Welcome to the Modern Farmer Farm Dog Cams, brought to you live from Border Springs Farms in Virginia, where hundreds of sheep and nine border collies call home. Up top, we have the PastureCam, which will show you footage from a stationary camera watching the fields.
Below is the ShepherdCam, which will be offline for most of the day, but there’ll be 20-minute demos at 9 a.m. ET and 7 p.m. ET every day as shepherds Jarrod Davis and Craig Rogers will take turns showing how they work with their dogs and the sheep. And finally, later in the week, we’ll have periodic footage from the CollieCam, where you’ll be able to see what sheep herding is like — from the POV of a the herding dog. (Here’s a picture of what that set-up look like.) Enjoy!
Farming has traditionally been a family affair, with skills passed from generation to generation, often through informal internships or years of apprenticeship. The problem with this model is that, today, many farming hopefuls don’t come from a farming background. They may be farmers market junkies and CSA devotees, but the closest they’ve come to plowing a field is planting an herb garden on their apartment’s rooftop. How to make the leap? Many choose the
When the EU announced an end to dairy production quotas, French farmers dumped almost one million gallons of milk next to a monastery. In response to rising fuel costs, they blockaded ports and refineries with heavy farm machinery. After a drop in food prices, they torched hundreds of hay bales in Paris. They’ve driven 7000 tractors down the city streets, battled riot police with shopping carts full of fruit, and planted wheat and grapevines on the Champs Elysées. Eac
Tim Smith has a story to tell, but it’s stuck way down in his throat. Typically, this fourth-generation Iowa farmer is chatty and warm, but sitting at the kitchen table with his wife, Tina, his face is ashen, his eyes clouded. Smith starts talking a few times, only to trail off mid-sentence. A fog of silence settles over the room, until Smith quietly, hopefully tries to change the subject: “Lots of robins this year. Don’t you think?” While not specific to
Before we bought this property in 2013 I did a lot of reading. I had a lot of ideas of what I wanted to do here. When you first start out, you have this grand plan of how everything is going to look and everything you are going to do. It’s a good thing! Plan, be hopeful and learn as much as you can. But, be open to that plan completely changing. Here at Dinner Time Farm, I wanted to have dairy goats for milk, and Dexter cows for beef, and a batch of pigs every year, and meat chickens an