Visit to All Grass Farms Was Mooving Experience
Plus, a tofu tasting at Green City Market.
Grazing in the Grass is a Gas
My time-challenging schedule doesn’t allow me to visit farms as often as I’d like, but the stars have aligned for a few trips through the summer. The first, on Saturday (July 22), took place at All Grass Farms in West Dundee, Illinois, a group tour arranged by my friend Jess Chipkin, founder/CEO of Crate Free USA, an animal welfare non-profit.
Cliff McConville, who runs All Grass Farms with his wife Anna, is a longtime acquaintance from my past work at FamilyFarmed, and I have long admired his passion for raising livestock on pasture. That this was my first visit to the farm is a little embarrassing, as it is located about as close to Chicago (a bit more than 40 miles from where we live, near suburban Algonquin) as a full-scale farm gets.
Farming is a second career for Cliff. Sparked by documentaries such as Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma that underscored the inhumane treatment of farm animals at factory farms, he gave up his job as an insurance executive in Chicago to start the farm in 2011. In the years since, All Grass has opened a farm store onsite that sells its own meats plus other food and natural products aggregated from other producers. The couple also has a farm in East Troy, Wisconsin, home to their beef cattle, where they now reside.
As you’ll see in the following photos, it was a beautiful day out (we luckily beat some late afternoon downpours that caught up with me on my ride home). Thanks to Cliff for the great tour and to Jess for arranging it.
The tour was a hayride atop a flatbed pulled by a tractor. The photo shows Cliff McConville explaining to the group about how the farm raises its cows.
All Grass Farms raises Guernsey cows, for their docile nature and because they produce A2 milk, which many nutritionists regard as easier to digest than the A1 milk that has been more commonly sold to consumers for many years. The farm store carries raw milk, which under Illinois law can only be sold on the farm where it originates.
The cows, seen as a distance in the top photo, gradually moved to right near the electric fence where the group was gathered. All Grass practices rotational grazing, a key to much of our regenerative agriculture, and these cows were to be moved to another paddock soon.
There were a couple of calves in the herd…
… and the bulging bellies on some of the cows were sure signs that there will be more calves coming soon.
The farm’s meat chickens are housed in these covered and enclosed structures, known as mobile range coops, where there can feed on grass (and a corn-free, soy-free feed in those red feeders) with protection from the sun and predators. These coops are on skids and are pulled from field to field by tractors (workers gently coax the birds to the front of the coop while it is being moved).
These young pigs are a mix of the Duroc, Berkshire and Hampshire breeds. These little piggies won’t stay little for long. According to Cliff, they will grow from 30 pounds to 300 pounds in four months.
All Grass Farms raises the bronze breed of turkeys. While many small turkey farms only raise flocks for the Thanksgiving and end-of-year holidays, All Grass meets customer demand by raising a spring flock.
The farm’s laying hens spend all of their time outdoors, with shelter from the shed where they lay their eggs. This exposed setting could leave the birds vulnerable to predators if it wasn’t for…
Baraboo, the livestock guardian dog who lives with the chickens 24/7. Named for the Wisconsin city where the McConvilles got the dog, she is a Karakachan, a relative rare Bulgarian breed. The fierce bane of all kinds of chicken-stealing varmints, Baraboo is gentle as a house pet to its humans; after bounding out of the shed and running up to Cliff, she immediately rolled over for a belly rub. Who’s a good girl?
Phoenix Bean Tofu Featured at Market Demo
Jenny Yang of Phoenix Bean/Jenny’s Tofu, right in the photo above, participated in a tofu cooking demonstration at Green City Market in Lincoln Park Saturday. She joined Chef Jeannine Wise (left), director of the Good Food is Good Medicine program, on which I formerly worked while at FamilyFarmed.
I was unable to attend because I was en route to the All Grass Farms tour above, so thanks, Jenny, for sharing the photo.