Cedar Meadow Farm Newsletter
Winter 2009
Where to begin? The end of the season is always hectic -- preparing Thanksgiving turkeys for pick up, securing the animal housing, stocking the yurt with hay and generally battening down the hatches for winter, but this one was even more hectic than usual. There has been much good news this fall at the farm, but also some bad news. Let’s get over the bad and end with the good. As the saying goes, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, we learned to expand this to our pigs.
After coming off the emotional high of receiving good press in The New York Times, and being featured in a front page article in The New London Day for our heritage turkeys, we found our best sow dead in the woods and within two days had lost 3 feeder pigs. Our other breeders were sick and we were worried that we could lose the entire herd. After a stressful week for everyone (pigs and people included), the pigs were well on their way to recovery and now, two months later, you would have never guessed there was ever an issue, except that we have 4 fewer pigs.
With assistance from the State Veterinary Diagnostic Clinic it looks like our suspicion that they ate some kind of poison was confirmed. We had two batches of pigs that were sickened – their housing and pasture were totally different, the only commonality was the feed they were receiving. We have sent several samples away for testing to try to confirm this theory. Though we are doubtful that we will ever know exactly what happened, we do have several bits of information that make us sleep a whole lot better at night. First and foremost, the pathology report indicated that it was not any kind of communicable illness – whatever affected them was due to a dietary imbalance of some sort or another. Secondly, within 24 hours of changing their feed, they started to show immediate improvement. If nothing else, it has galvanized our desire to move our pigs completely away from processed feed over to a more sustainable, locally raised source of nutrition. Based on some excellent advice we have received from Walter Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm, we are experimenting with raw milk and hay as the primary feedstuffs for our pigs.
We had been planning on bringing in some new genetics to our herd next year, but with this episode, we have had to escalate our time-scale. We will be bringing home a Gloucester Old Spot (GOS) boar at the beginning of February. In addition, we have purchased some half Tamworth-half GOS feeder pigs and will have a preview of our new line as early as May/June of this year.
Both the Tamworth and the Gloucester Old Spots are old breeds and crossing the genetics will give us the best of both breeds, i.e., the hearty, long lean body of the Tamworth and the larger size of the GOS. We can’t wait to see what the piglets look like and will let you know when to expect the new arrivals. However, our GOS boar is just a little guy. He won’t be ready to “do his job” until this fall, so we’ll be breeding our Tamworth sows to a Tamworth boar to supply us with our fall pigs.
Now for the good news. We are proud to announce our certification from the Animal Welfare Institute. Cedar Meadow Farm is the first farm in New England to be certified Animal Welfare Approved! This certification comes only after passing a rigorous inspection from an Animal Welfare Institute inspector. The inspection covers housing, handling, feeding regimen, overall ground maintenance, and slaughter practices. Our animals’ welfare and well being are always our top priority, and we don’t need a certificate to know that. But when you see this label on our products, you won’t have to take our word for it. Look for it on other products to be sure the products you are purchasing have been humanely treated every step of the way to your table.
In the fall, the farm applied for a grant to help defray the cost of establishing a self sufficient poultry breeding program here on our farm. We received funding which will help us with the purchase of a commercial incubator. Now we look forward to increasing our hatching success over the next season, and the impact on our poultry operation should be noticeable almost immediately. By allowing us to incubate our own fertilized eggs, in addition to purchased eggs from suppliers, we should be able to expand our heritage chickens, and eventually hope to expand our poultry operation to include pheasant, quail. More choice and lower costs are something we will enjoy sharing with our customers this coming season. Who doesn’t like more for less?
As winter tightens its icy grip, we are constantly working on the farm to keep our animals comfortable so they will continue to thrive. Hopefully lambs will be popping out in the next month or so to help us continue our love/hate relationship with the source of all trouble on the farm….sheep. In the workshop, more of our rough cut lumber is being hewn into posts and beams to expand the chicken coop to its full size and establish loafing area on the backside for our sheep.
Over the months, we have had many requests for handling and cooking suggestions. We are in the process of building a cooking section with recipes and tips for getting the most out of our products. The head chef at Cedar Meadow Farm (Brian) has been putting together some of our family favorites to share with you. Be warned that he seldom measures ingredients, more often working from the seat of his apron. We have done our best with approximate measurements but encourage you to tweak the amounts as you feel necessary. Be bold, experiment and, if you create any improvements, please let us know so we can incorporate them.
The snow continues to fall, making our driveway even more treacherous (as those of you know who have tried to pick up your orders recently). If all goes well this spring, we look forward to some improvements to the drive and the uncovering of a charming surprise down by the pond. As we put the finishing touches to this newsletter, the chill from the nightly rounds is melting away while we sit by the hearth fire where a hearty beef barley soup is simmering away. Twilight is coming later and later each day, and we are torn between the urge to hibernate and the restlessness for spring to arrive, allowing us to really get going on another farm season.
If you are reading this, you will already have noticed the changes to our web-site. Our technical wizard (Thanks Da) has been hard at work updating our site. Keep checking back as we hope to continue the updates through the winter in order to make our site more informative and user friendly for our customers. If we can find the time, we would like to update the photos for those of you that have not been able to get a tour of the farm, giving you a sense of our progress. Please feel free to send feedback about our site to webmaster@cedarmeadowfarm.net.
Thank you to all our customers for your patronage and patience in 2008. We wish you all the best in health and happiness for 2009!