There are many new faces around the farm these days, some of them human, some of them not.
Indeed the newest faces are Checkers’ piglets that she delivered late Tuesday night. She wasn’t due
Checkers Building her Farrowing Nest
until Thursday, but the nest building she embarked upon Tuesday morning clued us in that she wasn’t waiting for the 12th! 7 mountains at this point are braving their first hours figuring out milking and navigating around their mammoth mama. She is more like the mountain with 7 teeny foothills. So far, so good. Pictures & videos to come on Facebook.
Our other new teammates are of the human farmer variety, apprentices, joining us for learning, exposure and experience in exchange for their work.
Lauren with Jenga & her General Stark
Lauren Griswold is a recent UVM alum (‘11) looking to put her weight into efforts that strengthen community health, food security, and the resilience of ecological systems. She spent half of the last year apprenticing at her Uncle’s grass-fed beef & pastured pork North Woods Ranch in Pennsylvania. Lauren will be with us for a year focusing on all aspects of our livestock operation and marketing & sales. Look forward to some events coordinated by Lauren, blending the two we are certain, not too mention an additional facebook/newsletter contributor.
Melissa with K2
Melissa Usack has returned east after a long stint on the west coast (including some college geology courses with Liva’s father!).Originally from the Ithaca area, Melissa long term goal is to have a small farm/ homestead with a goat dairy and some form of community outreach/ education regarding home raised foods. Melissa will be getting a lot of your veggies started and in the ground while also playing a key role on the milking team and with all of the livestock. She will be with us until August, when she heads to Blue Ledge Farm for a cheese-making apprenticeship. We hope she’ll help us up our cheese making varieties here first!
Carrie from her Humaneitarian site
Carrie Abels is the editor/founder of Humaneitarian.org, a beautiful website that inspires people to give up factory farmed meat and eat the humane kind instead, and the editor of Local Banquet, a Vermont quarterly magazine about local farms and food. She is joining our livestock team for the pasture season as a grounding for her other work, “keepin’ it real by actually being around farm animals while running a website about them,” as she notes in her blog about her first week. In addition to her help with animal chores, we aim to have her help us on the communications side a bit, benefiting from her decades as a news & feature journalist.
We are thrilled to have these new teammates and look forward to welcoming an additional apprentice in the early summer and more goat kids later this month!
When you come to shop at the farm, do meet all of the new faces.