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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: market-farming The Joys of Local Alliances
  • Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 05:01:28 -0500


My neighbor Jim's Guernsey Cricket freshened on Monday and he brought me two gallons of milk yesterday afternoon, even helped me drag four bales of hay through the snow to the barn. That should hold me until I can get the plow guy awake enough to open up the drive to the barn. He's been very busy for the past couple of days.

I warmed up a gallon to make Jim some ricotta and oopsie had sudden colostrum pudding! Surprised me for a minute; I hadn't had fresh new milk for a while!

Tomorrow Jim and I are sitting down over coffee and fresh ricotta with homemade noodles to talk more about our formal local farmers' marketing co-op and putting up a field shelter so Cricket and her calf can spend the summer in my pasture and he can go back to New York City for his summer work. He has lots of contacts in New Jersey and if we can't convince the people in our own back yard that fresh is best, we can sell it to his friends in Jersey.

So far I've got about 25 lbs. of homemade soap put together for summer market sale. My hands have never been so clean, and I've finally figured out how well it works to alternate soap work with seed starting. Just a bit of soft soap under the fingernails and they clean up right nice!

Jim's two sows are due to farrow soon and I'm buying two gilts for our Pet Pigs and Living Rototiller Rental project. Jim thinks I'm nuts not to just raise 'em up and butcher 'em, but if they turn out not to have friendly personalities we can still do that.

Just goes to show that where there's a will, there just might be a way.

And no, those dang pygmy goats haven't kidded yet. Smiley is wider than she is tall, but she's in no distress so the vet says we should just keep waiting. I thought for sure the big snowstorm and locked-in barn would bring the babies -- isn't that how it usually works? <G> The two girls are snug and happy in their deeply-bedded chicken coop with a brooder light and radio playing NPR.

And people think that nothing happens at a farm in the winter. Hah!

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY

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