Writings From the Farm

Over the last two decades, I’ve spent a lot of time in random places, reflecting on various aspects of agriculture, conservation, and the environment (see blog categories at the left).

Most of what I write lately, focuses on small scale farming, but we still dig things up from the archives related to travel, entomology, my deep love of place, and rural life. Learn more in the various posts, below!

Recent Posts


  • Current Mood, October 2, 2024:  After receiving an email about the onsite certification I have to go through to ensure my egg laying animals are living in a context that provides them “adequate space,” I’m annoyed (again), by the requirements of an animal confinement law that was voted on and passed when I didn’t even…


  • I have a backlog of things I’ve written over the past few years and never posted on my blog. This morning, I was looking for an entirely different piece I had started a week or two ago, about butchering chickens, and found this one in my archive. It seems fitting today, as we are going…


  • Our kidding season started 38 days ago, with our first healthy baby born to Phoebe on January 17. Rachel the Goat followed two weeks later, on February 3, with two healthy babies. I always have to travel in mid-February for work, and luckily, based on dwarf Nigerian gestation and when Bangs paid special attention to…


  • I always thought I loved cheese, but I didn’t realize how much I really loved cheese until I started making it. Much like everything in the food system these days, what you find at the grocery store is such a tiny subset of the diversity that exists among cheeses. The USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS,…


  • Are Boy Goats Smelly?

    Yes, and all the other lessons I’ve learned from my bucks (male goats) in two years. In case you didn’t know, intact male goats are disgusting. They pee on their faces to attract the female goats, which is why they’re so dang smelly, and they have strong opinions about what the ladies should be doing…


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