Entries by John Socolofsky

We recently had our farm audited by a group called the Global Animal Partnership. They exist to promote farm animal welfare, and have a multi-tiered rating system they use to judge farms regarding how humanely the animals are kept and managed. We are happy to report that our farm received a GAP Step 3 rating. The next level up, GAP Step 4, would require pasturing our pigs, which just is not reasonable on our property in our dry climate. So we are pleased with the rating we received. The auditors were very complimentary of our facilities, our management practices, and our record keeping. For more information, you can go to the Global Animal Partnership website.

Well, we are recovering from what has amounted to the biggest snowstorm of the winter... so far. Pretty bad when you can say so far after a snowstorm in late April, but that's the weather here along the Colorado front range. This was an elevational event, which is to say, we got dumped on at our elevation (7,250), but those at lower elevations got nothing or only got rain. Our total was about 20-24 inches, with drifts to about four feet deep. We drove South yesterday, and as little as five miles South, they received "only" about 15 inches. Then another five miles South and they have almost nothing on the ground. Turning around and heading back to our place, it's like driving into a foreign country. There's a thick blanket of snow covering everything, which is certainly pretty, and is the best thing for the pasture. But it sure makes feeding livestock a challenge. I understand Denver, 30 miles to the North, received only rain.

We are hoping this was Old Man Winter's last hurrah. (We capitalize his name out of respect for his capabilities.) Often in the springtime, winter and spring battle back and forth, with winter unwilling to release its grasp and spring not quite strong enough to win conclusively. We are encouraged, however, with God's ordained cycle of the seasons, that spring will eventually win out and we will again enjoy a beautiful summer on the edge of the Rockies.

We've been looking over our shoulder a lot lately, since it seems like lots of folks want to look at what we're doing. For one, our processing facility is USDA-inspected, so whenever we're there the inspector is likely to show up. We've had several farm tours for current and prospective customers who want to see how their meat is raised. We had our processing facility audited for sanitation by a third party audit company. Then just yesterday we had our farm audited for animal welfare by a third party. We are passing all these audits, and our customers are happy with what they see, so that's good news. What it does, however, is give us the feeling that we're constantly on display.

I suppose what we are doing is a bit unique in our area, and the way we go about it is unique too. We don't raise animals the conventional way, nor do we raise the usual breeds. I can understand the interest from our customers, since, in our mostly urban corridor, we don't have many working farms. Certainly there are no working pork farms within 100 miles that I know of.

After yesterday's audit, I think we're done for a while. That one was from the Global Animal Partnership, a group concerned for the welfare of domestic farm animals. They were pretty impressed with our management and record-keeping. Now I believe we can get back to the business of raising great pork ... and maybe breathe for awhile???

Well, I think we've finally succeeded in getting new labels the USDA will accept. We received final approval last week on the round of labels I reported on last month. Of course, they couldn't just go through as-is. The USDA had comments, and we will have to slightly change the labels prior to use. But the changes are minor and easy to accommodate, so I'm calling this battle over.

It's been a while since I've provided an update on our continuing saga with the USDA labeling group in Washington, D.C. Time for an update.

We've been selling our retail pork cuts with labels approved by the USDA, but there is a problem: We submitted our label applications in two main groups. The first group included our fresh cuts, and the second group included our sausages and other processed products. The first group was approved for the most part. Sometime between the first group and the second group, a few months later, the USDA decided we could not use the word "healthiest" in reference to our pork without providing data to prove that it was the healthiest. So they approved the second group, provided we struck the word from the front label. Well, without this word the message on the front label was pretty lame. And we could not reasonably gather the data to prove that our pork was the healthiest. So, if we wanted to have labels that were consistent across our products, we had to come up with a new label for everything.

Long story short and several phone calls later (not to mention many hours of paperwork and label redesign) I have a set of label applications ready to go in the mail tomorrow.

This is the stack of paperwork for 15 applications covering 26 products. I went through more than a ream of paper.

Here's how the system works: The USDA does not keep a file record of applications for labels. They also want any application that includes label claims in triplicate. Label claims include anything like "raised without antibiotics," "Berkshire pork," etc. To substantiate the label claims you have to send in a protocol saying why you should be able to make that claim. We have to include pedigrees of our breeding stock, feed tags from supplements, explanations of why we believe our pigs are produced in the USA....... IN TRIPLICATE!

Once the USDA receives our applications, several of the USDA folks sit in a room together, pass them around, and decide whether or not to approve them. Then they send back one copy as approved, rejected, or approved with modifications and shred the rest. They keep no record of our applications. So... when I have to resend a rejected application, it has to include all the other documentation as well. This is an agency that supposedly manages the US Forest Service, which supposedly cares about trees. The ream I printed off tonight is about the third ream I've mailed to them in the past eight months.

Sigh. This is the system we live within, and it's also the system that explains why most folks would rather not be small, independent producers of meat products.

We receive emails or calls daily from new folks we didn't know before who are looking for good, honest, wholesome food grown locally and ethically. This is a trend that has been increasing for the past several month. We appreciate all the interest, and we thoroughly enjoy it when you enjoy our food in return. It works for all of us.

However, as you search for local food, there will be some challenges. I think I speak for other local producers when I say that I hope you will work with us as we all figure this thing out together. The biggest challenge you may face is in finding a reliable supply of local products. I am not sure anyone could have predicted the surge in demand for local food. We didn't a year ago when we should have been breeding all our sows and selecting new ones. We find ourselves at the moment unable to keep up with the demand. A good problem in a way, but not without concerns.

My biggest concern is that, while we and others ramp up production, folks will get tired of waiting and give up on local food. If you want to be in touch with your food supply, part of the picture is understanding the process of production. From conception to table, it takes roughly a year to produce a pork chop. Beef and bison take much longer. Lamb is somewhere in the middle. A sudden ramp-up in demand for milk takes many months to fulfill. In the process of ramping up, the farmer takes essentially all the risk. This is generally not a problem if we can be assured that the demand will still be there after we increase production. But if we all ramp up production and find in a year or so that this local food thing was only a fad and folks lost patience and went and shopped elsewhere, we all lose.

So please, let's look at getting to local food as a process. Let's work together, you voting with your food dollars to buy local. We as producers will be more than happy to respond and increase production ... it's what we have dreamed of for years. But please, please, don't lose patience during this process. We'll get there, and our food supply and our community will be better and more resilient in the end. Not to mention we'll all be enjoying better tasting, more nutritious, fresher food.

We started raising food for the local market six years ago, and the market was not all that interested. Finding customers was pretty tough. We started to notice an uptick in interest last year, but in the past three months this interest has finally exploded. We get calls and emails daily from new customers looking to buy local pork. We are ramping up production to meet the demand, and we are grateful for all the interest.

We're wondering why all the interest is happening now? Is it because of major media, like Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Inc.? Is it because of all the publicity recently in the news about antibiotics in animal feeds and problems associated with factory farms? Is it partly due to the E. Coli episodes that happen from time to time, seemingly at an increasing pace? Is it because of Americans placing their food dollar votes locally to help build community? Has it just taken a while for the local food mentality to reach Colorado from places that have been doing it a while, like Portland, Oregon?

I suspect the recent surge of interest is from all of these and more. Regardless, we have been stubbornly doing what we do for what seems like a long time and are excited about what the future has for local food in general and our operation specifically.

I finally took the plunge and created a page for Socolofsky Farms on Facebook. If you use Facebook, look us up and become a fan. I'm finding it easier to give quick updates on Facebook than on this blog. I'll try to keep both the blog and Facebook around for a while and then make a decision as to whether both are needed.

Lately we've been continuing the development of sausage and processed meat recipes. Our goal over time is to develop a whole list of sausages that we can make that offer unique flavors, contain no artificial ingredients, and, if cured, use our natural cure ingredients rather than synthetic sodium nitrate. We continue to sample our sausages out to our friends and customers for feedback, and tweak recipes until we achieve what we consider is a fabulous, one-of-a-kind product.

I think we're there on several sausages: medium and mild Italian, breakfast, andouille, tasso ham, Mexican chorizo are examples. I think we also finally settled on a brat recipe yesterday, offering a nice round flavor profile while not letting the spices completely overpower the excellent pork inside. With its natural casing, it also has a nice bite, or knack as the Germans call it. Last night we made what I hope is the final attempt at a German farmers sausage, which we'll be ready to sample today after it's smoked.

Continuing the German theme, I'm still working on fleischkaese, a sort of German meatloaf. We are also developing a pizza fleischkaese, a version of fleischkaese that includes bits of peppers and cheese. Both of these will use our natural cure ingredients, rather than artificial nitrates, which will make them unique products that I believe no one else in the US offers. Another German specialty meat is kassler, a cured and smoked pork loin. Again, the goal with this is to make a fabulous product that uses no artificial nitrates. This one has been hit or miss so far. A few attempts have worked out, but the last batch really did not work out. I made another one last night and will see if I finally nailed it. Our taste testers are first generation German immigrants who own a German restaurant and deli in Colorado Springs, so I think we'll get this right eventually.

Lately we've been experimenting with a number of new German sausages, at the request of a customer of ours who owns a German restaurant / deli. We have done a few turns of the crank on what we are calling Bauernbratwurst, a German farmer's sausage. This is a cured, smoked pork sausage that is great eaten straight, served with cheese and crackers, or cut up and added to soups. We've now settled on a cured recipe with the flavor characteristics, bite, and texture we want, and now we will convert over to an uncured version, with no added nitrate / nitrite.

We also worked up a couple of recipes of fleishkaese, also known as Bavarian leberkaese. This is a finely minced (emulsified) German meatloaf, traditionally cured. It's sliced, fried, and served with eggs for breakfast or on sandwiches. After some experimentation, we've settled on a recipe that is just delicious. Again, our plan now is to duplicate it with no added nitrate / nitrite. Our customer has also requested that we develop a pizza-fleischkaese, so stay tuned... I'll let you know what that is and how it worked out in a few weeks.

Working up sausage recipes is fun, rewarding work. Check out our products page for a list of all the sausages we can now make, and let us know if there's anything you'd like us to try working up for you.

In a continuation of the wicked cold stretch of weather, last night our low temperature was -16 degrees F. This is the lowest temperature in our eight winters of living here, and may be the coldest on record, at least that I can find. We spent the night half-awake, worrying about our livestock. I went out before dawn to check on things, and all the animals were fine. It's amazing how much cold weather pigs can take. Some of the sows were a bit restless, wandering about their pens and grunting, but for the most part they were all asleep, snoring contentedly. Some were buried in the straw so deeply that you couldn't see them. The only evidence was a slight heaving of the straw pile and escaping steam from their breath.

Coming out of an extremely cold stretch it feels like dawn has arrived. Indeed, we are getting a day of brilliant sun, a phenomenon we have not seen in the better part of a week. It's now a balmy 13 degrees, and feels like a heatwave. We feel a bit victorious that nothing bad happened last night, like hypothermia, broken waterers, or burst pipes.

Sometimes the best blessings are the lack of problems.

The mercury is sitting at -6 degrees right now, and it's bound to go lower. The high today did not quite reach 1 degree. We are in our coldest stretch of winter so far this year. Actually, it's the coldest stretch of winter I can remember in eight winters of living in our area. The sky is clearing tonight, and there is an even snow cover, and since it's only 6 pm right now, I am betting we'll see -10 at least. I went out to check on the animals, and they all seem to be doing fine. The pigs are snuggling up close together and trying to get as low in the straw bedding as possible. The sheep are wandering around, seemingly unaffected by the cold. They are Icelandics, and have about a 6" layer of wool, so I guess they are ready for it. It's the pigs that worry me. I threw an extra straw bale in with each of the boars, since they don't have anyone to snuggle with.
I remember growing up in the Omaha area, we used to get several weeks at a time when the temperature never saw the north side of zero. Not so here in Colorado. We are not used to consistently frigid temperatures. Fortunately we have modern necessities to assist us, like electricity to power the heated waterers and pump the water, a central wood burning furnace to heat the house, and heated cars and trucks to move us around. I am wondering how well anyone of us would survive if, for example, the electrical grid went down in such cold temperatures. For one, we would not be able to pump water to ourselves or our livestock. The water that is there already would quickly freeze. Our house would be at sub-zero temperatures within a day. Food preparation would be difficult without water.
How reliable is our electric grid? Perhaps it's time to look at a bit of preparedness?

Well, we finally received a response from the USDA on our last round of label applications. We were partially successful this time. Labels for uncured ham and bacon, ground pork, and sage-brined pork chops were approved. Labels for essentially all our sausages from this round were not. Sigh. There were a series of misunderstandings (my error), as well as errors on the part of the USDA label team. Once again, I had an enjoyable conversation with the kind USDA label guy in Washington, DC, and we parted on good terms. I have some work to do to get the labels resubmitted.

Winter has descended with a vengeance, bringing lots of snow and cold temperatures. This morning when I awoke it was 0.6 degrees (OK, I'll round it up to 1). It never got above about 7 degrees today, and tomorrow is supposed to be similarly cold. It's a struggle in such temperatures to keep the water to the animals flowing. We had a freeze-up in the rabbitry that took awhile to clear. Fortunately, years ago we installed heated, automatic waterers for the pigs. We still water the sheep by hand, though. I realize it's not -30 degrees (you folks from North Dakotan and Montana are REAL farmers), but it's still cold for our part of Colorado.

We made about 150 lbs of sausage yesterday. We made a variety of recipes, to provide friends and some potential customers with samples. We tried a few newly developed recipes, including a fresh sausage from the Alsatian region of France, and a Mexican chaurice. Both are great, but I'll need to tinker a bit more with the recipes. We also made our standbys: medium and mild Italian, breakfast, and what started out as a bratwurst, but has since been turned into a weisswurst. Brat or weiss, it's great.

We will have a session next week to make a batch of our uncured hams, just in time for Christmas. This ham is delicious. It's from our Berkshire pigs, and we process it without adding artificial nitrites or nitrates. It comes out juicy, flavorful, and looks, cooks, and tastes like regular ham. I know what we'll have on the table for Christmas!

I've learned quite a bit about our government through the process of obtaining USDA-inspected status for our meat processing facility. Did you know that labels for food products inspected by the USDA must be approved by the USDA before they can be used on the products? I learned that about a year ago.

A few months ago we received approval for our first round of labels for fresh pork cuts. This was a three month process. Along with the label application, I was required to send a protocol explaining how we can make the claims of Berkshire pork, vegetarian diet, and no antibiotics for our stock. This ended up being about 12 pages long. No problem. I was allowed to bundle seven or eight labels into one application, attach the protocol, and be done with it (after making two copies).

This second round, a week ago, I was applying for label approval for processed products, including our ham, bacon, and various types of sausage. All in all it was nine products. After a phone conversation with the very nice and even humorous USDA guy in Washington, D.C., I learned that they do not keep our documentation on file, so the protocol I sent before had to be sent again. OK. I can do that. What floored me was that this time around it had to be attached to each application individually ... in triplicate!

Long story short, I ended up sending about a ream of paper - I am not joking - for nine label applications! All I can say is that no federal funds will be used to copy and file my applications. All they have to do is circulate and (hopefully) approve.

I am sitting here at my desk watching the fourth or fifth snow of autumn dump on us. We are in a winter storm warning and forecast to get 10-18 inches of snow before it's over. I think we're about ready for winter, since we started getting the cold weather in September. We joked about it when, on September 21 we got our first snowstorm. We called it the last snowstorm of summer. It was followed a few days later by the first snowstorm of autumn, and we've had a few more since then.

It's hard to believe it's been over two months since I've contributed to the farm blog, but it's true. I'm debating about taking the blog down off our website, since I'm so sporadic, and it seems not many folks read it. I will try for a while to be more regular, and we'll see how that goes.

A lot has happened this fall, and we've made some key decisions concerning the future of our farm. Due to the dismal showing of our vegetable crops this summer and the tremendous amount of labor involved, we've decided to concentrate on livestock. We will still raise vegetables, but not on the scale we attempted this summer. We have interest from many friends and several restaurants in vegetables and greens, so we will plan to raise enough to accommodate them. We will probably not attempt farmers-market quantities of vegetables, however. If you would like to purchase our organic vegetables next year, please contact us directly.

Within the livestock department, we are ramping down our rabbit operation. While we will continue to raise them, the commercial marketing angles we were pursuing did not materialize after two years of work. We now have a facility where we can process them under USDA inspection, however, the cost of the inspection is so significant that it radically raises the cost of the meat, to the point where inspected rabbit meat is out of range for most people.

This cost issue is a shame. Rabbit meat is arguably one of the best domestic meats to consume, lower in cholesterol and higher in protein than beef, pork, chicken or lamb. Plus it's useful as a replacement for chicken in recipes. We think more Americans should eat rabbit. So here's the dilemma: The USDA considers rabbit inspection voluntary, which means that they do not require rabbit to be inspected to be sold in the US. However, the state of Colorado requires rabbit to be inspected, and they require USDA inspection. So since to the USDA it's voluntary, they charge us, the processor, the cost of inspection. This amounts to about $50/hr of the inspector's time. If we are only processing 10 rabbits at a session, the inspection cost adds about $5 to the cost of each rabbit, perhaps more. Thus, inspection is the second largest cost in raising rabbit, behind the cost of feed. Poultry, beef, pork, and lamb are not voluntary to the USDA, but compulsory, so the cost of the inspector is paid for by the USDA. Long story short, if you want rabbit, please contact us directly.

So that leaves the pigs and sheep, both of which we are continuing to raise in larger quantities. There may be some interesting developments coming within the next six months in the pork department, so stay tuned.

Well, July has come and gone and I'm not sure what happened to it. We've had a flurry of activity around our place lately, which probably accounts for the time passing quickly. The past few weeks the major activities have centered around getting ready for the Douglas County Fair. Our kids are showing pigs and rabbits at the fair, and getting the animals ready for the show is a time-consuming process. There are the daily weighings, baths, and walks for the pigs, and the regular nail clipping and grooming for the rabbits. Several of the show pigs have gained weight at a slower than expected rate this summer, and this causes additional stress on us as we help the kids find ways to increase the pigs' rate of weight gain. We'll get there, I think.
As for the rest of the farm, we're ramping up on the vegetable harvest. The beans have started coming in, and we've picked many pounds of pole beans. We grow the old standby Kentucky Wonder, and this year we added a yellow wax pole bean that is just fabulous. We cut our first few broccoli heads a few days ago, and the taste is so much better than the broccoli from the supermarket. The kids devoured our first cucumbers in about 5 minutes. We've been pulling beets for several weeks now, and are thoroughly enjoying them. We tried two new varieties this year: a long, narrow beet that slices nicely, and a yellow beet. The yellow beets are really nice looking. They have a slight tint of red-orange to them, and pickling them in jars makes for a very pretty product. We have begun harvesting our first few summer squashes, as well.
The potatoes, onions, and carrots are doing well, although we need several more weeks of growth before we can begin harvesting these crops. We are hoping for a very nice potato harvest this year. Our part of Colorado used to be famous for potatoes, many years ago. We like the way they've been growing so far, and if it ever dries out enough for us to get in the field and hill them up, we'll be very happy.
Of course, we will not complain in the least about the moisture we've been having. We had about 5 inches of rain during July, which is unheard of for our area. Some of the moisture came very rapidly as hail, and shredded some of the outdoor crops. Our outdoor cucumbers were destroyed last week, and I don't know if they'll make it or not. But that's part of the challenge of farming. We take the good with the bad and thank the Lord that we're out in the country enjoying His creation.