Farm Hopping: Our Visit to Lewis Waite Farm


Cows on Pasture at Lewis Waite Farm 
 
Living in NYC, multiple bars are always within walking distance. We used to spend our weekends "bar hopping" with friends. Now we spend our weekends farm hopping!
 
We’ve been hopping between farms on the weekends and speaking to farmers all over the country to try to get a better sense for which enterprises inspire us most and also fit with our vision for the farm. We hope others will take our lead and get out to see some farms!
 
Earlier this year we attended a Just Food CSA Conference and had the wonderful opportunity to meet Alan and Nancy Brown of Lewis Waite Farm
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Liver! Eating the Offal

Pastured Pork Liver and Carmelized Green Onion Over Lemon Grains
Smooth, rich, briny, savory, mmmmmm! Liver! Yes my friends, liver.  I know that many of you have had a traumatizing run in or two with the mushy non-muscle as kids - luckily I never did and so I headed into my first encounter hoping it would taste just like pate (I’m serious).  And it did!  Well...similar - very delicious with that guttural mmm! inducing taste that you only get from naughty things like bacon, pate, and pork shank (mmm!).  I’m a recent convert so you'll just have to deal with my enthusiasm.

Ever since we finished the left-overs of my liver experiment a few days ago I’ve been craving it!  My counterpart Scrapple, on the other hand, hasn’t been obsessed, but he did enjoy it.  There’s obviously a reason this organ has been prized throughout history by everyone from roman warriors to the beloved Julia Child.  It's reputed to be a miracle food - high in vitamins and minerals and possessing some very unique qualities in addition to its addictive flavor.  
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Pinning the Tail on the Donkey, or Choosing a Farm Location

The beauty of not having land in the family and essentially starting with a blank slate is that we can pretty much choose any location to start our farm. However, it is a blessing and a curse. Figuring out where to farm has been, and continues to be, the most difficult decision to make. Sometimes I wish the choice was already made for us and we had no other option but to make it work. Since that’s not the case, we spend an inordinate amount of time debating the pros and cons of weather, land prices, water access, distance from family, proximity to end markets, and so on. We’ve done a fair amount of research on each topic, so I’ll throw out a few bits and pieces of our decision-making process... and if anyone has feedback we’d love to hear it!
 
The first step for us was to eliminate places we definitely would not want to farm. We actually thought about several foreign countries, but eventually ruled them out and chose to stick it out in the good ole US of A (despite the seemingly insane regulatory environment). For us, deciding to stay in the US was primarily based on
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