To all our Boston-based locarnivore friends, come satisfy your craving for local, organic and humanely raised meat. We are bringing our Tamworth pork(including smoked cuts) and other Grace Note Farm products to Cambridge next Sunday. Come meet the Grace Note Farm farmers and stock your freezer with some tasty treats!
Limited quantities are now available of bacon, ham, and smoked pork shoulder processed at the highly acclaimed Vermont Smoke and Cure (sister company to the Farmer’s Diner), and they are out of this world! They use an old-fashioned, regional recipe, utilizing maple wood and corn cobs for smoking, to create a flavor that is subtle and divine. Get yours now! They won’t last long.
When: Sunday March 14, 6:00 pm until ? Where: Look for our truck in the harvest co-op parking lot, at 581 Mass Ave. (click for map)
Order ahead using the comments box below. Please come with your own cloth shopping bag. You can either pay on the day by cash or check, or paypal us ahead of time if you would like to pre-order (which we can arrange via email).
Hope to see you there. We appreciate your support!
Grace Note Farm is not certified organic, but we abide by organic growing practices. We only buy organic inputs for our farm. We provide free-choice certified organic feed to our chickens and pigs. They have ample barn space for shelter and also free access to a large fenced pasture, allowing them to roam outdoors for exercise and entertainment, and to supplement their diets by munching on yummy bugs, plants, and other forage. This keeps the animals healthier (and happier) and also gives their meat a richer, more complex flavor.
Raising most livestock means buying alot of feed. Over the year, we spend more on feed than on any other single item, which means that growing and transporting feed for our animals creates most of our ecological footprint. Take pigs, for example. Pigs really like to eat. They eat voraciously, at every opportunity. A pig eats around 800 lbs of food in its lifetime. In our neck of the woods, a 50lb bag of organic pig food costs nearly $22, while the non-organic option will run you $11. This extra $175 or so per pig is a frequent topic of conversation among our farming friends. In Massachusetts, you have several choices of farm to buy meat from if you want animals that were humanely raised, but many of those farms do not feed organic food. Our meat costs a little more than theirs. Is the additional cost justified? We feel strongly that all farm inputs must be organic, including the hay we use for bedding and the food we feed to our pigs and poultry. I realized it was high time for me to organize my thoughts on this subject and write a post saying why.
The three attributes that are prohibited in organic feed, but that are standard practice for non-organic, are 1) use of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers on the grain, 2) genetically engineered grain and 3) antibiotics in the feed. The first two are not unrelated, as you probably know. The reason for the engineering in genetically-engineered crops is to introduce traits that either replicate pesticides (Bt corn, for example) or that make the plant tolerate herbicides (Roundup Ready crops). So the use of GM crops, among other problems, leads to more insecticide and herbicide in the environment. Although it won’t be on the label, grain that is not organic has a high probability of being GM. According to USDA stats (from 2007, so the figure could be higher now), 73% of corn, 91% of soy, 75% of canola, and virtually all sugarbeets grown in the US are from genetically modified seed.
Insecticides and herbicides sprayed on grain that is subsequently eaten by animals builds up as residues in their meat, especially in the fatty tissues. And it also builds up in the human who later consumes that meat. Pesticide exposure in humans is linked to lymphoma, asthma, alzheimers, infertility, neurological disorders, and fatal birth defects. Many pesticides are known endocrine disruptors, which is fancy science talk for messing up your hormones – which regulate things like brain function, insulin, reproduction, metabolism, building muscle mass, etc. This looks to me like a list of the top health problems in the US. Funny that their connection with pesticides is not widely discussed in the media.
Although avoiding direct consumption of pesticide-riddled food is desirable on its own, there’s also the larger picture to consider. As this wikipedia article reminds us, pesticides don’t just go on the target plant, they go all over the place, disbursing through the air and flowing along in ground and surface water, negatively impacting wildlife and people who live downstream or downwind, leading to a long chain of ecological impact. Farm workers exposed to synthetic chemicals have a much larger incidence of cancer, chronic diarrhea, and other diseases than the general population. Their life expectancy of 49 years(!) (compared to 75 for an average American) is largely due to pesticide exposure. Their children have a much higher risk of developing fatal birth defects. Rural communities near cropland where pesticides are applied also see increased incidence of these diseases (see this PANNA article).
The harmful effects of pesticides on wildlife (birds, plants, aquatic animals) are too numerous to list. One of the founding principles we base our practices on, is to raise food without negatively impacting wildlife. Wikipedia reports that “The USDA and USFWS estimate that about 20% of the endangered and threatened species in the US are jeopardized by use of pesticides”. Wow. Count me out. Pesticides seem to be particularly harmful to natural pest reducers, such as frogs, lacewings, lady bugs, etc. So the application of pesticides reduces the natural system’s ability to control pests, thus deepening the farmer’s dependence on the pesticide. What a beautiful system for the pesticide salesman. Natural pollinators, such as honeybees, are also harmed by pesticides.
On top of all of these issues, the age of energy descent is upon us. Synthetic pesticides and herbicides, being derived from petroleum, deepen the dependence of agriculture on petroleum-based inputs. We would rather reduce our reliance on petroleum, and reward those grain growers who are doing the same. (Realizing, of course, that there are many other petroleum dependencies built into our supply and distribution chain).
Turning to the issue of GM crops, when growers switch to Roundup-ready crops, which are engineered to withstand being sprayed with herbicide, they typically use more herbicide for weed control than they would without the GM trait. This leads to an arms race with the weeds. The weeds develop more tolerance, more herbicide must be applied, and the cycle repeats. It is estimated that US farmers apply 15 times more herbicide on GM cropland than on non GM. The herbicide-resistance is leading to the development of so-called super-weeds, which are now basically unstoppable. Read more about this on source watch . Besides their encouraging more herbicide use, GM crops are a prime suspect in the incredible increase in food allergies in recent years. They have also been shown to cause liver and kidney damage in lab animals. There are many other reasons to be wary of GM crops (genetic contamination to other open pollinating crops, for one), and we would rather our dollars go to grain farmers who choose not to raise them.
Then there is the issue of antibiotics. Organic animal feed does not contain antibiotics, but conventionally raised animals are given low daily doses of antibiotics in their feed. Not only to counteract the prevalence of disease that goes hand-in-hand with high-density factory farms, but also as a growth stimulant (meat animals put on weight faster when given the antibiotics). This practice contributes to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We may face a future where infectious diseases are not controllable, largely because of our profligate use of antibiotics for livestock. CBS news even did a piece on this problem. A recent report finds that antibiotic-resitant traits are building up in soil microorganisms. MRSA is a growing cause for concern, especially its increasing presence in medical facilities.
I could probably come up with more reasons, but those are my top 6. Taken all together, the decision to buy organic food for our animals seems clear. There is a growing recognition that animal feed crops are a large source of ecological damage – both in terms of pollution and climate change – (see the FAO report Livestock’s Long Shadow), but organic feed does lessen some of that impact. When you buy meat, dairy, and eggs, I hope you will keep these points in mind and buy organic.
Hi. I reflect about the gardens in winter. Gardening to me is a great spiritual exercise in mindfulness. It is very easy, in the quiet of my work, to let my mind drift off. I often leave the present moment and think about things I did that hurt someone, or things that others did to me. I think about politics and unsustainable destructive practices, like pollution. I get this negative voice in my head that is useless chatter. Then, I notice something really cool in my surroundings, and I am brought back to the present. I am using gardening and other farm work as a meditative exercise to acknowledge thoughts, then let them go. It is very beautiful when nature gives me little wake up calls throughout my day to bring me back to the present moment. The more I garden and do farm chores, the more mindful of the present moment I have become. That is all I wanted to say.
Our organic-fed, pastured, heritage Tamworth pork is ready for ordering now. We had our first taste of it last weekend and BOY HOWDY is it good (if I do say so myself). I now know why Tamworths have a reputation as the tastiest breed of pig. Pick up on-farm. Please call or email us to place an order.
UPDATE: We will be bringing orders to the Boston area, probably for a weekend pickup date. Boston-area customers, please email us if you’d like to find out more.
Cut
Price per lb
Typical package size
Fresh Cuts
Pork Chops - 1/2″ cut
$9.95
2 chops per package, ~.75 lbs
3/4″ Chops
$10.95
2 chops per pkg, ~1 lb
Ground pork
$8.95
1 lb
Regular ribs
$10.95
1 lb
Country-style ribs
$11.95
4.5 lb
Butt roast – boneless
$10.99
3.5 – 5.5 lb
Loin end roast -boneless
$12.99
3.5 – 5.0 lb
Leaf lard
$2.95
2 lb
Cured/Smoked Cuts*
Smoked shoulder (nitrite-free)
$12.95
3 lbs*
Bacon! (nitrite-free)
$20.00
10 oz pack
Smoked ham (nitrite-free)
$13.95
3 lbs *
* Smoked/Cured cuts will be available for pickup around Feb 15. The weights here are a guess, we will not know actual weights until they come back from smoking. The highly acclaimed Vermont Smoke & Cure is doing the custom smoking/curing for us.
I met another hero of mine this weekend! And he wore a cool wool hat!
I was given the privilege and opportunity to pick up Joel Salatin at the airport. He was speaking at the NOFA Mass Winter conference. In plain English, that would be the Northeast Organic Farming Association Massachusetts Chapter 23rd Annual Winter Conference. The date for the conference was January 16th, 2010. I had also signed up for his all-day seminar there. Joel was kind and generous with his time and energy. He has “good character.” I recorded every lecture, including Joel’s NOFA Keynote speech that day. I asked Joel if I could post his talks on our farm website and he said “You can post all of it, you can sell it, do whatever you want with it.” What kind of person is this who would be so free with his knowledge? Of course, we are not going to sell these gems. We are going to donate our server hard drive space to Spread The Word. Joel Salatin is up there in my mind with any other genius. To meet him and be a recipient of his generosity only uplifts me and inspires me to continue to Aim For The Mark, to Be a Light in the World. To meet Joel was a thrill. I missed approx. 5-10 minutes of his first lecture because my recorder’s batteries died. But there wasn’t a loss of information really because he was talking about his micro-climate on his farm in Virginia.
Here are the audio files. For you non-geeks, I highly suggest you download these files to your own machine so you have your own copies. These lectures can be easily loaded into your mp3 player of choice, or played on your computer. (Right click your mouse on each link to download each mp3 to your hard drive. On Macs ctrl-click each link to download. Or just click on the zip archive and get them all at once).
These audio files have been captured, edited and digitally enhanced by Kent Byron at Grace Note Farm. My audio and video expertise is for hire or barter. We need a world where important information is not lost and can be repeated. Contact me if interested in capturing your own precious knowledge.
Check out Joel Salatin’s books. Great stuff! This guy knows how to turn a profit on a farm and do it with grace!
Hi. I’m Kent Byron. I’ve been a gardener for 20 years, off and on. The more I found out about our commercial food supply, the more I learned about organic gardening so we could raise our own food. I am not simply alarmed; I am also having a great time. If you care to know about the food that’s being eaten by the majority of Americans and most likely you and your children, I suggest the following three books:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver is an avid gardener and homesteader with marvelous writing prowess. This book is a fun and easy read with excellent research. A good introduction, this book reveals what you buy at the store and what you get when you go out to dine. This book is also filled with great stories of homesteading and its rewards. I recommend this book to start off, if you are new to the topic.
Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
This book is more dense but should alert you as to what the Corporate world and Wall Street are doing to your food supply. As I see it, there is far greater threat to our food than pointing the finger at terrorists. The corporate shenanigans are happening right in your area.
Harvest For Hope by Jane Goodall
This is a very detailed critique of our modern food supply, particularly about the unknown potential dangers and unintended consequences of genetically modified food.
We hatched and raised heritage turkeys this year. The hatchlings, now grown, are destined to grace the Thanksgiving tables of several lucky Massachusetts families. The older generation, which were slaughtered in June, have been a major gustatory pleasure for our own table this year. We have shared many delicious roasted turkey dinners with family and friends, as well as feasting on turkey enchiladas, turkey soup, and turkey tetrazzini.
I have cooked these turkeys using the same method I use to roast a chicken: Slather the skin with butter and then sprinkle on some seasoning (herbs de provence or shallot pepper), sprinkle a bunch of salt and pepper in the cavity, throw in some shallots or a halved onion, and bake on 375. Baste several times during the cooking. Turn the oven up to 425 for the last 20 minutes, to crisp the skin. The turkeys were amazing, moist, and flavorful. My mother cannot stop raving about how great the turkey was that we ate when they visited in September
Lately I’ve been reading up on advice for cooking heritage breed turkeys, to prepare for questions that might be asked by my customers, since they are slightly different than the commercial birds most folks are used to. Even though my simple roasting technique worked great, I guess they can be a little tricky if you are used to cooking commercial turkeys. First and foremost, heritage birds have more flavor and more fat, so they do not need to be enhanced by grilling or brining. Because of their additional fat layer, they are sometimes called ’self-basting’, but I did baste mine just to be safe. Second, there is less white meat to dark meat ratio, so they cook slightly faster. I guess if you’re used to the standard cooking time required for commercial birds, it can be easy to dry out a heritage turkey by over-cooking it. Third, since they cook quicker, your stuffing will probably not get fully cooked. So you have to either pre-cook it, or just stick to dressing.
I found contradictory advice on the internet about cooking heritage turkeys. Is it better brined or not? Cook on a high or low temperature? Cover it or don’t? You can find someone recommending each of these options. My impression is that maybe they are just making too big a deal about the differences. I think that as long as you keep it simple, and pay attention not to over-cooking it, you will have a wonderful-tasting bird. Or, perhaps the right approach is to think of your heritage turkey as a really big chicken, and cook it like you would roast a chicken. Here are the links I found with advice on cooking heritage turkeys:
We have several dozen fruit trees here at Grace Note Farm. Which is both a blessing and a curse. Fruit trees, not only stone fruits like apples and peaches but also brambles and blueberry bushes, and even our prized hardy kiwi vine, need to be pruned. We have used generic brand pruners and loppers from the big box Home Mart in the past, but they never lasted long and could not take much heavy use, or when you try to cut a branch that is ever-so-slightly too large, the two jaws of the cutting edge are stretched apart from each other and the tool is ruined.
So last winter we decided that we were ready to invest in some well made, heavy duty pruning tools. Being yankees (and environmentalists), we also prefer things that will last and that can be repaired if necessary. Several people recommended Felco pruners, but they are shipped from over seas, and we prefer to source our inputs for the farm locally whenever possible. After much internet research we decided to try Florian brand pruners, and it was a great decision. We use the Mini loppers for large jobs and the smaller handheld pruners for smaller jobs. They were worth every penny. Here’s why:
They are heavy, well made tools, made right here in the USA, and they come with a lifetime warranty
They are designed with an amazing ratchet-cut action that adds alot of power to your grip. You do not have to apply much force to cut through large branches, because the ratchet amplifies your force.
You can get replacement parts for them, or send them down to Connecticut if they need to be repaired
They deliver a sharp, clean cut every time.
We definitely recommend Florian pruners if you need professional quality pruning or other cutting tools, at a medium price. Three cheers for great tools!
Here at Grace Note Farm, we believe that animals deserve to have a happy life, even if they are destined for your freezer at the end of that happy life. Unlike commercially raised pigs that are raised indoors in tight confinement, the pigs we raise at Grace Note Farm roam in large fenced pastures and get rotated onto fresh ground every few weeks. They eat, nap, romp, play, and socialize as their natures direct them, outdoors in the fresh air when they want, or lying about indoors on a pile of hay if they prefer that. They also eat a varied diet of plants and animals as they forage on the land (pigs are omnivores), supplemented with free-choice organic grain. This is good for the animals and good for our land as well.
If you’ve been asking yourself “Where can I get organic pastured meat in Massachusetts?”, look no further. Our batch of Tamworth pigs will be available for sale in early winter. We raise Tamworths because they are good foragers, which allows them to obtain a portion of their food from the pasture (and therefore raising them creates less dependence on trucked-in grain). We also chose to raise heritage animals like the Tamworth hog because it helps maintain genetic diversity among food animals. Tamworths are also prized by chefs and restaurants because they are mighty tasty. But you don’t have to take my word for it: see this testimonial to the Tamworth on Chow Hound. It is reported on the web that Bristol University carried out taste tests using both commercial and rare breed pigs in a scientifically controlled experiment, and the Tamworth was judged as having the best tasting meat.
We are currently taking orders for 1/2 or whole pigs, priced at $6.00/lb hanging weight*. There is an excellent and detailed writeup on the Sugar Mountain Farm website that shows how much meat is in a half a pig . The meat will be frozen and available for pickup on the farm the first week of January, 2010. We can also get the ham and bacon smoked for an additional $3.00/lb.
If you would like to reserve a 1/2 or whole pig, please email or call us to make payment arrangements. We will require a $200 deposit to hold your order. Order soon, as we expect to sell out.
Subject to availability, you may order individual cuts. If you would like to be placed on the waiting list for individual cuts such as chops or roasts, please email us. (Updated Jan 23, 2010 – call or email us to purchase individual cuts. No waitlist necessary)
*Hanging weight is the slaughter weight of the pig ‘on the hook’, before it is butchered into individual cuts. Expect to loose 10 – 20 lbs of weight per half pig between the hanging weight and finished cuts.
Biochar is getting alot of attention lately as a technique both for improving soil, for growing plants, and for sequestering carbon dioxide, so I’ve been wanting to learn how to make it. I attended Yarrow’s biochar conference in NH and came home to experiment with my outdoor wood boiler and lo and behold, the universe blessed me with a way to quickly make it without special tools or extra inner-barrels. I plan to eventually put up a youtube video of how to do it but thought the discovery was too important really to wait. We need change in this world NOW. So here it goes.
To make biochar:
burn large 5-6 logs, 3-4′ in length in center of stove as usual.
cut 2-4″ thick slices off logs in the woodpile and make about 12 slices. The logs can be any diameter, just cut them thinly to 2″ or so.
pile those thinner slices on both sides of the main fire, so those slices are against the stove sides of the boiler, in piles all down the side of the boiler
open up 4-8 hours later. The main fire baked the thin slices into char due to (I am guessing here) increased surface area of the slices beyond the regular logs. If you see wood grain in the char, bake longer. If the slices have crumbled into tinier black pieces, its char and time to remove. If you probe a slice and it crumbles, its ready too.
since the char is on the sides, its easy to shovel out
shovel, dump outside and douse with water
all crushable char is good, or so I’ve been told. 99% of all my char was good so far. Treat char with compost tea or equiv for a week or two. Not sure what is optimum tea time.
one burn cycle of this makes about 3 gallon bucket and I bet experimentation with the amount of log slices, production could be easily expanded to 5 gallon volumes of char every 4-8 hours. When crushed, it goes a long way in the beds. I couldn’t wait the two weeks tea time which was risky, but mixed char in with my transplants after a few days of tea. I haven’t charred every square foot of my beds yet, but char is local near every plant root, at least. I am watering with compost tea from time to time too to make sure the soil-embedded char keeps getting inoculated. I have nothing to compare the char beds to as I have no control beds but everything looks healthy and green.
One person at the biochar conference told me the oxygenated char, which is my char, is actually better than the kind of char you smother and choke away from oxygen (the word escapes me here…I think it’s “Pyrolysis”).
I’m sure you know if char isn’t aged or put with tea for a short time, it will set back a garden for several weeks so I am trying to be careful and patient with the production.
Let me know if this technique works for any of you, please.
Feel free to post a comment below if you want to start a discussion. I have no evidence that biochar’s actually going to do me any good. I am taking a leap of faith with science, I’ve seen A/B comparisons of garden beds with and without char, and I’m just going ahead and putting it in all my beds. If biochar indeed is what scientists claim it to be I am excited because I’m constantly building soil for my organic beds. To be able to store what would be leaching away from my beds is very exciting. I know I’m getting old when something like that is exciting.
