The Bedford Farmers Market is located at the parking lot at St. Elizabeth Seton Parish (190 Meeting House Road, Bedford, New Hampshire); and the Derry Farmer’s Market is at the municipal parking lot at 14 Manning Street, Derry, New Hampshire. Come check us out!

In case you didn’t know, mankind is busy destroying the world’s topsoil with conventional agriculture. So the idea that we can reverse the process comes as great news. There is also hope that we can sequester a significant amount of carbon this way. Anyway, a big thanks is owed to Abe and Eric for the seminar, and to Doug Hamm for the catering, and to all the attendees.

It is not clear how well this will work in our climate, but we are experimenting to find out. Peter Nash has selectively thinned a piece of his forested land. Our pigs pictured above are happily working on step two: preparing the soil for planting an organic pasture seed mix. It will be some time before we know if it will be possible to graze cattle here. If not, I’m thinking the golf course business looks a lot easier than farming anyway.

The organic feed that we feed to our chickens is a significant part of our costs, so we have been searching for a way to control it. The price of commercial feed (mostly composed of corn and soy) has been on the rise for the past three years.

It sure would be great if we could grow our own feed grains. But the equipment required to do that is not available for hire in our area. Although chicken farms were once plentiful in New England, now they are mostly gone and so is the infrastructure for supporting them.

In fact, our kind of small-scale agriculture is so unusual in the United States that nobody here makes a combine harvester small enough to load on a trailer and drive from field to field (the way you have to in New England, where farm plots are relatively small and scattered). If we want to buy a small combine, our options are antiques or expensive imports.

Nobody knows whether grain prices will continue to rise. Many are predicting lower prices ahead. For now, we will keep buying from the feed store–at the mercy of the markets.

I’m not saying we have all the answers. We don’t. That is why I feel so bad for them. We all are working hard to make food and to protect the environment. You fix one thing and another thing breaks. Plus, nobody is immune to unintended bad consequences. But in our struggle to produce quality food and to protect the environment, we have chosen a very different path. We are not putting chemical fertilizers on the ground at all—not to mention herbicides or pesticides. I look at this picture and thank goodness for that choice.

If you are thinking about signing up for our Organic vegetable CSA, there is a $40 discount for those who sign up and pay in full early (originally, today). This information was buried pretty deep on our organic vegetable ordering page and in the newsletter we sent out last month, and many people did not see it. So we are extending the discount deadline until Monday, March 4.

The discounted prices are $560 for a full share (suitable for a family of 4), and $360 for a half share (suitable for 2 people).

Lots more information is on the ordering page, including our Organic vegetable CSA signup form. But if you are pressed for time and you want to get the discount, you can just put a check in the mail by Monday to Steve Normanton, 226 Charles Bancroft Hwy, Litchfield, NH 03052, or send us an online payment via the Intuit Payment Network (https://ipn.intuit.com/pay/SteveNormanton).

As you can see from this video, feeding 146 head of cattle in the winter uses a lot of labor, equipment and fuel. Even more fuel is used shipping the certified organic hay down from our supplier, Jeremy Smalley of  Transfiguration Farm in Brandon, Vermont. Where we farm, cattle eat about five times their own body weight in hay every winter. So, it would be significantly cheaper for us to truck our cattle up to Vermont and back than it costs to truck the hay one way. We have talked to Jeremy about this. If we brought the herd to the hay for the winter instead of the other way around, his farm would no longer have to buy manure to fertilize his fields. That would be a more sustainable system for him and a lower carbon footprint all around. On the other hand, his place is now a pristine paradise with no fences, no cowpies, and no muddy hoofprints—and tourists spend good money to vacation there. It is unclear what bottom-line impact the cows would have on that business.

While I had the calculator out, I did this math: If you take the total amount of money we spend on the hay plus the shipping, we could afford to ship our herd about 1,250 miles and back each winter. That just about gets us to spending our winters in Orlando, Florida. All we need is a free 150 acre piece of land to graze. Now that sounds like a plan!

Update February 7, 2013: Sure enough, the conference has been postponed. I will post the rescheduling information when I get it.