_ The cost of food continues to rise. If you didn't realize it, you either don't do the grocery shopping, or you haven't ask the person who does!

You can do a search on the 'net and find all kinds of numbers indicating how much food process have went up and what others believe they will do in the future.

  The viewpoint I liked was from Lynn Carpenter she believes "We have been enjoying a 60-year trend of low food prices that is crashing to an abrupt end this very year."

Lynn says (and I agree) the government numbers released, and what I see at the grocery store never seem to match up. She recommends figuring out how many hours you must work each week to pay for food.

She did some serious research and came up with some very interesting numbers! You can read it all here.

But all that aside if you go to the store a few times you get an idea of what it costs to eat and you suddenly feel a bit of gnawing worry. Now the mistake you might make is to leave the grocery store, get the groceries put away, and dismiss the gnawing worry telling yourself "it'll all work out somehow."

Don't fall into that mindset!

Nothing just "works itself out" and if it does, it is seldom in your favor.

Planting a garden is a proactive way to cut your food bill and improve your overall health.

Feeling overwhelmed when you think of  gardening?

Start Small

One of the best ways to get started growing your own food is to start small. Plant a few tomato plants and some bell peppers along the house.  Make a garden four feet by eight feet. Make raised beds etc.

I love High Density Gardening by Ric Wiley. Gardening is work no matter how you cut it but you can reduce the workload and space needed by using Ric's methods.

He covers everything from A to Z in this ebook.

• How to plan your High Density Garden in order that you can maximize the quantity of crops you can grow
• How to build a High Density Gardening bed
• How to propagate seeds
• Home made compost. How to make it quickly.
• Much more

I'm a lover of ebooks because you can be reading them five minutes after you decide to purchase them! Which might be why I spend so much at Amazon on my Kindle.

Take a look at High Density Gardening and download a copy and get started planning now. It takes some planning, money and effort to harvest a successful garden.

But it is worth it!

Imagine your very own lush, green, vibrant garden this spring. Can't you taste the garden fresh tomato's, beans, onions, peppers, cucumbers, water melons, peas, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, sweet corn, cabbage, you get the point……

until next time!

I recently read an article in the Columbus Dispatch about the manure problem in Ohio.


The article starts out "Under the best conditions, raising livestock is a dirty, smelly business."

The truth is under the right conditions, raising livestock is not dirty or smelly.


Until last year I let my hogs spread their own manure 24 hrs a day throughout the pastures. Then I decided I needed to keep some for specific applications. So I have been bringing hogs into the barn for winter to collect the manure.

As long as the carbon ratio is right there is no smell or mess. In my case, wheat or oat straw. Lots of it.

By keeping a good bed of straw in the barn I tie up the manure right along with the smell and mess.  Anytime you're smelling manure you know right away your carbon is low.

If you don't tie it up with a carbonaceous material you are losing valuable nutrients that you can use on your soil to fertilize it.

The nutrients either evaporate, which you smell, or leach away which wastes the nutrients by fertilizing the lawn around the barn. Or worse yet, running of into a waterway somewhere and polluting the water.

The whole idea of a huge amount of animals in one place (for long periods of time) is so unnatural it's no wonder big Ag had to come up with all these nifty, yet environmentally unfriendly ways, to store it or get rid of it. 

Big Agriculture spreads manure that is usually 100 percent raw manure. Nothing added like straw or sawdust. Heck just put those critters on concrete or slatted floors and let the pure manure pile up and then we can overload the soil with it.

Bad idea all the way around in my opinion.

If you read any old books they tout the benefits of manure as a fertilizer. But that manure was loaded with straw or other material which added to the organic material in the soil.

The combination of the manure with the organic material in my opinion is far superior to just raw manure you get from a factory farm.

As sustainable farmers we have to make sure we are doing things right. No manure running off into waterways or overloading the soil.

The American public is getting tired of factory type farms ruining the environment with all these unsustainable ways. I don't blame them I'm tired of it too.

The best way to send the message is to stop giving the factory farms your money. Give to a farmer who is acting responsibly towards the environment and the animals or crops they raise.

At Spring Hill Farms we think that's the right thing to do...

Until next time! 

Reducing off the farm inputs can be accomplished in many different ways. One of the ways we are expanding on this is by growing open pollinated corn. I blogged here about the small pasture we were running pigs on to take off the grass, root up the soil and then we would plant corn. You can read that blog here.

Once the hogs grazed the grass down and then began to root it up and eat the roots off the grass we got ready to move them. In this case we moved them the trailer for a short trip to see the butcher.

 I then tilled the field  and waited about a week  for any seeds to germinate. I then cleaned out one of our buildings we had kept hogs in all winter. We kept them in a building all winter so we could collect the manure for this project.

 I kept them deeply bedded with straw. Two reasons for this; one was to keep the nutrients in the manure locked up with carbon, and two, I think hogs laying around in mud and manure is a recipe for sickness not to mention poor farming.

 So we ending up with a bunch of manure with lots of decomposing straw mixed in. I then spread this on the previously tilled soil and worked it in.

This gave the soil a big nutrient boost and a good amount of organic matter or humus. We then planted an old variety of open pollinated corn.

Here's a definition of open pollinated corn from openpollinated.com

 “Open Pollinated”  is a horticultural term meaning that the plant will produce seeds naturally. When these seeds are planted they will reliably reproduce the same plant as the parent. On the other hand, hybrid corn is the result of controlled pollination of inbred plants. These seeds are often sterile, and if they do germinate, will not reliably produce the same plant as the parent. This means the farmer has a perpetual reliance on the seed companies.

 Being able to save seed is a big plus in my book however the good news doesn't stop there, open pollinated corn is typically 11 to 14 percent crude protein whereas hybrid corn comes in at around 6 to 7 percent.

 I have read claims that open pollinated corn picks up substantially more minerals than conventional corn. I've not seen any scientific evidence to support this claim but perhaps it exists. I have had several farmers tell me it can deplete your soil of nutrients as it is a "heavy feeder" which tells me it's taking nutrients from the soil and  I think that's a good thing.

The crop is almost ready and doing a quick and dirty yield test tells me the yield is around 193 bushels per acre. Now keep in mind this test pot is about a 1/4 of an acre.

I would be pleased with 100 plus bushels per acre on a larger scale.

Along with the manure, I also placed the equivalent of 3 gallons per acre of  Growers Mineral Solution in the seed band when planted and then foliar sprayed it twice before it tassled.

Over all, I am very pleased with the Growers Mineral Solution and open pollinated corn. We plan to plant enough corn to eliminate purchasing corn from off farm sources.

Until next time....

Spring Hill Farms

A Wisconsin judge has ruled that owners of cows do not have the right to consume milk from their own cow.

The Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund reported on this in detail and you can find the link at the end of this blog.

Among other things, Dane county Judge Circuit Court Judge Patrick J. Fiedler clarified his rulings by stating Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice.

 I want to use this crazy ruling in Wisconsin to once again say if you are a farmer that values the right to produce and direct market your goods, you need to join the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

If you are a consumer who believes you have the right to consume foods of your choosing, you need to support the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

 The FTCLDF is on the forefront of helping small farms keep, and take back, our rights to produce and consume foods of our choosing.

Take some time and read the article here and then either join or donate to the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

Until next time...

American consumers are becoming aware of the practices of large commercial farming operations and they don't like what they learn.

Here's a great example of proof. Not using sub-therapeutic antibiotics can quickly lower the anti resistant bacterias found on these farms.

You can read more about just how dangerous antibiotic use can be to all of us here: "This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me," says Kellogg Schwab

(From the Union of Concerned Scientists)

A blockbuster new scientific study shows that a transition to organic animal production methods that don’t use antibiotics can reduce levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on farms.

This is the first U.S. study to provide on-farm data on the impacts of removing antibiotics from large-scale poultry CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations).

Researchers from the University of Maryland and the Food and Drug Administration measured levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in poultry litter, water, and feed samples from 10 conventional poultry operations and 10 newly-organic operations of similar size. (Under organic certification rules, producers are not allowed to use antibiotics.) The newly antibiotic-free organic farms had much lower rates of resistant bacteria compared to the conventional farms, demonstrating that the reduction in antibiotic use can immediately lower the levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria found on the farm.

The study was released in the midst of a massive food safety recall of ground turkey contaminated with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. That incident, involving 36 million pounds of ground turkey produced by agribusiness giant Cargill, sickened some 111 consumers. Read the full study here, and learn more about the turkey recall here.

One of the many reasons I oppose the use of genetically modified corn is one of the modified traits is to make it resistant to pesticides.

To me it only stands to reason that if you know the poison won't kill your corn you would be more apt to use plenty enough to kill the weeds.

If you end up with some weed pressure when the corn is up high but still able to drag a boom sprayer through it, why not spray poison again? After all it can't kill the corn plants they are genetically resistant. And if you're the seed modifier why not make the seed resistant to the poison you sell?

Great ideas from strictly a marketing standpoint.

But common sense tells me I don't want to eat food that has been hosed down with pesticides maybe more than once.

The latest: Monsanto’s new GMO corn, intended for the frozen and/or canned corn market. This experimental corn will not be labeled, so consumers cannot know when they may be eating a GMO food that contains a toxic pesticide in every bite

Let the food giants know you don't want to eat pesticide laden corn.
Go to The Center For Food Safety and click the "Take Action" button
till next time...

In my never ending quest to reduce inputs from outside sources (like the local feed mill) I have been widening my research on ways to increase the amount of green foodstuffs I can carry through the winter for the animals.

I somehow stumbled upon silage. Silage is somewhat foreign to me. I remember the smell of it as a very young boy when the farmer would fill the silo on our place. But I don't remember anything else about it. 

I have read several references to silage in old books but didn't see much of a way it would help me here.

First, some terminology: Silage is grasses and other forages, such as alfalfa , put up at a high moisture content. Normally it is direct cut and put into an airtight storage quickly. Haylage haylage

a feed that is halfway between hay and silage. The feed is cut when green, chopped small (0.5 to 1 inch) wilted and then stored in a special airtight tower silo.
..... Click the link for more information. can be the same source put up after it has been allowed to wilt to a lower moisture level. Hay can be the same source, just put up very dry. In my part of the country, corn silage is popular.

I first found this article talking about ensiling your grass clippings for chickens and I kinda went crazy. I'm notorious for using as much of my yard as possible to graze livestock and poultry. I figure why mow it when someone will eat it?

When our yard gets out of hand (when nothing is eating the yard and I'm not mowing it either) we have typically tossed the grass clippings to the hogs who depending on the quality of the grass will usually munch them right down.

I found a pdf doc that talked about feeding sheep grass clippings as an experiment at one of the universities and they concluded it worked well.

So even though I had the goats and some pullets in the yard, I still had some spots that were needing mowed or baled. Better yet turned into silage for the chickens!

So I read up on the several documents I could find about making silage and off I went to get the mower fired up. 

When I explained to my boys what we were going to do my youngest said "Dad...really? Are we so poor we have to save the grass from the yard now?"

Which made me laugh so hard I couldn't answer. I'm sure this question was prompted by my recent talks with the boys about the economy.

Once I mowed the yard, I discovered the boys and mom were going to the high school football game and I was making grass clipping silage by myself.

So...it took my about an hour or so to bag up three bags of clippings. I packed them as tight as I could and double bagged them. I also did one small freezer bag in hopes that I can observe the process.

I'll report back to you once we open a bag in a few months. We will either have grass/lawn silage or moldy grass clippings, and I read in some cases, compost.

All I know is if it works I'm going to be eye ballin' the neighbors yard next.

Until next time...

I have long been a proponent of eggs from pastured hens.

Eggs get a bad rap many times but the truth is they are a great source of:

• Nine essential amino acids

One of the highest quality proteins you can find. Proteins are nutrients that are essential to the building, maintenance and repair of your body tissues such as your skin, internal organs and muscles. They are also the major components of your immune system and hormones

• Lutein and zeaxanthin (for your eyes)
• Choline for your brain, nervous- and cardiovascular systems
• Naturally occurring B12

I routinely eat my eggs raw but for many that is not something they are ready to do unless they are really a committed health fanatic!

It's very handy though, I can have two or three raw eggs and some fresh vegetable juice for lunch and be back to work in ten minutes.

If I'm in a hurry in the morning I can crack a couple of eggs into a mug and two swallows later my breakfast is over and I'm out the door!

I would not recommend doing this with store bought eggs regardless of pastured, free range or otherwise. The risk of salmonella is very real.

Here's a list of the top 10 super foods for your health. How many are you consuming?

The Top 10 Best Superfoods

I promised I would update you on the Little Tamworth Gilt who thinks she is a chicken.

A few weeks ago I noticed a pig running through the yard. I watched as she zipped down past the house and disappeared. I was sure she belonged to our oldest sow Droopy. But how did she get out?



Over the next few days I noticed as soon as we were all in the house she would sneak out and head for the laying hens which were being fed outside. She would charge right up and take her place at the trough!

Since the troughs have a bar that runs through the middle it was hard for her to get feed so she began upsetting it and eating the feed off the ground.

This became her daily ritual. Watch us feed the chickens and then run over and start eating. As with any bad habit (or so I'm told) it kept getting worse. Pretty soon she was waiting with the chickens when we went to feed them.

The boys would chase her back to the pasture and she would squeal as loud as she could to let them know she was not happy.

A few days of that and I caught her sneaking out of the hen house! Turns out she wasn't laying eggs she was climbing into the bottom box and eating eggs.

I resolved to fix the fence the next day and put a stop to her antics. I got up the next morning and went to the garden to check things out to find little pig had beat me to it and rooted out a bunch of sweet potatoes for her breakfast.

My next stop was the barn for some fence wire and thus ended the pig who only wanted to be a chicken because they roam around and get all kinds of goodies.

Until next time...

 

Love him or hate him, Joel Salatin is leading the charge when it comes to small farms.

 I can't wait to read his new book coming out in October. I love the fact that Joel has got the ear of a portion of America that is big enough to help bring about change. 

 Watch the video to get a glimpse into what he'll be covering. While you're at it if you don't know about the Farm to Consumer Legal defense Fund check them out!

 until next time...