Haverford House

Here is the sign for the Co-op that we visited for one of our farm tours.

A refrigerated truck for shipped fresh produce!

Peaches right from the farm – sooo juicy, like candy.

The farm owner and 2 of his 11 kids!

Baby turkeys!! Aren’t they CUTE!?!?!? As you can see, they live in a clean, well-lit environment, and will have even more space to roam once they get a little older and their immune systems are more fully-developed. They will be full grown just in time for Thanksgiving …   … well, they will have had a good, naturally-raised, free life, and then they can RIP.

Baby pigs, just a few weeks old, too cute for words! Again, pasture-raised. Pasture-raised doesn’t actually mean “free range” or rather, vice versa. “Free range” laws include enough loopholes that farmers and agro-businesses can get away with claiming that their animals have “access to the outside” even if that space is only a small window! Buying pasture-raised and locally helps ensure that the animals truly were raised naturally, humanely, and more sustainably.

I took SO many pictures of these piglets – they were just TOO cute … in real life, they were the size of a small cat or maybe a large rabbit – so very tiny, especially in comparison to their mother!

Here was one of the “mom” pigs – called a sow in farm-talk. Did you know that pigs are smarter than dogs?

Teenager pigs, lining up for their photo-op. Cute, no? They were indoors (in a well-lit, well-ventilated barn) because pigs do not do well in heat during the day – they dislike it. They are turned out to pasture at night.

Two Amish boys with their puppy – a Blue Heeler named Katie. When she gets older she might help herd and guard the cows!

We all remember those books we read when we were little about life down on the farm – with all the baby animals! Here are mother and son. Unfortunately, most of the meat and vegetables we consume are grown very differently from the way those children’s books depict them. Instead of an idyllic farmstead lifestyle (though, as the movie “FOOD, INC” points out, the farm is an idyllic pastoral icon used on many foods we find in the supermarket), much food comes from factory farming and big agro-business. For more information on this issue, I highly reccommend the books “FAST FOOD NATION”, “THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA”, and the new documentary “FOOD, INC.”

Thoreau said that a weed is a plant whose virtue we have not yet identified. I believe this. The plant in the picture above is grown as a “cover crop” that helps prevent erosion and recycle nutrients in one farmer’s field. Having cover crops reduces the need to till, which actually damages soil. Additionally, many weeds are able to send a tap root farther into the soil than normal crops, bringing nutrients that our crops need to the surface so that our crops can feed on them even though they have shorter roots than the so-called “weed.” Healthy soil, one farmer told us, should look like “Jurassic Park” under a microscope – with different microbes and bacteria and nutrients crawling all through it.

Me down on the farm. One farmer let us pick some of his yummy sweet corn (there is a technique to picking corn which he taught us and, I am proud to say, I mastered) and tomatoes!

This bird-brain (oh I am so punny) is a guinea fowl with a personality – he or she (the farmer has no one who can deterime the sex of guinea fowl) likes to escort cars to and from the parking lot, which he or she has adopted as his or her territory.

He or she is also very vain, prefering to spend time looking at his/her reflection in the hubcaps and occasionally pecking at them.

Sausage, anyone?

This is the room where they make the cheese!!

Where they age the cheese! Oh cheese … I was in a room with wheels upon wheels of it. YUMMY.

I cannot begin to tell you how yum this all was.

This is bleu cheese, aging. It looks gross now … but think about how good it tastes …

I took SO many pictures of baby cows. SO cute.

When we were in the cow barn, someone started talking about hamburgers. How horribly insensitive.

You should buy all your milk products from this farm. The cows are SO well treated that they even have this little back-scratcher for when they get itchy, a la a car wash (er, a cow wash).

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 8:44 pm by Sarah Mills '09 and is filed under What's New. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.