Our first stop on the CFSA Farm Tour was Wells Branch Farm in Alamance County. Wells Branch is a combination of Braeburn Farm and Cane Creek Farm. The farm consists of roughly 500 acres built up over time with the purchase of fourteen smaller farms. The owner of Braeburn, Charles Sydnor, is working on getting a conservation easement for the farm in order to protect it from ever being developed. Charles is also involved in restoring the wetlands on the farm using wetland mitigation resources. This is basically a trade from a developer looking to build in a wetland area to a place in need of restoration. The result is, in theory, no net loss in wetlands.

We started our tour on the back of biodiesel burning hay wagon, winding up and down through pasture roads and crossing through small rocky creeks. We were accompanied along the way by various sizes of dogs, all of which wanted to get a ride on the wagon.

Our first stop was the farm store where both Braeburn and Cane Creek sell their meats out of a walk in freezer and walk in cooler. They offer grass-fed beef, pork, sausage, hotdogs, chicken and turkey. Cane Creek focuses on the pigs, chickens and turkeys. They raise heritage breeds of animals, including the Ossabaw Island Hog, which is descendant from the hogs left by the Spanish in the 1500’s on Ossabaw Island in Georgia. Cane Creek Farm is run by Eliza MacLean who also runs the store.

The next stop was to the goat pasture where a bunch of new kids were running around with their moms.

I’m not sure how old the kids were, but they weren’t all that big.

Goat kids are sickeningly cute especially when they are well taken care of and allowed to run around like the crazy animals that they are.

You can see that they really aren’t very big yet -

I got to see a few minutes of head-butting between a couple of goats.

Last stop was by the grazing cow herd. These are part of Braeburn’s grass-fed New Zealand Red Devon herd. While we didn’t come across any, Charles said that donkeys are used as guard animals on the farm.

The cows are rotated daily to one of the thirty fifteen-acre pastures. The pastures remain ungrazed for twenty-nine days in between sessions.

Charles passed along a few interesting beef facts -

• One half of every cow will become ground beef.
• The term “ground beef” means that the beef came from a single cow while “hamburger” means a mixture of meats from lean milk cows and the fat from feedlot cows.
• Out of a 1200 pound cow only eight pounds will be tenderloin, which explains the price of that cut.

All of the meat products from the farm are available at the farm store, Piedmont area restaurants and farmer’s markets as well as Chatham Marketplace. Hopefully we will bring in some of their products to Tidal Creek as well.

This past weekend Noel, Danielle, Mike and I went to the 13th Annual CFSA Farm Tour. We drove up Saturday night to the land in Silk Hope, ate dinner at Chatham Marketplace and sat in the camper trying to figure out which farms to visit.

The choices came down to our individual interests and proximity of those farm choices to each other. The proximity issue was important since the 35 farms on the tour were spread out over several counties. Our hope was to visit four farms in three counties.

Since we have seen vegetable production in full scale operation as part of our jobs and lives, we decided we wanted to visit farms that incorporated animals, passive solar greenhouses and alternatives to the things we see everyday. We went over the maps and each made our choices. With little debate we picked four farms that were pretty close to each other and fairly diverse. After the choices were made there was nothing to do but make fun of each other.

Saturday night was the full moon, but it was obscured right after I took this picture and didn’t return. The rain came soon after. We could faintly hear the Shakori Hills Festival going on nearby as the thunderstorm came through.

We fell asleep in the Wolf Den to the pounding of rain.

Sunday morning was a chance to explore the new growth around the farm. The spring oats that we spread out a bit ago were a few inches high. It looks like it is going to take. The yellow clover was harder to figure out, and we aren’t sure what will happen with it.

The mint patch near the house was already a few feet high.

Wildflowers were coming up everywhere. I haven’t identified anything yet since I forgot to take pictures of the leaves, which is where my key likes to start.

Noel thinks this is a Quince tree.

The picture below is Cedar Apple Rust (Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae), and its presence makes the poor health of the surrounding apple trees make more sense. The fungus needs both cedar and apple trees to complete its life cycle. This cedar tree is about ten or so feet from an apple tree. The only source I could find on the edibility of the fungus simply said, “I have no information on the edibility of Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae.” Thanks.

I find new things every time I visit the farm, and of course I had to set up a nice still life with the note I scrawled in the lean to when we bought the place -

I will have reviews of the four farms from the farm tour coming up over the next few weeks…

The 13th Annual Piedmont Farm Tour is this weekend, and I’m going to be hitting a few farms on Sunday with Noel and Danielle. I haven’t been to a farm tour although I have always wanted to.

The farm tour is put on by Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA). CFSA does a lot of work to promote, develop and sustain local and regional sustainable food systems in the Carolinas. Their vision:

Healthy and thriving communities of farmers and consumers in the Carolinas are supported by local and organic agricultural systems that are environmentally responsible, economically sound, and socially just.

Hopefully the next few posts will be all about the farms we visited with details about how the farms themselves fit in with this vision.

Oh, and this year CFSA is doing an Eat Carolina Food Challenge. They are looking for folks to participate during the week of July 7th through 13th. You can sign up by going to the website.

There are certain things that are burned into a person’s memory, things that you might not think about for a very long time but all of a sudden show up in a dream or are triggered but something random. Today I thought about something I haven’t imagined for probably ten years. It was a grocery store I had never visited and yet its address is tattooed on a brain cell somewhere in the grainy trenches.

J&E Grocery was a store in Rochester, New York (my web research says it closed in 2001 after 37 years in operation), from all accounts an average small store with a focus on cheap specialty meats and canned goods. What makes the whole thing stick in my brain is the very low budget commercials they ran weekly on the local television stations. The commercial always featured the same mumbling guy in a butcher apron calling out the week’s specials. Ham hocks, fatback, and cow tongue along with Blue Boy succotash and creamed corn. At the end of the ad he would say something like “so come on down” to J&E Grocery, 139 (slight pause) Reynolds Street.

My brother and I would make fun of the commercials all the time, and it was impossible to say J&E Grocery without saying the full address. It was something about the guy’s voice in the commercial that made it impossible to separate it. There are many, many people that I know who grew up with these commercials as well as a handful of bloggers who have had the same observation. This was, in my opinion, a genius piece of marketing. This corner store with a limited advertising budget puts out these crappy ads with crappy pictures and with a guy you could barely understand, and here I am writing about it a million years later. Most businesses only dream about having that kind of marketing meme in place. When you said the name you had to say the address…

My brother and I made several parody videos around the J&E theme, purporting to sell everything from used ashtrays to meaty neck bones. I still have one of the parodies somewhere, on a VHS-C tape that also contains footage of me and him shaking the paw of a recently deceased woodchuck, making a claymation video to the song Spoonman and arguing about who was going to make the sandwiches on a particular day. My brother said “make yer own sammich” through a mouth stuck together with peanut butter. That became another J&E moment.

If you are from anywhere near the Rochester area and of my vintage, you will remember some great commercials from Jim “The Hammer” Shapiro, Joel Hyatt (”I’m Joel Hyatt, and you have my word on it), The Record Archive, Great House of Guitars, The Penny Arcade and Buzzo Music (watch Big B Buzzo eat corn)… Buzzo Buzzo Buzzo. And of course J&E. Let me know if you remember any of these…