We recently began using the phrase One of America's Most Sustainable Farms to capture the essence of our values and what we are trying to accomplish at Nature's Harmony Farm.  I received an email on Facebook asking what we meant by that. This new FAQ addresses this question.

As it says, of course there is no one "most sustainable" farm. The goal is to aspire toward sustainability and encourage others to do the same. I'm glad that the moniker has encouraged questions and conversation so that we can each pursue lasting farming models for our local markets.

With half of 2010 now behind us, I've found myself recently pondering our accomplishments thus far this year, and thus far in our progression of developing a completely sustainable family farm.  I'm a little surprised that thoughts of accomplishments even crept into my consciousness, as Liz and I are usually obsessed with the unchecked items on the to do list rather than the crossed off items.  Of course, there are numerous unchecked items and, of course, for every one checked off a new one (or three) appears.  But by now we're no longer rookie farmers, and we know that having an ongoing list of priorities is just a normal part of farm life. We're getting comfortable with it.

I think I started thinking about this during recent deliveries or during conversations at farmers markets.  With our blog and podcast, we're fortunate that quite a number of people are interested enough to keep up with us.  They ask us questions, feel like they know us and (my favorite part) share with us their stories of how they're attempting to make cheese, or raise some chickens or make their own bacon.  We really treasure those relationships we're forming.  But hearing about each of those things, and knowing that many of them became inspired to partake in those activities in part because of us, reminds me that we had no experience in any of those areas not too long ago. And that got me reflecting more on what we HAVE accomplished...if only for a moment, rather than what we HAVEN'T.  Here's a recap of some items this year.  Some of the items may seem redundant or repetitive, but we had to address them each individually to get where we are.  Many of the bullets below include links to blog posts giving more detail about the accomplishments.

2010 What We've Accomplished

So far this year, we have:

1. created and opened a Grade A dairy, having had no previous experience.
2. established a herd of 12 Jersey cows.
3. successfully implemented once-a-day (OAD) milking, creating less stress on the cows and more freedom for us.
4. set up a commercial, inspected raw milk cheese making operation.
5. learned the art of cheese making and successfully made several fine cheeses; most notably blue and Gruyere.
6. built an addition to the cheese room to separate the make room from the handling and aging rooms.
7. hosted several sold-out events to reconnect consumers with food, including whole hog butchering classes, chicken butchering classes, curing classes and, later this month 25 people will come from as far as California, Michigan and New York for our Farm School:Business Class.
8. repaired roofing and added windows to brood house, enabling us to successfully hatch and brood thousands of chicks/poults thus far.
9. gained tremendous experience in setting and hatching eggs for numerous types of poultry, and hatched out thousands thus far, eliminating the need from buying (and shipping) poultry from far away hatcheries.
10. grew out and sold as stewing birds hundreds of roosters that we hatched on farm last year, saving lives that would have otherwise been wasted.
11. assembled three 96' hoop houses and created winter housing for all laying hens, as well as transition housing for turkeys in between the brood house and pasture.
12. strengthened a breeder flock of heritage turkeys, hatched out almost 400 on farm and began offering potential breeders and poults to other local farmers.
13. made progress in establishing our own hardy meat chicken breeds and hatched out several different breeds (thousands of chicks) in 2010, and continue to monitor in pursuit of the right breeders for our environment.
14. successfully transitioned away from chicken tractors (see are chicken tractors inhumane?) to a free-range pastured poultry model that has, in my opinion, worked out MUCH better for the birds and for the land than I had envisaged.  The biggest drawback is at separation and catching time.
15. tended to and harvested heaps of strawberries (and made strawberry fruit leather!) from our 200 plants, all while trellising our thornless blackberries which are now bearing.
16. improved systems (thanks to apprentices) for easily catching and loading pigs from most anywhere on the farm.
17. began and executed a bi-weekly podcast in an effort to inspire others and increase awareness of sustainable farming and local food.
18. created a new website with improved interactivity and tutorials in an effort to accomplish the same.
19. developed two wonderful apprentices who have chosen to stay on farm for a second year, concentrating on more specific enterprises such as pastured poultry breeding and raising, and farmstead cheese making.
20. solved the problem of frozen spigots in winter!
21. learned how to dehorn (we don't like it) and bottle feed calves (we do like it!).
22. have completed clearing of 30 acres of the adjoining 50 acre tract so that we can A) expand grazing next year and B) begin growing all of our own feedstuffs, eliminating ALL off-farm inputs.
23. streamlined on-farm poultry processing to the point where it can often operate without Liz and/or I being there.
24. grew from two to eight hives of bees.
25. bred in resistance to infectious sinusitis, blackhead and mycoplasma in our poultry flocks.
26. successfully implemented multi-species grazing with sheep/cows/pigs by introducing Large Black grazing pigs to our farm.
27. transitioned all grower pigs to whey and natural forage, providing them with non-soy based organic feed produced 100% on-farm.
28. bred maternal instincts back into Berkshire sows.
29. finally procured a box truck for deliveries, a PTO mixer grinder for mixing our own feed and a PTO spreader for spreading compost on the pastures.
30. demonstrated that male pigs can be raised without castration, effectively showing that boar taint is a myth and traumatic, painful castration to newborn male pigs is unnecessary.
31. raised two litters of LGD puppies and placed on farms from Louisiana to Georgia to Virginia to Rhode Island.
32. finally, and most importantly, Liz and I found two days for ourselves to go camping in June for our first time off together in 7 months!

Of course, most of these are just the check list accomplishments we attended to, and don't address normal, day-to-day stuff such as deliveries, processing, breeding, farrowing/calving/lambing/hatching, gardening and so on.  As always, it's been busy, but we're getting a lot of important things behind us, and I believe the list of things ahead of us is finally shorter than the list of things behind us.

We'll see.