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Tracking Pocahontas….
….”Pokey“, of course. Our English shepherd puppy is now exactly a year old and showing great aptitude doing what English farm dogs do. This is her first time out working sheep with expert trainer Monroe Williams of Possum Hollow Farm near Strasburg, Virginia. Hopefully, “graduating” to larger animals will be a breeze. Wooz reports that Pokey clearly was pleased with herself…knew when she had the hang of it to Monroe’s approval. More lessons will follow but finding a training can be difficult so we thought you’d like to know about Monroe and Evelyne Williams school. We’re thinking of entering Pokey in their “long course”. Wonder if we can loan them…
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Tracking Jackpot….
….and he continues on track. From the first, this young bull….now approaching three….has been an eye-catcher. It was Rotokawa’s Ken McDowall who dubbed him “Jackpot“, when he first saw him on our pastures. Jackpot is a “243” son and last winter was introduced to his first group of females. We’ll be seeing the results in a few more months, and that’s what counts. Here are Jackpot’s four remaining classmates…one of them a line-bred 688 son. Thistle Hill may not be the biggest Devon breeder in the country, but we think, pound for pound, we’ll stack up against the rest.
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Do future cowboys like to smell flowers?
Great-grandson Rowan does! Two years and change now. Enjoy the “single-kid life” while you can son. A baby brother is breathing down your neck!
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A Cornwall post card….
….one of our English friends and colleague, Juliet Cleave, has entered this picture (and others) in a British post card contest. As always, she has a way of making us feel “home sick”. The shepherd here is Juliet’s husband, Chris. We have to get back to Cornwall in the Spring!
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Why I can’t raise a $1 cheeseburger….
….we’ve talked about the economics of small farm production before. But this is an article written by a young farmer that adds new meaning to the term “value meal”. How can the majors keep prices so low? By tampering with their product, of course. (See any number of earlier posts on that subject.) When it comes to hamburger, what you get in the supermarket….even that labeled Angus Certified Beef which probably hasn’t come from an Angus to begin with….is a concoction of as many as 20 different cuts of meat trimming and fat from around the world….all blended with the modern miracle called “pink slime”. That’s how you can get a…
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The most powerful medicine….
….speaking of miracles, as philosopher Wendell Berry was in the previous post….what could be more miraculous than the power of just plain old food? (And of course what could be more difficult to find nowadays than just “plain old food”?) We noticed another major hamburger recall this week. They’re so frequent that the media hardly covers them any longer. And no one bothers to point out that all this tainted meat comes from government-inspected factories while the government is busy trying to shut down small farmers and processors. But the point of this is how to keep your medical bills down. Grass fed beef, of course. And particularly those cuts that very…
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Wendell Berry on miracles….
“I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a ‘hypaethral book,’ such as Thoreau talked about – a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. “Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and…