Easter Dinner

Lovely Easter Dinner: Mutton Racks, Rice, Fresh Salad from Small Potato Farm and a Pinot Noir from Terror Creek Winery.

Meat delivery

We picked up the next batch of kolbassi today. There will be plenty of brats for revolution Brewing this summer.

Culinary School Visitors

We had Culinary School of the Rockies students here again this year. I didn't get pictures of both groups. We had 2 sets of students, each group for 2 days. We evaluated sheep, trimmed toes, built fence and sorted sheep.

Good way for them all to lean about the cost of food and where good local food comes from.

Here are some of the students after we finished building fences.

Spring Work Continues

The last couple of days we've been vaccinating the sheep and also doing toe trims. I can't do too many toes before my hands give out so we do them in batches. Pregnant ewes are now completely done except for the spring dewormer. I do that 24-48 hours before we turn them out on pasture so help keep the pastures cleaner. We're holding them in the winter corrals as long as possible because the grass is still not growing well.

Adult rams and ram yearlings all vaccinated. Ram yearlings toes all done.

Left on the list, ewe yearlings shots and toes and adult ram toes. We're slowly getting them all finished.

I've also been doing some farm tours. Yesterday was a group of chefs from Aspen learning about where the meat they buy from us really comes from. Some farms are charging for tours this year but I still think it's part of my job to educate the consumers about real local food.

No Fooling - It's Time for Local Food

It may actually be spring now.

Lots of people are putting in gardens and on our farm spring work is starting in ernest. That makes it a really good time to ask where your food is coming from.

Who is YOUR farmer? Do you know where your food is grown? How it is grown?

As you go on about your busy spring take a moment to stop and think abut the farmers who feed you and support your local farmer.

Food safety begins when you can look the producer in the eye and know that what you are buying is something they are willing to eat themselves.

Eating the Melon!

We decided to see if the melon I harvested was any good to eat.


It was wonderful, so we ate the entire melon.


Very sweet and tasty! I've saved the seeds because it's an open pollinated variety.

Culinary School of Rockies Dinner at Zephros

We were invited to the Culinary School of the Rockies dinner at Zephros Farm.



Here the students are busily working on the feast.

I got several shots of the students, both with and without the chef instructors. This was just before the rain.





We had a brief downpour and all the plates got wet. So several students quickly dried everything off.




It was nice after the rain and we had a good time.




In back Monica and Sue and in front, Gretchen, Mike and Riley.

Ken being silly!

Labor Day Labors

Today we had 4 students from the Culinary School of the Rockies out to help on the farm and learn about where food comes from.

We had a busy day, starting at 7:30 this morning we worked most of the flock. We had several task to perform, most important was to vaccinate all the lambs. We also took the opportunity to evaluate all the ewes and lambs. We have to start selecting sheep for slaughter and for sale so having extra hands to hold sheep, scribe, vaccinate and move sheep was most welcome. A job that would typically take Ken and I 2 or 3 days to finish got done in one very long morning.


I did not get many pictures at all. This is Kade holding up a ram lamb for his shot and evaluation.

I was really please to be a host farm for these students and we had a great time. I hope they learned a bit about what goes into producing good local food in a sustainable manner.

First Harvest!

My black thumb has not hit yet and I harvested the first of the peas today. OK so it is a meager harvest but there are a lot more growing and these sure tasted good.

Chicks Arrived

All the chicks arrived this morning. This batch is the 100 red broilers. We raise one batch a year. We keep half for us and sell the rest.


We also got 25 pullets for egg laying. The egg breeds we are trying this year are Russian Orloff, Dorking, Ancona and Welsummer. We also got some Gold Campines since we've had them before and liked them. I hope the chicken sexers did a good job. I hate having to get rid of roosters.

All the chicks arrived alive and so far they are all doing well.

More Beer!

Mike and one of the new fermenters for Revolution Brewing. Installed and working. Soon they won't run out of beer on the weekends! The second will have to wait until they get the brewing facility moved into the new building.

Wooly Beachballs & Garden Attempt

We still don't have any lambs but as you can see we do have some very round sheep.



This is Desert Weyr Tanwen. She had twins her first year but only a single last year. I suspect it's twins again this year from her size.

I have a very black thumb, but I wanted to try at least a small garden this year. Ken drilled holes in the ends of some left over trex railing that I am going to use to lay out some garden beds. My plan is to use it to mark out the beds and drive rebar stakes into the corners to hold them down. At the end of the season we can easily take the beds up and use the tractor to disk and cultivate the whole area.


I got two beds done and planted one with peas. The one in front. The back bed will have corn eventually but I didn't want it to shade the peas.





Looking back toward the house.

The garden area is behind the new elk fence and also protected from the orchard by the old elk fence so the sheep can't get in. We may add some side fencing so we can graze the sheep in the area but keep them out of the garden.

The other 3 types of plants we are going to try are corn, a melon and a watermelon.

Being Filmed

I was interviewed for the movie Locavore Movie about local food, sustainable farming and the state of modern agriculture. I have no idea whether any of my answers will be in the movie. It is due to be produced only on DVD and available in the Spring of 2009.

Flat Stanley got his picture taken as well.

Meat Cutting

We got the opportunity to watch some of our sheep being processed at the slaughterhouse.


This is a typical carcass of a US line sheep.


First step is breaking the carcass in half.



This is the cross section. This is not a very meaty loin compared to some of our sheep.


We had one lamb show up with a spool joint. This is usually the designation for a mutton. She was only 6 months old. The carcass on the left has a break joint and is a lamb. The carcass on the right has a spool joint and is a mutton.


Frenching the racks.


Trimming all fat off.


Bagging the boneless roasts into netting .


The packages are prepared to be vacuum sealed.


Here they are being packaged by carcass into the boxes.

We learned a lot watching the crew work on our sheep. Our biggest impression is how much fat our sheep have on them. These are entirely grass finished and not fed any grains yet they had more fat cover than I expected to see. I can only imagine how fat they would get if fed grains.

The lamb that had to be marked as mutton was also interesting. Most Black Welsh are slow growing and it is unusual to have one grade out as a mutton when less than a year of age.

The meat cutting and packing crew was 8 people and it took about 20 minutes to fully process one carcass. That is one reason for the high cost of food. A good slaughterhouse has a very skilled set of workers and they spend a lot of time making sure the meat is cut to order. The difference between a small place like this one and a huge assembly line is obvious. The smaller plant cares and every person is skilled and can do most of the jobs. They know how to cut meat to individual orders and are willing to keep individual carcasses separate and tracked for us. A far cry from huge plants where each worker only does a single cut all day.

It's a pleasure to have such a good partner in providing our customers with good meat.

Major Milestone

The farm had a major milestone today. This old travel trailer has been here for at least 10 years. It was used as a temporary guest house on occasion and Oogie stayed in it when she first got here in the fall of 2000 with the sheep. It was not in great shape, wasps had started to build nests and we had no use for it.

We thought about selling it but that seemed like a lot of trouble. The effort to sell it or make it road worthy was just too much. So we just left it. Last week in the local paper was an ad for a person wanting an old used travel trailer to make into an eggmobile for chickens on pasture. This seemed like a perfect recycling use to us. So today the trailer has been given away and moved off the property to go be turned into a portable laying house for chickens.

I hope it makes a great place for the chickens to lay tasty true free ranged eggs and be protected by predators at night.

Food Safety and You

Well there has been another major food contamination issue with meat. The largest ever beef recall for E. coli contamination. I want all of you to look a bit behind the headlines to see the system that allowed that to happen, what problems it presents for small farmers and how you can help keep your food safe.

No one disputes that the actions and contamination are serious and the animal welfare issues are significant. But why did they occur? The American consumer must share the blame for the problem. The huge push to get their food cheaper and cheaper has led to the systems breakdown that caused the problems. By wanting really cheap food the consumer has set a limit on what they will pay for. Yet the demand is there so the companies look for ways to cut costs to meet the demand. A lack of government funding for inspectors led to inspection delays. No real good traceability of the individual animal into the constituent parts means that if there is one bad one it affects and contaminates many thousands of pounds of meat.

I think the issue all started when we decided that in pursuit of low cost we'd let our manufacturing jobs go overseas. Globalization is nearly always a disaster when it's for basics and staples. When we lost those highly paid, skilled jobs the workers in the service industry had lower incomes driving food prices down. A factory worker in the early 1950's with a high school education could afford a car, a house and good food. But when you lose the manufacturing you move to service industry work which is lower paying, less skilled and the jobs are less reliable.

The push for bigger houses, more cars, more consumer goods at an ever decreasing price puts pressure on the companies to cut corners and costs. Open borders to basic goods from other countries mean we are forcing our workers to compete against places where the wages, standard of living and benefits are all much worse than in the US. That's why big companies want to move to other countries, lower costs, but at what price not only to our own workers but to the workers there.

The speed with which a big slaughter plant is forced to move nearly requires that workers push animals faster than they want to go. Any fearful or slower animal can get hurt or go down and yet there is no provision for working the animals calmly. To their credit many big plants have worked with Dr. Temple Grandin to develop less stressful handling systems but not all do and if the workers are not allowed the freedom to slow the process down or stop it if necessary all the good design in the world goes down the tubes. When faced with one very fearful and belligerent steer holding up the line the temptation is to move it along no matter how it gets done because the company will not accept a slowing down of the slaughter line. And with fewer and fewer people active in or living on farms there is a significant lack of knowledge by many people in how to move and behave around animals in a way that provides a calming influence. Anyone raised on a farm learns rather quickly the best way to get the stock to do what you want with a minimum of fuss, but we don't train our slaughter workers in stock handling but treat them like assembly line workers dealing with a car body.

Now come the calls for change, increased regulation and the like.

Well I have a very different idea of what we ought to do. I doubt if any politicians will support it yet I am convinced that it would make our food supply safer.

First : We need much more slaughter capacity. The regulations are so onerous now that only a huge plant processing hundreds of animals a day can support the overhead. I am willing to agree that more inspections are good, but I also know that it is possible to produce safe healthy meat products in ways that do not meet the USDA regulations. Any hunter knows that a carcass can cool over a longer time and still be safe. It's possible to process an animal in the field in the open and yet never have a contamination problem. In fact one of the best disinfectants known is sunlight but the US will not allow any processing to be done outside at all. At a minimum we should allow that any plant that is considered safe to process game meat for human consumption, or do custom processing of livestock should be allowed to package the meat for wholesale and retail sale. Ideally any farmer willing to maintain a food handlers license should be allowed to process and sell both retail and wholesale his or her own animals both as whole animals and retail cuts. We have to schedule our slaughter dates 12-18 months in advance. Think about it. I have to guess at the water, the grass growth, the lambing rates and figure out how many animals I will have finished and ready to slaughter before I have even finished butchering last years crop. I cannot get additional dates so I tend to schedule lots of them and then cancel dates if the animals are not ready. If I have a special customer request for a particular special cutting order I cannot accommodate it unless there is a slaughter date coming up soon. With such long lead times I and other farmers end up booking the butcher in advance and yet they are never sure if we will be ready for them and exactly how many we will bring on any given day. The excess dates I have to reserve make accurate scheduling a problem for the plant. More choices and more capacity would mean that I could schedule slaughter a month or a few weeks before the animals go and allow me to be more accurate to the plant on exactly how many are coming in on a particular day.

Second: Increase the identification requirements. I would like to see every single package of meat include the animal tag number on it and a place to track back to where that animal was born, raised, fed out and slaughtered. If the animal is processed on-farm under the rule above then the farmer address and contact info needs to be on every piece of meat sold. There is no reason we cannot implement that requirement especially in the smaller plants. Custom butchers are already skilled in processing a single animal at a time and keeping each and every carcass identified. With that level of tracking there is no reason why any current custom butcher cannot produce food that is at least as good a quality as the big plants and I would be willing to bet a sheep that it would test out cleaner with less bacterial contamination than even the best big plants.

Third: Replace inspection with testing. Instead of requiring an inspector have samples taken randomly of products and they must meet the contamination regulations. If you meet the rules you can sell your meat to any consumer, restaurant, wholesaler or store.

Fourth: Eliminate the restrictions on selling meat across state lines. If it's processed in a safe fashion there should be no restrictions on where it's sold.

Fifth: Eliminate the restrictions on how meat is packaged and who can buy it. Right now a farmer can process at the farm a certain number of poultry and sell them as whole birds only to direct consumers. If it's safe to do that, and the thousands of birds eaten annually that are processed that way prove it is safe, then that same farmer should be allowed to cut up the chicken into pieces and sell pieces individually both to consumers and to restaurants and other wholesalers. The birds or parts must be identified with the name and farm of the person who raised and slaughtered the bird. All the same options should also be available for the processing of all livestock species not just poultry. It's just as easy to properly process a sheep or a steer if you have the right equipment.

Sixth: Require the same level of care and regulations for any species that is eaten. Bison, rabbit, elk and all other alternative species should be held to the same regulations as their standard domestic counterparts when it comes to slaughter handling and safety but they are not. Some are more restrictive, elk must be tested for CWD before the carcass is cut while some are less restricted. All species should be treated the same. If there are individual disease issues that only affect a single species then address those individually but the basic regulations should be identical.

Seventh: Allow for any additional testing that any specific farm or processor want to do. The big hassle that occurred when a company wanted the right to test every steer for BSE is ridiculous. It doesn't matter if the USDA says it's not necessary, if the farmer or processor has customers who want the assurance of individual testing it should be allowed not prevented.

Eight: Eliminate the restrictions on what parts can be sold. Right now it's not legal for most plants to process sheep intestines for sausage casings. Or to provide the caul fat or many of the offal cuts like lights, sweetbreads etc. if someone wants them. Why not allow any part of an animal that the consumer wants to buy be available?

Implementing these changes would serve to distribute the food processing system. A distributed system is more stable and robust and less subject to catastrophic failure. If one plant has a contamination issue the labeling requirements would allow for the quick and simple identification of the affected meat without affecting other plants in the area. Increasing the slaughter options means that fewer animals have to be processed at any one place thus both limiting the time constraints and the contamination possibilities. Standardizing the regulations across all species eaten is just common sense. Why there are different regulations is beyond me.

Give farmers the tools we need to provide meats in a safe manner in a variety of ways and the consumer will have more choices.

However there is a cost, a big one. This is much more expensive than the lowest cost approach of the big plants. Smaller plants have to have workers skilled in a variety of jobs not just how to efficiently make one or 2 cuts on every carcass that passes them. That means training them in meat cutting science and it's not cheap. Small plants will also process fewer animals in a day so that means their prices will be higher on a per animal basis and those costs must be passed on to the consumer. However we will gain in less transportation costs as animals are slaughtered closer to their finishing farm and meat sold locally as well so the total dollar increase may not be as much as the big plants would have you believe.

So do write your various government officials about the problems but propose new and innovative solutions like mine rather than more of the same. We should have learned by now that verticle integration and big plants is a disaster when it comes to food safety. Our worst contamination problems come from large plants not small ones yet the small plants are going out of business under the weight of ill conceived regulations that do not prevent the safety issues they are designed to address.

We need a new system and the consumer will have to require it.

Working at the Winery

Yesterday Ken and I went up to Terror Creek Winery to help bottle wine. With the 4 of us we can bottle nearly 40 cases in a couple of hours if everything is set up when we get started. Here's Ken holding up the hose at the very end as we try to get the last drop of wine out and into the bottles.

Terror Creek makes wonderful wine, we helped bottle Chalet, a red table wine yesterday. Joan make the most wonderful Pinot Noir too. and her whites are also great. They are made in the Swiss style and the Chardonnay is not oaked. The Gewurtzaminer is a dry one and very good with all sorts of food. If you are in the area or see it in the store try Terror Creek wines for a special treat. You just might get one we helped bottle.

Off to Slaughter

It's fall and this year I vowed not to go into winter with as many sheep as I had last year. So our fall slaughtering has started. We've already done 16 adult ewes and today was 10 young rams.

We have to schedule slaughter dates over a year in advance and I have 66 slots this fall. I can always call a couple of weeks before the date and cancel a few but there is no way to add a few sheep to a slaughter date or get another date if I have more sheep ready to go than I planned on. I have already had to schedule my 2008 and 2009 slaughter dates. This can be a real problem, not only do I have to estimate how many sheep I will have to slaughter but I have to do it before we've even put rams in with the ewes and way before I know how lambing has gone. I've been caught before with more sheep than I can get killed and so this year I decided to make sure I had plenty of dates.

Our slaughter protocol starts at a minimum 3 weeks before the scheduled date. First step is deciding who is on the butcher list. Rams that butt us, ewes that have failed to care for lambs, have no more teeth or other similar problems are on the list. I also cull out to the freezer the lower ranking lambs. My goal is that the keepers of the ram lambs are all in the top 25% so I have 75% of the ram lambs born that are scheduled to be dinner. For ewes I try to select keepers (which for us also includes all for sale animals) from the top 50%. This year we produced 88 lambs, 49 ram lambs and 39 ewe lambs. So right off the bat I have to select about 37 rams and 20 ewes to butcher. That doesn't leave us many slots for old ewes so we'll end up with a few spare dinner sheep over winter.

Once the sheep are on the list we have many things we do to ensure that they produce good tasty meat with as little stress as we can manage. Our sheep are forage (grass and hay) finished. That means no grain. While this is more natural and produces wonderful healthy meat it does mean there is no excess glycogen in the muscles of the slaughter sheep. Muscle glycogen stores are what affect the Ph of the muscle at slaughter and the Ph and the subsequent changes in Ph as meat ages are what affects tenderness and taste. Grain fed animals have excess glycogen stored in their muscles. Under stress the glycogen of the muscles is used to combat the stress. We have no cushion that a grain fed animal would have so we need to do more to ensure that our animals are not stressed. Through experience we have learned that 15 minutes of really high stress will ruin the meat. And the bad effects from a significant stress situation will take 2 weeks to clear out of the muscles.

To reduce stress all butcher sheep are kept togther in sex segregated pens starting about 3 weeks before their slaughter date. So rams will be kept with rams and ewes with ewes. We keep all the slaughter sheep together so that they are with their buddies. One huge stress for animals is to have to deal with strangers so we make sure there are no strangers in the butcher pens.

Keeping the sheep in small pens means they are more used to us being near them so the stress of human contact is also minimized. We feed as high a legume feed as we have during the last 3 weeks. Legumes produce more muscle glycogen so a high legume diet is better for loading the muscles with glycogen.

We load the sheep into the trailer the night before so that the minimal stress of loading has several hours to wear off. We also keep feed and water in front of the sheep right until they walk off the trailer into the kill pens. Most slaughter houses want the animals to be off feed and water for 24 hours but for our forage finished sheep that would ruin the meat and stress the animals. We are fortunate to have a butcher willing to take the extra time it takes to properly prepare sheep who have full rumens. It's possible but does take more time and many places will not do it.

Finally, based on research data from both France and Finland on glycogen stores in the muscle of grass finished cattle we have added an additional insurance policy. Just before we pull out of the driveway we give each and every sheep about 10cc per 50 pounds body weight of a mixture of 50% propylene glycol and 50% molasses. Propylene glycol is a food additive for ruminants. It provides a quick dose of glycogen that gets into the muscles within 15 minutes of administering. It's often used to treat pregnancy toxemia or when sheep go off feed. Molasses makes the mixture good tasting and ensures the sheep will eat it. We found that this gives us about an hour and a half to get the sheep to the slaughterhouse and killed before they are using up their own muscle glycogen.

Once there we slowly and easily unload the sheep and get them into the pen. The butcher has worked with us to make sure our sheep are killed first so as not to run out of muscle glycogen.

This process is very labor intensive but we feel it produces the best meat we can and minimizes the stress our dinner sheep feel.

We are proud to provide tasty meat and also proud that we take care to make sure our precious sheep perform their function with as little stress as we can manage.

Wine, Mutton and Cheese

This past weekend the three main agricultural businesses on our mesa held a wine, cheese and mutton tasting. Our farm had mutton slow cooked shoulder roasts and 2 Welsh cheeses to taste. Terror Creek Winery had lovely fondue to go with their Swiss style wines. Stone Cottage Cellars had a selection of cheese paired with their wines and a fruit and chocolate fondue for their Alpine dessert wine.

We didn't advertise this event very much but we still got between 30-40 people to come by, most of whom had never been to our farm or either winery.

We set up signs on all the pens with what sheep were in there, and notes about our farm and farming philosophy.

It was well received and we hope to do this again next year.

Now we're gearing up for the big Paonia Harvest Festival that starts this weekend. Froday is the Chili Cookoff and the Pie Contest. Last year Ken was a judge, he hasn't been asked yet this year but I am still hopeful. It made deciding which piece to buy much simpler!

Saturday we will be open all day for the self-guided Farm and Winery tours. It usually gets rather crazy, in years past we've had as many as 10-15 people show up at once all wanting to learn about our sheep. Sunday we'll be back in town for hte last farmers' Market of the year.

If you are anywhere near Western Colorado, consider coming for a great time and fun event in Paonia. See you this weekend!

Local Food Dinner

One of our local farms Zephyros Farm hosted a farm dinner yesterday evening. About 125 people attended the event celebrating local foods. Each course was prepared by a top local chef and the menu included the sources for all the ingredients. Ryan Hardy from Montangna @ the Little Nell in Aspen did the appetizer course, Eleni Stelter from Eleni's Uptown in Paonia did the salad, Dava Parr from Fresh and Wyld in Paonia did the side vegetables, Mark Fischer of 689 and Phat Thai in Carbondale did the main course and Bob Isaacson of Smith Fork Ranch in Crawford did the desserts. Local wines and distilled spirits were available as well.

We were thrilled to provide all the Black Welsh Mutton for the main course.

Today it's back to the grind of end of summer farm work but last night was a welcome break.