Understanding Your Soil - From a Distance


Soil Comparison courtesy of permaculture.org

Now that's a pretty presumptive title given how little I know about soil! How about this: Understanding Your Soil - From a Distance - for Beginners. Yeah, that's more like it.

There are many fantastic resources for learning about soil and I won’t pretend to be any sort of expert, but I will offer up some insight as to how we’ve gone about evaluating different properties and their soils. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post on determining a farm location, we aren’t lucky enough to have land in the family or smart enough to just go pick a place and get started. Both of those options would be much easier and sometimes I envy the people that have gone down those tracks. We also don't live near the areas where we're considering buying land, so we rely on the internet for most of our research. So how can we evaluate whether a particular property will support a grass-based dairy without getting on the ground and taking a soil test?

Firstly, let's answer why soil is so important to to what we're doing.

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DUCK PROSCIUTTO! (that's right)


duck, prosciutto, bresaola, recipe

How does this heaping pile of deliciousness not deserve all caps and an exclaimation point!? I felt truly rich when we unwrapped the butchers paper and unveiled the freshly sliced centerfold bounty above. This wasn't just any cured meat - this was "prosciutto" I'd cured in our refrigerator! Somehow, magically it seemed, we had transformed a raw duck breast into something amazingly tasty using only the power of time and a little cool air. Want to give it a try?

Duck Prosciutto (modified from Michael Ruhlman's recipe in Charcuterie)

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Grass-fed Meat from Wal-Mart?

This is an article that I wrote for www.beginningfarmers.org

The other day I read a particularly thought-provoking post on the blog Honest Meat (Note: this post was removed by the author, I don't yet know why. Cached version here.). The post discussesed the entrance of a new competitor into the local and pasture-based foods market in Northern California. The new entrant, Belcampo Meat Co, is a 10,000 acre, vertically integrated farm focused on producing a wide variety of pastured meats. It also happens to be owned by Outpost International, which appears to be funded by at least one very wealthy individual (Todd Robinson). It’s not exactly Wal-Mart, but based on Wal-Mart’s recent moves it’s only a matter of time.

Small farms could never compete with the marketing prowess and enormous scale of such a competitor, right?

This article is not about whether Belcampo’s (or Wal-Mart’s) actions are right or wrong, it’s about how you, the small family farmer, can prepare your business for the realities of competing with large, well-funded businesses.

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