Blog Archives: Farm Lifestyle
We have created this blog categorization system as a way to organize and preserve the daily blogs written about our farming life. We hope you find this categorization system helpful.
The following blog entries are all related in some way to the topic of farming lifestyle. They may cover any one or more of the following topics:
stress management
holidays on the farm
healthy living
nutrition
Or they may simply be essays about some other aspect of animal the farming lifestyle. We hope you find something useful here, or at least some pleasant reading.
If there is some way we can improve our archiving system, please Contact Us and we'll take your recommendations into consideration.
Enjoy!
Cancer, Nutrition and Farming
April 12, 2011
Preview for this blog entry:
"I learned a week ago that my best friend has ovarian cancer, discovered during a surgical procedure. As with anyone making that discovery, the news hit all of us really hard. Suddenly everything changed. My friend and her husband realized that they needed to make some fundamental life changes to help her fight her illness and regain good health. Amongst those changes was a newly ferocious desire to dramatically change the way they eat. Their diets had been what I would call “standard American fare”, with reliance upon the conveniences of highly processed foods, a lack of fresh produce, and an over-abundance of “heavy” foods such as meats, sauces, pasta and other high-calorie items. As of that diagnosis, they both decided they wanted to only eat “good” food. But beyond that, they weren’t sure what to do..."
Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.
Pacing Ourselves
February 26, 2011
Preview for this blog entry:
"This time of year is chock full of plans. Plans for the livestock, plans for the fields, plans for the fences and outbuildings and house and woods. Plans are aplenty but alas, time is already short.
The question of putting those farm plans into effect is always an issue of juggling multiple things at once. There’s the ongoing care required for whatever is already on the farm, whether it’s alive or merely infrastructure. There’s the product commitments we’ve made, whether that’s produce for market, young breeding stock ready for new homes, value added products ready to be made, packaged and sold, or written materials for workshops and publications. Add in unanticipated developments like our work with Pamuk, detailed in our previous blog entry, and suddenly life gets real busy. Adding any new plans above and beyond the current issues and unexpected developments very quickly becomes a tricky prospect..."
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Valentine's Day
February 14, 2011
Preview for this blog entry:
"Valentine’s Day came and went here today with some, but not a lot, of fanfare.
Farm life is in some ways very liberating, because we pick and choose the business activities that we get involved in. But once we make those choices, we are tied to the requirements of those activities regardless of whatever else is going on. In the case of livestock ownership, there are chores to be done, pregnant or young animals to be tended and all sorts of related tasks which don’t give us the day off unless we hire someone to do the work for us. With greenhouses and field crops, those plants have to be watered, weeded, fertilized and other tasks which also sometimes can’t wait. That means holidays come and go and we still have work to do..."
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Migraine
February 7, 2011
Preview for this blog entry:
"...I get migraines. The first migraine I ever experienced was after a four-day road trip, driving from our previous home in San Diego, all the way across the country to Philadelphia. I was a Navy wife back then, and we had been transferred from the North Island NAS to the docks in Philadelphia for a refit. I'd driven 12 hours from some motel in Ohio, all the way across Pennsylvania, then threaded my way through Philadelphia, to a small bed and breakfast on the far side of Philly. The next day, we were scheduled to start looking for an apartment. That night, my first migraine developed, probabl a result of the pressures of moving into a new and unfamiliar city. All the pressures of coordinating the move, getting the car packed, moving the few animals we had back then, and lining up a new place to live, finally just boiled over. I spent most of that night trying to hold my skull together so it didn't fly into a million pieces. It was short lived, but some of the most intense pain I'd ever experienced..."
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Our Successful Farming and Ranching Books
We released our very first self-published book. The Chicken Coop Manual in 2014. It is a full color guide to conventional and alternative poultry housing options, including 8 conventional stud construction plans, 12 alternative housing methods, and almost 20 different design features. This book is available on Amazon.com and as a PDF download. Please visit The Chicken Coop Manual page for more information.
Rabbit Colonies: Lessons Learned
We started with rabbits in 2002, and we've been experimenting with colony management ever since. Fast forward to 2017, when I decided to write another book, this time about colony management. The book is chock-full of practical information, and is available from both Amazon and as a PDF download. Please visit the Rabbit Colonies page for more information.
The Pastured Pig Handbook
We are currently working on our next self-published book: The Pastured Pig Handbook. This particular book addresses a profitable, popular and successful hog management approach which sadly is not yet well documented. Our handbook, will cover all the various issues involved with pastured hog management, including case studies of numerous current pastured pig operations. If you have any questions about this book, please Contact Us.
Weblog Archives
We published a farm blog between January 2011 and April 2012. We reluctantly ceased writing them due to time constraints, and we hope to begin writing them again someday. In the meantime, we offer a Weblog Archive so that readers can access past blog articles at any time.
If and when we return to writing blogs, we'll post that news here. Until then, happy reading!