So on April 16, my birthday, I tapped a fresh keg of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale which I keep in my Walk In cooler in our barn. It was, after all, my 75th birthday, so I do deserve such luxuries in my Golden Years. As the Walk In is 300 yards from the house, the round trip of 600 yards, in my mind, makes the consumption of the beer calorie neutral and rationally justified as at the end of the day, Beer truly is “The Farmer’s Friend.”

We also had our first set of twins from our ewe flock on the 16th. The weather though has been unseasonably cold and rather hard on the lambs. We will probably schedule our lambing for later next year. But don’t get me started about Climate Change. Last year was a warm spring, this year it was not. I don’t know why and neither do you. What I do know is that we have rotationally grazed our paddocks for thirty seven years, never having broken the soil. We have been practicing Regenerative Agriculture since the mid-seventies before the term became recognized from Robert Rodale. Indeed, Jamison Farm was featured in the first Russian Publication of New Farm, The Magazine of Regenerative Agriculture by Rodale Press. I also know that after our thirty seven years of intensive rotational grazing we have sequestered somewhere around 40 metric tonnes on average of carbon per hectare. How much carbon have you tree huggers sipping martinis on Park Avenue sequestered?

So why am I cranky? We have been farming the right way since we began, much to the bemused astonishment of our neighboring conventional farmers who plow, disc, seed, fertilize and spray chemicals to control the weeds. We didn’t really start out with that being the goal. We lived in an area with incredible grass growth due to geographical location and 40-45 inches of timely rainfall per year which produces optimal conditions. We don’t take a Political Bent, we are proactive with what we can control and reactive to what we can’t control from Mother Nature; it’s our agricultural take on The Serenity Prayer.

As Sukey says, Spring is special to us. Last week, the first week of May, was not a great week for us with high winds and power outages affecting equipment and the Flu affecting me. But it’s still Spring, finally. The lambs are on the ground, we are foraging for Morels; Sukey asked me if I wanted salad or asparagus for dinner? Helloooo? Our first bed of asparagus we planted thirty seven years ago. The new one is only about ten years old. When the asparagus comes up, we eat it probably every other day. All other veggies are on hold during this season. And then, when Sukey is feeling really domestic, we have her fool proof Hollandaise slathered over the asparagus.

It was also the week of Sukey’s Birthday. Our friend and Mentor, Jean-Louis Paladin would have been 76 on May 7. He was quoted, “When I went to the farm, I saw they were raising the lamb outside just as in France. For me, it’s the best lamb in the country.” He felt that raising animals unconfined outside was important. We put up fence and rotated the pastures, based on the writings of another Frenchman, Andre Voisin. That’s it; no fertilizer, no chemicals, no nothing! And the Sheep and Lambs eat the weeds. Here is what it looks like outside.