Windy!

Photo Credit: Penny Gray

It is blowing like crazy out there tonight! 40 mile gusts! And today I went with a group of women homesteaders to the top of Tyree Mountain in Prairie Grove to Audrey Hacker's farm, Healthstock/Horned H Ranch, where the wind always blows. It blows away chicken hoop houses, dries out the soil, and dries out the garden plants. It was cold and rainy and downright uncomfortable, but our spirits were warm with the peace and harmony with the animals and the earth that we felt on their land.

Audrey Hacker is the real deal (and her whole family is too)! They raise their animals in a way that is both deeply intuitive and scientifically precise. On this windy mountaintop it is very difficult to grow vegetables because of the drought conditions, much dryer than surrounding lowlands with significantly less rainfall. They do, however, raise or hunt all their own meat. Their freezer is currently full of venison, pork, and beef and chicken from their farm.

Their beautiful, healthy, completely free-range herd of goats exude a joyful goat-ness. The small flock of chickens keeps the hay bedding where the goats sleep at night in the barn fluffed up and free of parasites. Audrey practices rotational grazing, with each animal either correcting an issue left behind by the previous (ie consuming parasites) or reaping the benefits of an improvement made by previous animals, or being on the other end of either of those transactions for the following species.

Audrey demonstrated and gave detail on making a mineral mix for goats to compensate for the lack of copper, trace minerals, salt, and minerals in general in Arkansas soil. She attributes the hardiness and excellent health of her goats to being free to choose their food over a large area, being in harsh weather, and her supplementing their trace minerals with a mixture of dolomite, sulfur, copper and seaweed that the goats love to eat.

She has a practical, down-to-earth attitude about things such as chicken breeds - use the breeds that are bred for high meat production, rather than heritage breeds which have been of necessity selected for higher egg laying because of the mathematics of operating a hatchery, so therefore meatiness is really hard to find in heritage breeds. However, when the Cornish Cross (the typical hybrid we see in grocery stores) are fed on healthy feed, as well as pasture containing not only a wide variety of greens, but also insects and seeds for protein, fresh air (not ammoniated chicken house air) exercise, and adequate space, they do not suffer the same issues such as heart attack (sometimes called "flip") and broken legs as hybrid birds do when confined, and provide a nice large delicious carcass with high quality meat on the bones.

We were also enlightened about the existence of two great resources:

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/

and http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/magazine.htm

We hope to go back soon and work on projects like lacto-fermenting vegetables, pressure canning, processing chickens, and trimming goats' hooves.