Saturday, July 31   12-4 pm

Lucky Penny Creamery

632 Temple Ave. Kent, OH

330-572-7550 abbe@luckypennyfarm.com

Enjoy delicious, freshly made goat cheese at the Lucky Penny Creamery in Kent, OH.  This is not a farm tour.  Lucky Penny Creamery specializes in crafting nutritious goat cheeses, produced with only the highest quality milk using no artificial preservatives.   True to artisanal standards, they craft the goat cheese by hand in small batches.  Lucky Penny Creamery cheeses are sold across Ohio at farmers markets, CSA’s, gourmet speciality stores, and restaurants.

This value-added processing facility is an important connector from “farm to table” and an example of entrepreneurial agriculture as well as urban and rural economic development.

Join dairy goat farmers Abbe & Anderson Turner at Lucky Penny Creamery, 632 Temple Ave. Kent, Ohio on Saturday, July 31, from 12-4 to learn about cheesemaking using milk from Ohio’s goat dairies.  Tour the facility and taste Ohio cheeses at the creamery retail store.  

Wednesday, August 18   1-4 pm

 Farming Education, Stratford Ecological Center

3083 Liberty Rd., Delaware, OH

740-363-2548

Stratford Ecological Center, is a teaching, working organic farm that includes walking trails, a high tunnel, straw shed, raised beds, sugar shack, and pastures with cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.

Join Jeff Dickinson, farm manager, for this very interesting and diverse tour.

Saturday, August 28  1:30-4:30 pm

Conservation Farming–Bargar Farm and Barn

7417 Township Rd 93, Woodville, OH

740-369-8270

The Bargar Farm was established in the 1850’s as a diversified family farm.  When June took possession of the farm in 2004, it included seven acres with a barn, woodlots, a stream, and 106 acres of tillable land.  Farmers Josh and Jeremy Gerwin will talk about their practices of no-till, cover crops, and the USDA’s Conservation Stewardship Program.  June’s husband Bob will discuss the reclamation and rebuilding of the farm’s pre-Civil War barn into an attractive and usable building.

The vet was called early Sunday morning. Being a weekend he charges double for emergencies. He told John that he could attend things as he walked him through what needed to be done. John called his mother who he said is better than 911 in her readiness. I was out of town. Then John called his younger brother Gabe to milk while he and his mother got the cow up and into the barn where they first gave her some calcium intravenously. Immediately the uterus shrunk to where it could then be cleaned with buckets of warm soapy water and rinsed.

Sleeved with a sterile glove, John pushed the mass back into the cow. However, it would not stay. So as he continued to hold it in with one hand, he called his older brother Rick who had a friend whose aunt worked in the ER. She had given him a throw-away staple gun still loaded. Could he come quickly with the device so the uterus could be secured inside the cow.

The staples worked. John then sewed her up with a large needle his mother had brought using fishing line. Huge doses of antibiotics and some banamine helped the cow fight the bacteria surely embedded in the uterus as she lay outside in that early rainy morning in the mud. The banamine soothed her pain.

She did alright even against predictions, ate fairly well, but toward the end of the week, she began tilting her head, hanging her ear to one side. Then she went down, her eyes rolling about, in great distress. John shot her. And buried her. He figured she had acquired a lethal ear infection or maybe it was listeria, always present in the earth itself. Who knows. He saved $500 no doubt in vet bills but lost the cow and calf. Sad business working and tending livestock, the operable word live, but it happens against everyone’s wishes though everyone, a long line of family and friends, tried to make it otherwise.

“It’s the kind of day you want to buy a farm because the farmer is sick of mud, wet hay, pugging, and spring seems so far away.”

This farmer was nowhere in sight when I pulled in the driveway. Nor was there any evidence of a horse. However, the kitchen glowed from within and through the besotted window panes a woman moved effortlessly back and forth, carrying things, bending, and lifting.

I expected a quick, “I’ll get my coat and we’ll go the barn.” Instead she invited me and my small son in and sat us around a table ladened with cookies.

On every counter cookie pans, tins, and platters crammed against one another. This woman was awash in cookie baking. I’d never seen anything like it!

As she told me about the horse, she continued to cream butter and sugar, cut bars, pack wafers. A flurry of controlled energy unfolded; I baked cookies, yes, but never in this quantity and variety and all at once! It was the first time I had seen multi tasking at its finest. And I loved it!

All the flurry, the shapes and colors, the smells and warmth set against the bleak and dull world outside opened a whole new way to approach life. Hit it head on, embrace the joy, pull against the pits that threaten to suck you in, create a can-do and do a lot of what you like.

This woman liked baking. I liked farming, animals, employing the land to produce. And I liked people who liked the land.

I didn’t buy the horse. Instead I went home and in due course, opened a B & B, built a small dairy herd, and created an on farm cheese business.

I helped renovate a run down house into a youth center, wrote articles for a local newspaper, continued with some aspects of ministry, worked for several non–profits and baked cookies.

When our former First Lady protested baking cookies, I knew she didn’t understand the power of the cookie bakers!