A Year at Black Sheep Farms: Winding down

No more early Saturdays spent picking and packing produce at this farm near Bennington. The farmers market has ended.

No more long Wednesdays spent filling boxes and giving tours. The last boxes of produce have been handed out to this year's member-investors.

The gardens are nearly empty now. Amid the decomposing vines: hardy kale and chard leaves, a few late-turning pumpkins, hundreds of newly planted garlic cloves.

The trees surrender their remaining leaves to the cool, wet late-October air. And Black Sheep Farms, like its founders, seems to breathe a sigh of relief: Year 1 is done.

After a brief vacation, Brian and Kelly Smith are taking stock of their first year on the farm and fine-tuning plans for next year.

They've already decided they won't do the farmers market in 2010. Though they loved the weekly communion with other farm families and foodies, this summer's market yielded unpredictable sales and relatively small profits for all the time and energy they spent harvesting, cleaning, packaging, hauling and hawking their produce.

They suspect they might have sold more if they'd stocked a fuller table. But they needed first to serve their community-supported agriculture, or CSA, venture. They didn't want to harvest more than would sell. And they got the sense that most shoppers were more interested in basic potatoes, tomatoes and sweet corn than in their farm's chemical-free “black sheep” varieties.

Losing most of their heirloom tomato crop to disease was a big blow, an estimated $6,000 to $8,000 in lost sales.

Their first CSA wasn't perfect either. But it was considerably easier than the market. The members were already committed to the concept, having paid for their shares upfront. And while Kelly and Brian still had to harvest and pack boxes, there was no delivery. Members came to the farm each Wednesday during the growing season to pick up their shares.

Not all the members put in the required 10 hours per share of volunteer help. A midyear job change for Brian put more of the daily work on Kelly's shoulders. Kelly often lacked help when she needed it most. In early summer and late September, there were sometimes more volunteers than work to do. In July and early August, the reverse was true.

The boxes for CSA members were never quite as full as they'd hoped. Their own family's share often involved the ugliest produce and the least variety: gobs of hot peppers and lemon cucumbers at season's end.

They know they'll need more help next year, and they plan some changes to better stagger volunteer hours throughout the season. They also expect to expand the garden area by about half an acre, make better use of the space with succession planting, raise a few guinea hogs (for meat and manure) and double their CSA to 25 full shares. They already have about three times that many names on the count-me-in list for next year.

The market's end, an early snow and lots of rain gave them time in October for a quick trip to visit friends in San Francisco.

But the fall is not without tasks. Kelly is still hoping to get more cloves of garlic and hundreds of flower bulbs in the ground. Work remains in the greenhouse. They still need to do a fair amount of accounting to figure out if they broke even this year. Soon they'll be flipping through seed catalogs again.

In the meantime, they have chickens and turkeys to feed. And there's always some new revelation with the poultry. For example:

Roosters can be nasty. They butchered 10 more roosters one weekend after the male chickens got a little too aggressive with the kids and farm helpers. The Cuckoo Marans were the worst, following behind the children and jump-kicking their backs.

The bigger the bird, the more difficult the slaughter. For the more mature roosters, they needed one person to hold the bird and another to swing the ax.

The hens come into the coop at night a little more easily now that most of the roosters are gone. And they are finally laying eggs.

Free-ranging chickens don't automatically know to use the nesting boxes. Most of the 10 to 12 eggs Kelly finds every day now — small cocoa-colored ovoids, some speckled with dark brown — turn up in a little closet off the main room of the coop. But Kelly still finds an occasional egg on the ground, on the porch or in a shoulder-height box near the coop's south-facing window.

Hens generally don't like it when you take their eggs. You need a fair amount of courage to get one away from an eye-level bird.

Turkeys can get big: The all-angles white turkey chicks they got months ago now are huge, fluffy and slightly imposing — nearly waist-high to Kelly and Brian and eye-high to their youngest son.

Though commercially raised turkeys must be artificially inseminated, the Holland white heritage breed they're raising hasn't lost the natural urge. The strangely exotic males openly court the plain-by-comparison hens. In six-to-one gaggles, the roosters trail the hens like a troupe of blue eye-shadowed, red-lipsticked showgirls: their snowy plumes fanned and fluffed, their pale blue faces dribbling off into brilliant red-beaded wattles, lone tufts of black feathers called “beards” protruding from their white breasts like deliberately exposed chest hair.

One puffs out his chest and feathers, the others follow suit. One gobbles, and the rest wobble-gobble-wobble right over him.

How to sum up what the Smiths learned this year?

“It's just a million little things,” said Kelly.

That pepper plants need staking. That the younger the vegetable, generally, the tastier. That free-ranging birds sometimes mistake the seed you've just planted as buried bird food.

The best parts: Catching the weasel (now thought to be a mink) that was killing their chickens. Finding the first edible eggs. Tasting their first homegrown peas, raspberries and Yukon gold potatoes. Seeing the stars at night and watching great-horned owls from their porch at dawn. The privacy and freedom they enjoy on 76 acres at the metro area's northwestern fringe. The perspective they gain every time they pass between their farm and city worlds.

“It is so much work, and there were so many times I felt devastated, but I wouldn't trade it for city life.” Kelly said. “There's a calm here I can't describe.”

Brian, who works a full-time day sales job near downtown Omaha, would like to be more than a weekend farmer. But he knows that it will take time for the farm to support their family — and that most farmers rely on some off-farm income. He's hoping a new business handbook he bought will help them get a better handle on the economics.

Some days they wish they'd inherited more basic farm knowledge from their forebears, grown up more with the farm life.

Other days, they're content to find answers in their own sweet time.

And for all the uncertainty, they are hopeful about making the Old MacDonald place of their dreams an eco-friendly, modern-day reality.

“I still want a goat and a sheep,” Kelly said, running her hand through the salt-and-pepper hair she recently dyed purple. “The image in my head sort of looks like a petting zoo — one or two of lots of different animals, so we can learn how to raise them.”

“It's that storybook farm,” Brian said.

“And that kind of a farm works,” Kelly said, “I think.”

Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com