A Late Summer Scrapbook

Been a busy few days, days that I hoped would include cutting hay. But a trip out of town and a short three day window for cutting, curing and baling left me deciding to postpone. So, we’ve turned our attention to smaller tasks.

The author Simon Fairlie, in his excellent work Meat: a benign extravagance, makes a brief tantalizing reference to the Japanese method of fermenting their pig slops. I couldn’t find anything else on the subject. But armed with my imagination, a fair understanding of The Art of Fermentation, (an essential work by Sandor Katz) and a fifty-gallon plastic garbage can, I went to work.

I drilled a quarter-inch hole in the top of the garbage can lid and inserted a fermentation lock with a gasket. A friend had come over last Saturday and used our cider press. In payment for the use he left me with fifty pounds of pressed apple “cake”. I added the “cake” to the can, alternating with hundred pounds of hog meal. This mix was finished off with a ½ cup of kosher salt and enough water to just cover the meal. It was then covered and left to ferment for five days.

Our latest crop of pigs, of which we only have three, have been a bit stand-offish. They have grown slowly and showed little interest in feed. Let me tell you this new feed system has made all the difference. The first day they caught wind of the sweet fermented smell and came running. They have doubled their daily intake of feed. The first pictures are of the fermentation system and the next of some happy pigs.

Fermenting hog slops

Happy pigs

 

 

 

Earlier this summer I had been reading an “idea” opener of a book, The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier. He uses a tarp system on his gardens to suppress weeds. It is quite simple and effective. I tried it out on two garden areas. The pictures below show the dramatic change.

This garden had been used to raise greens and turnips last winter. Since that time I have over sown it with seven-top turnips twice, cutting down the greens before they developed seeds. After the second cutting I covered the area with a 30’x50’ hay tarp and left it for four weeks. After uncovering and tilling lightly, the area was planted in turnips, kale, rutabagas and lettuce.

Tarp

Tarp

Uncovering garden

Uncovering garden

Saturday Morning 025

Tilling

Preparing the winter garden

Well amended soil

 

Produce 001

A daily harvest

These late summer days are also focused on domestic harvest and preservation. We have been making jelly, chutney and wine most weekends and canning tomatoes. Today we will do more of the same. But we will also fire up the smoker and dry the Anaheim and jalapeno peppers.

That is all from the farm this week.

 

Hogs, uncouth relatives and nannies

It starts with the clang and rattle of a lid being removed from the feed barrel. A deep belch like rumble, like that of an uncouth relative rolls from the woods, answered by other noises, all gastric in tone. The hogs have awakened. From various locations in the woods, for they all seem to have their own special sleeping spaces, the sounds grow in volume and slowly converge near the gate. I’m still a couple of hundred yards away and unseen. But they know I’m there and impatiently wait until I round the corner swinging a five gallon bucket of feed in one hand.

The feed bucket contains the contents of 10 cans of food purloined from the picked over debris of Donald’s belongings. After we bought his old house we spent a day hauling the bits and clutter from his life to the dump. But the canned food, a few hundred cans worth, well that was worth saving. So each day for the past month I open and heat about ten cans of creamed corn, sauerkraut, carrots, black beans, northern beans, mustard greens, spinach, sweet potatoes, add about five pounds of shelled and cracked corn and slop into the trough, turning deep belches of hunger into grunts of contentment.

Simon Fairlie in his essential work Meat: a benign extravagance
has an interesting chapter titled “The plight of the pig in the nanny state” dealing with food waste due to excessive interference by an over protective bureaucracy. He touches on how a complex system of food waste collection from homes and businesses in Germany and Austria fed six million hogs a year. That is until forced to stop this practice by the E.U. in 2006 and move their production to commodity grains. The ostensible reason was the danger of feeding tainted swill to hogs that could pass on pathogens to humans. The reality was that their system produced statistically zero cases. Provided one follows basic food safety controls feeding slops to hogs is safe, useful and makes sense and has fed pigs for tens of thousands of years.

Instead the E.U. has moved to an expensive system of feeding an omnivore exclusively on grains: grains that could be used to feed people. Hogs have always been the companions of humans living off their excess waste. The timidity of the E.U. certainly had no impact on the third world. Predictably hog production in Europe has declined even as pork consumption has remained steady. China and other countries with less strict controls and perhaps scruples over food safety have filled that void. Shipping pork at a lower price for thousands of miles in container ships to a consumer that had a perfectly sound system of low cost production at hand…now, that makes perfect sense!

In a world of population overshoot, waste of food products seems senseless. Yet every day one hears or reads about the struggle of landfills in the modern world to deal with food waste. Some ingenious people come up with overly complex methods to turn it into compost, methane farms, etc. with high tech and high energy inputs. But the simple low cost method of feeding pigs that feed us is abandoned, except by the small farmer, in favor of subsidized grain production.

The age old “A pig is health” or “a pig pays the rent” are simple testaments to the enduring relationship between hogs and food security for thousands of years of human history. Sometimes a wheel does not need to be reinvented.

Speaking of wheels, the sun is starting to rise and soon our “uncouth relative” will be demanding attention out in the woods.