Two Ways to Roast Turkey

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Number One:
Sprinkle salt all over the turkey. Lay into roaster breast side down. Add 2 inches or more of water. Cover. Roast turkey at 400 degrees for one hour. Turn the heat to 250 degrees and bake till it falls off the bone. I do a large turkey all night. The turkey is so tender and full of flavor. The breast is wonderfully moist. You will need to carve the turkey and put the meat slices on a platter. It is not a picture perfect whole browned turkey, but the flavor is tops! It also produces lots of broth.

Number Two:
Baste turkey with 1/2 cup butter. Sprinkle with salt and herbs if desired. Bake at 325 degrees till tender. This is super delicious! The butter gives the turkey a wonderfully rich flavor.

Preparing for Winter – Local Energy

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For the last 17 years our family has used wood as our primary heating source. Not only is firewood a local, renewable energy source, it is also a relatively clean fuel. That seems surprising when you see the smoke going out of the chimney. However, there is something that has to be taken into consideration. If wood is left to rot or is ground up into mulch and left to decompose, gases are released into the atmosphere. If the amount of greenhouse gases that are released from decomposing is subtracted from the emissions from burning the wood, wood turns out to be a relatively clean fuel as compared to fuel oil. Unlike wood, oil that is left in the ground does not pollute the environment. It is when oil is burned that it creates pollution.

I found a good resource on the internet on how to make improvements to a wood burning stove to make it more efficient and produce less smoke. It is http://www.aprovecho.org/  On the right side of their website are the links to several free publications that they have. Using the principles in those publications, I designed a heat exchanger that replaced our existing stove pipe. The heat exchanger is about four feet high and 11 inches in diameter. The lower 15 inches is an insulated section where escaping unburned gases are ignited and burned. Just above that section, an 8 inch pipe draws in room air from the back. The 8 inch pipe goes up the center of the heat exchanger and is open at the top into the room, allowing heated air to flow into the room. The smoke from the wood stove travels in the space between the 8 inch pipe and the 11 inch pipe. The smoke exits out the back of the heat exchanger into the chimney.

The heat exchanger works better than what I had hoped. It has reduced the amount of smoke produced, but even better, it has almost doubled the heat output of the wood stove. It is free heat that we have been losing up the chimney! What is important to me too is that Cathy likes the design which is not as overbearing as the ones on the Aprovecho.org website which use big 55 gallon drums for the heat exchanger. Attached is a picture of the heat exchanger.

One of the things that is important in heating with wood is to make handling the firewood as easy as possible. In the picture you will see the wood box that we built last year and is working well for us. It is essentially a hand truck style wood box that has large casters on the front which allow the wood box to be rolled back against the wall with the opening to the front. The wood box can be tipped back like a hand truck to make it easy to take out to the wood pile, load it up, and bring back to the house. We have two wood boxes so that we can have plenty of wood and don’t have to go out in the rain or snow and get wood.

Woodstove Heat Exchanger

Shipping Crisis

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There is another crisis that I feel I should let you know about so that you can prepare if it should become a bigger problem. All around the world, goods are sitting on docks waiting to be shipped by boat, but the companies buying the products are not able to get financing to pay for the goods because of the credit crisis. As a result of the big drop off in shipping in the last several months, the cost for rental of a large cargo ship has dropped over 90% as ship owners try to attract business so that they can survive. Ships that were getting over $200,000 a day to haul cargo are now only able to get $5,000 – $9,000 a day. This shipping crisis is an indicator of a much bigger problem. If things don’t change soon, imported items will start disappearing from store shelves when current inventories are depleted. This has the potential of becoming a serious problem because around 50% of the food in America and much of everything we use on a daily basis is imported. To read more on the shipping crisis, search www.news.google.com for "shipping crisis".

The End of Factory Farming?

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Wrong philosophies eventually come to an end, and it is interesting watching it happen to factory farming. The elections brought about a  change that you may not have heard about. California voters voted to do away with cages for laying hens, and the typical very small pens for hogs and veal calves. Most of the white eggs in grocery stores are laid by hens packed in small cages about five or six hens per cage. Each hen has the equivalent of a space eight inches by eight inches, which is less than a sheet of paper. The cages are in long rows, stacked three or four high, filling the huge chicken houses with tens of thousands of laying hens. The hens live their entire life squeezing out as many eggs as possible to fill the grocery stores with cheap eggs so that Americans have surplus money to buy iPods, cell phones, plasma TV’s, and other "necessary" items. The hens can’t exercise, breathe fresh air, or enjoy the sunshine. Factory farming has reduced millions of laying hens to mere egg laying machines that produce eggs that are barely fit to eat. California is one of the largest egg producing states in the nation, and they are leading the way in putting an end to the cruelest of the factory farming methods.

The factory farm broiler chicken industry is in trouble. Pilgrim’s Pride, the largest broiler producer, is almost bankrupt. Their stocks have fallen to 31 cents a share! Tyson Food is following closely on their heels. Tyson’s stocks have now fallen to where Pilgrim’s Pride’s stocks were several months ago, because Tyson’s poultry division is losing huge amounts of money.

For years the business philosophy has been for farms to get bigger and bigger. The small family farm could not compete. Now we are seeing that trend of bigger and bigger starting to collapse as the big companies can’t handle their huge debt load. The transition back to smaller more sustainable farms will probably be difficult, but the end result will be better quality food.
We live in some very interesting times.

Cathy’s Cooking Corner: Lamb Chops

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Our family loves lamb chops. My favorite method for preparing them is to bake them till they are fall-off-the-bone tender. I usually sprinkle both sides of the lamb chops with salt, garlic powder and thyme. I put them in a pan and add water about level with the top of the chops but not covering them. Then I bake them, covered, at 350 degrees for 1 1/2 hours. A small amount would would probably take only an hour. I feed eight people here.

Another sauce we love on lamb chops is a fajita sauce recipe:

1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup vinegar
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder (or 2 cloves garlic, minced)
1/2 teaspoon onion powder (or 1 onion, sliced/chopped)
1/2 teaspoon salt

Put lamb chops in baking pan. Stir together sauce ingredients. Pour over lamb chops. Cover and bake at 350 degrees 1 to 1 1/2 hours till tender. These would also be wonderful baked in a crockpot.

The Principle of Preparing For Winter

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In these times of economic uncertainty, the principle of preparing for winter helps us understand how to prepare for the uncertainty of the economic future. If you want to be self-sufficient in raising your own food, how many months’ supply of food do you need to store up for the winter? Three months’ supply? Four months’ supply? Six months’ supply? Our ancestors understood the importance of raising food and storing it up for the winter when they couldn’t grow food, and neither could anyone else around them. We have lost touch with what it means to store up food for the winter.

As a boy in the 1970’s I loved to explore my grandma’s basement. There were so many things to look at. It was so full of stuff that there were only paths to get around the basement. In one corner there were shelves that went from floor to ceiling, full of jars of canned fruits and vegetables from her garden. Plus there were boxes stacked on the floor that had more jars of canned food. The lid of each jar had on it the year when it was canned. I quickly discovered that she had at least two years’ supply of food from her garden in that corner. She used the oldest jars first, so she was always eating from what she had grown two or more years before. There were two freezers and they were always stuffed full of food year round. It was just her and my one single uncle that lived in the house, and yet every year she still planted two large gardens, one on either side of the house.

I thought at the time that my grandma was excessive in having so much food stored in her basement. However, in reflecting back on her food storage method, I learned an important lesson about how much food needs to be stored for food self-sufficiency. Just enough food to make it through the winter is not enough. If a person wants to be self-sufficient as much as possible food wise, you need to have more than just one years supply of food. In gardening, you never know how much of a particular vegetable will be produced each year. One year you will get a great crop and the next year little or nothing. If you only have enough to last one year, you will be without that particular vegetable until the next year.

There is another reason for storing several years worth of food. Grandma lived through the Great Depression and raised 12 children. She understood the importance of having food on hand. A two years’ supply of food enables a person to have time to adapt to whatever happens. A person with only a one week supply of food is quickly in an emergency crisis if something happens and they are not able to purchase food. There are a lot of things a person can live without. If a person can’t afford to live in a house, it is possible to live in a tent. However, if a person can’t purchase food, sawdust will not substitute!

My grandfather used to tell the story of a man who wanted to cut the cost of feeding his horse. So he started gradually converting the horse over to eating sawdust. He slowly increased the amount of sawdust that he added to the feed. Everything was going well and he almost had the horse converted over to eating all sawdust, when the horse died! 🙂

The principle of preparing for winter for self-sufficiency is, that a person needs at least one year’s supply of food and preferably two years’ worth. In preparing for economic uncertainty, if we have shelves full of food, and the clothes we need for the next year or two, it gives a satisfaction and comfort that having $10,000 in the bank does not give. You feel like a squirrel that has stored up its nuts for the winter.

Silly Boys, Tractors Are For Girls!

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In Henry Ford’s book, My Life and Work, he explains why the first Fordson tractors were built. They were not built for men but for women! It was during World War I and England was experiencing a severe food crisis. Most of the men were at war and the farm work with horses was difficult for the women who were at home on the farm. England came to Henry Ford and asked him to build an affordable, easy to use tractor so their women could produce the food that they needed. Up to that point, most tractors were expensive, big, heavy steam tractors that required a lot of technical knowledge to operate. Henry Ford quickly put the tractors into production, loaded them on ships and sent them to England. With the tractors, the farm women in England were able to produce the food that was needed.

This story illustrates an important principle. The right tool in the hand of a child or a person with less strength can enable them to do the work of a strong man. I have observed this over and over with our children. By giving them the right tool they were able to accomplish as much work as if they had been a man. It is important when working with children and young people to equip them with the right quality tool and train them how to properly and safely use it so that they can be productive, and at the end of the day look back with satisfaction at what they accomplished. Don’t treat them as inferior and give them inferior, frustrating tools to work with. They will get little accomplished and will not feel like helping you again. But with the right tools, together you can get much accomplished and have more fun doing it. The next time you see a tractor, remember, "Tractors are for girls!"

Thanks for Supporting Our Local Farm

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Thank you for your support this year. It is your support that makes it possible for us to provide clean, healthy, nutritious, pasture-raised meats and eggs for you. Now, more than ever, it is important that small local farms have the support of the consumers around them. We have been hearing a lot in the news about the credit crisis and the government’s $700 billion dollar bailout.

What we have not been hearing much about is the poultry industry crisis. Pilgrim’s Pride, the country’s largest chicken producer, is on the verge of bankruptcy. They were not able to meet their financial obligations at the end of September and their lending institution gave them a 30 day grace period. Their stock has dropped to less than $3.00 a share from a high of $40 a share in July of 2007.

The other big poultry producers have also been experiencing huge losses due to the high grain prices and their stocks have been dropping as well. Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson made appeals to the government to ease the ethanol production mandates for this year to reduce the demand and the cost for corn.  The appeals were rejected. The government is more interested in energy production and bailing out Wall Street than in domestic food production!

The supply of cheap imported chicken and a reduced demand and oversupply of chickens has prevented the poultry industry from being able to raise their prices when grain prices went up dramatically this year. Chicken prices should be much higher in the grocery stores than what they are. With the price of conventional grain where it is, the price of conventional chicken should be about the same as what organic chicken was a year ago.

For years I have observed one poultry company buying up another. Then another company would buy up that one. With each buy out, the smaller company was merged to make a bigger poultry company. It was a dog eat dog world. I wondered what would happen when the biggest dog (poultry company) died and there was no one to take its place. We are about to see that happen.

With each year, we are losing more and more of our food independence and have to rely more and more on other countries to feed us. Along with that dependence on other countries for our cheap food is an increased health risk because of the reduced food regulation in other countries. The past two years has seen a huge increase in the problem of food poisonings from Salmonella in tomatoes and other vegetables to melamine in Chinese milk and pet food products. For years, the big factory farm model has been promoted as the best food production method. The big factory farm model is failing as we thought it would. And we see how very foolish it is for us to rely on other countries to provide our food for us. It is important now more than ever to encourage the development of smaller local farms and know where your food comes from.

Global Warming and Climate Change

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Last month I shared with you a perspective of fossil fuels and carbon sequestering from my perspective as an organic farmer. One of the things that I stated is that "It is important for us to try to be independent thinkers, to research facts for ourselves, and to step back and try to look outside the ‘box’ that everyone is looking in." We hear a lot about global warming and climate change. Billions of dollars are being spent to correct the stated problem. However, one of the things that I noticed when I heard things on the news about global warming and climate change is that they did not state how many degrees that the earth has warmed up. This made me curious to find out the facts. I will share with you what I found.

The National Climatic Data Center of the US Department of Commerce has a chart listing the global temperatures from 1880 to the present. The temperatures listed are in hundredths of a degree Celsius. Note that in the past 107 years the global temperature has changed a little over one half a degree Celsius which is less than the statistical margin of error. According to the statistics, global temperatures have remained stable for the last 10 years. The following is an excerpt from that chart:

1900   -0.0281
1901   -0.0974

1997    0.4615
1998    0.5763
1999    0.3947
2000    0.3629
2001    0.4934
2002    0.5573
2003    0.5565
2004    0.5336
2005    0.6044
2006    0.5428
2007    0.5458
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/anomalies.html#anomalies

A similar chart can be found at NASA’s website. Please note, this is the first chart I looked at. At first I thought that there were very significant increases in global temperatures until I realized that the temperatures listed on this chart were not in degrees but in .01 degrees Celsius!

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ZonAnn.Ts.txt

I never gave it much thought about how difficult it is to measure the actual global earth temperature until I read the following article on NASA’s website. Note, there is no standardized procedure for measuring the temperatures at various locations around the world. I had assumed that there was a standardized procedure. The following article describes how inaccurate a non-standardized procedure for recording the global air temperature can be. Remember, this is on NASA’s website.

The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT)

Q. What exactly do we mean by SAT ?

A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.

Q. What do we mean by daily mean SAT ?

A. Again, there is no universally accepted correct answer. Should we note the temperature every 6 hours and report the mean, should we do it every 2 hours, hourly, have a machine record it every second, or simply take the average of the highest and lowest temperature of the day ? On some days the various methods may lead to drastically different results.

Q. What SAT do the local media report ?

A. The media report the reading of 1 particular thermometer of a nearby weather station. This temperature may be very different from the true SAT even at that location and has certainly nothing to do with the true regional SAT. To measure the true regional SAT, we would have to use many 50 ft stacks of thermometers distributed evenly over the whole region, an obvious practical impossibility.

Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created ?

A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a ‘climatology’) hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.

To read the rest of the page go to:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html

After reading the above information, I had to wonder if the children’s story of "Chicken Little" has more relevance than just a story for children. Often one of our hens will get excited and alarmed about a perceived threat and get all the other hens squawking about it too. They make a huge racket. It is amusing to watch. After a while they realize that the perceived threat was nothing and they go on about their business.

Are we destroying the global climate as fast as some would lead us to believe? From the actual statistics it does not appear so. However, that doesn’t mean we can pollute the air, spray chemicals on our ground and pollute our water. We do have a responsibility to be stewards of the earth and care for it. As I pointed out last month, sequestering carbon is important, not to correct global warming, but to build the fertility and nutrient density of our soils so that we can be healthy and live productive lives. Farmers have been depleting the soils for generations and it is important that we change that direction. Organic farming is moving in the right direction. Thanks for your support.

Our Farm is For the Birds!

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Our farm is a paradise for birds, domesticated and wild. Farming without chemicals provides a safe habitat for birds to find abundant food and raise their families. Many of you have noticed that we have a lot of bird houses around the farm. Early this year I gave our children a challenge: I would provide the materials to make bird houses, and for every bird house that had a bird nest in it I would give them a dollar. It was a success! Many of our bird houses had bird families living in them.

The birds are important to us for a number of reasons. Our family enjoys watching birds. The birds pay their rent by eating tens of thousands of flies, mosquitoes, and other insects. We noticed a significant decrease in flies and mosquitoes this year even though it was a wetter year than last year.

Last evening we were sitting on the back porch with some friends from Laurel. He wondered if we sprayed something to control the mosquitoes because there were so few of them. I said no, it is our bird and bat friends that provide the control.

A more financially significant reason the wild birds are important to us is that the barn swallows and tree swallows chase the hawks away from the chickens during the summer. We can tell when the swallows migrate south in the fall. We start seeing hawks circling overhead looking for a delicious, pasture raised chicken dinner.

Yes, our farm is for the birds. By inviting many species of birds (except the hawks and owls!), it makes a more enjoyable home for all the birds, both domestic and wild. And it makes a more enjoyable place for you and us as well.