This was taken in March 2003 from a ladder near a spot where the laying hens had just moved from.  Note the small green patches to the left of the English Hawthorne in the midground…

and this was taken in Feb 2010 (but without a ladder).  The knee high firs are looking pretty good.

This was from the same spot as before, on the ladder in March 2003, now looking east.

and in Feb 2010

Here’s a shot looking SE, up the “Low Pass” of Old Moore’s valley road

and here’s the shot from Feb 2010 from my guesstimate as to where it was taken. A lot more trees in the valley these days.

and a 50′s-era shot to the south of South Moore’s Valley.

and the closest approximation to the location.

It’s neat to see how a landscape can change, both in under a decade, and then over the decades.

While I’ve been wanting to do this post for a while, what finally sparked me to get it all organized was this article in the local paper by a local historian. The money quote:

Puckerville, in Moore’s Valley area, tried also to become a town. In the late 1880s and ’90s, Puckerville items in Yamhill County newspapers reported talk of a new store “in our berg,” the organizing of a literary society, and this confident item: “Puckerville has more get up and go than any other town its size in Yamhill County.” But Puckerville’s “get up and go” never “got up and grew.”

It looks like my next historical investigation will be finding out where this Puckerville town was. Moore’s Valley is a very small place, so it can’t have been more than a few miles from us, but I haven’t heard anything about a town site around here. Add it to my list…

Scrape together some change and drop them some at the link below.

http://maps.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

It’s a pretty fascinating tool…pounds of meat consumed per capita per year, access to grocery stores, WIC redemptions (pictured), and farmer’s markets are available down to the county level. We spent a good chunk of the evening playing around with it. It’s a good lead-in to Blog for Food month

Extreme Tree Planting – Trees for Earth from Peter Hill on Vimeo.

Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

Some thoughts and observations on it….

Improving our pastures could be a very fast, energy intensive, and expensive proposition, or we could take the gradual, improvement of management approach. Being fundamentally frugal when having to deal with a decent-sized acreage, we’ve gone the gradual approach. In our tenure here, we’ve seen a large increase in the presence of “good” forage grasses, along with vetch and subclover (soil building legumes), with a decline in the weedy annuals that dominated the pastures when we got here.

Marks & Spencer (a high-end UK retailer) spent £200million to take 100,000 cars off the road…in order to reach that level of effect, a 12acre grass fire burning for 15mins will offset all of those cars and money (1.5 acre fire puts out more pollutants than 4000 cars per second). Our seasonally dry climate evolved to burn every few years, and I’d like to include fire in our management at some point, but notwithstanding the conflagration danger, the pollution that it will spew, along with the volatilization of so much of our soil nutrients, makes me think that it’ll be something that we’ll have to pass on.

For the folks who really want to geek out on Holistic Management from the mouth of the prophet, click here for the hour long lecture. It’s a bit dry at the start, but totally worth the time.

(via)

The effect of livestock on greenhouse gas emissions are often overrated, if not entirely exaggerated

Pasture is part of the solution to the carbon issue

Some farms are doing it right

And the systems exist to fix the problem

OK, seriously, I need to post more often.

They talk about land, farm cooperation, and meat processing, as well as our favorite advice to meat buyers – meet the meat…Check it out.

We’re offering quarters (split halves) for sale at $3/lb, plus butcher
charges (which are usually ~$90-100 per quarter).  This is a lower price
than our usual price ($3.75/lb) for a few reasons: 1) fall beef tends to
be less tender than spring due to the quality of the grass at this time
of year, 2) the grazing rotation is less intensive (meaning that they
are moved less), and thus gain weight more slowly.   These cows will primarily provide ground beef,  along with some roasts, and maybe some steaks.   If you’re looking for premium grass-fed beef, I’d suggest waiting for our spring offerings, but if you’re looking mainly for delicious, but more affordable, ground beef, roasts, and stew meat for the winter, this might be a great option!

Just like our steers, these cows are only fed grass and hay, and are not
given antibiotics, hormones, etc.   And we’ll be using the same butcher
as usual – Frontier Custom Cutting in Carlton.  We’re estimating that
the hanging weight will be ~130-160lbs per quarter.

If you’d like to place an order, or ask questions, please contact us by
email (info@mossbackfarm.com) or phone (503 852 9585).  Orders will be
taken on a first come, first served basis, and filling the orders will
depend on having enough customers for each cow (4 per animal).

Thanks!