All photos by Walter Jeffries

Sugar Mountain Farm, owned by Walter Jeffries and his stellar family, is what you want a pig farm to be. Pig range freely in a series of padocks, rotated frequently to avoid over-stressing the land. Walter plants root vegetables, like turnips, in some of the fields for the pigs to forage in the fall. In addition, they get a varied diet of hay, whey (leftovers from a local cheesemaking plant), and high-protein and -calorie treats, such as expired peanut butter from the Ben and Jerry’s factory. Pigs are not castrated and do not have their tails or teel trimmed, as is usual even on family farms. These pigs are smart, lively, and well-respected. They live life like pigs – not boxed into crates on a concrete pad – and the meat is (I hear) fabulous.

Walter and his family are pretty fabulous, too. Walter’s a master-of-all-trades, from raising and breeding hogs to building his family’s barrel-vaulted “tiny cottage” house. His wife and kids (especially the older boys) help out on the farm, learning animal husbandry and construction as part of their home schooling. I have come to admire the whole clan immensely as I’ve followed their blog over the last couple years. It’s tempting to compare Walter to an undiscovered Joel Salatin, but where Salatin build chicken tractors, Jeffries pours concrete.

Design and image by Walter Jeffries

Walter’s next endeavor is to build an on-site, USDA-inspected hog processing facility where he can slaughter, cut, and cure the meat from his own hogs. This facility will be tiny – 1500 square feet – and he estimates the cost will be about 6% of the cost of a typical “small” USDA facility ($150,000 vs. $2.4 million). Currently, 47% of his sales go directly to the butcher shops, which routinely mis-cut, waste, lose, or allow meat to spoil. He also drives 600+ miles per week dropping off and picking up pigs. Building his own on-farm facility would circumvent all these issues. Walter’s also generously offered to share the plans with anyone who wants them – meaning folks around the world could benefit from his expertise and help their own farms keep more dollars in the family.

Currently, the plan and foundation are in place, but there’s a snag. Banks just aren’t lending, even to someone like Walter with stellar credit. The tiny cottage is too small for a second mortgage, and banks are just not taking risks right now.

I am so impressed with the Jeffries family’s operation, and his generosity for sharing knowledge and plans that can help local farmers make a good living. I want to help them out in thanks for all the good work they’ve done, how much they’ve taught me, how they model sustainable farming practices, and the vision Walter and his family have for the future.

So here’s what I suggest.

• If you have a local food lover in your life, give them the gift of a small slice of a great farm by making a donation to the Sugar Mountain Farm Fund Drive in their honor. Walter pledges to “pay it forward” to others!
• If you live in Vermont, order a pig (or half) for yourself. Or, find it at local retailers and restaurants (scroll down to “retail cuts”).
• If you live far from Vermont, order a pig and designate it to be delivered to a food bank close to the farm.
• If you’re independently wealthy, give Walter a loan! He’ll pay you back in five years. Really.
• If you, too, are strapped for cash in this crazy economy, “signal boost” this post by reposting it to your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking mechanisms.

Here’s to sustainable farming! Do you know of amazing farms like this in your area? Tell us about them!

Emily

Naming our food is a long tradition in my family, starting with Boris the Bull, who I believed would cause my parents’ divorce (do YOU really understand how large a whole steer is? Yeah, us neither…). Last year we bought half a hog and named it Eric. This year’s participant has been dubbed Señor Porcus. No absent referent here!

We picked up our 1/2 hog from Old Pine Farm on Oct. 17th. They have a very nice farm – hogs are pastured with some supplemental feed, not confined to a muddy sty. They are slaughtered on-farm and then sent to the butcher, so there’s no travel stress for the pigs. I feel extremely grateful that we have such a farm near us, and that we can afford to buy our food from them.

Looks like we ended up with about 85 lb of meat (for $300, including cutting and smoking, so somewhere around $3.50/lb). Old Pine Farm is unusual in that they charge a flat price for your hog, no matter what size, and they do not charge extra for cutting and smoking. You get to pick how you’d like your meat cut up. Here’s what we got – showing our strong preference for sausage and pulled pork in this house! My only complaint so far is that the meat is wrapped in Saran Wrap, which I find hard to remove from the meat. Hopefully it will fend off freezer burn – since there’s no air inside the wrapping, it should do that. So long as the wrap is thick enough. We’ll see.

• Loin roast: 10lb in 3 large packages. Wonder if we should have gotten this sliced into chops?
• Shoulder roast: 20+lb in about 10 packages (will become pulled pork)
• Bulk Sausage: 18 one-pound packages
• Smoked kielbasa: 10 – two to four links per pkg
• Ground pork: 6 – 1.5 lb packs
• Bacon: 5 lb in one-pound blocks
• Smoked hocks: 8lb in 2 hocks
• Ribs, pork butt, other misc: 8lb
• Plus about 5 pounds of soup bones and 5 lb of fat for lard
• The tail, the bladder, and possibly the squeal for the Cooking with Laura Project, which I will get to in a few weeks

This filled 2 large coolers and a paper grocery bag; it takes up about 2/3 of our tiny 7cu ft chest freezer and close to half the space above the fridge.

I think this was a steal for $300. I think prices are going up for next year, and they will be worth it.

Does anyone know where I can get about 1 gallon a month of goat’s milk (pasteurized or raw) in the Ann Arbor area? The goat shares I’ve found are too far away and give too much milk.

The Crosby Mint Farm in St. Johns, Michigan, was founded in 1912 by J.E. Crosby Sr. on two acres. The now 140-acre farm has produced chemical-free spearmint and peppermint essential oils for 96 years. They are facing foreclosure, even though they have enough mint oil in stock to pay off their debt. So they’re having a mint oil sale! Pure, chemical-free, steam-distilled peppermint or spearmint oil is $5/dram (1/8 oz). Free shipping if you order 6 or more. Help a neighbor and local chem-free farm! Buy some mint oil!

Anyone know where to buy fresh turmeric root? It looks a lot like gingerroot.

For a long time, I’ve thought that if I’m going to eat meat, I should be able to kill the animal I’m eating.  It just seems like the honorable thing to do. However, I don’t know how to hunt, and I don’t know anyone who raises livestock. This spring, however, my dear friend Suzie told me of a conversation she’d had with someone she’d met at a conference. This woman, Lori, and her husband, Floyd, and some neighbors raise about 75 chickens each year, then get together one day in the fall to butcher them. Lori graciously invited not only Suzie, but me to come out and help this year.

Chicken Day was yesterday, and I’d like to tell you about it. Some of the description will be a little graphic, but there are no pictures. Still, I’ll put it after a cut so you can skip this post if you want to. But really – I’ll be talking more about my thoughts about meat eating, so don’t be put off! (If you want a really nice photo essay of the process of slaughtering chickens, please see Angie’s excellent posts on prep, slaughter, dressing, and packaging chickens, plus her husband’s post on building a mechanical chicken plucker. I used the same methods, only varying a little bit in details like the wooden trough instead of a cone.)

I arrived around 9:30, and they’d already gotten started. There were two tall tables set up in the barn where two folks were dressing birds. They handed me a pair of rubber gloves and a knife and I jumped right in. This was pretty easy for me. I’ve been cutting up whole chickens to cook for years, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to first cut off a head and feet and then take all the innards out. It looked kind of like a rubber chicken – so not quite the “oh, hey, this is a dead animal” punch it might have been.

I got pretty good at eviscerating birds. It took a few times before I got all the parts out on the first try – lungs and kidneys are especially hard to remove. I didn’t even know I’d missed the lungs on the first bird! I’d not realized how warm the birds would be. It makes sense; they’d been alive three minutes before. This was actually pleasant surprise. My least favorite part of cutting a chicken into serving pieces is that my hands just ache with cold. The tactile feedback wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, either, except perhaps with the lungs, which really have to be scraped out. (Even this morning, I was having some “fingertip memory” of that feeling. It wasn’t the most pleasant thing, but it wasn’t horrible.) If you’re used to handling whole chickens, you’ll probably do fine with gutting one.

After cleaning a few chickens, it was time to try killing and plucking. I ended up killing two chickens. It was not physically or emotionally difficult. It’s possible I was distancing myself mentally from what I was doing, not wanting to freak out in front of strangers over snuffing Chicken Little – but I really think I am just at peace with the idea that I killed these birds and I will eat them later.

In college, I flirted with vegetarianism. I hated everything I learned about factory farms and it seemed like not eating meat was the only answer. Then I started gardening, and I realized that many of the non-animal things we eat also die so we can eat them. It seemed like there were two choices – eat only things that don’t die as a result of my eating them (so, fruit, leaves, and perhaps grains, which die on their own in one season) or accept that eating often causes the death of the eaten.

So yes – I want to do as little harm as possible in my life, but I have a right to eat, too. Eating meat that came from real farms, where the animals got to eat and act like the animals they are, seemed like a viable third option.

These chickens led good lives and died quick, respectful deaths. As I felt their necks, looking for the place to make the cut that would kill them as quickly as possible, I found myself thinking, “Thank you.” Not, “I’m sorry.” Just “thank you.” Then I cut their throats, and they bled, and they died.

I didn’t feel horrible afterward, which tells me my heart and my head agree that eating meat raised like this is ethically acceptable to me. Two of the fifty birds I helped dress yesterday are now in my freezer. The two of us will probably make upwards of fifteen meals from them. They were huge birds, and by the time I make stock from the bones, we might be closer to twenty meals.

Thanks, Suzie and Lori, for giving me this opportunity.

Ok…I think this is the weekend I finally rev up the pressure canner for the first time! The sweet corn is coming in and the freezer space is running out.

Any words of wisdom or encouragement for a first-time pressure canner??

Ok, I’ve finally gotten that food blog survey around! Please respond whether you write or just read blogs about food, gardening, etc. It’s only four questions – would you like to share your thoughts? I’ll share the results in about a week.

Take the survey! [closed]

See the results!

Do you ever sit down and realized just how much you’ve changed over time, even though you still feel like the same “you” you were fifteen years ago? And wait…fifteen years? Was I even alive then? Wait – I was not only alive, but I was doing something meaningful and being kind of an adult fifteen years ago?

Whoa.

Care to dive into my food habits over the last decade and a half? It’s really interesting to see how my definition of healthy eating has changed over time and paychecks.  More after the cut…

Fifteen years ago, I was in college and mostly eating in the cafeteria. Our cafeteria wasn’t bad, though it went downhill, I think. I recall some Sundays when the only thing edible was white rice and yet another limp salad, because I didn’t consider frozen waffles and canned ravioli to be “edible,” even then. I loved the wok bar. I would stir-fry up my own veggies, white rice, and sometimes meat (pilfering veg from the salad bar if the wok bar didn’t have enough options) toward the end of a meal. Then, since you were allowed to take a slushie out of the cafeteria, I’d fill a slushie cup with the stir fry and hold it up to my mouth as I left the cafeteria. Instant bedtime snack!

And I definitely needed my bedtime snacks. Some kind of noodle was my first choice; the bathroom of my dorm always functioned as a kitchen, too. Ramen, with its MSG, gave me vivid dreams; sometimes my roommate and I would split a pack and compare dreams in the morning. Like a cheap and legal acid trip for the chickenhearted, I suppose. Even eating 3 meals and 2-3 snacks a day, I still weighed about 115. I tried eating vegetarian a couple times, but each time I came down with a cold within a week. I think there just wasn’t enough good fuel in the caf to keep me going without meat.

My senior year, I had an apartment. Pasta was a mainstay. One time, I was grocery shopping with my roommate and we noticed between the two of us, we had about 10 pounds of pasta in the cart for a week or two’s supply. All white flour, the cheapest the big chain supermarket had to offer. Kraft parmesan cheese, though; that off-brand stuff was just nasty.

After college, I started getting my first real paycheck: $1400/month, of which $425 was rent, plus car payment, insurance, and student loans. It often struck me that I was making about twice minimum wage at that time. How could I have made do on half my current income? I’m not sure how I would’ve made it if I hadn’t been teaching music lessons to supplement my actual paycheck.

I was eating more brown rice and veggies at that time, and I made one other important switch: instead of stretching a packaged pasta-sauce-and-veg mix with more pasta, as I’d done in college, I stretched it with more frozen vegetables. I admit, part of this was spurred by having put on 30 pounds in about 2 years while losing muscle tone, but I was also realizing that pasta would cause me to “carb crash” almost as badly as dessert. There was apparently a very nice farmers’ market in the town I lived in, but I never went. Well, I think I went once to see what was there, but I didn’t buy anything and it certainly wasn’t a habit. I tried to shop some at the co-op, but it was small, and the produce, especially, was pricey and limp.

After a few years, I got married, and we decided that it was a priority for us to start buying more organic food. Some we got at a local health food store and some came from the giant groceries-and-stuff store. By this time, the proportion of veggies to noodles was about 50/50, up from 75% noodles. It was also around this time that I realized dairy was not so good for me. My husband also switched to rice milk; corn flakes, rice milk, raisins, and apple juice were staples of his diet.

Then we moved to Ann Arbor, home of an amazing food coop and an astounding farmers’ market. I started learning about food miles and the benefits of keeping money within the local economy. I also learned about the coercive pricing practices of places like Wal*Mart, the (un)sustainability of ocean fisheries, the spectre of GMOs, and the evils of feedlot beef and dairy. We continued to buy organic, switched 75% of our monthly grocery bill to the co-op, market, and another local “natural” grocery store, and started seriously looking at changing where our meat come from.

I think some of my interest in “localness” is the puzzle aspect. Can I make a whole meal out of food from within 100 miles of here? What’s in season now? Who are my local suppliers? What are the hidden bugaboos in my diet?

A big one for my sweetie was the corn flakes. He realized they were calorie-dense but nutrition-poor, and switched from eating them to eating organic yogurt. It was a fairly big price difference, but cutting them out also cut a ton of packaging from the cereal and rice milk boxes. And rice milk…that’s not really a food, is it? It’s just as processed as the corn flakes – though not GMO. The latest step in that particular evolution is that he’s now making his own yogurt from local milk (bought in a returnable glass bottle) and I’ve made several kinds of jam to flavor it. Suddenly, the price is back down to the price of a bowl of corn flakes, there’s no waste to speak of, and it’s all made of Real Food.

I’d also put on another 20+ pounds, and decided this was just silly. I started exercising every day – just 10 minutes a day at first, to establish the habit, then up to 30 mins or so, which is where I am now. I also looked at my diet and realized how many hundreds of calories of pure carbs I put away in a day. Not that carbs are inherently bad; it’s just they are so dense, you can eat way too many without realizing it. And when I paid attention, I could see that the more pasta I ate, the hungrier I felt. So I no longer eat pasta or white rice as a main dish – it’s more like a side, or it’s “diluted” with a lot of veggies, some meat, and a fair bit of fat to keep it from slamming into my bloodstream like a snowplow. I’ve lost about 25 pounds and kept it off for several years, up from my too-thin childhood and teen years, but down from my sedentary days.

Then last year, I inaugurated National Local Food Month. Many friends were doing some variation on National Novel Writing Month – producing a novel, or album, or art show within the months of November. I decided that food is my passion, and that’s what I would focus on. That was really a big shot in the arm to get me where I am today.

I would guess that 75-80% of our diet is from local sources in the summer, and about 40-50% in the winter. I’m working on root cellaring this year to try to bump the percentage up then, too. Last winter, we ate “virtually local” foods as much as possible – things that could be grown and stored in this climate, even if this particular sample came from California. The local supply really does just dry up around January, except maybe for potatoes and meat.

I’m eating more meat these days, which is a little ironic, because I’ve always thought of meat as essentially bad – bad for my health, bad for the environment, bad for the animals. I’ve come to realize, however, that livestock that gets to eat natural foods, roam at will, and be slaughtered individually (not on a conveyor belt)reduces or negates most of those objections. And conveniently, it’s also less processed than, say, white flour. I totally respect the decision to eat a vegetarian diet, but I will eat meat as long as I can get meat that meets my values.  So we’ll see how long meat stays a central part of my diet. For the moment, it works well, interspersed with vegetarian meals 7-12 times a week.

I guess my point here – if I have one, beyond reminiscing – is to say that change can start very slowly. It can take a sudden uptick, but even if it doesn’t, it still adds up. Fifteen years ago (shoot, five or six years ago!) I was eating mostly cheap pasta with a few frozen veggies and the occasional chicken breast, factory farmed and trucked in from who-knows-where. Today, I’m eating much less refined starch, many more fresh vegetables, and more meat (as much as 4-5 oz every day). And a huge percentage of my food is grown within a hundred miles of my home.

Sometimes I’m not even sure how I got here.

So remember when I ooohed and aaaahed about Eat Local Eat Natural? And when I went to that township zoning board meeting to say “Hey, this business is awesome; you should let them build their distribution center”?

Well…they want to hire me to write for them! I will essentially be blogging for them. I’ll write stories about their farmers, featured chefs, and aspects of the business (like the delivery truck they’re currently converting to run on veggie oil/biodeisel).

On September 13th, I’ll be attending the Homegrown Festival in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown and blogging from the scene. I know several of you are heavily involved in this festival…will I see you there? Any thoughts on aspects to cover, or niches that aren’t already being filled? Or should I just show up early to set up tables?

And everybody…what are your thoughts on personal vs. professional blogging? I don’t want to turn my blog into an advertisement, and I don’t want to abandon Eat Close to Home. I’m hoping to keep talking about my personal efforts to eat more sustainably, garden, cook at home, etc. on this blog. But where’s the line when it comes to talking about local food sources? Do you consider it a problem if I mention the same producers here and at the ELEN blog? Or does that sound too much like “a word from our sponsors”?