Farming in the shade

Most American farms are still family farms. Today, 98% of all U.S. farms are owned by individuals, family partnerships or family corporations. Just 2% of America's farms and ranches are owned by non-family corporations. In addition, 82% of U.S. ag products sold are produced on farms owned by individuals, family partnerships and family corporations. Non-family corporations account for only 18% of U.S. ag product sales.

Here's the obligatory photo: This is Shady Side Farm chunky 100% wool yarn that was hand dyed. We sold this grouping of yarn to another etsy seller for her to make things with. This photo should make you think about Christmas, as all the major Christmas colors are present. :) I've been thinking about Christmas, lately. We celebrated Christmas with the snowbird half of the extended family last weekend. We will celebrate Christmas with the other half of the extended family sometime during Thanksgiving week, when out of town family is here anyway. So we've been busy thinking about gifts, and schedules and such. That's also the week that we are doing a craft show/home tour and the week that we start our big craft show--the Kerstmarkt in Holland, Michigan. So you can see why I've got Christmas on the brain. If you are local, please come and visit us at these shows. We love to visit with friendly faces. I'll try to figure out how to make a cute little button for th...

(this is what you get when you ask a farm kid to paint a pumpkin for Halloween...)

I tried something new on one of my looms last night. Mini-rugs (often called mug rugs)--to be used as coasters. It's quite a bit of fiddle work, but uses up leftovers nicely. What do you think? Good for a craft show? I'm trying to have some smaller, less expensive things, as well as the normal throw rugs.

It's been fairly quiet on this blog because we've been busy. I'm still trying to adapt to working part-time, homeschooling, and doing all the normal things that people expect of me: making sure food is prepared on a daily basis and the house stays livably clean and there are at least a few clean clothes to choose from. (Yes, I share the load, but training teenagers is a work in progress.) I have realized lately that I am usually too exhausted to do any fun-for-me things, and/or simply haven't the time. I'm working on that, as I realize that I'm shriveling up like fingers and toes that have been in the bathtub too long. Other things that get left out when I am too busy are working with The Farmer and taking photos for the blog. These photos were taking by my mother in law and my daughter. Our field of lovely sunflowers has been ready to harvest for over three weeks. Except for one thing. Excessive rain has made the clay field difficult to walk through, much less...

We've become aware the Michigan's governor intends to line-item veto MSUE and MAES out of existence in her quest to balance the budget. While we are in favor of balanced budgets, and realize that Michigan has a very serious problem, we do not want to see these invaluable programs cut. So I've taken the liberty of putting these talking points up on my blog so that I can (hopefully) point some twitter traffic here. For those of you who come here for cute lamb photos and news from Shady Side Farm, don't worry. We'll be back to our regular programming soon. I hope. Just another day in the life of a farmer--fending off government attacks on our livelihood... MSU Extension and Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station Impacts • The $64 million in state funding for MAES and MSUE leverages $148 million in contracts and grants and similar funds and generated a total economic impact $1.062 billion . These two funding lines generate $2.33 for every $1 provided by the state. ...

What's on America's dinner table? flour & cereal products -- 196.9 lbs. eggs -- 245 eggs red meat -- 116.9 lbs. cheese -- 32.7 lbs. poultry -- 85.4 lbs. rice -- 20.5 lbs. fresh veggies -- 202.2 lbs. fats & oils -- 86.7 lbs. milk -- 21 gallons fresh fruit -- 126.2 lbs. (annual per capita consumption of major foods)

The Farmer recently talked his way into owning two antique seed cleaners. He bought them from another farmer who had bought them from a now-closed feed mill. It was the feed mill that my hobby farmer father (and all the farmers, hobby and real, for miles around) purchased feed and supplies from when I was a girl. When our daughters were very young, they would ride along with The Farmer on his trips to the feed mill. But like most cooperative feed mills that catered to the small farmer, it went the way of the telegraph. The two antique seed cleaners were not put together when we bought them. In fact, we weren't actually sure that all the parts were there, or which parts went to which cleaner. I wish I'd taken a photo of the piles of parts, so that you could see the scope of the project. But at that time, I was busy having pneumonia . The larger of the two cleaners is basic ally t ogether, thanks to hours of puzzling fun by The Farmer's father, my father, and our son, with oc...

"Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy..." --Amos 5:14-15

Your favorite pizza originates on America's farms and ranches. Top-producing states for Mozzarella Cheese (a dairy product): California, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania Tomato Sauce (from fresh tomatoes): California, Florida, Virginia Pizza Dough (from winter wheat): Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota Sausage (from hogs): Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota Spinach (seriously, who puts spinach on their pizza?): California, Arizona Mushrooms (have you noticed that most of them come from China now?): Pennsylvania, California Onions: Georgia, California, Texas Green Peppers: California, Florida Pineapple: Hawaii Each year Americans consume nearly 3 billion pizzas. If you look at it another way, that means each person eats about 23 pounds of pizza every year. In fact, 350 slices of pizza are eaten every second!

If you've read my Friday Fun Farm Facts posts at all, you can't have missed the fact that compared to other people, Americans spend very little of their disposable income on food. In discussions about rising or "unbelievable" grocery prices, I find myself biting my tongue a bit. I think we've been spoiled by very affordable food prices, and we really don't know how good we have it. A little teeny spike in the prices, and we're whining like there's no tomorrow. The reality is that often our cheap food is subsidized by those who raise it. Right now, milk is selling in the range of $1.70-2.10 per gallon in my area. A news article from an Iowa TV station reports that farmers are getting paid about 90 cents per gallon, while the farmers' costs are at $1.40 per gallon. That's right--for every gallon of milk they produce, they lose 50 cents. Many family farmers run a pretty tight ship. Sometimes a spouse works off-farm to provide benefits and much-ne...

Last Wednesday we picked the Concord grapes. Actually, my extended family picked the grapes. I scurried around getting out jars and sugar and lids and canners. We carefully picked all the grapes off their stems, removing the spiders and ladybugs and less-than-desirable grapes at the same time. We did this outside, to minimize the mess in my kitchen. When a large bowl was finished, I let the extended family continue their sorting job, and I went inside. I washed the grapes. I put about 1/3 cup of sugar in the bottom of each jar, and enough boiling water to dissolve it. I then filled the jar with grapes, and added enough water to come up to the "shoulder" of the jar. I leave some extra room when I can grape juice (and that's what this post is about--I guess I forgot to specify that). Otherwise I have purple mess outside of the jars. I added sterilized lids and rings. I pressured canned them for eight minutes at five pounds of pressure. I rotated three canners so that I cou...

I love to read other blogs. When I find some that relate to farming, do you mind if I share them with you? Today I was pleased to read about the American Sheep Industry Association on this blog post.

In 2008, $115.5 billion worth of American agricultural products were exported around the globe. The Top 5 countries accounted for more than 50 percent of all U.S. agricultural exports. Canada -- $16.3 billion Mexico -- $15.6 billion Japan -- $13.1 billion China -- $11.2 billion European Union -- $10.7 billion Canada and Mexico are the two largest trading partners of the U.S. Together, they account for nearly one-third of all U.S. agricultural exports. (Thank you, my friends!)

Saturday we spent the day at the Van Raalte Farm . It was Heritage History Day or some such event, and we went to demonstrate fiber arts. Unfortunately for the planners of the event, there was plenty of competition from nearby events and plenty of rain to keep folks away. But we had a large tent that kept the worst of the rain off, and because there were several of us demonstrating different crafts, we enjoyed the conversation and our crafts. A quilter: Spinners, using the wheel... ...and the drop spindle. A weaver using a rigid heddle loom: Basket-makers: All with a background of lovely, lovely music, provided by these two: Despite the lack of visitors and the abundance of rain, it was a pleasant day.

There are a couple of things that cause wool to be itchy. Very dirty wool, commercially processed, is sometimes treated with acid to get all the yuck out. People react to that. That's one of the "itches" of wool. The other is bits of hay. "Vegetable matter" or "VM" is the industry term used. Even with wonderful large machines to clean and card and spin the wool, bits of hay remain. Sometimes they are broken up into such small pieces by the processing that you can hardly see them. But you can feel them. Because of this, we've made some changes in the way we feed at Shady Side Farm. All summer long, the sheep are on pasture. But when the snow flies, they come inside and are fed hay during the cold months. The backs of their necks are typically full of hay bits by the time they're shorn, and it's a shame. Here's a photo of the feeder before: And one of the feeder after we added white plastic: They can now only each the hay from the lower p...

Off-farm costs (marketing expenses associated with processing, wholesaling, distributing and retailing of food products) account for 81 cents of every retail dollar spent on food. Farmers and ranchers receive only 19 cents out of every retail dollar spent on food that is eaten at home and away from home. In 1980, farmers received 31 cents out of every retail dollar spent on food in America.