December 2016 - Winter Is Officially Here

     This is our final meat delivery of the 2016 CSA season and our pastures are quieting down.  This week we saw the first dusting of white covering our green, grassy pastures. The animals (and farmers) were grateful for the warm, mild weather we had in October and November.  Our pastures continued to thrive and the cattle were still able to forage enough grass until just recently when we started supplementing their diets with stored hay.  They are still out grazing and snacking on what is still remaining, but we are accepting that winter is here and it’s time to transition them to their winter diet.
     Just before Thanksgiving, we got 11 new Red Angus beef cattle.  They are only about 7-8 months old.  It took them a few days to acclimate to their new home, but they quickly became friends with our other cattle who graciously showed them out to the pasture and made them feel welcome.  All of our cattle made their way around our hillside through the pasture to their “winter camp.”  While they still spend most of their days and time outdoors, they are now close to the barn which we’ve prepared for them to use this winter.  They are cold-hardy animals and can withstand the cold of winter, but we like them to have a dry shelter to retreat to when the winter storms blow through.  We normally feed them their hay outside in their pasture, but on stormy or cold days Richard convinces them to stay inside by feeding them his special “Chocolate Hay.”  This is how we describe the best hay we have….the stuff the cattle would like to eat every day, but we have to make it last until spring so feed it sparingly.

Angel (Left) & Juan Pablo (Right): Our Animal Care Team

     We’d like to thank Juan Pablo and Angel for their help with caring for our animals this year.  These two gentlemen are responsible for feeding the pigs twice a day, maintaining the paddock fences for the cattle, moving the cattle to fresh grass as needed and making sure the mineral feeder got moved with them.  Farmer Richard and Captain Jack “The Dog” will be taking over animal feeding chores in about 2 more weeks when Angel returns to Mexico for the winter.  They don’t mind feeding animals through the winter and enjoy checking in on them once or twice a day.
     As we move into the cold of winter, I can’t help but crave warm comfort food…soups, stews, chili, etc.  I have a stack of about 15 cookbooks that were published by Taste of Home magazine.  My Mom used to give me one of these cookbooks every year for Christmas, long before I ever went to culinary school but enjoyed cooking for my family.   These books are filled with simple, down-home Midwestern recipes.  My brother used to flip through the cookbooks and mark the recipes he wanted me to make.  I haven’t cooked from them for many years, but just recently decided to look through them again to see what I could find.  Lots of simple, filling recipes!  This week’s newsletter features four simple, family friendly recipes using beef and pork.  They’ll guide you in making tasty, nourishing meals for your family this winter…and leave you with a little time to sit and sip some hot chocolate.  We hope you have a relaxing and nourishing winter.  We’ll see you in the spring!
–Your Farmers Richard & Andrea

Chili Casserole

Yield: 6 servings

Photo Borrowed from Taste of Home website

1 pound ground beef
½ cup chopped onion
1 can (15 ½ oz) kidney beans rinsed and drained
1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
1 can (14 ½ oz) stewed tomatoes
¼ tsp garlic powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp pepper
2 cups cooked bow tie pasta

1. In a skillet, brown beef and onion; drain.  Stir in beans, tomato sauce, tomatoes, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes.
2. Stir in pasta;  heat through.

This recipe was featured in a cookbook entitled The Best of Country Cooking 1999, by Taste of Home.  It was in a section of the book entitled “Meals in Minutes.” Our Midwestern bookkeeper, Kelly, would argue that this is not really a casserole but rather a “hotdish.”
Whatever it’s called, it’s quick, simple and hearty!

Breakfast Patties

Yield: 8 Patties

Photo Borrowed from Taste of Home website

¼ cup water
2 tsp salt
2 tsp rubbed sage
1 tsp pepper
½ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp crushed red pepper flakes
⅛ tsp ground ginger
2 pounds ground pork

1. In a bowl, combine water and seasonings. Add pork and mix well.
2. Shape into eight 4-inch patties.
3. In a skillet over medium heat, cook patties for 5-6 minutes on each side or until no longer pink in the center.

This recipe was featured in the 1999 Taste of Home Annual Recipes cookbook.  It was submitted by reader Jeannine Stallings from Montana who says “This homemade sausage is terrific because it’s so lean, holds together well and shrinks very little when cooked.  It’s incredibly easy to mix up a batch and make any breakfast special.”

Hungarian Goulash

Yield: 6-8 Servings

Photo Borrowed from Taste of Home website

1 pound stew meat, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 pound lean boneless pork, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 large onions, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 cups water
2 Tbsp paprika
½ tsp salt
½ tsp dried marjoram
1 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1 cup (8 oz) sour cream
Hot cooked noodles

1. In a large skillet over medium heat, brown beef, pork and onions in oil; drain.
2. Add the water, paprika, salt and marjoram; bring to a boil.  Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 1 ½ hours or until meat is tender.
3. Just before serving, combine flour and sour cream until smooth; stir into meat mixture.  Bring to a boil over medium heat; cook and stir for 1-2 minutes or until thickened and bubbly. Serve over noodles.

Recipe borrowed from the cookbook, 2002 Taste of Home Annual Recipes.

Barbequed Pot Roast

Cookbook Photo Borrowed from
Eat Your Books Website

Yield: 12 servings

1 boneless chuck roast (3 pounds), trimmed
¼ tsp pepper
1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce
1 cup water
3 medium onions, sliced
2 garlic cloves, minced
¼ cup lemon juice
¼ cup ketchup
2 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
½ tsp ground mustard

1. Sprinkle roast with pepper. In a Dutch oven coated with nonstick cooking spray, brown roast on all sides.
2. Add the tomato sauce, water, onions, and garlic. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.
3. Combine remaining ingredients; pour over meat. Cover and simmer for 3-4 hours or until the meat is tender.

Recipe borrowed from Low-Fat Country Cooking published by Taste of Home.

A Pasture Walk with Farmer Richard

By Richard de Wilde

     This article was originally printed in our vegetable newsletter in September 2013. After a recent walk through our pastures this fall, Richard and I were reminded just how important it is to continue to manage our land, including our pastures and woods. It’s a big job, and one that is never finished. It takes a diligent effort to keep things “under control,” but the result is healthy pastures that are pleasant and desirable for our animals to live in and graze. We find joy and fulfillment in watching our cattle graze and live peaceful lives on our lush pastures while the pigs keep us entertained with their pig-like behaviors. Thank you for supporting us in our efforts to do the best we can to raise meat in the most respectful manner we can. 

--Farmers Andrea & Richard

     Our farm, like most farms in the Driftless region, has land along creek beds, dry washes and steeper hillsides that is not   suitable for farming and has traditionally grazed animals. Our hillside pastures were cleared and planted to wheat in the late 1800’s and it was an erosion disaster! The scars are now healed and grass covers the hillside, preventing erosion. This month’s Edible Madison magazine (September 2013) has a very well-written article on the birth of soil conservation and contour farming which started in the 1930’s in our own Vernon County, Wisconsin. The present day NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) was started and Aldo Leopoldo was actively working in the field with them to turn around 70 years of disastrous farming, which had destroyed the productive capacity of most of the county’s farmland. Animals, grass, and strips of non-erosive hay between cultivated crops saved the land. Now our county is experiencing a new crisis as animals leave the farms to go to big feedlots and confinement dairies and contour strips and grass waterways are being torn out to accommodate only two crops, corn and soybeans. As a result, erosion is on the rise once again.

     I milked cows on this farm from 1984-1986, but sold the herd to devote my time and resources to full-time vegetable farming. In the years that followed this transition, we saw the results of abandoned pastures. Prickly ash, willows, box elder trees, black locust, honeysuckle, multiflora rose and garlic mustard took over and choked out the hillsides. Our beautiful little Spring Creek disappeared in a tangle of brush and the stream no longer flowed openly. With the grass overtaken and the stream banks eroded, the trout were choked out. In recent years, we have spent considerable time and resources working towards reclaiming our beautiful Spring Creek, as well as learning from our mistakes and working hard to maintain other waterways and river banks on our property. We have removed huge patches of prickly ash, multiflora rose and invasive honeysuckle by pulling them out and then grading and reseeding these areas to establish new grasses and clovers. We built new fences and brought animals back to our hillsides to graze these areas to help us maintain them. We have cleaned the trees and brush out of the creek and fixed stream bank erosion with large limestone rocks lining the banks. Many areas we can now mow once a year to keep down invasive plants and prevent trees from taking over. Despite all our efforts, the single biggest help in maintaining our improvements are now the cows, pigs and goats that graze our pastures. 

     While we realize that not all of our customers choose to eat meat and our focus is on vegetable production, we’ve chosen to include animals on our farm because they have a very important purpose. Unlike feedlot cattle and pigs that exist solely to gain weight and be taken to slaughter, our animals have a greater calling. Their purpose is to graze and fertilize our hillside pastures, thereby maintaining them and improving them for years to come. This is a very different lifestyle for these animals in comparison to industrial animal production.  

     Farmers are stewards of the land, but we can’t forget that part of that calling is honoring and respecting the land and animals we care for. As we walk through our pastures and look out across the hillsides, we see the beauty that is the result of all of our hard work. We are blessed to live in a beautiful, unique location and will continue to strive to maintain our land.

Meatballs in Pineapple Sauce

Yield: 10 as an appetizer or 4 if served as a main entrée

Photo Borrowed from Shannon Hayes' blog

For the Meatballs:

½ cup dry breadcrumbs

2 Tbsp finely chopped onions

½ tsp salt

½ tsp Worcestershire sauce

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 pound ground beef

2 Tbsp olive oil

For the Pineapple Sauce:

½ cup packed light brown sugar

1 Tbsp cornstarch

1 can (13 ¼ ounces) chunk pineapple, in natural, unsweetened juice 

⅓ cup apple cider vinegar

1 Tbsp soy sauce

1 small green bell pepper, coarsely chopped

1. Mix all the ingredients, except the olive oil, in a large bowl.  Shape into 1 ½-inch balls.  

2. Saute meatballs in the olive oil over medium heat, turning occasionally, for about 15 to 20 minutes, until browned.  Pour off the fat, remove the meatballs from the skillet, and set aside.

3. Mix together the brown sugar and cornstarch, and add to the skillet used for the meatballs.  Pour in the pineapple and juice, and add the vinegar, soy sauce, and chopped pepper.  

4. Over medium heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly.  Reduce heat immediately, add the meatballs, and simmer 10 minutes longer.

Recipe borrowed from Shannon Hayes’ book, The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook.

Slow-Cooker Chipotle Beef Tacos with Cabbage-Radish Slaw

Yield: 6 Servings

Photo Borrowed from the Real Simple website

2 ½ to 3 pounds stew meat (May also use round steak or chuck roast, cut into 2-inch pieces)
1 large onion, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 to 3 Tbsp chopped chipotle chilies in adobo sauce
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried oregano
Kosher salt
4 cups thinly sliced cabbage
4 radishes, halved and sliced (may use fresh red radishes or beauty heart radishes)
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 Tbsp fresh lime juice, plus lime wedges for serving
12 6-inch corn tortillas
Sour cream, pickled jalapeño peppers and hot sauce, for serving

1. In a 4 to 6 quart slow cooker, toss together the beef, onion, garlic, chipotles, bay leaves, oregano and 1 tsp salt.  Cover and cook until the beef is very tender, on low for 7 to 8 hours or on high for 3 ½ to 4 hours.

2. Twenty minutes before serving, heat oven to 350°F.  In a large bowl, toss the cabbage, radishes, and cilantro with the lime juice and ¼ tsp salt.  Wrap the tortillas in foil and bake until warm, 5 to 10 minutes.

3. Transfer the beef to a medium bowl (reserve the cooking liquid) and shred, using 2 forks. Strain the cooking liquid through a fine-mesh sieve into the bowl and toss with the beef to coat.

4. Fill the warm tortillas with the beef and slaw.  Serve with sour cream, pickled jalapeños, hot sauce and lime wedges.

Recipe borrowed from Easy, Delicious Home Cooking by Real Simple.

The Easiest Ribs You’ll Ever Make

Yield: 2-3 servings

Photo Borrowed from Alexandra's Kitchen 

1½ to 2 pounds pork spare ribs 

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Smoked paprika 

¾-1 cup brown sugar

Heavy Duty Foil

1. Preheat oven to 275°F.

2. Rinse off the ribs and pat dry.  Liberally coat the ribs with the kosher salt, pepper and the paprika.  Pack on the brown sugar.

3. Lay out a piece of heavy duty foil that is large enough to fully wrap the meat in.  If your spare ribs are in more than one piece, you can wrap each piece individually if it’s easier.   Wrap the ribs into a packet and make sure it’s closed on all sides.  Place the ribs on a sheet tray and place in the oven for 2 ½ hours.  

4. Remove the tray from the oven.  Let sit for one hour.  Do not open the pouch during this hour.

5. When ready to serve, reheat the ribs in the oven for about 10-15 minutes at 350°F (this is assuming the ribs have not been refrigerated) or open the pouch, baste the ribs with the juices and place them under the broiler for five minutes.

6. Serve immediately with cornbread and a simple salad for a yummy yummy meal!

Chef Andrea Yoder’s Note: This is the easiest method I’ve ever used to cook spare ribs and they come out tender and delicious.  The prep time is very minimal, so I often prepare these the night before or first thing in the morning and put them in the refrigerator.  If I have enough time in the evening after work, I’ll cook them for dinner that night.  If we’re hungry and don’t want to wait, I’ll heat up the oven and cook them anyway while we’re eating dinner.  Then they’re ready to just reheat for the next night’s dinner!

Recipe adapted from the blog, Alexandra’s Kitchen: alexandracooks.com

Wow, What a Year!

Some of our wonderful crew helping out during Strawberry Days

By Farmer Richard

     We’ve had a roller coaster of challenging weather, but have had mostly successful crops despite the bumps along the road. Good management and good crew have been the key to this year, but there’s only so much you can do when you get the unavoidable 100 year flood! The third of its kind in 8 years!...hmmm. It did help us make the final decision to not farm one of those flood prone farms next year!
     The last couple weeks have been beautiful fall weather! We finished most of our harvest and had plenty of time to plant our 2017 garlic crop. We put a nice layer of mulch on it and are praying for a good crop for next year. We’ve also finished planting our sunchoke and horseradish crops for next year as well as applied compost and planted a rye cover crop on all available acres. Our crew spent quite a bit of time over the last month cleaning up most of the driftwood and rocks from flooded fields. We are ready for spring! We’ve completed all of these fall tasks earlier than usual, so we have also had extra time to clear trees out of the river and cut fallen trees.
     We also have been able to work in the woods! We have 325 acres of woods that have not seen much attention for 50 years until recently. We have a forester working on a management plan for us. He has been walking all our woods, cataloging tree species, designing a network of access roads, and recommending work to be done. It is enormous! The forester has described our woods as typical for most Wisconsin woods, representing 150 years of poor management and over-grazing with livestock. The best trees were removed by a logging company 40-50 years ago and the poor, crooked trees were left to capture the sunlight and dominate. We have many of those old trees, yet many good trees as well. Despite the fact that we have had offers from logging companies to come in and log some trees, we are well aware of their intentions to only take the good ones which will still leave us with a woods full of poor, crooked trees. Their price usually sounds good, but still would never cover the taxes that we have paid and will continue to pay on the woodlands. So we have chosen to decline their offers and take on management of our woods ourselves, which will also help support local jobs and local sales.

Bottle Stopper Top in Cherry Wood

     We have a small bulldozer and a strong desire to connect with our woods. Most woods are moderate to very steep slopes, difficult to walk, hunt, ski or enjoy. So this fall, the last few weeks of mostly warm fall weather, the leaves turning color and then dropping with rain and wind, I have been blessed to spend many hours on our little 80 hp New Holland bulldozer making roads through our woods. Roads that are very challenging to make, requiring a carefully chosen path flagged with yellow ribbons, sometimes weaving a bit to avoid big trees, but having a beginning and an end point. What a fine way to get to know your woods! Admiring the towering old oaks, walnuts, hickory and cherry trees and identifying the smaller trees to make the right decision about what stays and what goes, all the time looking for burls on cherry trees that would make nice bottle stopper tops. Most of our logging energy has gone into salvaging ash trees that have recently been killed by the Emerald ash borer. Ash is a beautiful hard wood. Anyone thinking about a new floor?  Once the logs are sawed, we will have approximately 15,000 board feet of lumber! We could provide you with a beautiful ready to install floor!

     Ah, working in the woods is such a joy. The fall colors, the few remaining birds. Even with the bulldozer running, I saw a beautiful buck deer slowly working his way through the trees below me…and that rabbit that was hiding under the parked bulldozer after lunch was quite the surprise! We love our beautiful woods, and I’ve dreamed about building access roads through it for many years. For the first time we have a road that runs from one end of our farm to the other allowing us an easy-to-walk path to stroll on, enjoying the peace and beauty of our valley and woods. Andrea and I took a little Sunday stroll a few weeks ago, what a fun escape!
     We’ve taken care to immediately seed fescue and clover grass as soon as we finished a section of the road and the fall leaves provided a beautiful mulch. We aren’t doing this just for us, it’s for you too! We hope you will consider a trip to the farm and enjoy hiking or skiing the roads on our farm as well!

The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson

Photo Borrowed from Author Kristin Ohlson's Website

A Book Review By Bobbie Harte

     If you’re reading this newsletter, you already know many of the benefits of organic farming. You intuit that organic practices make tastier food, encourage biodiversity, and promote clean air and water. What you may not be aware of is that soil is connected to climate change, that land mismanagement contributes to 30 percent of the carbon emissions that enter the atmosphere, or that certain farming and land use practices may even reverse global warming. Striking the perfect chord of reality and optimism, Kristin Ohlson’s 2014 book, The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, explores just that.
     In college, I chose Botany 101 to fulfill a five-credit science requirement. I like plants and I wanted to learn more about them, but the class was a disappointment.  We covered the biology and chemistry of photosynthesis, and we grew plants in milk containers and exposed them to different kinds of light. Sadly, I don’t remember anything else. What I really wanted from that class was something like Ohlson’s book: an exploration of the complexity of the soil and its connections to all of life. The book begins with a discussion of carbon farming and goes into the science of soil and photosynthesis. Ohlson effectively presents complicated scientific ideas in a digestible way, and she seamlessly shifts from details to the big picture. With her engaging writing style, Ohlson takes us to visit scientists, farmers and ranchers from Zimbabwe to North Dakota to Western Australia, as well as urban landscape managers in New York, Portland and Boston.
     Healthy soil prevents droughts and floods, purifies water, grows healthy food and sequesters carbon.  Soil is a collection of fungi, worms, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, microarthropods, earthworms, beetles, voles and more. How many microorganisms are in a cup of healthy soil? “More than all the humans who have ever lived,” Ohlson writes.
     Working together, those living things create healthy soil. “Weirdly, we’ve all been schooled in the notion that plants are takers, removing nutrients from the soil and leaving it poorer,” Ohlson writes. “But when plants are allowed to work with their partners in the soil, they’re givers. They feed carbon exudates to the community of bacteria and fungi to keep them thrumming with life and pulling mineral nutrients from the bedrock as well as from particles of sand, silt, and clay….When the predator soil organisms eat the bacteria and fungi, all those nutrients are released near the plant. There’s always enough, unless human or some other force messes up the system.”

Mulch and cover crops can be an alternative
means to amend and protect soil integrity

     How can humans mess it up? Chemical fertilizer is one way. Scientists determined long ago that nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus are essential for plant growth, and most chemical fertilizers are a combination of the three. But scientists have discovered more and more essential nutrients, and healthy soil is not a simple recipe with a list of ingredients and instructions for their combination. Plants obtain the minerals they need through complicated interactions with soil microorganisms. “Even after tilling,” Ohlson writes, “soil microorganisms will still be in the soil, but they aren’t likely to provide these varied nutrients to the plants once the chemical fertilizers are applied. Simply put, these applications interfere with one of nature’s great partnerships. By the terms of this partnership, plants …distribute carbon sugars through their roots to the microorganisms in exchange for nutrients. Fertilizer disrupts this pay-as-you-go system.”  Putting nutrients at a plant’s roots via fertilizer means the plant doesn’t have to give up any carbon to get them, and the soil organisms can’t get enough food, says Ohlson, quoting USDA microbiologist Kristine Nichols. “Without their carbon meal, the mycorrhizal fungi can’t grow and stretch their strands of carbon through the soil. They and the other soil microorganisms can’t produce the glues that fix carbon in the soil and build the aggregates that hold water. They go dormant and given enough stress, can die. At that point, the soil is so depleted of life and structure that a farmer can’t get a decent crop without chemical fertilizers….” If the relationship that makes nutrients available to plants is absent, then farmers must add more and more fertilizer each year to maintain or increase yields, which in turn creates a new set of problems. The nutrients that the plants cannot absorb runs off into waterways, where it causes algal growth. This depletes the water’s oxygen which kills aquatic life.
     As I read this book, again and again I marveled at the interconnectedness of all living things. In 2015, Robert Waldinger gave a TED Talk about the 75-year Harvard study on human happiness. Waldinger is the fourth director of this study which began with 724 men in 1938. Using questionnaires, medical records, blood tests, brain scans, interviews and more, the study continues today with 60 of the remaining men, and has expanded to include wives and some 2,000 children of the original participants. So what has the Harvard study uncovered about the secrets to human happiness? People who are more connected to family, friends and community live longer, Waldinger says. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” This was also the idea that stood out to me most in Ohlson’s excellent book. The key to health is relationships, whether human or microbial. Our future depends on our ability to nurture relationships, and we need to nurture them everywhere.

Note from Farmers Richard & Andrea: Soil is one of the most important components of what we do and is an essential part of life for all of us. Even after all these years of farming we continue to learn more about soil and how to care for it…..and are continually amazed by the complexity of its system. We hope you’ll consider reading this book to gain even just a glimpse into the world of soil and continue to learn along with us. In next week’s newsletter, we’ll introduce you to Sandy Syburg. Sandy is the owner of Purple Cow Organics, the company that makes our potting soil mix for the greenhouse as well as compost for our fields. Sandy is passionate about soil, loves teaching others about it and has even created a “Soil Bus” that he uses in his efforts to spread the good word about soil. He’ll be bringing the bus to our Harvest Party on September 25! See the Harvest Party Invitation sent via email for more details.