A Farmcraft Summer Summary

A Farmcraft Summer Summary:

Time flew by this summer, as I imagine it always will and does for everyone. Here is some of what comes to mind:

Andrea is having a baby! She is/was more and more pregnant as summer went on. The baby is due in January.

We hired Tianna to work with us. She is organically and ecologically minded, she has more farming experience than we do, and she is stronger than Luke. So that has worked out very good.

Our cows calved 6 calves on our farm, and we bought 10 baby bottle calves from DaKel Jerseys just down the road from us. The bottle calves lived in the yard with us for around 12 weeks. It’s great fun to have the little babies in the yard for us and our customers to interact with. Now they are out with the main beef herd, which has grown from last year’s 8 or so to this year’s 30 or so total head.

Starting in April, we moved the beef herd to a new paddock each day. They grazed the whole farm 3 to 5 times (depending on the area) between April and now. The sward is thicker and more diverse, and the cattle are bigger, fatter and shinier than when we started, so I think that makes a good season of grazing.

The beef herd is currently eating hay. They have been for the last 5 days or so, and they will continue to eat hay for another few days. Two related points:

            -The pasture is almost done growing for the year. We had a few light frosts, and heavy freezing is right around the corner. The pasture plants will be mostly dormant after heavy frosts/freezing. We want the plants to go into dormancy with strong root reserves, so that the sward survives the winter, pops back into life and grows vigorously come springtime. If we graze the plants down tight to the ground, the plants will use some of their reserves trying to regrow. We don’t want that. So we are feeding hay, waiting for the grass to become mostly dormant, than we will move the cows around the farm in one more Fall rotation.

            -We swapped 15 acres with our neighbors so that each of us now has a more contiguous set of fields. We planted our new 15 acres to a pasture mix, made hay from this field twice, and now the sward is 8 or 12” tall once again. It’s a beautiful mix of grasses, clovers, alfalfa, chicory and plantain. I am super stoked to graze it, but first we need get up fence around it. Tianna and I are building fence with some urgency, and hopefully we will have it up and the beef herd will be grazing in our new field by the end of the week.

The new field will hopefully give us 20 or 30 days of grazing this Fall, and the rest of the farm another 10 or 15 days, which puts us toward Thanksgiving by the time we are feeding hay. We’ll feed hay on the meadows and pastures from Thanksgiving until April, same plan as last Winter, just in a different location than last year, so that we spread the impact and fertility around the farm. I figure we’ll want somewhere around 60 tons of hay for the winter, which is about 120 big bales. We have some hay from our new field, and we are buying more hay from an organic local farmer not far from here.

We built a shed. It’s not quite done, we still need to get the rest of the metal siding on. The shed’s primary purpose is to keep hay and equipment (tractor, trailers, etc) out of the elements so they don’t get moldy and rusty, respectively.

We raised 4 groups of about 300 meat chickens each, for a total of 1200. We raised them the same as previous years – on pasture, with daily moves, organic feed. They’re as delicious and nutritious as ever. The first 3 groups we brought to the butcher, the last group of 340 we butchered here. We are hoping to do more of the butchering here next year – it’s less stress for the birds, less stress equates to more ethical and better meat quality, and on-farm butchering is a way for us to keep more money circulating through our farm and local community instead of hauling the birds and the money to the butcher 120 miles away.

The meat chickens very thoroughly fertilized an 1 or 2 acres. The grass grows back incredibly fast, thick and dark green after the meat chickens have been across it. It goes like this:

     -The cows graze the grass short

     -We move the meat chickens onto the short grass where they can eat the grass shorter yet and also get into the soil to scratch, peck, forage and dust bathe

     -The chickens manure

     -Hopefully it rains

     -20 to 30 days later the cows are back to enthusiastically chow down on the lush grass regrowth

Somewhere around 220 hens laid about 200 eggs a day, every day, all Summer. 15 dozen or 16 dozen made it into cartons to be sold every day. The hens moved with their sleeping coop, nest boxes, shade trailer, water, feeders and fence to a fresh paddock every five days. Mostly they followed the milk cows through their rotation.

About those milk cows - Bonnie calved May 15 and we have been milking her since. We bought Betty on July 1 and have been milking her since. Together, they’ve converted sunshine to pasture to milk and then given us 6+ gallons a day of incredible nourishment for our household and for the community. We also milked Peppa Cow for just a couple months, but she didn’t really want to be here or work with us, and we butchered her after she jumped over fences every day for a week. Bonnie and Betty were bred a little later than we hoped, due to us trying some fancy AI semen again and again, but now they seem to have settled from our Bull Osage and will hopefully calve again at the end of June.

We milk seasonally here, coinciding mostly with the grazing season, and the letting the girls rest and put their energy toward warmth and gestation during the deep of Winter. That means the 2025 milking season is coming to an end soon. In addition to Bonnie and Betty, we have a few other prospects for milk cows in the future – Rosie, the beautiful and gentle and friendly heifer from Bonnie in May (hopefully milking in 2027); Daphne, the graceful heifer we raised as a bottle calf in 2024 and that is somewhat cooperative with us (hopefully milking mid-June 2026); and, to be able to have milk for the house a little earlier in the season, we will hopefully milk our beef cow (75% Speckled Park, 25% Jersey) named Wendy, who is very friendly and lets me touch her udder out in the field and will hopefully calve again in March or April 2026.

We do have dreams of providing more milk of incredible healing and vitalizing quality to the community through a Farmcraft micro-dairy, milking something like 5 to 10 cows, on 100% grass, seasonally while the grass is at its highest quality and nutrition. The cows will be dried off soon for the winter, then we'll have more milk to offer in July 2026, and then hopefully we will milk seasonally in future years (2027 and beyond) from April through November.

We raised 40 or 50 piggies. Same beautiful pork as ever, from pigs rotated across the landscape to a new paddock every week, soaking up the sunshine and lounging in the shade and taking in all the nutrients of the pasture and meadow and forest edge as well as the organic grains we provide them. We are using a new butcher this year and have added a few really nice products to our pork offerings, all of which now have very clean ingredient lists, such as no-nitrate natural casing weiners, no nitrate deli ham, no nitrate bacon, maple breakfast links… We have been offering rendered lard from our pigs for a few years now, and the last few months we have been selling more than ever. Andrea and I cook with lard and tallow exclusively, and we prefer the mouthfeel and taste of lard, so we are excited that word is catching on regarding what we consider the tastiest and most health promoting organic pasture raised fat.

Our pig operation is completing the transition to seasonal pig raising. Instead of butchering year round, we are going to work closer with our ecology and the natural rhythm of the seasons by farrowing (having piglets) only once a year, in early Spring, raising them through the Summer growing season of abundance and butchering them at the peak of their nutritional intake in late Fall. One of the nice consequences of this system is a long break for the sows. Gestation in pigs is about 4 months, and sows raise the piglets for about 2 months, so they are left with 6 months of kicking back and lounging. Our 4 sows have had a great summer relaxing, enjoying brassicas, grasses and clovers with each paddock shift, and have been keeping an eye on our new boar Eddie as he grows up and gets ready for breeding around Thanksgiving.

We set up a humble little farm store. It is the little garage closest to our house with three freezers, one refrigerator, some shelving, and perfectly weathered whitewash shiplap walls. It’s open 7 am to 7 pm every day, serve yourself, pay with cash, check or venmo. We are very happy to have a place for people to easily access our tasty & nourishing food 365 days a year and very happy that customers seem to find the store convenient and functional and worth regularly coming to.

This was our 3^rd year at the Sheboygan Farmers Market. Andrea owned it solo all season long. With the amount of farm chores each morning during the summer, it became impractical for both of us to go. We would have to wake up at 3am or earlier, and the animals don’t want to be moved or milked at 3am, so it just wasn’t working out. Now Luke does most of the morning chores on Saturdays and Andrea runs the farmers market.

Just a month ago a new venue came into this world - the Sheboygan REKO Ring. If you live in the area, definitely check it out. It is a pre-order farmers market with vegetables, greens, meat, snacks and more. Customers drive through a lineup of vendors to pick up their orders every week. Pickup is in the Plymouth Fleet Farm parking lot from 5:30pm to 6:00pm on Wednesdays. We aren’t in them, but there are also Ozaukee and Washington county REKO rings. Here is the link to the Sheboygan County REKO: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1288047212867420

Farmcraft is offering home delivery to Washington, Ozaukee & Sheboygan County, every Wednesday, for $6.99. If you can’t make it out to the farm, this is a very convenient way to get Farmcraft fare to come to you!

We grew 5 acres of organic corn. This was pretty cool. We had the opportunity to rent 5 acres, so we jumped at it to gain the experience, meet more neighbors, have some fun and hopefully harvest our own organic corn to feed our pigs and chickens for the next year. A neighbor did the pre-planting cultivation and the seeding, and I did the weed cultivation during May, June and July. The corn grew to 7 or 8’ tall and is laden with long cobs with full seeds. Harvest will be in November or even December, once the corn is dry. Hopefully the neighbor is to harvest it using a corn picker to harvest the whole cob with the grain attached, and we will either feed it to our pigs and let them chew it off the cob or we will grind it for both the chickens and pigs. Organic corn has been grown this way – as part of a multi-year rotation, on appropriately flat and fertile land, without chemicals, with many rounds of weed cultivation, picked and stored whole to be fed to hogs and chickens – for many generations, and we are grateful for the opportunity to participate in the tradition and the craft. Hopefully we will continue to grow some of our own grains for chickens and pigs, and/or have nearby farmers grow organic grains for us each year to store and feed to the next year’s animals.

We grew sweet corn, pumpkins, melons and tomatoes. We chose not to have a “market garden” this year, so we sold just a little bit of the excess produce and also provided some gratis in our farm store.

Three great parties! Thank you to the 70 to 100 people that came out to each event to enjoy the farm and the food and good company! Tentatively we will do the same next year, so see you next May, August and October!

We were awarded as the Nourish (https://nourishfarms.org/) 2025 Good Food Champion. Nourish’s recognition is pretty much beyond our wildest dreams. It is our mission to steward the landscape and provide the community with knowledge of and access to good food. It’s our mission, so of course we hope or expect to accomplish it. But as you work through everything in the above Summer Summary and daily life and 1000 other small chores or projects, you can get lost in the mire and can’t see the forest for the trees, or whatever. So it was with surprise and great honor to receive Nourish’s award.

--

Thank you so much everyone over the Summer that bought eggs and meat and nourished you and yours with Farmcraft fare. You, as customers, are creating a beautiful and productive place that we are honored to steward, and it is our satisfying privilege to have raised the food with which you choose to nourish, grow, heal, and vitalize the bodies of you and your family.

--

That’s all for now, thank you for reading, hopefully more (shorter) blogs to come!