Soffritto Napoletano over homemade pappardelle What is Soffritto? Traditional, that is what it is. As a proud member of a first-world nation and the middle class (though just barely), I don't need to eat the scraps. I also don't need to know where my food comes from: But I do both, passionately. We raise our own animals. We slaughter, butcher, package, and cook our own meat. My last post was about our medical students dissecting Hearts and lungs. For that reason, I do not eat many of them, especially the pigs as they are a 1:1 ratio to human organs. As a child, my great grandmother from Napoli would make a Thick crust "white pizza" with Olive oil, rosemary, garlic, and anchovies. She also made the Soffritto. They did not encourage us children to learn Italian...they actually worked against it. I believe this was a mix of wanting to be able to talk about "adult things" without us being nosy. They also believed that we were Americans and should only speak English. Still, through her mix of languages, I could understand that the making of the Soffritto was a point of agitation for her. She would swear and wave her arms around and lament what freedom is. My father would only ever say, "Its the lungs. She is pissed about the lungs." Maybe I was five when I first took interest in her anger. She was old and Italian and always seemed so angry. I would try to press for more explanation to no avail. Well, a lifetime later I totally get it. Before we began raising our own animals, I searched high and low, legal and illegal for lungs. Both for the classroom and the kitchen. Maybe if my name was Smith, a butcher would have let it happen, but no. Nobody would allow lungs to leave their shop in anything other than a vat of caustic fluid. Though really, the slaughterhouse took care of lung disposal...into the dog and cat food industry. Yes, your dog and cat can eat lungs. If you take a moment and look into culinary habits across the world, you will find a rich and often necessary tradition of eating organ meat. Why? The average American will ask that...why would you want to? Just the thought makes most feel queasy. The answer lies in survival. The poor wanted to eat and wanted to live. Lets take feudal Italy for example. Italy was a collection of independent city-states, kingdoms, and duchies prior to the Risorgimento (unification) in 1861. Following the Risorgimento, though now a nation, the land remained as duchies with the lord of that area controlling everything. Peasants worked for the land lord and were indentured...basically slaves. Allow me to digress: My mother's Great Grandfather was a member of an upper class, actually a Marconi. Well he had been out foraging and gathering firewood. Capos (enforcers) from a local lord approached and claimed that he was poaching. They proceeded to stab him 12 times. He lay in his pool of blood through the night and crawled home the following morning. He was a large man and their pocket knives did not manage to get to any vital spots. He healed and the neighboring lord attempted to make amends. Retribution was the way of the day and he would not accept anything short of an eye for an eye. Understanding that there would be blood, the three assailants fled to America. That was not the answer for those men. Great Grandad had a brother already in America. His name was Guglielmo Marconi who was manufacturing and selling his wireless radios out of New Jersey. His brother used this as a base for his search. The Search for those three men was 66% successful. The first was in White Plains, NY. The second was located within weeks of the first but in Waterbury, CT. He then was informed the third went to Chicago. Great-Great Grandad had no desire to travel any further having decided he liked the Waterbury area. He also saw a need for stone mason's in that area and sent for his family. He sent word to that third man that the other two were dead and he had found him and might come and finish him. The family lore remains that he enjoyed having let this man live and how miserable looking over his shoulder must have been. And that is how I ended up here. I also do not remember why I told this story! Oh yeah. So they took property rights seriously in the Italian Duchies. Though my ancestors were not the peasantry, the abuse of people and freedoms extended between classes. The peasants would farm, hunt, and slaughter for the lords. They would then be allowed to eat the scraps. Over the centuries, poor peoples all around the world worked out how to take the undesirables and create delectables. As such the entrails and sweetbreads became cuisine. Lung tissue was one of those things. The rich land owner did not want them so if the poor workers could find a way to make them yummy then life would be better. There is a bit more to it than that. Many humans have been stranded on tropical islands or in the vast stretches of wilderness throughout the world. Research of those destitute finds that they initially did what you would expect...they ate the flesh; protein rich and delicious. But as the weeks continued, those humans would find a growing hunger for different parts of the animal that they previously would not dream of eating. What is happening to these starving wretches? They were becoming deficient in micro-nutrients. Vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, specific amino acids, glucosamines, and chondroitin's. An animal's muscle mass does not contain many of these nutrients. It is the organs that hold them. Liver, Pancreas, Lungs, Kidneys, etc. hold the gold. Now lets return to feudalism. Those lords tended to have signs of deficiencies due to poor nutrition more than the peasants. They had the best cuts with the lowest nutrition ratios. The wealthy would have more fruits and vegetables throughout the year, but many did not wish to eat fruit and suffered for it. Now we move to more recent centuries. The classes evened out their freedoms but the eating styles did not drift away for many if not most cultures. The eating of offal and sweetbreads transitioned from necessity to desire. Dishes have been perfected and handed down through generations. My ancestors in Italy can continue to make their Soffritto uninhibited. Those emigrants, not so much. Back to my great grandma. She had to barter for pig or lamb lungs to make her dish. We could not talk about it, what it was, where it came from. My mother was staunchly against this sort of "yucky" food. She could smell it on me and knew what it was. I would be shunned and berated for eating something so dangerous and disgusting. Luckily for me, I had a strong constitution and an innate desire to eat weird things. Pancreas is a limit. I can eat it in sausage, but not alone. I also have never been able to just do as I am told. I must have a logical reason. I must be able to show that the way we have always done it is the best possible way. If it is not, then we must change it. Mom said lung meat was dangerous. I wanted to know why. She could not tell me. Over the years I have found many different reasons. The first of which is heavy metal toxicity. This makes sense at first. I do know that heavy metals collect in body tissue. If an animal is breathing air filled with a heavy metal then that metal will get trapped in the lung tissue and stay there for a very long time. The issue with this is that heavy metals are in fact heavy. Heavy things don't really float in the air. It is only in very specific and rare circumstances that mercury will aerosolize. The metals will "infect" other tissues as well so this alone cannot be the reason. Prior to starting this article, I looked at the actual statute and studies behind it. The statute is, 9 CFR § 310.16 - Disposition of lungs. Every year the USDA puts out a recommended regulations list for the following year. I cannot find any reference to who creates this list or how the items are added. However it happened, in 1969, the report had a recommendation to investigate the safety of lung meats. The USDA sent out a small group of investigators to three giant Midwestern slaughterhouses. I will paraphrase...I initially started copying and pasting but it became arduous and confusing. The gist is this. They went to three commercial slaughterhouses and randomly picked a total of 600 Beef lungs for testing. In 1970, 27.5 million cows were slaughtered for consumption nationwide. Anyway, 600 lungs were isolated. I can only assume one of the following: The decision to ban Lung meat had already been made and this study was just for show. My other assumption is that they had a finite budget and timeline and good intentioned government bureaucrats did what they could. The 600 lungs were not sampled and tested individually. Instead they took 1 oz worth of random samples from a lung and mix it with 1 oz from four other lungs making a sample of 5oz which they sent to the labratory for testing. Their tests showed "measurable amounts of airborne particulates and stomach juices." Not deadly amounts...not dangerous amounts, just measurable amounts. In the 1970's we were able to measure CDEC in parts per million while you would need parts per thousand to make someone sick. There was no reference to quantities of stomach juices referenced. Again, as someone who believes most of our government's decisions over the past 150 years have been nefarious in nature, I cannot believe that this one study of 600 beef lungs scared real scientists enough to cause a ban. I believe this ban was planned and the study was used to justify it. I have more research to do but am currently torn between an attack on the ethnic classes that frequently ate this sort of thing...our American Empire has been quietly subduing cultural differences since we claimed cuba and the Philippines. Removing one of the foods that these ethnocentric people frequented was one small way to further homogenize the masses. The other hypothesis is the dog food industry. The early seventies was a tumultuous time. With great strides being made by the "New World Order' types. Nixon was destroyed and replaced with one of their Manchurian candidates. The gold standard disappeared and manufacturing began to leave our shores. Dog food companies needed cheaper ingredients and organ meat was a good option. Tell the slaughterhouses they could no longer sell parts to the masses decreased their value to $0 overnight. Actually a net loss. Remember they were selling lung meat for money now they had to pay money to destroy the lungs and dispose of them. Dog food companies to the rescue. Read the statute and see all the different ways they state that the lungs can be used for nothing but dog food. They would take them for free. This might have saved the dog/animal food industry in America, but again this is currently only a hypothesis until I can provide references. Have I mentioned that there is very little historical record of eating cow lungs. Pig and Lamb lungs are on the menu. I did not look very hard but all reference I can see to lung meat is lamb and pig yet our USDA did not bother to test these animals prior to banning them. It is also uncanny how little discussion there was. Or should I say was NOT. There were no hearings. There was no public notification. Just a quiet addition of a new regulation...no vote, no congress, no president. Just a couple of bureaucrats and one small study. For those who might be interested in the recipe, look no further: I don't do so well with measurements but will provide the process. Porcine Heart Half to all of a Porcine Liver ( depending on your love of liver) A Kidney or two Lungs For the Sauce 1 large onion a couple sticks of celery 1 large carrot A ton of garlic 4 or 5 10 oz cans of crushed tomatoes or 50oz of fresh crushed tomatoes Large Handful of Parley Small handful of Marjoram Process: Dice the meats: I like to do a fine dice, Like 1/8 in cubes. Do your best based on your knife skills set aside in the fridge. Saute your Soffritto (italian Miriproix) celery, carrot, onion, and garlic Add the cans of tomatoes add the minced meat and stir to incorporate. Set stove to low and let it go. 3- 5 hours once it begins to simmer. Note: This can be pressure canned. I would never advise anyone to actually can meats because canning is dangerous and you probably would never figure out how to do it without killing everyone you know with botulinum toxin. If you were to try regardless of the severe risk to your life, you could pressurize to 15 pounds and let pints cook for 35 minutes. Quart jars 45 minutes. Remember that this is based on ladling the simmering sauce directly into your sterilized jars. If you cool the Soffritto Napoletano, add 10 minutes to both. I do this and had just opened a pint the other day that I canned a year and a half ago. It was delicious on some home made pasta.

We haven't created a post recently for good reason. In November 2024, I fell blowing leaves and tore his rotator cuff. It is only now that I can manage to type. The voice typing just doesn't work for me. I cannot flow, so I hit pause. Rest assured the farm stands strong and our children have pulled together to do my share of the chores. I don't know I can thank them enough. Unfortunately, they were not able to cover the capital projects list. We have quite a list of building projects ready and waiting. Here are the next projects that we will be discussing in depth over the course of this year. We even bought a drone to capture our activities. Greenhouse: We have a 10'x12' Walipini Greenhouse designed and all the Lumber milled and piled. We have barrels for the back wall (heat sink) and gutters for rain catchment. It is going to be epic. Fish farm: A 10'x10' shed behind the greenhouse will hold stock tanks. The fish water will fertilize and water the greenhouse. Rainwater will replenish the tanks and water the outdoor garden in the summer. It is going to be epic. Windmill: We have a 1600 watt Missouri Wind and Solar Falcon 5 blade. It measures 55" Diameter. We intend to build a 15 foot tower for the Turbine. Barn: We have a two-story gambrel roof planned. We are estimating 300 hours of milling to get the lumber list complete. It will be walk out on both floors if we can build into the hill. We will see what the town has to say. You know wherever you live in America, no matter how long your land has been in your family, it is not actually ours. We are merely renting it from the town. Through the permitting process, your town takes complete control over what you can do with your own land. Property line setbacks...30 feet for me. I am sorry to digress however we built our country on the sanctity of property ownership. It is infuriating the level of municipal control our past two generations have allowed. Redo the roof on the horse barn. It is just a two stall shed row. We have the first few slabs after the but cut set aside for this project. We will cut off the live edges to square them and burn the topside. Will be turning Japanese; I really think so. A big spring coming up...the greenhouse was supposed to be the winter project. It has moved to the spring.

When you live on a farm in the country surrounded by 1000's of acres of natural preserve and private land, predators will be a concern. Whether you are farming or not, predators can be a problem. You may also find yourself working your property during hunting season with a buck 30 yards out as your tractor crests the hill. Maybe you have a bear problem and know they are not scared by yelling. In these as well as myriad other situations, having your rifle close by is helpful if not imperative. We can buy a rifle mount on the internet for $60-$200. That will be easy. Directions for installation and everything, but what fun is that? O.k., I admit there are some really nice mounts out there for your tractor, quad, or side by side. I just happen to be a poor farmer and that $100 cannot be spent on something like this right now. Having your rifle swinging around from the shoulder strap just is not safe. So, I found the mount that looked like it would work the best on my tractor and made one out of scraps I had on the property. Looks Terrible, I know. I also know it works great. What is this? It is a "range anti-tip bracket" What is that? If you ever slide your kitchen stove out from the wall to clean, you should see this bracket along the floor. There is a stud mounted to the bottom of your range that slides into this bracket when you push the range back into the wall. It stops you from tipping the range forward which could cause hot stuff to splash or slide toward you. I had an extra kicking it in the bracket bucket. The U-shaped space for the range stud is plenty wide for every rifle I have that might find its way onto the tractor. I normally carry a stainless steel Mini-14 with a wire frame/synthetic stock. This is the rifle I made the flashlight holder for. With the flashlight holder mounted, this side of the bracket is too wide to fit between the barrel and the flashlight, so I had to grind the left side of the bracket to fit. I highlighted the metal I had to remove in orange. Anyone without a home made flashlight holder would not need to do this. I was concerned about the metal scratching my rifles, so I wrapped the metal with gorilla tape and then a layer of hot glue to give it a nice soft rest for the rifle. It looks messy but works well. I was also slightly concerned that over time the tape would peel off. I made certain to spread hot glue over all the tape seems. That tape isn't going anywhere. After looking at several options for attaching the bracket to the tractor, I decided to use the lock nut on the ROPS bar. The finger nut in the center of the picture to our right. This thumb screw just stops the ROPS from rattling so adding a bracket to it has worked well. At first I was going to form a mounting bracket that curled tight around the ROPS so the rifle mount would not rotate. After the first few rifles I fitted, I found that a few degrees of swivel allows for more rifles to fit better. I had to flatten the bracket and re-bend it to allow about 10 degrees of swing. I drilled out the rifle cradle to accept four bolts to mount it to the ROPS bracket. This mounting bracket is a piece of 5/16 steel that was on an old monkey bars. I used locking washers and flat washers given the high vibration of the tractor. Having the rifle mount fall off while traveling through the woods is not my idea of a fun day. Next we needed a stock brace. The holders I saw on the interwebs had a rubber cradle that bolts to the floor. This seemed like an important piece to keep the rifle from bouncing around or having the but slide forward. Given I don't have big chunks of rubber kicking around, but I do have a saw mill, I found a two-inch thick chunk of hickory and cut it down to match the shape of my biggest stock-butt and routed out a stock-shaped oval and drilled a recessed hole through the center. The cradle was still attached to the board I cut it out of. I used a jigsaw to cut the outer shape and a plunge router to hollow out the center. The recessed hole for the mounting bolt was drilled out after confirming the proper bolt placement.   I put it in place and drilled the hole in the tractor floor. Then I hammered in a 1.5in long carriage bolt and secured the cradle to the floor of the tractor with a lock washer and nut. This project did take a couple of hours to complete. I have been rocking this gun rack for a few months now with great effect. My rifles stay put and makes a great jacket rack as well. I try not to have my rifle visible when I am on the public road...like most farms, we must use our street to get to different sections. Though it is completely legal and morally acceptable to have a rifle visible to passersby, I prefer to cover my rifle more to protect the gun than to protect the liberal creampuffs that frequent our farm. This project was worthwhile and has worked great!

In 1902, the first gasoline powered farm machines rolled onto farms. Farmers of the time quickly realized how much manual labor could be accomplished by one or two people and a tractor. In 1917 Ford brought the Fordson Tractor to the market. As farm markets began to crash, Ford began a price war with the few competitors of the time. Through this action, ford made the tractor affordable to the average family. Some could even buy a Ford Fruit Wagon and a tractor together at the same dealership and use credit to take the pair home. Henry Ford actually demanded that his car dealerships sell the Fordson. Though many of those dealers were not pleased, this setup eliminated the overhead cost of a seperate dealership, ultimately keeping the price below all competitors. Now we can take this post in a few directions. We can discuss how the purchase on credit by farmers was the beginning of the debt based economy we now find ourselves suffocating under. Another rabbit hole would be how the tractor affected the farming industry eventually leading to the great dust bowl and then to Corporate Agribusinesses. We can roll into how corporations like Monsanto devoured family farms. But no, that is not our purpose here. Here we will accept the tractor as a necessity for all but the most niche of micro farms. In my research I have come across one micro farm in Quebec Canada that uses a two-wheel tractor of sorts and that is it. Still most of us just cannot do without our tractors. We are on them everyday. We bathe, and feed, and care for our tractors as we do our family. Tractors tend to not have enough lighting. There are few places to hold gear and accessories. Anyone farming in the country also has predation issues that must be addressed on a daily basis. There are accessory manufacturers that produce brackets and holders for all sorts of things. Most of them are ridiculously expensive and often easily reproduced with items from your scrap pile or some inexpensive parts from the hardware store. In this post, we will discuss the LED lighting I attached to our tractor. Tractor headlights are in the nose of every tractor. They tend to be as bright as our cars and work fine driving forward. There is one tractor implement that interrupts our headlights and that is the front end loader. The average operator will travel with their bucket elevated two to four feet. With the loader bucket hanging there, all that is illuminated is the back of your bucket. Few of us are going to remove our front end loader to use our headlights. The best option then is auxiliary lighting mounted somewhere other than the nose of the tractor. After several trials, the ROPS bar (roll bar) is the best option I have found. I must make the safety announcement that all users manuals state that you should not drill into the ROPS bar or attach anything to it. It also states that the seat belt must be used every time you sit on the tractor. The best option therefore is to buy light clamps for $25.00 each, or make your own. fashioning your own will probably cost you about $5.00 per light bracket and 20 minutes to an hour for fabrication of each. I chose a different option that goes against the user manual but works very well and is extremely efficient. The ROPS in made by taking two c-channel pieces and welding them together. The weld seam is on the inside and provides a guide line for drilling all your holes. Forward facing lights are forward of that seam and rear facing just distal to the weld. I mapped out the lights for placement and punched the spot for each bracket bolt. The holes were each drilled out starting with a pilot drill bit, then enlarged with increasing drill bit size until we reached the hole size for the tap. I had a tap that matched the bolts included with the lights and tapped each hole for the bolt. I went with Nilight and they do not sponsor this page in any way, however they are good lights at a good price. The kit came with a 20 inch bar (126 watts) and four four-inch lights (18 watts ea). I had two 6 inch LED's (36 watts ea) and a few old four inch LEDs in the spare parts pile so they all went on. Power requirements. A watt is volts x Amps. It is imperative that you figure out the power requirements for any electrical project. Luckily this is fairly easy. The average LED uses 3 watts of power. The total watts for the 8 lights that I have installed is 288 watts. We know the voltage is 12. We need to know the amperage load. It is the amps that matter to our switches and wires. I like to think of the voltage as the lanes on the highway. The amps are the cars. So we need to figure out how wide that road needs to be to carry the amount of cars travelling on that road. 288 watts/12volts= 24 amps. 14 gauge 12volt wire can carry about 20 amps...up to 30 with 90 degree insulation. I like to overengineer to eliminate the chance for problems so I went with 12 gauge wire (also from my scrap pile). Now the Mahindra 2638 is equipped with wiring for a single rear facing utility light. This 16 gauge wire is not sufficient for my purposes, so simply tying in there failed with a blown fuse and a melted wire. For this reason, tying directly into the factory headlamp switch will burn out your tractor headlight system. Still, I wanted to flip the factory headlamp switch and have night turn to day. This was accomplished with a bosch style 5-pin relay. If you do not know about relays, don't feel inept. They are very simple and there are videos on youtube explaining how they work and how to use them. For our purposes, all we needed was a four pin but, you guessed it, I had a stack of 5-pin relays "in stock". Real quick, the fifth pin (87A) is on when the switch is off. This is necessary for our high beam/low beam switching. When you turn on your headlamps power is going to 87. when you flip the high beam lever, the relay moves power to 87A which is connected to the high beams. In this project, we only need on and off. Without the relay, we would have 24 amps running through the factory light switch. Keep in mind the tractor headlights are also running through a relay so that the switch itself only pulls an amp at most with its 18-22 gauge wire. Hook up your 24 amp light system and you have a blown fuse at best and a burned tractor at worst. Put the power through the relay and the relay to your switch and life is good. I must admit that this left-side light does not survive. I do not know why, but whenever I drive through brush I hug the left side and this left side light has been ripped off of my current and past tractors. The threaded hole has survived unscathed but the mounting bracket from the light was destroyed each time. The lower light mounted to the front face of the ROPS is on a 2 inch wide L-bracket that held the monkey bars onto an old swing set. I have it bolted to the ROPS with a flat washer under and above the bracket so it will rotated. The light is mounted to the bracket with a bolt and washers that allows it to pivot about 1oo degrees. I had to round off the lights-side of the bracket with a grinder to allow for the 100 degrees of swing. This light with the green bracket is on the front face of the ROPS so it is fairly well protected from the brush and given it can be rotated to face the side, I have not seen a need to replace the side mounted light. There is another light with the same home-made bracket on the rear just above the 3-point hitch. Have you ever tried to put the backhoe on your tractor at 10 pm on a cold fall night, alone, with only your phone for a flashlight? I suppose this was a unique situation, however it left me with a conscious decision to never suffer this plight again. That night was the death of my mother-in-laws cherished ankle biter. You would have thought she was Jewish with the fervor in which she pleaded that we bury little Tucker that night. I had only one option...figure it out. The 20 minutes it took to attach the digger was pure misery. I really did not like that dog, still it hurt to watch him pass and even more to see Nana so sad. It was expected but that did not make it any easier. That whole time I was thinking about the best option for lighting there. Now I have a light that can be angled fairly effectively to see the hydraulic connections or the 3-point connections. It can also be angled up for more rear lighting when the backhoe is off. In this close-up, you can see the messy wiring job I did clearly. What you cannot clearly see is the hole I drilled in the ROPS to send the wire through. I could have just zip-tied the wire to the lateral ROPS but I did not want to effect the folding of the ROPS. I must admit that the lights being there and my general fear of rolling, encourages me to always keep the ROPS upright. our farm is on a ridgeline so steep angles is part of our normal, still every time I get over 6 degrees lateral, I am scared. There are times when you need to lower the ROPS to get under a low limb or into a shop with a low door. Running the wire through the ROPS in the down position ensures there is enough slack in there to put the ROPS down and then back up without any issues with the wiring. Also, I feel a nagging need to point out my wiring is messy. Most bloggers make sure that there projects are presented in a beautiful way. I do not really have time for beauty. I do know what I am doing with electrical and have the ability to match the presentation of most professionals out there. Still I just don't care how it looks. I do care that it works well and does not burn up anymore time than necessary. I did have buss bars and waterproof cases that could have been attached. If I had been installing these lights on a "customer's" tractor, I would have spent another hour to enclose all the wires, and add breakaway points in the wires. but I was not making money on this project and I am not trying to impress anyone. There is also a practical reason for this wiring. If a limb gets caught in the wires, it will just pull out of the connector and I can fix it in the field. In closing, I would like to restate that drilling into your ROPS is not recommended by safety standards or any manufacturers. I would also like to say again that this makes for a simple and effective project. Adding effective lighting to your tractor will increase its utility. Assuming we ever get snow again, this lighting makes clearing it away late at night or in the wee hours of the morning much easier.

Late after work, I found myself replacing the battery in our 2008 Toyota Sequoia. There was a problem... The above picture shows the completed battery hold down and one of the old side arms that were too short. So what happened? Many years ago I had replaced the original battery with an Optima Red Top. Why? Well, at the time I could afford it and you do get what you pay for. The Optima batteries were developed for off road vehicles that are likely to roll over. The standard lead-acid battery has lead plates and sulfuric acid, which is a liquid. When the battery is inverted, the acid spills out causing the battery to fail and whatever the acid lands on to be destroyed. Optimas on the other hand, have thin lead thread wound around a center post instead of plates and a gel acid instead of liquid. The optima battery offers greater power output and deaper drain ability. This means it will give power when it is mostly discharged below 12 volts and it can be mounted on its side or upside down. They work more like a deep cycle battery. Six years later, we are not in the same financial comfort we once knew. So my darling beloved went to get a battery while I was working. I had advised her that we do not need an optima again and she brought home the original equipment. The OEM battery is much taller than the optima. It would appear that I had replaced the original battery hold down with a shorter hold down to match the optima. Why am I doing this on a Saturday night in the dark? All the married men can guess...my wife wanted the sequoia for a road trip first thing Sunday Morning. I could not let my woman down, so I got creative. Like all good farmers and homesteaders, we have a scrap metal pile. Every time I consider bringing it to the scrap yard, I find another use for something in the pile. This time it was an old oven rack. The wire for the frame was just a bit larger than the arms on the original and they were long enough. I cut off the side frame rods from this rack. The bend in the rod at the top left holds the rack in the oven. I used these for the beginning of the bent ends that hook into the vehicle body. With the help of my vise and a mallet, I bent the tips into the hooks for the vehicle body. I then smoothed the hooks on the grinding wheel and then beveled the other ends to make starting the threading die easier. Scroll down for next step The rod was 7mm. Luck would have it, the bevel allowed me to use a 1/4-20 die to cut threads in the rod. I also had plenty of 1/4-20 nuts and matching washers I had never twisted a die so many times. This was downright painful as it took time. Cutting threads is not something that can go fast. You need slow steady pressure. It took about five minutes per arm to thread five inches of the rod. If you look at the bottom of the vise, you can see how I used the hook to keep the rod from spinning while I was threading. I actually clamped the first one too tight and it bent. It was easy to straighten and I was more careful on the second. The very first picture shows the cross bar from the old hold down in place with the new side arms. An hour later, the truck was ready to go. A happy wife makes for a happy life!

Stop buying canned chicken broth. Stock is one of the easiest things to make. throw bones in a pot with Celery, onion, garlic, and carrots. Salt and pepper, then simmer until the collagen flows from the bones. There is broth and stock. Lets define the two. Stock is an extraction of bones. Stock includes all the fats and waters. It is strained to get the bits out and then stored. Broth is made by separating the water based fluids from the fat. I am certain there is some elaborate process that big manufacturers use to separate the fats from the waters. At home, let the stock begin to cool on the stove top. This will give the fats a chance to begin separating. then move it to the fridge while still warm and leave it overnight. the next day scrape off the fat cap and you have broth. We do not make broth as I feel the fats are good. Our family is active and healthy. Our bodies need fat and our fats are mostly good as our animals are all grazing all year long. Animals that get more fodder than grain have a much greater ratio of Omega-3 to Omega 6. I also leave the fats in the stock due to flavor. Fat is flavor and recipes made with my bone stock come out richer and tastier. So how do we do it? Save your bones is the first step. My family has it engrained not to throw away bones. We do eat a lot of bone-in meat. We also only eat the meat we harvest ourselves, so we never are at a loss for bones. One of our freezers has a bin for bones. That bin holds about the same amount as my stock pot, so when the bin is full, we make stock. This is a process. If you only have one freezer, it probably wont work for you as bones will take up precious space. Though, you can also make smaller batches more often. You can also ask the butcher in the store for stock bones. Most will give them free or for very little money. We also use a lot of stock so generally we have a depleted supply about the same time we have a full bone bin. The bones are all dumped in the pot frozen. All the animals together both raw and cooked. Ex: a gallon ziplock of raw rabbit bones from the last slaughter, chicken bones from southern fried chicken, raw duck bones from the last duck slaughter (we debone and grind a lot of our ducks.) and pork bones from a smoked shoulder. On top of these bones goes two or three onions quartered with the skins still on, a half dozen carrots cut up into big chunks, a half dozen celery stalks cut the same, and two or three cloves of garlic smashed with the skins still on. Season with a handful of sea salt (more or less to your needs but make sure you add at least a little.) Fill it up with clean spring water about 3 inches from the top, and put the heat on low. Walk away. It will take a couple hours for the bones to thaw and everything to get up to temperature. Don't rush this. Let it take all day. We are then going to simmer the pot all day give or take. We are looking for the meat to fall off the bones and for it to appear that the contents of the bones has released from the bones. Anywhere from three to 8 hours depending on the size of the pot and size of the flame. This is not a situation where you can use high heat and get it all done faster. Remember you are not trying to roast anything, we are trying to extract. It takes time for the collagen to liquify, not just heat. Once it is done, we have to store it. We pressure can ours when we have enough jars. We also use giant pickle jars we get at the Restaurant Depot and store them in the fridge. The fridge can hold our stock safe for three months. Preserved stock has lasted for three years. It is generally recommended that you only preserve for a year at most. Still, we missed a jar and found it three years later. It was good as new. I must admit that we would store it longer, but we use it fast. Now we have a 30qt stock pot filled to the brim with boiling liquid. You can see the golden fats swirling around the bubbles. We now have to get all the chunks out of the liquid and this 212 degree fluid into canning jars. Process your canning equipment as you always do. Want to hear a secret? I haven't boiled a jar, lid, or ring in 20 years. I also reuse my lids two or three times before I throw them out. We have a 90% seal rate with used lids. This has saved us hundreds of dollars over the last two decades. The few lids that don't seal go in the fridge and we use them first...easy peasy. The straining is the most tedious part of the process. At the beginning, I use a 4 cup measure to scoop out of the stockpot. I place a colander over another stockpot and pour the measuring cup into the colander. You now have to make a decision. what to do with the bones and vegies? The easiest option is to pull the garbage can over and pitch the colander contents into it. We try to use everything to its fullest at Farm Life Farm. Most batches of stock, we use the leftovers for dog food. We toss the biggest bones to our farm dogs whole. All the little bones and veggie bits go into a bucket and we drop a sledgehammer into it repeatedly until everything is broken into bits. We mix this into their kibble. Other batches, we bring out and mix into our compost pile. Other times, we place some tinfoil on the gas grill, lay all the bones out and turn it on low and cook them until dry and brittle and smash them into bone meal for our garden. In the past, we brought the leftovers deep into the woods for the animals to eat. We would always find the spot barren the next day. More physical work but no financial cost. Also, you are ensuring that your fertilizer is all natural with no chemicals...that is priceless in our current world of food that is poisoned. Now that we have a full livestock farm, feeding the apex predators is not the best plan, but going a mile into the forest before we dump it does not seem to have a negative impact on our farm. Some old timers have pointed out that they never suffered predation on the night that they dumped offal in the woods. I remain apprehensive with raw offal as I fear it gives the predators a taste for our animals. Composting the bones and bits is always a good plan. Just ensure that you get the bones deep into the compost pile. You don't want your dogs, coyotes, fox, or anything else getting to it. If your compost pile provides an easy meal, those predators will stay close. Recap: We have made the stock and got it all strained through a standard colander. We then give a quick rinse to the original stockpot and add a fine mesh strainer. We pour the strained stock through the fine mesh strainer and then we transfer it into the canning jars. We used to do a third filter with cheesecloth but that is tedious and takes forever. We just don't mind anything small enough to fit through the mesh strainer. We tend to continue using that measuring cup to pour the hot liquid into the canning jars. Leave one inch of headspace and put them into the pressure canner. 20 pounds of pressure. Twenty minutes for pint jars and thirty for quart. I have not made rice with plain water in years. We use our stock. Want to make lipton cup a soup, a pint of bone broth and a handful of noodles and a sprinkle of dried parsley. Boil the noodle in the stock and done. My daughters 12 and 8, prefer this now to the box soup. Help yourself to increasing nutrition decreasing waste.

There are few food sources that require less experience than raising rabbits for food. The average cost of a bunny is $30. You obviously need two; one male and one female. Woke genders have not yet made it into the world of the quadruped, so we need one of each. Two or three wire cages. You can find used cages all over facebook and Craigslist. Prices I saw just now were from $10 for a simple wire cage to $100 for a hutch. Now a water dispenser and a food dispenser. A fifty pound bag of grain is under $30 and will feed them for several months. It is currently November and we have spent a total of $90 on rabbit grain this year. That works out to about $8.00 per month for an average of five rabbits eating grain throughout the year.. All in you are looking at $200 to start raising them and about $6.00 per month to feed them.. Assuming you purchased mature breeding stock, you can have your first litter withing 45 days of bringing them home. 12 weeks to Slaughter weight and you are harvesting your meat after less than four months of saying, "self, You should raise rabbits." One rabbit is a meal for our family of 5. To buy a butchered rabbit, you will pay about $35.00. Ground beef is running about $7.00/pound and pork chops are $5.00/pound. Your rabbit meat will run you about $1.30/pound not counting your time. Looking at the money alone, this is a great way to add quality food to your kitchen without paying "all natural" "farm raised" "organic" food prices. Another reason to raise rabbits is the nutritional value of their meat. Rabbit meat contains high levels of Essential Amino Acids. It is also extremely easy to digest and absorb. Rabbit is processed by the body similar to lamb...our stomach can absorb the nutrients directly. This is a good thing, especially since Americans currently ingest more bad fat than almost all other nations. Rabbits are low fat animals. This poses a concern for those planning on rabbits as a prepper plan. We cannot eat rabbit without another fat source. Remember our bodies need fat and cholesterol. Eating nothing but rabbit meat will lead to a protein poisoning if it is not supplemented with fats and carbohydrates. Add boiled cattail roots to your rabbit diet and you will be good. It is also possible to increase their fat reserve by providing them with unlimited grain and hay. Yes hay. I have read myriad posts on to feed hay or not to feed hay. It appears that many rabbit keepers don't believe that you are smart enough to know if your hay is moldy. All the don'ts seem to have this as their main theme. They are correct. If your rabbit eats a bunch of moldy hay, they will probably get real sick and die. You can also run into problems if you feed them late summer/fall second cutting with a high sugar content. Too much sugar will make your rabbit sick as well. First cutting hay properly stored will delight and fatten your rabbits nicely. We are lucky in having a hay supply at no cost. If you would have to buy hay bales at $5-$10 per bale, it will still be cost effective as one bale will last a month or more. The other fodder we provide is maple bows. Rabbits love maple. Fresh leaves in the summer and limbs during the winter. They can digest the wood without issue and it is a treat that they clearly enjoy. Most summer days with a large pile of leaves and sticks, your rabbits will not eat much grain. We also rake up the weed wacker trimmings all summer and feed that to our rabbits. How do we eat rabbit meat? All kinds of ways. I grew up in a very Italian family, in a very Italian neighborhood. Rabbit was a staple and most of my friend's parents kept a few in their backyards. They were either roasted, braised, or stewed. As I grew up, rabbit became difficult to attain ready to cook. If you could find it, it was $15/pound or more. I enjoy a roasted rabbit, whole. My family does not enjoy it nearly as much, but they will eat it. Stew and pot pie is much more to their liking and extremely easy to make. Cut up the animal in six pieces and place them in the pan, brown and cook as any other stew. For pot pie, poach or roast the rabbit, pull the meat from the bones and make just like chicken pot pie. You can use rabbit in any recipe that calls for chicken. We separate the legs and southern fry them. But my family's favorite is to use the meat ground just like ground beef. We make tacos and meatballs and meatloaf. Today, most of our rabbits are deboned and ground. We freeze it in 1 1/2Lbs packages and use it just like ground beef. I happen to be real good at deboning meat. If you are not, save the carcass and make a stew out of it. We also save the bones for bone stock. At Farm Life Farm, we raise rabbits, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and ducks. We save all the bones and freeze them. I will make another post on our bone stock. In conclusion, consider raising rabbits for meat. They are delicious, cost effective, and nutritious. For those that are feeling nervous about slaughter and butcher, Farm Life Farm is here to teach you how it is done! gestation about 30 days Litter size 1-12

We have begun using FarmRaise tracks for managing our farm. In our prior business ventures, we used Quickbooks and Quicken. These are great programs and have their place. Unfortunately, their place is not on a farm. Schedule F does not populate properly in Quicken. There is not the ability to manage livestock or farmland. FarmRaise offers a great solution to manage the business end of the farm with ease. Inventory, products, expenses, assets, and liabilties are all extremely intuitive to set up initially and to use day to day. This is the first program I have used that makes mileage tracking easy in real time. With the phone app, we can add mileage and purpose when we arrive at the destination. Everything is labelled according to Schedule F if applicable. The tutorial videos they have on youtube are excellent! FarmRaise has been a game changer. We are still learning the system but so far it is more helpful than the other accounting software we have tried. At this time, the only thing we need to figure out is field locations. When you watch Farmraise youtube videos, they show how to move your four cows from one field to another. That is simple. What is not clearly explained is how to create your field locations to begin with. What I was hoping would be the case is a tab to add locations to your farm. The best I have figured out to date is that you need to create locations for each type of animal in your inventory. This would probably make sense for larger farms. We are not a large farm. We are ultimately a micro farm with only 3.5 acres, four paddocks, three poultry enclosures, and one mix-use pen that currently holds our two boars. Still not a problem...let me add a detail. We mix our animals together. Sheep, Pigs, and a goat all use the same fields. For example, we currently have five piglets, our ram, and a goat in our front field. We have the three kune pigs in our lower field with three lambs. We created the field locations for our pigs and assigned the correct animals to the fields. We then went into our sheep inventory and the locations that I had previously created are not visible. This does not allow for a complete picture of our field rotations. We would really benefit from having the locations as s separate entity in the Tracks. Update I began writing this post in August of 2024. I had stopped writing to get in touch with the team at FarmRaise and see what they had to say. It is now November of 2024 and I happened to find this in draft form. At some point between then and now, I did chat with a FarmRaise associate. That nice lady stated that this is a known impediment and their developers are working on it. At this point, it is mute for us at Farm Life Farm. We had to add the fields to each animal in our inventory. I don't like duplicating efforts, and I really loath sitting in front of a computer. Still, over the past few months, we had to rotate our livestock and therefore had to create locations. We have the following animals in our inventory right now: 5 Kunekune piglets (6 months old) 2 Kunekune pigs (12 months old) 1 Kune sow 1 Yorkshire Boar 4 Ewes 3 Lambs 1 Ram 10 Laying ducks 8 Meat ducks 15 Laying hens 10 Meat chickens 6 Chicks The above list is how we classify our livestock in FarmRaise Tracks. The reason for this is based on how we track our expenses and sales. Putting all the ducks in the same group would conflict when parsing out revenues and expenses. We do not want to assess grain costs for our egg layers that our meat birds ate. When it comes time to sell a meat bird, the costs of raising it has to guide the selling price. At the same time, we need to know if the cost of raising and keeping the egg layers so we can see if our selling price of $4.00/dz for chicken and $6.00/dz for Duck eggs is tuning a profit, breaking even, or running a loss. The same thing applies to livestock. Fencing costs, grain, hay, etc all must be tracked to know what profit or loss you are running. All of this led to how we broke down our livestock for proper tracking of expense and income. As much as I dislike computers, it is really neat to run a profit loss statement and see that your pig sales are up this year and actually made a profit. Our farm has three grazing fields. Top Field Front Field Lower Field One mix use pen currently holding two boars Boar Pen And three poultry pens. Laying birds Meat Birds Brooder Pen As Mentioned above, being able to create these 7 locations would be the most efficient. In our case, we had to create the four paddocks that ewes can live in, four that the lambs can be in, and four for the ram. Then we had to do it again...Five paddocks for yearling Kunes, and five paddocks for the older Kunes. That is 22 locations we had to create for a 4 acre farm with 17 animals. Keep in mind that the above math is not for all our animals, meaning in the end we created more than 22 locations This was not as bad as I make it sound. We ultimately created the locations as we rotated animals to different fields. It worked out to just a few extra minutes of typing every few weeks. This really isn't such an inconvenience. Unfortunately I am a libra and nothing is ever quite good enough. This is my only critique which I must admit is an amazing achievement for this sort of software. Adding mileage is also a 20 second task. Over twenty years of some sort of business, I never tracked my mileage. Farmraise Tracks has made this pain free. Seeing our mileage add up over the past 11 months has made it clear what a mistake I had made over the past two decades not tracking mileage. At one point in our twenties, we were travelling the country with a show jumper barn she worked for. I was following along working as a logistics coordinator and equipment operator for the Horse Shows her barn was showing at. I had called a car insurance company for a quote and when asked my yearly driving I told the truth; 24,000 miles a year. the sales rep laughed and would not believe me or knew that the cost would have been astronomical based on that much driving. Not a single mile had been documented and therefore the deductions at tax time were not realized. Fun fact: 24,000 miles at an average speed of 50mph works out to 20 days of driving or 480 hours a year I sat behind the wheel. I loved it. I still love driving. And it was me. My darling beloved can drive for a few hours and then she falls asleep. Tracks also creates a very professional invoice with little effort. At the onset of use, you can upload your logo and business information. The program does the rest. All you have to do once your info is in is tap the invoicing tab and put in the customer, what you sold, and the program creates an invoice that you can print or email. It also allows you to classify the sale according to your schedule F. In quicken and quickbooks, the tax classification had to be done seperately after the invoice was created. I had created invoices with quicken and quickbooks in the past. Those programs are labor intensive. You have to build the invoice form from a template, adding text boxes and choosing columns. Going back in to change anything you created wrong is also a chore. Tracks has this simplified. (screenshot of the Transaction screen) Few of our customers want invoices however and in those situations the process is just as easy. Click on add revenue and enter the customer name, amount of money, and the date. That is all you have to enter. You then have the option of classifying the revenue by tax category and product. You can also split an expense or revenue. Ex: I sold a dozen eggs and a pig. We can split the total revenue of $900. $4.00 for eggs and $896 for the pig. You are also able to classify each separately when you do the split. This has been invaluable when going to the grain store. One receipt for $250.00 that you can split for each item purchased and assign the, lets say $28 in pig food to the pigs and the $30 worth of chicken grain to the chickens. You can also take a picture of the receipt and save it to the expense. I tend to sit in the parking lot after buying and enter it all into my phone app. Again, an amazing program for a farmer! Above I had mentioned a profit loss statement. This is one place that this program excels. Adding revenue and expenses is easy and intuitive as described above. This all culminates with three or four key strokes to create reports. All your effort is worthwhile when your wife asks if her wooden signs are worth making. Pull up a report for your expenses and sales associated with your sign making and your answer is clear...charge ten dollars more per sign and it is worth it. One other function that we do not use is banking connectivity. Tracks allows you to link your farming bank accounts and download your transactions just like Quicken and Quickbooks. I cannot critique this as we don't use it. I must admit, we did not demo other software for farm management. We did do a bunch of research and did not find anything to compare to FarmRaise Tracks. There are other programs out there but those we looked at were clearly for corporate level agribusiness with a price tag to match. FarmRaise offers virtually everything a small family farm needs. It certainly offers everything we need. Though I remain soar over the location topic, I cannot find any other failures of this software.

Our Tractors are extremely useful with so many implements and configurations. In our last post I discussed tractor history 101 and additional lighting. Today's post is about our 3-point hitch parts. Our Mahindra 2536 came with a bracket on the tow tongue that supports the lift rods while the backhoe is mounted. We lost that the first week of getting this machine. I made a new one with some flat steel from an old swing set. When we use the 3-point, we put that bracket in the tool box so we don't lose it again. Now when the backhoe is in service, the lift rods have to be secured and the hitch-lift arms must be removed. The amount of time I have spent looking for the hitch-lift arms is immense. I often left them laying outside wherever I had removed them. In an effort to avoid this, I began placing them between the seat and the PTO lever. They would invariably fall forward and get under the brake pedal or slide off the tractor entirely. After a bit of trial and error, I decided on making a bracket for them on the left rear fender. The bracket is about 10 inches of flat hurricane strapping That I bent into a rectangle. It is secured to the fender with the fuel tank cover mounting bolt. This is a close-up of the inside of the bracket with the bolt There was a pre-drilled hole in front of the signal light that fit the hitch pin. Initially the hitch pin could wiggle through the hitch-lift arms. I cut a 2 1/2 inch piece of flat stock and drilled a hole through the center 1/16th smaller than the hitch pin and hammered it into place perpendicular to the hitch pin handle. Now it can rotate with vibration and not wiggle through the lift arms. This is a photo of the underside of the fender. A Lynch pin keeps the hitch pin in place. Application and removal can be done by feel or by bending and looking at it. I initially considered cutting down the hitch pin a few inches but there is plenty of clearance between the pin and wheel. In the interests of time I chose to try it at full length and have had no issues at all. Now the lift arms are always on board and do not pose a safety issue. I have not had to search for an arm since. On my old tractor, I would have also placed the top link in this bracket, but the Mahindra has enough room to keep the top link attached while using the backhoe. About an hour of fabrication and tinkering will save me many more hours of searching!

Farm Life Farm is located in the Northwest Hills of CT. Between the private land and nature preserve our farm is surrounded by, we have about 3,000 acres of wildland. Though humans respect property lines, animals do not. To date, we have had the following animals invade our farm. Ravens Lynx Bobcat Coyote Opossum Fox Black Bear Our two farm dogs protect our animals for the most part. We let the dogs out in the morning when we open the chicken pens. The dogs stand vigil over our farm with great success. However, they are not always successful. Fox and bobcat are excellent at learning our habits and invading when they are least likely to be opposed. Our poultry is the biggest loser on our farm. We hatch chickens, ducks, and turkeys. There comes a point where you cannot keep your chicks in a box anymore. Our chick pen was not covered when we first built it. Everything seemed to be safe and secure. Their pen was sandwiched between the meat bird pen and the laying hen pen. They were safe until they were not! On a balmy spring morning, our turkey chicks were playing in their pen and we were all home. A kill of Ravens began carrying our Turkey chicks out of the pen one at a time. Our dogs and our 8 year old daughter watched the birds flying into the pen. She did not see them carrying out the birds. It wasn't until the last chick that I saw a raven carrying an obviously dead turkey into a nearby tree. By the time I got out there, there was nothing left...Just a few feathers. That afternoon we covered the pen with bits of netting and fencing. I would have never believed this. I did not know crows or ravens to be hunters. Also, this is not what this post is all about. It is about the animals that come out at night. That lurk in the shadows looking for a way into an easy meal. Netting protects the chicks. Dogs protect the birds during the day and chase away anything that does not belong. A fox had taken three laying hens over the coarse of six days. It walked right down the driveway, took a chicken, and walked back down the driveway. Nana had been bringing the dogs inside due to the heat of the summer. She did not seem to realize that we have dogs for the farm, not just as pets. The fox lives because it has learned the dogs are there. A bobcat was our issue two years ago. It stalked our birds for weeks and we managed to be there just in time on several occasions. This culminated with one shot from a 9 mil glock that just grazed its left front leg below the knee. I admit I was aiming for a kill shot, but at 40 yards, I was happy to make contact. We see sign of the bobcats moving on our property but no sign past the point where I shot it. We do know it is well as it immediately began stalking our neighbors chickens. There remains one animal that shows up periodically and our dogs are afraid of: Coyote. Bear pose no threat. 500 pounds of black fur and the dogs charge. The bear runs away and does not return. We did have to run electric along the top of our field fencing to keep the bears away. They were pushing down the fence and walking right in. Meanwhile the sheep would run out. Electric wire has ended that issue. Still the coyotes remain undaunted. They actually have not taken any of our livestock yet and they don't come around often, but about once a month, the pack invades the hayfield adjacent to our poultry and sheep fields. They roam the fence line looking for a way in. The dogs wont go out and we have little to defend against them at night. Many have recommended a night vision scope. For $300-$2,000 we can do that, yet with our bank account in its current condition, we cannot. Next I looked at gun lights. Unfortunately they are either ridiculously expensive or underpowered for this job. My mini-14 can kill out to about 150 yards with me shooting it, but the infrared and standard gun lights just don't reach out that far. Not to mention that I like to use what I have and make things myself. Also what I created gives me light out far enough to reach the coyote while being easily removeable. When I purchased the mini-14 at the ripe age of 20, I wanted to build the A-team rifle. Anyone in their 40's will remember this show. I loved the show and adored their rifles. I found a collapsible stock with a wire frame in a small gun store in northern Florida. This stock is actually illegal in my home state of CT. This makes sense given that the more intimidating a rifle looks, the more dangerous it is. We all know that it is the gun that hurts people. It has nothing to do with the human commanding the weapon. O.k., this is not true, but it is the basic thought that guides gun law in my state. It was legal when I brought it home...not anymore. Luckily this is my farm rifle and does not travel very far. As I have mentioned in past posts, I make things to be functional, not beautiful. I had all this stuff kicking around the farm. I had an old weaver rail. I drilled and tapped the stock and used wide thread screws to attach it. This allows for fast removal and attachment, though I have not removed it more than once, it remains an option. The tube was probably a patio umbrella or something...it was a metal tube that perfectly fits my streamlight stinger flashlight. The most noticeable drawback to my design is weight. The tube is 4mm metal and 6 inches long. Add the 13.6oz of flashlight and it is a hefty package. I tend to shoot from the kneeling position. With the weight of the gun resting on my bent knee. it remains manageable for an extended period. Standing, my shoulders can only handle one or two shots. This is ok as one shot is all I need.

One of the largest expenses for a livestock farm is feed. Our ruminants (sheep) will devour a field quickly. Field rotations is paramount to success. Our farm currently has three fenced paddocks all possessing a mix of pasture and woodland sections. This provides a great deal of variety in their diets. We find there are many plants and trees that fulfill almost all the nutrient requirements for our ruminants. We find that most summer days, our sheep do not want grain as they are well fed with the forage available. How do we know when to move animals around? What factors affect the decisions? What animals are in the field and where are they going next? These are just some of the questions we ask when making decisions on movement . Then there are a few other factors that must be taken into account. For example, we mix our animals together. Example: Field 1 currently has three ewes (breeding female sheep) Field 2 has 4 Kune Piglets, one Ram, and one wether (castrated male goat) Field 3 has 3 teen kune's, one Kune Sow, and three lambs Earlier this week, we created a new pig pen. We are raising a kune boar for family member who has not yet erected his fences. We also took delivery of a Yorkshire Boar three months ago for a cross breed project I will explain in a separate post. Those two boars were in field 2 with the other piglets. As they approach maturity, we must limit their access to females. So a new boar specific pen was necessary. Not to mention how much easier it is to heard a 70Lbs pig than a 200Lbs pig. Field one is currently short on snacks for the pigs and not enough grass for the lambs. We had the ewes and lambs in field one until weaning time. At that point, the lambs were moved to field 3 where we currently have an abundance of grass and plants that the lambs love. Field two has a grub problem and a tremendous amount of briars, prickers, and other scrub as it hadn't been used for anything but a horse over the last 25 years. Now we have the goat and ram eating the briars, prickers, and other brush, while the kune piglets devour the grubs and other creepy crawlies. I must point out some time discrepancies. Our home page shows that we established our farm this year. That is partly true, as we incorporated as a farm this year. We have actually been raising livestock here for more than a decade. Though our paddock rotations were based solely on husbandry, as our flocks have grown, we have needed to become much more studious in our land usage. It is with great pride that we report having three healthy, useful fields. Why have I shared all that with you? The main reason is to get your head around the importance of forage for your livestock. The more plant life available to your ruminants, the less you will need to feed them grain. The less grain you feed, the better the margins will be at the other end. That is the fiscal reason, which is of course very important. My personal motivation is flavor. The grass fed animal will taste different than grain fed. They tend to have less overall fat with better fat distribution. You know the contents of your field and can better control what man-made contaminants than with a bag of grain. Grass fed animals have better coloring as well...BPI pork is gray with just a hint of pink color and virtually no marbling. Our pork and lamb have deep color and good fat distribution. Unfortunately, however, we live in Connecticut. How much do you know about nutrient content in our soil? Let me teach you real fast...its not that good. New England soils tend to lack necessary trace minerals which cause our forage to be deficient. We must balance our animals diets with grain feeds to make up the difference. Another source of salts and trace minerals is salt blocks. We ensure there is always a mineral block available to our livestock. Monitoring the salt block is a great way to know if your animals are deficient...if they are, they will eat the mineral block. Few people understand that animals will seek out the nutrients they are lacking. When humans are taken from our first world societies they will actually do the same things. People who find themselves stranded on an island with abundant fish will begin by eating the flesh as we would expect. As time goes on those humans become deficient in all the nutrients and minerals not in the fish meat. That human will begin to seek out sources of those nutrients. The stranded human will have a sudden desire to eat the entrails, eyeballs, and other bits that disgust you as you read this. Those bits contain the nutrients that the body needs. Your subconscious will convince you they are the most delicious things ever...our children wont eat anything because they are well fed since birth. Give them bread and water for a week and see how open their appetites become. Meanwhile, our animals do not need to get to that point. So we feed small amounts of grain throughout the year with increases during gestation and lactation and winter. One of the signs it is time to rotate animals is when they lap up every last morsel of grain...most days all our animals leave a portion of their grain for the mice and birds.

I just spent over two hours watching a Tucker Carlson interview: https://rumble.com/v5b73od-calley-and-casey-means-the-truth-about-ozempic-the-pill-and-how-big-pharma-.html#:~:text=Calley%20%26%20Casey%20Means%3A%20The%20Truth%20About%20Ozempic%2C%20the%20Pill%2C%20and%20How%20Big%20Pharma%20Keeps%20You%20Sick Calley and Casey Means I love food. All kinds of food. From Tofu to sweetbreads and everything in between. I am also obese according to my doctor and the BMI charts. The body mass index is another hoax that you should learn about. But not right now. Understand that I am not lazy, nor do I lead a sedentary lifestyle. I am up by 6am and begin the day with morning farm chores. I can get help, but I enjoy this time with our animals. After that, with a mason jar of coffee, I head back out and begin projects. Since we began in earnest building our farm, we have been busy. Sarah did not ride her horse at all in 2023 as every free moment was spent on farm building projects. Many days, we would not eat till dinner, and then it would be leftovers or a pizza. Sounds pretty typical for an American middle class family, right? Now lets back up a bit. In 2009, we had our first child. As our son grew, baby food became a conversation. We bought Gerber and Beach Nut. We read their ingredients list. We looked at their processing process. We tasted them. We should have tasted them first. That is all it took. We then had one of those magical moments in a marriage when both partners have the same thought at the same time...."I don't want to feed him this garbage." It was, and I assume, still is disgusting. What to do? We were not wealthy. Actually we have been just barely holding it together like most of you. Still we had to do something that would provide actual nutrients and taste good. I had been a sous chef in my late teens and early twenties at some very fine restaurants. As a side note, I worked at a little deli two doors down from the West St Grill, a rather famous 5 star restaurant. The grill was short staffed and my boss asked me to go and help them. James O'shea, the proprietor, expected the perfection from me that day as he had from every chef he had ever hired. Never being able to hold my tongue, I quickly made it clear that I was not a five star professional, but I was eager to do better and felt honored to be screamed at by him; but only once. Apparently, he was impressed with my confidence and "bullocks" ( I had to look that up and given it was the 90's and I did not know it was British slang, it took a while) I was asked to help out there a few more times over that summer. Unfortunately, the owner just couldn't not scream. I again explained my stance that his environment was not worth the culinary experience, but I sure would appreciate a reference if I went for another kitchen job. I was addicted to cooking since I was standing in my high chair stirring and skimming gramma's sauce. I was definitely going to be a chef! The next restaurant I went to apply at had a sous position. A 17 year old is not a sous chef; the Exec's assistant takes years to learn. Well as they looked at me clearly not believing a word, the chef asked, "where have you worked and do you have references?" I started with the deli, which was also a well respected catering and specialty food store and butcher shop. Yes the chefs there, the owner, and the butcher were all willing to provide references. I then mentioned the grill and a private golf club. I quickly stated that I would not get any reference from the golf club as I had been fired for horsing around on a golf cart. The part I had left out is that I only did menial tasks at that club. Looking back, I don't remember ever working in their kitchen. But that did not matter. This chef and the owner heard me say the West St Grill in a way one would mention working at a Subway sandwich shop. They questioned me and I acted cool and pointed out that I was not impressed with the management and parted ways. "Your telling me you quit and O'shea will give a reference? He doesn't give references. Everyone knew that once you left the grill's kitchen, you were a bad person and a horrible cook." I looked at him and explained my leaving. Of course I left out the part about me only moonlighting there a handful of times but did vividly describe me telling the grill's owner that he was an evil prick that should be arrested for employee abuse. Then in the same breath asked if he would offer a reference? Yes he would...because of those bullocks. (still no idea what they were) To this day, I do not know if he would have or if my new boss ever actually called him. Any which way, I was hired. All that to say: I know food. I also understood basic human nutrition. Macro and micro nutrients. Good fats and bad fats. How hard could it be. So we went to local farms for vegetables and purchased the best quality meats and fish we could afford. We would steam or bake virtually everything and then run it through the food processor with whatever pan juices and scrapings we could save. This continued for our other two kids. During this time, we would garden as much as possible and buy the most natural foods we could. This grew into a mission. We began buying raw ingredients. Wheat berries directly from a Minnesota farm. Raw milk from the horse barn/ dairy farm Sarah worked at. (one time a two gallon jug of fresh milk spilt in the truck on her commute home. Cleaning that is a story worth telling) We would make butter, mozzarella, and buttermilk. Grass fed beef from another local farm. As time went on, this whole food lifestyle continued. We began raising rabbits first. I am Italian and rabbit was a staple. We could not afford to buy them at $10/Lbs but raising them is very low cost. Then we added chickens, then ducks. When learned about BPI pork and Smithfield being purchased by a Chinese company that changed their old ways into "modern" farming that would produce more profit, we knew that store bought pork was no longer safe. Smithfield went communist on May 29. 2013. BPI was already Chinese. This terrified us. Raising pigs was an obvious next step. Unfortunately we were not set up for such a strong and intelligent animal. (One of the truest statements I ever heard from a pig farmer selling me piglets was this..."don't let it get out. You'll never catch em. You'll hafta shoot em. And that'll be one expensive sucklin pig on the spit") So pigs had to wait, but sheep are dumb and easier to contain. (we were wrong by the way) The pigs followed closely once our enclosure was complete. After our first harvest of meat, we realized how different the meat we raised tasted. It made us feel better. Cholesterol levels decreased. Energy levels increased and my weight...nope still fat. The issue we have as a nation is the quality of our food supply. Big farming intends to make as much money as possible. Our animals roam and graze with grain more as a supplement than their staple food. Their animals live in small cages suffering stress-induced cortisol levels through the roof. MMM, cortisol! These animals are being fed a grain containing genetically modified sugars and grains and antibiotics. Prophylactic antibiotics mind you. More if they actually are ill. The past two years have been difficult. Nana has been living with us due to the slow onset of dementia which is currently becoming an unspoken epidemic. Covid has nothing on diabetes and dementia. Nana is part of the processed foods craze of the 60's. She found the convenience wonderful. She believed the Food Pyramid and that seed oils were better than animal fats. She embraced the center grocery store aisles and never looked back. She loves to bring processed foods home from the store. She brings our kids to the store and lets them pick out cookies and cakes and chips. Then the children will sneak these snacks right before dinner and again at bedtime. One bag of chips leads to a cookie. Processed sugars are addictive. As addictive as heroin. In 1950, the average American consumed 5 pounds of sugar a year. Now that number is closer to 100 pounds of sugar. High fructose corn syrup was developed as a less expensive option to cane sugar. The Farm bills every year since the 70's, when high fructose corn syrup was invented, has tax paid subsidies to big corn farms like Monsanto. Such commercial farms get huge cash payments for their corn from the department of agriculture. They are then able to undercut real sugar suppliers. Our government has been paying for private companies to poison our food supply for more than 50 years. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a science experiment. The results have been reproduced with worsening results each generation. It is poison. Lets look at a soda. 39 grams of sugar in a 12 oz can of coke. 9 grams of sugar in an orange. So you can drink that soda or eat 5 oranges. (both contain a form of Fructose: Low fructose in the fruit. High in the soda) I bet you can drink 5 cans of soda before you can eat 5 oranges. Why? Fiber. That is why. The orange has fiber. Fiber takes up space in your digestive system. Fiber feeds your gut bacteria. soluble fiber enters your cells, attaches to waste products/toxins and removes the waste from the cells. Insoluble fiber scrubs the walls of your stomach and intestines, expelling the sludge there. Hi-Colonic anyone? In 1964, Surgeon General, Luther Terry, MD stated publicly that smoking cigarettes led to cancer and chronic bronchitis. At this time, R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris were the largest cigarette companies in the world. They were making millions in 1960 dollars. They also had more lobbyists than any other industry at the time. An article for the University of Michigan LSA states, " In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables." This article ends with: "The findings suggest that tobacco companies engineered processed foods to hit what is known as our “bliss” point and elicit cravings, said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies food addiction." This year, Kraft is lobbying to have lunchables added to the USDA school food program. We must understand that big tobacco had an army of scientists working to make cigarettes more addictive. As they realized that the new surgeon general's warning was going to decrease sales, they moved almost all of their "research" divisions to food. They created flavor enhancers, highly refined sugars, and new preservatives. They lobbied the FDA to classify many man made ingredients as "natural flavors." They created the food pyramid to make their "new foods" the base for our diets. How has this worked? Simple answer: We believed. We believed our scientists and doctors. We believed in our governmental agencies. We believed! Ex: The Surgeon General's warning in 1964 was listened to and smoking decreased by 20% virtually overnight. While researching this article, I came across the following blog: https://myserenitykids.com/blogs/news/seed-oil-alternatives#:~:text=In%20the%20grand%20scheme%20of,supply%20in%20the%20early%201900s . This is an excellent article that I would recommend to you. One particularly interesting excerpt: Hillary Bennets quotes an issue of Popular Science from the era that sums up the evolution of cottonseed with the following sentiment: "What was garbage in 1860 was fertilizer in 1870, cattle feed in 1880, and table food and many things else in 1890."   Proctor and Gamble had a tremendous amount of cottonseed oil which was a waste product of cotton production. I cannot blame a company for trying to find a way to make more money from their waste products. On our farm we do the same. We use the scrap cuts from our sawmill to make signs. We use the extra lard from our slaughters to make soap. We use our animal manure to fertilize gardens. I can blame our governmental agencies for allowing this to happen. This is very similar to the fluoride scam. If you did not know, fluoride is a toxic biohazardous waste product of Aluminum production. The National Institute of Health, has a glowing report on their website about how conclusive their study on fluoridation of drinking water was. "The architect of these first fluoride studies was Dr. H. Trendley Dean, head of the Dental Hygiene Unit at the National Institute of Health (NIH)...Dean wondered whether adding fluoride to drinking water at physically and cosmetically safe levels would help fight tooth decay. This hypothesis, Dean told his colleagues, would need to be tested. In 1944, Dean got his wish. That year, the City Commission of Grand Rapids, Michigan-after numerous discussions with researchers from the PHS, the Michigan Department of Health, and other public health organizations-voted to add fluoride to its public water supply the following year. In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water. The Grand Rapids water fluoridation study was originally sponsored by the U.S. Surgeon General, but was taken over by the NIDR shortly after the Institute's inception in 1948. During the 15-year project, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids' almost 30,000 schoolchildren. After just 11 years, Dean- who was now director of the NIDR-announced an amazing finding. The caries ( pretty sure this is a typo that should read Cavity) rate among Grand Rapids children born after fluoride was added to the water supply dropped more than 60 percent." Nothing in the one and only study on fluoridation tested fluoride levels in the body; it only measured how many cavities they saw. It did not factor in that fluoride is a persistent heavy metal. Persistent refers to the fact that fluoride, lead, mercury, etc, settle in our cells and stay there. These metals continue to build up in our bodies and will travel through the blood-brain-barrier. The difference between our farm using "waste products" and these large corporations is the moral factor. Farm Life Farm considers how our decisions will affect our customers and our family. The corporations only factor in how much money will be made or lost. This would not be a problem if we had governmental agencies actually doing what is right for our people. Unfortunately what we have are protection agencies like the FDA that are filled with corporate actors working for the benefit of the companies, not the American people.