When I got home, I cracked two eggs open for scrambling, and WOW! DARK DARK Orange yolks, as dark as or perhaps darker than any of the duck eggs I've had from Crooked Sky Farms. Incredibly rich in micro-nutrients, and so delicious! I sauteed up some organic portabellos, organic baby spinach, and organic yellow onions in a lil bit of butter, and then added these wonderful eggs. Josh's foreign fowls' eggs are fantastic!
What is "central hug" farming technique?
ReplyDeletetypo. "hub". sorry.
ReplyDeleteDrats. Central hug sounded like a cool new farming technique. We'll have to invent it.
ReplyDeleteI actually don't know what central hub farming means, either.
Central Hub farming, as the rancher explained it to me, is pretty much the opposite of monoculture industrial farming. The farmer has an orchard planted near the farm house; vegetables and small crops, chickens, cows, maybe a few pigs (for waste disposal / clean up) and 2 or three rotated cash crops. The farm house and barn are the "central hub" - as opposed to large scale industrial farming where cattle are jammed together, chickens crammed into light-less aircraft hangers, or monoculture GM hybrid seed crops are planted en masse, with liberally sprinkled pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers (petroleum). Down in Wilcox, enroute to Tuscon, there's several small farmers who do sustainable. targeted farming & ranching. Josh's and Double Check, being 2 of them.
ReplyDeleteSorry, no hugs, but the eggs & steaks ARE delicious!
Nice term. Makes sense. But kind of strikes me as odd that what should be the normal, intuitive practice requires a special term. What's normal has been inverted so that industrialized agriculture is not considered strange, but a farmer in a farmhouse surrounded by a manageable and diverse set of livestock and crops requires a special designation.
ReplyDeleteThe rancher told me that their margins are very narrow. When I told him how delicious the ribeye I'd had the prior week was (as I was buying 5 more pounds of ribeye) he said to me "we used to slaughter the cows at 700, 750 lbs, because we were desperate, but now we fatten them up to over 8 or 900 and I think it's improved the quality of the meat". I told him that Might be true, since the steaks do seem to be incrementally juicier and less tough over the 3 years I've been buying from him, but part of that might be my grilling and preparation techniques (tenderizing, marinading, rubbing, etc) have also improved. However, the Double Check double rib eyes yesterday were "as is", no prep other than a 400F grill with flames turned down to the bare minimum.
ReplyDeleteWatching Weight of the Nation, and listening to sustainable growers, vegetable farmers, small family farmers, and ESPECIALLY dairy farmers, I think they are barely holding on by their fingernails, not richly prospering like the corporate behemoths who rule the land scape. It's a sad and creepy world of corporate mega-consolidation we live in today, unlike any other in the history of man-kind.