Reflections from 2024
Its always amazing how fast a year flies by…its almost like I blink your eyes a few times then boom its over! But when I look back and reflect for a moment as I sit by the wood stove on this rainy day I cant help but to think “Wow, we did all that?!!!” So what did we do this year you might be wondering? I mean what did we do in addition to the daily chores and tasks that are required to keep this farm in operation 365 days a year…
It all started in January when we had what is now referred to around here as “The Ice Age” when overnight temperatures plummeted and a steady rained turned into a solid 6” layer of ice covering everything! We woke up to single digit temperatures and ice so slick you could barely walk much less drive a vehicle anywhere. The temperature did not go above freezing for 10 days which meant that we were iced in for that long…we were holding down the fort as you might say, keeping animals safe, fed and watered was our number one task each day. Meanwhile the children sledded. I mean they sledded for hours and hours each day for 10 days straight. We faired pretty well all things considered, we had plenty of food, plenty of firewood and somehow the power stayed on most of the time. Mattie, Sara (this was her first week in TN having flown straight in from Oregon) and Randal stayed in the studio and we all shared hot tea and meals together so the evenings were rather festive, which made up for the long cold days of sliding around out in the pastures, breaking ice, pouring feed out on the ice for the chickens to eat and gathering eggs that froze solid if they were left for more and a couple hours outdoors. We did loose two large 30x90’ hoop houses, one of which we had just put up the year before and I did have to cancel my trip to Texas to attend the annual APPPA conference but otherwise we survived the Ice Age quite satisfactorily.
February was less eventful thank goodness! It rained a lot, our pastures flooded…but that’s pretty normal for us this time of year. We did manage to take a quick family camping trip to the coast in Florida for a much-needed change of scenery.
In March Randal hosted a Southeast TN Young Farmers Grazing event that was well attended and very informative. And lambing season began! For some reason we were expecting lambs in April but that is only because I am incapable of remembering the correct gestation periods and writing things on the calendar. Lambing is always such a fun time of year, each morning we go out and see how many new mothers there are tending to their freshly born babies. We move the flock to fresh pasture and separate out the new moms into the “nursery” where all the new families get to mingle and get to know each other. Lambs are one of the most adorable of baby farm animals, especially when they hop around excitedly and play together in a pack racing from one end of the pasture to the other. We also started a substantial water line project, burying over a mile of waterline out to our furthest pastures for livestock watering.
April is always abuzz with the excitement of spring! Flowers begin to pop out everywhere, the grass really starts to grow, and the people yawn and stretch and busily begin making plans and starting seeds in the greenhouse. We had the unique opportunity to provide a large amount of grits and cornmeal to the Memphis food bank and this started in April which meant lots and lots of corn bagging (we were also in full swing providinging eggs to the Chattanooga Area Foodbank). We hosted our first farm dinner of the year with chef Kenyatta Ashford. We attended a very fun compost workshop at Chelsea’s farm, hosted by Southeast TN Young Farmers (SETYF) and taught by Krisi Olivero.
May is when things really start to get busy on the farm…. We kicked things off with a beautiful May Day celebration with the Cumberland Forest School families. My grandmother Anne Keener fell ill and passed away so the whole family travelled to Savanna to be with family and for the service. Back on the farm the sour cherries ripened and we had enough for a cherry pie. Roscoe got his hair cut just in time for the temps to really get cranked up, garden beds began to be prepared (although this spring was very wet (more flooding in May so we were slow to get in the gardens) We hosted the Atlanta Waldorf school for a interactive farm camping trip, we hosted our second farm dinner of the year with Sujata Singh and we purchased 2,000 new pullets to add to the laying hen flock. By the end of the Month we planted our crop of Bloody Butcher Corn plated by hand and pressed into the furrow with bare feet which is a deeply satisfying feeling. Somehow we even had time to go on a adventurous camping trip into the Nantahala National Park area to visit our friends “fish camp” and snorkel looking for shinny minnows in the freezing creek.
June in TN is full throttle busy! The flowers, grasses, gardens and weeds are growing like gangbusters! The livestock are also going wild with productivity, including the bees who made some amazing honey! This is when the heat gets real, that combined with the insects buzzing and crawling about I always feel kind of like I’m in the Amazon rain forest this time of year…what a contrast from just a few months ago when everything was iced over! June is also when one of the biggest and most fun events of the year takes place, FARM OLYMPICS! Farm Olympics is so fun for the whole family with lots of farm related competitions like Temporary Fence Relay (we are the reigning champion of that one) to egg juggling (we were not so good but were happy to provide eggs!) and ending with a good ol fashioned pig roast and contra dance…if you missed it be on the lookout for 2025! June is also officially swimming season which means that we swim in the spring fed Little Sequatchie River every single day. We also made another trip to the mountains of N Georgia where our family has a shared cabin on a lake at the top of the mountain (amazing swimming location), this has been the first year that our family has consistently been able to take trips throughout the year to enjoy life off the farm, thanks 100% to our amazing team we have here working together. ***Side note this is a super duper important thing that has taken us decades to achieve…often farmers are not able to take a single day off during the growing season and this inevitably leads to burnout…part of sustainability has to be taking care of oneself on the farm and taking the time to rest***. By the end of June the sweet corn was ripe as well as potatoes and green beans, the bloody butcher corn was already waist high, the temps were in the 90s. We wrapped things up with another farm dinner prepared by one of our local favorites Mallory and her team from Lunch in Sewanee.
July is the heart of summer when everything is a bit of a humid blur but its still so amazing because of Fresh tomatoes and homemade pasta with basil, sweet corn, watermelons cooling down at the swimming hole. The farm is so incredibly bountiful this time of year and there is so much work to do…its really hard to keep up but it goes by so fast too! We did get to go camping and rafting down the Nantahala river with a group of friends, which was a first for our family and we had a blast!
August feels like a continuation of July but I would say that the most eventful part of this month was when the 10 cows we purchased jumped the fence and took off into the wilderness. It ended up taking us 6 weeks to get these back to the farm which really seemed kind of like a miracle since they ended up on top of a nearby mountain over 5 miles away!! Around this time is when we realized that after a wet spring, this was really shaping up to be a particularly dry year…we had very little rain June, July or August which combined with very hot temperatures was drying the water table and soil up at a rapid pace. The young farmers group hosted another grazing workshop/ farm tour at Solace Farm which was a great time to discuss pasture management during drought conditions…always a fun topic for those obsessed with pasture management like myself. Interestingly this year in our pastures we found several native warm season grasses that we have never seen before, Big Bluestem and Eastern Gamma Grass…maybe it was our grazing practices or maybe it was the hot dry conditions that woke up some seeds that had laid dormant for who knows how many years.
In September the drought was really starting to get serious…crops were turning brown and shriveling up, across the state and the nation entire corn crops were lost, and driving through the countryside most cattle farms looked like barren wastelands turning into dust. Our pastures however still had plenty of green forage, partly due to us being understocked and partly due to our rotational grazing practices leaving long rest periods for the plants to grow and send down deep roots. Our Bloody Butcher corn also did surprisingly well, while not as productive as we had hoped, we still had one large ear on almost every plant. Considering the drought and considering this crop was grown with zero purchased inputs I think this is a remarkable testament to growing heirloom crops using regenerative methods. These old varieties of plants have been bred throughout the centuries to withstand the unpredictable weather patterns and to provide nourishing food in healthy soils untouched by modern chemicals and mechanization…I think it is important to learn from the lessons of the past and the wisdom of our indigenous ancestors. Speaking of learning from others, this month I took a big trip out to California to a pastured poultry seminar hosted at one of the most impressive large scale regenerative farms I have ever visited, Alexandre Family Farm. I learned a lot on that trip and immediately started implementing lessons and improving our own pastured poultry operation. September was when hurricane Helene wreaked havoc just east and south of us in TN NC GA and FLA just barely missing us but we did get 6” of rain over the course of 24 hours. This was the only rain we had since June and the ground was so dry you couldn’t even tell that we had gotten any at all one week later.
All throughout this year we have been building chicken coops as fast as we can and improving on our egg producing infrastructure. We have really honed in on a chicken coop design and we are building these coops on old trailer frames which are economical and also very easy for us to move around, this is important since we are moving our 2 flocks of hens two times per week to fresh pasture! October was another busy month, as we were preparing to receive 3,000 new pullets to add to the laying flock! We made a trip up to our friend Jeff Poppins farm right near the Kentucky line for a wonderful Biodynamic farming conference where we got to hang with some of our farming friends and meet some new friends as well! Then bloody butcher was fully dried down so we harvested that all by hand which is one of those things that is just as deeply satisfying as planting the seed by hand…there is something just so human about these simple acts, something that makes me feel connected to our ancestry in a way that hardly anything else does. Ashley and Carrols folk school has also been busy this year hosting a variety of workshops on the farm ranging from birding and mushroom foraging to broom making and natural dying, this month they had a white oak basket class that started off by cutting a white oak tree and splitting the wood down into usable strips. Later in the month our longtime friend and fermentation legend Sandor Katz taught a fermentation workshop which was such a treat and re inspired us to make lots of yummy ferments with the farm’s bounty. The work that the folk school is doing, bringing people together to learn traditional crafts and skills I think is so important and is such a great resource for our community! We finished off the farm meal season with a sold-out feast prepared by Khaled Albanna and his team from Calliope, the meal was a huge success! I also attended The Climate Underground conference at Caney Fork Farm put on by Al Gore and Alice Waters. While some of the presentations highlighting the devastation that climate change has been causing around the world was disheartening, it is encouraging to see so many folks come together to talk about solutions with an emphasis on how regenerative agriculture can be a really big part of the solution. I came away from that conference feeling inspired to keep doing the hard work that we are doing here on the farm and spreading the word about the positive impacts that regenerative agriculture can have on our communities, our environment and on the planet.
In November we kicked things off with another one of our favorite events of the year Farm To Crag! I am just so impressed by this organization whose mission is to help educate and connect the climbing community to regenerative farms and create a safe space to have difficult conversations about sustainability, and equity within the climbing community. We always have a great time and spend time with some of our good friends who we have made over the years and meet all kinds of new amazing people. And yes we also go climbing which is so incredibly fun and challenging…it was Farm to Crag 3 years ago that turned Bill and I onto climbing in the first place and we are totally hooked! We even have begun to develop some climbing routes on the top part of our property which has its very own crag! November also marks the beginning of the holiday season which for us mostly means that we sell out of eggs every single week, thanks everybody!! And lots of feasts with family and friends. We also broke ground on a new building which is going to be designated just for egg processing and cold storage. We received a 50% reimbursement grant through TN Department of Ag to help us build this infrastructure to help strengthen our local food supply chain. Very exited about the added efficiency and the ability to continue to grow our operation that this structure is going to bring to us!
In December we finally started to get some rain, but we are still 15+ inches below our average rainfall. Its hard to fully describe what farmers experience when we have prolonged drought or other extreme weather events. Our livelihoods and our emotions are so tied to the weather patterns and lately that means a wild roller coaster ride. In the drought we dream of rain, this years drought lasted so long that I completely gave up on checking the weather…its almost like the weather people love to torment us by dangling 40% chance out 10 days in the future and that 40% never comes. Emotionally its challenging to keep from getting depressed, the drought was financially devastating for many farmers we know, our farm is fortunate in that our egg operation makes up most of our income and chickens can still produce eggs even when the pastures are all dried up and the grass isn’t growing. Crop farmers, fruit and veggie farmers, and grass-fed beef and lamb producers have faced extreme financial challenges this year. That being said the rains have started back again, just in time for the cold temperatures and long dark nights which means nothing is really growing until spring and we farmers have time to reflect on the season. I attended the TN Local Food Summit which is a really wonderful food and farming conference focusing on building a more robust and equitable food system in our region. I went home feeling inspired with new ideas and new frameworks for thinking about the bigger picture of our food system and how our farm can fit into that. We wrapped up the year by hosting the Pate & Wilson Circus at the farm. It is so inspiring to see young leaders sprouting up in our community doing amazing things like organizing a rag tag group of feral children (including our own) and creating a performance that was just so fun and amazing! What a creative way to spread joy, awe and laughter during the dark days of winter!
2024 was a year of pivots and lessons learned (many of those weather related!). It was also another year of growth for our egg operation. This is a testament to the growth of our local food loving community as well as the hard work of our team here on the farm… we couldn’t do what we do without all of the loving support so thank you! Looking forward to the new year we have lots to reflect on, letting the lessons of 2024 really sink in. There are so many external forces out of our control like the weather, politics, viruses, the economy. Building resilient farms, resilient food systems and resilient communities seems more important than ever. That is a big goal of mine this year, to continue to hone our craft here on the farm and have plans in place for unexpected events, work on creating new and strengthening existing relationships within our regional food system and creating more opportunities for our community to unite and work together to support each other as we all do the important work that needs to be done.