Interesting things happen on a farm, some fun, some less so. This is a good place to check for a picture of day-to-day life on Cairncrest Farm.
By Garth Brown The topic of diet is particularly fraught, with strong feelings about the relative merits and demerits of certain foods or nutrients endlessly litigated. Poke around online and you’ll find outspoken vegans and carnivores, frugivores and raw foodies, people who never touch a carb and people who eat thirty bananas a day, or...
By Edmund Brown With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning - How Do I Fence Thee? Let Me Count the Ways How to fence a farm? Let me count the ways. I build fence to the depth and breadth and height my fields can reach, where reaching out of sight For the ends of keeping stock...
By Normandy Alden I would never tell you that you must own some land. Just as I would never say that you must have a garden, or bake a blueberry pie, or mend your own pants. I can see well enough the difference between a private and a universal joy. But there have been a...
By Garth Brown Years ago I worked at Aldo’s Coffee in the coastal town of Greenport, New York. While I had developed a habit in college, it was there, that first damp, blustery winter, that I began to appreciate the difference between lighter roasted Brazilian beans and darker roasted ones from Sumatra, between high quality, single origin...
By Garth Brown There are two big, well fenced sections of pasture on the farm, and proper grazing management requires moving the cows and sheep between them several time each growing season. Unfortunately, they are separated by a road, a stream, and a muddy swale. While future fencing projects should simplify things, for now taking...
By Garth Brown Early on the Friday of a dreary, rainy week in the dreary, rainy June of this year’s dreary, rainy spring, I looked out my window and saw my herd of cows running down one side of their fence while two of my neighbor’s kept pace on the other. I hadn’t seen them come...