Farm News September 2021

Autumn is coming quickly. The air is cooler now and has a distinct crispness first thing in the morning. The trees are beginning to turn brilliant colors and we found frost in patches across the fields at least one morning last week.

Happily the smoke that hovered most of the summer has blown away, at least for now.  Especially in the afternoon the light is so bright and clear after all the weeks of smoke and haze. I keep pausing to look around and admire the bright rich colors, the hills clearly visible and how the valley seems to nearly sparkle.

Our beef harvest is moving apace, we have sent six beef nearly each week this month to our processor Northwest Premium in Nampa, and our big walk-in freezer is just about full. Orders keep rolling in, for which we are thankful, but we have plenty of beef available here to fill your freezer and feed your family this winter.

Late summer and early fall is the best time of year to harvest since the steers have had all summer on the best pasture available. They can gain 2 pounds per day! And it’s good for us as we plan and prepare for winter to have fewer mouths to feed through the cold months, especially large steers that can each eat quite a lot! By harvesting now while the grass is still growing, we capture the highest nutritional profile in the beef, and allow the pasture to grow and stockpile feed to graze through the winter.

We are finally raising our prices in October. It’s been years since we raised them, but the current state of the economy dictates that we must. If you order bulk beef (eighth, quarter, or half) and send in your deposit by October 1, you can take advantage of the current pricing for your whole order.

In other news, Aaron has decided to step away from the farm in mid-October to pursue a career in law enforcement. Claire is stepping in to fill more of the management of grazing and cattle and our friend Robert Kennedy is also coming on part time to help with the heavy lifting. However, given the wide range of responsibilities Aaron carried out here, we have a need for more help. There are a variety of options with field projects, managing social media, coordinating orders and making deliveries. Please feel free to contact us if you have interest in working with us.

Farm News June 2021

Summer is nearly here!

Spring for us was long, with very little rain and lots of temperature fluctuation, both of which slowed our pasture growth significantly. Fortunately we were able to buy a load of organic hay from Kings Crown Organics to hold over the cows until the irrigation started and the grass could grow and catch up. But now the pastures are looking really good. I love it when cows are belly deep in fresh pasture!

We had our fourth ever C-section in the history of our farm last week. Small mama cow, and a big baby boy. Claire was watching her through Saturday evening and brought in Mama and Jonathan to help assist with the birth, and then made the call at 11pm to bring in the vet. Dr Dan from the Animal Medical Center here in Emmett does a phenomenal job.  It was a long night with a lot of work! But both mama and baby are alive and well.

Dr Dan did the last C-section here four years ago on our cow Holly, and two weeks ago she delivered her third healthy calf since then.

We’re planning a book signing here on the farm for our friend Grace Olmsted who just wrote “Uprooted,” a book about farming in the Emmett Valley. Her grandparents and great grandparents farmed here, and this is their story along with the stories of many other farming families in our area. She met with us several times and our family and farm feature prominently in several chapters. I particularly enjoy her description of our farm “A group of Brown Swiss cattle stand together in a sprawling pasture, feasting on grass…..The sound of their satisfied munching and crunching fills the air, while swallows dance overhead in a dizzying profusion……these cattle are a symbol of full scale agricultural revolt.”

Come see us on Wednesday, June 16th at 6:30pm to get your copy signed! Here’s the facebook event page. Book Signing

Aaron’s book “Share the Gift” will also be available. It’s a collection of notes and stories from his adventures and training over the last 10 years, along with the philosophy of health and farming we hold here. He wrote and illustrated by hand.

We’ve been moving chicken and cow manure into a compost pile, it should be garden gold in short order. It’s amazing how quickly it heats up and starts breaking down the nutrients into a form that is usable to plants. We piled it up and mixed it together, while sprinkling water in to make sure the compost had enough moisture. By the next day it was too hot to put your hand into the pile. So we used the tractor to turn it and add some wood chips to increase the airflow.  It may be available by the five gallon bucket to spice up your garden, stay tuned…..

The raw milk coop idea continues to move forward. Please go to our survey page for more information and let us know if you are interested!

Aaron and Heather and Jonathan ran a Murph workout on Memorial Day with several of our friends, followed by a cold plunge in the Payette River and brunch together. Then as soon as the cows were fed for the day it was time for long naps. We hope you had a lovely time with family, and could take a minute to reflect on the sacrifices of those who went before us to protect and preserve the liberties we enjoy today.

Cheers,

Aaron

Farm News Update April 2021

It’s been a busy month!!

March kicked off with Aaron getting married on the 7th! He and Heather have been dating for a couple years now, enjoying work outs, working on the farm, and adventuring in the mountains and boating on the reservoir.

The wedding was lovely, with bagpipes and Celtic music, dancing, and good food. Aaron and Heather used Aaron’s Scottish basket-hilted broadsword to cut their cake!

Aaron and Heather took off for a week in Moab, Utah for a short honeymoon hiking in Arches National Park. Then back to regular life and spring speeding up on the farm. Heather works as a CT tech at a hospital in Nampa but enjoys coming out to the farm to help with all and sundry projects, Aaron continues to work full time on the farm.

We started calving! We’re up to more than a dozen new babies so far, with plenty more on the way. It is a good calving season, largely due to Claire’s diligence in checking on mamas and babies and working with them before an issue can develop. Most of the time they are fine all by themselves and we (she), can just watch, but once in a while we step in to help guide a baby to where it needs to be to nurse, or to settle a new mama down if she’s unsure about things.

Last year we used a Brown Swiss bull that we raised ourselves to keep the Swiss genetics that we like so much, so these are really sweet friendly little calves. Aaron had one following him up the field last week when he was moving the cows to a new paddock. The mamas all took off for new food, and one little baby was by himself napping in the sunshine. As Aaron walked over to find him, he woke up and instead of panicking and running away, he just stood up and came over to see Aaron and follow him up the field to where his mama was waiting. Happy day. :)

Other new faces on the farm are about 600 baby chicks that arrived last week! We are raising meat birds for Josiah of J-Bar Farms, as some of the only Organic chicken raised in Idaho. He will be marketing these, we are only raising them.

Once the chickens are big enough (about 4 weeks old) they will be in mobile chicken coops in our pastures and moving every day to fresh grass just like our cows. We are really excited to see how adding this new species into our pasture rotation will increase the fertility of the ground and possibly even knock back our already small fly and mosquito population.

Other activities these last few weeks include the normal spring run of projects getting ready for a new season of growing: burning and weed-whacking ditches to prepare for irrigation water that comes in around April 15; harrowing fields to spread out the manure and hay from winter feeding and dethatch the last of the wintered grass; and feeding out the final few bales of hay so the barns and stack areas are all clean and ready for our hay harvest this summer.

We also keep moving beef along to our friends and customers! It hasn’t been the crazy rush we had a year ago, but demand has been steady. It’s so nice to have our inventory all stored here onsite in the new freezer! Call us up and come by to try out our beef or refill your freezer!

Cheers to you and yours! Hope your spring is full of sunshine and fresh air and flowers. It’s getting on toward barbecue weather…….

Farm News Update Feb 2021

Hello all,

January has been a mix of busy days, and winter rest. Working with the seasons, we often have some quieter days in the winter. The sun rises later and sets sooner, and the daily workload is such that we are able to come in and sit by the fire and read for an evening. 

The largest development, and it’s 40 feet long and 10 feet tall, is a new walk-in freezer unit we moved to the farm so we can store all our beef here onsite. Now, instead of storing most of our inventory in downtown Boise, we can have easy access to it for customers coming to the farm and to bundle for deliveries.

We are glad to note that we have slots reserved with our processor, Northwest Premium Meats, for all our beef this year. It was a little questionable around the first of the year, whether they would have any space for us. All the local  butchers have been run off their feet with a massive increase in demand for their services in the wake of the upheavals brought on by 2020. However, things seem to be steady for now, and we are planning our first harvest in June.

It looks like spring is beginning to stir. There’s increased warmth in the sunshine and on my daily rounds I have been seeing more birds coming back. I noticed the Collared Doves came back a couple weeks ago to scout nesting locations, this week we saw skeins of Canadian Geese flying north, and on Friday I saw two geese paired off, as well as flocks of Starlings singing fit to beat the band. 

Several of our heifers are looking closer and closer to calving, stay tuned on the IG/FB pages for photos of baby calves!

My mother, Susan, is excited because her garden seeds arrived this week, she’s planning the layout for this years garden and ready to get her hands in the soil. She is also reading Gabe Brown’s “Dirt to Soil” and finding encouragement and new ideas for inter seeding and cover crops to strengthen our already vibrant pastures, we’ll see when I get sent to borrow the local extension office’s no-till drill seeder to start experimenting.

We feed hay once a week, and our cats, and my border collie Ragnar, have discovered the haystack is a target rich environment to catch a mouse or three for a quick snack!

All the best, and feel free to look us up for some tasty nutritious beef!

Aaron

Updates from the farm. Dec 2020

The weather is clear and chilly, the days are gorgeous and sunny, and a bit brisk if the breeze picks up.

Saint John’s Organic Farm

We started feeding hay last week; Aaron and Claire load up 5 of our 750lb bales on the trailer and take it out to the field where they spread it out down the paddock. Right now we have two groups of cows who are each eating about 1000 lbs of hay per day. So Aaron and Claire take out about 4 loads in a morning and then there is enough hay out for the next week. Aaron will set up a movable electric fence to give the cows an appropriate section each day, along the same theory we use when grazing the paddocks in the summer. We have found that it is really good to keep cows in the field all year long, they do just fine in the cold. We adjust their feed rations so they get more if the temperatures plummet, and try to feed a little extra so there are leftovers for them to sleep on, but they seem to adapt quiet well to the low temps. It’s great to have them out on the grass turf even though the grass is pretty well grazed down, they stay healthy in the fresh air and sunshine, and the manure is distributed straight back to the field; it’s a lot less work than cleaning corrals, managing compost windrows, and hauling compost out to spread in the fields.

Aaron Dill - with Ragnar, hauling hay out to the field

The steers are still grazing, and doing well on the stockpiled grass. At this rate we’ll graze them all winter long on grass that grew this fall. We’ve managed to do this every year for the last 10 years, except for the snowpocalyse in 2016. Then we had to feed hay to the steers too, though the grass was still viable to graze after the snow melted down.

Our frost-free waterlines are working well to all groups of cows. What a gorgeous system! Aaron turns them on when he goes out on his daily rounds to move fences to feed cows, and then several of us split up in the evenings to go drain the short supply hoses for the night. So much better than the years when we had to haul all their water out in a 500 gallon tank! Especially with 125 head, many of which are eating hay, we were hauling water almost every day.

Beef harvest is all wrapped up for the year, but we have about 7 pallets full of beef in Boise Cold Storage, so we’re well supplied to meet anyone’s beef needs throughout the winter and spring!

We are already looking at which rib roast we want for Christmas dinner.

Cold plunge! November 2020. Click on the picture to see a video of the whole experience!

Aaron recently began a new practice of ice water plunges, exploring the Wim Hof practice for health. He set up an old water tub in his backyard, and goes out every couple days to immerse in the ice water. There is some interesting research on the effect of cold exposure, to strengthen your circulation and thermo-regulation, and how it causes a reaction in your core to superheat your blood, like a microfever which cooks out impurities and kills viruses. This takes training however, so it’s best to start with cold showers. Aaron is putting together a progression of cold exposure training ideas that he’ll post on his Share the Gift instagram and facebook pages in the near future. Enjoy! 

May your holidays be bright in the midst of a crazy year, may you enjoy the warmth of your family, and may God grant us all peace.

Emmett Farm Memories

I asked my aunt if she would share some of her memories of moving to the Emmett farm and growing up here. We hope you enjoy these memories and photos as much as we did!

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In 1934, jobs in South Gate, California were scarce. Frank Robinson was a skilled plasterer with a wife, Blanche, and two children, Frances and David, then aged 6 and 4. When they found themselves having to choose between gas for the Model T or milk for the children, they knew something had to change. A farm would mean a bit of security. At least they would eat! Frank had an acquaintance, Wes Awald, who had a dairy in Meridian, Idaho. He did Frank the favor of checking out the Larkin farm which was for sale in Emmett. It was 40 acres with a house and barn. His report was that the barn was good but the house was “not much.” Both were built with square nails. No plumbing in the house!

The decision was made. The Model T was traded for a larger Jewett for the trip. The kids’ cousin Don Malan was still in school, but old enough to drive the truck loaded with the family belongings. The trip took a week. It’s hard to imagine that trip without today’s highways, rest stops and drive through restaurants.

Blanche was beginning to have her doubts as they drove mile after mile through the desert. It was when they came to the top of Freezeout Hill and saw the beautiful valley below she began to feel confident about the move. In later years she would recall her relief, seeing “two shades of pink and white” stretching out below, in the valley that would be her home for the next 48 years.

They grew the grapes and bottled the juice themselves. Lots of the bottles were left behind as they drove. Less weight was better.

TRAVELING

The trip from California to Idaho took a week, and the Robinsons had to picnic along the way. Frank fashioned a box to hold food, towels, and bottled grape juice. The photo shows one of the remaining juice bottles. The box would become a towel holder in the “wet room” of the home, a back room that Frank plumbed for a bathroom and laundry. Everything was used and reused, fixed or repurposed.

Frances with bee swarm

BEES

Frances was her Dad’s willing helper when the family kept bees. She turned the crank on the extractor and filled 5 pound tins so honey could be sold. The photo shows their bee keeping license issued by the Idaho Department of Agriculture. It came in the mail as a post card dated March 21, 1945 and had a 3 cent postage stamp.

A bulletin from the American Honey Institute dated May, 1945 suggested the following:

“Are you serving plenty of cottage cheese these days when meat is scarce? For dessert press cottage cheese through a sieve. Add 3 tablespoons of sour or sweet cream and 3 tablespoons of honey to each cup of cheese. Beat until fluffy. Add 1/8 teaspoon of salt. Note: This is also delicious when served as a topping on gingerbread, fruit gelatin, or cherry tarts.”

American Honey Institute Bulletin

BALING HAY

During WWII farm laborers were hard to come by. To manage hay season, a loan from Blanche’s brother Will allowed them to purchase a Case wire baler. It took all four family members to complete the job. Frances drove the tractor; Blanche fed the wires into the slots of the wood block, wearing leather gloves; David tied the wires as the 100 pound bales worked their way to the end of the process; and Frank had the dusty job of placing the wooden block that marked the end of one bale and the start of a new one. It was the first baler of its kind in the Valley.

DAIRY COWS

Soon after arriving in Emmett, Frank arranged to pasture dairy cows in exchange for the milk, probably around 8 cows. Frances was the tail holder while her Dad sat on a T stool to milk. After some time, Frank fashioned tail holders from rubber hose and heavy wire. Milk went into 10 gallon cans to be cooled in the irrigation ditch until they were picked up. As time went on, they purchased a separator and sold cream to the creamery.

The NCAP Annual Report

NCAP helps protect our community through environmental health; they inspire the use of ecologically sound solutions to reduce the use of pesticides, and their work is helping so many farmers and communities in the Northwest.

NCAP assisted us in planting a native wildflower pollinator meadow, which is a mutually beneficial piece of land for both bees and farmers. To read their full report, go to http://www.pesticide.org/annual_reports.