Think it’s not possible?  I mean, Foie Gras.  Come on.  It’s the most inhumane foodstuff available, right? Well, it can be. Most times it is.

Take the time to watch this video and you’ll get your dose of sustainable agriculture inspiration, that’s for sure.

Almost makes me want to get some geese.

Normally, that type of thought might bring more ‘missing luxury’ if you believe The Secret. But I must have thought it in a more positive light. Here’s a pictorial of my reasoning:

This is a beautiful vest that my sister sent me from Vancouver. Thanks Sis!

Here we have my Christmas present from DH and DS. That’s a number 8 jar!! And original, or so we’re told. I await my buckets of milk with baited breath.

Not so much a picture of the actual luxury in question but of the location of said beacon of quasi-modern technology. This was the joy of chores this morning… Wait for it… We, here at J. & C. Nyman Farms, now have… running water IN the BARN!!

And I said I don’t have a luxurious life. Ha…

Here’s hoping that everyone has a little bit of whatever they consider luxury this holiday season.

Cheers!

For some comedic relief to start and to show that I don’t only read about farms, check out this great daily comic.  Today’s strip is about ear wax.  How does that entice ya? 

Here’s meat – or rather the veggies – of my reading, though.  And oh!  The inspiration to be had in the gardening department!

Click here for Winter Planting Plans on the Observer Organic Allotment Blog

• Check out the beautiful produce pictures at one of my favourite blogs, Throwback at Trapper Creek.
• If you’re interested in extended season gardening specifically, click on the winter garden plan picture to read about this piece of useful art.

• For those of you who get a little overwhelmed with the task of gardening to sustain a family,  (we’re just starting to attempt to grow enough to avoid the grocery store), I found this great resource.  It’s a gardening calendar specifically for hardiness zone 5b but I’ve got to think there are more helpful bloggers out there in other zones.  (Potential future post: compilation of gardening calendars?)

On the livestock front, I had the pleasure of reading about a shockingly smooth pig loading session at Tylerfarm Homestead’s blog.  Yes, it is that time of year.  The cold weather meat producing animals have reached full size.  The freezer will be full soon.

Our pigs are not yet ready for the freezer as they are on the slow, mainly grass-fed plan. Here John is enticing them back to the barn after a successful attempt to escape. Our three year old sounded the alarm while I was cooking lunch: "Mom! The pigs are on the road!"

My pig loading experience stems from long ago and was not that smooth.  When my sister and I were small, our family lived on a small farm near on Blue Mountain.  My mother has been known to tell the story of one loading day when a somewhat coarse talking neighbour came over to help out.  I would have been 3 or 4 years old with my sister a couple of years older.

I guess my sister, Gena, and I sat on the edge of the log enclosure the pigs lived in and observed the proceedings.  Later in the day, the weather had turned and we went in to play in our living room while mom worked down the hall in the kitchen.

As she tells it, her ‘mom-sense’ went off and she started listening more closely to us playing.  Finally, certain that she was hearing our attempts at some of the worst language you can think of, she came in to ask us what we were doing.  My sister, always bold and sure of her right to do as she pleased piped up:

“We’re playing ‘load the pigs’, Mom!”

Neighbours.  You take the good with the bad.

On the topic of pigs, click on this lovely Large Black to visit the site of a great little farm that I have recently

Click on the photo to check out Upper Canada Heritage Meat.

discovered not too far from us.  I have yet to approach them about it but I’m dreaming of some of these beauties for our farm next year.

For anyone yearning to hold onto summer just a bit longer, here is the one and only flower on our new hydrangea bush from this year.  It took all summer to brew.

I took this picture two days ago and it is still sitting there, though slightly less fresh.

On a final note of what has been, for me, a leisurely, random post, our co-op student, Kenley, was here on Saturday for what was her last full day.  We did some puttering around in the garden, shelling dry beans, taking down the pea trellis, bundling the last of the herbs for drying and generally enjoying the beautiful day. 

We have enjoyed having her here and are thrilled that our local highschool has seen fit to run an agricultural co-op program that actually give the students the chance to learn from experience.  What a novel concept!

Kenley’s last few hours will be spent next Saturday, preparing our meat CSA packages for delivery.  After that, we’ll be back on our own and richer for having had her with us.

Now, I can cross ‘Sanity saving’ off my to-do list and move on to the marketing. Happily, that is a task that I enjoy, not only because I know that a small farm like ours would never fly if someone didn’t SELL IT!

I write my experiences and thoughts about the realities of starting a farm, no holds barred, no rose coloured glasses, and people find me.  In startling numbers.  These days, one of my ‘How to Start a Farm’ series can usually be found on page one or two of Google.  (You can buy a $90 e-book on how to get yourself on the first pages of a Google search!)

I’m so encouraged that such numbers of you want to start farms!  I can’t tell you what that would do for our communities, our health and our economies if you all actually did it!

(Come on! You can do it!)

So, give me a moment of your time, and tell me what it is about farming that interests you.  I’m including some questions to get you started.  But don’t feel you need to answer them.  Just take a minute to tell me where you’re at with your farm dream and where you want to be.

If you’re not among the ‘dreaming about farming’ group but have already reached your farm dream, in whole or in part, put your two cents in!  I’m looking to get some serious farm-start-up momentum going over the next little while!

I’ve gone through the family farm situation while growing up and I’m deeply embroiled in creating and re-creating a farm now.  Creating a farm has so many facets.  It can get beyond overwhelming.  Tell me where your overwhelm is.  I’ve been to enough of the valleys and peaks that small farm start up can take you to.

There is a reason things get repeated enough times to become cliche.  Usually, they get said a lot because they’re true.

So here’s mine:  If I can help just one person succeed at a new farm, I’ll be happy.

I’m fascinated to know what draws different people to farming.  And, I love writing about the process we’re going though on our farm.  Give some good thoughts and I’ll have writing fodder for the upcoming winter writing season!

Here are those questions (should you want them):

1. If you’re looking into what it takes to start a farm (or turn your farm into your job), do you truly think you might do it some day?
2. If you already have started your own farm, is it working out the way you imagined it would?
3. What part of starting your farm (or expanding from hobby farm to income farm) has got you stumped?
4. In your wildest dreams, what does your farm look like?

So, even if you’re not farming vegetables, one of the best things about being on the farm day in and day out is the ability to work a garden into your reality.

Our garden doesn’t look as pretty as that of our friends who run a 5 acre market garden and veggie CSA.  We definitely have more weeds and more random plantings as a result of trying to balance my limited knowledge of biodyanmics with the weather and how much time I have to plant before a toddler needs something.  I will include some current pictures of the garden in the coming days.  Anyone who is feeling bad about not weeding enough is welcome to post my garden pics on their fridge to help them feel better. 

I did apply a great heap of mulch in the spring, though, so the vegetables won out over the weeds and have produced a bumper crop of everything except peppers.  (My first foray into pepper growing was not terribly successful.)  Todays picture of a pail of our delicious yellow heirloom tomatoes will be the first of a handful to come this week.

We are eating really well here these days.  That in itself is a good enough reason to farm.

- Sustainable Agriculture as defined by Wikipedia

Today, John and I were interviewed for a short video profile about our farm.  Hopefully, it will introduce us to more people who are looking for animal friendly, sustainable meat.

While Jennifer, our interviewer, was setting up her camera, we got to talking about sustainability.  We were trying to decide if our farm could truly be considered sustainable.

Pasture Buffet - Hard to see, I know, but on that wagon is freshly cut clover and grass. Everyday, we bring it to the sheep and pigs so they can eat fresh without being eaten themselves.

Obviously, there is a point where a farm can clearly not be considered sustainable.  Genetically modified plants, chemical application with wild abandon, confinement housing for animals.  These are all pretty much unsustainable.  But there is a middle ground that is hard to pin down.

For example, there are farms that are widely celebrated for their sustainable farming practices where the farmers feed conventionally grown grain (in small quantities).

So, the farms feeding the grain are considered sustainable due to their animal welfare practices among other things but the farms growing the grain – spraying pesticides, herbicides etc… – are clearly not.

Where does that leave a farm like us?  We grow our own grain in a not completely organic fashion and feed it to our nature-imitating animals.

Speaking of nature-imitating, animal welfare issues surrounding housing are another a part of sustainability (or not).

Here at J. & C. Nyman Farms, we endeavour to raise pastured animals.  Our chickens are definitely pastured and we have yet (knock on wood) to have any threatened by wild life.  The sheep are another matter.

While we would love to have our sheep roaming the range in a truly pastured, nature-imitating way, it simply isn’t realistic considering the predator pressure in our area.  This spring, we even had to start closing the sheep in the barn at night, not just keeping them in the barnyard.  We lost 4 ewes, including our best mother hands down, right at the backdoor of the barn.

One could argue that being a coyote’s lunch is what would happen in nature and they’d be right.  This is where the grey area in sustainability can be clarified a little.

When thinking about whether we’re sustainable-enough (my neurosis about ‘not enough’, I know!), I often forget the second part of the definition.  We, as the people running the farm, have to be able to sustain ourselves so we can keep running the farm.  Otherwise, it won’t be sustainable, will it?  So, if the animals that we raise to sell are coyote food instead or if we choose to buy feed that is too expensive to recover the cost when selling the meat, we’re going to go out of business.  Not sustainable.  There needs to be a balance.

So, Jennifer, while standing next to our wagonload of green chop (read: pasture on a buffet), came up with a great equation.

Ideals + Reality = Sustainability

That made perfect sense to me at the time.  Since having pondered and writen about it here, I’d have to add something.

Ideals + Current Reality = Sustainability

I added the word ‘current’ because, as an example, we may not always have the predator pressure we do now.  We will also, one day, finish building superior sheep pasture fencing, best the steep learning curve regarding growing organic but not budget breaking crops and be done with the many capital expenditures that have kept John working off the farm to fund the farm.

Reality is always changing but if you strive for the ideal within the confines of the current reality, you’re likely to come out with something like sustainability.

So, are we a sustainable farm?  Absolutely.  More and more everyday, in fact.