Be the Change

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Sometimes the world seems irreversibly damaged. There’s so much anger and hatred, produced by what I have to assume are (or once were) good intentions. I wonder how we as a society step away from our current loop of confirmation bias and create a new trend of listening. And loving our neighbors. And wanting what’s best for our fellow man because at the end of the day their well-being is ours.

What do we do when we don’t know what to do?

It’s disconcerting to look at the big picture and realize the frame is falling off the wall. How do we even begin to prioritize the seemingly endless list of troubles we’re facing?

The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, right? So we will plant seeds and water crops and breathe. We will wait until the crops are ripe. We will harvest. Then, in a modest, meager attempt to act on our convictions, we will deliver our organic, lovingly-raised, hard-fought-for crops to a nearby minority-dominant community that doesn’t have access to fresh produce. We believe wholesome food can do a body good, and that’s what we have to offer.

This is one small way of acknowledging we come from a place of privilege by being born into white skin, by being raised in safe neighborhoods with decent schools that opened doors to future successes, by never being unfairly suspected of wrongdoing because of the way we look, by being blessed with the opportunity to tend this land in the first place. We acknowledge our privilege in this moment, and we refuse to squander it on ourselves.

How do we already know our plan is a failure of sorts?

We know this is a drop in the bucket. We know it’s more impactful to teach a man to fish than to give him one you’ve already caught. We hope one day our outreach will be a partnership with local communities, through which we work with people to raise their own food, but we’re just not there yet. In the meantime, we’re doing what we can do share our bounty.

The Hog Blog

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Here at Fail Better Farms we raise our hogs like we raise our kids. We give ‘em plenty of space to roam, we feed ‘em as well as we can, and we love ‘em even when they’re gross. This season is our third for raising hogs, and we finally feel like we know what we’re doing, so we figured we’d share what’s been successful.

Rotational Grazing

We practice rotational grazing. This means our pigs and chickens separately spend up to a week on a specific patch of land before moving into a new area. The documented research as well as our anecdotal evidence shows that rotational grazing provides the following benefits.

• If you let pigs or chickens linger on one plot of land for too long, they’ll lay waste to it. If you keep them moving, on the other hand, they don’t pulverise any one patch of land, and the land can rest and regenerate before the next time the pigs are on it.

• It creates a food cycle that benefits our chickens. After the pigs move onto literally greener pasture, the chickens follow behind them. Naturally prone to scratch everything on the ground, the chickens scratch through the pig poo, which helps to distribute this natural fertilizer AND provides a source of protein (any maggots unlucky enough to be laid on the poo) for our birds. Gross, we know.

• Pigs love digging up the ground, eating bugs and roots as they go, so the regular exposure to fresh plots of land makes them happy (& healthy) as clams.

• Because the pigs are contained in a small section of land, they don’t run long distances, which results in tender, tasty meat.

Balanced Diet

In order to get them up to an ideal finishing weight (about 250 pounds), we feed them a locally-milled mixture of whole grains, bruised/ugly fruit from a nearby orchard, and fallen chestnuts in the fall. As mentioned above, they also get a kick out of scouring the ground for bugs and roots.

Attention

We show affection to our pigs regularly. Our newest trio of piglets is still warming up to us, but, as soon as they’re more comfortable, we’ll be petting them and using high-pitched voices to repeatedly ask them, “Who’s da sweetest piggy on da planet?”

We know some folks think it’s weird to treat future food as pets. We’ve been asked often how we can raise an animal, grow to love it, and then send it off to the butcher. Truth? That’s exactly why we feel comfortable with eating our animals. We absolutely know they lived pleasant lives.

A quick explanation of what rotational grazing looks like and why we practice it.

Compost: Nature’s Magic Trick

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When you compost, you’re keeping “trash” out of a landfill, where it would have otherwise gone to die and produce a bunch of methane. You’re enriching your soil and bolstering healthy plants. Composting is like a slow motion version of that magic trick when the magician (nature) puts the cloth over the empty hat (food and yard scraps) and manages to pull out a live rabbit (finished compost). It’s pretty wild, really. You mix stuff together and sit back while nature does what she does best…improves things.

What Composting Looks Like for Us

1. We have a compost can that sits under our kitchen sink. I regularly jam stuff in here that our chickens won’t or shouldn’t eat…coffee grounds, tea bags, egg shells, onion peels, celery ends, and apple cores. (Fun fact: apple seeds contain cyanide. Don’t feed them to your birds.)

2. My husband Aaron uses a leaf shredder to chop up the fallen leaves in our yard. By shredding the leaves before combining everything in the pile, the compost pile will take less time to finish and be easier to flip/aerate. (Check out the compost flipping video at the bottom of this post!)

3. We combine our kitchen scraps with shredded leaves (carbon) and chicken poo (nitrogen) in a homemade compost bin made from t-posts and wire fencing, but you can find a bunch of prefabricated compost bins online.

4. Then we cover the compost pile with a tarp, which is held down with bricks. The tarp helps to keep the moisture level right where it composts best, the dampness of a wrung-out sponge.

5. We monitor the temperature of our compost heaps. (As you can see in the photo below, the ideal temperature range is between 150°F and 160°F, and we’re killin’ it at a solid 154°F!)

6. After about five weeks, we’re able to apply our finished compost to our garden beds.

How We’re Failing Better

We still throw too much away. It’s hard to avoid waste in our package-happy world. We don’t pretend to have all of the answers, but we’d argue composting is definitely a step in the right direction.

Using Bti to Control Mosquitoes

We have quite a bit of standing water on the farm: two ponds, rain barrels, and animal troughs. A lot of water makes for a lot of mosquitoes. In order to control the mosquito population, we’ve had success with using Bti.

What is Bti?

Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelesis. It’s a naturally occurring bacteria that wreaks havoc on the aquatic mosquito larvae.

How does it work?

Well, when a male mosquito and a female mosquito fall in love and decide to start a family, they lay their eggs in water. They start dreaming of a bright future for their young. They paint their little mosquito nurseries, get all their mosquito onesies cleaned and folded just so, and even begin little mosquito college funds. They scope out the humans nearby and envision all the blood within them that their precious mosquito babies will suck. Everything in Mosquito Land seems promising and bright.

Stop it, Mary. Seriously, how does it work?

Okay. I’ll stop. We keep standing water around our property for mosquitos to lay in…on purpose. The water is shaded and provides perfect places for mosquitoes to lay…and for us to kill. We place mosquito dunks in each body of water. The dunks float on the surface of the water, releasing the bacteria and dissolving slowing to ensure the Bti lasts for about a month. As the mosquitoes develop in the water, the mosquito larvae encounter and consume the bacterial spores and eventually can’t digest food, so they die. A tragedy for the hopeful mosquito parents. A win for us.

Is Bti safe?

Not for baby mosquitoes, it’s not! Used as directed, though, it’s perfectly harmless for humans, animals, and even honeybees!

Who needs bug spray when you can prevent mosquitoes from growing to full size in the first place? Use Bti to control the mosquito population and keep your fa...

Earth Day Clean Up

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We’re into taking care of the land, and we want to teach our kids to do the same. We celebrated Earth Day this year by cleaning up litter on the roadway near our farm. If you’re thinking of doing something similar, here are some tips for making this a successful expedition:

1. Wear gloves. Some stuff is gross. Or pointy.

2. Pay attention to traffic, ya ninny. Depending on your location, this might not be a safe undertaking near your house.

3. Make a game of it. Maybe count how many pieces of trash you find? Or try to find a piece of trash in each color of the rainbow? Or create a story to explain how a particular piece of trash found its way to the side of the road?

4. Set a goal. It might be based on time spent or amount of garbage accumulated. Our goal was to fill one trashcan. Once we filled it, we headed home. No guilt about the trash that remained. We would go crazy if we tried to pick up all the litter on our street.

5. Keep it positive. Yes, you could grumble the whole time about how litter bugs are the worst, but that’s just bringing down your vibe. Instead, focus on how much better nature looks when there aren’t a bunch of soda cans and plastic bags strewn across it.

If we all give a little effort, it can lead to big results.

The Free, Effective Answer to a Funky Humidifier

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Because my son suffers from respiratory issues, it’s important that we keep his humidifier clean. Although we were changing the filter regularly and keeping the filter tray clean, I noticed a funky yellow substance building up in the bottom of the water tank. The trouble with our particular model was that I couldn’t open up the water tank to effectively clean it.

What didn’t work for us?

• I tried all sorts of bendy-necked scrub brushes. They worked…but only as far as they could reach. There were those hard-to-reach areas that stayed coated in a yellow film, and the newly cleaned spots just served to emphasize how gross the dirty spots were.

• I tried vinegar and baking soda, which provided me with a fun, explosive mommy playtime in the kitchen. Aaron and the kids ran in after hearing loud pops followed by me whooping hysterically. Maybe the baking soda and vinegar method worked for other people online because their humidifiers weren’t as filthy as mine, but it didn’t make a dent in my yellow scum.

• I tried bleach as a final measure. I figured bleach would lay the hammer down and wipe this bad boy clean. I was wrong. It hardly touched the funk.

What finally worked?

Driveway gravel. As a last-ditch effort, I walked out to the driveway, grabbed a handful of gravel, threw it into the water tank, shook it around until all the gunk was gone, and rinsed out the tank. It was noisy, free, simple, quick, and 100% effective.

Our First Attempt at Using Cloches in the Garden

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Because he lost access to his work greenhouse, Aaron was forced to use every clear, flat surface of our home to start our seeds. As you can imagine, the wall-to-wall seed trays were inconvenient, so Aaron transplanted tomato seedlings from seed trays into the garden this week. We realize this was a bit risky because tomatoes prefer warm weather, but we were able to get the soil temperature under the black row cover to a consistent 65 degrees. In preparation for any last frosts, Aaron set up the caterpillar tunnel AND was extra cautious by using Mason jars as cloches. (Basically a mini greenhouse, a cloch is a bell-shaped glass jar first used in the 1600s to keep individual plants warm.) We were confident that we were doing the right things to protect our plants.

There’s no way we could fail with this, right?

No chance this well-planned, well-executed planting could go awry, right?

Truth: it was a tomato seedling massacre. We experienced a freeze one night, and only two of the 20 seedlings survived. Disheartened and crestfallen, we decided to throw in the towel with this whole gardening gig.

Kidding! We’re gluttons for punishment. Instead, we did some research and realized what we’d overlooked. It turns out, we missed an important step in effectively using cloches. Depressing the Mason jars into the soil wasn’t enough to protect our plants from frost. We should have also mounded up soil/mulch around the base of each jar to prohibit the cold from sneaking in and killing the plants.

Failure is uncomfortable. It’s disappointing to experience lost time and energy. This is where the fail better mindset comes into play. This is when we have to realize we’re learning valuable lessons through each one of our setbacks. The benefit of losing these precious little seedlings this week is that we won’t overlook the importance of mounding up soil ever again.

Planting Potatoes

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If potatoes are as much a staple for your family as they are for ours, you might want to consider planting some. Check out our quick tutorial on how to get the job done with worm castings, compost, drip tape, and landscape fabric.

Kombucha: A Science Experiment on Your Kitchen Counter

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Why did we start making kombucha?

My son suffers from asthma and a slew of allergies, which have resulted in rashes, puffiness, eczema outbreaks, labored breathing, and endless visits with medical professionals. Hours of research and doctors’ visits led us regularly back to the idea that the root of the problem is gut health. Since I happen to be close friends with a generous, helpful kombucha-maker (Shout out, Megan!), the jump to making my own kombucha was inevitable.

What the heck is kombucha, and what does it have to do with gut health?

Kombucha is a fermented sweet tea. I use eight bags of black tea (I like Earl Grey.) and one cup of sugar in each gallon I make. But that’s not all! To ferment your tea you’ll need to add a disc of otherworldly slime called a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast). If you have a friend who makes kombucha, ask her if she’ll help you get started by giving you a layer of her SCOBY. Otherwise, you can buy a SCOBY online or even make one yourself.

The digestive benefits of kombucha reside within the SCOBY, which adds probiotics to the sweet tea. Drinking your probiotics is an effective way to support a healthy gut.

How did we fail better?

From my experience, kombucha brewing is pretty easy to get right. However, I’ve managed to screw it up. Before I made kombucha-brewing a recurring item on my weekly to-do list, I unintentionally allowed the fermentation process to go on for too long, which produced a really vinegary drink that nobody in our household would drink. This wasn’t a huge deal, though. We saved the SCOBY and a cup of the vinegary kombucha and threw them both into a freshly brewed batch of sweet tea. Problem solved.

Also, when I first started making kombucha, I skipped one step of the process entirely. I didn’t realize I was supposed to ferment our kombucha for a second round. Honestly, we all really liked the taste of the single fermentation, and single-fermented kombucha also offers immunity-boosting gut benefits, so it wasn’t really a fail. The second fermentation helps the kombucha to have a delightful fizz to it. I’m still working to perfect the fizz. Sometimes I nail it; sometimes it’s a flop.

Is my son magically healed?

Of course not. He still has eczema flare-ups and other issues because he still has asthma and allergies. However, we’ve noticed fewer reactions since we started being more intentional about building gut health. Like all good motivational speakers these days, we’re seeking progress, not perfection.

Prepping a Garden Bed with a Broadfork

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I realize you’re not all farming in your free time. I know you may not need to personally utilize the information in this video. The reason I’m posting it here is to show you how we prepare our beds for our crops. That way, the next time I give you a butternut squash as a gift, you understand why I’m so dang proud of it.

Thoughtful intention goes into our farming practices here at Fail Better Farms. Research shows that strong, healthy crops are a result of healthy, living soil. I know it maybe feels a little strange at first to think of soil as living, but I promise it’s a thing. Preparing our beds in the Spring with a broadfork rather than a rota-tiller allows the living organisms in the soil to thrive. If they thrive, so do our plants, and so do we.

Watch Aaron broadfork a bed in order to aerate the soil. It's all about giving the earthworms a break, people.

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