Webmaster’s note: The format of this column includes all of the Quill’s Endians participating at various times and in various ways! Phil writes this month’s column.
At Least There’s Still Bacon…
Two years ago I resigned myself to the reality that, despite my best intentions, I would just never get to the task of improving an overgrown two and a half acres on the farm, the “Hidden Field”. I had cleared and rocked it 15 years earlier, but never improved its fertility so that it would produce good grass. I looked away for a second and it grew trees.
I had to come up with a plan that put me down in the Hidden Field every day because, as the adage goes, “A farmer’s feet are the best fertilizer.” The first step was to level the alder patch.
A friend of ours had just started a land-clearing business with a machine that literally shreds trees and incorporates them back into the soil. It is a beast of a machine that exists only for tree death. After he finished his work, and I was still ruminating potential uses for the new clearing, it grew nasty woody shrubs. Time for action.
With Benjamin’s return to the farm from college last spring, uses for that piece of land started to become more possible, so… I called in the hogs.
We have now rotated hogs over about half of that ground. They match my friend’s machine in disruptive power, but also fertilize and produce pork on the side. How clever am I?
Coming into this “winter,” I had to choose whether to leave the hogs on that patch or move them closer to the barn. Getting feed and water to them 1/3 mile away and across our main field could prove difficult in the shoulder seasons. I thought I’d order up two different weather scenarios in order to cover my bases. Old-fashioned Maine winter with frozen ground for easy transport of food and water OR mild, dry winter for less easy, but not all that messy, transport.
I got mixed results with my order and got a mild and wet, wet winter. Not the ideal that I ordered up. Getting a truck to them has become tricky, and has churned more soil than I like. I’m afraid that working that two and a half acres has now become slightly more. I’ll have to clean up my mess come warmer weather. My cleverness thwarted, at least there’s still bacon.
Heather and Phil Retberg and their three children run Quill’s End Farm, a 105-acre property in Penobscot that they bought in 2004. They use rotational grazing on their fifteen open acres and are renovating thirty more acres from woods to pasture to increase grazing for their pigs, grass-fed cattle, lambs, laying hens, and goats. Heather is Vice President of Halcyon Grange #345 and writes a newsletter for their farm’s buying club of farmers in her area and has generously permitted us to share some of their columns with Grangers. Visit the Quill’s End Farm Facebook Page for more information.