Well folks, it’s been quite a month!  Between family visiting, our farm animal population increasing, new staff coming on at Wheatberry, the grain harvest, and Ella being her usual hilarious, sweet, challenging self, I hardly know what day it is, what I did yesterday, or what I’m doing tomorrow.  Looking back, it seems like last August was similar!

I’ve been wanting to share some of our wonderful experiences from the NOFA summer conference, but got swept away by everything else.  So now, take a trip back just a few weeks with me . . . UMass Amherst campus, and lots of wonderful, amazing farming folks.  My dad, brother, Ben, Jeanine (our farm apprentice), and I all attended different workshops – wow!  These oxen from Simple Gifts Farm were there, much to Ella’s delight – they’re in training to be used as draft power at Simple Gifts someday.

My brother and Jeanine took an awesome workshop on cheesemaking with the folks from Boblink Dairy in New Jersey (who brought samples – yum!).  It included some really interesting animal management techniques, including feeding grass and hay exclusively (almost all cattle farms currently supplement with grain – or feed it exclusively, much to the animals detriment), and having two bulls that he keeps with the females all the time.  Usually, farmers will have one bull (if a male at all) and keep him separated from the females except for specific breeding periods.  Jonathan, the farmer, said that if you only have one, they can mistake you (the farmer) for a competing bull, especially if you are keeping them away from their females, but that when you have two they are quite pleasant to work with.  Very interesting . . .

I took two really amazing workshops, one on alternative health practices for livestock with Michael Keilty from UConn, and one on Health for the Family with Tony Llemos from Blazing Star Herbal School in Ashfield, MA.  Both of them ended up mostly talking about herbs, but in very different ways.  I got some great book resources from Michael’s workshop, such as The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable, by Juliette de Bairacli Levy, and Wild Health by Cindy Engel.  The main idea I took from Michael’s workshop, which I am really excited about, is the concept of planting herbs and healing plants in pastures, instead of just grasses and clover.  The animals will graze the herbs and healing plants as needed, and will self-medicate.  Often they know about their health issues before we do (and know better how to treat it!).  I’ll let you know more and I study up, and get started planting.  (As Michael said, “You’re going to have a lot of homework!”

From Tony, I took the wonderful idea of not only using herbs as teas (infusions) and tinctures, but adding them to the food we eat, as nourishing and health-giving supplements.  She talked about drinking infusions of nettles and milky oats daily, over the long term, making herb vinegars (you basically just add fresh herbs to cider vinegar and allow to steep, then use in salad dressing or other uncooked food preparations), and herb honey (again, add herbs to raw local honey, and enjoy!  yum!).  She also talked about adding astragalus (a Chinese herb) to soups and rice in the winter, and adding slippery elm to foods such as oatmeal.  Astragalus is a wonderful, warming and immunity building herb, and slippery elm soothes the body’s membranes (eyes, urinary, respiratory, and digestive).  I got some great ideas for our family, and for the bakery.

Ben took a couple of sheep workshops (just in time!), one with the folks from Winterberry Farm in Leverett, and one with Dale Perkins (pictured above) from Mesa Farm.  He learned how to flip a sheep on its butt (they go totally passive when you do this, and it’s how you shear them, administer medicine, etc), and it’s a good thing because we’re going to need to shear Curly in just a few weeks.

Whew!  Well, that was a long one, but truly only skims the surface of all the wonderful things at the conference.  Hopefully, it will titillate you just enough to join the party next year.