Stock

Two years ago this month we moved across an ocean, started a farm, bought some goats, some poultry, and a dog. After two years, it’s time to take stock.

I think we got our priorities straight—first thing we did was close in the barn to protect our hay and equipment. Never mind that our free-range Royal Palm turkeys roost on everything and decorate it with white guano. I keep feeling that everything we’re doing is temporary until we get a better system in place, which in the case of the turkeys–the three pets, not the ones for eating–is an aviary which I have in my head. Moving it from my head to reality takes more substance that I have right now, so in my head that is where it stays!

Then Bruce built a sturdy goat shed for our 16 girls. It’s solid oak, built from boards sawn from dead trees that he and his brother cut down from their respective back yards. Remember how high the costs of lumber were during COVID? A dead pin oak outside our window started looking like a pillar of cash. So we turned it into a field shed.

And THEN we built our house. 

Technically, it’s an addition. (And no, we’re not doing it ourselves–Bruce has his limits. Not many, but building an entire house is a bit beyond what he can do right now. Check back in a few years.) The addition is slowly growing up next to our “secret cabin”. I think of it as the Secret Cabin because it looks like a normal farm house from the outside and you can’t tell it is a civil war era log cabin until you step inside. It’s small, about 1400 square feet. The addition of two more bedrooms will turn it into a multi-generational living space with flexible divisions for shared space and privacy.

And now, after two years in the US and half a year in the log cabin on the farm, we’re taking STOCK.

We’re raising STOCK. Small-scale, high-quality, humanely raised and harvested meat production is the heart of our farm, and as much as possible we want to grow our own animals. We set about collecting our foundation STOCK of Boer and Boer/Kiko/Myotonic cross meat goats. We bought 16 does and a buck.

Our small goat herd is about to explode with our first babies, expected imminently. And in April our small herd of pigs, which numbers two, will likewise exponentially increase. This is our first time to raise pigs, and I really don’t know what to expect. Are we looking at 20 piglets? Ten? I need to make some adjustments to their pig-house and install pig rails along the floor so the piglets have space to crawl away from their 300 pound mamas, who might inadvertently squash them. In a month, how many head of liveSTOCK will we have on the place?

We STOCKED our freezer with broilers, turkeys, and quail. Our first year we processed 200 broilers, 50 turkeys, and about 100 quail, but I didn’t keep careful track of the quail so I’m not quite confident in that number. But a lot. Our first batch of spring broilers are feathering out and will be ready to go out on grass in a week or two, and will be ready to process at the end of March, so we’re trying to move out the few remaining frozen chickens at the bottom of the freezers to make room for the new ones. And the cycle begins again.

We’re making STOCK. Leftover Thanksgiving turkeys are slowly being converted into pot pies and other food items, including copious amount of delicious broth. Poultry cooked with fresh herbs (grown on a sunny widow sill during the winter), salt, pepper, onions, garlic and celery makes a rich and meaty broth for winter soups or pot pie filling.

How many ways can we make use of the word STOCK? There are at least 9 nouns, 2 adverbs and 2 verb forms of this nuanced word. Bruce and I were not raised on a ranch or farm (although Bruce spent 8 years on a sugar bush in New York, so maybe that counts?) but we’re from Swiss-German STOCK, and our Anabaptist immigrant forbears to Lancaster were farmers, so maybe farming and animal husbandry is in our blood.

The origin of the word STOCK is Germanic. Old English, Dutch and German all have similar words related to wood, posts, sticks, or the trunk of a tree. STOCKy, like a fence post. And we know all about fence posts, having built fence to create three new paddocks of about 4, 3 and 5 acres.

There’s a lot of paperwork that goes into setting up a small business. We formed an LLC and registered our farm, got insurance, got an exemption letter from the VA Dept of Agriculture to raise and process poultry. Once we had our legal footing and an identity, we had to figure out how to pay for it all, until the business could begin to pay us back. So we took out a loan, sold our house, and sold some STOCK from our investments.

Lest you think setting up our farm has been all work and no relaxation–you’re not wrong! Well, not entirely. We do manage to find some down time.We usually unwind in the evenings with a movie or miniseries, currently waiting for the next episode of The Last of Us to drop. T-LOU, as the cool kids call it, is a delightfully gross horror show (based on a popular video game) about fungi invading the human race and turning us into evil-intentioned marionettes out to devour other humans so as to spread their species. Our college-aged kids recommended it to us. If I ever thought about fungi at all (as anything other than food, of which I refuse to partake), I thought of them as useful agricultural inputs. Part of the “liveSTOCK” under the soil–microorganism that good farmers try to cultivate to improve their soil health. This series puts fungi into an altogether different and alarming light.

We also worked through 1883, an uneven look at the expansion of settlers and immigrants into the American West. I enjoy watching Sam Elliot in any film he’s in, from Mask (with Cher) to The Big Lebowski (with Jeff Bridges). He’s always cast as a STOCK character, his signature cowboy hat and mustache unmistakable. He looks like he would fit right in at a Buckwalter reunion.