Three Stone Farm

Announcing our CSA program for 2011! Some things have changed from last year–we have added a week to the program so now it is 22 weeks from the beginning of June to the end of October. We have also changed our Farm Discount CSA program to a Market Booth CSA program. Instead of purchasing a discount card, you can now purchase booth credits ($40 or $100 up front gives you $44 or $115 in booth credit). No need to dig out your wallet or worry about your purse! More details on our CSA page…

We are increasing the number of shares available over last year, so tell all your friends who haven’t already signed up for a CSA in the area. Contact us to sign up!

Tags: CSA, farm, market

Here is Popcicle’s big bull calf, Pepper. We unfortunately didn’t get to see him being born as he was coming out backwards (we think). After freaking out and going inside to call the vet, by the time we came back out he was already on the ground with his mama licking him clean. Seriously, this guy is huge. He was at least the same size as Penelope, who had 3 weeks head start on him.

And I couldn’t resist taking a picture of both the calves on their mamas at the same time…

Cow breeding via AI is kind of strange to a person who’s never had to deal with this sort of thing before. When we had goats in Oregon, we took our lady goat on a “date” to visit with a friendly buck. But since we wanted to breed our girls to a Dutch Belted sire, we had to have our ladies “serviced” by a technician. Figuring out heat cycles (Popcicle bellowed all night long, Lily was a little harder to detect), selecting a sire (going through sire catalogs can be a bit humorous…studs, stats and udders!) and then calling the AI hotline (which is somewhat akin to sending out the bat signal) all took some time to get used to. Lily was serviced first, and the AI tech that came apologized for being late and told us that he’d been working at one of the mega farms aka CAFO up north. It was a 2000 cow dairy and he and another tech had 82 cows to do that day. The barn was 900 feet long and had computerized gates that were malfunctioning that day, so he and the other tech had to hand-sort the cows scheduled to be done. “It was a nightmare,” he told us.

Popcicle came into her cycle two days later, and the other AI tech came. He saw that she was in standing heat (which means that they will stand for a bull) and said that you just don’t see cows like that anymore…all the CAFOs use hormone shots to get their cows to cycle on schedule. He tapped the metal hoop support on our greenhouse and said getting into those cows is kind of like going through one of those pipes, not very easy at all. He continued, saying that back in the day a farmer would be jumping up and down in excitement to see a cow like ours but now it’s all shots, then sighed.

Yet more reasons to support small moreganic/local farms!

(Just waiting for the weird search terms that people will be using to find this post…)

Tags: CAFOs, calving, cows, farm animals

We had mistakenly thought that late Fall and Winter would slow our work down, but instead we have just shifted over to the other fires that were burning in the background. But as my best friend says, “The list is just that long. Take a break because you will NEVER finish it.” So here I am taking my break to update our long neglected blog.

Our biggest project? The Barn. Ever since our hoop storage shelter blew up, we’ve had just random piles of our stuff strewn about covered in tarps, a shifty proposition at best in a place that gets pretty severe winds. Every time we get a wind storm, I am chewing my nails thinking about what is going to blow away. I will be very happy to get the barn done! We still need to finish the siding, install doors and windows, and then finally move all our stuff in.

After we got the roof on the barn, we took a little break to make a wood-fired Rocket Bread Oven. It’s really nice to have an oven again after living without one for 2 years. Then over the New Year’s holiday, we butchered the T-Bones with the help of our friends Jim (who also helped last year) and Joe (our friend from Evergreen Farm). They helped us get the steers processed and cut up in one day, then we made lots of sausage, traditionally fermented and dried, and now have our freezer space that we rent stuffed full for the coming year. Our holidays were pretty good; we stayed at home so it was pretty quiet. We unfortunately could not see the Solstice lunar eclipse as it was cloudy. Now we are working on our seed order for this coming season, and trying to plan out our house design which we will hopefully start this Spring.

Here are some pics of the barn building…enjoy!

Tags: building, farm, meat