Rosewood Hill Farm

Cabritas en Primavera

2010-03-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

Esta semana cinco cabras nacieron en la granja. Cada otoño pongo a las hembras con el macho. El resto del año el macho se queda solo. Tengo 12 cabras, incluidas 5 hembras embarazadas. Espero que vaya a tener doce cabritas cuando todas den a luz. Normalmente una cabra tiene gemelos. Los granjeros dicen que si un animal no tiene gemelos, es necesario venderlo porque no vale la pena y no van a haber ganancias.

Cuatro semanas después las voy a las vacunar. Yo voy a castrar a los machos porque no pueden tener más que un macho en la granja. Si lo tienes van a pelear y será agresivo. Se llaman cabras carneras castradas.

Las cabras me ayudan de tres maneras. Primero, bajan los impuestos en la finca porque agricultura paga 25% menos de los impuestos que otros tipos de asuntos inmobiliarios. Segundo, las cabras comen la malesa y cortan los pastos. Finalmente, las cabras diseminan abono en el suelo para su caca. En otoño, voy a vender los carneros castrados y guardar las hembras para criarlas y de esta manera aumentar el número de cabezas de mi rebaño.

Baby Goats in Spring

2010-03-13T14:49:00.000-08:00

This week four goats were born on the farm. Every fall I put the does in with the buck to breed them and then the rest of the year the buck is by himself. I have 12 goats now and 6 pregnant females. So I hope to have 2 x 6 = 12 more goats when all the goats have given birth. Usually a goal has twins. Farmers say if an animal does not have twins then get rid of her because she is not producing a profit for the farm.

Four weeks after the goats are born I will vaccinate them and then vaccinate them again 4 weeks later. The males I will castrate because you cannot have but one male on a farm. If you have more than one male they will fight plus they will be aggressive toward the farmer too. Castrated male goats are called wethers.

The goats help me keep the farm orderly in three ways. First they reduce my taxes on the land because agriculture is taxed at 25% the rate of residential or industrial land. Second the goats eat the vines on the property and keep the grass mowed. Finally the goats fertilize the land as they spread manure. In the fall I will sell the males goats and keep the females so they can be bred the following season thus increasing the size of my herd.

Earthquake in Chile

2010-02-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

This web site is a running commentary of the Earthquake in Chile. My wife lives there in central Santiago. We have been in touch by internet and she sent me the photos posted there. My wife Gricel is OK but scared. There are still aftershocks every dozen minutes or so some very strong. She said when the earthquake struck she thought she was going to die. She was alone so got up and called me via MSN messenger then set out of foot to her mother's house to retrieve her daughter Lulu.

Tuesday March 11 9:30 AM EST

Gricel and Lulu hid under the kitchen table again as the strongest aftershocks yet rocked the city. While the Presidency of Chile passed from Bachelet to Pinera a 7.2 magnitude replica terrified the citizens. Gricel says that with a 3 to 4 point tremor the building shakes and light bulbs flicker. Then she asks one to imagine a 6 point event. A 7 point shake she says can be called an "earthquake". But with an 8 you cannot even walk because the ground is heaving beneath your feet she says. We hope life gets back to normality soon. Monday Lulu goes back to school one week later while Gricel's damaged school does not open until April 5.

Tuesday March 5 8:00 PM EST

Gricel and her neighbors had a meeting because there is a crack in a pilar which holds up the right hand side of the apartment building. Now Don Francisco is hosting a telethon to raise money for the rebuilding effort and the victims. He is the host of Sabado Gigante on Univision and now lives in Miami but returns to his native Chile often where he first started his television show. He is like Johny Carson or Jay Leno but more famous. In the audience is the current president of Chile and the president elect.

Tuesday March 4 4:00 PM EST

This guy has become a hero in Chile for obvious reasons. Fuerza Chile is the rallying cry to rebuild the country.

Tuesday March 3 8:51 PM EST

6.1 aftershock. This is really rattling the nerves of my family

Tuesday March 3 2:00 PM EST

Thieves broken into my mother-in-laws house.

Max is on the radio at http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id343606106.

Tuesday March 2 6:00 AM EST

My friend Max from Concepcion has finally updated his facebook site. He says his family is fine because they are in the hills but 90% of the coast is destroyed. Downtown Concepcion is on fire and 15 buildings are threatening to fall. He tells his friends around the world to tell the journalists to bring the military and cops to stop the looting.

There is martial law in Concepcion and in Talca because of the looting. Citizens are shown on TVN carrying baseball bats and pistols to protect their stores many of which have already been looted. The police fire tear gas and pursue criminals into the grass across an irrigation canal. The city is without electricity and water still. Women stopped in the street carrying pilfered goods show that they have taken water, food, toilet paper because their kids are without food. But the citizens lament that many of the looters are simple looters.

Monday March 1 4:00 PM EST

Gricel's mother still has no electricity, water, or gas. A 100 year old school down the street from our apartment collapsed during the earthquake. Already the newspapers say 10,000 school children are without places to go so that children will have classes in shifts. Gricel and Lulu have prepaid cell phones but there is no place to recharge them. There is no place to keep food because our refrigerator was broken in the earthquake. I sent Gricel some money via Moneygram but the telecommunication line is down so she could not take it out yet. There is water in the pipes but it is brown. The toilet does work. Our nannie has family in Concepcion but has not been able to talk with them. The firemen came to our building yesterday because gas was escaping and they shut it off. As you can see from this graph the earth is still moving.

Monday March1 6:00 AM EST

I was finally able to call Gricel on her land line using Skype. She said she slept little because of the aftershocks. Tomas her other son is back in Santiago having been with his father in Rancagua during the earthquake. The Chilean newspapers say the president has given local authorities the right to declare martial law. The US papers say Chile has not asked the USA for help but the Chilean papers says Chile did ask for help getting telecommunications working again. I hope that Chile uses this opportunity as they rebuild to more closely integrate the cellular and land line networks which operate as separate entities with one having to dial special codes to access the other and the fee to call a cell phone from the USA ridiculously expensive compared to other countries.

Sunday February 28 5:00 PM EST

School is postponed a week which is not so bad because I still owe tuition. Gricel worries about people being robbed in the street. She says the police and military are there but not enough of them. My wife said the same thing that a writer for El Mercurio newspaper put forth as a topic for debate in the newspaper's pages:

Seeing the news I cannot but be left with a profound sense of shame which characterizes many Chileans---looting the supermarkets and local businesses and spreading a sense of panic.

An Argentine seeing this writes in response "now you are like us". Meanwhile in Concepcion the Lider supermarket faced down by an angry mob and with police and military on hand to restore order flung open its doors and gave away its groceries for free.

Sunday February 28 12:00 PM EST

Gricel is crying and wants to know if I can get her a visa to come to me in the USA. (No I can't at least not overnight. ) She ventured out into what she called the black market to buy food. She has seen injured people in the street and says it is chaos out there. She says she is ashamed of her country for the way people are behaving on the streets. She says with this mornings aftershocks more buildings have fallen. She says some people are trapped in a building 6 blocks from her apartment.

Sunday February 28 9:00 AM EST

Gricel spent the night outside on the street with her daughter Lulu. Now the worry is there is no food and no water. The Lider grocery store is closed and a riot has broken out at the Lider in Concepcion. Here in Santiago Gricel says people are charging 6,000 pesos for 1 kilo of bread ($12 for 2 lbs). She says the police are driving around firing tear gas bombs to disperse crowds. Not sure if this is in her neighborhood or she saw this in Concepcion on television. She is worried now about criminals wandering the neighborhood in particular illegal immigrants from Peru who she says are responsible for most of the crime. I am still unable to call her by skype or telephone.

Metro service on certain lines has resumed.

Saturday February 27 4:00 PM

Gricel has gone out in the neighborhood to take the photos shown here at the top. Aftershocks occur every few minutes and emit a horrible sound she says. The national newspaper El Mercurio's web site is still offline from the USA and only recently has La Tercera come back on line. The University of Chile keeps track of the many web earthquakes that occur every few days in Chile on-line but this too is off line. The web site I use to watch TVN Chile is offline so I am using http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tv-de-chile which has been put up just for the crisis .

I have no news from Max Morales a friend who lives in Concepcion and runs the web site AndesWines.com . May and I had talked by Skype just the day before on Friday. He lives near the epicenter of the quake in this city of 600,000. The strongest earthquake every registered struck this region in 1960. The coastline actually sank one meter.

Saturday February 27 4:30 AM EST

4:30 AM EST my computer in Virginia rang out as my wife Gricel Carolina Fuentes called me via MSN messenger from Santiago. She said that a terrible earthquake had struck. The television fell off the table and broke, books flew from the shelf, the refrigerator broke, and the toilet was thrown from its mount. There is electricity but no gas nor water. Her apartment is well built and it did not suffer the large damage of the other buildings in the neighborhood.

I posted a message to CNN ireport and a CNN reporter wrote to me asking for my wife's phone number. CNN then called my wife and a reporter talked to her. Then later CNN en espanol called to interview her. I am unable to call Gricel by skype, pingo, or a Verizon calling card. Our internet is working in the apartment again but the land line telephone is not.

The Blizzard of 2010

2010-02-08T06:07:00.000-08:00

This weekend we had 23 inches of snow. I lost electric power at 3 AM on Saturday and as of Sunday there still is no power. No power means no water and no heat. But fortunately I live surrounded by a forest so I had plenty of firewood to keep the house warm.

I brought a handful of books to read but when the power winked off I turned on my portable radio and listened to WTOP news which was my link to civilization. Without internet, television, lights, one suddenly feels cut off from modernity even when more antiquated pleasures (books) fill the house.

The snow was so deep my dozen pregnant goats could hardly walk through the same. The ones that ventured out from their little barn descended onto a pine tree which fell across the yard--they like to eat pine needles. Yuck! The little female Spanish goat, the one who is so flighty, hopped like a rabbit in the head high snow. "Dog" the little goat that I bottle fed followed the Great Pyrenees guard dog to the house to be near to me. This goat's mother died the day she was born. So she thinks I am her mother.

Sunday I left for the city for a house with heat and a hot shower leaving the animals with a bale of hay and dog and cat pails filled to the top. It was no problem for me to get out of the farm and drive back to the city on Sunday as I parked my truck next to the neighbors driveway. He has a huge John Deere tractor so plowed his drive. I sold my tractor last year so my goatherd will have to trudge 1/4 mile up to the house on foot since the snow is too deep to navigate even in a 4x4. (I pay her double salary when the snow piles deep.)

Local sixfortyseven

2009-09-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

Derek and his wife Amanda Luhowiak operate a mobile food kitchen out of their home on route 647 in Fauquier County called “Local sixfortyseven” whose name comes from their address and Derek´s roots in Pittsburg, a city with a strong union presence. Having given up their day jobs the young couple have embraced all that is sustainable serving up their local fare on sugar cane plates that are themselves compostable. Their idea is to motor up with their portable kitchen and serve food at the local farmers markets.

Talking over a bottle of Barrel Oak Norton wine--a winery from which Derek and Amanda recently resigned to pursue their passion full-time—Derek and his wife serve up a lunch from their kitchen which is stainless steel and fully equipped.

Derek, who learned to cook at the Pennsylvania Institute of Culinary Arts, says last year he went to interview for a job as a sous chef in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At the interview they told him to go to the farmers market, buy food and cook for four people. Derek says, “The Chapel Hill farmers market was out of this world. They have a really cool foodie kind of local scene there. As I was walking around I was thinking 'I don't want to go back to the kitchen. I want to go to the farmers market.' So the idea kind of sprung up around me being at the farmer's market.”

On a day late in winter Derek servers venison hamburger (he shot that so cannot sell it), deviled eggs from local free range chicken, mayonnaise and pickles for the visiting journalist. Plus there is a salad of local greens including wild onions (called “ramps”) that Derek picked from the forest. There are no summer vegetables yet because it is a tenet of the local organic food movement that one must eat only what is season and squash does not grow in winter.

The chalkboard menu propped up outside their portable kitchen is left over from yesterday´s trial run. It lists ramp soup, tamworth paté, asparagus lemon and ricotta tart, creamy polenta and local pork chops, ricotta, and grass fed baby beef slider which they fed to friends over the weekend. Derek says, “We had the grills going the saute going everything at once it was a little hectic at first. All 20 people showed up and all 20 people ordered at the same time.”

Derek and Amanda make everything they serve including the sickles, bread, even the ketchup. Everything is locally sourced. “I am going to work with small farmers who maybe have 10 acres and two cows per year. A lot of these farms are trying to create their market. I am sure they would love to be able to sell fresh.”

Saying he is sort of a wholesaler himself because he buys from so many local producers Derek rattles off a list of their farm providers. They buy greens and vegetables from suppliers such as the Tuscarora Growers Coop. Organic eggs come from Ayshire farms where Derek worked for three years as executive chef. They make paté from tamworth hogs bought from Matt and Ruth Szechenyi at Briars Farmstead in Boyce, Virginia. Derek says, “They are really small doing 1 or 2 cows per year.” They buy grass fed beef pimarily from Angelic Beef in Remmington. Because local organic farms are so small Derek has to buy from different ones at different times when one has inventory and other does not.

The Local sixfortyseven entrepreneurial debut was at the George Mason farmers market on Earth Day. There they served grass fed beef, bratwurst sausage, cookies and fresh brewed tea from filtered virginia well water. Then they were off to the Winchester farmers market, Centerville, and back to Barrel Oak winery where they will be twice a month from 12 to 8. Their calendar is filled all the way to November.

To be “sustainable” a cook should grown his own food so Derek and Amanda are trying out that. Outside their house they have raised beds with rosemary, thyme, rows of garlic and onions in freshly turned soil. He used a Bobcat to rip the sod then backbreaking labor to dig it to 20 inches deep so the plants roots would thrive in the loose soil. He says, “When we started in mid October and it was just moss and rocks. Now you can stick your hand down to your elbow. My mom's boyfriend was a farmer out in Pennsylvania and he said double dig everything with your hands.” For compost he ordered a big truck load from the Fauquier Livestock exchange.

Outlining his vision Derek says, “If I can pull up to the farmers market I can buy everything I need straight from the farmer. We see ourselves as an integral part of the farmers market. You have consumers who don't really know what ramps are or what to do with dandelions--how to cook this or how to cook that. We see ourselves as an educational tool. If I can cook it in a tiny little kitchen you should be able to take it home to your house and roughly do the same thing. Essentialy in a nutshell that´s pretty much it.”

Boutique Wineries in Chile

2009-09-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Ed Flaherty says in Chile a “boutique winery” means a winery whose owner is the winemaker and viticulturist and not an absentee landlord. He says boutique wineries in Chile really are small family-run operations and not the mega custom crush operations found in his native California.

Flaherty Wines

Having arrived in Chile 16 years ago, this son of an American agronomist sits behind the computer ordering wine barrels for future vintages as chief winemaker at the million case winery Tarapaca. This towering gringo longs to get his hands into the pomace and away from the keyboard having worked as chief winemaker at the mega wineries Errazuriz and VIA Wines. So on the weekends Ed Flaherty heads home to the Aconcagua Valley where he produces 25 barrels of red wine a portion of which when it is available includes tempranillo which he is planting at a new vineyard in Cauquenes near the Italian-owned Caliboro winery.

Ed fostered an interest in tempranillo having worked a harvest in Spain and having spent time in Argentina where are a consultant for the Zuccardi family he developed a tempranillo wine. Of Chile he says, “There is very little tempranillo planted in Chile, maybe10 hectares so no one really knows what the potential of the variety is or where it grows best in Chile”. Ed selected Cauquenes for his new plantings of tempranillo, syrah, and cabernet franc because this coastal mountain region has just enough annual rainfall to allow dry farming. The area is heavily planted with 100 year old head trained mission grapes, called “país” in the Spanish. Ed says, “the Red clay soils, rolling hills and moderate climate 40 kilometers from the coast have started to produce some really good red wines from carignan, carménère, syrah and a occasional cabernet sauvignon.”

UK Agent: Boutique Wines of Chile

Koyle

For Chileans the name “Undurraga” is synonymous with those odd shaped wine bottles with the wide bottom. But that is history as the family has sold the label. In its place they have planted 35 hectares in the upper Colchagua Valley and joined the ranks of boutique winemakers in Chile. The father Alfonso and daughter Rebecca work in finance and administration while one of the sons, also named Alfonso, works both at the new winery and as commercial manager at Matetic. The other son Cristobal left his day job working at Aurelio Montes´s Kaiken winery in Argentina after having worked one vintage at Chateau Margaux, another in Napa Valley, and at the Rosemount Estate where he picked up English saying his French is pretty bad but improves with a glass or two of Bordeaux. Having quit working for others he has plunged headlong full-time into the new family venture working as enologist and viticulturist. Cristobal says he went to work in these overseas wineries to gain experience that he could apply to Undurraga. At the Rosemount Estate he says he learned to apply quality standards to really large quantities of wine. At Chateau Margaux he found winemaking with passion coupled with a constantly development of new techniques. He bundled those experiences into what he calls a “fusion” of old and new world styles and brought them back to his native Chile.

Koyle is located in a corner of the Colchagua Valley where grows a rare purple flower of the same name. The vineyard situated here at the foothills of the Andes is divided into three terraces. Syrah and carménère in the bottom terrace are planted on grafted rootstock to reduce their vigor. But cabernet sauvignon and other red grapes planted on less vigorous soils are planted on their own roots. The vines are so well balanced that they require hedging only once per year or not at all during the growing season.

UK Agent: Genesis

Polkura

Polkura vineyard in the Colchagua Valley produces exclusively syrah on yellow granite soil whose name in the Mapuche language is “Polkura”. The partners here include Sven Bruchfeld who was chief winemaker at the giant Chilean winery Santa Carolina.

Having quit Santa Carolina last year to pursue his 2,000 case boutique winery full-time, Sven Bruchfeld is one of Ed Flaherty´s protogées from Errazuriz. This Chilean whose mother is from Norway planted the Polkura vineyard in 2002. The property is located in Marchigue between Santa Cruz and Pichilemu. Neighboring vineyards include Montes, Los Maquis and Bisquertt. Of the location Sven says, “It is sort of an area in between. It is not cool climate, but it is not warm climate either. So you get cool climate character on the nose but on the palette is it more warm climate--more full bodied and textured wine.”

Agent in UK: Direct Wines Ltd

Antiyal

Alvaro Espinoza and his wife farm Marina Ashton farm two vineyard red wine grapes in Maipo. In 1996 they planted Antiyal which is 1 hectare of carménère, cabernet sauvignon and syrah valley vineyard followed by Kuyen which is another hectare of syrah and cabernet sauvignon. Alvaro is considered by many in Chile to be the innovator of the boutique winery concept and Chile´s foremost biodynamic grape grower having planted the Emiliana Organic Vineyard and others. He is much in demand from his grape growing and winemaking clients so his wife Marina takes care of day-to-day operations of the family vineyard. Marina says, “We started Antiyal Winery, with the vision of making a family wine teaching our kids to make wine, have a nice time, and grow grapes organically in our own vineyard.” With accolades flowing in from the international press this small family business soon became a full-fledged winery producing 19,000 bottles per year leaving Marina with her hands full. She says, “In the year 2000, we stated selling and I started helping Alvaro, I had another job, but then we had more and more orders. Someone needed to take care of the day to day work.” The vineyard is readily identifiable as one of Alvaro´s biodynamic projects with flowers planted in the vineyard rows to attract beneficial insects and chickens scratching at the soil to get rid of the bad ones, mainly mites. Horse drawn plows cultivate the soil instead of tractor mounted equipment. The weather here in Maipo is for the most part rain free so there is no need to spray systemic nor manufactured chemicals. Because the vineyard is biodynamic the harvest and training of the vines is timed to the rhythm of the moon and stars. Compost replaces fertilizer.

UK Agent: Adnams

Facundo

Facundo is not a winery but a label. These wines are produced by the husband and wife team of Felipe García, a winemaker from Casas del Bosque; and Constanza Schwaderer, whose day job is making wine at Córpora where her husband says she is in charge of all the top projects. Formerly, Felipe was a winemaker at Calina which is Kendall Jackson´s operation in Chile. He says working at Calina he learned to buy high quality grapes from such farm flung locales as the Limari Vallley. Of that experience he says, “For that reason the grapes that we choose for our project are really small growers with unique conditions.” Now he sources grapes for Facuno from Itata Valley to the South and Limari in the bone dry North.

Facundo does not have their own winery nor equipment so they use the facilities of the Tabonkö winery where works his former boss from Kendall Jackson. While acknowledging that it could be difficult for anyone to work too much time with one´s spouse, Felipe says his wife brings some French perspective to this Chilean operation. Felipe says his wife, who he calls “Cony”, worked side by side with French winemaker Pascal Marchard making pinot noir and chardonnay in he Burgundian fashion. Córpora have been a joint venture with the Boisset family of Burgundy then called “Veranda” but then Córpora bought out the French.

UK Agent: No agent in the UK

Philip Carter Winery Fetes Virginia Wine History Event

2009-09-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

September 5, 2009 Contact: Donna Johnson

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Public Relations Director

540.364.1203

djohnson@pcwinery.com

www.pcwinery.com

Hume, VA - The celebration of Virginia Wine Month takes on mammoth proportions with the weight of just one event at Philip Carter Winery on October 17. This date is reserved for The History of Virginia Wine Dinner, an elegant evening in which guests are transported through the history of Virginia wine. The evening will include the unveiling of the historical document signed in 1763 by Royal Governor Francis Fauquier certifying the pioneering achievement of Charles Carter as the first person in America to successfully grow and produce quality wine from European vines. Carter’s wines, produced at Cleve Plantation, Virginia, were received by the Royal Society of the Arts, UK, in 1762 and awarded an international gold medal in recognition of Carter’s spirited attempt at making fine wine. These were the first internationally recognized fine wines in America.

Author Walker Elliot Rowe will speak at the dinner about his new book, A History of Virginia Wine: From Grapes to Glass, noting the section specific to the Carter family’s 250-year history with wine production in Virginia. The evening will also include the unveiling of an original oil painting of Crooked Run Valley (both historic and an upland bird area) by graphic designer Allan Guy, a landscape now a featured part of the Governor Fauquier labeling. Released for this particular event, this exceptional white wine honors the historic connection between Fauquier County’s namesake, where Philip Carter Winery is located, and the Governor’s 1763 certification of Carter’s achievements in wine production.

A portion of the proceeds of this signature night will be donated to Ducks Unlimited, the nation’s largest conservation organization. Each attendee will be provided with a Ducks Unlimited membership and an autographed copy of Mr. Rowe’s book. Carefully choreographed and executed by A La Carte, the four-course meal will include traditional Virginia dishes, pairing perfectly with Virginia produced wines. A host of luminaries will be present for this very special event.

The soils of Calyptra

2009-09-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

In the flat vineyards of Chile growers who do not use drip irrigation simply flood their vineyard from one end to the other. As the gentle giant winemaker François Massoc at Calyptra explains in English, “Water has owner”. This 35 hectare vineyard and 100,000 liter winery might lie along both sides of the Cachapoal river, but in the arid desert farming which is Chilean agriculture one cannot simply siphon off the water just because it is within arms reach.

Most of Chile´s vineyards are located in the flat plains in the valleys. But Calyptra is 1,000 meters up in the Andes, a twisting and turning 45 minute drive beyond the city of Rancagua just beyond the entrance to one of Chile´s nationalized copper mines. Here in winter--unlike in most of the country--it actually snows as photos provide by François attest. Most Chileans are accustomed to looking up at the snow of the Andes from, say, Santiago but here at Calyptra you can walk in it. Beyond copper and snow it is an accident of geography that the vineyard here surrounds the famous Cauquenes hot springs on two sides. A resort is build over the top of the hot springs there that well up into a cavernous somewhat humid and dripping Roman-bath-style building. Above the hotel is an aqueduct built high into the hillside traversing deep canyons in open air as it ferries precious irrigation water from one side of the mountains to thirsty farms and vineyards in the other direction.

François came to the 20 year old Calytra five years ago having studied winemaking in Burgundy. For Burgundians by traditionthe most important part of making wine has little to do with the winemaker are more to do with the vineyard soils and location. This notion is etched into law by the French system of appellation d'origine contrôlée .

So it is with François and his outlook. This former barrel maker who was Chilean manager of the French cooperage Nadalie and still makes his own barrells says, “I am ashamed to say I am an enologist. I don´t think the winemaker is important.” He says the best wines in the world are made in the vineyard the machinations of man not withstanding. After school he tempered his enthusiasm for manipulations and all things French with a tendency to remontage, pigeages, and otherwise orchestrate the gushing red juice into the barrel and bottle. “I try not to put my signature on the wine. I try to respect the fruit. Here you don't need an intervention. I prefer to make an honest product. The great wines in the world are like that. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and it's neighbor La Romanée, that I know very well and I have tasted. They are wonderful, but very different. Because they are honest winse. That is one part of the French philosopy that I want to keep is honesty."

The vineyards here of pinot noir, chardonnay, cabernet, syrah, merlot, and sauvignon blanc are delimited by soil type which François has carefully measured and mapped. Each plot is fermented separately, measured, and blended together again according to the taste of the winemaker which he says varies by soil. In melodious that is self taught François says what is important is soil drainage which in turn turn depends on the percentage of rocks in the soil, their make up, and using the French word he says “argile” meaning clay.

François repeats some of the sometimes amusing observations which are prevalent throughout Chilean vineyards. In the winery grapes are sorted along a vibrating table staffed with women because their dainty little fingers are more nimble than those of men. The women can snatch up unripe or rotten grapes and toss them to the side for quickly than men. Asked about this François says, “Of course it is true.” In Chile such sentiments might be labeled “machista” (chauvinist). But in the USA such this type of thinking can get you into trouble with the feministas and their government mandated oversight.

The wine tanks here are insulated with cooling jackets so there is a temperature gauge on each none of which are to be trusted. Yes says François that presumption is true too.

In traditional Burgundy men plunge nude into the tank or open top fermenter punching down grapes (pigeages) so they don´t dry out as the gases of fermentation cause them to rise. François keep his cloths on doing when he does this using his feet to push the fermenting grapes back down into the juice taking care not to crush any seeds. He says, “I learned that in Burgundy. As there is a lot of carbon dioxide its really dangerous for my workers. As I am the tallest it is safer for me.”

We take a tour of the vineyards on this day late in the harvest season in June driving down a winding mountain road. The last of the harvest has just been completed and end-of-season rains have caused the mountainside to come tumbling down in a mudslide that nearly took a truck heavily laden with fruit over the side. The driver had just driven past just before the hillside gave way.

Because the weather is ideal for grape farming in Chile, there is not much use of agricultural spray to combat the rots and fungus as is done in the rainy parts of Europe. At Calyptra only sulfur is applied. They spray it every two weeks to keep botrytis and powdery mildew off the leaves and fruit.

François has changed much since coming to the farm. Part of the vineyard was overly vigorous producing too much fruit that had to be dropped off by hand in what is called a “green harvest”. So François changed the training of those vines from spur to guyot. The vines here are otherwise well balanced only requiring hedging one time per year where as in more vigorous sites in Chile it can be up to 4 times . One plot runs north to south instead of east to west. François says that alignment with the sun produces 1 gram less of acid in the final fruit. So he sells that fruit to other wineries keeping the best for himself.

Regarding acid he says Chilean white grapes measure up fine but that all of the red grapes in Chile need to have acid added by the winemaker. This is because in the long California-like growing season the fruit hangs in unending sunshine their the sugar level increasing while the pH falls off as does the level of tartaric and malic acid (low pH means high acidity) as the optimal part of this curve is reached and surpassed. This is generally not the case is regions with more rain and cloudy weather like say Virginia or New York.

François did his thesis at the university in preserving color in pinot noir wines. But here as in most of Chile the greatest portion of the red wine production is cabernet sauvignon while he does produce some pinot noir. So François gives a barrel tasting of 4 different cabernet sauvignon wines produced from different plots to show the differences owing to the differing soil

Starting with plot number 23 François asks with boyish humor from whence came the name then supplies the answer, ”It is called 23 because it is located between plots 22 and 24”. Laughing at his answer he says the vines here had been a tangle of fruit which the owner had not bothered even to prune and wanted to abandon. François dug deep pits to inspect the subsoil and mapped the property by the electrical conductivity of the soil. He then told the owner it would produce fine wine in this plot saying he would pay the costs of production and harvest himself if he was wrong on this point. François says the soil in plot 23 are older alluvial soils--which are those round stones worn down by the river and glacial erosion--coming from the last glacial period of which there have been four.

The wines from plots 24a and 24b are big tannic wines somewhat similar, but plot number 8 produces wine that is less gripping. François says these are colluvial rocks which are the big rocks that crack off and fall from the mountain. He says, “This is the youngest soil of them all. It has the most complexity and is the most feminine of the wines of the four. It is a welcoming wine. It has nice length.”

All of this discussion of soil makes sense to the farmer. I have a vineyard and farm in Virginia. The first vines I planted by hand before I had money to buy a tractor to drive the wooden trellis posts. It was back breaking labor because the topsoil was shallow clay on top of hardpan subsoil. Another richer farmer might have hooked up a subsoiler to crack the subsoil where roots could penetrate. Instead the roots in my vineyard grow outward in all directions interlacing themselves with neighboring vines unable to grow deep. This is not bad as the fertilizer the farm applies to the soil leeches only a few inches into the group. But grape vines roots explore going deep were they can reaching a depth of as much as 40 feet in places like Burgundy. As the roots go deep they dislodge minerals in the soil bringing them up to the surface and into the fruit and foilage. In short this is why soils matter.

Putting the last bung into the barrel François relates a French dictum that “One must respect the barrel”. In other words as you taste wine you can spit out what you don´t drink but not pour it out on the floor. You have to respect the barrel by returning the wine inside. In Spanish “Tienes que respectar la barrica” .

Bari California Olive Oil and Wiebe Farms

2009-09-03T16:44:00.000-07:00

Gordon Wiebe and his brother-in-law Richard Sawatzky farm olives, nectarines, plums and peaches in the San Joaquin Valley 30 miles west of the Sequoia National Forest. These orchards were first here in 1956 by Gordon´s father. The land is so flat that special laser guided machines are used to grade the slope to 1 degree so that irrigation can flow to all corners of the individual farms that Gordon calls “ranches”. The ranches here are delimited by dusty rural roads that have the oddly urban sound name of “avenue” even though nothing looking like a city is anywhere nearby. Seemingly more latinos than gringos live here and even the local English language newspaper has classified ads in Spanish that read “se vende pollos” (Chickens for sale).

The great majority of America´s fruit and vegetables come from this region of California and even Gordon marvels at this size. Just the weekend before he flew his airplane for three hours across the valley, over the mountains, and out to the ocean saying he did not overfly even one city. Fruit farms growing pomegranates, peaches, almonds, every conceivable fruit are interlaced with dairy operators and mile after mile of high alfalfa forage and of course corn.

Gordon is a Mennonite farmer who says he started planting olives in his fruit orchards a few years ago when most of the migrant workers here turned to construction and labor became scarce. Olives can be harvested by machine so it requires less workers than peaches, plums, and nectarines which are harvested by hand. But when the construction business collapsed the migrant workers hung up their hammers and saws and returned to his 600 acre ranch. He says, “Today there are 200 people working today on 600 acre of peaches and if all of that was olives you could do it with 20 people.”

The olives grown here are not destined for fruit although that is what The University of California is trying to promote with their local extension office. These olives will be pressed into oil and sold under Bari Olive Oil Company’s own label “BARI® ”. Inside the processing facility is a tasting room and gift shop with oils from different types of olive trees. This fall a brand new olive oil mill will be installed to process their olives. The extra virgin olive oils are quite good with different hues of color and tastes that vary from mild buttery to intense fruity and pungent flavors. These are from oil that Bari Olive Oil Company purchased from other growers. Their own fruit must wait until this year because their three year old trees have just come into production.

Here in the Central Valley orchards are ripped out and replaced from one year to the next as market conditions change. It takes three years at a minimum to produce fruit from trees which is the same for grape vines. Of course corn and alfalfa can be rotated in and out of a field in the same season. But here you see piles of bulldozed orchards stacked up like ghosts along the landscape as one grower's decision to plant, say, pomegranates is replaced by another, say, who decided to grow olives. These former orchards without the irrigation which keeps them alive quickly revert back to desert so flat, hard, and dusty that you can drive off the road there without so much as jostling you car.

Olive trees that line the streets of certain cities like Phoenix are too big to be harvested by machine but here at Bari Olive Oil Company Gordon and Richard have planted hybrids that are bred to grow short like bushes. Plus they are pruned. That way a harvesting machine can straddle the plant and shake it vigorously tossing the fruit into a hopper. This way one or two men can do the work that otherwise would require many times that. Gordon points out that olives used to be more widely planted in California in areas like the hills around San Diego and the olive district of Fresno. Now all of that turned into cities. He is trying to lure local producers to the area predicting that the politically-correct and healthy olive oil consumption may drive the California production and market ahead of the Italians in a dozen years or so.

The temperature here in this bone dry region is 105 during the day and there is no rain during the growing season. This is good for the raisin farmers who drop their Thompson seedless vinifera grapes straight onto the ground where they dry in place outdoors.

Irrigation is what makes farming possible in this bone dry desert. Every citizen who lives in this water district is taxed to pay for the system of canals and ditches and the men who monitor the water usage by the farms and keep the system working. But the supply has been cut as the reservoir is running low owing to the continuing California drought and increased demand from the cities. Gordon says the ditches will provide him water only 60 days this year. “We have to rotate with the neighbors. There's a guy that watches it and regulates it. There are no meters they can measure flows. Its more how much is allotted from the dam for irrigation in this area. The other system [we have] is ground water. We are irrigating first irrigation in April and [the last] in September. We have to irrigate every 10 to 14 days. We get the water allotment through the canal system but we need water for 6 or 7 months. If we don't irrigate in 2 weeks we are dead. The San Joaquin valley is really a desert. We get 12 or 14 inches of rain per year. We just need a few more dams to store it.” But he adds that the city people would be against that.

A few miles down the road from the olive processing facility 50 to 60 Mexican workers are working in the Wiebe Farm's packing house processing peaches for delivery to a cold storage facility where they will be drawn from inventory and shipped to Costco and Walmart and others. As part of a local group of farmers marketing their fruit together , Wiebe Farms’ fruit is sold under the Summeripe® label. A camera inspects fruit as it zips along the processing line separating the peaches by quality. Different colored paper stickers are applied denoting the market for which it is intended. Some fruit is shipped to the stores right away while other will be kept in high humidity and warm temperatures to soften them up a bit. Fruit that has begun to splits open is discarded and allowed to drop through the processing line where it will be returned to the field as compost, sold to make juice if a buyer can be found in that crowded market, fed to dairy cattle, spread along the avenues here to keep dust down on the farm, or given to Gleanings For The Hungry, where the fruit is dried and sent to hungry people throughout the world.

Gordon says the average person has no idea where their food comes from. He says driving around here the tourist or city dweller cannot see much. “A lot of activity goes on in the fields and most people don't see and recognize it. They think these are all quiet farms.” Farming is hardly profitable. He says, ““Farming has not been lucrative over the past 15 or 20 years." For growers he says they get $10 to$11 per box but need $13 to make a profit. Gordon says were it not for his packing shed--which allows him to cut out one layer in the business model--he would be losing even more money. Now he says he is just getting by. He says, “5 or 6 more packing houses will may go out of business this year. “ Gordon grows alfalfa and corn to sell to dairy farmers where it is too expensive to replant trees. “Last couple of years we have been thinking how can you lose less money. But I still love farming!”

(Further reading: The California Olive Oil Council.)

A History of Virginia Wines from Grapes to Glass

2009-08-20T10:30:00.001-07:00

A History of Virginia Wines: From Grapes to Glass
ISBN: 978-1-59629-701-2 • Paperback • September 2009
By Walker Elliott Rowe

Go beyond the bottle and step inside the minds- and vines- of Virginia's burgeoning wine industry in this groundbreaking volume. Join grape grower and industry insider Walker Elliott Rowe as he guides you through some of the top vineyards and wineries in the Old Dominion. Rowe explores the minds of pioneering winemakers and vineyard owners, stitches together an account of the wine industry's foundation in Virginia, from Jamestown to Jefferson to Barboursville, and uncovers the fascinating missing chapter in Virginia wine history. As the Philip Carter Winery's motto explains, 'Before there was Jefferson, there was Carter.'

Rowe goes behind the scenes to interview migrant workers who toil daily in the vineyards, makes the rounds in Richmond with an industry lobbyist and talks shop with winemakers on the science and techniques that have helped put the Virginia wine industry on the map. Also included are twenty-four stunning color photographs from professional photographer Jonathan Timmes and a foreword by noted wine journalist Richard Leahy.

Joel Salatin´s Polyface Farm

2009-07-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have been working on an essay on Joel Salatin´s Polyface farm a couple of weeks. Each time I start it I run into Joel Salatin either in a magazine or on the news and that changes what I have written or have planned to write. Last night he was on CNBC looking slightly uncomfortable for he was wearing a suit--this is the first time I have ever seen him not wearing his trademark floppy hat. And then the week before he was on ABC News being interviewed with the CEO of Chipolte burrito restaurants where Joel sells some of his chickens and pork. The ABC news producer had the camera on the wrong guy, interviewing the CEO and not the farmer. The more interesting story is with Joel Salatin even if it is slightly harder to explain.

Some say that Joel was made famous by Micheal Pollen´s book “The Omnivore´s Dilemma”, but it should be the other way around as those of us involved with grass-based farming have for a long time been following Mr. Salatin. I was first introduced to him at a screening of a film he made about his farm at the Acres USA annual conference in Minnesota in 2006. Standing there in his trademark floppy hat, with his shoulders pointed slightly askance to the camera, talking about his farm he has the charisma of a Hollywood actor even if he appears like some dorky country nerdy psuedo-intellectual. Call it “charisma” or “gravitas” or whatever his message is important to small farmers and is interesting too.

What Joel Salatin has done to garner all this attention is to take a rather mundane issue—mundance to everyone except small farmers--which is a pressing rural problem and report on it in an interesting manner. Through his books, magazine articles, and now in his appearance in the film “Food, Inc.” he has gained legions of followers who seek to imitate his farming and farm marketing practices.

What Joel has done that resonates with farmers is he has tackled the difficult problem of how to direct market his products to consumers. What he has done that resonates with consumers is take a leadership role in what he calls the “local artisanal slow growth food movement”.

Most farmers simply sell their hogs, chickens, and cattle to the livestock market or the mega companies like Perdue Farms or Swift which end up in the hands of the giant distributors like Sysco. But many do so at a loss or with a miniscule profit. The average farmer would throw up his hands in frustration if he were to, say, try to make an end run around the local livestock auction and direct market cattle to consumers. The challenge is daunting. Those who do this with success, like Cliff Miller of Mount Vernon Farms, are such a novelty that magazines and bloggers like myself write about them as if that were news. That someone can make money farming might indeed be “news”. It´s far easier to just continue to sell cattle at a price lower than the cost of production, take a loss on your income taxes, and continue working the day job rather than finish off your own cattle or sell one cut of beef at a time at the farmers market.

Joel Salatin--whose 400+ acre Polyface Farm is located in the Shenandoah Valley west of Charlottesville--has written a handful of books which cause quite a bit of excitement for those farmers who would like to figure out how to make a living at grass-based farming. His self-published books, which sell quite well for self-published books, and magazine articles rail against factory farming and the specialization of the culture of which the poet Wendell Berry spoke. Joel levies his pointed criticism at factory farming, confined feeding operations, corn-fed cattle all of these terms of course are variations on the same theme. He marvels at the cow which he calls a "self-contained production process" converts grass to meat which converts manure into more grass which produces more meat in endless rotation all without the need for chemicals fertilizer.

Explaining his philosophy he told CNBC “We´re trying to heal the farm, heal our customers”. The bewildered talking head listened as Joel explained that his business model is “contrarian” as he has no goal to increase his sales and production as people are knocking at his door because that would run counter to the philosophy of the local food movements. Speaking prophetically he says that as the local food movement grows and start to take away market share from the industrial food concerns they will come at the small farmers with farm and food bills stacked in their favor.

All of this is a lot of information to absorb as the seemingly simply Polyface Farm is in fact multi-faceted in its outlook. It takes some time to understand what is really happening here. So it was after reading Joel´s magazine articles for a couple of years that I headed out a few weeks ago to go see for myself what was all the fuss about.

Polyface Farm says on its web site that is has an “open door policy”. They apparently are overwhelmed with requests for guided tours so they charge $500 for that perhaps to discourage them, who knows, as I have not talked to the great man myself. They do not for example even have an email on their web site saying they have no time to respond to the great volume of email. So my son and I headed down for our self guided tour.

To get to Polyface Farm you drive west from the vineyards of Crozet, Virginia across Interstate 81 and following a route which cannot be plotted by Mapquest you drive past all that Joel rails about: miles and miles of chickens “farms” where one man takes care of millions of birds in filthy squalor. Pastured cattle farms where cattle are raised in one year to 700 or 800 pounds then shipped off to Nebraska confined feeding operations where standing in their own manure they are finished off to slaughter weight on a corn based diet that were it not for the abattoir would kill them anyway as their liver and stomach fails.

My own farm in Rappahannock County is years behind Joel´s operation as the woods there are filled with green briar vines and poison ivy which my goats are busy working to devour and will at some point finish cleaning. Tall fescue grass dominates the landscape except where I have planted new grasslands with other grasses. But on Polyface Farm I found not one leaf of poison ivy nor one blade of tall fescue grass. I did find one lonely vine of poison ivy climbing a locust tree but as I ran my hands through the grasses of the pastures there the leaves were smooth indicating rye or other varieties and did not have the sandpaper rough finish of fescue. Fescue is really a weed not suitable grazing in the hot summer months. The pastures here too we filled with red and white clovers which on industrial farmers are replaced by liquid nitrogen produced using natural gas.

The land and the forest here is carefully groomed not by machine but by the animals that work and live there. Pastured poultry were lined up in portable chicken coups that march across the landscape—Joel is famous for having designed and promoted this process and whole books are devoted to the topic. The chickens pick the grass clean of the deadly intestinal parasites that spell death for cattle, sheep, horses, and goats. A Great Pyrenees livestock guard dog stood watch over the flock. Turkeys and broilers were inside a polywire fence in enclosed mobile chicken coops. Laying hens were allowed to roam free and then boarded up at night inside a much larger mobile coup where they were safe from the fox, raccoon, and stray dog.

Black Angus cattle, whose coats glowed with the luminosity of health, were grouped together in a high density grazing system called “mob-stocking”. Cattle left free to roam across the landscape would cherry pick the pasture leaving weeds behind and spreading their manure too thin to fertilize the same. But cows grouped in such tight groups trample the weeds and leave a sheen of manure. The manure causes the grass to grow in a flush of green and keep the weeds under control. Then the cows are moved off to another location and the omnivore poultry moved in behind to disperse the manure and pick through and devour the insects therein.

Extra large bales of hay were stacked in several barns here as three farm interns or perhaps Joel´s sons worked to build a new barn erected from lumber they had cut themselves using the farms portable saw mill which is yet another way this entrpeneur makes money. The hay here had been cut in the prime stage of growth when it is highest in protein and most digestible to the animal. Its color suggested healthy forage indeed.

My son and I walking about unescorted had seen everything except for the pastured pork. We could not find them. But I forgot they are not in the pasture at all. These free range hogs live in the forest where they root up the soil and consume acorns which Joel says changes the flavor of their pork. Joel, like Salman Rushdie, invents his own words as he writes. (His book on grass finishing cattle is called "Salad Bar Beef".) In the winter the pigs are moved to a barn where he calls them “pigaerators” for they turn over the soil making compost as they forage with their snout thus improving the soil.

Joel had written about selling his pork and poultry to Chipolte long before ABC news reported on it. In his writings and conference speeches he explains his run ins with the US Department of Agriculture who wanted to shut down his on-site slaughter house because, well, farms are not supposed to slaughter their own animals on site without the oversight of government. This, says Joel, favors the large producers at the expense of small ones. When you buy a side of beef stamped “USDA inspected” it means exactly that—there is an inspector from the government literally standing there inspecting each cow as it is slaughtered and then stamps it with his seal of approval. Quality experts like the late legendy industrial researcher Dr. Edward Demings would tell you this makes no sense, but this is the government way. The USDA told Joel he could not kill and cut up his own chickens so he used a loophole in the law to do exactly that explaining that his chickens, unlike those processed by Perdue, Swift and others, are not given any chlorine bath or radiated to kill pathogens, are not processed indoors by men wearing chemical suits wading in blood but are processed outdoors in the open air and sunshine. Which environment he asks is the healthiest?

Joel is not the only farmer doing grass fed beef, rotational grazing, pastured turkeys, chickens, and rabbit but he is the most vocal. He is a prophet like Wendell Berry who he has obviously studied. Someone needs to be the de facto leader of the local food movement and we are fortunate to have Joel doing this right here in Virginia.

Travel Guide for Chile

2009-05-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

Converting pesos to dollars----double it; divide by 1,000; then multiply times 90%. So 2,000 pesos (written "$2.000") equals $1.80 USD.

weather--it does not rain in the wine region and Santiago for 9 months of the year. Winter starts in May. Then the rain comes and the Chileans are awed by its apperance. The rain clears the contaminated air of Santiago where a system of "pica y placa" determines which automobiles can be driven on any particular day. The chileans bundle up in the day when the temperature drops to 10 degrees celcius (50 degrees farenheit) as if it was the Chilean Antartic while the gringo can go sleeveless. In July even the gringo is shivering as there is no central air heat and the hotels do not turn on the heat until 8 o'clock PM. People heat rooms with propane fired heaters and wooden stoves so one wonders whether they will die from carbon monixide poisoning. The Chileans have no natural gas of their own and are dependent on Argentina for that---to be dependant on Argentina for anything puts one in dire straits.

rodeo--In Chile cowboys do not lasso cows or ride a bucking bull until it tosses them off. Instead two cowboys ("huasos") mount horses and corral a steer into a wall gaining points depending where the horse makes contact--e.g. 4 points for the rear end. No gringo could possible understand this sport. The rules are listed here.

natural gas and hot water--if you stay in a hostal you might have to share a shower with others--well not at the same time unless that is the thrill you are seeking. If the hot water cuts off when your hair is filled with soap then the hot water heater is probably turned off. In Chile instead of heating gallons of water as we do in the states they use an on-demand type of system that heats water as it flow through the pipes. This uses natural gas for which the Chileans pay world market price so it's expensive. If you rent a house then perhaps the hot water heater is located on an outside wall and the pilot light can blow out in a really heavy wind. Propane tanks are delivered by truck or even by bicycle to the neighborhoods. You can relight the hot water heater yourself with a simple lighter and there is not much chance you will blow yourself up.

exiting a bus or an airplane--Chileans do not understand the concept of "first on last off". In gringolandia if you are sitting in, say, row 22 you let the people in row 21 get off first. Instead the Chileans--man, woman, child--push ahead comptelely oblivious of what to most would be logical.

soccer--"futbol" is more important here that what President Obama might be saying or the fact that the global economy is in free fall. The only thing that attracts more attention for the native is the soap opera ("telenovela") "Donde esta Elisa?" ("where is Elisa") which closely mirrors the comings and goings of the family who owns the nation's largest newspaper El Mercurio.

has been musicians--Where can you see Peter Frampton and The Brothers Johnson? Certainly not in the USA because they cannot earn a nickel there. So they head to the music festival at Vina del Mar where the natives do not know better. The Jonas Brothers are in Chile today? Does this portend their end?

news--television news starts at 9 o'clock at night on TVN. At the airport instead of CNN they broadcast music videos. It must be easy for the rest of the world to let the Americans alone worry about terrorism, famine, that sort of thing.

women--there are lots of single mothers ("madres soleteros") here. If they can get it they seek child support ("pension alimientos"). The gringo with $100 bills, a blue passport, and an odd accent has a decided advantage over the local womanizer ("mujer riego"). But Chileans, like Colombians, are not so poor, at least the upper tier. They glamorize themselves in the social pages of El Mercurio and have expensive houses in Las Condes and at the beach in Vina del Mar. The poor people are more comfortable in Valparaiso. As for The Spanish it is much easier to be charming if your speach is halting whatever the language. I find it charming that young girls often hold hand when they walk.

love--Chilean teenagers and young adults live with their parents so they go to "cabanas" for lovemaking which are motel rooms rented by the hour. There if you happen to have a car you can drive it behind a curtain where the adulterer can hide from the prying eyes of the detective's camera. There is a whole language for different degrees of courtship. If you female friends lets you have sex with her she is an "amiga con ventaja". If you are dating she becomes you "polola". Date her and no one else and she is your "novia". Marry and she becomes your "esposa". Divorce and--as is the case in the USA--she becomes your "ex".

school and English--the wealthier people send their children to private school ("collegios") and those most fortunate of all take private classes in order to score highly on the PSU (equivalent of the SAT) so they can go to college. Children who go to the collegios know English pretty well. Simple laborers earn about $1 per hour working in agriculture and are laid off after the grape harvest is done.

agriculture---The whole of the country from La Serena down to Concepcion is planted with grapes, onion, olives, whatever. Were it not for the irrigation which cuts across the country in aqueducts and canals it would all be dust. If you grow roses and live in the humid and wet east coast of the USA you will be envious how easily everything grows here without mildew.

coffee--Chileans export most of their agriculture it would seem keeping little of it for themselves. So they drink powdered drinks or buy cheap, watered down jugos ("juices"). Contrast this with Colombia where mango, blackberry, and other juices are drunk au natural without so much water. In the USA of course we prefer water, corn syrup, food coloring, and cancer causing concoctions which contains say 2% real fruit. Chile does not grow coffee. Instead of brewing ground beans they like it powdered. As for decaf they know not what that means.

sea food--clams ("almejas"), sea urchin, and and odd looking creature called "pico roco" are plentiful here sold by the cartful in the open air at Puerto Montt. For fish they have salmon in the South and congrio and reinata everywhere. I have never seen anything like what in the USA they call a "Chilean Bass" so presume that to be some invention of the gringo mentality.

waiting in line--if you go to the pharmacy to, say, recharge the balance on your cell phone take a number and wait. In Santiago, which is a large city, you have to wait in line for the pharmacy, the bank, to obtain service from the butcher and so forth. Chileans wait in line to pay bills at "servipago". In the USA I wait in line for nothing prefering to pay bills and buy tickets on the internet.

public telephone--it costs 100 pesos to call a land line ("linea fija") and 200 pesos to call a cell phone ("movil"). Dial 09 before each cell phone number.

la once--Chileans eat 4 times per day. breakfast ("desayuno"), lunch ("almuerzo"), dinner ("la cena"), and a light dinner at 5 o'clock (oddly enough called "la once" which means 11).

the work day--don't wake up at 5 o'clock and put on your running shows and head out to Starbucks. Shops here don't open until 10 and children go to school in shifts. For this reason you will see lots of school kids on the street at night when you would imagine they should be home fighting with their siblings.

dogs--dogs are free to wander all over Chile and no one cares. You will see them sleeping on the streets and crossing with pedestrians to the rythym of traffic lights ("semaforos"). In the USA someone seeing a stray would call the police and the dog squad would descend in great numbers perhaps with guns drawn.

cell phones--buy a prepaid cell phone in the USA and pay over the internet to have it unlocked. Make sure it is a GSM phone. Then here you can buy a SIM card and a prepaid cell phone card ("tarjeta") in order to recharge ("recarga") the balance ("saldo"). Chile under Pinochet embraced Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and free-wheeling capitalism while electing socialts to office since then. Consequently there are multiple cell phone companies vying for your business. When you call someone it is free or them which is good when you are dating a girl who has no money, honey.

paying for stuff--In Chile you pay the "cajera" (cashier) after first choosing a product from one counter, perhaps retrieving it from another, then finally paying for it at a third. The system is bureaucratic with even the smallest stores having at least two steps in this three step process. They will always give you a receipt ("boleto") which is one reason Chile is known as a country where they is little corruption, well comparated to say Ecuador or Argentina, since there is this paper trail.

swimming pools--apparently no one swims in Santiago for there is one indoor pool ("piscina techada"), the YMCA, and it costs $12 per day to swim there. As for the ocean it is too cold for lots of people unless you are used to the Pacific chill in California.

police--the national police here are called "carbineros". They are professional and courteous and will not accept bribes ("morditas"). Argentine drivers accustomed to paying bribes to avoid a traffic ticket are arrested here when they try that.

illegal immigrants---as the USA is overrun with Mexicans Chile is overun with Peruvians. That is why you will see signs “for rent” ("se arrienda") only Chileans.

Chilean wine--buy my book "Wine, Communism, and Volcanoes".

Wifi internet---buy a prepaid mobile broadband card from Falabella or Ripleys or Paris. It will cost $100 and the first two months might be free. So no contract required. The service providers are EntelPC, Movistar, and Claro. When you go back to home just give it away to someone else.

Public transport----taxis are cheap but collectivos are cheaper. A “collectivo” can mean a bus or a taxi that runs in the same loop day in and day out. On the windshield it says for example “$200”. That would be 38 cents. These cabs are shared. You can tell the driver when you pay “se paga” meaning "I am paying you now". When you want to get off say “la esquina por favor” meaning “drop me off at the corner.” The subway in Santiago is clean and efficient. Buy a BIP card and use it to board the bus and the metro. Push the button near the door to signal your descent. In order to plan your trip around santiago use http://www.transantiagoinforma.cl/deDonde.do

tips—a tip is a “propina”. For meals it is 10% or zero and there is no place on the credit card receipt to attach it. For taxis it is zero.

hookers--legal. Not much more need be said. Larger towns will have a red light district. If you are looking for the traditional burlesque show go to a "cafe con piernes" where topless women serve drinks over the bar.

petty crime--Chile is free of the kipnapping and extortion problems or Colombia and Mexico. But here there is petty and sometimes violent crimes from criminials ("delincuentes"). Watch your camera and your back pack.

Credit cards---every time you use your credit card they will ask for your “RUT”. This is like a social security number. Just make up a 7 digit number or write down your passport number. No one will ask to see your passport except maybe the Chinese restaurants whose owners are adrift between two cultures. Also know that the cashier will ask you if you would like to pay in installments ("cuotas") and whether you want to donate 100 pesos to the poor. Just say "sin cuotas".

refrigeration--my first wife came from Ecuador a country where meat is sold in the open air without refrigerationand people pile in 7 to a vehicle without seat belts. She threatened me bodily if I took our 11 year old son to the store without his child restraint system and her family all wanted their food cooked well done. When my mother-in-law and sister-in-law came over for a cookout I simply burned what they ate and they appeared pleased. As for Chile and Colombia don't look for eggs in the refrigerated section of the dairy. The are on the counter. As one who has farmed chickens I can tell you a hen lays her egg in 90 or 100 degree temperatures and it can sit there days or weeks without spoiling. One reasons eggs in the USA are refrigerated is they are sold old, months old in many cases. An egg yoke should be bright yellow. If it is grey, as they usually are at the Walmart and elsewhere, it indicates age. "Botalo"--i.e. trash it. I buy only brown or organic eggs as the conditions in which chickens are raised on factory farms are filthy and disgusting.

sex--The gringo culture is rather uptight. We have The Moral Majority, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Right to Lifers, militant Lesbian feminists all railing again what THEY consider to be immoral. In Chile--a Catholic country where divorce was only made legal a few years ago--there is little of this tyrrany of the Moral Minority. This is also the case in Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, everywhere beyond the stifling confines of USA victorian mores. Here women wear thong bathing suits while they are arrested for doing the same where I was born at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. It is 1:30 AM here now and I am watching a burlesque show on broadcast television. There is no FCC here to impose the will of the religious right on the rest of us. The telenovelas are almost soft born with steamier scenes than you would ever see on, say, Days of Our Lives. Prostitution is legal while--owing to the influence of the church---abortion usually is not but even that is changing. Which country is more free? If I could say more I would add to this burden the misery which is inflicted by the legal system in America which stifles so many aspect of our lives with "no running", "no trespassing", "no skateboarding", "no regard" for what is logical the lunacy havencompletely haven got out of hand.

A Farmers Market in Santiago

2009-05-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

I am still here in Chile having turned over the goats to a goatherd and a vineyard to a vineyard worker. So for my blog on Virginia agriculture today I write about the farmers market in Chile.

This is a four day weekend in Chile to mark the end of the War of the Pacific on May 21 which is when Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia enlarging their country and denying Bolivia access to the sea. Since the holiday is a Thursday Chileans take Friday for vacation as well. They have not pushed all their federal holidays to Monday as we have done so the kids get an extra day off school.

Here in central Santiago in a neighborhood located between Cummins and Quinta Normal subway stops peddlers line the street for a dozen blocks selling everything from clothes to seafood to vegetables. The streets are crowed on this cloudy Sunday morning as worshipers pile out of the Salvation Army church a few blocks away. The city library is crowded with students working on the free internet access provided there. The walls could use painting. Many books have their covers worn. At the entrance there is mention of a grant from the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation. In the markets crowds of illegal immigrants from Peru sell pirated DVD music, candy apples, socks, or a single brassier if that is all they have for inventory. It would seem only in the USA and maybe Europe that copyright piracy laws are really enforced so the gringo pays $29 for the latest movie while on the street here it costs $2.

I head into the street to buy cilantro and peppers, kiwi, and olives, spring onions, and carrots. I am looking for a ready-made mix of spices called “verdura surtida” which is hojas de apio(celery), perejil (like cilantro), and oregano fresco(fresh oregano). Carrots are called “zanahorias”. Bell peppers are “pimentones”. Spring onions are “cebollin italiano”. Kiki of course is “kiwi” and plaintains are “platanos”.

According to today's La Tercera newspaper the latest fashion in agriculture in Chile arearellanos, which are hazelnuts, which you can have with your coffee at Starbucks. The newspaper says they can be grown here cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Fortunes have been made here and lost in olives, oranges, grapes and kiwi and now perhaps arellanos but those markets are given to wide swings in price. There is lots of kiwi planted here in Chile. One male plant is planted in the middle of a dozen or so females. The vines are trained overhead in theparron style of trellis which is used to grow table grapes and low quality wine grapes. You can readily tell a kiwi farm when you drive buy because the fruit smells strongly like kerosene.

All of this produce is of course local agriculture except no one touts “locally grown” or “organic” or any of that because Chile is one giant cultivated garden at least where the ground is not vertical (I.e. The Andes) or desert or timbered forest. So many people work in agriculture here not simply as laborers but as salesmen, agronomists, managers, and other that they don't treat it as a novelty like we do in the outer burbs of Northern Virginia. The situation here in Chile must be like, say, Fresno, California where agriculture is simply a way to earn a living for an entire communities.

Back at the market I have filled two shopping bags—you need to bring your own---for 4,000 pesos (about $8). I have some money left over so I buy oranges (naranjas) and acetunas which you might call “olivias” except they are not as salty. (Salt is to olives as vinegar and alum are to pickles)

Eldon Farms

2009-05-19T06:49:00.002-07:00

John Genho, is a 29 year Ivy League school graduate who reads the Wall Street Journal and farms 7,600 acres of pastureland and forest in Rappahannock County. His crew includes a cowboy from Florida, a former rock-n-roller who had a top 40 hit, two other farm hands, an office person, and a pack of border collies and other types of working dogs.

People who live in Rappahannock County know Eldon Farms, if only by reputation, as the local environmentalists eye what might be the largest tract of contiguous land in three counties hoping the owners never carve it up for development. Running all the way from Slate Mills Rd to Sperryville this sprawling farm cross both sides of highway 522 with 24 rental houses and 100 buildings on the property plus 65 miles of fencing. Unlike so many of the hobby horse and cattle farms in the county—whose owners sometimes say they “farm” although they produce no profit--this farm is a working farm whose revenue pays the salaries, the medical bills, the food, and the clothing for the handful of people who work there.

Eldon Farms has for 40 years belonged to the Lane Family whose founder William “Bill” N. Lane, II died in an automobile accident near the family's Bell Ranch in New Mexico some 30 years ago. The late Mr. Lane was an astute businessman who bought an interest in a Chicago book binding company acquiring other properties which continue under family ownership as Lane Hospitality, Acco Brands and others. His widow continued to spend time at the house they call “Little Eldon” and his son Nelson still knows people in the county.

John Genho does not deal with the family members too much since Eldon Farms is owned by the corporation and run as a business. The same environmentalists who are eager to assert an easement across the farm will be comforted by the fact that John sits on the Culpeper Soil and Water Conservation District board, a generally elected position, with Monira Rifaat who of course is an advocate of conservation easements. Cliff Miller was formerly on that board and has put much of his Mount Vernon Farm into the CREP and BMP cost sharing programs which pay farmers to keep cattle out of the stream. Eldon Farms is doing that too although it will take a while with so many miles of fencing to replace. The BMP cost sharing program has been boosted from 75% to 85% plus Rappahannock has a matching funds program from a donor for $50,000 for the 15% gap.

John is a Mormon who went to school at Brigham Young then Cornell where he studied animal genetics. He lives on the farm in a large house with his child ren and wife who likes to take photos and upload them to the family's blog.

Farming, of course, is hardly profitable anymore the costs of machinery, grain, and land having put profitability out of the reach of possibility for most family farms. John says Eldon Farms breaks even and has a positive cash flow in the years when he is able to cut timber, the mountainous forest here harboring some veneer quality red oak. Because of the crash in the housing market , timber prices have fallen to “65-70% of what the value was a couple of years ago” so logging is no windfall.

John says, “When you look at our accounting we make money off cattle.” But it won't make you rich adding, “It's not something you would want to take out a loan and start a business. We have 24 rental houses. If we can cut timber we have positive cash flow.”

Every day John checks the price of feeder cattle and corn on the Chicago Board of Trade. He says that for years corn traded for $2 to $4per bushel. “But last summer corn was trading over $7 dollars. Grass has all of a sudden become more valuable.” The traditional model for a cow calf operation has been to raise cattle to 500 pounds weight then sell them at the livestock auction where they would be shipped off to large feeding operations in Nebraska or small Mennonite Amish-run operations in Pennsylvania where they would be fed corn until they reach their 1,200 pound slaughter weight. Corn is now back down to $4 per bushel, still feedlots prefer calves that weight 700 to 800 pounds because it takes less time and less money to fatten up the cows for slaughter. In order to each that extra weight 200 to 300 pounds of weight the rancher needs to overwinter the cattle which is difficult to do if you have to pay for hay. Eldon Farms does not have to buy hay because they bale their own and stockpile fescue for the winter—that means they simply leave certain paddocks ungrazed and unclipped.

John has 1,400 head of cattle on the farm including 500 calves which in June will be headed to market. In January he sold those calves which weighed more than 600 pounds to the Winchester livestock market and was pleased by the price in the off season sale. October and November are, “The Absolute worst time to sell them, because no one wants to take them through the winter.”Calves kept over the winter are called “stocker cattle”.

Of other parts of the country John says, “Nebraska grasslands are prime cow calf country”. But the disadvantage there is you have to supply hay in the winter while in Virginia fescue grass can be stockpiled for the winter. He says, “The three best things about fescue are January, February, and March and the worst are June, July, and August.” By this he is referring to the endophyte infected tall fescue grass which dominates the landscape here. The fungus lives in harmony with the plant thus giving it the ability to tolerate the cold winters here. But in summer endophyte causes cattle to lose rather than gain weight as their respiration and heart rate increase. The alternative would be to try and kill all the fescue and replace it with orchard grass or something like MaxQ fescue but that takes time and costs money.

To boost protein Eldon Farms plants some summer annuals like pearl millet and small grains like barley but only on a small scale for their heifers that will become breeding stock to give them an extra boost. His focus instead is to maintain the highest quality pasture as he rotates stock from one paddock to another to both improve the grass stand there and keep the animals from overgrazing pastures, which would expose them to lethal intestinal parasites which live in the soil.

John's ideal pasture management system would be to sample 20% of the pastures each year and then apply fertilizer according to the soil sample. But prices have wrecked havoc on the ideal situation. He says, “What we are really interested in is getting the phosphorus and potassium right and for nitrogen we figure if we can clover into the field nitrogen will take care of itself. Unless we are stockpiling fescue we cannot afford to put nitrogen on the field.” But he ads, “Potassium prices went from $100 per ton to $1000 per ton so we cannot afford to buy that. I would love to put potassium and phosphorus down on our field. Nitrogen gives you a short term bloom but it leaches out pretty fast. Potassium and phosphorous give you a good healthy field.”

The two cowboys Robert Gainer and Rich Bradley and the farm manager John Genho offer to saddle up the horses and move the cattle on horseback for the visiting journalist but pick up trucks and dogs will do just fine. Ray Bennett is waiting at the other end of the pasture several miles away as the lowing herd is marshalled toward tender new ungrazed grass at the other end of the village of Woodville. The grass here is a mix or orchard grass and clover with some blue grass and fescue mixed it—it is what the farmers would call “lush”. A dozen bulls barely lift their heads as we drive by in a pickup truck in order to meet the cowboys and the herd. The bulls have long ago worked out which one is dominant and the lesser males take care to stay out of the way of the largest. John says each year a couple are injured killed fighting. He says, “This is what it means to be a male.”

We have completely blocked one of the winding lanes leaving Woodville as the herd is turned down the road. The working dogs snap at the heels of the cows as they push them along. There are so many cows one wonders for a moment whether you would be crushed if they stampede. John's border collie is meant to be at the front of the pack but is working at the back as he responds to John's verbal signals. The border collie lurks behind a few stubborn cows then nips at them as the cows briefly challenge the dog then retreat. A couple hundred heifers are in the pasture on the other side of the road and crowd the fence trying to join the larger herd. Traffic, if there were any on this almost abandoned road, would not be able to pass as the animals have taken over a ¼ mile of unpaved roadway. The cattle kick up dust on their way to the other pasture. The herd moved to the new location the cowboys return to their never ending task of maintaining the fences.

What Happened to All the Silos?

2009-05-19T06:49:00.001-07:00

Drive across the landscape in Virginia and the observant person notices that practically all of the silos here are no longer in use except on some dairy farms. Instead of being used to store silage—that is, grain that is fermented so that it will not spoil—trees are growing up through the middle of these ghosts of the landscape which have not been used for some years.

There is an old saying which is very much true for those who bale hay: “Make hay while the sun shines”. When you cut hay you have to let it dry for a couple of days in the sun before you bale it up. Otherwise if you bale it damp it will rot. Not so for what is called “bailage”. This is grass which is cut then baled straight away and wrapped in air tight plastic. The bales ferment turning into something akin to vinegar. Cattle love it, the cow hands at the 7,600 acre Eldon Farms in Rappahannock County say they even lick up the juice from the plastic and the ground.

In the past sillage was made by lifting grass or corn stalks into the anerobic (i.e. oxygen free) environment of the silo. Sillage can also be made by shoveling forage into a pit into the ground and covering it with plastic and tires. Or you can just bag up some green grass in a plastic bag and wrap it up tight.

Jim Bowen farms wheat, cattle, and hay on 3,700 acres of land in Culpeper owned by the Germans. He has been working here since 1981. His farm is well-known throughout the state having hosted the annual Virginia Ag Expo which is the largest event in the state for row crop farmers. Jim is well-positioned to explain why there are no more silos.

Standing in front of an enormous 8-tire 248 horsepower tractor in front of empty silos and functioning grain elevators Jim explains what he does here.

“I have silos and grain bins and grain elevators I don't use the silos. Mostly what we do is we use it grain for sale corn and to store [soy] beans for grain.”

For his cattle he says, “All I feed is hay but I feed sillage hay. I use ballage which is sillage wrapped in plastic. You can make the hay at 50% moisture. All I do is cut it and bail it. No need to dry it. With ballage you can bale it the next day.Wrapped it tight and it ferments. Used to be, to make a bag you would push 50 rolls into a bag and you would cut a little slit it in but now you don't have to do that because we wrap it so tight. Almost all dairy farmers use silage. It is a great feed. Pits work the same way. You put the sillage into pits and you pack it as you put it in. Cover it up and keep the air out. Uncover it as you feed it. So it won't turn into compost you need to pack it good. You don't want air to get all in it.” He says most sillage pits are made of concrete..

Jim says, “You can make hay and sillage out of winter rye. Its a real early crop its almost ready now [April]”. At this time of the year area lawns and pastures are still grey from winter but rye and wheat feels are bright green especially if they have been fed nitrogen.

Asked about fertilizer he says, “I will put nitrogen on the wheat in the fall or early spring. I just put nitrogen on it last week. Last fall I bought nitrogen. I paid $450 per ton right now it is $200 per ton that costs 70 cents per unit—I can hardly make money at that”

Jim runs about 200 Angus cows. He put has 7 frost-free Merafont watering systems that use the temperature of the soil to keep themselves ice free even when it is below freezing. He says, “ I try to limit the grazing along my farm banks. I didn't want my cattle in the streams.”

When straw prices are high Jim sells straw but otherwise leaves in on the ground as he rotates to the next crop. Because of the crash in housing prices there is not much demand for straw now as few builders are seeding new lots.

“Hay” is forage which is cut wet, allowed to dry, then baled. “Straw” is wheat which is allowed to dry then cut after the combine has taken away the grain. Jim farms and sells orchard grass to area horse and cattlemens. They prefer that over alfalfa he says, “There's not many people who buy alfalfa. They don't want something which such high protein. Because most of these horses are not working. They get fat if you feed them alfalfa. Most horse people in this area like the 2^ndcutting orchard grass which is a lot shorter and finer cut.”

Of the costs and revenue he says, “It probably cost me $70 year fertilizer on my orchard grass and I normally make 2 – 2.5 tons per acre of hay. Selling it for $45 per bale I am grossing $200 per acre and $45 for 800 an pound bale. I do some small bales too”.

Most of what Jim grows is corn and soybeans which is pretty much what most row crop farmers do and they collect a subsidy for that but Jim does not as this farm is foreign owned. Jim markets his grain to the chicken industry. I have written about two row crop farmers on this blog to date and both of them sell to Perdue. These chicken operations obviously buy a lot of area grain.

Jim says, “Everything you see here thats green here like that is wheat. Most of my wheat I sell to Perdue farms and it used for export out of Norfolk. I grow wheat corn soybeans rotation. I sell it by the bushel. 60 pounds to a bushel. I sell spot market and futures contract..”

Because of all the chicken farms in Harrisonburg and elsewhere there is a surplus of manure available for fertilizer. Jim says, “Right now chicken litter is $30 per ton just dumped on your farm. Contact Mount Pony Farm. They are brokers. Talk to Billy.”

Flying to Patagonia

2009-05-09T07:21:00.001-07:00

I am here in Puerto Montt near the bottom of Chile and consequently the bottom of the planet where the Pacific Ocean, which one normally thinks of as lying to the west, surrounds the peninsula here both in a southerly and westerly direction. The wind is howling and the rain blowing in this corner of Patagonia where rain falls some 300 days of the year.

My wife and I have left behind the dry climate of Santiago for a few days amongst what in Spanish they call “naturaleza”. Here there are not one but three volcanoes each higher than the next. The Volcan Osorno looms above the town of Puerta Varas reflected in the waters of the lake Lanquihue as if in a postcard. A postcard is in fact the only way we can see the top of the volcano today because of the cloud cover.

I've left the goat farm in the hands of a goatherd and the vineyard in the care of another farmer while I come here to both repair relations with my wife, who lives in Santiago, and look for work in the USA. Each day I answer emails from IT recruiters in the USA and talk on the phone with prospective employers using the wonderful program Skype. It's two cents per minute.

Today we are taking the ferry across to the island of Chiloe. You board a bus which for 7,000 pesos ($12) will take us to the town of Castro including the 45 minute board ride across the bay. Yesterday the ferries were shutdown because of the howling gale. So we braced against the rain and joined the legions of high school kids hanging out at the mall while I looked for a charger for the battery for my camera.

I find it amusing the the hostel where I am staying is located on the Avenue Salvador Allende and I am heading to Castro. My wife is a pinochenista or supporter of the dicator Pinochet who sacked the Marxist President Allende and took on the role of leader of the military junta. Emotions over this period of time run deep which I learned when I made the mistake of naming my second book “Wine Communism and Volcanoes”. I should have called it “The Gringo and the Harvest” because the winery owners here, who for the most part supported Pinochet, are embarrassed by their communist past and my book did not sell well here.

That does not matter now as I have written a new book with a larger publisher which I believe we will call “Virginia Wines from Grapes to Glass”. I turned in the last chapter friday—now the process of editing begins. So I have something to do to fill the days before I return to the grind of the daily corporate job.

Gricel, my wife, and I went to the office of Lan Chile airlines last week and looked for a promotion, cheap flights to wherever. We thought of the Valle del Luna in the desert to the North or Puntas Arenas which is at the bottom of the country. But both locations were too expensive so we settled on Puerto Montt which is no disappointment at all.

Two days ago we hired a van and went with a family from Valpairso and two single girls from Ecuador and Argentia to visit the volcano here and see the lake. As such things usually transpire by the end of the day we were all friends and had exchanged email addresses promising to share photos with people we will never see again.

Geography in this part of the world is large on a scale which is hard to imagine. Driving up to see the Saltos de Petrohue (Petrohue Rapids) we passed a lofty mountain that rose straight up into the horizon which the chauffer told us was the precordillera. The Andes here are called the “cordillera” and of course “ precordillera” would mean the foothills but in their towering immensity they are taller than anything we have in the well-eroded mountains of Virginia Appalachia. In Virginia we have little tiny trout swimming in the stream but in the stream here there are salmon roughly a meter in length, huge animals laying their eggs on their way back to the ocean.

After Puerto Montt we spend two days in Chiloe. The strongest earthquake from recorded history rocked this region in 1960 sinking the coastline by a meter. To get to Chiloe you take a bus which then takes a ferry across to the island. It's a pleasant location with a cloud of sadness hanging over it for 9,000 people are unemployed having lost their jobs in the salmon farming business when a virus invaded the fisheries. The fisheries are still closed after two years.

If you go to Chiloe visit Castro and there stop in and talk with the owner at Loco Tony's supermarket. He is a retired fisherman from Maine.

Virginia BMP Farm Cost Sharing Program

2009-04-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

After the drubbing I took from my last two posts—mainly on rappnet--I decided to write something cheerier and return to the agricultural theme of this web site.

Local farmers be advised there is money there for the taking if you are willing to fence your cattle and other livestock out of area streams. This essay is the tale of my participation in the BMP (best management practices) cost-sharing program.

At first glance BMP is a no-brainer proposition. The states of Virginia will pay you 75% of the cost of putting in a well, fencing, and a frost-free watering system if you agree to keep your animals from wading and defecating in the water. Plus you get a 25% state tax credit for the portion that they do not reimburse. The reason this is desirable is animal manure is high in nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Their manure flows down the stream, into the river, and into the Chesapeake Bay where it causes algae blooms, red tides, all sort of maladies.

Now the program is voluntary. One day it could become mandatory and that certainly will set local farmers howling. Some say they would be forced out of business if they are required to fence off their streams. That's not true for all but the poorest farmers. There's no reason not to participate in the program if the state will pay the lion's share of the cost. Some farmers are simply philosophically opposed to the idea. Some of these complaining cattlemen are just tax farmers who keep cattle simply to keep their farms in the land use program thus lowering—you could say “lowing”---their real estate tax bill by 75%. They are out there now buying so-called “land use cattle” driving up the prices for calves at the spring auctions.

My own reason for participating in the program was financial. All winter long I had been hauling water two times per day down to my goats as the water I gave them quickly froze. So what I needed was a frost-free system: a mirafont.

The mirafont is elegant in its simplicity. It works sort of like a toilet with a floating and a valve. A pipe driven into the ground allows warm air from the subsoil to keep the water free of ice. A plastic ball floats into the space above the water and the animals learn to push down the floating ball and get a drink of water.

I applied for the BMP (best management practices) cost sharing program through David Massie at the Soil and Water Conservation office in Culpeper. The board of directors there took a look at my farm and approved a fence and frost-free watering system for 700 feet of stream footage. They said I did not have enough goats to justify a well so Clyde Pullen, the contractor I hired for the job, simply hooked my mirafont watering system directly to my existing well. As I grow my farm I plan to apply again: next time maybe I will have enough goats to justify a well.

The whole project cost me about $7,500 for which BMP will pay approximately $4,000. It's a bit difficult to calculate what portion of the project went toward the conservation project and what portion went toward the other project I finished which was to fence in 4 acres of forest (i.e. the other side of the stream easement) and run electric and water lines 800 feet down to my pasture. (The idea is the goats will clear the forest over time and turn it into pasture.) Clyde and his crew rented a Kubota backhoe and dug a trench 30 inches deep some 700 feet down my driveway. Then my electrician, Greg Lukas, installed three electrical plugs and put lights in my greenhouse and tool shed. For the electrical work I traded two years of hunting rights on my farm. (During the Great Recession barter has supplanted cash in some cases.) Clyde installed two frost-free hydrants. This way I will have water for my garden, my green house and my other pasture where the herd sire lives and where there is no mirafont, yet. As for the fencing I did all of that myself. The state paid a subsidy for the cost of the fencing, the cost of the mirafont, the water line, and the electric charger to power the fence. And I have contributed my own, albeit modest, effort to keep the Chesapeake Bay clean.

Laid off from the Day Job and Nursing two Kids by Hand

2009-04-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Problems on the Goat Farm: Unemployment and Nursing two Kids by Hand

Two disasters befell the goat farm this week. First, I got laid off from my day job from Sprint. Second, the mother of two of my day old goats died. So I am bottle feeding her two kids while I buried their mother this morning with the tractor.

In the last 20 days thirteen baby goats have been born on the farm. Two of them died—one had bite marks from some wild animal and the other perhaps got bacteria in its umbilical cord and dropped dead without warning. I had followed the textbook procedures and instructions from friends. I had vaccinated all of the mothers a month before they delivered so that the mothers would deliver immunity to their kids through their colostrum. And I dewormed the mothers the day they delivered so they would not die of anemia. Still I found myself in the veterinarian's office this week a little moist eyed as the vet put down one of my kids. Farmers are supposed to be hardened in sprit as birth and death are part of life. But I had been with this little girl since the evening before trying to force feed her milk I had drawn from her mother's teats. With no registrable temperature and despite steroids fed through a catheter the little babie die in a box on Dr. Massie's office. A little bit of me died there with that doe.

Tonight I just got back from the drug store where I bought two baby bottles to feed my orphaned day-old goats. I had been unable to get them to suck on the calf-sized nipple that I had affixed to a bottle of Goat-Savr powdered milk. They sucked on my fingers and nibbled on my shirt all the while yelling for their mother. But unless they learned to feed from the bottle they would die of starvation. I tried everything the book told me: cover their eyes to emulate the dark under their mother's udder, tickle their rectum as their mother would do. Then it dawned on me that the nipple designed for a calf was too large for a goat. So at the Walgreens I bought two nipples and voila both kids drank a whole bottle of milk. Now they are sleeping peacefully on the couch at my side and have quit crying for their mother. For the next two months I am their mother as they will require feeding 4 times per day.

This of course ties me down as I look for new work. I cannot help but be angry to yet again have been tossed out by the brutality which is capitalism where morality matters not and profit is the only goal. I once had my own company but am not much of a capitalist because I never laid off anyone even when there was no work. Of course Sprint has a fiduciary duty to its stock holders to lower costs and maximize profits but that is what is wrong with this system in which we live in the USA. Sprint was making positive cash flows and had billions of dollars in the bank so there was no crisis there. Their former CEO Gary Forsee had been singled out by some magazine as the worst offender in the malfeasance which is executive compensation and greed. He had paid himself $22 million dollars two years ago as the company shed customers unhappy with the poor customer service and dropped calls. The new CEO Dan Hesse promised to do better and I believed his every word. I was encouraged as each quarter we met our targets and my own bonus was usually equal to one month pay. But the board of directors was not happy that Sprint's operating costs were 20% of revenue and not 15% as was the case with AT&T and Verizon the primary competitors. So Dan tossed me out along with 5,000 other fathers and mothers and tax paying citizens and replaced them with people in India a dozen of which I had personally trained. Of the people left behind in the office in Reston and Kansas many were working on immigrant visas.

There is a new type of McCarthyism lurking in the halls of corporate America where you are not supposed to mention the visa status of those you work with. But having been laid off twice in the past 8 years and replaced by Indians I feel compelled to speak out. I had asked the Vice President at Sprint where I was working whether priority would be given to U.S. Citizens over workers on immigrant visas during this round of layoffs. He said “No, we're all God's children”. But the stimulus bill has required that U.S. Citizens be given preference when the decision is made to cut head count. This is a rule which is widely circumvented especially by Indian contracting firms that illegally bring workers to the USA when they have no position for them here. The corporation is able to say “this is not my doing” when they delegate work to these these H1B body shops.

For ten years now Indian immigrants have steadily replaced US Citizens in the workplace. Bill Gates is so enamored of their prowess that he declared Southern Indians the smartest workers in the world. It's made me so mad I want to leave the IT field and do what I really want to do which is farming and working in the vineyard. But I am a prisoner---tied down by the need for health care I must have full-time work. Like most farmers my day job pays for agricultural hobby and my farm losses are a hedge against the taxes I pay working for the corporations. Last year my farm had an income of minus $31,000 USD.

I have bittersweet relations with Indians as the advertising for goat meat on my web site is written in Kannada, Hindi, and Telegu. I had had the idea to direct market goat meat to Indians but are finding them too cheap to deal with. Unlike the gringo the Indian does not understand nor care for the idea of “organic”, “sustainable agriculture”, and “local farming”. They simply are interested in what does it cost. It's frustrating beyond belief as I had hoped to make them my customers. I have the same emotion as Indian headhunters phone me up as I look for work. The gringo will ask me about my experience. The Indians only concern is "what is your billing rate?"

Indian immigration is a theme I have written about before as they have so abused the systems to now outnumber US Citizens in the IT work place. Take a look at this essay which appeared in two Indian publications including this one http://mediakit.indusbusinessjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=8BC1B012FC0D4682A435C4D1B601370A

Dr. Richard Smart, The Flying Vine Doctor

2009-03-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

The Australian Dr. Richard Smart—known as the “Flying Vine Doctor”--rocked the viticultural status quo when he dismissed the notion that only the French can make world class wines. The French success, he wrote in his book “Sunlight into Wine”, is more of an accident of geography. The characteristics of the gravely, slightly alkaline soils of France can be replicated elsewhere by pruning and training the vine to have a proper balance of fruit and foliage. Science trumps tradition. New World grape growers started building trellises he designed and New World wine sales surged while French wine sales slumped. Recently Dr. Smart flew from Tasmania to Virginia by way of Georgia to explain his principles to 150 grape growers at Veritas Vineyards. There he spent some time with “Virginia Wine Lovers” magazine.

Can Virginia produce premium wines with all this rain and humidity?

Virginia is not the only place in the world where you are growing in humidity. It occurs in much of Europe. Bordeaux is an example of a place with rain and humidity. So you can do it. I like to say it’s a bit hard to do it. It’s easier to grow grapes if you have no rain fall and you irrigate. However you can get by. The high humidity has been an issue with some vintages. But then again there’s lots of places in the world that are humid. I would have to say that high summer rainfall is a problem here and some other places because we like to stop shoot growth before veraison and if you get a lot of rain before veraison that is hard.

Do you think Virginia can ripen Cabernet Sauvignon? Some growers say plant cabernet franc instead which is a Loire grape where it is cooler than Bordeaux. It requires fewer growing days to mature. There are people who grow it here and some who will not like Dennis Horton.

This is not a question you should ask me because it requires knowledge of Virginia and I am hardly an expert on that. But in Pennsylvania I have heard some people who question the suitability of cabernet sauvignon in Virginia. And I saw why bother if you gripe about it. There’s enough bloody cabernet in the world without Virginia adding to it.

I know you have worked in New York and Pennsylvania. How do Virginia wines compare with those of New York?

I’ve had some good wines here. The wine that has impressed me the most is viognier, undoubtedly. What I do find distressing here is people are hung up on the international varieties. They are slavishly planting cabernet and chardonnay. This is not healthy. They should be looking for their own varieties.

Twenty-Five or thirty years ago people in Virginia said you can only plant hybrids here. Now vinifera has had success. Do you think Virginia, given the humidity and rain, should be planting more mold and rot resistant seyval and vidal or do you think we should kept the focus on vinifera varieties?

I think keep the focus on the vinifera. That’s not to say there aren’t some good hybrids and not to say there won’t be more good hybrids in the future. Vinifera with some with some disease tolerance--that’s the ideal. Part of the problem is that people--partly your own profession is to blame--promote varietal labeling and consumers are averse to trying new varieties. And that is a shame because there is such a rich wealth of great varieties. I was just in Georgia where there are 500 indigenous varieties and they make wine only from some 10 or 20 of them and the others are not even evaluated.

You said vinifera will have greater disease resistance in the future?

Yes, that is because of breeding programs.

What can Virginia do to improve wine quality?

Keep experimenting with varieties. I suspect there is going to be a red variety as good as viognier and I suspect you haven’t tried it yet. I encouraged the group this morning to try some varieties from Eastern Europe. The weather is similar there.

Tell me about talking to Virginia grape growers today.

Tony Wolf [Virginia Tech’s viticulturist] encouraged me to put some perspective on the business here. I told the people they are making it hard on themselves with a lot of small operators and small vineyards. Not a very serious investment. The one we just went to Pollack they match up against some of the best vineyards in the world. And I think of people like Tony Wolf who I regards as one of the best grape researchers in the world. I think there is a good chance for the Virginia wine industry. You have something here that much of the rest of the world admires and that is wealthy consumers. And you have so many around here. You got to work on the reputation of Virginia wines. I think the way to do it personally is to do it in external wine shows, international wine shows. You need to keep plugging away like good old Jefferson did.

(The article originally appears in "Virginia Wine Lovers" magazine.)

Kidding

2009-03-13T06:37:00.001-07:00

The first goats were born on Rosewood Hill Farm this morning. Exactly 5 months from conception the first female I ever bought had twins. Within minutes of being born the babies were up and walking. I was hoping on this day it would be warm but we have snow. Still they have found a dry spot under a pine tree.

February Snow and the Deadline

2009-02-03T04:55:00.001-08:00

I apologize to my readers for not writing too much lately. I've been busy writing a new book on Virginia wineries which I hope to complete in just a few months. So I've taken a break from magazine writing and of course from reporting and writing updates for this blog. Rest assured rosewoodhillfarm.com will resume with a passion and soon.

Last night I rushed home from Charlottesville as fast as one can "rush" in a snow storm. The day was warm with temperature in the 50s. No one took the weatherman seriously when he said he would have snow because it was so warm. But snow is what it did and more is forecast for today.

I stayed out late at a dinner party and told my host I needed to get home to feed my guard dog Molly. My neighbor Melvin Jenkins gives Molly beef bones so I often find her laying next to his house guarding his cattle instead of on my property guarding my goats. The dog goes back and forth looking to see who will give him a better meal.

I have two dogs: a working dog and a "soup dog". Melvin gave my black lab Will this name meaning an animal that lies around waiting for food and does not do much of anything else. Will has been reduced to wearing an electric collar and sleeping in my bed and on the couch since I cannot trust him to go outside too long for he will run off. His one redeeming feature is he can retrieve geese when I shoot them down in the middle of the lake. Molly, the Great Pyrenees, on the other hand never runs off--except to Melvin's of course and that is within eyesight--and does a superb job of guarding the goats. At night she barks at whatever moves in the forest and chases raccoon up in the trees. In the day she takes a well-deserver rest.

This morning I got up and pat Molly on the head, brushed the snow from her coat, and then walked down to the pasture to snap pictures. Now I am need to stop writing before I run out of words so I can transcribe the interviews I made last night and cobble together another chapter for the new book this afternoon.

The Bulldozer

2009-01-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

They say that everyone ends up like their parents or at least one of their parents and for me I believe that is true with regards to the ideas I have had for this farm. My father had lots of business ideas, most of them did not work out and he had to pull back on several of them. He only made money with his tugboat company and regarding farming he tried everything from cattle to catfish even farming eels for the Japanese market. But the only thing from which he ever profited on his farm was hogs so he said. So it is with me as I keep shifting gears on my farm here trying to find someway to make it pay.

With this history behind me I came up with what I can now call the ridiculous idea to plant a vineyard on the mountain where I live. I say ridiculous because the only people I have found here in Virginia to profit from grapes are those who invest in a winery or who plant a lot of grapes. I’ve invested in a winery buying stock in The Winery at LaGrange an investment which has done well. But as for growing grapes I’ve decided it is better to do that for someone else and let them pay me by the hour. Then I will make money regardless of the circumstances and the owner can worry about the birds, hail, subzero-weather, raccoons, or whatever malady may befall the vineyard.

A lot of people are smitten with the idea of having their own rolling vista of grapes and aspire to have their own vineyard without realizing how difficult that can be. I can tell you it is not for the faint of heart nor for the city dweller who does not like to work outdoors in the heat nor cold. So it was with five years of experience planting grapes that I briefly thought about having my own vineyard until common sense prevailed and events overtook me changing my mind. My 65 acre farm is ideally situated for that with a southeastern exposure and elevation rising from 600 to 1,000 feet. The proposed vineyard site would have been ideal, rising above the frost, giving me three extra weeks of growing time over those vineyards down in the valleys or flat fields. But the problem with this site is it covered with trees which would need to be excavated. For that I would need a bulldozer.

I have already mentioned my investment in The Winery at LaGrange. When Chris Pearmund and his partners started to clear the land, they bought bought an International Harvester bulldozer. The partners there took turns driving it around and were as giddy as a bunch of school boys with their new machine. Chris tells the humorous story of clearing a bush or tree from near the old manor house. That obstacle had to go but there was a hot power line overhead in the way. No one wanted to drive the bulldozer, which of course is made of steel, underneath the power line thus grounding the machine and one’s self to the electric grid. So Chris powered up the dozer, pointed it in the right direction, and dove off as the machine approached the bush and electric wire then hopped right back onboard in time to steer it away from crashing into the building. I wonder how he could have done as the tracks would have been moving thus threatening to grind the bones and flesh of anyone who tried to do that into the dirt.

After the winery finished with the bulldozer I bought it for $8,000. I thought that was a steal but I didn’t realize that they had employed a full-time mechanic which a bulldozer really needs, full-time. Chris had paid more than that for the dozer and then had to replace a hydraulic pump deep inside the bowels of the monster. To split the machine apart to replace one individual pump cost $8,000. With that pump newly renovated I would not have to worry about that cost I assumed.

I had the idea that I would use the dozer to clear the trees from 8 acres of forest on the mountain above my land. I thought I could use a cable and then drive the dozer downhill using the momentum of the machine to snatch heavy stumps from the ground. The area where I wanted to plant my vineyard was a 15 degree slope which is a little steep but not too steep to operate machinery. So this seemed reasonable. I hired a logger to log the farm and thought he could cut clear cut this area. But as you can read in this other essay I could find no logger to cut each and every tree off my vineyard site. Also the money that I got from logging my farm was not enough to plant an 8 acre vineyard which had been my plan.

So now I had a bulldozer to drive around the farm and nothing to use it for having scrapped my vineyard plans. .

The statement that “you learn everything the hard way” certainly has been true for me. I learned that my bulldozer was not a bulldozer at all but a “loader”. This meant it was mainly for digging and not pushing things over or grading. I learned that when I tried to fix my driveway. I had spent $6,000 hauling gravel up onto my driveway when my insurance company threatened to cut off my coverage unless I put down a solid 1/3 mile footing for the fireman’s heavy water-laden truck. After a time the driveway formed ruts from vehicle traffic so I found that smaller cars could not climb the hill without bottoming out. A learned this when a reporterette from a local newspaper who had come to interview me walked up the hill with her photographer in tow. Of course I was eager that such pretty young women be able to drive up and see me when they wanted so I proceeded to grade the driveway with the loader.

A loader has a bucket in front that you can lift high overhead to pick up and move dirt. A dozer has a blade to smooth out the landscape which cannot be lifted in the air. The bucket on my loader had teeth instead of a smooth edge so when I went to fix the middle hump in my driveway it gouged out holes. The loader was so big it felt like navigating a boat as I proceeded to carve up my driveway. I could scarcely see in front of me so I could not tell if the bucket was smoothing out the dirt or churning up the same. The loader cut groves in the driveway and I only made it worse as I raised and lowered the bucket trying to steer a smooth course. My driveway ended up rougher than ever. My kids in the back of my pickup truck fairly bounced off the ceiling as I drove up and down the farm from that point forward. For months the ride was so rough that I soon abandoned the driveway preferring to navigate through the pasture instead.

I finally found a logger who rescued me by both logging my forest and repairing my driveway so it was again suitable for truck traffic. Then I pointed the loader at 6 acres of woods that had been pasture many years ago and proceeded to bulldoze it flat.

An off-the-road bulldozer has a track with a metal blade perpendicular to the same. So as the track moves the dozer hugs the ground and digs itself in. But my dozer had street tracks with no perpendicular blade. With its 60 horse power diesel engine it could push down small trees but not big ones because instead of digging down into the earth the tracks just spun. I pushed over 6 acres of hard woods and pine trees—including one which bounced off the roof of the dozer careening above my head—but could not move the biggest trees nor grade the soil to my satisfaction. Unlike Bill who had logged my farm I did not have much patience so I just drove the heavy noisy machine all over the place rolling over sapling and bush alike. I pried the front grill lose from the machine and knocked the smokestack off. When I was done the pasture looked more like a moonscape littered with piles of trees than a smooth landscape ready to plant to grass. So Bill the logger rescued me again when I paid him $2,000 to clean up the huge mess I had made.

The left clutch on the dozer failed so I could only make right-hand turns which was OK since I could still get where I wanted to go as long as I went there in a circle. A couple of water hoses wore out and the air cleaner needing replacing for which I paid the winery mechanic $900. So with my pasture where I wanted I gave the dozer away free to someone simply if them agreed to haul it away. In all I don’t consider this adventure a waste of time as I did get the land I needed cleared for $8,000 + $2,000 + $900 = $10,900 which after all was a reasonable price.

Cliff Miller's Mount Vernon Farm

2008-12-31T02:56:00.000-08:00

As county administrator he had responsibility for the maintenance of the roads. As a poet he was less inclined to do so.----paraphrased from Julian Barnes

Scene: A young suburban couple shopping at a grocery store

Shopper A: Look. This tea is on sale.

Shopper B: Let’s buy it. It’s organic.

Shopper A: Yes, it must be better than that one.

Shopper B: That’s right, because it’s organic.

For Cliff Miller “grass” is a metaphor for all that is good about ranching. While farmers around him break even or lose money selling cattle to grain-finishing feedlots, Cliff’s revenues are up over 20% from last year from the sale of grass-finished beef and lamb and pastured pork that he sells directly to retail customers from his Mount Vernon Farm in Sperryville, Virginia. His secret lies beneath his feet saying, “This is a grass farm. What we are really about is growing grass.”

What is wrong with feeding cows grain (corn, oats) instead of grass? Michael Pollen in “Omnivores Delight” put into print what followers of Alan Nation, editor of “The Stockman Grass Farmer”, and other grass-farming profits like Jo Robinson, author of “Pasture Perfect” have known for years. Cows, lamb, goats are ruminants designed to eat grass and not corn. Ruminants have a special 4-chambered stomach which is designed to break down the cellulose fiber found in grass and leaves. They can consume and in fact thrive from vegetation that other animals would hardly find palatable. Having digested a meal for the first time ruminants regurgitate it, chew it some more, and then digests it again. This is where they old expression “chewing the cud” comes from.

But man, or rather corporations, in their quest for quick profits are impatient with nature. As the documentary film “The Corporation” makes clear their only interest is “the bottom line” so the morals of what they are doing are not a factor in their design. So rather than wait two years as Cliff does to grow cattle to slaughter weight—that is, to “finish them off”—90% of farmers pack them off to the misery of the confined feed lot where they are fed grain, a diet which will kill them as it lowers the pH in their stomach and eventually causes their liver to fail. The feedlot is a downward spiral of discomfort from which they are given antibiotic shots just to keep them alive.

Jo Robinson in her book writes, “Most of our animals today, including cattle, are being ‘finished’ in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, of CAFOs—corporate owned, highly mechanized, fuel-intensive factory farms where large numbers of animals are confined in a small amount of space.” Gauchos in the pampas of Argentina--whose vast corn, soybean, and of course cattle production rivals that of the United States—believe the white colored fat of an American grain-fed cow indicates an unhealthy animal preferring their own leaner grass-finished animals. All of these concerns have been shunted aside in the decades head-long rush toward profits that is the corporate farming model.

Here in rolling bucolic Rappahannock County the mountains of Cliff Miller’s 850 acre Mount Vernon loom above the village of Sperryville surrounding it on three sides. In addition to owning a forested mountain Cliff is in the enviable position of having over a hundreds acres of flat river bottom land through with the Thornton River glides having tumbled from the rapids of the Shenandoah National Park which lies just beyond the town. Cliff and his family have been farming this same land for 181 years. For generations they disked the soil, spread fertilizers, and raised orchards, livestock, and row crops. But in the 1970s this once profitable local farm, like so many across the nation, began to lose money as the model of local sustainable agriculture was cast aside in favor of much larger farms where profits could be managed only by planting thousands of acres of corn and soybeans instead of hundreds and where one needs thousands of cattle instead of dozens in order to turn a profit. So Cliff began to look around for a way to make his farm profitable so that his heirs would not have to sell it off to others would could potentially carve it up into smaller lots.

Cliff’s full-time live stock manager, Darren Busét, is a pig farmer from Warren County with years of experience. With a heavy canvas jacket, range hat, and a pony tail mane, Darren is an experienced veteran rancher to whom Cliff has turned mainly for his knowledge of raising hogs. Darren’s dawn to dusk job is to maintain the electric fences, keep the water lines drained at night, and most importantly move the herd. Cliff says, “Darren is a great addition to the farm. He is the point man as far as the animals are concerned on the farm.”

Mount Vernon Farm practices what is called “management intensive grazing". This basically means Darren sets up and tears down portable electric fencing to move the cattle from one paddock to another every couple of days or more frequently. For example in one 40 acre field, 50 cattle are herded together in one small 1/3 acre moveable paddock. When Darren tears down the paddock the cattle go willingly into the next 1/3 acre enclosure which Darren puts together in about 30 minutes. What they leave behind is a sheen of cattle manure that fertilizes the field. Darren will march the animals across the pasture in this fashion all winter.

Most cattle farmers simply turn their cattle loose into large fields and then feed them hay all winter. Such a wide dispersal of animals does little to fertilize the pasture as their manure is placed haphazardly as they cherry pick the most succulent forage leaving thistles, Johnson grass, and other undesirable weeds in their wake. If you herd the animals together tightly it not only controls the weeds it also lays down manure fertilizer in proper amounts. This improves the pasture and lowers the farmers cost of production as well. Cliff says, “For years this was a traditional farm and we put down whatever [fertilizer] we were told to put down. And we have not put down chemical fertilizer for 8 years.” He doesn’t bale hay either saving the cost of diesel fuel and avoiding a practice which he says takes nutrients away from the soil. He says, “We’re not having to make the hay. We’re not having to feed the hay. We’re not having to spread the manure. That is being done by the cows.” Asked how all this dormant tall fescue grass compares with baled hay he says, “It [the dormant grass] is full of sugar. It tests better even than the best hay, even in February.”

Cliff does not give his animals growth hormones, vaccinations, or dewormers either. He says, “Everything fits together here”. The sheep are rotated behind the cattle. They also naturally kill each other’s worms. We never deworm our cows. And for the last 8 years haven’t vaccinated any animals.” As for the pasture Cliff explains, “The sheep and the cows only compete for about 30% of the grasses. “ In other words, “They don’t eat the same thing.”

Cliff says when you rotate the heard the grass is eaten in what he calls its “adolescent” stage where it is neither too young—so that grazing it would damager the plant--nor too old—in which case it could damage the cow especially if it is so-called endophyte infected fescue which is what dominates the landscape here in Virginia. The result is twofold: the cattle graze the highest quality forage and the field is fertilized with a large dose of manure which causes a flush of growth in the spring. The cattle are then moved on the next spot and the cycle repeats itself.

One problem with all the boutique farms that dot the Virginia landscape is they don’t always have enough inventory on hand. This is why the big grocery stores prefer to deal with Cisco and other mega distributors who buy their meat from Midwestern cattle producers and produce from California growers. This is the biggest problem for the local food movement and proponents of local sustainable agriculture. Cliff wants to avoid these inventory problems so he is expanding into poultry and has tasked Darren with growing the herd of swine. Cliff says, “It also helps with our sales to have three different meats”.

In prior years Cliff bought 65 pound piglets from a breeder in Gordonsville and finished them off here. He raised them for about 5 months and then butchered them at 180 pounds. Now he and Darren plan to breed pigs themselves and raise them year round. Pigs are profitable. Darren says old time farmers called pigs “mortgage lifters”. (Note from author: My father raised everything from cattle to tobacco to catfish and eels making money only on hogs he said.) Breeding as prolific as rabbits, pigs can have three litters per year but Darren plans to breed them twice saying it takes “3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days” for a sow to produce a litter.

Darren explains that the Tamworth hogs farmed here are a heritage breed that are known for their ability to thrive on grass pastures. Pigs are not ruminants like cattle or sheep so Darren says, “You need to supplement with grain.” He says they get, “Cracked corn and soy meal. My grandfather added a little bit of wood ash for the potassium”. Cliff says they also feed them vegetables and fruit from neighboring Roy’s Orchard. “We get a lot of his stuff that he would normally send to the dump.”

The pigs here are working animals. Darren explains that, “Every animal on the farm has a job”. The pig’s job is to reclaim the 4 acres of vines and weeds where they are currently living and turn it into pasture. With their firm snout and keen sense of smell pigs root in the dirt turning it over as they look for grubs. Cliff says, “They not only eat grass, like a goat they will east honey suckle, poison ivy, and everything else, which is what we have them doing which is denude the soil.” When they finish cleaning out this area Darren will move them to another and turn their pen into pasture.

As we talk a dozen or so eager reddish brown piglets are munching on grass at our feet and one light colored fellow reaches out so Cliff can pat him on the head. The little pigs are supposed to stay inside the electric fence that contains the boar who is their father and one of the three sows who suckles 10 of them at a time with her two rows of teats. One little fellow is not paying attention and he backs up to the fence with his hind end. The electric fence cracks audibly and the piglet squeals having learned the lesson to respect the hot wire. (The fence is not dangerous. On my farm I am constantly being shocked by the same.)

One reason Cliff’s farm is more profitable while so many area farms are less so is he sells everything retail. He says, “Primarily we sell by the cut. We have buyers clubs at 8 different cities. On the web site in an order form. This past year we did 18 hogs and planning on 30 next year. We did 163 [lamb] last year and probably [will do] 200 for the coming year. For the beef we could have sold twice and we did 18 [will grow to 30].” Asked whether grass-fed beef is tougher than their grain-fed counter parts he says, “ If our meat was tough we wouldn’t sell our filet for $25 per pound. If our lamb was tough we wouldn’t sell 200 of them per year to 500 to 600 people.”

Adams Custom Slaughter

2008-12-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

I went to Gene Adam’s slaughterhouse early one morning this week to talk to Gene Adams about his business and watch him slaughter a cow. The state inspector Sean O’Brien and I ducked behind a door as Gene dispatched the first animal with a .22 rifle. I was worried that the bullet might ricochet. Mr. Brien told me he was crouching there, “Just in case”. In the next room Gene’s mother Shirley and his brother David were grounding up patties while his Uncle Warren was sawing a carcass into t-bones.

It took Gene and his assistant Ernie Holbrook only 35 minutes to slaughter and clean a Charolais Angus crossbred steer and move it into the cooler where the carcass would hang for 10 to 14 days for aging. Mr. O’Brien, moving with the deliberate speed of a government employee, poked his knife blade into the cows liver and lungs checking for any discoloration which might indicate an unhealthy animal. He was also on hand to make sure that the animal was handled humanely and killed without pain. Ernie cleaned up the offal which would be shipped off to Valley Proteins to make dog and cat food, oil for biodiesel, and leather for which they pay $10 per hide.

Gene feeds about 80 cattle per year himself and slaughters many more buying cows and pigs from area farmers and both local livestock auctions: Front Royal and Marshall. He buys grain-finished cattle from Dale Welch who formerly managed the Fauquier Livestock Exchange and he buys hogs and cattle from Lindsay Eastham who is the current manager of that exchange. Gene says there is “strong demand” in Rappahannock County for his beef and pork yet he only wholesales his meats at two area stores which are not much more than gasoline stations: Mayhugh’s and Settle’s Garage. Gene’s retail customers drive all the way from Richmond and from across I-95 to his on-site meat market which has no web site, is only open on Saturday’s, and is so far back in the woods you need to know where it is before you go looking for it.

Gene is sort of a burley country fellow who looked askance at this arm-chair intellectual carrying a camera and digital voice recorder when he gave me a tour of his facility. Gene looks a little like a Black Angus bull standing there in the cooler with his dark hair and steely black eyes without a hint of a smile as I snapped his picture. Perhaps he has taken on the countenance of the big creatures that he faces down each day.

One of Gene’s customers who I managed to track down is Chancellor’s Rock Farm. They told me they give their meat to charity. Let me repeat that: they GIVE IT AWAY. This is hardly the model of sustainable agriculture about which people in the local conservation movement are talking. The environmentalists here worry that the county will turn into one large country club where people keep cattle simply as a way to lower their real estate taxes.

To be fair I did talk to the farm manager there at the 446 acre Chancellor’s Rock farm which, by the way, is for sale. Karl Hoyle spoke highly of Gene Adam’s slaughterhouse and explained to me that their farm is a “cow-calf operation”. That means they make money selling calves that have been weaned to feedlot operators. He said, “That’s the one place that we allow our animals to be slaughtered. We used to retail ourselves. The owners of the farm give it to charity or we give it to the staff or themselves. The owners are very concerned how their animals are going to be treated even after they are slaughtered.” They gave up on the retail beef business not finding it profitable or worth their time. Karl also says that the design of the cooler at Adams Customer Slaughter is ideal for aging meat. He says, “When the beef is hung and aging if the air is not properly circulating around it gets a bad taste. It’s aged perfect.”

Bill Havlik has a farm in Loudoun County where he farms a handful of cattle which he butchers at Adams Customer Slaughter. He too is not farming for profit. (Good grief. Another one.). Bill says, “I am a tax farmer. ” Bill is well-positioned to comment on Gene Adam’s because Bill is a retired veterinarian with the USDA. He oversaw a team of 20 scientists who flew to export markets around the world inspecting their slaughterhouse facilities and adherence to the strict standards of USDA import law. Of Gene’s operation he says, “As far as I am concerned it is a fairly decent slaughterhouse. They know what they are doing about slaughtering. He does a good job. He has a good cooler.”

I phoned up Kenner Love of the Agricultural Extension Service. I told Kenner that I had gone to Gene’s slaughterhouse but had not come away with a story of any local cattle producer who was having Gene slaughter his beef then retailing their meat at Marshall’s IGA Grocer (they carry products from lots of local farms) or area farmers markets. This is the whole vision of what community based food systems are all about and what Kenner spends so much time trying to champion.

Several folks have told me that raising cattle is hardly profitable. Gene sells sides of beef--slaughtered, wrapped, and packed--for about $2.35 per pound. He is currently paying about $0.95 per pound for finished cattle. (Five months ago the price paid to the farmer was $1.20 per pound). This is called “hoof weight”. That would mean a 1,110 pound grain-finished steer would bring $1,045 if the farmer sold the whole animal or $912 for the 645 pounds of meat produced by the carcass of an animal of this size. So it might be profitable on a cash-flow basis but with corn, taxes, fuel, that sort of thing there is not much if any income for the farmer.

His packaged pork and beef patties are much less expensive than what you would find in the grocery store. His current price for ground beef is $3.99 per pound and pork sausage is $2.99 per pound.

Gene currently sells patties to the Rappahannock school sports association and is looking to sell to the school system itself. Of Gene’s business Kenner says, “He is proud of what he has done and we need to keep working with him to help him do more. All the farmers need additional help with marketing. The primary reason they need help is they don’t have the resources to go out and market. They need all the help they can to market outside the commodity channels. We don’t want to depend on those commodity markets because they are not sustainable long term. It’s very efficient for large farms but we don’t have those large farms in this area.”

Farms that sell livestock for breeding stock instead of for meat are not contributing to local sustainable agriculture if you measure that by the amount food that they produce themselves. Two other farmers I have talked to recently have found selling breeding stock more profitable. That is true with Steve Shippa, who is the largest goat producer I know, and Alan Zuschlag who retails lamb and sells breeding stock from his Touchstone Farm. While both of these guys say they make profits selling meat to consumers (Alan) or wholesalers (Steve) they suggest more money is to be made selling breeding stock. I find this highly frustrating as I look about for ways to make my goat operation profitable. The lack of profitability in the livestock business is exactly why Gene’s family started this slaughterhouse in 1994. Gene’s family had a 1,600 acre cattle farm but “lost it” he says over the years to a subdivision covered in houses. Of course Gene and his family have figured out how to make a living raising cows but not every farm can set up a slaughter house. There are a lot of rules and regulations around that and of course you need a government inspector on the premise, gratis of course, paid for by the US taxpayer.

There are two other slaughter houses in the area: Faquier’s Finest and Blue Ridge Meats. They do cater to farmers who wish to resell under their own label even producing halaal meats. (Halaal is to Muslims what kosher is to Jews.). Of course packaging meat for others to sell is not Gene’s business model and for him business is good.

Addendum

Definition: To "finish" a cow means to grow it to slaughter weight. Most cattle are grazed on pasture grass until they are sold at auction as "feeder" cows at around 700 pounds of weight. Then they are fed a grain diet which causes them to gain about 5 pounds per weight until they are slaughtered at around 1,100 pounds at which point they become "slaughter" cattle. A "grass fed" beef is one that has only been fed pasture forage.

Here is how to get in touch with Adams Customer Slaughter:

Adams Custom Slaughter

27 Shurgen Lane

Amissville, Virginia 20106

540.937.7497

Logging the Farm

2008-12-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

People who attack logging as being unfriendly to the environment have no idea what they are talking about. The unenlightened believe to “clear cut” a tract of timber is morally equivalent to committing a crime. The land will be defoliated, they say, the soil will erode into the watershed. The trees which wick up the CO2 we exhale will be replaced by a barren and scarred landscape. Even Wendell Berry, the poet who writes philosophically about farming, attacks clear cutting in one short sentence in “The Unsettling of America”. He does so without explaining what clear cutting means, simply tossing out those two menacing words “clear” and “cut” as if that were enough to convey his message of evil run amok. For the shallower thinker those two words would be enough because they are so firmly etched into our psyche that they need no elaboration. But when I asked the Virginia Department of Forestry to survey my farm, clear cutting is exactly what they recommended. That will probably surprise the laymen but it makes for the best possible forest.

Bill Twarkin is as humble and honest a fellow as you are likely to ever meet. He hails from Upstate New York and has felled timber in the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, and most recently in Madison County, Virginia and on my farm. My consulting forester, Kevin Lyle, had surveyed the timber and put out a request for bids but no one had even placed a bid finding my forest of rather low quality. The bigger local loggers were busy felling trees at The Marriott Ranch and the 8,500 acre Lane farm in Woodville. So Kevin talked to local lumber mill operators and they recommended Bill.

Bill owns his own logging equipment: a John Deere bulldozer and a single axle logging truck complete with a hydraulic lift and boom. Like the average working class fellow none of this was paid for in full so Bill owed the bank money on both. His equipment now sits for sale at a local trucking company Bill having completed the job and deciding that logging is no longer profitable for him. He says his 1995 model bulldozer is worth perhaps $35,000. I am not sure what the value of his logging truck is. The problem with it is its one axle design. Bill got pulled over by the cops last spring and given a ticket for $5,000 when his rig was found to be many tons overweight. To haul such a heavy cargo as logs one needs multiple axles to distribute the load and satisfied the policeman’s truck scale when it measures the weight on each tire.

Bill started working on my farm in the fall on 2007 and fell the last tree in the summer of 2008. He had worked for almost 9 months logging the property but it was not a continuous ordeal. He designed his schedule to get two loads per week hauled to the lumber Augusta Lumber mill near Amissville by Wednesday because that is when they made their tally for the week and cut their checks . Bill’s wife had a government job in Washington, D.C. and this was the reason he and his rig had relocated from New York State. She took lots of vacation time and Bill went with her. Some times it was too wet to log. Other days Bill had mechanical trouble. He needed to replace the water pump on his dozer once and more than one time his truck needed new brakes or to repair a hydraulic line. And when he got the ticket for being overweight he just sat home and fumed at Kevin the consulting logger because Kevin had talked Bill into taking one load to another mill which required him to travel along the busy highway 29. That is where he got pulled over.

I am sure Bill lost money logging my farm. When you consider what he paid for diesel fuel and repairs on his rig and the long commute he had from Fairfax, Virginia I doubt whether his income exceeded his expenses. Rather than log the property on a contract price we logged it on shares. I took half and Bill took half with a 10% commission paid to the consulting logger Kevin Kyle. Each week Bill hauled about two loads of logs to the mill. His truck held about 4,000 board feet of timber which was from anywhere from 45 to 65 logs depending of course on their diameter. The mill paid an average of maybe $330 dollars per thousand board feet. This meant each truck load was worth about $1,000 of which Bill collected $500 and I collected $500 of which $50 went to Kevin. In total I made about $20,000. This was far below what Kevin had estimated but I was pleased anyway since I used the money to pay off some debts and to buy a new tractor. So in my mind this agriculture sale went to fund future agricultural endeavors on my farm. For Bill I am certain had a net income loss. He certainly complained a lot about losing money but that was part of his personality. He said his logging business was a hedge against the taxable income of his wife. If this agricultural endeavor had been like most he would have had some positive cash flow but no net income. But when you add in the depreciation on his equipment and his costs for fuel I am sure it was a loss.

For me there was a certain satisfaction is having my property logged. Obviously I had wanted the money but that was not the only reason for logging my stand. Twice over the past 15 years I had had the state forester come out and make a recommendation on my property. They divided it into four sections. The western-facing top of the ridge was 6 acres of chestnut oak averaging 85 years of age. They recommended leaving this section in tact since it had little commercial value and would be difficult to log the steep terrain. The bottom of the farm included 6 acres of forest between two pastures. This area had formerly been pasture so was a fairly young stand of fairly young trees also of undesirable quality. I paid Bill to bulldoze that flat so make additional pasture for my goats. The remaining 45 acres of forestlands included 20 acres of large poplar trees that had not been logged in at least 80 years the rest of the property having been logged about 20 years ago. When the former owners of the property logged the property they cherry-picked the forest taking the largest trees and leaving the less desirable ones. This is called “high grading” and was the reason why my timber stand was of less that optimal quality. But they had passed over about 15 acres of large poplar trees mainly because cattle had foraged there.

The highest quality trees are those that can be used to produce veneer. Veneer is what is used to make the highest quality furniture. I had no veneer quality timber on my farm. Rather I had saw timber quality and pulp wood. No one wanted the pulp wood so we told Bill just to take the saw timber.

The lumber mill too makes demands upon the logger. They would grudgingly take hickory would but told Bill not to take send over any red maple. The consulting forestor told me that Virginia is the southern most range of the red maple. That tree needs cold weather so it produces better logs in Vermont and New Hampshire. You can see that for yourself if you look at the red maple here. Many of the trees are badly knotted, twisted, and grow rather crooked.

Most of the trees Bill hauled from my farm were poplar followed by black, white, and chestnut oak. There were a couple of black walnut and cherry trees. Walnut is the most valuable of hardwoods and so is cherry. White oak is used to make wine barrels. There is a stave mill in Culpeper, Ramoneda Brothers, who does exactly that. But most oak is used to make flooring and of course furniture. Poplar trees grow straight and true here but their lumber is mainly used to make pallets and not furniture. Further it is not suitable for a load bearing beam as would be a heavy piece of oak. Hickory is used of course to make ax handles. All those giant hickory trees on my farm sadly did not have much commercial value. The lumber mill did not want at all sycamore trees, known for their white bark. They tend to grow along streams so have lots of water content. I cut one down myself and when I tried to split a log with an axe the axe simplybounced off as if the log was rubber. Are you beginning to see why my 45 acres of timber was not too valuable?

When you log a property you have to follow the forest service rules. Several times inspectors came by to make sure that Bill was not fouling the streams and to make sure that he constructed swales so that water would not run down hill digging a furrow into the mountainside and causing soil erosion. Bill put in temporary bridges which he hauled away when done. He also refrained from logging along the edge of streams.

Mike Santucci was the area forester for my region when I made the second timber survey. He is well-known to area environmentalists and farmers who frequent meetings on timber land, watersheds, organic farming, and so forth because Mike is usually there. He wrote the plan for my farm that called for clear cutting the forest. But the problem was I could find no logger willing to fell the smaller trees. To clear cut does not mean you chop every log off down to the ground. In such a mountainous terrain as my farm that would be impossible. Rather you cut down everything 4 inches and larger. Only 15 inch diameter logs can be hauled to the mill. So the other trees would be left there to rot while new trees take their place.

Mike’s plan also called for something called “crop tree release”. This means when the crown of two trees are touching you fell one thus leaving the more desirable species. So if a red maple is crowding a white oak you cut down the red maple leaving room for the oak to crow, dominate the canopy, and shade out any trees that would complete for water and nutrients there. Mike also called for planting loblolly and white pine in certain areas in order to improve the diversity of trees for wildlife and future timber sales. The state of Virginia subsidizes the planting of pine forests by paying part of the cost.

All of these practices were meant to enhance the future forest. If I had been able to find someone to do a proper clear cut then sunlight would have reached the forest floor and the small saplings and poles there would be able to grow into desirable forest. As it stands now, from the distance you cannot even tell that my forest has been logged even though it was logged quite heavily in some areas. You have to actually climb up into the forest and look around to find where trees were felled. The canopy overhead it still covered with shade because all of the many young trees here are 15 to 20 feet tall and reaching for the sky. And since the forest was once again high graded crooked maples, hickories, and lesser quality chestnut oak dominate the forest. In 40 years the forest could be logged again but it would be yet another low grade timber sale. It would have been better to follow the recommendations of the state forester to produce a high quality stand of poplar, white and black oak, and white and loblolly pine.

My forest is covered now with the tree tops I tried to give this away as firewood and finally found a green house operator who is hauling this away and cutting it up as fuel to fire his boilers. As for my forest I need to spray Garlon on the alanthus trees that have and will spring up in the areas of disturbed soil. This is an exotic invasive species that grows along most of the roadsides here in Rappahannock County where power lines and fencing have disturbed the soil.

The citizens of Rappahannock County have protested in the past when landowners have announced plans to clear cut their property. Fortunately no permit is required for logging so we don't have to explain what we are doing to people who would not listen anyway. If anyone wants to see what a logged forest looks like I will be glad to show them mine. They will be surprised to see that logged or not the forest pretty much tooks the same. Only a trained observer can tell the difference.