Have you ever wondered how butchers cut a steak or pork chop, making them so even, even while cutting through bone? We use a tool called a band saw, which is exactly what it sounds like, except bigger and made of stainless steel.
The cycle of seasons catches me by surprise this time of year. Summer is a blur, often seeming like she will live on forever.
Our turkeys come from our dear friends Dave Perozzi and his family at Wrong Direction Farm in Canajoharie, New York. These turkeys live the life I would want to live as a turkey: ranging in pastures and hedgerows, searching for bugs, with comfortable places to roost and fresh air and sunshine aplenty.
This was one of those weeks that did not go as planned, which sometimes can be exciting. On the way out of the field, Terron was driving the tractor when all of a sudden it stopped running.
Moving a group of pigs is one of the more humbling jobs on a farm. Moving 70 of them, each approaching 300 pounds, across a road is the kind of thing that can go wrong in a hurry. This is the story of how our team member Terron did it calmly, by himself, with a hog cart and a few buckets of wild apples.
At the end of August we lost two people who shaped how I think about my work: Dolly Parton, and six days later, Wendell Berry. A remembrance of both, and of the draft horses we used to farm with.
If you have seen shaved pork in our store and wondered what it is, the short answer is that it's thinly sliced pork from the ham, and it might be the most useful thing in our freezer. Thinly sliced shaved pork from pasture raised pigs at Reber Rock Farm. The longer answer starts with a question we were trying to solve.
Each summer we open the farm for a few Friday evenings of food and live music. We call them Farm Food Fridays, and having just closed out another season, I have been thinking about why they matter to me as much as they do.
This year we farrowed our first certified organic piglets here on the farm, and one of the clearest lessons came from a sow who made a decision for us. During a summer thunderstorm, she walked across a fence and gave birth somewhere no pig had been in a generation.
...If you want to know what's in it, it's simple. We take the whole ham and remove the bone in the middle. The ham is tumbled with a mix of salt and sugar for flavor. Then it is smoked, which in turn cooks the ham. Then we slice it thinly, package it, and it's ready to eat. Nothing more, nothing less.
Lovett was inspired this week to go find her old friends Butter and Vinegar, the two calves she adopted in their first days of life, when their mothers had challenging births and were not able to nurse them.
The first update is about our piglets. I took down the electric fence that had been separating the new piglets from our friend Ben at Wild Harmony Farm and the piglets that were born here, and I can share now that everything has gone well, something I was pretty concerned about: these two groups of pigs coming together.
Reber Rock Farm is a small family farm in the Adirondacks producing pasture-raised certified organic chicken, pastured organic-fed pork, 100% grass-fed beef and lamb, and maple syrup.
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