An Open Letter to Detour Drivers

Dear Road Construction Victims,

Welcome to my road!  I hope you enjoy your new route to the outside world and that it be most temporary.  I understand that detours have the ability to adversely affect your life in the form of longer commutes, lack of turn lanes, and low shoulders.  Please allow me to give you a short orientation to my road, in the hopes of improving your experience.

1.  My road is extremely picturesque, please enjoy the view.
 
2.  On the West side, among others, you will see undulating fields, cattle dotting the hillsides, a few mules (look hard!), a barn with the flag painted on the side, and some quaint, broken down, rusty old farm equipment deposited oh-so-lovingly in someone's field.

3.  To the East side, among others, you'll see a round barn, some chickens, a shelter-house, a horse farm or two, as well as the requisite undulating fields and cattle dotting the hillsides.

4.  If you happen to have car trouble, don't panic.  A friendly farmer will be along shortly to help you.

5.  Please don't flip that same farmer off as you pass him/her at 80 mph tomorrow morning when you're late for work.

6.  You are lucky to be driving through the rolling hill country of Illinois.  A few 20 miles south of here, it's flat for as far as the eyes can see.

7.  On that note, I'll make the respectful request that you don't pass me on the uphill when I'm on the way to move cows, driving the farm ATV.

8.  Yes, it's legal to drive farm-related ATV's on the road.

9.  No, it's not fun to off-road it when you're loaded down with fence posts, electric wire, and a 50-lb. bag of salt/mineral blend.
 
10.  This area of the country is called the Heartland, not the Wasteland.  The bread basket of the world, not the waste basket of the world.  Get my drift?


11.  Ahhh, it's harvest time.  What a wonderful time of year.  You have the unique opportunity to observe, up-close and personal, how our nation's crops are harvested.  Take advantage of it!

12.  You also have the unique opportunity to be squashed into an accordion by a random bale-mover crossing the road if you decide you can text and drive on our quiet route.

13.  WARNING:  There are farm implements, attachments, and trailers sticking out, parked along, and blocking the road entirely at any and all random times and locations throughout harvest season.


14.  Rural people are friendly.  We're also isolated.  I know you had a bad day at work, but put it behind you and wave at us, for Pete's sake.

15.  Oh, this one is important!  Rural people in cars wave by raising their pointer finger off the steering wheel.

16.  Yes, we're raising a finger at you.

17.  No, not that one.

18.  I know you're frustrated that you can't get to work on the main thoroughfare and I'm so sorry for your inconvenience.

19.  Our stop signs are not optional.

20.  We love to have people stop by and visit our farm animals.

21.  Not all farmers feel the same way.  Ask first.

22.  Which reminds me:  the fences are electrified, the horses and goats can bite, yes, that's a bull in the pasture, you might get some chicken and/or cow poop on the bottom of your shoes, and we have rusty nails galore.  Keep your wits about you and don't sue me if you or your kids do something foolish.
 
23.  We try our best to keep the chickens out of the road, we really do.  They have wings.  Enough said.

24.  Please don't go bowling for chickens.

25.  The speed limit is 55.  Not 65, not 75, and certainly not 85.  Please SLOW DOWN.

26.  If a farmer is pulling a wagon loaded with grain, s/he absolutely can't pull off to the side to let you pass.

27.  We also really don't enjoy holding up that long line of cars behind us.

28.  Unless you're one of those who flipped us off while passing us at 80 mph.  Then we do.

29.  Farmers love to flag down other farmers, idle in our pick up trucks in the middle of the road, ideally at a corner or on a blind hill, block traffic, and chat about the corn yields over coffee in styrofoam cups.

30.  You should try it sometime.

31.  Finally, farmers know that manure stinks.
 
32.  If you don't slow down, a random farmer might just lay a strip of that stinky manure down the center of the road.

Well!  I'm so glad I've had this opportunity to show off my Midwestern hospitable nature.  Once again, enjoy the drive and rural scenery.  Soon enough you'll be back to your regular route and our quaint little farm road will be but a distant memory.  Until then, be well and have a wonderful day!

Most sincerely yours,
The Farmer

Product Endorsement

I hate to make sweeping generalizations here, but farmers don't traditionally have a lot of money.   We're what you call asset-rich, cash-poor--all of our money is tied up in land, equipment and livestock and pretty much the only way to access that money is to sell the farm.  You can get the money but then you're out of a home and job.  (Please remind me once again why I signed up for this?)  Of course I use the word 'we' here in the most general sense.  Marcel and I are even better off:  asset-poor, cash-poor.  Please dial back your envy.

Anyways, the point of this post is thriftiness.  Thrift-i-ness.  Farmers have to be thrifty because we don't have alot of cash on hand.  I know most of you are used to the common definition of the word thrifty--showing thrift; economical or frugal, but did you know that thrifty also means thriving or prospering?

That makes sense, doesn't it? If you're thrifty you'll become thrifty and probably stay thrifty, unless of course you start being unthrifty.

Wait, what?

In the spirit of thriftiness, I'd like to now endorse a product that has enhanced my life dramatically in the past few months. It is Pampered Chef's Quick-Stir Pitcher.

I purchased this pitcher from my lovely cousin who used to be a Pampered Chef saleswoman.  I unwittingly attended someone's Pampered Chef party, enjoyed the company, admired the hostess' ability to unabashedly sell her wares to friends and family, and then promptly gagged on the free veggie pizza slices as I saw how much everything costs.  High quality?  Check.  High class?  Check.  High falutin' tootin'?  Check.  Affordable for poor ole little ole thrifty me?  Nope. 

So I did what I always do at these types of events, I frantically flipped pages and searched through the catalog until I found something that met my criteria:  1) useful, 2) not a million dollars.  I found it in the Quick-Stir. 

To be honest, the Quick-Stir Pitcher pushed my sensibilities a bit.  I mean, how hard is it to stir up a chunk of frozen cran-lemon-raspberry-tea with my trusty wooden spoon?  Not very!  And yet, the next affordable, halfway useful item was the cheese knife, for which a butter knife had always done the trick.  The Quick-Stir won out, if only for the fun name.  Quick-Stir, Quick-Stir.  I could say that all day.

I used it.  I did.  It came in handy a few times here and there, even though it wasn't as pretty as my cobalt-blue pitcher I had bought in college.  (I have no idea why a college student need a cobalt blue pitcher, but I've been glad many times over for that unthrifty purchase.)

Fast forward approximately 9 years and 3 months, give or take a few years, and the darn Quick-Stir is my best friend.  Best friend, I tell ya!  Ever since Honeysuckle, our bottle calf, was born we've had to make up first 4, then 6, and now sometimes 7 or 8 bottles of dry milk replacer per day.  I'd start out by adding the dry powder to the bottle itself, slopping it on the sides of the bottle and the porch floor, all the while making a sticky, fly-attracting mess. Then I'd add the warm water and shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.  Shake until my back hurt, shake until my brain hurt, shake until I could shake no more.  The milk would mix, but inevitably there'd be big chucks of powder floating around in it, stopping up the nipples and frustrating the calf. 

And then I remembered the Quick-Stir.  I got it out, added the milk powder and warm water, and plunged.  Plunged, plunged, plunged, plunged plunged.  No mess on the bottles, no mess on the floor, and I'm pretty good at plunging now, just in case the toilet ever gets plugged or some sort of nonsense.  I plunged that nifty little plunger up and down until the liquid was a perfectly smooth milky mixture.  Remove plunger, pour it into the bottles, and Viola!  Breakfast is served. 


$16.50.  That's it.  That's the cost of my nifty, thrifty Pampered Chef Quick-Stir Pitcher, the one that makes my porch cleaner, Honeysuckle's milk smoother, and my life easier.  I gotta say, the next time you have a bottle calf on your hands, you just gotta get yourself one of these!  Maybe I'll pitch (ha ha, sorry) a new name to the company while I'm thinking of it--The Pampered Farmer has a ring to it, don't you think?  

Thriftily yours,

Farmer Jackie

Farm Events Galore

We've been busy this spring.  Busy with farm work, yes.  But also busy with events.  Farm events.

The renewed interest in local food has meant that there are a lot of people suddenly interested in and wanting to visit farms.  So far this spring we've been the destination for a local elementary school field trip, we participated in our second annual Openfields Farm Tour, and we hosted a Pasture Walk.  All of these events are a lot of fun (and a lot of work). 

The first event, the fieldtrip, brought 20 1st-graders and their parents out to see the chickens.  Each classroom at their school focused on a different farm animal, organized a field trip around that animal, and then reported what they learned back to the others.  They all visited a large farm and a small farm in the same day to see the differences in production styles, which I thought was a brilliant idea.

The kids that came here had first visited Phil's Fresh Eggs in Forreston.  There they got to see a video about egg production, they got to see the egg washing machines, the egg sorters, the egg packing machines, etc.  Everything is very mechanized--it has to be when you're packing 150,000 dozen eggs a day (!)--and must be pretty cool to watch, especially for a 1st grader!  But they didn't get to go in a see the chickens (disease control) and they didn't get to touch an egg (not quite sure why--couldn't they spare a couple?).

When they got here, I let them visit the chickens, taught them about the different breeds and showed them the food that we used.  We showed them the baby chicks and explained the difference between those used for meat production and those kept for eggs.  They got to hold the chicks and gather some eggs.  Every single one of them got to candle their own egg, grade it and put it in the appropriate-sized egg carton.  They then took home a few dozen eggs (the teachers insisted on paying for them) so they could each take an egg home with them.  I joked that I took no responsibility for school-bus-induced scrambled eggs in their backpacks. 

The kids had fun, and so did I, but the best thing that came of that fieldtrip was the packet of thank you letters and hand-drawn pictures I got back from the kids about 2 weeks later.  They were absolutely hilarious.

Next, we participated in the Openfields Farm Tour for the second year in a row.  I seriously considered not doing it this year because the tour comes at the busiest time of year for us.  But it's an Extension event, and I work for Extension, and my boss and co-worker basically told me I had no choice but to sign up for the tour, the big bullies.

That's OK, it turned out to be a lovely day, Laura and Rob and family came over to help, and we had about 90 people come by the farm.  Wow!

Look at that farm crew! (Madelina was such a good tour guide she was given a few tips and I even had a lady threaten to steal her away. We definitely have her slated for the marketing and advertising department.)

Here are some happy visitors taking home a dozen eggs.  (This lady is running for the county board!  She likes farms, so she just might get my vote.)

Rob is taking some visitors out to see the baby calves, which reminds me I need to post some pictures of them soon.

And Ana is taking advantage of the fact that we finally have enough people around to make a good go at a lemonade stand. Marketing and development for her, too.

All in all the day was a success.

Our final farm event was a Pasture Walk.  A pasture walk is an informal event for people interested in grazing.  It was hosted by the U of I Extension and the Northwest Illinois Grazing Network.  Extension did a good job of advertising for the event so we had between 20 and 25 people come, which I think was a really great turnout.

I explained our operation, Jim Morrison from Extension provided some technical information about finishing animals on grass, forage values, grazing techniques, etc., and Ed Johnston from NRCS gave the crowd some information about the EQIP program, which we used to cost-share for our fences and waterlines.  There was a nice article in the Freeport Journal Standard about it, so I'll let you read it.

That's right, I'm getting tired of typing. Follow this link:

Pasture Walk

Visit Irish Grove Farms!

Irish Grove Farms is participating in the Openfields farm tour on May 24th!

Take advantage of this great opportunity to come and see just exactly what it is we're doing with this lovely farm of ours. We'll tour the pastures and visit the grassfed beef cattle. We may even get a peek at some young calves. You could collect an egg or two, climb up a hay shaft to the second floor of a milking barn, or find out exactly what a round barn looks like on the inside. Kids can feed carrots to the horses and goats; families can bring lawnchairs and a picnic and enjoy our hidden pasture for a bit. Better yet, you could just hang for awhile with the wackiest rookie farmers in the area.

Hope to see you!

For more information and a map of all participating farms, visit the University of Illinois Extension--Winnebago County website:

www.extension.uiuc.edu/winnebago

Calving Season

Calving season is upon us.

May is the month our calves are scheduled to be born, if the bull did his job right, that is. And how hard is it? All he's gotta do is be a typical bull and work the crowd, so to speak. He doesn't even have to compete for the ladies. He is their only option.

I do believe he did a regular fine job, though, because I saw him all frisky and sly, all coy and cudly; I saw him whispering sweet nothings in the cows' ears and.......umm......maybe I'll just leave it at that. A bull deserves some privacy, doesn't he?

In defense of my creepiness, when the future of your farm depends upon one bull doing his thing correctly....well, I'm trying to say that my spying from the edge of the field had nothing to do with any socio-psychological problems of my own. Really.

Lord help me. This farm stuff can be embarrassing.

Anyways, i.e., how can I get myself out of this awkward situation, what I'm trying to say is that I'm really looking forward to seeing this:


and this:


I love how they play follow the leader like that.

I also love how they strike a pose and act all tough like this guy:


And then, of course, there's this sweet scene:


Oh, dear. Maybe a call to my therapist isn't such a bad idea.

Boots

Galoshes?


Or shit-kickers?



You decide.

We're Famous!

Ok, not famous. But we did make the local newspaper.

About 2 weeks ago, I received a call from a man with a heavy accent who stated that he worked for the Freeport Journal Standard and wanted to interview me about the farm. I asked him how he heard about us, and he responded that he had found our information on the new Local Foods Directory put out by the University of Illinois Extension Office of Stephenson County.

Score! My friend Margaret Larson, Extension's Director, worked hard to get the local foods directory printed in response to an increasing desire to support local producers. The directory hasn't been out much more than a month, and I was impressed by how quickly I had been contacted by someone who had found us through it.

But then I began to wonder how this reporter dude had chosen us over the many, many other interesting and varied farms listed in the directory. So I asked him. He said he was starting a new weekly column titled On The Farm, and I was the first person he contacted. He just picked us....no special reason, really.

Well, after chatting a little on the phone and again noting his thick accent, I asked him if he minded telling me where he was from. "Well, it's funny you ask," he replied. "I'm from Ireland."

A-ha!!

"Now I know why you picked us," I laughed. "It couldn't have something to do with the fact that our farm is named Irish Grove Farms, now could it?" He chuckled and admitted that yes, that might have had a little influence.

Just goes to show that we should never underestimate the importance of a name.

We had a nice 3 hour visit where we grilled him on every detail of his life. And then at the end, we let him ask us a few questions as well.

This is what came of it: Making the Move to Organic

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Irresistible

Late Sunday morning, the call came. "Your chicks are at the post office. If you'd like, you can come pick them up. Or, we'll send them out your way in tomorrow's mail shipment."

Who knew that postal workers worked on Sundays? (Boy, do they need a labor union.) And who knew that chicks came in the mail? Ok, I did. But did you?

Baby chicks come in the mail on Sundays.

Let's try not to focus on how ridiculous that sounds.

Instead, let's focus on how absolutely adorable and irresistible these chicks are....which is exactly what my kids did for about 5 straight hours.

Here they are, still in the box. They come in these neat little compartmentalized boxes, 25 chicks per compartment. In fact, you have to mail-order a minimum of 25 chicks, otherwise they won't have enough body heat to keep themselves warm. A cold chickie is a doomed chickie.

Yes, you are seeing two boxes there. 150 chicks in all. That's a lot of little peepers.

We take them out of the box one by one, and dip their beaks in their water. It's a welcome drink for most, except for those squirmy ones that get water up their teensy little nostrils, poor guys.

At the hatchery, the chicks are born, vaccinated (ouch), and immediately boxed up. No food. No water. So these birdies are thirsty. And hungry. And scared out of their pea-sized minds. Good thing I've got some willing kids to make them feel right at home.

Madelina's like a little mother hen.

Ana's snuggled in nicely with this one.

And Armando is Mr. Popular. Look how many he has crowded around him.

It takes awhile to get the heat lamps situated just right. If the lamps are hung too high up, the chicks get cold and start to mob together like this:

I'd better lower that light a bit.

Ahh, that's better. Now that they're warm, they start to zip around from here to there. It's hilarious, especially because they aren't very coordinated yet and tend to bump into things.

Gosh, these peeps are irresistible. Baby chicks have to be the most adorable creatures on the face of the earth. So cute, in fact, that I've gotta run and check on them, just in case. For the fourth time today.

What? I can't help it.

Winter Wonderland

As I write, six to eight inches of snow are falling upon Irish Grove.

Our farm has converted itself into a winter wonderland. A fact which did not go unnoticed by Marcel.....

or the kids......

or even Olivia, for that matter.

When it's this beautiful, there's no way you can resist the urge to go out and play.

Here's Marcel pulling a child-laden sled with the PUG. (Pleae don't ask me what PUG stands for.)

We went down to the pond to see if it was frozen enough for some ice skating. On the way there, the PUG got stuck.

Push, kids, push!!

Umm, Armando....?? Just 'cause you're three doesn't mean you can slough off. Gees, what kind of farm kid are you, anyways?

Maybe we should try the other way.

Or maybe we should just walk the rest of the way.

See that open water? Guess ice skatin' is gonna have to wait. Bummer.

Instead, we can just admire the beauty of the creek.

Gosh, that's pretty.

Here's another view:

Winter in Irish Grove is a sight to behold.

Lucero

Meet Lucero, our trusty farm horse. He's a Standardbred--a huge and powerful animal that's as tame as a puppy dog. He also happens to have a pretty intimidating presence about him. Just ask our cows.

Lucero is his Panamanian name. (Hey, we do more than one culture around here.) His real name is Battleborn, or so it was before we acquired him. But we renamed him our 'bright star', which is what lucero means in Spanish.

Lucero is a horse with a past. And that's no small feat for a horse that's only 6 years old. Before he came to Irish Grove he lived in the Chicago suburbs, was owned by my cousin Jeff, and was a race horse...a trotter. Trotters and pacers pull these small carts with small men in them around a not so small racetrack, and try to outrun and out-manuever the others. They are harness racers. And the only thing that differentiates a trotter from a pacer is their gait. When a trotter runs, he simultaneously moves two legs which are diagonal from each other, i.e., his right front leg with his left back leg. Pacers move the two legs on the same side of their body at the same time, with both left legs stretching out first, then both right legs.

Lucero's life as a trotter was short-lived, however, because he was knock-kneed. He was fast enough, but as he got going, his knees would knock together and make him stumble. I know how it is. I was a knock-kneed young kid, too. Thankfully we've both outgrown our affliction. But Lucero earned an early retirement, and cousin Jeff generously gave him to us.

Farm life is a little boring for Mr. Big-City Race Horse, though, and Lucero likes to shake things up once in awhile. So when he gets the chance for a little excitement, he's not gonna let it pass him by.

There go the cows, into their fresh paddock for the week.

Ahh, what a peaceful farm scene.

Uh, oh.....

No, Lucero! Don't do it!

It's not too late! You can still turn back!

Hey...are you sure you weren't a rodeo horse in your early days?

Darned horse. Oh, and if the photos are a little blurry, it's because he was moving so darned fast. Knock-kneed? I don't think so.

Our Herd Mothers

Isn't she a beauty? She is one of our four new herd mothers, the future of Flynn's Irish Grove Acres.

We are in our first year of transitioning the farm from a conventional grain-fed beef operation to an organic grass-fed beef operation. The reasons for the change are wide and varied, but I'll briefly touch on a few of them here.

Today, to be a successful farmer following the rules of the game set out by Big Agriculture, you must "get big or get out". For those of you who don't own land and aren't familiar with farming, 260 acres may sound big. But for conventional agriculture, it is laughably small. We are WAY too insignificant to compete in conventional agriculture, and unfortunately, that's exactly how the big players want it. The only future I can see for a small, working family farm is to specialize in a rare, niche product, and/or go organic. There is no other viable alternative.

On a more personal level, I am a farmer, but I'm also an environmentalist. As a farmer, I see my farm as as a productive entity, as a partner, as a provider. As an environmentalist, I see my farm as an ecosystem, as a lifeline to flora and fauna, as a prairie waiting to emerge from beneath these strange and foreign plants called corn and soybean. Obviously it is pretty difficult to reconcile these two, real, live personas within me. Grass-fed beef offers me an almost perfect opportunity to work the land without damaging it, to take but to also give back.

Finally, I want to raise grass-fed beef because I am a mother, and because I want my children to love this farm. There are plenty of jobs around the farm that would make even the most seasoned farm kid want to thumb a ride to the Big Apple, but it is nothing but fun when we are working with the cattle. My kids love to help switch them from one pasture to another, and think it's hilarious to see them kick up their heels when they are allowed into a new section of the farm. We all love to go see the cows, to watch them eat or laze around. Oh, and I almost forgot: grass-fed beef poop, yep, you guessed it, in the field. Take that, Dad!

Here are my kids--happy as flies on manure--the day we brought our new cows home. You can tell they're real farm kids because they have no fear of those poop-smeared trailer panels.

And thanks to the cows, they are genuinely happy, even after being forced to ride 8 hours in the Big-Ass truck to go get our new mama's. Yeah, that's right. We drove all the way to Black River Falls, Wisconsin for these beauties.

But they are worth it. They're Murray Grey cows, and Murray Grey's are a specialty breed. There aren't too many people raising them around here, but those who do love them. The best thing about them, to me, is that they're an all-beef breed, meaning they've never been cross-bred with a milking breed. Their genetic make-up is focused on bulking up, not producing obnoxious quantities of milk, and, because of this, they fatten easily. This is key to a grass-fed operation, because we won't be supplementing their diet with grains. They will have to survive on pasture and dry hay only, and these ladies are good at producing calves that achieve a nicely marbled meat without grain.

Here's another look at our Murray's en route to their new home in good 'ole Irish Grove.


They were calm and collected the whole way home. Good girls. (Murray's are also known for their calm and gentle disposition, which is another big hit with this mama.)

Even though they are an Australian breed, a cross between a Scottish Aberdeen Angus and a Shorthorn, Murray Grey is appropriately Irish-sounding, don't you think? If not, no matter. They're Irish now, and, if you can't tell, we have high hopes for them.

You'll be seeing more of these ladies, I can guarantee it.