Essex Farm

January through February I worked at Essex Farm – up on Lake Champlain. I learned a ton:
- how to make soap: mix lye with water, cool it down to about 100F (it’s helpful to have a foot of snow on the ground so you can stick the pot of hot lye solution in the snow), and heat lard (or in our case, a mix of lard, which is from pigs, and tallow, fat from cows) to about 100F. then mix them. After a lot of stirring, it undergoes saponification, which is when it thickens to about the consistency of sour cream (if you drop a bit of it on the surface, the surface “supports” the drop, for a bit). Then you let it cool for a few days, then you cut it into bars, and then you let it cure for a few weeks. Then we gave it out to members.
- how to strip cows: at Caretaker, we would leave the calf on Chloe, so it wasn’t super essential to get every last drop of milk out of the cow. But at Essex, where we kept the calves separate, it’s important to milk the cows out so they don’t get infections that can lead to mastitis. Milking is one of my favorite things. It’s such an intimate relationship with an animal. There is an overall sense of care and respect for the cows, and at both farms discussions of particular teats was common. To milk a cow out, it helps to use both hands on the same teat, squeezing the udder with one hand (for me, usually my left) just before squeezing the teat with my right. This helps to get the last of the milk. For more…read “The Family Cow”. I recommend it.
- how to set up an evaporator for maple sugaring season: Sugaring is usually a February –March activity in New England. While there are “freeze thaw cycles”, when the temperature goes below freezing at night and above freezing during the day, the sap in the sugar maples runs. Once you tap the trees (big operations often use tubing, Essex did buckets, which means you have to go empty the buckets when they fill), you have about 6 weeks before the trees heal over. It takes about 40 gallons of the slightly sweet sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. Usually the light syrup (grade A), comes from the beginning of the season and grade B from the end (I prefer grade B – it has more of a distinct maple flavor). The evaporator we had at essex had a pre warming tank, where the sap would flow over the back of the chimney to get warmed up before going into the back pan (still over the back of the evaporator), and then into the front pan. We also had a HUGE tank (nicknamed Bubby, the name imprinted in it, not to be confused with the cat that had stubby legs and would pretend to fall down in front of you to get attention), that held the syrup when we brought it in, and gravity fed it into the whole evaporator system.

Essex is a lovely little town on the lake. I lived right across from the ferry dock, and could see the little green light at the end of the dock (felt a bit like Daisy from The Great Gatsby). I had run-ins with Casper, a Jersey bull they were using (apparently, when you have your period you should be particularly careful around bulls), helped matt and sam move the sows into farrowing pens, in which we’d constructed little tables that fit into the corners so the piglets could fit underneath and the sows wouldn’t be able to sit on them. I got my time in hand milking a jersey down to 10 minutes and built my hand strength up to milk 3 jerseys in a row. (don’t tell me I have popeye forearms – I prefer the comparison to Rosie the Riveter). I learned how to split wood with a maul, which they brought in with teams of horses (they use Belgians as draft horses for most of the work on the farm)

In the meantime, I drove down each Wednesday for a class in Greenfield “Tilling the Soil of Opportunity”. I came out of the class with a business plan for a CSA in western mass. Between that and working with Target Hunger on establishing a relationship with a farm out there, I’ve been busy!