Caroline Lepczyk
Thursday May 23rd
Today we spent our morning at The Cory Family Farm and in the afternoon were able to meet with Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey and his Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, Jay Johnson.
To help the Cory boys milk the goats, we left the farm at six o’clock in the morning and arrived at their farm at 7 am. Milking the goats was such a strange experience! It was like nothing I had ever done before, and I wasn’t very good at it. The Cory boys however milked the farm’s eight milk goats quickly and efficiently. After milking the goats, we helped lay down straw in the barn where the nanny goats and kids were kept before moving on to learn about the cows and sheep that the family kept. The Cory’s keep a quite rare breed of beef cattle, called American White Park Cattle. These cattle are said to produce some of the best beef in the world and are a superior beef breed in the modern industry, even on a grass-fed diet.
After looking at the cattle we traveled up the road to the pasture, which I believe was about a quarter section, or a square quarter mile. On the pasture they keep sheep and soon will also move their goats and cattle there. Although they have a good amount of land, right now the sheep are only on a small part of it. Soon they will start a pasture rotation, where the different grazing animals will each be in a pasture for a set amount of time, before they are moved as a group to the next pasture and will move in a train-like group. For example, if the goats are in first pasture, the cows are in the second pasture and the sheep are in the third pasture, when the animals are moved, the sheep will move up to the fourth pasture, the cows will move up to the third pasture and the goats will move up to the second pasture. I’m not sure quite how much pastureland was available for rotations, but I think it was about eleven paddocks worth of land. In the winter, a grain mixture of eleven seeds is sown into these pastures so that they will be good grazing for the animals.
After exploring the pasture and putting up fence we went back to the main farm for lunch. For lunch we had French cut goat chops and they was surprisingly delicious. During this lunch we learned a little more about the Cory family’s beliefs and practices. Although some of them seemed a little extreme to some of us, they certainly seemed like a very productive, healthy, and happy family.
Though the Cory’s, the Fiscus’s (Fisci) and the Wallace Center all farm organically, there were a few quite obvious differences in their principles. The Fiscus’s struck me as the most ‘normal’ of the three farms. Though they raise an organic garden and allow their chickens and cats to roam freely around their home and home school their five, delightful children, they also still visit the doctor and act as a traditional nuclear family. The Cory Family Farm and the Wallace Center were both more business focused, but had quite different beliefs. The Wallace Center is primarily a restaurant built on the notion of farm-to-table, healthy foods for the community. They may have had a CSA, but I do not remember. Although it was definitely necessary for them to make good money, they clearly cared about the local community. The Cory family on the other hand, seemed to care about their family’s health, and about making money. From the looks of things, the Cory’s had money before they started to farm organically and raise grass-fed animals, which is important, because it is a quite expensive business to go into. Though they probably care very much for some of their neighbors, their market is not local, and their children do not attend public school, which means that their ties to the local community are greatly diminished. I do not mean to say that the Cory’s are not wonderful people, because they did truly seem to be so, however, the local conventional farmers who live around them simply cannot afford the price tags on their meats.