That February Sun!
- richardmasta
- 43 minutes ago
- 8 min read
It is zero degrees outside, but I have the smell of fresh-pinched cilantro on my fingers, the sunny shine of green in my eyes. Fresh eggs from the chickens sizzle in the pan and the smoky smell of pork jowls spatter in the pan. When you buy a whole pig, you get the whole pig. Jowls “bacon” is my current favorite snacky snack. The winter farmhouse captures that smoky smell for hours, swirling with fumes off the coffee pot. The low sun sneaks in for five minutes of glory through the icicles in the front windows. I stare at peeling plaster, hundred-year-old flower wallpaper, a broken window screen, and I don't care. I love this old farmhouse. I kick my feet up on the couch with a full belly of bacon and a full cup of coffee and Farmer Joel Salatin’s new collection of essays on farming and homesteading, Pitchfork Pulpit. I toss Pip his mushy, wet rope toy between flips of the page, and I glaze off into that lazy weekend stupor….
Usually it takes a half-hour of reading and coffee to get me fired up for farm chores, but it’s winter. Today it takes a half-hour to realize I don’t want to do anything. I could shovel snow out of the chicken run; I could cut some dying ash trees down for next year’s firewood; I could organize the messy barn. I could begin building my new farm stand. Instead I go outside shirtless in the zero degree temps and let the sun hit my chest. Oh, that February sun! The dogs body slam each other into the foot-deep snow. They don’t know what “degrees” are. They sit in the snow like it's the couch and chew snow off their paws. A neighbor drives by and waves; I wonder if she notices I’m shirtless. It feels good to shiver a little.
I decide to watch TV, the nemesis of the homesteader. Two hours of Game of Thrones is two hours I lose mucking stalls, two hours I lose splitting firewood. But come May, I’ll be glad I sat still for a few hours last winter. I’ll be glad I went out in the snow and played with the doggy boys and dug our snouts into rodent holes and came up empty. Hours and hours of snowshoe hikes around the farm, leading to ideas, inspiration, poetry, and fun.... The familiar dent on the arm of the couch from where my socked feet rest shall be saluted like a flag come spring, when the grass laughs at the lambs and grows high and proud, enveloping all who dare enter. Anyway, G.O.T. is amazing writing. I’m a big fan of wildlings and dragons and the general upheave of undesirable political structures. Hit that “play next episode” button…..
I take a break between episodes to set up the slow cooker. I’ll be tossing in a butt roast from my own whole hog, purchased recently from Mountain Breeze Farm in Sandwich. I’ll shred that piggy right up and toss it with some sticky-sweet BBQ sauce. A big pot of rice, some tortilla chips, sour cream, salsa, guac, shredded cheese. Super Bowl snacks and lunches for the week. This is how we eat ‘round here.
It’s quite the experience buying a whole pig. I pull into the sugarhouse at Mountain Breeze Farm and meet Farmer Ryan, who has five boxes full of pork products for me. It can feel overwhelming buying a whole pig (or a half, or quarter), but it’s never as bad as you think. You fill out a sheet, and if you don’t know what to write, you guess. I saw “jowls, whole/sliced. Smoked/not smoked.” I guessed sliced and smoked. And guess what, they’re delicious. I dance a jig while I eat them. I signed up for all the weird parts – back fat, leaf lard, tail, organs, hocks – everything except the head and feet. I don’t have any apples to stuff in the mouth and the feet have too many bones for me to care (though they do taste decent). When I get out of my truck and shake Ryan’s hand, he offers me a spare tail, unwanted by another customer. A shrink-wrapped piggy tail is a funny sight. Sign me up, I say. My instincts tell me tails are good for broth. I text my chef buddy, who confirms immediately, and sends me a ramen broth recipe. Worst case, I bet Wilder will chew on it for hours. And I got one for Pip, too.
If you buy a whole pig, though, you should have a plan for how to store it. My hog is 250 pounds of “product” and I'm dropping $1700 for it – that’s $6.80 a pound. That’s a steal if you run the numbers. Five boxes don’t look so bad on my counter – but as I pull them apart, I begin to question my life choices. 37 pork chops, 20 packs of bacon, 4 hams – 4 hams! – and 7 roasts. I haven’t even begun. Where the heck will I stick two – two! – tails?! I put one against my butt, give it a wiggle, shrug at Wilder, who seems concerned for my sanity, then toss the tail back into the box. He’s right. Give it to him. He will make the tail dissappear.
And twenty pounds of ground pork! In case you haven’t checked prices lately, good ground pork from Robie’s Farm costs $9 a pound at Heath’s. I don’t even want to know what good cuts of pork cost. All I know is the $1.49 a pound ground pork at Market Basket tastes like the pig laid in its crate and waited to die. The supermarket makes its crummy 1% profit and begs us to buy the nasty processed packaging stuff in the impulse aisles made out of corn and soy. The supermarket ground pork was probably made exclusively out of corn and soy, too. I doubt Ryan’s pigs lived such lives. I’m happy to cut him a check or 15% of my annual food budget. 500 half-pound servings of Sandwich-raised hog. I’m about to shovel a path out to my snow-covered grill so I can send some pork smoke to the gods beyond those beautiful winter skies. Thank you, God. I shall salute my view of Whiteface through the white pines and chomp down on some amazing meals this year.
But those freezers! They’re pretty full already. Green beans and kale and elderberries and random bags of unlabeled meat and critter parts. I can make some elderberry syrup, some jelly.... But is this Roo’s neck? Kiriava’s leg roast? Something mysterious I took from Corner House when Lexi sold it and let me clean the freezers out….. The dead of Something Wild Farm rise again. Freezer-burned purslane from 2022, corn cobs I saved for jelly, random mystery soups frozen long ago. I load up a cardboard box and carry it out to the chicken coop. Every morning for the next few weeks I toss them some goodies with their feed, along with any fresh veggie scraps from the kitchen – and crushed egg shells for extra calcium. They devour everything, one peck at a time. I catch mice in the house and toss them to the chickens too. My birds are not vegetarian. Chickens are not vegetarian. They are tiny velociraptors. I toss an old, frozen pig heart I got from a farmer friend. Gone by dusk. The birds are happy.
The new mascot of Something Wild Farm is Goober the Guinea Hen. She came with a flock of chickens I took from a co-worker who was moving. During the round-up at their old home, she escaped and flew off into the trees. A few hours later, my co-worker captured her and drove her over in a box. Goober is a wild animal. She’s the last of six guineas – she’s figured out how to survive when her sisters were taken out by predators. Fortunately, she's bonded with the flock. Every time I poke my head in the coop, I see a bunch of mundane, laid-back chickens, then – BOO! – Goober pokes her butt-ugly head out of the mass of winter feathers. She looks like a buffalo hiding among cattle.
When I decide to consolidate the new flock with my baby pullets, Goober turns into a Pokémon. If you are my age, you specifically recall the mildly violent buzzing of your Gameboy Color during a Pokémon battle, while the opposing critter kicks your ass. Goober squeaks her rubber chicken battle cry and employs her best move – FLAP – whacking me in the face and flying across the coop, kicking up dust and bedding. In a frenzy, she runs seven different directions then hides under the other chickens, who are as easy to pick as flowers. I pluck a chicken like she was in a grocery store freezer and bring her to the new roost, then return for Goober. FLAP! SCREECH! If I manage a good grip on her, she squeaks and whacks me with wild, violent strength.
Eventually though, I remember I’m not a Pokémon trainer, but a very strong farm boy. I corner her against the wall and hug her into me. Panic! Panic! Then, calm. Like her chicken sisters, she calms down as I hold her. I toss her into the new coop and she explores curiously. The hens are happy to oblige me, but Goober does not oblige; she merely exists. Guineas are wild girls – “warriors in a polka dot dress,” as a dear friend once told me. I wonder when the birds go out on pasture if Goober will wander off into the forests – and if I’ll worry for her.
The daily egg count has begun rising. There are zero Goober eggs, but the hens are laying. There were days of one or two eggs, but now it’s five, six, seven, ten! And those pullets are hours away from dropping little eggs and looking around to ask frantically, WHAT IS THIS?! Don’t worry, girl! You’re doing good work! I spend Valentine’s Day giving little farm tours to some of my rEGGulars and giving all the hens little kisses and dancing around the coop. I stomp around the farm in my snowshoes with the dogs and pack down snow around some trees that look like next year's firewood. I daydream about running electric netting and seeing little lambs chomp down on some grassy goodies. I love a whole pig, but I love lamb too....
The sun sets slowly behind the maple trees.
You can play around with the numbers all day, but they point to similar conclusions. When a culture worships a cheap food policy in order to accumulate stuff and entertainment, their food turns to junk and their relationships turn to mush. Only when we restore farmers--good farmers--to a place of prominence do other societal ills begin healing. - Joel Salatin
Something Wild Farm is back! I hope to have pasture-raised chicken eggs, meat chickens, meat lambs, firewood, veggies, maple syrup, herbal products, and all the other little homestead thingamajigs you see in a farm stand throughout the course of the year. I do all this by myself for fun while working a full-time job.
My mission as a small-scale farmer and writer is to promote local food and local community resilience. There should be a dozen small farms in Sandwich. Maybe we need two dozen! Every neighborhood in America could have one person with a flock of chickens and we wouldn’t need that entire department in a grocery store filled with bleach-washed eggs that taste like nothing. If you want to see small farms succeed, send a message with your dollars at local farm stands in Sandwich and surrounding communities.
When they say on the news that the government gives money to farmers with bailouts or subsidies, they aren’t talking about small farms that produce food you actually eat. They cut all the funding programs for those farms. They’re talking about corn and soy farmers – which goes to mega feedlot operations and ethanol production for gasoline. Farmer Joel Salatin laments that the average soy farmer loses $100 an acre and needs bailouts from the government, when they could be making $1000 an acre with a pasture-raised beef enterprise. America’s cattle inventory is dangerously low right now – this is a market opportunity. Instead, the soy farmers try to figure out how to get their soy into diesel fuel. None of those federal dollars land in pockets that make food which makes you healthy.
When you go to the grocery stores, look at the labels and buy things from local farms and brands who make great products. If you want any info on local farms, ask on the Sandwich Board or send me a message. I’ll always be happy to make suggestions and send you contact info for what you’re interested in. There’s even a 17-week farmer’s market all summer in Sandwich – and Tamworth’s market rocks year-round. The only way to keep farmers around is to support them!