If you’ve driven past Brun Ko Farm lately, you’ve probably noticed a lot of ‘fluff’ in our front pasture.  … Hay fluff that is! We have been spreading hay over the ground like crazy to make new garden plots. Let me tell you, it’s a strange feeling to be breaking open bales of hay and spreading it over what was once a hay field! The neighbors probably think we are nuts. And we might very well be! I haven’t ruled that possibility out ..
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So WHY are we doing this??

1. To create more garden space without having to till
2. To suppress weeds – Yay for minimal weeding!!
3. To retain more moisture in the soil
4. To build up the organic matter of the soil
5. To preserve & protect our precious topsoil!! Have you ever been tilling in your garden and watched the topsoil blow away like dust in the wind?! Even on fairly calm days this happens!!!

So basically, we are really anti-tilling, anti-weeding, (read: lazy) and really PRO keeping our topsoil, not only present and accounted for, but also in good shape for ourselves and future generations.

Now, there is a time and a place for tilling and we will actually be doing some tilling ourselves in a couple of weeks when we prepare another portion of the pasture for …. Oops, that’s a whole other blog post! For now, it will suffice to say that there is a time and a place for tilling but NOT Every. Single. Day. In. A. Constant. Battle. With. Weeds.

Will this little experiment of ours work?

Will we really have less weeds to pull?

Well, it worked last year.  After struggling through most of June, we decided that trying to stay ahead of the weeds was impossible. We had plenty of hay leftover from winter so we broke down and gave this crazy idea a try. NP and I both read extensively about mulched gardening before we finally decided it was worth a try.

Aaaaaand, we LOVED it!!

So much so that now we are using the technique not only to prevent weeds (and do lots of awesome things for the soil) but also to prepare future garden plots. For that purpose it works so-so. We tested out the technique with one garden plot and one strawberry plot last fall. What we have found so far is that the first year you will fight the sod a bit as some patches of grass will still prevail. However, if you first scalp the grass with the lawn mower and if you apply a thick enough layer of hay (8 inches or so), it does kill the majority of the grass and leave the ground workable.  It has worked well for us to plant ‘viney’ fruits and vegetables like watermelon and squash in the newer plots and use the 2+ year plots for ‘row’ crops like carrots and beets.

Some might argue that hay is simply too expensive – and we do have an advantage here because we are already making hay for the animals – but even if we had to buy the hay, the cost of the hay pales in comparison to the value of the hours spent tilling and weeding in a traditional garden setting.

And it’s not ALL about the weeds. The other awesome thing about mulched gardening is that the hay breaks down throughout the year, adding nutrients and organic matter to the soil just by being there! The mulch also retains moisture. This is especially important during the dry periods of summer. It means that we have to water less and when we do water, the water stays around long enough to do its job instead of running off or evaporating right away. What’s not to like about conserving soil and water??

 So, we embark on year 2 of this crazy journey, surrounding ourselves with more and more ‘fluff’.

Happy Earth Day! What are you doing to improve your environment? We would love to hear from you in the comments!

If there is one thing that I’ve learned since high school – it is that plans change. A LOT. Some changes are minor and hardly make a blip in life. Like deciding to go out at the last minute and cook those pork chops tomorrow night instead. Other changes are huge and really shake up your piece of the world. Like getting married and moving back to SW IA. 

And then there are changes like selling your cows to give yourself more time to make better business decisions.

That was a decision that we made final last Saturday when we closed the trailer door on our 6 heifers. Right now, my world feels pretty shaken. This is NOT the plan we wrote. This is NOT how the plan was supposed to go. In fact, selling the cows wasn’t even IN the plan. And let me tell you, selling critters that we intended to have around until ‘death do us part’ was a whole lot harder than selling bottle calves or market animals that we acquire, knowing from day 1 that their place on the farm is temporary.

So the world here at Brun Ko Farm feels pretty shaken up right now. But I’m sure that in 20 years this will look like a blip on the radar. And we are confident that it was the RIGHT decision – even though it was HARD.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. We STILL plan to build a dairy and a creamery. We STILL plan to sell milk & yogurt and other products. We have just decided to take a step back - build a little slower – and try to do it debt free. How in the world are we going to do this debt free? By taking our time – finding materials & equipment used and/or on sale – taking the time to build it ourselves (at least as much of it as we can do legally).

Why did we have to sell the heifers? Because they were all due to calve within the next 6 months and we simply couldn’t afford to feed them without being able to draw an income from them. Up until now, we have been able to make enough selling bottle calves to pay the feed bill but lactating (milking) cows eat significantly more than pregnant heifers and we don’t have the space or resources to feed the number of bottle calves it would take to cover expenses for 7 milk cows!

On the brighter side, we still have NP’s first ever cow, Abby.  And our 2 youngest heifers, Lily and 54.2. And we will continue to raise bottle calves. Just maybe not as many.

Things you will still find at Brun Ko Farm this summer:

• Lots of delicious fruits and vegetables – we are planting ¾ of an acre in veggies and expanding our strawberry and raspberry patches!
• Bottle calves & milking demos
• Rapidly growing baby chicks!
• Hand pies, breads, and more (made to order)
• And a handful of other surprises that aren’t quite ready to be unveiled yet 

With that .... Thank you so much to everybody that has supported us and that continues to do so! We look forward to seeing ya’ll this summer at farmers markets and here at the farm!
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Enjoy!
Brun Ko Farm

I love it when blog material falls into my lap. :)

Last week sometime, one of NP’s co-workers, we’ll call him Alex, went to a trivia night and one of the more memorable questions of the night was “How many cups of milk does a cow produce in her lifetime?”

When NP brought this question home to me, I said “Well that depends.  What breed is she? Grassfed? Or does she get grain? What exactly was her expected productive life span? Because not all farms and locations are equal.  Was this question drawn from recent data? Or was it still hanging around from the 1950’s or 60’s?

And I could go on.

So while I thought it was an impossibly silly question to expect a very exact answer to – it did get me (and NP’s coworker) thinking! In the middle of chores and milking two cows, I started doing mental math – which quickly upgraded to calculator math!