Fat and purring, he lies in the sunbeam. His pure white underbelly billows and slivers of pink flesh peek through the fur.  His eyes, mere slits, bear the heavy satisfied look of one who recently tossed back a few shots of tequila, polished off a Porterhouse dripping with grease and butter, then finished the meal by lapping up a bowl of heavy cream.

Tomorrow has no meaning for this cat and yesterday doesn’t ring a bell.  This moment and maybe the next are enough.  This particular beam of sunlight and the faint taste of a meal lingering on the back of his tongue consume every part of his attention.

Being near such complete satisfaction is remarkably satisfying.  I am content to sit and observe this feline Buddha, noting changes of breath and thrilling to tiny movements as if every lazy stretch of the paw brings this cat (and his audience) one heartbeat closer to Nirvana. It is performance art and I don’t want it to end.

I have an itch.  I scratch it.  Zen zapped.

The world changes when I move my hand and the curtain collapses on this one-cat show.  Self-satisfied lizard eyes snap open and flash arrogant yellow once again, demanding to know my intentions. In no uncertain terms he communicates his disappointment in my inability to grasp the principles of the universe and I understand that at this exact moment it has occurred to him that I may be unworthy.

I attempt to placate this fake-Buddha by scratching his chin to remind him that he, too, appreciates a good scratching.  He’s not buying it.  You just don’t get it, he says. With enormous dignity, he heaves his corporal frame to the floor and stalks out of the room, his twitching tail giving me a piece of his mind.

He’s going to check out his food dish.  I know this and he knows this, but we have to pretend his superiority.

Charlatan, I hiss.

I’m sitting on 28 dozen eggs our chickens laid in just the last week and brooding over how to sell them. We have a small loyal weekly client list already, but our hens matured to full production recently and my refrigerator is a wall of egg cartons.

For a farmer, the most incredible aspect of an egg might not be its edibility but its profitability. Finding our chicken eggs each day is the one chore that brings a little cha-ching with it – that is when you can find them. We’ve had longer client lists many times, but when I can’t find the eggs, I can’t sell the eggs. Also, it’s important to note that when I talk about profitability on Erma’s Farm, our idea of profitability is measured, quite literally, in chicken feed. We’ve gone from finding a dozen eggs daily to four dozen, which only means that the chickens are able to foot their bill at the grain mill each week as well as treating the goats and Emus to dinner.

Collecting eggs reminds me of collecting coins in a Mario Brothers game; sometimes you can skip along and grab egg after egg until your basket is full, but usually the chickens make you jump through a few hoops first. My favorite time is winter when the snow is deep and the birds have to stay inside. Although I still end up on my hands and knees gathering eggs, at least I know where to find them.
Because we let the chickens and turkeys outside in just about every other weather situation, I’m usually less lucky than Luigi and more like the bumbling Inspector Clouseau slyly sneaking up on chickens hiding in the garden in an attempt to catch them laying an egg.

Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind being less a cartoon character on my own farm. Therefore, in an effort to redress the seasonal instability between our egg availability and egg customers, we’re reviewing movable fencing options for this summer.

Meanwhile: Is anyone in the mood for Quiche? Egg Salad? Lemon Meringue Pie the color of Marigolds? Email me! ermasfarm@gmail.com

High Fives go to our flightless Emu friends, Squiggy and Jax, for successfully hatching out two beautiful baby Emu chicks in March.  In December we began squirreling away their gorgeous eggs in an incubator we kept in the house, but when Jax, the male, began finally sitting on Squiggy’s eggs in January, we let him take over.  One of the ten eggs we had inside attempted to hatch but sadly failed.  In late February Jax stood up to show me that one of his five eggs had broken and he let me remove a fully formed dead chick.

Despondent, I waited another two weeks before finally deciding that I needed to remove the eggs from under Jax.  The male Emu sits on the eggs, not eating, for an incubation term of approximately 50 days and I hated to see him waste away pointlessly.

Jax kept his Emu chicks warm under his feathers and hidden from view.

I knelt down and slid my hand under his hot underside to pull out an egg.  Jax looked annoyed.  I dove in and extracted another egg.  When I went for the third egg my hand stumbled across a warm little feathery bundle and while my mind processed what I was feeling, Jax partially rose to expose both his hostility for my stupidity and the most adorable and miraculous live baby Emu chick.  I was able to snap some quick pictures while he contemptuously used his long neck and beak to roll the eggs back under him.

Because I seem quite incapable of optimism, the following week I resolved that I must remove the remaining three eggs.  That same day I discovered a second glorious chick nestled into Jax’s feathers.  (The final two eggs were duds, so the cup really was half empty.)

Both chicks have now joined Jax and Squiggy in their tireless march along the fence lines of the pastures in search of predators and treats.

The baby Emus are perfect miniatures of their parents except that they are vastly more attractive. Young Emus are crisp and dapper with spotted heads and black and cream striped bodies and grow into their dust mop of feathers as they mature.

The baby Emus are perfect miniatures of their parents except that they are vastly more attractive.  Young Emus are crisp and dapper with spotted heads and black and cream striped bodies and grow into their dust mop of feathers as they mature.

I love the grid.  I LOVE it. The only way I’m ‘getting off the grid’ is if somebody unplugs it and then rips my iPhone from my cold dead hands.  How Charlton Heston felt about guns?  That’s me with conveniences like internet and drive-thru Starbucks.

What I’ve learned since losing my job, however, is that almost everyone I know believes that my goal in life has long been to be a Homesteader.  This, my dear friends, is completely insane.

Homesteaders are hard-working disciplined folk who are motivated by ideas far stranger and infinitely more exhausting than any I’m likely to hatch.

According to Merriam Webster, the original term Homesteader was used to describe “a piece of government land that a person could acquire by living on it and farming it when the western part of the U.S. was being settled.” The modern Homesteader is not merely one who owns a tract of land and a makes a home on it, but one who strives to live a life of self-sufficiency by deriving as many products as possible from the land to live on.

In other words, and I say this from the bottom of my heart, a Homesteader is a lunatic.  Anybody who wants to work that hard must be half-cracked.

And yet, I find myself making this argument against Homesteading while one part of my brain considers whether or not I should pick and pickle some green beans this afternoon for fun cocktail garnishes and if those giant red semi-hot peppers I picked yesterday would freeze well for a chicken tortilla soup this winter.

Believe me; I harbor no particular love or attachment to these beans I planted.  I could turn my back on them and let them grow fat, tough and die without another moment’s thought. The thing is, to me this sounds like a pleasant afternoon activity. By my own definition, this shows that I’ve got some potentially clinical cracks.

I’m not, however, planning to pick and pickle beans because the government and/or big business is trying to murder me with poisoned food at the grocery store.  And, by the way, I’m definitely not planning to pick and pickle green beans because I’m preparing for an undefined but soon-to-come end time where civilization as we know is indefinitely cancelled mid-season.

Note: Our small farm is not in preparation for a zombie apocalypse.

Unfortunately, when I hear the word “homesteader,” I think of people whose motivations for ‘going back to the land’ are painted with paranoia or are doused with a fanatics fervor.

Ironically, I love a good conspiracy theory. I’m pretty sure the FDA and big business ARE permitting the sale of foods that are killing us.  It seems obvious that nearly everything in the middle isles of the grocery store is bad for you, fast food probably does lack any nutritional benefits and poisons sprayed on fresh food will also poison us… eventually.  I just can’t get myself into hysterics about it.  There are plenty of ways to make better choices without having to work your fingers to the bone.

I’m also my father’s child. He was raised in the Great Depression and his family was one of those trying to steal coal to stay warm instead of those who were able to get a steal on cheap hired help. His stories of eating lard and onion sandwiches were greasily imprinted upon my imagination at an early age and were deeply influential in my desire to have a farm. Even though I personally have never known a hungry day that wasn’t a self-imposed scheme to lose weight, it became my goal to live out Scarlet O’Hara’s vow:  “As God is my witness … I’ll never be hungry again!”

(Hmmm.  Melodramatic impulses, in a variety of costumes, appear to drive ALL small farmers. It seems I should stop throwing stones from my half-cracked glass house.)

Accidentally Very Busy

Getting a few backyard chickens is apparently a slippery slope for those of us with Melodramatic Impulses.

Having a small ‘hobby’ farm means that I’ve accidentally found myself very, very busy doing a lot of activities that are suspiciously similar to a Homesteader.

When you milk goats you get milk.  When you have raw milk you make cheese.  When you plant and weed your garden weekly you end up with lots of vegetables… and you can’t let all of that hard work go to waste so you spend hours more in harvesting, cooking and preserving them.  When you like beer, well, why not brew it yourself?  And, when you have free range chickens, you spend your time hunting for eggs and chasing hawks. Then there is the basic maintenance and cost of feeding the livestock.  Who wouldn’t decide to grow your own animal feed to save money?

And…when you live in the middle of a windy sunny country field, it seems only sensible to begin daydreaming about wind and solar energy.

(Wait, Grid!  Don’t worry darling!  We’re not breaking up with you anytime soon. I’ll always stay in touch, you massive hunk of all-night industrial power you, no matter what.)

Granger taking a well-deserved afternoon siesta.

Homesteaders? Not us, pal, no way.

Luckily, what will save us from a speedy spiraling descent into the madness of self-sufficiency is our organic laziness. We are not hard-working lunatics, we lack discipline and work our fingers to the bone only on special occasions. But, we’ll just possibly get there, one day, {sigh} quite accidentally.

Two things happened this past month that have taken me from being a muck-boot wearing hobby farmer to a farmer up to their boots in muck.

I guess to make it more literal, there were three things.

1. We bought four goats to add to our farm.
2. I lost my job the same week.
3. It rained most of the month of June.

You’ve perhaps seen the photos of the glorious glamorous Miss Hibbitz the Duroc Sow, but you have not known how I paid to feed Hibby each week.  Ironically, I’ve worked for a Lubavitcher Rabbi for the past 12 years.  It worked out well; I kept my bacon separate from the lettuce the Rabbi provided and worked tirelessly to help him market and communicate Judaism to the community.  Here’s a tomato: I’m not Jewish and I’m not religious.

While Hibby grew and grew, so did the Rabbi’s Chabad House.  My skill set now fails to cover all that they needed, such as the ability to count and keep track of money, and so they decided to restructure and hire somebody who could Do It All.  I wish them well and much mazel.  Obviously there is so much more to say about it, but… goats are just more interesting.

Glorious Gwyn, shouting out a fire, brimstone and hail litany of diseases of the goat.

If you know anything about goats, which in June I did not, you will know that bringing four goats into a fledgling farm changes everything.  Apparently they have a great knack for getting sick and dying. Gwyn the Goat Lady, who has raised goats since the 1970’s, recited the long litany of diseases and disorders to me while she installed the goats in their new pens at our farm.  Rain was thundering down on the metal barn roof so she had to raise her voice to a shout so I could hear her. I was petrified.  I still am.  Each morning and evening, when I waltz through the doors with the milking pail, I am inwardly steeling myself for the worst even as I call out merrily to my new friends.

We have two already-milking Alpine does, Myra and Ballerina and two bucks born in March,  One buck, Jay Joplin, is a sweet Alpine who will one day be the daddy to these lovely ladies’ kids.  Silent Bob McGee is the other buck, a Saanen who we bought to keep the other buck company but who came un-wethered and is now destined to grow into a giant white stud-muffin who will demand that we buy a pretty Saanen doe for his pleasure next year.

Ballerina, sweet Ballerina.

Within the first week I had damaged Ballerina’s teat with my clumsy stubby stupid little hands, which led to blood in the milk and the immediate onset of the dreaded mastitis.  Gwyn, the patron saint of all goats and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, came immediately.  She came every day for five days in fact, driving an hour each way, to administer the injections Ballerina needed to recover.

In my defense, well.. have you ever milked a goat?  Prior to the goat’s arrival, I had not.  It turned out to be exceedingly difficult to get the milk out of those swollen udders.  After milking for 20 minutes I could still see shimmers of stainless steel at the bottom of the bucket.  When Gwyn tapped the teats a quart of milk gushed out as though she had pressed the foaming nozzle on the espresso machine.

Gwyn shared two bits of information with me that week that I find interesting.  A)  Gwyn had entered competitions at one point in her life.  She won first place repeatedly.  B) Once she had a family come to visit her goats and a toddler, just a year and a half old, had slipped away from the group.  They found her under a goat on the milking stand and… she had milked the entire doe out.

This is not the baby in question. Thanks Google.

So, although I am pleased that I am being taught by a grand-champion goat milker, ultimately, a baby can do it.

I might not have a job, but it is raining buckets…. of milk.

Matchmaker Profile:  Miss Hibbitz

Plus-Sized Female Seeks Long-Term Relationship

Profile:

My friends describe me as a pretty, non-conventional, good-natured girl who has a dark sense of humor and a penchant for solitude.

They have a few things right.  Except for a birthmark on my shoulder, I am in perfect condition.  I blushingly admit that I receive compliments on my corpulent size continually.  Born and raised on a farm, I have a practical and pragmatic outlook on life and am not definitely not one of those types of females who refuse to get their hands dirty.  (Although, don’t worry – I’ve been told that I clean up extremely well!)

And yes, probably another result of being raised on a farm is that the things that tickle my funny bone are often macabre.

But solitude?  This I could do without. My days are often long and silent here in the country.   I crave companionship to share my life with, from the sunny balmy days spent wallowing in cool water to the dark cold winter nights spent under an icy moon.

I seek someone of my own kind, who understands my wants and needs and who really ‘gets’ me.  I absolutely prefer dating an honest-to-god swine rather than some feathery puffed-up rooster who is all show.  My perfect match would be kind, funny, take long rambling walks, let me have all of the extra cookies, would weigh in at least 600 pounds and have a raging libido for three crazed days every three weeks. While it is not a priority to have a family, I know that things happen and I am not averse to raising 10 – 12 babies every year or so, should our relationship move to that level.

If you are looking for a girl who can make you laugh and keep you warm on cold winter nights, please email me discreetly at Hibby@hoglove.com

Have you ever seen two nearly six-foot birds having sexual intercourse?

This past week the farm morphed from a platonic PG rated place of miscellaneous poultry and a pig to a palace of porn.

Here is what I saw:  Upon entering the pasture to feed Miss Hibbitz and the Emus, I observed one of the Emus walk over to a far gate and calmly lay down.  I then watched as the second Emu calmly sauntered up behind the first one and began lowering its moppy body down as well.  A strange place for a nap, I thought.  Then, with complete disregard for my presence, the second Emu began thrusting and pumping in a physical expression of pure lust.  The first Emu appeared to find it equally delightful.  Upon completion, perhaps a full minute later, both Emus returned to a standing position and, with slightly dazed expressions, paced off a bit to let their feathers dry.

I then tried to discipher which Emu was which in order to confirm my long-standing record of misnaming animals by gender.   It became clear that I had done it again:  Shirley Emu was a dude and Squiggy was a lady.

(Shirley Emu has been renamed Shirley Jackson with the goal of slowing rubbing all of the extra letters away to leave simply:  Jacks.   Squiggy is a name that can definitely bend in either direction.)

Squiggy and Jacks, before they had inappropriate names, when they first came, as week-old babies. Notice the beautiful markings, which disappear after about six months.

After my catcalls across the field to them died away, I fed everyone and took a walk around the field to see if Squiggy was laying any eggs yet. Last year we began finding the greenish blue giant Emu eggs, although the birds were only a year and a half old then.  What we didn’t know is if one or both were laying, nor if they were fertilized.  The peep show I had just witnessed made these gorgeous eggs even more interesting.  Having finally realized that Emus are excellent security guards for the hen house, we hoped to be able to incubate some of the eggs to hatch another pair of Emu who could live out with the chickens.

(Squiggy and S. Jackson are deeply committed to their current pasture.  After the barn burned down, we arrived at the barn on several occasions to find both Emus had somehow gotten out of their temporary pasture and were back in the yard they were raised in.  Once I came to the farm to do the chores and found the builders working on the new barn while both Emus strolled contentedly amongst them under the new construction.  Nobody thought it interesting enough to call us, which is fascinating to me.)

Happily, I found S. Jackson hovering over two lovely eggs.  In the Emu family, the male sits on the eggs and tends to the young, often not eating for the duration.  I’m not sure what this says about our guy’s character, but he obviously gets up to get it up and I’ve seen him eating with gusto all week.  I also found another egg around the corner, which I purloined for a gift.

What I forgot about is how much Miss Hibbitz enjoys Emu eggs.  The first time I found an egg I was walking with Hibby and we both saw it.  I figured out what it was three seconds after my smart sow and two seconds before I saw the giant yolk flow out of it.   She’s been an addict ever since and never thought to consider the joy of fatherhood that Jackson was hoping to experience.  I received an outraged text from Michael two days after the sex scene regarding Hibby’s selfish (pig) behavior (she ate all of the eggs) and news that she had been banished to a different pasture.

Emus lay between 20 – 40 eggs a year in late fall, early winter, so we have plenty of time to incubate more.  A slight problem is that Emus hatch in as little as eight weeks, which would mean that we would have baby Emus in frozen February.  And we need to build an incubator, since Jacks seems to be a bit of a dead-beat.

Also seen on the farm, aside from the usual rooster rapes, is one of our Tom Naragansetts looking all droopy-eyed and romeoesque as he lowered his body repeatedly over a half deflated basketball.   But let’s talk turkey later.

Shirley Emu posing for a self-portrait with me.

After two and a half years of feebly fielding questions regarding the purpose of having the Emus, we feel that we’ve hit on something solid.

First, here are reasons we’ve given in the past, each of them lifted straight out of the Emu Handbook:

Their Feathers are Highly Prized by Knitters

En masse, the Emu feathers present a dusty muppet appearance, but the single feather is a delicate herringbone of interwoven taupe and charcoal that makes it, allegedly, highly prized by
knitters.  As far as I can determine, this is a myth.  I have not investigated how the feathers are extracted nor at which frequency, but I did become curious as to who is really weaving wearables from Emu feathers.  A quick google search reveals that the native to Australia Emu’s feathers mainly end up in Native American dream-catchers.  The only woven products that I found were in ads from the 1950’s featuring lovely ladies wearing sweaters made with Emu brand ‘wool’.  Both of these search results point to the idea that Emus are a very misunderstood bird.

Emu Steak:  The new low-cholesterol ‘red meat’

Next we dutifully list the culinary delight that an Emu steak is said to offer, even thought the idea of eating our friendly big -bulging-eyed pets is so foreign I can’t even imagine it.  Emus, touted 40 some years ago as the ‘new red meat,’ are basically all leg and feather and only provide about 30 pounds of meat per bird. (In contrast, we’ve had turkeys weigh close to 40 pounds.) The meat, however, is 97% fat free and high in protein, vitamin C and B12 and iron and low in cholesterol.    There really is no point in continuing to discuss this.  I don’t care how tasty and healthy it might possibly be:  I’m not eating Shirley and Squiggy.  This option is completely off the table.

Emu Oil is the new Mortgage Lifter

This brings me to the cash cow of Emu farming:  Emu Oil.  An Emu carries approximately 24 pounds of fat that can be rendered into two pounds of an oil that sells for between $7 and $10 per ounce.  The oil works wonders on arthritis, aching joints and has been shown effective as an anti-aging moisturizer.  My sister became a fan of the oil when she first moved to Manhattan for graduate school and her joints were acclimating to the concrete jungle.  When she heard the news that we’d adopted a pair of Emu, her immediate plan was to tap the oil out of the living bird much like taking syrup from a maple tree.  When I shared with her that the Emus would need to be killed before extracting the oil, she was unfazed, which is a testament to how well the oil works – or to the poverty of graduate students.  Regardless,  I am not killing my friends to harvest their fat, melt it down, and rub it on my body, so this is another moot option I should refrain from mentioning to people.

Shirley and Squiggy Emu at home on the farm.

Don’t Mess With the Muppets

Here is what we’ve discovered Emus do really well:  They keep our chickens safe because predators, too, have no idea what the purpose is of these tall ungainly birds with giant talons.  Our Emus have been very clear one one point:  they despise small furry creatures.   The sight of a cat crossing their pasture drives them into twisting lurching corkscrews of hysterical murderous rage.  If a cat could provoke this reaction, I must assume that possum, raccoon, and skunk are equally unwelcome.  The Cooper hawks, who live in the woods near the pastures and are the number one threat to the hens, seem to find the six-foot birds …. confusing.

But before I anthropomorphise too much, let me just give you these plain facts : last year, before the barn burned down, the chickens, Emus and hogs lived in the same pastures and we rarely, if ever, lost a chicken.  This year the chickens live in a different pasture away from the Emus and Miss Hibbitz.  We bought 100 pullet brown-egg layers this spring and my last count was that we have 26 left, which means that 75 chickens were picked off this summer by predators before they even started laying eggs.

Why do we have Emus, you ask?  Because they are bad ass big birds who take care of business, that’s why.  You got a problem with that?