 200 hours a year.

Assuming my labor is worth at least minimum wage, 200 hours/year * $8/hour = $1600. With our $1800 net profit after feed expenses, $1600 in labor pretty much kills the remaining budget. We’re now down to $200 in remaining cashflow, to account for any other expenses like infrastructure, water, straw for bedding, and bird replacement.

Long-term flock maintenance

People sometimes forget that chickens don’t live forever. They get eaten by hawks (especially pastured ones like ours), or die from old age/disease like any animal. In fact, we’re probably better off regularly culling birds past a certain age, for three reasons: (1) to avoid aged birds introducing disease into the flock, (2) to give them a cleaner, more humane death than decrepitude provides, and (3) to get a bit more value from them (a 3-year-old hen is still a decent stew bird; a real geezer is not). Why bury an old carcass when we can eat a middle-aged one?

The corollary to this is the need for regular introduction of new birds, either by purchase or breeding. We’ve opted for the latter, buying a small incubator so we can breed and raise our own, and hopefully improve the genetics of the flock (one reason we keep a number of roosters around). However you replace birds, it costs time and money that aren’t easy to factor into an annual budget, and that remaining $200 somehow has to cover this and everything else.

Manure/fertility
I didn’t include manure production/handling here, which can be a cost and/or a benefit depending on the farm. For us, generating on-farm fertility is a major reason we raise chickens in the first place, so there is some inherent value there, although it’s hard to monetize. What’s the actual value of using our own manure rather than feedlot manure, other than removing GMOs, antibiotics, and off-farm diseases from our input stream? Even for a benefit like this, there is still significant extra labor involved in regularly cleaning out the shed, hauling & composting the bedding, and otherwise managing the waste stream to be a net farm benefit instead of a problem (like it is for larger operations). So I pretty much figure the manure handling evens out; more benefit offset by more work.

Infrastructure
Nowhere in this discussion have I budgeted for infrastructure. Everyone has to pay for, or value, the infrastructure needed to raise chickens, particularly if they’re being rotated on fresh pasture and not just let out to the same yard year-round. This includes fencing (whether permanent or moveable net), housing (whether building new or converting existing), refrigeration cost, feeders and waterers, and so much more. Even though we built our new shed from cedar lumber generated on the farm, that still costs chainsaw work & labor, milling fees, hardware, and roofing. These costs should spread over 20 years at least, but they still need to be there in the price of the eggs.

Conclusions
In effect, what these numbers tell me is that it’s possible to make at most minimum wage raising high-quality, organically fed pastured eggs, even charging the “high” price of $6/dozen, and that’s under a nearly ideal system in which few birds are attacked by predators and everyone lays to their potential. The real world is rarely so accommodating. Even if you quibble with specific numbers and estimates, you’d have to double or halve a major number to make a meaningful difference in the income, and that’s not realistic.

The same economies apply to conventional small-farm eggs, and to industrial ones. Let’s say we halve the feed costs for people just buying generic feed; we also then halve the price to the $2-$3/dozen typical of farmers market eggs, or even lower given that various country people sell eggs for ludicrous prices below $2/dozen. Given that feed and labor are roughly equivalent percentages of the whole, the same ratio holds: you’re making at most minimum wage in fairly risky business. People charging under $2 are simply insane, and those in the $2-$4 range really aren’t making much meaningful income if they’re accounting for their actual costs. They might be making a profit, but they aren’t making an income; there’s a big difference if you care about the long-term viability of local foods.

This tiny profit margin is why feedlot eggs sort-of work; you can afford to make a miniscule profit per bird if you pack ten thousand of them into a barn, keep them in artificial light throughout the year, pre-emptivally medicate them against inevitable health issues, and turn them into dog food as soon as they decline from peak production (and most of the profit still goes to the middle and corporate level, not the “farmer”, who still makes at or below minimum wage). But that system has also taught consumers that the “value” of a dozen eggs is lower than that of a few tomatoes, and so people are no longer willing to pay a reasonable price for a much more nutritional food. The price of cheap food is farmers unable to make a meaningful living at almost any scale.

It also tells me that many people selling eggs at farmers markets and roadside stands aren’t treating themselves like businesses. There is simply no way to actually make a living wage or meaningful income on eggs at the prices most people sell them for; the reality is that they’re not. They’re either doing it as a hobby, and/or not paying attention to their numbers. Lots of non-business-minded small farmers seem to equate gross income with actual income. In fairness, there are also people who do realize this, but just don’t think they can get a fair price (and often can’t), so charge whatever they can get because they like having chickens. That doesn’t change the economic reality, though, and hurts farmers who are trying to earn a living.

Personally, I think the skill and risk it takes to raise pastured eggs should be worth more than minimum wage, but $6/dozen is the only way we’ll even get that far, so we’re going with it for now. We agree with Liz at Happy Hollow, who’s said that if not enough people will pay minimum wage for good eggs, it’s chicken soup time and we’ll go back down to a home-sized flock. There are lots of easier and less risky ways to make minimum wage; neither of us will do this work, and take these risks, for less.

Under Construction

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We’ve finally made the switch to WordPress, allowing us to integrate our website and blog. But the site is still a construction zone with a good-sized to-do list. Feel free to comment on other features you’d like to see (or give advice on some of the items that remain on the to-do list).

Still to do:

  • Add content to static pages. We’re planning a far more comprehensive site than we’ve had in the past, with farm management info, organic certification info (for produce), info about products/services, and much more. Pages will also mine the content of posts. It may take years to fully achieve our vision for the content, but we should be able to move beyond the current skeleton of a menu within a couple of weeks.
  • Add a recipes section to the site. I might use a canned plug-in or I might try to program it myself so I understand the inner workings and can better maintain it over time. We’re planning to put significant effort into the recipes part of the site and want to use a format that will last. If all goes well, the recipes will implement the hRecipe format in a WordPress custom post type. And CSA members will likely be able to contribute recipes directly.
  • Consider adding an email subscription option(?) We’re debating about what to do with this one. WordPress automatically generates an assortment of feeds, including RSS, so readers can use various methods on their end to subscribe using that.
  • Come up with a fix for images that didn’t transfer well from the old blog. Most of the content imported with a minimum of headache, but some of the images didn’t make the final trip to the new site and are not rendering properly. I have a couple of ideas on fixes, but this is low in the priority list right now. (A direct import from blogger to the WordPress installation at cherthollowfarm.com didn’t work, so the blog took a detour to cherthollowfarm.wordpress.com, which took care of most of the problems, except for some of the photos that didn’t make the final leg of the trip. Grrr…)
  • Add content to the “biodiveristy” section of the site. This is a custom post type that we’re going to use to catalog both wild & domestic plants & animals on the farm. This is a long-term project. The most immediate use will be to provide info on various crops that we offer to CSA members. We also want to use it to keep track of varieties.
  • Ditch the old blog post categories and develop/implement a new, better-thought out category structure for blog posts.
  • Finish an assortment of behind-the-scenes work (including implementing a system of regular backup and coming up with a method for filtering comment spam that doesn’t cost us more $).
  • Monitor for any problems with site navigation, etc. Is the sidebar missing anywhere? Do the pagination buttons work as they should? Etc.

Mid-winter work

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After returning from a much-needed and -enjoyed early January trip to visit family and friends, we’ve launched ourselves into number of important winter projects.


JANUARY CSA DELIVERY
Immediately upon returning home, we got to work putting together the first CSA shares, including setting up the inaugural online member survey. Our goal is for this system to allow limited share customization, helping members have some control over what they do and don’t receive, while not being too complicated for us to manage. Two share sizes plus ten or so items plus three options (none, standard amount, extras please) is already a significant amount of complexity, but we’re trying the system out this year because we really like the value it creates for everyone involved.

Shares were delivered on Monday and Thursday afternoon, with only one small hitch that was easily corrected. It took about 2 hours each day to do the delivery route, a significantly shorter time expenditure than going to one market, though higher mileage. Saving us more time, one of our employees will generally be doing the Thursday delivery route for us, paid as an independent contractor for the off-farm work. She likes the idea, as she’ll be working here Thursday mornings anyway, and it means we only have to come to Columbia once a week, a significant time savings for us.

We’ve received a couple good comments already, so I’m hoping everyone enjoyed their pulse of fresh winter vegetables (and purchased eggs, in some cases). We’d certainly like to hear of any concerns. Although storing all these crops until now creates a higher risk and workload for us, we also really like getting some product to members right away. It makes their investment more real; no one has to wait five months to get any return on the up-front payment, and it buffers any future crop failures or issues through the rest of the year. So far, so good for the 2012 CSA.

SEED ORDER
Before leaving on our trip, Joanna especially worked long hours putting together our fairly complex seed order that juggles six or more seed companies and ~150 varieties. In addition, we save our own seed for many other items, but still need to integrate those stocks and any leftover seeds from last year with the rest of the order. Developing the seed order inherently requires putting together a realistic planting plan for the coming year, which is a large task in itself as we balance crop rotations, work schedules, weather/climate considerations, CSA needs (which are quite different from market needs), and more. Effectively, to make a cost- and resource-efficient seed order requires planning out much of the next year, and needs to be done by early January so we can get the orders submitted in time to get everything we want. With the continued growth in both small farms and gardening, more pressure is placed on the seed-supplier bottleneck every year and many items vanish quickly (particularly so as organic certification requires us to seek out organic seed whenever possible/practical). Most of our orders are now submitted, and are arriving. The first indoor seed starting (onions) is already only a few weeks away.

We used results from our December survey of CSA members to guide the seed order development. For example, with respect to pepper heat/spiciness, only one household of twenty voted for habanero-level heat, so most of the hot peppers that we grow will be in the low-to-moderate heat category. (We were thinking about skipping habaneros altogether until we tasted an amazing habanero salsa while traveling and learned that the almost tropical fruitiness is a characteristic flavor of habaneros; so we’ll grow one or two plants.) From the survey, we also learned that many members seek out bitter flavors, so we’re going to trial a couple of new crops that tend to be on the bitter side: escarole and radicchio. Joanna isn’t especially fond of bitter flavors, but then again, neither are most insects, so these crops are likely to have fewer pest problems than some alternatives. Radicchio has a reputation for being finicky, though, so we’ll start by trialing a smallish quantity this year. We had several members comment that they would love to get any fruit we can grow. Hopefully the strawberries that are in the ground will produce enough for distribution, and we’re tentatively planning on a small watermelon patch, though they tend to be space-hogs for the yield anticipated. We’re also increasing blueberry and fruit tree plantings that will hopefully pay off with fruit in future years. And in spite of an already complex seed order and planting plan, Joanna always enjoys playing with a few new things, so this year some new herbs are on the trial plan; these include shiso, cumin, anise, and bronze fennel (some of which can be grown for seed, but all of which have edible leaves).

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Behind the scenes, we’re developing a new farm website that uses a WordPress platform to integrate our blog, general farm information, CSA member information and utilities, and a better recipe/advice section. It’s a major upgrade to our online presence, but takes a lot of programming, design, and content development. At some point in the next month or so we expect to have enough done to bring it online, at which point this blog will go dormant as a content archive and all activity will move to the new site. In the meantime it means we’ll be competing for computer time while balancing our roles (Joanna does most of the background programming & structural design, I’ll be doing most of the writing and layout). It’ll probably take us a year to really get all the new content put together, but we at least need to get enough done for a respectable online presence.

OUTDOOR WORK

Weather and indoor work permitting, we have a long task list on hand for outdoor infrastructure work. There are several more acres of overgrown land we’d like to clear of cedars entirely, and/or thin out for better pasture, given the growing goat and chicken population. The image above shows the orchard area; most of the visible cedars are on the clearing list. I also have to build a new, strong fence for this area, which will have more trees and other fruits going in this spring; other pasture areas could use some fencing work as well.

Another view of the new chicken shed above the orchard; that thick mass of cedars needs to go, so the area can regrow in a better pasture mix that chickens and goats will enjoy. We’ll be saving the few hardwoods in that mix, which should really benefit from more sun and growing room to hopefully become good shade trees. We’re also working with some neighbors to set back the thick cedar groves south of our entry road, which currently prevent the winter sun from warming and melting any snow and ice on that steep hill.

Whenever we get enough cedar logs collected and milled, there are a wide variety of possible projects requiring wood. We already have a request for some nice lumber for raised garden beds from a past wood customer. High on the list is enough lumber to build a smallish passive solar greenhouse for seed/plant starting, to get that work out of our basement and away from expensive grow-lights. In addition, I’d like to be able to improve the goat barn by adding battens along the walls (thin planks to seal gaps between the original boards) to improve the interior comfort. I also want to rebuild most of the doors, which were originally built with really ratty lumber because that’s all I had left from the year’s milling when the rest of the barn was built. Then I need to build new milking stands for the (expected) larger milking herd this year, making it possible for two people to milk at a time. The new chicken shed also needs more work, including finishing battens and building a solid confined run so the birds can have fresh air on days when hawks are around (right now we’re just using less-than-ideal chain-link panels). Any logging we do generates branches to chip into mulch that needs spreading on paths, and various types of firewood that need to be hauled and stacked.


INDOOR WORK
Many small but important indoor tasks might be tackled this time of year, such as tool cleaning and sharpening, packing barn improvements, recipe research/writing/editing for later CSA use, finalizing the planting plan (& improving the long-term rotation plan), organic certification paperwork, tax preparation, and more.

January CSA share

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FIRST CSA DISTRIBUTION
We’ll begin the 2012 CSA season by home-delivering our January share this week, a nice diverse set of seasonal storage produce with some fresh items made possible by the mild weather so far (we don’t use hoophouses).

We intend to start writing up and including more recipes for items as the year goes on, but are still rebuilding our website for now and so haven’t gotten to that yet. For now, Google and personal cookbooks will offer plenty of suggestions for recipes & uses, though I did find three recipes in our blog archive that rely heavily on share-included items:

Parsnip-sweet potato shepherd’s pie
Sweet potato curry
Spiced squash soup

Here’s a look at what shares will include, depending on individual requests (CSA members have the ability to opt out of items they don’t like/want). Images don’t necessarily reflect quantity distributed. NOTE: many root crops will have some dirt remaining on them, as it’s just not practical to fully scrub these outdoors in winter conditions. Much easier for each household to wash a pound of roots in a warm kitchen with warm water; we did a basic wash to remove clods, numbing our hands in the process, but you’ll want to finish them. That’s the reality of farm-fresh food sometimes.

Garlic heads: A selection of multiple garlic heads, drawn from good storage varieties still on hand. Siblings of these garlic heads are already in the ground growing, and this is the time of year when the biological clocks of some of the remaining storage heads also realize that it is time to sprout and try to grow. Heads can last until March or longer, but if you notice that one is beginning to sprout, just use it first. Green sprouts may have a more pungent flavor than the rest of the clove if used raw.

Here’s a key to the shorthand on the labels:
   All shares requesting garlic should have one of each of these:
        SIB: Siberian, excellent cooking variety which should be featured, not buried in the background.
        FIRE: Georgian Fire, spicy raw variety with strong flavor when cooked.
        SAM: Samarkand, one of the best varieties for storage.
  
Full shares also have one big or two small heads from among this collection:
        TOCH: Tochliavri, milder variety good for raw uses like pesto and salad dressing.
        BRIC: Brickey–Only a small supply, and thus we haven’t sold it before, but we’re quite fond of its robust flavor. From a woman who has been growing garlic in the area for years and was kind enough to give us a head back in 2009. Look for more in 2012.
        CRYST: Georgian Crystal, a good general purpose garlic.

For other information on garlic varieties, you might review this post.

Onions: A mix of red and yellow onions, small quantities but very tasty.


Carrots: Sweet cold-weather carrots with plenty of uses. They’re a mix of sizes in part because the grasshoppers devoured numerous rounds of seedlings back in late summer, and we kept reseeding to fill in gaps. The small ones are true baby carrots, not the lathed things that get passed off as such in the store. A shredded carrot salad is a nice way to feature these, or simply enjoy the sweetness with a pile of carrot sticks. No need to peel, just scrub.

Parsnips: Excellent roasted, alone or in a root vegetable mix. We really enjoy parsnip soup, which we make as a creamy blended soup that’s rich and filling on a cold winter day.  



Sweet potatoes: Great for roasting alone or with other roots; big ones can also be baked. There are two varieties, one with orange flesh and one with white flesh; we think the latter are especially sweet with a nice texture. We especially like roasted sweet potato fries: Preheat the oven to 450ºF. Scrub potatoes and cut out any blemishes, but there’s no need to peel. Cut small potatoes into rounds, larger ones into cubes or strips of somewhat uniform size. Toss with oil/fat of choice, sprinkle with salt and maybe a touch paprika or cinnamon. Roasting time is usually ~20-25 minutes. Stir after 10 minutes and check again at 20.

Butternut squash: These didn’t store as well as we hoped, and are showing their age, but should still have good flavor & nutrition for those willing to work around any developing softness. Offered as seconds-quality to those willing to take a chance on them. We’d recommend baking them whole (poke a few holes), removing any obvious bad spots, pureeing them, then using the puree in soups, breads, or other uses where the squash is combined with other ingredients. Anything that isn’t taken by members, we’ll use the above procedure on and freeze for later use.

 Leeks: Tasty mild alliums, adding a different flavor to dishes than onions. These are excellent sliced thin and sauteed in butter, or used as the base for leek-and-potato soup. Wash before use to remove any grit that might have gotten between layers. The easiest way to do this is to cut lengthwise in half and rinse under running water.

Cowpeas or cornmeal: Specialty items that are inefficient to grow but fantastic from a culinary point of view. We’re offering members a choice of small quantities, one or the other. Cowpeas are similar to black-eyed peas, and should be featured in cooking rather than buried in something like a chili; they also make a nice hummus base when cooked very soft. Cornmeal will be fresh-ground from heirloom corn, especially good for cornbread or polenta. If making the former, use all cornmeal (no wheat flour) to accentuate and appreciate the flavor.

Daikon radishes (not pictured): Long, large white radishes with a sweet/mildly spicy flavor. Great for stir fries, pickling, and certain salads, though they may be strong raw for some palates. Can also be shredded as a topping for wraps.

Spinach: Harvested fresh from overwintering beds that have done really well in the mild weather. Would not have predicted that we’d be able to pick field-grown spinach in mid January. Delicious sweet winter flavor, almost like candy; don’t waste this on cooking, just enjoy as a nice fresh green salad. We rinse greens and send them through a salad spinner (because they store better if they’re not soggy), but we always recommend that you wash greens again in your kitchen to remove remaining grit, bits of mulch, etc. Thanks to one of our dedicated employees, Kim (in background), for freezing her hands alongside us this day!

Herbs: Snow is melting off now, but haven’t had a chance to check on all of them yet. Thyme is in harvestable condition for sure.

Eggs: These aren’t directly included in the CSA but are available for purchase by members. Only some hens are laying right now, and we can easily personally go through 3 dozen a week, but we’ll have a few dozen extras available.

The next distribution won’t be until March or later depending on weather & crop conditions, but this early batch of farm-sourced food will be a nice treat for all involved.

Using & sourcing electricity on the farm

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A reader from Georgia wrote with a question on our approach to electricity use, and our decisions and experiences with being on or off-grid. The response email quickly became detailed enough to become publishable as a useful discussion of this issue.

We’re on-grid through an electric co-op (Boone Electric), and our electricity use varies strongly with the seasons. Summer is by far the highest because we’re running a walk-in cooler and refrigerators for produce. We also run AC in the house midsummer when the outdoor temperatures get too high, because we have to be able to sleep at night, though we keep the thermostat pretty high by most people’s standards. We also have an electric stove, which gets used heavily in late summer and fall for all the canning we do. 

We actually have two meters, one each for our house and main packing barn. The latter runs all our cold-storage areas and electric fences, while the house runs our personal needs plus the computer, and grow lights we use to start plants in spring and summer. The graphs below show the last 12 months of electricity use here, drawn from our Boone Electric account. Keep in mind that the billing month is well after the actual use dates, such that the peak in “October” is actually closer to mid-August through mid-September.

The graphs show monthly usage in kilowatt-hours/month. Our cold-storage barn meter peaked at around 650 kwh/month this year, which was hot and dry. Our home meter ranged from 400 – 1300 kwh/month. The highest month was an outlier (the highest usage peak we’ve had while living here) that may relate to AC use combined with lots of late summer canning, though it still seems abnormally high. I can’t explain the data glitch for the missing “August” numbers. For reference, these numbers translate to monthly bills of $60-$130 for the house, and $20-$60 for the barn (including the base fees and taxes, which are around $20 whether or not we use any electricity that month). The house electric bills also includes a fee for a “renewable choice” program which creates a commitment by the electric coop to source at least as much power from renewable sources as is used by the members in that program.


To put these numbers in context, I drew on data from the US Energy Information Administration, which tracks residential, commercial, and industrial electricity usage by state; the latest data are from 2009.


Our annual household average is just over 700 kwh/month, as compared to 1,098 kwh/month in the average Missouri household. That’s still inflated from our actual personal use, as there’s quite a bit of power used for the business, such as the fact that the computer is running a lot more for business use than personal, and we currently start all of our transplants in the house using grow lights, which are a serious power suck (but one that will dissipate when we build a greenhouse for managing transplants). So in terms of actual personal consumption I’d guess we’re closer to half average.  In terms of total power use, if our household and barn 12-month averages are combined, they total just over 900 kwh/month, meaning our home and farm business combined still use less electricity than the average Missouri home alone.

We take a number of simple power conservation measures. We don’t have a clothes dryer, virtually never use electric heat, have energy efficient light bulbs in virtually all light fixtures that will take them, and keep various electronic devices on power strips that we turn off when not in use to minimize power drain. We do have a solar hot water system, which we noticed cutting our electricity bills by 20-30% once it went in years ago, and which we like having for the ethical sense of how it works. We do try to target our major hot-water usage (like laundry and dishwasher) around sunny days to maximize its benefits, and there are many days where our hot water is effectively “free”. That being said, we’re not sure it was really economically worth it, and are sure that solar PV (electricity) isn’t for us, because given how little energy we use already the cost of the system never really pays itself back. At our low rate of usage, it’s going to take 30 years for the solar hot water system to pay itself back (and that’s if we don’t have more expensive repair bills like we had this summer on a system that doesn’t seem to be nearly as fine-tuned as we anticipated). It would take a lifetime for PV to pay itself back. Estimates for how fast solar or other renewables pay themselves back often rely on high energy use numbers for wasteful households, not for how sustainably minded homes can actually be run to minimize use in the first place.

We could do far more sustainable things with the solar PV money (like invest it directly in our vegetable farm) rather than put it into newly manufactured solar panels which use resources to mine, manufacture, and ship, like just being smart about our energy use in the first place. It’s a similar situation to paying $30-40,000 for a hybrid car, or $12,000 for a normal one that gets 80% as good mileage. I’m happy to see hybrids (and renewable energy sources) being built and purchased as that does help push development of better technologies, but basic personal conservation is still the untouchable elephant in the room of energy options.

Also, being off-grid increases your risk of power loss, and/or increases your costs to buffer that power loss (large generators, serious battery banks), and for a vegetable farm whose livelihood requires keeping lots of vegetables cool in the heat of summer, the cost/benefit of off-grid power just doesn’t compare to the security of grid power (we do have a small generator for emergencies anyway).


 Besides, neither wind nor solar are all that cost-effective here in Missouri’s highly volatile climate, especially without investing in some serious backup generators/battery banks which also don’t really pay themselves back. We feel we’re overall more sustainable by staying on-grid and practicing effective conservation, rather than spending gobs of money to “save” that last remaining power cost. Part of our estimates, too, rely on the fact that Boone Electric is extremely well-run and we’ve very comfortable placing ourselves in their hands (they’re even quite respectful of our organic status, happily allowing us to maintain our power lines instead of spraying them, unlike some utilities we know of). In a different setting, we might be more willing to explore alternate options, but we’re quite comfortable with our setup. Effective conservation fits our lives better than the alternatives.

Bird list and other natural events, December 2011

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December was a wonderful month here. The weather was pleasantly seasonal, with gradually declining temperatures and many sunny days, and enough rain but no disruptive storms. Along with an equally reasonable November, we’ve had a long stretch now of sensible, enjoyable weather that we’ll try to remember whenever it ends. We spend somewhat less time outdoors in December, partly because of office work, and so naturally have less time to see and hear birds and other events, but this is normally a quiet natural month anyway.

Birds were very quiet over the first half of the month, but starting on the 18th much larger mixed flocks of robins, bluebirds, waxwings, titmice, juncoes, chickadees, goldfinches, and more began appearing. During the week leading up to Christmas, it often felt like an aviary outdoors, as flocks of birds packed our trees, chattering and singing away, while other streams of them coursed through and over the treetops. This began around the time a major winter storm walloped the Plains west and north of here, and I suspect many of these birds were moving south ahead of the inclement weather.

Hawks have been all but missing, with only one Red-Shouldered and no Red-Tails observed all month. We’ve seen or heard no sparrows, either, though many do overwinter in this area and we saw multiple species on a morning hike at Rudolf Bennitt Conservation Area, about 15 miles northwest of here. Our Great Horned Owls are clearly remaining for the winter, though, as they can often be heard hooting at dusk from their roosts just to the north along Silver Fork.

NEW IN NOVEMBER (1 species, some observed earlier this year but not in November)
European Starling (one dense flock one day)

PRESENT IN NOVEMBER (22 species)
Canada Goose
Red-Shouldered Hawk (seen once)
Bald Eagle (seen once soaring over the farm)
Great Horned Owl
Barred Owl
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Blue Jay
American Crow
Tufted Titmouse
Black-Capped Chickadee
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Dark-Eyed Junco
American Goldfinch

MISSING/UNOBSERVED SINCE NOVEMBER (6 species)
Snow Goose
Turkey Vulture
Red-Tailed Hawk
Golden-Crowned Kinglet
White-Throated Sparrow
Song Sparrow

December food on the farm

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December is a wonderful month for on-farm food, as we have about the highest possible diversity of ingredients to work with. Some fresh produce is still available, we can justify starting to dip into preserves, fresh meat is back on the menu, and we can start making time to do some really interesting and enjoyable things in the kitchen. In addition, we often end up hosting many visitors throughout the month, giving yet another impetus to culinary extravaganzas. Here’s an extra-long photo essay on the kinds of food we can source and make from this one diversified farm. As always, ingredients listed in italics were sourced on-farm.

Joanna’s birthday party
We held a special birthday celebration this year, as it turned out that a couple from Joanna’s college geology department would be visiting for the first time over her birthday weekend. Her old workplace at the USGS hosts several other college geology alums, so we invited everyone out for an evening of catching up. Here’s the diverse spread we put together to feed the crowd.

 Tasting platter: smoked pork shoulder, smoked Canadian bacon, cucumber pickles, beet pickles, fresh goat feta cheese, aged goat cheddar cheese.

 At left: homemade ravioli with creamy (goat milk) winter squash sauce & sage leaf. At right: pork loin simmered in goat milk sauce with carrots and parsley.

 At left: fresh bread from Missouri flour. At right: sweet potatoes chopped for roasting.

 At left: mixed salad greens (not the same ones served this night, but a similar fresh mix). At right: birthday carrot cake (our eggs, goat yogurt), with creamy (goat chevre) frosting and organic Missouri pecans.

 This was a fun meal to put together. Overall, Joanna wanted an Italian theme, as her college geology department has strong ties to Italy. As Italian food is generally her realm (partly because of her experience there), this was mostly her meal to prepare, which she was quite happy to do. I insisted on the nice Germanic tasting platter just to even things out a bit, and give me something to do. Plus we had all this fresh pork begging to be shown off…

Serving Sycamore
We try to invite our main restaurant chefs/owners out to the farm every winter. This allows them to see the place and maintain a direct connection with their ingredient sources, allows a good discussion of the past and future growing year, and lets us thank them for their support by preparing a good farm-sourced meal (especially from things we can’t/don’t sell them). Last month it was Trey from Red & Moe; this month we hosted Mike from Sycamore. We went with a Mexican theme this year.

 Fresh-made Missouri-wheat tortillas in the cast-iron skillets, plus two sauces. Upper right, smoked pork simmered in a spicy red pepper sauce (dried anchos, jalapenos, red anaheims, garlic). Lower right, green sauce (roasted green tomatoes/onions/garlic, dried peppers, herbs).

Tortilla fillings (along with meat and sauces): fresh goat cheese, cowpeas.

Other treats: fresh pepper sausage (ground pork, dried anaheim/jalapeno/ancho peppers, garlic, cilantro, stuffed in our hog’s casings). Fresh carrot sticks & watermelon radishes for garnish.

Not shown: baby greens mix and cilantro for topping the tortillas & fillings.

 Other random meals
 When we’re not hosting guests, there’s still lots of interesting food to be made with December ingredients. Here are just a few more meals that we happened to take photos of:

 Stir fry of ground pork pepper sausage (see description above), rehydrated peppers, daikon radish, Filipino noodles. Side of fermented kimchi (cabbage, carrot, daikon).

Healthy breakfast: Diced sweet potatoes fried in lard; fried eggs & cured bacon. Side of strawberry yogurt (goat’s milk yogurt, preserved strawberry jam). BTW, we define healthy as “hearty enough to get us through a morning of work without being hungry two hours later”.

 Above left: baked beans (beans unfortunately not ours due to crop failure): organic white beans, maple syrup, mustard seeds, cured pork, onion. Above right: our weekly staple cornbread (ground corn, goat’s milk yogurt, eggs, leaveners).

Above left: BST (bacon, spinach, & cheese sandwich; cheese on left is our aged cheddar, cheese on right is purchased smoked gouda) with cucumber & beet pickles. Above right: sweet potato pancakes (sweet potatoes, eggs, onion) with simmered cabbage (onion, cabbage, pork, organic Missouri apples, wine, caraway) and a rare treat of brussels sprouts (from a depressingly low-yielding test planting).

There were many more interesting meals, and most of these photos are drawn from the first half of the month alone. Don’t let anyone tell you local foods are boring or restrictive.

Winter holidays

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Christmas is a quiet time here; it’s not a major holiday for us, so we mostly enjoy it as a cultural reason to make traditional foods like German Christmas cookies and relax for a couple days. We exchange a few gifts for tradition’s sake, but tend to feel that our lives and actions throughout the year mark our beliefs far more strongly than an isolated flurry of stress and consumerism (we view New Years resolutions the same way).

The winter solstice has a more direct meaning as farmers, marking the literal transition into winter, though also the beginning of increasing day length again just when we’ve finally started to slow down. We celebrated that on Wednesday evening with a small group of friends and a visit from Joanna’s parents.

The farm animals are settled in for winter as well, in solid buildings that will keep them in comfort through the weather to come. Whatever your holiday preferences and plans, may they mean as much to you as a quiet house, warm fire, and good food mean to us. Merry Christmas and all other holidays from all of us at the farm.

Food preservation methods: Fermentation

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We’ve had questions from new CSA members regarding home food preservation techniques and any relevant items that might make good holiday gifts. We’re thrilled that folks are thinking ahead to preserving next year’s bounty, as that’s the key to getting the most out of a CSA and building the economic sustainability of local foods in general. This series will present some of our experiences and advice, along with ideas for kitchen items that we’ve found to be useful investments as serious practitioners of home food preservation.
 

FERMENTATION OF VEGETABLES
Fermentation is a historic food preservation method that has increasingly fallen out of favor since the advent of freezing and canning, but one that remains useful for some vegetables in particular. Cabbage, for example, can be fermented into sauerkraut, a perfectly normal food that nonetheless is almost entirely purchased instead of homemade. Even our hard-core traditionalist German cookbook assumes the home cook buys, instead of makes, sauerkraut. Yet there are distinct benefits to fermenting vegetables yourself.


One useful book on the subject, Keeping Food Fresh (a fascinating collection of traditional Old World recipes and methods for food preservation; the new edition has been renamed Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning), includes this worthwhile point:

Inevitably, food is altered in the preservation process. However, unlike sterilization (canning) or freezing, many traditional methods do not necessarily mean a loss in flavor or nutritional value. Lactic fermentation, for example, enhances digestion and also increases the enzyme and sometimes the vitamin content, compared with the unfermented food. In other processes, the act of preserving often enhances the flavor of a food rather than its nutritional value.

From another angle, Harold McGee’s eminently scientific tome On Food and Cooking states that:

(the microbes involved in fermentation) leave most of the plant material intact, including its vitamin C (protected from oxidation by the carbon dioxide they generate); they often add significant amounts of B vitamins; and they generate new volatile substances that enrich the food’s aroma.

We’ve found that home-fermented sauerkraut is a tasty and stable way to preserve cabbage (which you can’t really freeze or can), that doesn’t degrade the product, and was well worth our trying over the last few years. We’ve also experimented with fermented pickles and kimchi.

JAR FERMENTATION
The simplest method, which I drew from Keeping Food Fresh, is to pack shredded cabbage into jars, layered with salt and spices, and let the natural fermentation take hold in a controlled setting. I am intentionally not giving a recipe here, as fermentation (like any other home kitchen experiment) can go wrong if not done right, and folks wanting to try this should rely on a more authoritative source for specifics. But here’s how it looks when I do it:

I shred multiple cabbages using a food processor. For this batch, I did about 20lb of cabbage, 5 ~4lb heads of our excellent fall Napa. I cut out the cores but use the rest, washing it well. For rough reference, this resulted in 4 half-gallon jars packed tightly.

Then I pack the shredded cabbage into quart or half-gallon jars (latter shown here), adding a dose of salt every few inches, along with a few juniper berries per jar. A wooden rolling pin makes an excellent tool for repeatedly mashing down the cabbage into a tightly packed mass, which also helps release some juices. When I’ve packed all I can to the base of the rim, I pour some boiling water into the top, and screw on a good-quality canning lid and ring, a good use for once-used canning lids. You don’t want these to seal entirely, so you don’t water-bath them. The not-quite-seal you get with hand-tightening allows just enough air exchange to allow for controlled fermentation without spoilage. These just sit on the counter or another storage area, and do their thing; weeks or months later, we crack a jar to a loud HISSSS and most of the time a nice, tangy, excellent kraut. We cook it before serving just in case, but usually it’s quite obvious when it’s gone bad (this has rarely happened).
 CROCK FERMENTATION
We’ve also tried fermenting cabbages in large open crocks, with less success. For this to work you need to keep all the vegetable submerged in a brine, weighted down, and this has been hard to do with the materials we have on hand. We’ve wasted a distressing amount of cabbage which has just gone moldy. So this fall we ordered a modern German Fermenting Crock (picture below from the linked site) on the strong recommendation of a trusted friend. This new version of the old-school crocks has a special water seal that helps keep the process under control, and seems quite well thought-out. Our trial run is underway, and we’ll report on the results when applicable. We prepared this batch in late November when cabbage was abundant and we were still overwhelmed with other produce. The recommended fermentation time is 4 to 8 weeks, meaning that we’ll have abundant kraut just about the time that our freshly harvested greens take their winter break.
OTHER FERMENTATION
There are many other items, and ways, to ferment. We’ve tried cucumber pickles before, with mixed results. One batch worked okay, but we didn’t prefer the flavor compared to “normal” vinegar pickles, though this may just be what our taste buds are used to. Both we and a good friend have experimented with fermenting kimchi, with very tasty results. The kimchi recipe that we used needed only three days of fermentation at room temperature, yielding very quick results (but arguably not achieving much in the way of food preservation since we ate it in within the time frame the the ingredients could have stored on their own). On the other hand, it was a good way to experiment with fermentation. The quick-fermenting kimchi recipe that we used is from Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook that we saw referenced frequently when we did some online reading on the topic of fermentation; Daniel Boone Regional Library has a copy or two.
Whey is an optional but recommended ingredient for many fermented recipes, because it helps jump start the microbial activity. We use whey from our cultured cheeses such as feta or cheddar (but only if we started by pasteurizing the milk), or we drain yogurt in cheesecloth and collect the whey from that. We don’t use whey from ricotta, because it’s not cultured, and we don’t use whey if it is from an unpasteurized batch of cheese that will be aged (just to be on the safe side). 
Books on fermenting are full of interesting and oddball ideas for home cooks to explore as desired. But the core point is that fermentation is a very useful and unique method of food preservation, one that doesn’t require as much work or equipment or energy as many other methods, and which can even improve the food in question (something rarely said of freezing in particular). So it’s worth trying if you’re feeling adventurous or just like the idea of making real sauerkraut for once.

Food preservation methods: Root cellaring

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We’ve had questions from new CSA members regarding home food preservation techniques and any relevant items that might make good holiday gifts. We’re thrilled that folks are thinking ahead to preserving next year’s bounty, as that’s the key to getting the most out of a CSA and building the economic sustainability of local foods in general. This series will present some of our experiences and advice, along with ideas for kitchen items that we’ve found to be useful investments as serious practitioners of home food preservation.

ROOT CELLARING & WINTER STORAGE
Many kinds of produce and foods are reasonably stable on their own, if given the proper conditions. Traditional farms and homes used various forms of a root cellar, generally a room dug into the ground (or a retrofitted basement) which used the ambient ground temperature and humidity to keep foods in proper conditions for long-time storage. As in other topics, there is a ton of information available in books and online, so we’re going to focus on the ways we handle this process.

Choosing storage varieties:
There are many different varieties of any given produce item, with different culinary and storage properties. For exampe, Arkansas Black apples are virtually indestructible, while others may last only a few weeks (see this publication from Iowa Extension for examples of apple storage qualities). Potatoes, garlic, onions, and many other storage crops are the same way. If you’re buying (or planting) items intended for storage, do some research and ask some questions first. If the grower has no idea, that may be a hint that they don’t store food themselves and maybe aren’t handling the food properly for storage either (see next).

Preparing storage items:
In some cases, like apples, the product is pretty much ready to store as-is, assuming you establish the proper conditions. Onions and garlic need to be cured first, a process of hanging the fresh crop until it dries enough to become shelf stable. Most of the time, you buy these two in this condition anyway, though it’s worth being aware of the season and asking the grower to ensure they’re actually properly cured and not fresh. Other things, like sweet potatoes, are often sold “fresh” at farmers markets but will benefit greatly from proper curing before sale, and will then store much longer and taste much better. In these cases, curing involves storing the items for a certain length of time at fairly warm temperatures to allow certain natural chemical changes that enhance stability and flavor.

Storage locations:
Selecting the proper storage location begins by researching what “ideal” storage conditions are for a given item (in terms of temperature & humidity), then finding the closest conditions that reality will permit. Knott’s Handbook for Vegetable Growers, p. 432 & 433, is our reference source for storage conditions. For long-term storage, temperature stability is a plus; temperature swings will reduce the storage life of produce (this is why garages aren’t ideal). For example, garlic begins to sprout if temperature fluctuates regularly; sprouting is desired from the October-planted garlic in the ground that will be next year’s crop, but the garlic that we want to keep eating into March needs to be tricked into thinking that it’s not time to grow yet, and stable temperatures will help. Sweet potatoes like it warm and will start to go bad if they get too cold. Most other storage crops are happier in cooler conditions. We don’t have a proper root cellar, dug into the ground to ensure high humidity and temps just above freezing all winter, though it’s a someday-project. It’s also possible to construct a basement version, in effect a cold-storage room that stays colder than the basement itself (see these articles from Mother Earth News on building a proper root cellar and a basement version).

We do, however, have a house that is larger than we need, and whose back rooms we hardly ever use and thus don’t heat or cool artificially. So for years we’ve used the back “master” bedroom as an excellent root cellar, as it tends to remain between 34-40F throughout the winter, given the large buffering presence of a basement underneath and well-insulated walls. Apples, garlic, onions, and more do well back there, the former in crates or boxes and the latter hung in bundles or spread on wire racks. Other items store best at warmer temperatures, like sweet potatoes and winter squash, and we store these in the house itself, often in the same room we cured them in originally. Darkness is important, too: daylight will encourage sprouting or other unwanted developments.

Storage time:
We don’t always intend our storage items to last a really long time, given that we also preserve lots of food in other ways. In most cases we shoot for things like apples, potatoes, and squash to last us into January, at which point we can start dipping into more canned and frozen foods for the next few months. Garlic and onions usually last us into March with some attention. It’s important to check your storage items regularly, and use anything that’s starting to sprout or otherwise go bad. You can’t predict ahead of time which onions will sprout in January versus March, but regularly checking and using the ones just showing some green will naturally cull the supply without much waste.

If you take your home food supply as seriously as we do, refusing to buy produce from off the farm year-round, you quickly realize that the “hungry” months aren’t winter, but spring. We still have plenty of food on-hand in the depths of February; it’s the warm rainy days of March through May in which food supplies are actually the thinnest. By this point the only fresh food is lightweights like salad greens and radishes; you still have months to go before the heavy hitters of summer and fall show up again. This is why we use root cellaring as a complement to other preservation methods, as a way to delay the use of longer-term storage items. Our special Mercuri winter tomatoes are the same way; we don’t expect them to last all year, but we do expect them to keep us out of the canned tomatoes for a few extra months, thus saving the need to do extra canning during the already-busy season.

Salvaging stored items:
When you do notice stored items starting to sprout or go bad, there are many ways to salvage them before loss. Sprouting onions can be cut up and dehydrated, an easy task for a cold February day. Now you have onions for much longer, without doing all the work in busy onion season. My favorite trick for saving sprouting garlic is to steam-roast large batches, then freeze the pulp (a trick I learned from a Michael Ruhlman cookbook). I pack a glass baking dish with sprouting garlic heads, pour a little water in the bottom, cover it with foil or a lid, and roast for an hour. Then I squeeze all the soft, aromatic garlic pulp into a dedicated ice-cube tray and freeze it, creating little “bullion” cubes of pure roasted garlic that add great flavor to soups and sauces for months past the expiration date of the whole garlic. Mid-winter squash or sweet potatoes can be cooked up into pulp, then frozen, replacing empty spots in your freezer where you’ve started pulling out other items. Mid-winter apples turning brown can still be made into applesauce.

All of this could  be done in the fall, but that’s when we’re already too busy preserving food that has to be dealt with then, and still actively farming. If nothing else, cellaring/storage is a way to delay some of that preservation work a few months, spreading it out so it’s not so overwhelming, and extending the storage life of these items. At best, it’s an easy way to enhance the diversity of your winter menus with food that took little to no preservation work, simply the dedication and planning required to acquire and store fresh local food when it’s available.