In the early 1940s William George Pope, and his wife Mildred “Moodie” Pope, left Utica, NY and bought a farm. They named it High Acres, and started raising Ayeshire Cattle. Pope had been an engineering teacher up to this point in his life, but his passion for High Acres is made clear in the daily journals he kept. In spare and unsentimental language, Pope describes the weather, goings on at the farm, he and his wife Moodie’s social life, and occasional mentions of the war overseas, in which his two sons were serving. His great-grandson Lucas Adams is now illustrating W.G. Pope’s diary for us here at Modern Farmer. See the rest of W.G.’s journal entries here.
Nothing puts a sparkle in a young woman’s eyes like plowing up loads of liquid manure. At least, that would seem to be the case as you watch Carolyn Kokko, a Cornell University graduate student, cheerfully driving a Bobcat utility tractor and using its scoop attachment to muck out lanes between rows of cow stalls in the school’s new Teaching Dairy Barn. More important, the building’s residents seem quite content, too. When the barn was devised, “cow
Milk myths didn’t stop with the Greeks, though. Ever since the first cow udders were yanked by human hands, the substance has invited inspection, suspicion, fear and desire. But these days, we milk drinkers are so disconnected from where our milk comes from that it could well originate in a vending machine. The typical dairy buyer lives in a city or a suburb, and likes to imagine that milk still comes from a small family farm with a red barn and cows gra
“I’m trying to push that wild hare gene,” says Eric Shevchenko, while cradling a bunny in one heavily tattooed arm. Instead of dried pellets from the feed store, his 100-plus rabbits – heritage breeds such as Blanc de Hotot, CrÁ¨me d’Argent, and Giant Chinchilla – forage for grasses, apples, pears, fruit branches, and fermented hay. “You can taste the difference in the meat,” insists the 42-year-old, who supplies chefs Thom
When Mehmet Öztan moved to the US in 2006, he never imagined he’d one day become a seed farmer in West Virginia or that he would become the caretaker of one of the largest collections of Turkish seeds in the country. Öztan originally came to the United States to pursue a PhD in civil engineering at Michigan State University. “I didn’t have a garden and certainly didn’t do much cooking in those first few years,” says Öztan. In fact, the first meal he ate in Am