I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, but have never liked living in a city - I guess I've always been a country girl at heart. My father has always had a garden and was born on the property he still lives on in SE Portland. When he was a child, his mother gardened, and this will give you an idea of how Portland used to be long ago - but not that long ago - the family also raised chickens and shared a cow with the neighbors. My father's job was to take the cow down to the local field, now a city park, and stake her out to graze every other day. My father has some interesting stories about that cow and one of the roosters his ma had....
In grade school I made friends with a girl who had a horse, and in high school I made friends with other girls who had horses and we spent all of our free time at the barn. It wasn't a fancy show barn, it was what I call a 'common' barn, that is there were people who practiced many different horsemanship disciplines but in general they didn't compete, they just had horses - Western, English, people who did Calf Roping and other Rodeo events, and then there were those of us who learned to ride outside of any particular discipline, taking something from each that suited us.
In 1991, my boyfriend, Harold, and I moved out to Mulino to a small acreage - 6.67 acres - to raise emus. Those birds were all the rage back then, and while we had gotten into it at the tail end of the breeder market, we had decided to continue on in the slaughter market when it developed - which it didn't for a variety of reasons, and I'll probably write an article on that but not today. Harold had grown up on farms, both here in Oregon and on the family homestead in Missouri, which his grandfather had originally homesteaded and on which the family had raised mules for sale to the wagon trains moving over the Oregon Trail, and they also raised other crops and livesotck. Harold has a rich history in hunting, fishing, farming, and living off the land - which his family had to do to survive the Great Depression. So, when the emu market crashed, we decided to stay on the farm and keep the emus for our own use. We also had been improving part of the land with the horses I had bought - I'd had horses off and on over the years but had never had the opportunity to keep them at home. Believe me, if you like horses and can keep them at home, you are truely blessed. We also boarded a couple of ostrich for a friend of ours and I was raising upland game birds which our wolfhybrid Loiosh kept an eye on for us. I have a seperate blog for stories about the animals that you can read if you're interested. It relates directly to this blog as an awful lot of what we do out here is directly related to animal agriculture, although we are always experimenting in plant agriculture too.
Anyhoo, getting back to the farm....
In 2001, I happened into enough money to buy a Lipizzan mare. I had boarded one of the mares I already had at a local stable during the winter to be able to ride during the wet part of the year - not having good footing or a covered area will seriously cut into a person's riding time in winter. At that barn there was a lady who was boarding her young Lipizzan stallion there. I learned from her that Lipizzans, contrary to my thinking, were not out of the realm of a 'regular' person's means, and so in 2001 I asked her to locate a mare that would be suitable to breed to her stallion. That search resulted in my purchase of the mare Melora who was in foal to the Andalusian stallion Regaliz. In the spring of 2002 Melora delivered a superb foal who I named Luna.
My original plan was to breed Melora to this purebred stallion, who carried excelent bloodlines, but my friendship with the stallion's owner fell appart and I decided to keep Melora and Luna and either just enjoy them or find another suitable stallion to breed to. In 2005, I happened on the stallion Neapolitano Debora, a purebred Lipizzan stallion who's sire had stood at the state stud in Hungary at one time, and so had very good bloodlines which aren't too common in the USA and who is just far enough away, genetically, from Melora to make a suitable match for her. I was able to arrange to purchase him, and brought him home to our farm in late 2005. I was now set to run my own Lipizzan breeding farm. Everything was going well, and I was about to realize my lifelong dream of not only working with a wide variety of animals, but some of them were horses, and even better yet, the horses were Lipizzans. As a teenager in Portland, I used to go every year to see the Lipizzaners perform at the Colliseum, it was one of the things I looked foreward to all year long.
Then in February I learned about some regulations that USDA was planing to implement that threatened that dream. I have yet another blog about that and links to my other blogs can be found in the links in the side bar. I began to research this new thing, called the National Animal ID System, and formed the Oregon Small Holders Alliance in order to provide information on agriculture issues that can affect small scale livestock owners and formed a working group to study the implementation of the NAIS in the USA and it's effects on our segment of agriculture.
In my studies - I've racked up almost 1,700 hours of study to date - I've come to realize that small scale agriculture is every bit as important to the health of agriculture in general in the USA, and, in fact, everywhere in the world, as large scale agriculture. However, just as large scale agriculture has it's challenges, so do we, not the least of which are management and financial issues.
I've always been poor, still am in fact. Yet I've always found way to accomplish the things I've set out to do. Quite often I've had to come up with solutions that, at least to me, were somewhat innovative and unconventional, but they do get the job done. And so, with that in mind, I've started this blog in order to share my experiences in small scale farming, in the hope that I can share some of my solutions and perhaps even share information and experience from others. I also hope to educate people who don't farm or garden, and give them a perspective on why I farm small scale and would like to continue to do so. Remember, you don't have to be big to farm, technically if you have a garden, you're farming as far as I'm concerned. And here's an interesting bit of info - according to USDA if you have property that could, not that is, but that could produce $1,000 worth of gross revenues in a year, you're a farm as far as they are concerned. Heck, my dad could do that raising nursery stock instead of having a garden on his city lot in Portland - the same one, by the way, that his ma 'farmed'.
So I suppose, in a way, perhaps I did grow up on a farm, even if it was in a city......
You can read my other farming related blogs by taking any of the links in the side bar up topside -
Not All Of My Friends Are Human - articles on animal behavior and the animals I currently have and those I have had in the past
Oregon Small Holders Alliance - the website and blog I set up to highlight ag issues affecting small scale livestock owners.
OSHA NAIS Working Group - the working group I formed to study the implementation of the National Animal ID System and it's effects on small holders in the USA, its tribes and territories. Anyone interested in our work or in serving on the working group are welcome, there are no restrictions, you don't even have to own any animals or be engaged in agriculture. You do have to join the working group to view posts or have access to files posted to the discussion list. There is no charge for joining and I don't share your information with out your permission to anyone not already on the list - hey they have access on their own in that case.
If you look close, you can see the path going out to the barn (it runs behind the little red truck), and the path that goes out to the emu compound (to your left) and the arena.
