Elmark Farms
Dan and Frances Ribbink
5968 County Rd. 43
RR5 Perth
phone: 267–9848  email: elmark@ripnet.com

What they offer:
Grass-fed chicken and turkeys, pork, eggs. Order meat at the beginning of the season (March-April). Custom grazing. Gallagher electric fence supplies. Riding lessons and boarding.

Elmark Farms
You may wonder why the farmer profile this month features a farm that specializes in grass-fed meat and custom grazing. Looking around the countryside these days there isn’t so much as a blade of the green stuff to be seen. Maybe I was just trying to forget that it is indeed December (not June), and to give myself a taste (so to speak) of things to come in only, uh, five months or so… In any case, I found myself rolling in to Elmark Farms the other day to interview farmers Dan and Frances Ribbink.
Dan and Frances live on a fourth generation family farm between Smiths Falls and Perth. They each grew up on a dairy farm and met many years ago at junior farmers. The 230-acre farm that Dan grew up on has changed significantly over the last 20 years or so. Until 1993 it was a conventional dairy operation with around 40 holsteins. Doing everything “right”, according to Dan’s agriculture classes at Kemptville, did not, in the end, mean making more money. More money would come in, but more money would also go out to pay for inputs — things like chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, drugs for the animals to deal with sickness, feed, and a lot of fossil fuels to operate farm machinery.
In 1992, Dan was introduced to a Pennsylvania farmer who ran an intensive grazing operation. He was given a copy of The Stockman Grass Farmer (a journal to which he has subscribed since). What followed was basically nothing less than a paradigm shift for the couple and the way they have continued to farm. They sold their dairy quota in 1996 and began experimenting with intensive grazing. Frances, who grew up with horses, also started putting her coach’s certificate to use by teaching riding. She now manages about 15 horses (her own and boarders) and is busy contributing articles to Horse Life magazine, and producing a great new video resource for people who are beginning to develop their interest and knowledge about horses. Instead of milk, the farm now produces pastured poultry (chickens and turkeys to order), pork and eggs. From May through November, Dan “custom grazes” cattle from other farms.
Managing a grazing rotation on your land for someone else’s animals is an interesting approach, but there are at least two apparent benefits — you don’t have the expense of feeding cattle over the winter, and you essentially get paid to “grow” your soil. Dan is as passionate about intensive grazing as he and his wife both are about the necessity and importance of growing good food sustainably for their family and like-minded folk — and they are clearly related passions. The land they have is classified Class 6, which essentially means “not that great” — there’s a thin layer of topsoil covering limestone bedrock. It is not cut out for growing grain and corn that tends to need a richer soil or lots of inputs. It is, however, well suited to intensive grazing. Intensive grazing is a method of rotational pasturing that has a high animal-to-acreage ratio. Grazing like this could be detrimental to the land if animals were left too long in one place; but if managed properly, it works because the animals are moved every 12–24 hours to a new plot. What Dan is finding is that the land is able to give the same production value without the inputs he used to need, and the nutrients stay, or rather increase, in the soil.
Intensive grazing is gaining recognition as a valuable method of producing healthy, high quality meat (and healthy animals), and it also builds soil relatively quickly. Dan explained that the original fertility of the prairies is due in part to the pasturing habits of the buffalo. They would move across the grasslands in dense herds, grazing and moving on quickly. If they returned it would be weeks or months later, allowing the pasture to recuperate. Each time the animals grazed, the grass root mass underground would decompose (roughly proportional to the amount eaten above ground), adding humus to the soil.
Intensive grazing management (management being the key to this) works on similar principles, but the animals are enclosed in temporary pastures that are moved daily. As you can imagine, this is labour-intensive! During the summer Dan spends a few hours each day just setting up and taking down temporary electric fences. By the end of the season, the plot may have been revisited 2–3 times depending on the land and weather conditions. The high animal-to-acre ratio helps control weeds by flattening down (or eating) any vegetation by the end of the rotation. Because the animals don’t have wide open pastures to wander through and choose from, the grasses (and many other less favoured field plants) get eaten down. Dan no longer needs to bush hog (aka mow) his fields — thus saving fossil fuels, pollution, and money.
To top it all off, rotating the different animals they have in a particular order also increases the benefits to the land. Horses go first — they are the most fussy eaters — followed by cattle, followed by chickens. The chickens (both meat and egg birds) become living nutrient spreaders by providing the essential services of scratching up manure patties, helping the pasture grow evenly, and reducing the fly population by eating the fly larvae that accompanies cow-patties.
Though summer pastures seem a long way off, you may want to place orders for some tasty, sustainably-grown, humus-building, grass-fed, free-run meat by February or March!
(Of note for anyone interested in further research are several excellent books by American farmer Joel Salatin, on the merits and methods of grass fed meat, and the survival of the family farm. See Pastured Poultry Profits, Salad Bar Beef, and Family Friendly Farming)

Chicken Stock
1 whole Elmark Farms chicken
feet from the chicken (if available)
4 quarts cold filtered water
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 large onion, coarsely chopped
2 carrots, coarsely chopped
3 celery sticks, coarsely chopped
1 bunch parsley
With whole chicken, cut off the wings and remove the neck, fat glands and the gizzards from the cavity. By all means, use chicken feet if you can find them — they are full of gelatin.
Cut chicken parts into several pieces. Place chicken in a large stainless steel pot with water, vinegar and all vegetables except parsley. Let stand 30 minutes to 1 hour. Bring to a boil, and remove scum that rises to the top. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 6 to 24 hours. The longer you cook the stock, the richer and more flavourful it will be. About 10 minutes before finishing the stock, add parsley. This will impart additional mineral ions to the broth.
Remove chicken. Let cool and remove chicken meat from carcass. Reserve for other uses. Strain stock into a large bowl and reserve in your refrigerator until the fat rises to the top and congeals. Skim off this fat and reserve the stock in covered containers in your refrigerator or freezer.