Scale fee increases

All scales used for commercial purposes, such as selling at a farmers market, need to meet two requirements. One, they must be "legal for trade", meaning they're manufactured in such a way as to be reliable and inspectable/adjustable by the government. These are generally much more expensive (hundreds of dollars) than the standard cheap kitchen-type scales you can buy anywhere for home use. Two, they have to be inspected every year, and given an official sticker saying so. Until recently, this cost $5 per scale, and was conducted by a Weights & Measures inspector from the Missouri Department of Agriculture who would either come out to the place of business (like our farm) or try to do many scales at once (such as moving down the aisle at the farmers market).

We received a letter this fall that the annual scale inspection fee, for the kinds of scales market farmers use, was hereby increased from $5 to $30 (fees for scales of all sizes are going up, from little platform scales to railroad scales). I want to discuss both what this increase means for our farm business, and what it says about why people like us keep losing faith in government.

First, the impact on us. We currently have two certifiable scales that cost around $200 each. If these each have a lifespan of 10 years (could easily be more), those would have cost us an extra $50 each to keep in operation. Now it will cost us $300 each. That's a big cost increase for a low-overhead farm like ours that is very careful with its budget. Also, we were discussing upgrading to a better platform and/or digital scale (very expensive) to make certain transactions easier and faster for customers. Now that's off the table, because that money in our budget just got eaten by the new inspection fees. We're grateful that we didn't make that purchase just before finding out about the new fee structure.

Now the more complicated part. The reason given for this increase is that the division is trying to keep its fee structure on par with the cost of providing the service. That's absolutely fair, and I applaud the concept. Certainly, the fact that an inspector might drive from Jeff City here and back for $10 worth of scale inspections isn't the most efficient use of taxpayer money. So I don't have a philosophical argument with raising the rates, especially since this is the sort of service governments are best suited to providing.

What bothers me is the context for doing so, and the way in which it's being done. First of all, making the rates standard for any number of scales is silly, though it is currently required by law. Accepting for the sake of argument that $30 for the first scale is fair, why charge the second, third, etc. scale the same? It actually takes about five minutes to do the scale inspection, such that if we had four scales we'd be paying $120 for 20 minutes of work. Why not have a sliding fee structure to make the cost and time use more efficient for larger numbers of scales? Or have a surcharge for travelling to a specific lone site, while lowering the rates for very efficient settings like a farmers market, where the inspector can serve 60 farms in a couple hours? Or give us the option to take our scales into one of their offices to reduce their travel expenses and to save us money?

Second, the context for this fee increase exposes one of our core concerns about governments: that they operate in a world largely free from consequences. Let's look at the law regarding scale inspection fees (the current wording was passed in 1994):

2. On the first day of January, 1995, and each year thereafter, the director of agriculture shall ascertain the total receipts and expenses for the testing of weighing and measuring devices referred to in subdivisions (2), (3), (4) and (5) of subsection 1 of this section and shall fix the fees or rate per hour for such weighing and measuring devices to derive revenue not more than the total cost of the operation, but such fees shall not be fixed in amounts less than the amounts contained in subdivisions (2), (3),(4) and (5) of subsection 1 of this section.

In other words, it is the legal responsibility of the Department of Agriculture to keep tabs on the budget for scale inspections, and every year adjust fees as necessary to keep their budget roughly in line. Yet since the current law was passed 15 years ago, that never once happened. As the letter itself admits:

Although the law required that the fee be adjusted periodically to cover the cost of inspections, the fee rate has not changed since 1983 for small capacity scales and 1994 for large capacity scales. Failure to adjust the inspection fee to cover the program costs was noted as a deficiency in a recent State audit report. Unfortunately, as a result the Department is now faced with cutting this valuable program or adjusting the fees accordingly to cover the costs.

And so for fifteen years, businesses were taught to base their budget on the same low fee, instead of adapting to a gradual and expected annual adjustment. Now, all of the sudden, a state audit noticed that the law wasn't being followed, and a decision was made to rectify it through a massive fee increase. In a narrow view, good for them for finally paying attention (or rather, the State auditor's office). But in a larger view, this exposes some real problems in the way governments work.

If we, as a private business, ignored a Missouri law for fifteen years, we could be prosecuted, fined, or even jailed. We could easily lose our business, whether directly or through the economic hit of prosecution and restitution of any unpaid fees or taxes plus a penalty (not to mention bad publicity). But when a government agency ignores its own law for fifteen+ years, nothing happens to the people who didn't do their job; nothing happens to the agency's budget, their powers, or their right to implement/enforce policy. The penalty for fixing their wrong simply falls on the rest of us who had nothing to do with that failure.

And this sort of thing is why people like us end up sounding anti-government. I'm not anti-government philosophically, but I too often become disgusted with government in the real world, where all too often government failures and incompetence have real and serious consequences for citizens and businesses. For private citizens, failure to know and follow the law is not an excuse. Far too often, for government agencies it's an unpunished fact of life.

And this is one reason I'm so strongly against increased regulation of farms and food safety: because one mistake on our part could put us out of business, but a plethora of screwups by the FDA or any other agency won't have any effect on their power to enforce or ignore the law as they see fit. And that's simply not right.

Sweet potato curry

After having a very nice vegetable curry at Bluebird Bistro on our recent trip, I was determined to recreate something similar at home. I've made various forms of curries for many years, but generally relied on the crutch of manufactured curry paste. This time, I decided to ditch the paste (which we were out of anyway) and create my own spice mix, based on the abundant varieties of on-farm peppers we dried this year. These have an amazing, strong flavor when used in a spice mix, but I have no idea if store-bought ones would be as potent, so you may want to experiment if that's what you use.

It's a good winter recipe, relying on well-storing items like leeks and sweet potatoes, and easily frozen items like peas, though obviously you could use fresh ingredients at other times. I don't have a photo, but this came out wonderfully and was quite easy to make. The amounts are estimates, as I didn't take notes while making it. On-farm ingredients in italics.

SPICE MIX
4-6 dried anaheim peppers (4" long)
2 dried jalapenos
1/4 cup chopped dried bell peppers
2t coriander
1t cardamom
1/2t turmeric
1/2t annato seed (a Filipino spice)

OTHER
1.5 lb sweet potatoes, sliced 1/2" thick
2 cups snow peas
4 small leeks, chopped into rounds 1/4" thick
2 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
1 14oz can coconut milk
1T soy sauce


To make the spice mix, roughly chop all the dried peppers with a knife, then place in a food processor with a sharp blade. Blend for as long as it takes to shatter these into a powdery mix with a few stubborn chunks remaining. Meanwhile, grind the other spices with a mortar and add to the processor when you're almost done. Warning: the pepper powder/dust is pretty strong and will have you sneezing if you're not careful. The aroma is delightful, though.


Meanwhile, bring the coconut milk to a simmer in a large saucepan and add the sweet potatoes, leeks, garlic, soy sauce, and spice mix (you might start with half and see how the flavor develops, as my estimated quantities are just that). Simmer, stirring now and then, until the sweet potatoes are almost soft. You may need to add water if there isn't enough liquid to cover everything. A few minutes before you want to eat, add the snow peas so they cook just enough; you don't want them reduced to mush.

Serve over rice or noodles.

Scratch on-farm BBQ sauce

We like making things from scratch rather than buying them, especially condiments and processed foods; I've been making my own mustard for years. This fall, as I began to experiment with both pork and a smoker, developing a reliable BBQ sauce recipe became a high priority. After several rounds of experimentation, here's one I came up with that we've really liked. It would probably be considered a Kansas City-style sauce, a sweet/sour tomato sauce that's rich and tasty. Using our own farm-smoked chipotle peppers really adds to the flavor. It doesn't have to be a meat condiment; the flavor is plenty good for adding flavor to rice, eggs, and lots of other things. As I often do, I'll note on-farm ingredients in italics.

2 red onions

5 cloves garlic

1T cumin

1T coriander

1t mustard seed

1t paprika

1t black pepper

2 chipotle peppers (our own dried & smoked jalapenos; dried or fresh regular jalapenos work too)

2lb tomatoes

1 cup water

1t salt

1/4 cup sorghum

1/4 cup cider vinegar

1/2 cup tomato paste (made & canned in the fall)

Saute onions, then garlic, in a bit of oil in a large pot. If using fresh jalapenos, chop in with garlic. If using dried peppers, grind with all spices in a good mortar and stir them in for a few more minutes. When this is all nicely aromatic and sizzling, add everything else, stir to blend, and allow to simmer for as long as you want. I generally go for a few hours, to really blend the flavors and get it nice and thick. At some point I'll combine everything with an immersion blender to get the texture I want. Adjust flavors as needed; it should be a good blend of sweet and sour with a nice kick to it. This freezes well for easy use later, and is good to make in fall with abundant tomatoes, or winter with canned and dried ingredients.

Ozark Winter Travel Part II: North Central Arkansas

Part II in our January off-farm travels; read Part I here.

After spending a day relaxing with Joanna's parents in NW Arkansas, we headed southeast toward the core target of our trip: Buffalo National River, deeper in the Arkansas Ozarks and a very familiar area from Joanna's upbringing. Taking some back roads where possible, we enjoyed the rugged scenery highlighted by traces of snow.

We spent the afternoon hiking a long loop around and over Rush Mountain, home to a once-booming mine district. Starting in the 1880s, large deposits of zinc drew miners and companies to this remote area, lacing the hillsides with mine shafts, roads, buildings, and more. Most traces are still there, a cruel temptation to two geologists who nevertheless know better than to sneak in:
The road into the Rush area drops steeply from a nearby ridge line, and hadn't been plowed since the recent snowfall. We considered it for a minute, and decided that the presence of other straight tire tracks leading down (or up) and the fact that the temperature hadn't risen above freezing since the snow fell, meant the road would provide sufficient traction. With the help of 4WD, it was no problem in either direction, and we had the valley to ourselves.

The town of Rush still contains numerous buildings remaining from the collapse of the local mining industry, starting in the 1920s. We enjoyed poking around various foundations and remnants, such as this blacksmith shop:

Overall, the Ozarks are very difficult to photograph at a wide scale. From higher elevations, broad panoramas of river valleys, sheer limestone bluffs, and steep topography are clear to the naked eye, but are mostly seen through screens of trees that render cameras useless. So if you haven't been here, you'll just have to imagine the enjoyment of following slopes and ridge lines through the seemingly endless rugged terrain. With the light recent snowfall, every subtlety of the topography stood out sharply in the clear sun, a bonus for our landscape-trained eyes.

That evening we headed for our chosen accommodations, a small cabin at Buffalo Point, on a high ridge overlooking the Buffalo River itself. If you look closely in the photo below, you'll see several small buildings on the far ridge, though our cabin was set just to the left along the ridge without a direct river view. Same difference. Note also in the photo below just how low the river is for this time of year; the huge exposed gravel bars are impressive.

This cabin was perfect for us, essentially one room with a small but adequate kitchen complete with stove, oven, and fridge. This latter never worked while we were there, but the outdoor temperatures hovered around freezing during the day and hit the teens at night, allowing us to keep all our food in coolers in the truck with no ill effects. They must have been spending a fortune on electricity, as the one electric heater seemed to have two settings: sauna or off.

The next day, we headed for the Blanchard Springs area, a portion of the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest including an impressive cavern system, beautiful flowing spring, and excellent hiking. We spent the morning taking the only winter cave tour, which turned out to be one of the best-run tours we've ever taken. Our guide, a Forest Service employee, was thoroughly knowledgeable about cave history and biology, clearly referencing various studies she'd been involved in recently and generally being professional and well-informed. We've taken many cheesy and uneducated cave tours, mostly in private caves, but including a real doozy in a Missouri State Park in which our guide attempted to explain how different layers of the cave walls correlated to The Flood (yes, that one). It was a real thrill to follow a professional through a beautiful cave, and we took our time enjoying each others' company (we got the sense she enjoyed us as much as we did her).

The road into the valley was closed to vehicles due to snow/ice, though it was much clearer than the unblocked road into Rush. Odd to see the USFS more concerned about road conditions than the NPS. Thus we decided to hike down instead, and had a great time. After eating a light lunch at the truck, we secured some basic maps from the cave staff and headed off for a long loop hike down into the Sylamore Creek valley. Reaching the valley floor, we first headed up a side branch to the outflow of Blanchard Springs, which drains the cavern system in a very nice setting:
Following this, we headed off on our loop, which slowly climbed the ridge overlooking Sylamore Creek while offering excellent though unphotographable views of the region. This took the rest of the day, under perfect sun on powdery snow, and was just a lovely way to spend a day. Oh, yes, and we stopped by the impressive rock shelter near the Blanchard Springs campground. Appearances are deceiving; the opening is around 30' high and that's a huge bluff above it.
The following day, we left directly from our cabin to hike down in to the Panther Creek valley, heading for the Indian Rock House, a giant bluff shelter. On the way, we thoroughly enjoyed some of the more subtle geologic features, such as this sculpted creek bottom:
And this freshly-forming ice pile at the base of a waterfall, mimicking the development of cave features in fast-forward:
We took no photos at Indian Rock House, as we'd forgotten to change camera batteries and it was dead by then. I don't think we could capture it anyway; the feature is a truly massive bluff overhang that feels the size of an airplane hangar. Facing south, it was warmly lit by the brilliant sun, and we could relax against a rock spire and eat a needed snack. On one side of the shelter, a cave stream emerges briefly into the open before flowing back into an underground passage, providing the soothing rush of water echoing throughout the chamber. We explored a short distance into several small caves leading off in various directions, but not far enough for concern or to disturb any bats deeper in their recesses. I even Googled other images of the shelter, but found nothing that remotely captures its size or the sense of awe you feel standing within it.

From here, we hiked up and over a steep ridge to the entrance of Bat Cave, which was impressive and tempting but also closed in winter (as most caves are) due to concerns about disturbing hibernating bats and the concerning spread of White Nose Disease. We didn't like the route of the trail up, so took our own route back and thoroughly enjoyed seeing a different and little-visited landscape.

We finished this loop with time left in the day, so headed down to the Buffalo River itself to enjoy walking the gravel bars. We found a small rock shelter along this bluff (below), out of the wind and warmed by the sun, where we settled in and spent several hours reading, sipping tea from our thermos, and snacking. Despite an overall air temperature around freezing, this little pocket was so warm we took off half our layers and ended up napping. Several kingfishers were active along the river, and we enjoyed listening to and watching these neat birds.
This was our last night, and we headed for home the next day. These three days and three nights in the Arkansas Ozarks were nearly perfect, though. Ideal weather for hiking, with clear skies and temps no higher than freezing, making hiking plenty comfortable but keeping everyone else away; we saw effectively no one for three days. Light snow on the ground to bring out the topography; active birds & wildlife foraging; a diverse mixture of hikes, landscapes, and history. Despite our cabin's mild flaws (broken fridge, tiny shower with head at chest height, hellish heater), it was cozy and perfect for our purposes, making cooking good meals a breeze and offering plenty of comfortable settings for relaxing reading (I finished Volume 3 of Will Durant's History of Civilization and started Volume 4 of Dumas Malone's biography of Thomas Jefferson). Just a perfect finish to the trip.

We're glad to be home, though, back in our own bed and back to work on our long winter to-do list. The weather has been seriously wintry ever since we returned, forcing our focus onto the indoor tasks. With over 8" of snow outdoors, up to 5" more forecast through the weekend, and temp not going above freezing for the forseeable future, we just work on the indoor stuff and hope February will clear up some. Though given how cloudy it's been for the last few months, I'm going to have to start taking down dead trees for firewood within a few weeks.

Good to be home.

Ozark Winter Travel Part I: Southwest Missouri

In mid-January, we were fortunate enough to take a week off and travel a bit through southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. This was the longest time we'd been away from the farm together in over two years, and was thoroughly worthwhile. This was possible in large part through two friends who were happy to farm-sit, taking their own mini-vacation for a snowed-in week here; our deep thanks to them. After the enthusiastic response from our short fall trip's writeup, it seemed worth writing up this longer experience as well. There are so many interesting and enjoyable back corners of our region to explore and enjoy; to make this manageable I'm dividing it into two parts (Missouri and Arkansas).

We began by attending the Great Plains Growers Conference in St. Joseph, Missouri, at which we'd been invited to give a talk on our methods of analyzing crop choices. Although "Assessing the Economics of Crop Choices on a Startup Market Farm" was scheduled for the last session on the last day, we had a nearly full room (50 people?) and a lot of good comments and discussion afterwards. In brief, we presented a spreadsheet-based model for comparing the relative profitability of potential market crops that could help small/start-up farms like ours make more informed decisions. We're currently working on writing up a version for publication in Growing For Market, a monthly journal for market farmers.


We left St. Joe late Saturday afternoon, and headed for Kansas City, where we intended to have dinner at Bluebird Bistro, a very local-farm-based cafe/restaurant on the edge of downtown. The meal did not disappoint, as both my vegetable curry and Joanna's ravioli were perfectly done, with complex but not overdone flavors and no trace of screwy seasonings or additives. Joanna's salad appetizer was superb, while my roasted beet bruschetta were mildly disappointing. The bread was too soft (bruschetta should be like toast), and the beet topping (while good) was spread thickly in sections but completely lacking in others. It appeared that they'd taken a very large piece of bread (almost like Texas Toast), mounded the topping in the middle, then sliced it like pizza. Quite attractive, but impractical for eating as one had to nibble lone bread along half of each slice to get to the then-too-thick topping on the rest. Bruschetta should be thin, crusty bread with the topping spread evenly along it.

My only other complaint was the service; despite being far from busy overall, our waitress was continually rushing us. She kept pressing for an order even when we explained we were in no rush, brought our main dishes out when we weren't even halfway through our appetizers, and prominently deposited the dessert menu with us halfway through our main courses. It was annoying, but didn't detract from the excellent food and the clear commitment to year-round local supplies (they were hosting a large dinner soon at which diners could meet & greet some of their winter farmers, a long list). With a few forgivable quicks, this was excellent and well worth a visit the next time you're in KC.

Staying at a cheap motel south of KC that night, we headed for Prairie State Park in the morning. This had long been on our list, as the largest remaining tract of tallgrass prairie in the state. It was a raw day, with a bitter wind gusting from the northwest over thoroughly frozen ground, which simply meant we covered more ground hiking fast to stay warm. The winter landscape is beautiful, a sea of bluestem and other plants flattening in the wind, while an impressive population of hawks and other birds stayed active enough to be seen (Joanna birding, below).


One herd of the park's bison were clearly visible on the next ridge over, along with a lone male in the opposite direction. We gave these impressive animals a wide berth but enjoyed watching them through good binoculars. A Northern Harrier gave us an especially good demonstration of its ability to slowly drift and hover low over open land, scanning for prey. We were nearly frozen by the time we finished our long circular hike through the eastern portion of the park, but it was a wonderful experience to traverse so much natural prairie and experience something close to the original nature of much of Missouri.

Human history remains in and around the park, as well. The Missouri, Kansas, & Texas railroad's abandoned mainline bisects the park, offering a forlorn yet beautiful scene as the grasses slowly reclaim it. This could be the southern extension of the Katy Trail State Park rail-trail system if a short section of the line south of Clinton, MO, were not still in use by the Missouri & Northern Arkansas, a modern short-line railroad. Above, we're looking north toward Clinton, Sedalia, and eventually Boonville.


Southwest Missouri and southeast Kansas were once major mining districts, and we passed many abandoned strip mines for coal and other minerals in the area. They don't photograph well, but are now impressively geometric sets of lakes and ridges much like those throughout central and northern Missouri at places like Finger Lakes State Park, practically in our own backyard. More information on the coal mining history of eastern Kansas can be found here; a quick trip with Google Earth is suggested as well (look for Mulberry, KS).

We continued south to Carthage, Missouri, then and still a center of mining and quarrying activity. Beautiful limestone blocks are quarried here, and you could tell long before reaching the city by the memorable stonework remaining in many barns and houses on the back-roads, built back when it mattered that farms look good. The courthouse in downtown Carthage has to be one of the prettiest buildings in Missouri; view it on the city's home page (upper left).

Carthage was also home to an early Civil War battle, in which a badly outnumbered Union force dispatched from St. Louis fought a nearly 24-hour running battle with a much larger Confederate force led by the secessionist Governor of Missouri. The Union forces retreated over ten miles toward Carthage, breaking through every attempt to surround them, finally fighting street-by-street through the city as the day wore on. Eventually they reached the low line of bluffs just southeast of downtown, on which they mounted cannon in a last-ditch attempt to cover their retreat down the adjacent road:

As night came, this stand held, and the Union forces escaped amazingly unharmed into the night. Both sides could claim victory, as the larger Confederate forces had removed the only obstacle blocking their rendezvous with another force moving north from Arkansas, while the Union had avoided what would have been a disastrous story of true defeat. One of those small, yet significant local battles that affect the course of history but are mostly forgotten. Battle of Carthage State Historic Site is well worth a visit for those interested in this period of history.


Finally, we headed for Roaring River State Park, where we finally left the plains and descended into the Ozarks proper. Roaring River is a large spring, normally averaging 20 million gallons of outflow a day; a large MDC hatchery uses the spring to raise 250,000 rainbow trout annually. However, unlike central and northern Missouri, southern Missouri has been exceedingly dry over the past year, such that at the entrance to the spring (below) we were amazed to see water actually flowing in reverse back into the spring from the holding pool beyond. Joanna grew up just across the Arkansas border and has been here many, many times, but had never seen that before. We found a hatchery employee who simply shook his head and lamented the large numbers of fish they were losing; the hatchery was having to pump water up into the spring from the river just to keep water levels high enough to preserve even small quantities of fish. . Too bad we couldn't even out our own weather patterns with them.

Roaring River is also home to some great hiking; we took a short jaunt up to the Devil's Kitchen, a long-known rock formation that used to resemble a large room before suddenly collapsing in the '80s; Joanna remembers the excitement that surrounded this event. Now it's an impressively tilted pile of limestone blocks that are great fun to scramble around on:
From here, we continued south across the Arkansas line, heading for a brief visit with Joanna's parents before heading deeper into the Ozarks toward the Buffalo National River. Our time in Arkansas will be covered in Part II.

One last note, as I won't have room in the next piece. Being ourselves, we brought all our food and had a wonderful week's worth of farm-based travel food. Sausages, bacon, eggs, meat, yogurt, cheese, jams, frozen soups, bread dough, canned tomatoes, applesauce, pickles, dried applies, sweet potatoes, and much more formed the basis of a week's worth of delightful meals that cost us very little and were far better than we could have found otherwise (Bluebird excepted). It's not hard at all to bring your own food, and we get great satisfaction from the self-reliance and quality of the results.

Making sausage, and other uses of farm pork

For most of our time on this farm, we haven't raised meat animals. That is, we haven't intentionally raised animals solely for eating; we mostly eat meat as a necessary side product of producing dairy & eggs (hunting is its own category). That changed in 2010, when we acquired a newly-weaned Berkshire pig from JJR Farm, sellers of organic pork at the farmers market and valued colleagues.


While pork chops certainly taste good, we didn't raise a pig just for the meat on its own. We're happy with goat and venison for most of our meat-as-a-condiment-to-vegetables cooking. From a farm management perspective, we raised a pig to convert scraps (such as whey and overgrown zucchini) into a tastier product. From a culinary perspective, we raised this pig for its fat, and for all the interesting things you can do by curing & smoking pork on its own and in combination with other meats. In short, we raised a pig so we could really delve into Ruhlman & Polcyn's Charcuterie (thanks to Mike Odette and Show Me Eats for starting us down this path). We butchered her in mid-December, and having been playing with our new ingredients ever since.


I have two hams cured and hanging, and have made some nice sweet bacon and pancetta. But it's sausages that were my core interest in having an on-farm source of pork fat, and these have been a rousing success so far. You need pork fat to make proper sausage; goat, deer, and most other fats just don't work culinary and chemically for the proper bind and texture needed (I've tried). Plus, hog casings are the proper size for stuffing sausages; the casings we saved from a goat kid last year are just too small and delicate for effective use (more on casings soon).

Having pork fat on hand means I can turn decent to low-end cuts of goat and venison into something far better, at a 4:1 ratio of meat to fat. Clockwise from upper right: Anaheim pepper sausage, spiced "Italian" sausage, roasted garlic/fennel sausage, and real hot dogs. More on each of these coming.

First, the equipment. You can use a hand grinder and stuffer, which we have, but I don't recommend it if you do this more than once a year. It's slow, which has consequences for the quality of the sausage as the meat & fat must stay cold; it's annoying and painful, as your hands quickly freeze doing all this manually with ice-cold materials; and it's messy as your hands are always in raw meat though you keep having to wash them to grab something you forgot. We use a meat grinder attachment for our electric grain mill, and recently upgraded (through a Christmas present) to a designated 5lb-capacity sausage stuffer. This makes the process faster, cleaner, and more enjoyable. Using the right equipment makes it easier to not screw up the sausage; if you break the bind between meat and fat, you get a sausage with the mealy texture of wet cardboard (I've done it).

Next, the casings. You can easily order casings through online suppliers, with a choice of normal/traditional (i.e. cleaned-out hog intestines) or various forms of "natural" artificial casings made with things like collagen. We don't like using artificial, manufactured foods ("natural" or otherwise), nor do we care to support the industrial food system. So we collected, cleaned, and prepared our own casings from this pig. I won't diverge into detailed instructions as that's tangential to this post, but suffice it to say it's not nearly as smelly or nasty as you'd think. It's not enjoyable in that it takes a while and some care to do properly, but if you can change diapers you can prepare casings (having done both, I'll take the latter any day). On to the sausage:

Anaheim pepper sausage
For this, I used a base recipe for Mexican-ish sausage, making a fresh-ground mix of various spices similar to my personal chili powder mix (cumin, coriander, fenugreek, paprika, black pepper, turmeric, etc.) and added a good whack of our own dried peppers (jalapenos, bells, and anaheims). I ground all these partially in a mortar, then transferred them to a food processor to really shred the peppers. This makes an amazingly aromatic spice mix, which I need to use in other recipes. Then this mix, along with garlic and some other stuff, was mixed into goat meat and pork fat and ground. I didn't stuff this recipe, as we have limited casings and figured this recipe would be just as good as patties or crumbled. So I froze it in larger logs, from which it's easy to slice off patties as needed. This is the best sausage I've ever made; the dried pepper mix has an amazing aroma and flavor with much more complex flavors lingering in the background. Wow.

Italian sausage
This was just a garden-variety recipe for American-style spiced Italian sausage, using various herbs like dried basil & parsley (on-farm) and other spices. It's not as mind-blowing as some of the others, simply because it's a very familiar flavor, but a really good comfort sausage. These we stuffed, figuring they'd be excellent in buns or sliced into pasta.

Roasted garlic/fennel sausage
For this I took a specific hint from Charcuterie and steam-roasted a whole pan of garlic heads (12+), then squeezed them all into one bowl as a really rich paste. What didn't go into this and other sausages I packed into an ice cube tray, froze, and repacked into a freezer bag as an instant shot of garlic flavor to whatever soup/sauce I'm making quickly. I used the first one recently and the effect was excellent. Try this. Anyway, this was a really basic recipe using primarily the garlic paste, fennel seed, and red wine (a semi-dry from Adam Puchta). Simple, but a very nice flavor. Note that in the photo above, these look lumpier than the others; they were stuffed with a hand-crank unit rather than a higher-quality stuffer, and it shows. It's just a lot harder to control the process, and you get a lot of air bubbles and otherwise uneven results.

Real hot dogs
Now, these I'm proud of. Charcuterie has a very specific and time-consuming recipe for getting the flavor and texture just right, which I followed closely except for leaving out the corn syrup. I used more of the roasted garlic paste (above) in place of minced garlic. The basic flavorings are mustard seed, paprika, coriander, pepper, and garlic. The meat is ground coarsely, let stand in the fridge overnight with salt to form a better texture, then partially frozen, then ground finely, then frozen again, then passed through a food processor until it's a thoroughly uniform paste (it looks disturbingly like industrial-strength cat food at this stage). Then it's stuffed. Ideally these should be smoked, and I intend to smoke a batch when I fire up the smoker again, but so far we've eaten them roasted or grilled. These tasted real, at least as far as our distant memories of decent hot dogs go (as a well-travelled baseball fan, I sampled lots of cities' dogs once upon a time).

We served some to friends, freshly grilled over charcoal and served on fresh-made "squishy" buns with homemade mustard & relish and our dill pickles. Oh, and with a side of pork & beans (day-long baked beans with sorghum and smoked pork hock providing the flavor). Pork 'n beans n' hot dogs, predominately farm-sourced. Now that's farm comfort food, with the added comfort of knowing--not wondering--exactly what went into them.

Coming up
Next up, I want to try my hand at bratwurst, and have enough materials to do a few other batches as well. Perhaps it's our German side, but we are thoroughly thrilled with the sausage supply this year. And as fits many of our culinary & farm-management choices, doing this ends up more budget-friendly after raising everything ourselves than having to buy all these ingredients retail, or worse the finished product, if we could even get an equivalent. Eating well is one of our core goals here, and real sausage making has taken that a significant step further. Give it a try sometime.

We'd already decided that we couldn't live without goats; now we're realizing we're stuck with pigs as well. They're fantastic animals to raise, as smart and entertaining and energetic as the best dog, while being really useful and cost-effective on a diversified farm like ours. I've done some mathematical modelling and the economic return of raising them for sale seems minimal, but we're certainly going to keep it up for ourselves. The food and farm value is just too good.

Mid-winter farm work

As we move into January, farm work continues to balance between indoor and outdoor tasks. This is a more relaxing time, as we're generally able to choose our daily work rather than having it choose us, and we take more evenings off and generally move at a slower pace. But we still effectively work six-seven days a week, as there is just too much we'd like to get done to continue building up this farm. Here's a look at our general task-list.

INDOOR WORK

We had set a goal of finishing our seed order by January 1st, but a very poorly timed computer issue put our desktop out of comission for almost two weeks of December. Thus we're still working on it, and will hopefully be virtually done by mid-January. Developing a seed order is more complicated than it sounds, because it effectively requires (a) a full planting plan for the entire farm in 2011, (b) at least some analysis of our 2010 harvest & sales data in order to assess production and profitability of our varieties, (c) a long series of discussions about both of our experiences/observations in 2010 and predictions for market demand and competitor behavior in 2011, and (d) spending hours with seed catalogs to consider available varieties. This is a very long process.

This time of year also includes end-of-year financial work for the business, and the beginning of preparations for tax season, as we need to get all personal and business tax work out of the way before spring arrives. We also need to start developing our employee plan for 2011, which we're changing somewhat to accommodate lessons learned last year. We'll need to start looking for folks within the next month or two.

Finally, we'll need to put together our application package for organic certification in 2011. This gets a bit easier every year as we learn just what the agency wants (they're not nearly as thorough as we expected them to be) and what we can leave out. It's still a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy to distract us from useful work, though.

OUTDOOR WORK

The two core categories here are logging and fence-building. We have a number of areas in which we intend to clear trees, either pushing edges back from existing or future fence lines, or thinning out brushy areas for better pasture. Long-term we're working toward restoring more and more of the farm to a prairie/savanna setting, establishing better grasslands with a good smattering of shade trees; each year we thin out a few more areas of overgrown ex-pasture. Some controlled burns to knock back invasives and encourage native plants are on our radar as well for spring. The logging work carries multiple other integrated benefits besides pasture restoration; the resulting timber becomes firewood (if hardwood) or fenceposts/lumber (if cedar). We also run many of the upper branches through our chipper for mulch, while selling some firewood to Goatsbeard Farm (their dairy runs on a wood furnace).

Nearly all our pastures require new or better fencing to allow for more efficient animal management. Our vegetable field fences are in decent shape, though we still need to replace the south and east sides of our smaller market garden. Mainly we need to run multi-strand tensioned electric wires on the boundaries of our main pastures. This allows us to control both predators and goats, while making it easier to subdivide these pastures for the rotational grazing that is at the core of our animal management. We won't get every area done this winter, but have a priority list for which pastures will show the best return for the work in the short term. If I can get the top two done this winter I'll be satisfied.

SIDE PROJECTS

There are also many smaller side projects to prepare for the growing season, such as building and arranging new sinks and washing stations in our main pole barn, improving our walk-in cooler and other storage facilities, fixing/sharpening tools, organizing seed stocks, and more.

THROUGH FEBRUARY

So through the beginning of March these types of jobs will dominate our time. By early February we start the first seedlings indoors, and begin thinking about preparing beds for planting (weather permitting), and soon enough March is drawing us into the vegetable farming for real. We're planning a short trip away, our first more-than-overnight trip together in two years, which (while worthwhile) eats into our work. So we have less than two months to work through a long list of projects, but as I said above, the beauty of this season is that we can pretty much choose our day-to-day schedule based on weather and interest. It's a relaxing feeling and we enjoy it while it lasts.