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Weekly Email - July 3rd
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Weekly Email - June 5th
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Cold Wet Days, Bustle of the Farm Continues
If you’ve been to the farm recently, you’ve probably noticed it busier than ever, and through the unprecedented busyness we thank you for your help in navigating the challenges we’re all facing. It’s certainly a different feel coming to the farm these days, but I know that our store and land both are a source of nourishment to so many people right now, physically and internally. For me, it comes from the grounding feeling of life and activity on the farm, that I feel as soon as I set foot in the parking lot.
While the store has been a huge source of our focus these days, we are still carrying ahead with the cycles of sustainable agriculture that we practice and improve every year. With our old laying hens and a new flock growing out in the fields North and West of the main farm, our egg production is increasing, and the regular routines of collecting eggs and moving and feeding the animals have begun. The pigs have returned to pasture as well, and we have over 1,000 meat birds growing; signs that our season has truly begun.
Our staff has grown, and we’re lucky to have Eli, Sabrina and Kayla joining us on the farm crew (Kari will be working on Gaining Ground’s crew until she rejoins us in the fall). They bring both familiar and fresh eyes to the farm, and have been working hard to keep things running day-to-day. Along with the store and animal chores, we’ve been planting potatoes and spring vegetables, as well as flowers and summer crops. Personally, I’m looking forward to the PYO Flower Garden in particular as an uplifting source of beauty, a necessary kind of nourishment, for everyone visiting the farm. Daffodils and peonies which were transplanted last year into the garden’s new home behind the greenhouse have sprung up, joining the greening grasses all around our pastures signaling to us the life which is ready to spring forth as we move towards the summer.
It looks like the cold spell has broken, at least for now, and we’re looking forward to the string of nice days ahead. If you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, you can find the signup form here for our Friday updates on the farm store, and any other relevant farm news. Our most recent newsletter can be found here.
As a non-profit, we serve a mission of preserving local agriculture, following sustainable practices, and educating the community about land and food. That plays out day-to-day in the dance of bodies and minds working in the fields, and the thrum of customers, friends and supporters that make up the community of the farm, tied together deeply by their interactions with this place. For us, that’s a beautiful thing to be a part of, and we’re glad that you are here with us.
With any questions, feedback, or concerns, you can reach us here.
Animals Growing, New Staff and The Farmstead Greens Up
The road of the past month has been long and difficult for all of us. The weather has matched that challenge, filling April with cold and wet days that chill the bone and make it hard to face leaving the house. Amid that, the bustle of the farm has been a core of gratitude for me, an inspiring and warming energy even on those damp days.
Animals out to Pasture
Despite the challenges of this odd time, the farm revs back up for the season.
If you’ve driven down Codman Road this week, you’ll have noticed a surefire sign of spring: it’s not daffodils, crocuses, forsythia or magnolia blossoms (though we have been enjoying the sight of all of those around town too!)…but hanging out on Codman North Field, you may have seen some our familiar mobile chicken coops, surrounded by chickens and Andy the guardian dog, thrilled to be back out on open pastures once again. After a long winter ranging in and around our high tunnel on the main farm property, our birds said their goodbyes to their winter home and headed out into the fields last Wednesday evening. This year was a bit different - we didn’t put out our normal call for a large group of volunteers, like the 60+ folks who gathered to bring the chickens home at the end of last year. Instead it was a small group of farm staff and a board member and his family left to catch the 700-800 hens and put them in their mobile coops to be towed down the road and released later that evening. Still, the work got done, and the season continues!
We’ve also brought some of our piglets out to pasture, and boy are they loving it. Our pigs thrive on fresh grass and woody field edges, where they can root, wallow and play to their hearts’ desire. These young piggies are thrilled to be out from the winter barns and back into the field.
With the chickens out of the high tunnel we are now quickly cleaning up the entire area in preparation for spring seedling production and converting the unheated tunnel into our summer growing space for heat loving crops such as tomatoes, peppers, lemongrass and cucumbers. It’s one of our busiest times of the year with many moving parts, but it’s incredibly fun and rewarding.
In the Farm Store, we’re working with many local farms to ensure we have a steady supply of locally raised and produced products. We’re increasing our meat chicken production, and we’ll also be growing plenty of tomatoes, winter squash, eggplant and other fresh favorites. While our focus is on producing the highest quality pasture-raised meat and eggs, we also know the benefit of being a diversified farm which is why we also have a small fruit growing area including a micro-orchard, some soft fruits, and we are also growing a small amount of staple crops including greens, tomatoes, potatoes, onions etc.. Meanwhile, the Farm Store remains stocked with local grains, pasta, syrup, coffee, and all manner of ethically and locally produced dry goods.
Hundreds of baby chicks have arrived and are happily growing in the brooder barn, and we’re looking forward to our new flock of laying hens next week. The cows are still here on the main property, anxiously awaiting the pastures to green up. Pretty soon we’ll shuffle them off to their summer fields, and the farming season will be back in full swing!
Thanks as always for your continued support during this challenging time, and please let us know if you have feedback for us - we’re always ready to serve, whether it’s trying to source a new local product that we don’t carry yet, or keeping you up to date about harvest times and fresh chicken supply.
Stay healthy, safe and strong, and we hope you can share in some of the joys of fresh spring air, baby animals, and tasty local food. Sending our best, from all of the staff here at Codman Community Farms.
COVID-19 Update: Farm Still Open
During this crazy, new time, we are continuing to provide a source of local food to the community
With the wild shift of the past few weeks, we’ve been working diligently to keep the farm running as smoothly as we can. We’ve seen a huge uptick in people shopping at the farm store, and we’ve adjusted rapidly to keep our shelves stocked with local goods! We’ve added a bunch of new products, and are selling goods from many other local producers whose markets have disappeared overnight, helping them to keep their businesses open.
We are doing our best to keep everyone safe and healthy, and have made some changes to the store in order to promote better social distancing. We’ve created some guidelines asking you to do your part as well - we need our community to work together to keep everyone (especially our farm staff!) safe. For these guidelines, more about our Coronavirus Response, and info about the new, delicious local products we’ve added (think pasta, fish, greens and more!), you can check out our newsletter below:
We will send weekly emails updating you on the farm season and the store as we move through this crisis together. If you aren’t already receiving our newsletter, you can join in just a few seconds!
Thank you for your support during this time, for your care for each other, and your willingness to adapt quickly and readily to this new reality. This crisis is revealing the importance of strong, local sources of food and goods, and we here at the farm are grateful to be a part of such a place.
~ The Codman Farm Staff
Our Freedom Rangers on pasture in 2019
Springing to Life
We’ve had five litters of our heritage piglets this spring on the farm.
Spring is in the air, even if the weather has been a bit unseasonable lately! Though the farm never totally slumbers, things certainly slow down during the winter; now we’re on the cusp of spring and you can feel the dormant life of the farm stirring and rousing itself.
The most obvious signs are the births we’ve had - five litters of beautiful, happy piglets born to our mother sows. You may have heard about them already (or seen the pictures folks have been sharing on social media) and we’re so lucky and grateful to have their presence at the farm. They’re still in pens under the barns (our resident ducks have taken to hanging out nearby) but once they’re big enough to fend for themselves, they’ll move out into pastures and forest borders where they can roam, romp, wallow, and play.
Our first meat bird chicks arrive in just 3 weeks - more life to stir on the farm! Before long our daily chores will be back in full swing. It’s hard to imagine that we’re only a month or so away from our first birds heading out to pasture.
While the sows have been nestling with their newborn piglets in soft hay under the barn, many hardy volunteers have been bustling about the farm, braving the cold (and the warm) temps to harvest that local sugar source - maple syrup! This hardworking team, coordinated by Board Member Steve Hoenig is collecting, hauling, and boiling hundreds of gallons of raw sap into thick, amber syrup. With these unusually warm days it’s been a challenge to predict the sap flow but the rapid swing from frosty to warm days has been really great for getting the sap to flow, and we’ve been gratefully receiving the benefits!
As things get busy, we’re going to need your help too! We have our Spring Work Day coming up soon, and we’ll have to unload our new layers from the truck when they arrive from the breeder - a busy chore of unloading over 1,300 birds from a truck that ventured here all the way from Pennsylvania. Contact me if you’d like to be added to our volunteer list, and we’ll send you more info as we get closer to those dates.
If you have any other thoughts, ideas, feelings,suggestion, opinions, poems, farm-themed jokes or anything else that you’d like to share, you can reach me at jon@codmanfarm.org. In the meantime, thanks for supporting your local farms, and I hope to see you around here sometime soon!
Until then,
Jon Mayer
Education, Outreach and Volunteer Coordinator
Raising Grass: Animals, Agriculture and Regeneration at Codman Community Farms
Heritage breed Red Devon cattle graze on fields managed by Codman Community Farms (pc: Pete Lowy)
We often talk about our rotational grazing practices at Codman Community Farms, and how they are an example of regenerative agriculture - sustainable practices which regenerate the degraded landscape. What exactly does that mean though? What is actually going on at the farm and in the fields - what needs to be regenerated and how are we doing it?
A Kubota tractor used to move mobile coops for laying hens across pastures as part of our rotational grazing plan
For years, Codman was primarily a hay farm. Every year, forage from our pastures was cut, baled and sold off as hay. Tractors hummed along, cutting and moving and removing, but rarely adding anything back into the fields. Imagine, all those nutrients in the soil being transformed into long, lush fields of green by the grasses’ hard work, only to be cut and whisked away each year for decades.
This kind of farming is at heart an extractive operation, much like mining. When we pull iron or coal out of the ground, it doesn’t grow back (at least on any meaningful human timeline), and neither do the soil nutrients that the grasses and clovers transform into leaves every year. Over time, this extraction of nutrients degrades the soil, and the health of the whole ecosystem declines.
As the years went on, and with fewer nutrients in the soil, the pastures Codman managed became less productive; less grass grew, and we were able to cut less hay. When our current farm manager, Pete Lowy, started in 2016, we had to buy in the majority of our hay to feed our hardy cattle through the winter because he quickly realized the soils needed to rest. Environmentally and financially, this was an unsustainable operation - it could only go on for so long, and depended on taking hay from someone else’s fields, in turn depleting nutrients and perpetuating this cycle.
Piglets enjoy fresh pasture as well at Codman Community Farms, and help to root up invasive species as well as fertilize fields (pc: Pete Lowy)
Pete brought to Codman extensive experience in sustainable animal management. He immediately began moving our chickens, cows, and pigs intensively across our fields, often moving them every day or two to fresh grass. This more closely mimics the grazing patterns of animals in natural ecosystems. As the animals move to fresh forage, their manures have time to break down and enter the soil where they are absorbed by the plants’ root systems. This vital rest and recuperation provides time for the plants to gather strength and drive their root systems ever deeper into the soil horizon, cycling fertility back into the soil. This is vital to the long term sustainability of these pastures. One of the key issues of sustainability in our human enterprise is that if we don’t put back what we take out of the earth, we must look farther and farther away for resources, and eventually will have nothing left to support ourselves. However, as seen at Codman, by adding back in the fertility we extract by grazing our animals intentionally, we can find a balance of giving and taking, which nourishes us and the environment.
Round-baling hay on pastures managed by Codman Community Farms (pc: Pete Lowy)
Rotational grazing at Codman Community Farms - the mobile chicken coops (bottom left) move daily, and the dark green squares (top left) are the grasses rebounding with the fresh fertility from the chicken manures. Cattle graze in a wagon-wheel pattern (right), to be followed by the chickens.
Today, grass grows with new vigor at Codman, as anyone who passed by our fields this spring and summer can attest to. Dense waves of green and gold hummed with crickets following the spring rains, and in 2019, we harvested all of our hay needs for our cattle through the winter - 300 round bales weighing hundreds of pounds each. This is directly due to Pete’s rotational grazing plan, and is a clear indicator of how this management style has revitalized the pastures with fresh fertility, and a cycle of growth that is closer to harmony with the natural ecosystem. Far from the standard, this is a practice which has ancient roots in some cultures, but has been largely ignored in U.S. agriculture. However, we cannot keep extracting resources the way we have been. Our farmland is a precious lifeline, the root of our vitality and our culture. Its health is our health - the two are not separate. Local farms like Codman remind us of that fact, as we can see up close the effects of our short sightedness, or of our wise choices in farming. We need to think of our farming not in human lifespans, but in environmental, or even geological time. Only then can we grasp what choices we must make to sustain ourselves.
Assistant Farm Manager Jared Martin stands next to freshly-baled hay from the fields we manage at Codman, Summer 2019 (pc: Pete Lowy)
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We don’t have it all figured out, but we are lucky to have Pete at the helm of farm operations at Codman. Pete didn’t grow up farming and learned all he knows from observation, reading, attending workshops, and watching how the animals interact with their environment. He will be sharing his expertise at a Tri-State Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) workshop in March, alongside professors from Yale and the University of Rhode Island. His leadership, along with our dedicated volunteers and our supportive community, help us to strive for the most responsible, sustainable practices on our farm. The quality of our pasture-raised proteins reflect our dedication to these practices, and you can support us by stopping by our Farm Store as your source for truly locally-raised meat and eggs. If you’re interested in donating to support our mission, you can do so online here. We’ve just announced our 2020 events calendar, so check it out on our website to see what will be going on at the farm this year, and as always, feel free to reach out to us at info@codmancommunityfarms.org.
~ Jon Mayer
Education, Outreach and Volunteer Coordinator