I am a carnivore through and through, which I believe is evident by how we raise our own pigs, chickens, and lamb for our consumption. I dare say a meal for me is not truly complete without some kind of animal protein. However, as they say there is an exception to every rule, and my exception is corn on the cob.
From the Fourth of July until the weather really changes in September, I eat corn on the cob every chance I can. I even happily will break my “must have meat” rule and sacrifice animal protein for this seasonal delicacy. Its season is a flash in the pan, and while the eating is good I take full advantage.
All good things must come to an end and sadly that doesn’t exclude my unapologetic binge eating of corn. But thankfully, you can preserve the summers bounty and get that fresh summer taste in the depths of winter by properly freezing it. While it may not be corn on the “cob”, it tastes like it was freshly cut from the cob just picked, which is about as good as you can possibly get.
You can use this method to freeze as little or as much corn as you want. I try to freeze two bushels a year, and usually do it a bushel at a time. It’s one of those things that you have to get set up and you are going to make a mess anyway, so why not do a bunch?
What You Need:
- Fresh corn (make sure it’s fresh picked and not overly mature)
- Large stockpot with lid
- Clean food grade bucket
- Propane burner/propane (this makes a big mess so I always do it outside!)
- Sharp knife
- Bundt pan
- Large colander
- Large tongs
- Freezer Bags
- Cookie sheet/dish to put cut corn in
- Table to “work” on with a hose closeby
Directions:
- Get your work station set up. Fill your stock pot with water, and get it boiling on the propane burner. Fill the food grade bucket with very cold water (I use the garden hose). Clean off your table and have your bundt pan, colander, and knife ready with the cookie sheet or dish close by.
- While the water is boiling, get to shuckin’. This is admittedly the crappiest part that happens right off the bat, but sadly necessary.
- Once your water is at a full rolling boil and your corn is all shucked, add 8-12 ears of corn to the pot. Put the lid on, and wait until it reaches a full rolling boil again. This will take a couple minutes. Once it does, check your watch and time it for 2-3 minutes (2 minutes for smaller ears, 3 minutes for large ears) **The amount you add depends on the size of your pot and the corn. You aren’t looking to fill it, it cooks quickly. For a 22 quart pot, I add 10-12 ears at a time.
- After the time is up, quickly grab the corn with the tongs and put into your bucket of very cold water (try to minimize the amount of boiling water that goes in). You are blanching the corn, so you need the water to be very cold so it can stop the cooking process. Be prepared to dump and refill the water before each new batch of corn. It has to be cold!
- Once the corn is cool to the touch after a few minutes, put the ears in your large colander so the water can drain off.
- Then, grab an ear and place it vertically pointed side down into the hole in the bundt pan. Using your sharp knife, cut the kernels off the cob being careful to get as close to the cob as you can without actually cutting chunks of the cob off. Using the hole in the bundt pan prevents the cob from sliding around and slipping, while the kernels are captured below to reduce mess.**There is a tool that is specifically for cutting corn off the cob, which I used to use. However, it didn’t cleanly cut the kernels off and make it more of a “cream style” texture. I prefer whole kernels which you can only get from cutting with a knife.
- Continue cutting the kernels off the cob and dump into your larger container as your bundt pan fills up. Once you have prepared all of your corn, freeze it in bags (either ziploc or vacuum sealed) being careful to get all of the air out.
- Enjoy the fresh cut from the cob taste all winter long!
Once you get into a groove, you can do a lot of corn in a short amount of time. When you hit your stride, you will have corn boiling while some is cooling in the bucket and simultaneously cutting kernels off the cob at the same time. You don’t need to take it from Step 1-6 before starting back over again, multitasking is the name of the game!
When raising livestock you are always on the lookout for ways to save on feed costs as it is the number one expense. Spring and summer months bring a natural reprieve with pasture for grazing, food scraps from the garden, and excess milk/ cheese making by products. But what about the winter? There’s no pasture, no garden, and certainly no milk to be spared. This is where sprouting grains for fodder can come into play.
Fodder, quite literally means food for animals. So, there are many different types of fodder. Hay, grain, pasture, silage, these are all “fodder”. So, for the purposes of this blog post, when I say fodder, I am referring to sprouted grains.
By taking your grain ( you can use a number of different types of grain it’s just a matter of figuring out what works best for you. I use barley because it’s highest in nutritional value and it’s readily available) soaking it in water for a day, and then spraying it daily for a week you can turn it into a lush blanket of grass with a thick root mat. Everything is edible! Not only that, but you triple the weight of the amount you are feeding out your livestock. So, a 50 pound bag of organic barley that runs $25, actually turns into 150 pounds of fodder. So rather than paying $.50 a pound, you are in fact paying $.16 a pound. Pretty awesome huh?
Just in case the cost savings wasn’t enough to get you interested there are some pretty amazing health benefits to supplementing your livestock’s feed ration with fodder:
- Increased nutritional value (vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymatic activity, omega 3’s, amino acids, natural hormones, immune response) versus feeding grain form – great for fattening lambs and flushing ewes
- More easily digestible
- Increased hydration
- Increased milk production and butterfat content in dairy animals
- Healthier coat and hooves
- Lower pH in rumen
- Easier transition in spring to pasture full time
- Natural and fresh fee
You Can Have too Much of a Good Thing
So you may be thinking ” oh wow this is amazing I’ll never have to buy hay again!”. Wrong. Sadly, this is not how it works. Fodder is a supplement and is part of a well balanced diet, and is not intended to be a substitute for hay as part of a complete diet.
But why? Because fodder is hydroponically grown and sprouted, the nutritional content is exponentially greater. For example, barley as a seed has a crude protein percentage of 12.7%. When sprouted, the crude protein spikes to almost 17%! Not only is it more nutrient dense, but it’s more digestible maximizing its absorption. So, they don’t need as much, as they are efficiently converting it to energy.
A percentage of the animals body weight determines how much fodder they should be fed out daily in addition to their normal feed ration (percentages below from Tractor Supply):
- Horse: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; 1.5% body weight in dry hay
- Beef Cow: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; barley straw ration
- Dairy Cow: 3-5 percent of their body weight in fodder; barley straw ration
- Sheep: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; hay ration
- Goat: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; mineral and hay rations
- Dairy Goat: 3-5 percent of their body weight in fodder; mineral and hay rations
- Alpaca: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; hay ration
- Pig: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder
- Rabbit: 3-5 percent of their body weight in fodder; hay ration for roughage
- Chicken: 2-3 percent of their body weight in fodder; grit and calcium supplements
How To Sprout It
Sprouting fodder at home is incredibly easy and can be scaled up or down as much as you want. I am not going to get into the nitty gritty on how to make your shelving set up and your tray system. There are quite literally hundreds of different set ups you can find with a simple google search, and it will be all about finding what system works best for you. I currently am using a shelving system I got from Amazon because I didn’t have an old plastic shelf kicking around I could use, and I wanted something I could wheel around that didn’t look totally awful. I know I may need to scale up from this to meet my needs, but it’s giving me a start.
- Soak your grains in cool water for 12-24 hours. Drain and spread out onto a tray with drain holes with a tray below to catch water draining.
- Spray your grains twice daily with water so that they do not dry out. You don’t want them sitting in standing water (that’s why there are drain holes) but you want them to be consistently wet. Keeping your trays in a room with an ambient temperature of 60˚F-70˚F is ideal to promote sprouting and reduce mold growth. (**If you end up getting mold growth be sure to sanitize the pans before sprouting again)
- After just a day or two you will see the grains begin to sprout, and a couple days after that the grasses will begin to grow!! The grains will sprout and grow without sunlight, but sunlight is needed to turn the fodder green. Keeping your system near a window or in a well lit room is enough sunlight to get the job done. You don’t need grow lights or anything special unless you’re growing in a windowless room.
- Within 7 days or so you will have a lush blanket of grass that is ready to feed out to your livestock, root mat and all! You will want to feed it out fresh at this point, as the nutritional content is at its peak and it will not be able to develop any further hydroponically without fertilizer.
How I Plan To Use Fodder
Right now it’s spring and I currently have more than enough grass for everyone to forge for on their own. So I am taking advantage of this time and am working on getting a good rhythm in place figuring out a daily routine for sprouting grains for fodder. Although it takes merely minutes, I still am figuring it out. What room I want to keep my shelf in, how to spray my grains (sink or spray bottle), do I want to get another shelf from Amazon or come up with my own system, etc. I am figuring out this rhythm now so that over the coming months I can adjust my set up and be ready to go for the winter.
I will not be feeding this out to all of our animals. It’s simply just not doable! My three dairy goats alone would consume 12 pounds of fodder a day if I fed them their maximum daily ration. That doesn’t include the male goats, the sheep, or any of the pigs! Unless I wanted to dedicate an entire room to this, it’s just not feasible. But, that’s okay! Some is better than none, and even if I can’t feed out everyone their maximum ration, I can still feed out a portion of it and it will still provide amazing health benefits as well as help cut some costs.
The sheep will be gone by the end of fall as will the pigs, which leaves the dairy goats that will still be in milk. So, they are my priority, and my goal is to be able to provide each doe with at least two pounds of fodder a day to help stimulate milk production among other health benefits.
While I am just getting my “system” in place and figuring out the specifics of my set up, the health benefits and cost savings of sprouting grains for fodder cannot be denied. Whether you have a small herd of dairy goats, some ewes, a couple of chickens, or a whole menagerie like me, you too can do this to save some money while providing a nutrient dense supplement in the lean winter months, flushing for breeding, or fattening lambs!
Happy Sprouting,
There is no denying the laundry list of health benefits to raw, unfiltered, apple cider vinegar. Whether it be used for cosmetic or internal purposes, a simple google search will yield millions of reasons why you should add it to your diet or beauty regimen. I personally have used it for years on my hair and face, as well as a substitute (in most cases) for plain white vinegar in recipes. The stuff is just plain ole’ good, and good for you. I always bought Bragg’s with “the mother”, because if you’re going to buy it, in my opinion it really is the best. But a couple years ago during apple season I thought shoot I can just make it myself no problem! So, I did! And it really is as easy as I detail below. All it takes is some patience and you can have homemade, raw, unfiltered, apple cider vinegar with that wonderful “mother” at your fingertips! Give it a try and see for yourself.
If you’re relatively new to the ACV world and aren’t familiar with “the mother” let me enlighten you. The mother is what makes ACV so awesome, and houses all of the nutrition and benefits. Without it, well, you would have filtered apple cider vinegar and I can’t imagine such a world. It’s the cream to milk, the fat to a ribeye, the whey to yogurt! Without it, ACV would lose what makes it so incredible. It is that floaty, chunky, wonderful goodness that settles at the bottom of a jar and is a byproduct of the fermentation process.
The process of making ACV is just simple fermentation. All you need is some apple cores/peels/whatever apple scraps you have, some water, raw sugar, a jar, and time:
- Collect any peels, cores, or other apple scraps you have collected. Place in a sterilized mason jar (of any size depending on how many scraps you have) and fill the jar 3/4 full with scraps
- Make a simple syrup with a ratio of 2 tsp raw sugar dissolved in 1 cup of water. So if you are making your ACV in a quart jar which is four cups, I figure a 3 cup simple syrup solution is needed. Pour your simple syrup solution over the apples leaving a few inches headspace, pushing down and around the inside of the jar with a knife to remove any air bubbles. If needed add more simple syrup so the apples are completely submerged. This is key! The apples have to be submerged at all times, otherwise this can promote mold growth which would require you to pitch the entire contents of the jar.
- The keep the apple scraps submerged you can buy fancy fermentation lids that hold contents down with a valve on top that allows fermentation to happen. I don’t have those and really don’t see the need. So, I put a bunch of pie weights in saran wrap and twist it up nice and tight and place it in the jar on top of the scraps. Give it a firm push down, and this will weigh down the scraps keeping them below the simple syrup level.
- Place a breathable top (I.e paper towel, coffee filter, cheesecloth) over the top of the jar and secure it with a rubber band or jar ring. I personally double layer, because as fermentation happens you will bring fruit flies out of the woodwork. A double layer will prevent them from getting into the jar.
So now that your jar is assembled, you want to put it in a relatively warm and dark place (I used my kitchen pantry on a high shelf) and pseudo forget about it! The first few days check on it, as you want to make sure that the apples are staying submerged in the liquid. If not, add more weight. This is the key part that can cause this to take a hard turn towards the trash. If you see bubbling and a scum forming at the top – wonderful! That’s fermentation and mother forming friend.
Let that baby sit for 3-4 weeks in that same relatively warm and dark place then remove the apple scraps. It should have a sweet smell at this point. I poured the contents of my jar out into a colander over a bowl, then added the strained liquid back into the same jar. Replace with the same breathable covered top and put back into the same relatively warm and dark place. Then forget it about it even longer! Let it sit for a month or so, go over and take a whiff through your breathable top. Does it smell vinegary? If it does, good for you, you have a warmer house than me and it fermented a little quicker. Does it still smell a tad sweet? Then let it sit another week or so and check on it again. Once it has that distinct vinegar smell, take a spoonful of that bad boy and give er’ a taste. You’ll know if it’s vinegar or not! Once you have achieved the vinegar state, recover with a sealed lid and put it in your pantry and enjoy!
When making your first batch of ACV, you are also “creating” the mother. Because of this, you want to use raw sugar, and you also will likely not get a large amount of mother in your first batch. However, when you make your second batch, you should reserve some of your ACV from the first batch to add to the second replacing some of the simple syrup to kickstart the fermentation process and make a stronger mother culture. You could also use some store-bought (raw, unfiltered, with mother) such as Bragg’s in your first batch to make that first mother strong as well. Either way, as long as your keep your apple scraps submerged, and your jar in a relatively warm and dark place, fermentation and the mother will happen and you will create some delicious and good for you homemade raw, unfiltered, apple cider vinegar!
When your sow is in heat, it’s time to inseminate! Watch my two part video series below to learn all you need to know about the tools to artificially inseminate a gilt or sow and the process! Part 1 covers supplies, where to get them, and some helpful hints. Part 2 walks you through the insemination.
In the middle of August with three months to go before shipping mid- November, we were already working on the plan of attack for finishing the pigs. Up until this point, the hogs had been rotated through four paddocks, seeding with a mixed cover crop after moving on to the next area. The larger they get the more they eat and root up, which means we had to rotate them more frequently. With them quickly approaching their ship date and weighing in around 190 pounds, the time came to move them to virgin ground to help pack on the pounds and flavor the meat over the next three months. Fall is the perfect season for finishing them thanks to an abundance of produce, canning scraps, nuts, and fruits which not only offsets some feed cost, but also enhances flavor.
Even though pigs are nature’s rototillers, they do enjoy munching on various greens and other saplings. Maple tree saplings, Jewelweed, and spent plants from the garden are some of their favorite snacks, and make a good supplement to their existing varied diet. The three new paddocks we rotated them through from August through November were full of various tree saplings. Jewelweed another favorite of theirs, grew rampant around the farm making it easy to walk around and quickly pull it out to toss it in for them to enjoy.
In addition to the cover crops, spent broccoli, cauliflower, and broccolini plants from the garden had been pulled from the dirt and tossed in as well. All of these supplemented greens albeit do not provide the most calories for weight gain or contribute a whole lot for a flavor profile, they are full of beta carotene which results in healthier fat. This equates to more nutritious meat lower in saturated fat, cholesterol, and higher in mono and poly unsaturated fats. The nutrition of the food I raise is just as important to me as the flavor. This is why supplemental greens are just as important as any of food source that will add flavor or mass as they produce a more nutrient dense end product.
In regards to flavor alone, the food your hog eats towards the end its life is more important than what it consumes in the beginning. General rule is that the flavor of the meat will start to change after a month, and by the end of the third month the flavor profile has fully developed. With a ship date of mid-November, if we wanted the full flavor profile we hoped for, moving the pigs in the middle of August was essential.
Our main focus for the finishing period as far as supplemental food goes was acorns. The area that we moved the pigs to is full of last year’s acorns that have dropped, while this year’s were just beginning to. In addition to ones falling in the paddocks, I raked the acorns in early spring that fell into our yard from various oak trees and spread them throughout the paddocks the pigs finished their last three months on. Acorns are renowned for the sweet and nutty flavor they incorporate into the pork as well as the fat. The nut’s high fat level also lowers the melting point of the pork’s fat, creating a melt in your mouth texture. All of this flavor is why hogs finished on acorns fetch a higher price. The affect it has on the meat’s taste, texture, and nutrition is something that you can’t get in the store.
When fall creeps in in New England that means that apples, peaches, and tomatoes are starting to ripen. We have a few crap apple trees, so every few days I would go out with my five gallon bucket and collect all of the drops full of bugs, and toss them in the paddock for the pigs to munch on. These apples which were inedible for us, would otherwise go wasted. Fortunately, the pigs enjoy them and it’s free food (pork chops and apples anyone?!). At this time my tomato plants are loaded with fruit that is beginning to ripen, and when I can all of the different tomato products any cores, skins, and seeds will be gobbled up by the pigs.
I believe fall to be the best time of year to finish pigs due to the abundance of food scraps from the garden as well as mother nature’s gifts. If believing what I say isn’t enough for you though, I believe the proof is in the pudding (or in this case pork chops). The hard work and more labor intensive method of raising pigs on pasture and in the woods proved to be worth every second of our time when we could see the results in our meat. The result was deep red, nutrient dense meat with delicious marbling throughout and a nice fat cap. I do believe that I will make every effort from hereon out to finish my pigs in the fall!
