Innovative Farmers of Ohio

Farm Tours Trigger Planning Efforts

ifohAdmin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:26:20 +0000

Last summer’s highly successful farm tours have given IFO’s board good ideas about how to grow and serve our membership in the future. We have focused our efforts on “entrepreneurial” farmers, those who grow or produce products for consumers and we have invited those consumers into the conversation.

In 2011 we completed ”Our Farms, Our Food” series of workshops for farmers and consumers. We continued our support for the Sheep Dairy Initiative, and our farm tours brought farmers and consumers together to learn more about successful farming for local markets. As we plan for 2012, we welcome your input. Please use the “comment” option below or send us a letter to let us know what IFO can do to help you move your business forward. Your membership renewal and/or donation are greatly appreciated.

Be an Innovative Farmer! Support an Innovative Farmer!

ifohAdmin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:39:36 +0000

IFO Annual Conference brought together farmers and eaters to look at the business of farming.
Check out some details under the conference tab.
Whether you are a traditional corn and beans farmer interested in transitioning to more sustainable methods, an organic producer, a new farmer, Innovative Farmers of Ohio invites you to join our efforts to increase the number of sustainable farms in Ohio. If you are a consumer who wants sustainably produced food from Ohio farms, IFO invites you to join us as well.

Check out this wonderful story about an innovative farmer and IFO board member, Abbe Turner:
http://neotropolis.org/2010/11/lucky-penny-creamery-111210-segment/

We offer workshops, farm tours, technical assistance, newsletters, an annual meeting and much more. And we want to hear from our members about what more we can do to increase the number of profitable farms producing good food and fiber for Ohio.

Look under EVENTS to learn what’s coming up.

Birth Pangs

ifohAdmin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:42:13 +0000

We lost a cow last Sunday though she was dispatched a week later. She prolapsed giving birth to a bull calf who stumbled away in the darkness and died as she relentlessly pushed beyond measure not knowing the calf had already been born. One of nature’s cruel side effects of animal pregnancies. Pigs, my husband says seem to inherit this tendency to prolapsed where the uterus comes out along with the babies or soon there after. Save no gilts from these litters he was warned.
The vet was called early Sunday morning. Being a weekend he charges double for emergencies. He told John that he could attend things as he walked him through what needed to be done. John called his mother who he said is better than 911 in her readiness. I was out of town. Then John called his younger brother Gabe to milk while he and his mother got the cow up and into the barn where they first gave her some calcium intravenously. Immediately the uterus shrunk to where it could then be cleaned with buckets of warm soapy water and rinsed.
Sleeved with a sterile glove, John pushed the mass back into the cow. However, it would not stay. So as he continued to hold it in with one hand, he called his older brother Rick who had a friend whose aunt worked in the ER. She had given him a throw-away staple gun still loaded. Could he come quickly with the device so the uterus could be secured inside the cow.
The staples worked. John then sewed her up with a large needle his mother had brought using fishing line. Huge doses of antibiotics and some banamine helped the cow fight the bacteria surely embedded in the uterus as she lay outside in that early rainy morning in the mud. The banamine soothed her pain.
She did alright even against predictions, ate fairly well, but toward the end of the week, she began tilting her head, hanging her ear to one side. Then she went down, her eyes rolling about, in great distress. John shot her. And buried her. He figured she had acquired a lethal ear infection or maybe it was listeria, always present in the earth itself. Who knows. He saved $500 no doubt in vet bills but lost the cow and calf. Sad business working and tending livestock, the operable word live, but it happens against everyone’s wishes though everyone, a long line of family and friends, tried to make it otherwise.

Cookie Bakers

ifohAdmin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:40:38 +0000

I went over to a neighbors to buy a horse one cold mid-December long ago. It rained the whole way and I thought of what my father said,
“It’s the kind of day you want to buy a farm because the farmer is sick of mud, wet hay, pugging, and spring seems so far away.”
This farmer was nowhere in sight when I pulled in the driveway. Nor was there any evidence of a horse. However, the kitchen glowed from within and through the besotted window panes a woman moved effortlessly back and forth, carrying things, bending, and lifting.
I expected a quick, “I’ll get my coat and we’ll go the barn.” Instead she invited me and my small son in and sat us around a table ladened with cookies.
On every counter cookie pans, tins, and platters crammed against one another. This woman was awash in cookie baking. I’d never seen anything like it!
As she told me about the horse, she continued to cream butter and sugar, cut bars, pack wafers. A flurry of controlled energy unfolded; I baked cookies, yes, but never in this quantity and variety and all at once! It was the first time I had seen multi tasking at its finest. And I loved it!
All the flurry, the shapes and colors, the smells and warmth set against the bleak and dull world outside opened a whole new way to approach life. Hit it head on, embrace the joy, pull against the pits that threaten to suck you in, create a can-do and do a lot of what you like.
This woman liked baking. I liked farming, animals, employing the land to produce. And I liked people who liked the land.
I didn’t buy the horse. Instead I went home and in due course, opened a B & B, built a small dairy herd, and created an on farm cheese business.
I helped renovate a run down house into a youth center, wrote articles for a local newspaper, continued with some aspects of ministry, worked for several non–profits and baked cookies.
When our former First Lady protested baking cookies, I knew she didn’t understand the power of the cookie bakers!