After a very restful night's sleep, serenaded by frogs and some birds, on Thursday morning we decided to bike over to the Farm Store at Scholze Family Farm to make some purchases.
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We are lazy and didn't want to unhook the Jeep if we didn't need to...
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...and biking gets us a little exercise...
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... generally exercise is harder to fit into our schedule on travel days.
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Over near the farm store we saw the weanlings all in a mass in the field. They had a yellow tag-type thing in their noses -- we asked and the farmer said that it keeps them from sucking on each other... I found something like it on the web: https://quietwean.com/ -- though that seems to be intended to prevent them from nursing their mother.
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The Farm Store
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Information from their brochure about their cattle.
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We brought our purchases back to Gracie and got them into the freezer (the meat was already frozen) - we'll enjoy it later in July!
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We did not have a long drive planned for Thursday, so we left after having lunch and a nap.
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We had looked at another Harvest Host location that was in Eau Claire - it sounded interesting, and was about halfway to our planned overnight Harvest Host location, so we decided to stop just to have a break. We figured if they had enough room to support overnight visitors, then they would probably have room for us to stop for a look around too!
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We enjoyed looking at all the interesting things in the shopping area, and Carl enjoyed a mug of coffee.
From there, we drove up US 53 to Barron, WI, where we had reservations to stay at a produce farm, Dragsmith Farms (https://www.dragsmithfarms.com/). After getting parked at the old barn site near the river, we drove the Jeep back over to the farm store to get some produce.
We selected some mixed greens, and then went into the greenhouse to have some small head lettuces cut for us...
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Beautiful small head lettuces
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Gail recommended a few and then cut them for us...
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Yum! That's about as fresh as you can get your salad!
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All around this area there are large poultry raising houses with turkeys...
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They are not part of Dragsmith farms, but other farmers who produce turkeys for Jennie-O.
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When on a farm (whether our family farm in Virginia or various others we might visit), we are reminded what a tough job it is and how thankful we are that people are willing to do this task to provide food and sustenance for all the rest of us. Wednesday at Scholze Farm they were getting in hay for haylage -- I asked Theo why they made haylage instead of baled hay and he said that they just don't get enough drying weather to bale hay. He said if they need rain, he just cuts hay, and rain is pretty much guaranteed! For Dragsmith, if you visit their website, you'll see that they are recovering from a tornado that hit last year on July 18, taking out all but one of their greenhouses. Gail mentioned that when bird flu came through 2+ years ago, one of the local turkey farmers had just gotten young birds, the disease was found in a few of them, and they had to kill 187,000 birds across all of their raising houses.
Gail also told us (as I recall the story) that they had been growing produce for local sales and farmers' markets, but then a well-known chef came one day (from Minneapolis?) and made an arrangement with them that Dragsmith Farms would provide the greens for the exclusive restaurant where he is the chef. That led to contracts with other restaurants and they now have great demand for their product without the need to go to weekly markets -- what a great story! They still offer farm shares for local folks to be able to enjoy their products.
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