Farmer's Journal
"On a wintry February 22, eight Philadelphia high school students with three chaperones traveled to Dame Linda Geren’s High View Farm in North Hanover, NJ, to learn about sheep shearing from Kevin Ford. Ford is America’s foremost hand sheep shearer. Ford wrote the finest book on blade shearing available today: Shearing Day: Sheep Handling, Wool Science, And Shearing with Blades.
Linda’s sheep are bred for meat and wool and are a combination of Finn, Suffolk and Cormo. To shear all 40 sheep took more than seven hours. Hand shearing assures that the wool will have longer strands. Each fleece is skirted by hand to remove debris and yields about 15 pounds of wool..."
Read more about this event as reported in the March 2010 edition of Green Table News published by Les Dames d'Escoffier...
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For years I’ve been building a modest but awkward ramp for getting the pigs from their little house into the stock trailer when it’s time for them to go meet their maker. Inevitably, this ends up being a combination of straw bales, plywood, rope and a few other things. It’s always worked (we haven’t lost a pig yet) but it’s been a pain in the butt and has never been sufficiently sturdy that we could back the trailer up to the pig barn and let them go in and out overnight to get used to the trailer. Getting them used to the trailer is critical. There’s nothing more interesting than locking a dozen 300 lb plus pigs in a small shed and then getting in with them to try to convince them to enter the ‘death’ trailer when it’s something they haven’t seen before.
So this year I...
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Jill, our 5 year old Finn ewe, looked like she was having problems with her pregnancy last week so we moved her into the barn despite the fact that she wasn’t due for another two weeks. Last Sunday morning I checked on her and apparently her water had just broken. Linda went down to the barn and sat with her. When I came by a little later there was a tiny, 3-lb lamb sitting on the floor between the two of them. An hour later there were four more, all five looking exactly identical with their mottled black and white markings. Linda put each one up near Jill’s head so she could lick them clean, but it was clear that the delivery had taken so much out of her that she was going to need to rest for a while before she could take care of her lambs herself.
Jill lay there in the stall while...
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This past weekend we went to northeastern Pennsylvania to pick up Finn, our Border Collie, who was finishing his latest round of herding training. We took advantage of the trip to stay with Marilyn and John Anthony, two friends of many years who own a cabin in nearby Springfield. John is a musician, music producer and potter and Marilyn is a very successful professional in the dining world who gave it all up to open a restaurant in a former garage in Montrose which specializes in locally grown, organic and naturally raised products. The restaurant – the Summerhouse Grill – has been a huge success in terms of drawing and pleasing customers but also in terms of Marilyn’s real motivation, which is to create a support mechanism for the many local farmers who produce fresh products on a small...
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I was out working in the barn and had placed Maggie and Finn, our two Border Collies, in a ‘down’ position so that they wouldn’t get into trouble. I was more worried about Finn than Maggie. She’s adventurous, but a little less so since her puppies were born a month ago. Finn, on the other hand, knows no fear and shows little sign of common sense. Just as I turned around to check on them I heard howling coming from the horse pasture. Running out of the barn, I saw Finn lying on his back in the pasture, twisted in an unnatural position and howling his head off. He’d obviously been kicked by one of the horses that he loved to charge whenever given the chance. I ran into the pasture and tried to pick him up but he whined so hard I worried that his back was broken. I finally decided to lift...
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