Tag: Food Safety

Time to Put Eggs Back on the Menu

Leave a comment

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food after many years of warning people not to eat high cholesterol foods. It has been discovered that for healthy adults, eating high cholesterol foods does not significantly increase the level of cholesterol in the blood or increase the risk of heart disease. This is something that has been known for a number of years, but has just now been acknowledged by the government. (Why didn’t scientists and doctors know that dietary cholesterol didn’t significantly increase blood cholesterol years ago?)

So now you can eat your Jehovah-Jireh pasture-raised eggs without any guilt. We do recommend that you do not eat an excessive amount of eggs at one time – definitely not more than one dozen eggs at one time. I say that in jest, eggs naturally tell you to stop eating after you have eaten several eggs. They are not like some foods where you want to keep on eating.

To read more about the amazing reversal in scientific opinion on dietary cholesterol, you can check out this Washington Post article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/

All of this makes me wonder how many other “scientifically” proven “facts” are error, and we will look back years from now with amazement of how naive and unscientific we were.

Farm Red Cross

Leave a comment


When you are up to your eyeballs in work is often when disaster strikes. We were in the middle of processing dog food when we received a call from Phil Freeman at House in the Woods Farm, about three miles from us. The wind had ripped the plastic off of their greenhouse, and he wondered if we could help him put new plastic on. From one end of the 100′ greenhouse to the other were rows of flats of very young seedlings. These seedlings represented most of the income for their farm for the entire year. We went over that evening and helped Phil remove the rest of the old plastic and get ready to put the new plastic on. But it was too windy to put the plastic on the 28’x100′ greenhouse, but fortunately it was warm. The next morning the wind had died down some so we went over and worked in the rain and got the greenhouse covered. The plants were saved! In this picture you can see all the human “paper weights” keeping the plastic from blowing off again before it could be fastened down.


We were all very happy when the plastic was on. And you know, even with the emergency, we were able to get all our work done at home. The dog food even got packaged quicker than normal!
http://www.houseinthewoods.com/index.html

Poultry Processing Inspection and Certificate

Leave a comment

Our chicken and turkey processing facility has been inspected by the Maryland Department of Agriculture and we have received certification. We are now certified to sell our poultry at other locations other than our farm, including stores. While this inspection is not required for on farm sales of poultry, it gives you a level of confidence that the chicken and turkey that you purchase has been processed in a facility that has been inspected and has been processed in a sanitary and approved manner.

We did some investigation into having drop off points for the chickens or to sell our chicken in some of the Maryland MOM’s stores. We did not get much interest in the drop off points and so at this point we will not be pursuing that. After talking things over as a family, we decided not to pursue selling chickens in the stores at this point. It would mean significantly increasing production and processing chickens every week. None of us enjoy processing chickens enough to do it every week and the wholesale price would also reduce our profit margin. We are open to any suggestions you may have.

Cathy’s Cooking Corner

Leave a comment

Recently our family watched “Frontier House”, a PBS historical reality series that first aired in 2002. Three modern families were selected to go back in time to 1883 on the America Frontier in Montana during the Homestead Act. Each family needed to establish their homestead as if they were living in 1883, and prepare food and firewood for the coming Montana winter. Would they be able to survive the winter?

One of the things that stood out to our family was how little food that they actually had for the winter. The growing and preservation of food for the winter seemed to be way too low on their priority list. They had small gardens and did not have much set aside to make it through the winter and the spring until the next summer’s harvest came in.

Most modern families, by going to the grocery store two or three times a week, buying lunch at school or at work, and eating out several times a week, do not realize how much food that they actually eat in a year’s time. I went to the mom of our largest chicken customer and asked her how much food her family needs in a year’s time. It is a family of eight that produces a lot of its own food and tries to source as much local food as possible.

This is her list (It is not a complete list of everything they eat in a year’s time):

250 chickens a year
10  25 lb turkeys
5 to 6 dozen eggs a week
one beef cow a year
1 1/2 to 2 gallons of milk a day
        plus 1 to 1 1/2 quarts of yogurt a day, 5 lbs of cheese a week, and 4 lbs of butter a week

The following is per year:

60 qts of peas
100 qts of green beans
65 qts of sweet corn
45 qts of lima beans
40 qts of kale (frozen and canned)
23 qts of spinach
35 qts of canned tomatoes
40 qts of tomato juice
40 pts of ketchup
40 pts of salsa
20 qts of pizza sauce
40 qts of dill pickles
70 qts of peaches
50 qts of applesauce
25 lbs of blueberries
60 pts of raspberries
700 lbs of potatoes
250 lbs of sweet potatoes
200 lbs of winter squash
170 lbs of carrots
900 lbs of wheat

It is hard to believe that one family would eat that much food, but I know it is true because it is our family. We made a decision a number of years ago, that if we wanted our family to be healthy, we needed to opt out of the grocery store/ restaurant food system (including the organic grocery stores) as much as possible and produce our own food. Our observation has been that most of the people who eat that food are not as healthy as they should be. That is evidenced with around 70 percent of the US population being on at least one pharmaceutical drug. Our family’s goal is not to be food independent, self-sustaining, or homesteaders, but to be healthy. Health is often taken for granted until one is sick or lacks energy. Life is too short to live it in an unhealthy state and not be able to enjoy life as one should. It is much easier to eat right to stay healthy, than to try to get healthy once we get sick.

The nutrient value of all the foods that we eat is more important than what most people realize. We try to grow as high brix and as nutrient dense food as we can. We are what we eat. It is difficult to be healthy if the food is low in necessary nutrients and when the chemicals and antibiotics in the foods are working against us. 

In one of the upcoming newsletters we will be sharing with you about a harmful antibiotic that is in much of conventionally produced, non-organic (and non-GMO) foods. We found out about this harmful antibiotic a little over a month ago.

Homesteading In the City

Leave a comment

Homesteading in the city is a practical, efficient, and cost effective way of providing high quality, great tasting, nutrient dense food for your household. It is a method of homesteading that many people have overlooked. Homesteading in the city does not require any land, and you don’t have to move or quit your job. It also avoids a lot of the problems with the traditional method of homesteading, plus it significantly reduces the amount of work required. First we will look at the problems with the traditional method of homesteading and then look at the advantages of homesteading in the city.

What most people promoting homesteading will not tell you is that the traditional method of homesteading is a life of poverty unless you have a source of outside income. Homesteading is a smaller version of a small farm and has little income. The great difficulty of trying to make a living from a homestead is seen in the following statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The latest statistics that the USDA has for farm income is for 2004. While those statistics are not current, what they reveal has probably not changed much. According to the statistics, 82 percent of all the farms in the U.S. had less than $100,000 in sales of farm products, while 18 percent had more than $100,000 in sales, and only 8 percent had more than $250,000 in sales. For a farm to have $100,000 in sales may sound like it is doing well, but the profit margin is very low. After all the expenses are subtracted off – farmland land rent or mortgage, fertilizer, seeds, fuel, equipment costs, animal purchases, vet bills, feed, electric, supplies, etc. there is very little left of the $100,000 to pay the farmer or homesteader for their labor. The USDA report states: “For the 82 percent of U.S. farming operations that have annual sales of $100,000 or less, off farm income typically accounts for all but a negligible amount of farm household income.” (http://www.usda.gov/documents/FARM_FAMILY_INCOME.pdf) This is an incredible and sad statistic. 82 percent of all the farmers in the U.S. make practically nothing off of farming.

The bottom line is that homesteading is not self sufficient financially. A person almost has to have off homestead income in order to have enough income to cover living expenses and medical costs.

Another problem with the traditional concept of homesteading is the economy of scale is too small. A homestead tries to raise everything it needs and has a little of this and a little of that. The homesteader can end up spending almost all their time raising their own food, preserving it, spinning, weaving, splitting firewood, developing the homestead, etc. just trying to exist. For example, it takes almost as much time to care for one beef cow as it would to take care of 50. Each type of animal, type of poultry, each species of vegetable or fruit requires a certain amount of time, equipment, and expertise. The more different kinds of things that one tries to raise, the greater the chance that other things will suffer because there is not enough time and expertise to produce the quality and quantity of food that is desired.

Homesteading in the city (or in the country) that I am recommending takes on a different approach. My mother practiced homesteading in the city and I got the concept from her, even though she never called it homesteading. Our family lived on a small 1/3 acre lot in town with 40 full grown trees on it. There was no place to have a garden. She did have a spot where she was able to have several tomato plants. Instead of growing our own food, my parents sourced some of it from local sources that they trusted. My parents bought a large 20+ cubic foot chest freezer which they kept well stocked with food. They bought a quarter of a beef each year from a farmer. Sometimes they bought a number of jugs of milk from my uncle that had a dairy farm and put them in the freezer. Another uncle planted a number of rows of sweet corn at the edge of his corn field each year. We would go to their farm for corn day and process 1200 to 1500 ears of corn, cutting the corn off the cob and putting it into freezer boxes. It was like a holiday, except we socialized by working together. My mother would go to a local orchard each year and buy three to five bushels of Red Haven peaches. We would help her can them so that we would have great tasting peaches to eat that winter. She would often buy several 20 pound boxes of blueberries when they were in season and put them in smaller containers and put them in her big freezer treasure chest.

Homesteading in the city is not about trying to grow all of your food or even to preserve all your own food. It is about buying food from local farmers and sources that you know that have a great tasting product and that is nutrient dense. It is buying food in bulk in season and freezing it or canning it for the rest of the year. Homesteading in the city is letting others do the hard work of raising the meats or fruits and vegetables, and you reap the rewards of their labor. It is about being part of community rather than being individualistic.

And since you are homesteading, don’t forget to buy “insurance” for your big freezer that is filled with all those delicious, nutritious treasures. If the power goes out you don’t want to lose all that wonderful food. The “insurance” is a generator. It does not have to be a whole house generator, and it only needs to run several hours each day to keep the freezer and your refrigerator from warming up too much. A 3000 watt generator can be purchased for a little over $300 or a 5000 watt generator for about $600 and will last for many years.


The right tools make homesteading in the city easier. We bought several of these propane burner units this year and are very pleased with them. They are similar to a turkey fryer burner, but they produce a lot more heat (170,000 BTU’s) than a turkey fryer ( 40,000 BTU’s). It is also much more fuel efficient than the propane weed burning torch that we used to use. You could use a large galvanized wash tub with this burner to can 19 quarts at a time. The burner is available from Agri Supply for only $39.95 http://www.agrisupply.com/carolina-cooker-12-in-cooker-stand-and-burner/p/49469/

In addition to keeping the heat out of the house, we feel this method is much safer than canning on a stove top. A person is not as likely to burn themselves with the hot water when taking jars out of the canner. The burner is only 12 inches high and very sturdy, which keeps the canner close to the ground. It is much easier to take the jars out as well.


You can also make your own mini walk in cooler with a window air conditioner and a Coolbot. I first saw this idea used at Cathy’s uncle and aunt’s house. He had made a closet (about two feet deep and six feet wide) into a reach in refrigerator where they could put things from the garden. He used a small 6,000 btu window air conditioner as the cooling unit. There are many times when a fruit or vegetable is available, but you don’t have time that day to freeze or can it. It needs to be refrigerated so that it can hold until you have time to get it put up. This summer when we put in a new walk in cooler for the eggs, we used a Coolbot controller and a high efficiency window air conditioner. With this setup, we use 30% less electricity than with a conventional walk in cooler refrigeration unit and it is a fraction of the cost.

The Coolbot was designed by a farmer for their CSA farm. It can be purchased here: http://www.storeitcold.com/

Here is a suggestion for a homesteading food gathering trip in the Lancaster Pa. area:
The first stop is Community of Oasis at Bird-in-Hand 60 N. Ronks Rd, Ronks Pa 17572 http://www.reallivefood.org/
Oasis has organic, grass fed, raw milk for a reasonable price. They also have a large variety of cheeses. Their drinkable yogurt is very good.  .

Next door in the same building is Lancaster Ag. There you can buy soft rock phosphate and high calcium lime for your garden or raised beds. They also carry garden blends of organic fertilizers.

Continue north on Ronks Rd. several miles to the village of Bird-in-Hand. There, just down from the corner at 2805 Old Philadelphia Pike is the Bird-in-Hand Farm Supply store. It is an Amish hardware store with prices that are considerably lower than Lowes or Home Depot. There you can buy a quality Amish made pulley style clothes line. But the real find is their food room hidden on the left side of the store. We did not find it until the second time we visited the store. There you can buy raw organic cheese for $4.35 a pound in five pound blocks. The price is a little higher for smaller sizes. They also have some of the best prices on canning supplies. You have to look carefully, most of the food is not organic, but there are some great deals on some other food items as well.

If you need some organic potatoes, continue east on Old Philadelphia Pike toward the town of Intercourse. On the left is an Amish farm with a white house that has a sign for organic potatoes. We have purchased 50 pound bags of potatoes from them several times when we ran out of potatoes. Note: most Amish farms are not organic and do not use organic practices. Just because Amish farms are selling produce along the side of the road does not mean that it is nutrient dense, health giving food.

The last stop is several miles north of Bird-in-Hand on Ronks Rd. On the right you will find Miller’s Natural Foods. It is a large health food store on an Amish farm.

One of the real joys of homesteading in the city is the satisfaction of having a bunch of good food in the freezer, or canned on the shelf. It gives you a feeling of self-sufficiency knowing that you don’t have to run to the grocery store every time they are calling for a snowstorm to make sure you don’t run out of food. It also gives you a satisfied feeling, knowing that you have stored away some really good healthy food for the winter.

Happy homesteading!

Newly Revealed Dangers of Eating Roundup® Tainted Food

Leave a comment

Most pastured poultry producers use conventionally grown feed (either GMO or non-GMO) for their chickens because it is half the cost of organic chicken feed. They are able to offer what appears to many as the same product at a much lower cost than what we can provide. We remain committed to using organic feed because in the end, when all the health care costs are figured in, it is probably at least half the cost of using conventionally grown chicken feed. Actually, a person’s health can’t be measured in dollars. Many terminally ill people would gladly give all they had just to have true health.

GMO grain is only part of the problem in causing health problems. Newly released research shows that trace amounts of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, are slowly and silently degrading people’s health. Farmers us glyphosate to kill cover crops, grass, and weeds so that they can plant the new crop. It is an important part of no-till farming, which is the method most conventional farmers use.

I remember, back when we first started farming, that farmers were being told that Roundup was completely harmless to people. We were told it only affected plants, and when it touched the soil it was neutralized. That was false information. I believe that most farmers are totally ignorant of what they are doing to other people’s health by their use of herbicides, pesticides, and GMO’s in the food that they are producing. In addition, for many farmers, money clouds their thinking and practice; not because they are greedy, but many of them have their backs to the wall financially and do not see it as possible financially for them to produce organic food.

New research shows that trace amounts of glyphosate is found in corn, soybeans, wheat and sugar grown on ground where Roundup was applied. These trace amounts of glyphosate inhibit enzymes in the gut and prevent the body from detoxifying other chemical residues and toxins. The result is many of the modern diseases.

The abstract of the new report in Entropy reads:

“Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Here, we show how interference with CYP enzymes acts synergistically with disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids by gut bacteria, as well as impairment in serum sulfate transport. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.” (Emphasis added)

You can read the full report at this link: http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416

The bottom line is: if you want to get sick, eat as much food as you can that has ingredients from conventionally produced corn, soybeans, wheat, and sugar beet sugar. Eating out for lunch or dinner is a great way to get these glyphosate contaminated foods.

Our family is committed to providing you with food that will give you health. Thank you for your support by purchasing our products and making it possible.

“Crazy” Farmers Eat Two Breakfasts!

1 Comment

We eat two breakfasts about five days a week. After learning several years ago that we get 80% of our energy from the air and sun, we realized that we could make a greater improvement on our health by focusing on the 80% in addition to the 20% – our food. After the normal food breakfast, we gather in the living room for about 20 minutes of spirited, four-part singing around the keyboard for our air breakfast. Each of the children have learned to sing harmony – alto, tenor, or bass. We take a hymnbook and start at the beginning and sing each song whether we know it or not. It is amazing how many excellent, beautiful songs there are that are not being sung, and the old “worn out” hymns are the ones that everyone sings. The singing makes an invigorating way to start the day. Cathy and I met while singing on the Rosedale Chorale from Rosedale Bible College in Ohio. We traveled together on two chorale tours in the US and Canada totaling over 12,000 miles.

Singing or playing the harmonica is an excellent way to develop one’s lungs. Dr. Alexander Beddoe, one of Carey Reams’s students, said that one of the best ways to increase our body’s intake of oxygen is to sing or play the harmonica several times a day. He said that it is not the inhaling that is important, but the controlled release of the air that helps the lungs take the oxygen out of the air. When we sing, we take a deep breath and then slowly release the air as we sing a phrase. It is the opposite principle of the lung exercising tool that they give to patients in the hospital that focuses on creating a vacuum by sucking with the lungs and then you give a quick exhale so you can take a breath again.

The concept that people, animals, and plants receive 80% of their nutrients from the air is a revolutionary concept when it comes to how we think about feeding ourselves and feeding plants. I had verified to my own satisfaction that plants receive at least 80% of their nutrients from the air. I shared some of my finding in the article “The Most Important Plant Food – In Your Face and You Can’t See It” http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/06/14/the-most-important-plant-food-in-your-face-and-you-cant-see-it/

For people, it was more difficult to verify that we receive a significant amount of our nourishment from the air and sunshine. Some time ago, I read an article and I can’t locate it now, about how the human body radiates infrared light. The article stated that the body uses about 2000 calories to produce the infrared light in a 24 hour day. If a person eats a 2000 calorie diet each day and burns 2000 calories walking, working, and other activities, and burns another 2000 calories producing infrared light; and you subtract off the unused food in the waste that is excreted, we find that there is not enough calories used from the food to provide the 4000 calories that the body burned. We get the additional energy from the air.

An excellent article that explains how air (oxygen) is combined with the atoms from our food to produce the atomic energy that our bodies run on is titled “You, Me and Energy”. It explains how air is as an important an energy source for our bodies as the food we eat.   http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Body%20Energy/body_energy.htm

If anyone has any more information on how much energy our bodies take from the air, I am interested in hearing it.

For more on the importance of air as a food, you can read my article in the newsletter archives: “Trying to Stay Healthy Wrapped in Plastic and Living in a Sealed Insulated Box, Starving Ourselves From a Food We Can’t See”
http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/11/19/trying-to-stay-healthy-wrapped-in-plastic-and-living-in-a-sealed-insulated-box-starving-ourselves-from-a-food-we-cant-see/
http://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/11/27/trying-to-stay-healthy-wrapped-in-plastic-and-living-in-a-sealed-insulated-box-starving-ourselves-from-a-food-we-cant-see-update/