Yes, there are a few acorns in there for good measure!

Now, the walkway to the house is guarded by tons of big butternut and acorn squash, and there are still more to be picked so that we can make them lunch before the bugs do.  Apple peeling was interesting as well, as I don’t generally peel apples , so it took a little while before I figured out that going around the apples and getting one long peel, instead of going up and down and getting a dozen, was preferable. After much apple peeling, coring and slicing, we had a nice large pot of apple sauce to be canned.
It would seem the chickens are feeling particularly frisky these days,  as a few of them decided to go for a run when I opened their enclosure to give them some food, luckily they quickly realized that they would much rather be in with the other chickens and let themselves be easily caught and deposited back with their friends. I guess they aren’t quite born to be wild. All the other animals seem to be doing well. The pigs are still oinking, the sheep are still baaing and the steers are still doing whatever it is that baby bulls do. Prince, the lovely backyard horse, is still fulfilling his duties, and conversing with visitors who pull up in their cars. I’m sure his demeanour has nothing to do with the apple scraps and ears of corn he’s been getting over the fence in the morning. Don’t forget to pet him  if you come by for a visit! I’m definitely looking forward to spending the next week with the Nyman’s and their crazy critters!

- Kenley

Hello!

My name is Kenley, and I am doing my co-operative education portion of Prince Edward Collegiate Institute’s new program County Roots at J&C Nyman Farms. In the County Roots program, we learn about three very important sectors of business in Prince Edward County, these sectors being agriculture, marketing and tourism, and hospitality. Part of the agricultural portion of the program, which runs for the full school day, Monday to Friday, is selecting a local farm and going to an interview with the owner(s) to do a 3-week placement at the farm. After deciding which farms we could easily access, we went for our interviews. In my opinion, mine went fairly well and on Monday, the twenty-second of September, I started my placement with the Nyman family. So far I have really enjoyed working with the animals here on the farm, because they are all friendly. J&C Nyman Farms differs greatly from all other farms I have been to because the animals are fed very natural foods that are good for them, and they get to spend the majority of their day outside, which, as a vegetarian and animal activist, I feel is the way they should be treated. Colleen & Johnny seem to really respect the animals and what’s good for their well-being. I have a learned a lot already in my few short days here, such as how to wash eggs, and that eggs need to be stored point down, as well as many things pertaining to raising healthy and happy animals. I’m sure I will continue to learn more in the next two weeks of my placement, and now am off for another adventure on the farm.

Kenley-Ann Noll

There are people who lead and people who follow.  Someone famous said that, I’m sure.  I don’t know who it was, but I do know that they were right. 

Each roll is appropriate to certain situations.  Leaders initiate action and make changes.  Good leaders make positive changes and improve something about the world around them.  But they don’t do it alone.  In fact, leaders couldn’t change much without followers.

Followers are perfect for getting jobs done and for keeping things going long after the initial action to get them started.  I’m sure we all can figure out which one of these characteristics we embody more, leader or follower.

(Even among these laying hens there are the leaders who jump out every time I open the door initiating the search for the greener grass outside their ‘condo’.)

How does this apply to starting a farm?  Well, the clue is in the word ‘starting’.  Like I said above, it’s the leaders that initiate action.  And you’re trying to initiate some serious action in the shape of changes to every area of your life if you’re trying to start a farm.

I’m sure this applies with all start up small businesses.  If you can’t summon and inflate the leadership qualities that you have, you’re going to struggle during the start-up phase of your farm.

Why?  Because initiating action requires certain leadership characteristics such as:

• Finding being in charge exhilarating, not stressful
• Being driven and having the desire to create

Being in Charge:  Exhilarating or Exhausting?

There are those who feel on top of the world when they’re the ones who get to call the shots, motivate the team and carry the lions share of the responsibility.  These people feel more alive when they’re coordinating a project or focusing on a goal.

This is not something that I have that much experience with.  While I don’t mind being in charge and do find it mildly exhilarating, I also find it mildly stressful.  Call me a fence sitter when it comes to being the boss.

There are those, however, who cringe at the thought of having to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome of a project.  These people will have a hard time starting a farm.  Starting a farm is a project and you, along with any partners you have, are completely responsible for making it run.  There are opportunities to be farm employees, but there is no space for someone starting a small farm to have an employee mentality.  Someone has got to be in charge.

Being Creatively Driven

I spent a few years working on setting up a Teen Room in our public library while I worked there.  Everything about the creation of this new space, the fine tuning of the guidelines for it’s use, the rearranging of attitudes around the need for it was exciting to me.

I was inspired and driven to make the new Teen Room a success.  And it was.  The only problem was, when the room was established and things were running on autopilot, I started to get board.  The challenge to create was gone.  The creation phase was over and someone more suited to maintenance needed to step in.

Granted, there are projects that inspire me enough to keep me interested even in the maintenance phase but this wasn’t one of them.

Farming needs to be one of these dual inspiration projects if you’re going to make it successful.  You need to be the leader in order to get the ball rolling and, even while you’re doing that, you need to be of a follower or maintenance mindset.

Both at once, you ask?  Yes.  Farming has to be done every day.  You need to maintain your animals even while you’re driving the marketing aspect of the business from your office.

A couple of quality follower or maintenance characteristics that will help in your farm business are:

• Enjoying routines
• Thriving on seeing physical results of your labour

Routines-R-Us

This one is mandatory:  In order to not go crazy farming, you need to be able to stomach the same routine seven days a week for months at a time.  I’m not meaning that you’ll do the exact same things from sun up until sundown.  But you will have certain tasks – chores – that remain pretty much unchanged everyday for a whole season sometimes.  And they might take you a few hours a day.

If you’re interested in a dairy farm, you’re looking at many hours a day, no changes but the normal farming surprises that come with animals and weather, 365 days a year.

If you don’t have a routine bone in your body, you don’t have a farming bone in your body.

A Result You Can See

For me, this is what makes chores do-able repeatedly.  While I don’t do our daily chores these days, I have been an everyday chore-er in the past and know that this is what makes it rewarding for me.  Standing back and seeing the turkey curtains on the barn all cleaned out, looking back at the row of cows that are milked and seeing that it is longer than the row yet to be milked.

Daily chores are much easier and more rewarding if you can take joy in the small details and if you feel accomplished when you see the results of your labour.

These are only a couple examples of how the leader and follower in us all need to be tapped into when starting – and running – a farm.  Now I’m turning the challenge over to you:

Post a comment below with your thoughts on what characteristics you have that will help you towards your farming goal.  And, by all means, share your thoughts on the things you have to work on.

Maybe we can help each other get a balance that will start a farm!

]]> http://jcnymanfarms.com/2008/08/20/how-to-start-a-farm-5-farmers-need-to-be-leaders-and-followers/feed/ 2 JNyman http://jcnymanfarms.com/2008/06/18/the-real-farm-life-2-farming-fails-business-101/ http://jcnymanfarms.com/2008/06/18/the-real-farm-life-2-farming-fails-business-101/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:18:21 +0000 J Nyman http://jcnymanfarms.wordpress.com/?p=87 ]]> This is Part Two of a series called: How to Start a Farm: 6 Things All Would Be Farmers Should Know Before Getting Knee Deep in Sheep (or any other farm venture). See Part One here.

Farming can look really good from a middle income drudgery job that has you bored out of your mind for 40 hours a week. You and whoever you share your life with might even head to your favourite wing joint once a week to mull over how and when to make your farming dreams come true.

Maybe you imagine a nice house in the country with an old red barn or a rustic market garden plot while you browse the garden centre, coffee in hand, picking out terracotta pots for your balcony herb garden.

These are just couple of brief mental images – possible normal, everyday scenarios – that I ask anyone thinking about starting a farm to scrutinize closely. How much of what you consider ‘normal, everyday’ could you stand to forgo?

This is important because, unless you’re bringing a small fortune into the farming venture with you (read: a cool million, no exaggeration), some of what you consider incidental will become luxury.

Farming as a small business (as opposed to a large business that you create with your million dollar investment) is not very financially profitable. Sure, there is a great return on investment if you’re counting health, peace of mind and other soul-salve type personal rewards. But, it is generally accepted that actual profit above and beyond a somewhat meager wage for your labour is hard to come by, to say the least.

I’m not saying it will never happen. I’m saying it takes a long time and requires that you ‘keep your pencil sharp’ as John’s Opa and weathered dairy farmer would say.

Let me lay out what ‘keeping your pencil sharp’ might entail using the two scenarios from above.

Start with the wing night dream session after a torturous week in a cubicle.

First things first, weekly wing night is out. Unless there is at least one substantial off-farm income, that weekly restaurant trip will turn into a biannual event.

How’s that working for you so far? Remember that you’re trading some of it for other rewards like starry skies, letting kids run out the door unchecked, getting your hands dirty and feeling connected to the natural cycles of the Earth.

Let’s talk about your forty hour work week. Feel long, does it? Well, you’re in luck. It’s history. Juggling an off farm job or a veggie CSA means 7 days a week from sunrise to sunset, or longer for part of the year, at least.

How about the vehicle that got you to the restaurant. Can you drive something cheaper? More versatile? Rustier? Something that is full of little bits of hay and smells suspiciously like livestock? Our Ford Focus is my farm truck, hay and all.

How about the dream farm scenario number two? I’m sure you can see where I’m going with the coffee and nice terracotta pots.

Sure, you won’t be confined to your balcony but your plants will be in whatever pots you can get at Giant Tiger for $3.99 or the cracked ones the old farmer left in your newly acquired, dilapidated drive shed. The coffee is something you’ll stop for on your way to wing nights – on your new schedule, in your new farm truck/’92 Ford Taurus wagon.

(Guilty conscience here: We currently drive a 2005 Ford Focus wagon, fully loaded with leather seats. We got it on lease and have been kicking ourselves – hard – and wearing the exact same clothes to wing night every since.)

Your nice house will be a wonderful home, if you make it so. But if you’re used to calling the repair folks whenever your tap is dripping, you’ll likely need to think again. A lot of minor things can be overlooked if you have to trade your dinner to get them fixed.

The big red barn, while an icon of simpler, nostalgic times, will be dark and damp and not that great for raising animals in. When the roof leaks, it will have to be fixed before the house gets any attention and will cost significantly more than you can fathom being able to afford. Here is where the line of credit becomes your friend and your foe. If you had any space left on it after planting crops, it’s full now. Better not schedule any more emergencies till after harvest time.

Have I got you kissing your computer terminal with it’s regular, tidy summed paycheque yet?

This is the reality of starting up a farm. The money will be tighter than most people can ever see themselves coping with. Handling money stress is a job requirement. But, if you’re up for it, if you can let financial uncertainty and the need for new shoes slide off your back like water off a duck, the rewards are worth it. And, if you keep your pencil sharp, you’ll see a sustainable farm income in time.

(I’ve combined the wonderful idea of a One Sentence Journal, where you commit to writing just one sentence about each day, and a Gratitude journal, where you make a short – or long – list of things that you’re grateful for each day.)

It seems, though, that in my busy-ness, I have been stressing moderately about getting everything done. But, thinking about the Gratitude portion of my journal has made me realize that I have not been grateful for what we have gotten done! (Seems to me I’ve been hard on my husband about being hard on himself for not getting enough done, too. Double anti-gratitude whammy.)

In my experience, the less gratitude I show about getting things done, the less I accomplish.

So, in the name of being prepared to deliver food to all those we’ve committed to, here is an expanded and public entry to my Gratitude Journal:

• All the oats and barley are planted. Shea and Daddy had a great time planting together.
• I actually got to run the tractor for a few hours for the first time since our son was born! (From this I realized why John arrives from his hours of solitary tractor work in such a good mood. Once or twice, as I pulled the cultivator from the ground to start another row, I wondered how much fun John was having trying to run the seed cleaning set up while entertaining our 2 1/2 year old. Mostly, I enjoyed the relative silence of the diesel tractor, though. )
• Our laying hens are up to speed, laying almost 40 eggs per day.
• Our broiler chicks have survived in less than perfect housing to start loosing feathers and start looking far less cute than when they arrived.
• Our sheep are so happy with their new barn that they stay in it even when they could go out!! (This is partly because the pasture fencing is about a day away from being ready. The grass was ready last week but the containment devices will be ‘a go’ this weekend.)
• Our vegetable garden, which somehow grew from ‘Enough salad greens and beets to take for dinner each night’ into ‘Please don’t let all of this be ripe at the same time!’, is 75% planted and looks pretty darn good. We may even be able to afford a wheel hoe before too long to make the maintenance of a large garden easier.
• The pole peas that the kids planted are coming up and Shea, who is 2 1/2, started jumping up and down, yelling: “Mom! Come see! Come see!” When he noticed them poking their light green heads out of the dirt.
• I finally might have found a Canadian source of Fertrell products so we can get our poor chickens on to some decent food that we can actually afford to give to them. (Around here, you’d have to charge about $7 per dozen eggs if organic feed costs were to be recouped.)
• I have relaxed my sense of what is important enough that the foot high lawn in front of the house is not bothering me.
• Yeah for being hicks! My sense of what is ‘too hick’ has also been relaxed. Not only do we have a truck cap sitting in the yard, but our 7 week old Barred Rock laying hens live in it surrounded by a temporary fence! (Photo potentially to come, though actually adding this task to my to-do list seems just a tad counter productive, no?)

And, last but not least, I am grateful that I forced myself to take the time to write here. Because, whether or not people read it; whether or not this blog brings any of our customers more insight into how their food is raised and by whom; whether or not people agree with all I write, the writing of it is worth the effort. Putting my thoughts into written – okay, typed – words is soothing like nothing else that I do. And so, thanks to me, for taking the time to do something that, though it might be solely for my own good, is absolutely worth it.

Happy Eating!

I think I’m noticing more feathery details because I’m getting excited about finally getting some fowl back on our farm.  We’re leaning towards ordering from McMurray Hatchery as we’d like to do some of the rarer breeds.  (Anyone with experience with McMurray, please comment on your level of satisfaction.)

It’s been a few years of eating grocery store poultry for us and it just doesn’t compare. Even the ‘top of the line’ chicken isn’t as good as what we grow in our 10′x10′ ‘chicken condos’.

So, with every aspect of chicken rearing and eating right on the tip of my brain, I hesitated at the grocery store when I saw chicken legs on sale for $2.20 CDN per kilogram. (That translates to about $1 a pound, still in Canadian dollars. We’re so close to par that I’m not going to do that calculation. I’m all calculated out with the kg to lb switch!)

I hesitated for more than one reason, not the least of which was the number of chicken related posts on ChowHound‘s post called Grocery Store Items NOT to buy.

First, I looked down at those pale but large-ish chicken legs and thought of the conditions the birds must have been grown in; no sunlight and breathing in a heavy concentration of airborne ammonia. I knew, also, that their diet had not been optimal. Not the most healthy choice for our family but still chicken, at least. And bargain, at that.

My second reason for not immediately latching onto the bulk package of legs has to do with the bargain factor. I am one who stands upon my soap box (and as a public speaker on the subject, no less) and tries to drill it into farmers that we must start demanding a fair return on our investment for what we produce. Gone are the days when we produce food for only a couple of dollars an hour, I declare!

I’m also lucky enough to speak with consumers and I politely but firmly inform them that our food is artificially cheap and that, if we want to eat good food, we have to pay for it.

So, picture me having these conflicting thoughts and emotions as I look down at what could be the protein portion of 3 meals for my family for the ROCK BOTTOM SALE PRICE! of $5.35! When I have, on other occasions, seen a similar package for $20 or more, this is hard to resist.

And resist, I didn’t. Home I came with my bargain basement chicken all the while looking forward to the days when there would be a chicken feast awaiting me in my own freezer. At least it’s chicken, I reminded myself again. It’s not a fatty cut of ENTER YOUR LEAST FAVOURITE meat here. Pat on the back for choosing lower fat meats, Colleen.

Or so I thought. Here is where I started to hear my own words ringing in my head about artificially cheap food.

I decided to skin a few of the pieces and stew them. And, as I peeled away the skin, I was appalled to see how fat these birds were. It’s no wonder commercially raised chickens frequently die of heart attacks before making it to market. This guy must have been the sumo wrestling champion of the chicken feedlot!

I decided I wanted to know the extent of my bargain shopping folly and weighed the fat that I trimmed from these puppies. Not the skin, just the thick, solid, white fat.

(I thought about including a picture of the slimy little pile, but decided it would have been cruel to my fledgling blog).

Here’s how it calculated out:

For my $5.35 I got 2.432 kg or roughly 5.36 lbs.

Of those 2.432 kg, 525 g was pure fat. That’s 1.16 lbs.

So, I paid just shy of $1.16 for fat. That’s about 21.5% of the total cost of that package of chicken.

Now, a quick word about fat. Fat is good for us, we need some to survive and for healthy joints. There’s my disclaimer.

I’m not a low-fat fanatic by any means. (Butter on your toast, anyone?) But this is a little ridiculous. There is more than enough fat within the meat of a chicken leg for flavour and good health. And chicken is not usually one of a North Americans main sources of healthy fats.

So what is with this chunky chicken? Grain. That is the only reasonable explanation why a cut of poultry would have that much of the white stuff. Big chicken producers are pushing their birds to grow faster with high amounts of grain and little natural ‘chicken exercise’ like scratching and pecking the ground – in essence, foraging for their food.

It puts me in mind of a poultry version of Hansel and Gretel. And, don’t we want the chicken on the table to have actually once behaved like a chicken should?

I sure do. Don’t get me wrong, I will get in bed tonight and be grateful that my belly is full of trimmed chicken leg dinner but, you can bet I will dream of robust tasting, ammonia fog-free, lean chicken to come from our farm.

(How’s that for jumping on my soapbox for everyone? )