Local farm provides educational experience
Published 12:10 am Thursday, October 24, 2024
Jessiica Evans, left, talks to the Catawba College class membrs and professor Dr. John Wear, fourth from right, as they start their tour. — Karen Kistler
Jessica Evans shares information about turkeys as they visit the flock. — Karen Kistler
One of the guardian dogs, stands inside the fence with the egg laying hens. — Karen Kistler
The turkeys gobbled loudly as Jessica Evans talked about upcoming Thanksgiving. — Karen Kistler
Students listen as Jessica Evans tells about the pigs on the family farm. — Karen Kistler
Jessica Evans stands on the porch of the Evans Family Farm. — Karen Kistler
This set of broiler chickens scratch in the ground in their mobile coop or chicken tractor. — Karen Kistler
The students listen to Jessca Evans tell about the turkeys. — Karen Kistler
MT. ULLA — Farming and teaching go hand in hand at Evans Family Farm.
This first-generation livestock farm, located in Mt. Ulla, is not only a working farm, but they also share their knowledge with others.
Jessica Evans, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the farm, led a group of Catawba College students and their professor, Dr. John Wear, on a tour of the farm Oct. 17, showing them some of the animals and providing lots of information about each and the farmland.
Jessica, a former teacher, and husband Matt, an electrical contractor who does the building around the farm, and children, 14, 12 and 3, moved from southern California in 2016 and started the farm. Neither of them had a farming background but wanted to start a farm and began with 10 acres, growing a little bit, she said, to offset their cost. When they outgrew those 10 acres, she said they were able to buy some surrounding land and now have a 110-acre ranch.
When the tour began, Jessica told the group they are a regenerative livestock farm, which, to them, means “our end goal is that the land is healthier the longer we’re on it. We don’t just want to sustain and maintain just like a bare minimum, we want to continue to improve the land, and particularly the soil. Everything comes down to the soil.”
They don’t grow produce, she said, as she isn’t a plant person except for the grass their livestock eats.
“Livestock has the biggest impact on the land,” she said.
Walking through the open pasture, the group was instructed to look back where they had walked. Jessica explained to them a way they regenerate the soil pointing out the green stripes in the pasture which come from the chicken tractors, or mobile coops where the broiler chickens live.
These chickens come as baby chicks and are placed in a brooder, and after three weeks, they come out for pasture in these bottomless shelters, she said. And there, they can peck and scratch and “get to be chickens and eat worms and bugs and green grass.” They also receive a fresh, local non-GMO feed, which is very important for many reasons, she added.
The shelters are moved to fresh ground daily and chicken litter is left along the way and fertilize the soil, serving as a great nutrient for the soil, she said
As of Oct. 17, the chickens, which are bred for rapid growth, were about five weeks old and at approximately eight weeks old, they are harvested and ready for the dinner table, she told them.
Poultry is one of the main products the farm produces, and they also process the meat there at the farm. The meat, Jessica said, is processed weekly and sold directly to people and not to restaurants or any of the big corporations.
As they made their way to the pastures, she pointed out the compost area where the inedible chicken parts are broken down, turned and spread back out on the fields.
“We are trying to grow, feed the soil microbes,” she said.
In addition to the broiler chickens, Jessica showed them the 400 egg-layers in the fencing.
She informed the group that the hens don’t start laying eggs until they are about 4-5 months old, and they are kept for about one and a half to two years, which is their peak production. About 300-400 eggs are gathered daily.
Several chickens, which had flown over the electric netting wandered around, but most were inside the fencing along with Max, one of the guard dogs, which protects them from predators.
Jessica said they have four working guard dogs, “because we are doing poultry, and everything loves chickens” including possums, hawks, raccoons and snakes get the eggs. Therefore, they use dogs to protect their livestock from predators.
Great Pyrenees is the breed she likes to use, she said, “because they are also people friendly for the most part.”
It takes approximately 2-½ years to train a guardian dog to be fully trustworthy, she said, especially around poultry.
Using dogs, Jessica said, is a “very predator friendly way to protect your livestock. They’re not going to hunt them down to kill them.”
They’re just going to let them know there’s easier food somewhere else and there’s no issue. “The dogs are enough to protect our investments,” she said.
Another member of the poultry family that the class went to see was the flock of 400 turkeys, which she said they farm raise for Thanksgiving. They have all sizes of toms and hens. Their pen and shelter is rotated every 36-48 hours so they can have fresh forage as Jessica said the turkeys “get 30 percent of their diet from forage.”
The turkeys also eat fresh milled non-GMO grains and along with the grains, they eat grit or gravel. Turkeys, she said, “need a lot of grit. They eat it and it goes in their gizzard and it grinds up the grains so they can get all the nutrients.”
Chickens also do well with grit as it helps with nutrient absorption from the grain.
Jessica had to speak loudly to be heard over the loud gobbles of the turkeys, which she noted by this size don’t have many predators except perhaps some domestic dogs that might wander onto the farm.
The last animals the group visited were the Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, which were enjoying the shade of the woods and wallowing in the dirt.
Docile with a good disposition, she said the pig’s life consists pretty much of sleeping in, eating a ton, destroying things for fun and sleeping some more.
Weighing approximately 375 pounds, Jessica said they were ready for harvest in the next few weeks.
Just like the other animals, she said the pigs are also included in a rotation as “they love to pull things up and grub.” They eat lots of saplings, kudzu and poison ivy as well.
Jessica said they don’t breed the turkeys, pigs or the cows they have on the farm, but they do breed sheep; however the group was unable to see them as they were farther away grazing at another area.
These sheep, she said, are a hair sheep breed and don’t grow wool.
“They get a thicker coat in the winter and shed it off in the spring, so I never have to shear them, which is fantastic. I need easy animals,” she said.
She also mentioned that the sheep will eat a lot of the different grasses they grow that the cows will pass by including pigweed, thistle and dog fennel.
Other grasses they grow, which are good for grazing, are clover, winter rye and crabgrass, which many think is a weed, but it’s good forage that grows well all summer and reseeds itself, she said.
Before their last stop to see the processing area, they paid a visit to the farm’s store, which sells meats, local cheese, ice cream, milk from a nearby dairy farm and organic dry goods. It is open Monday, Tuesday and Friday from noon to 4 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
These students are in Dr. Wear’s Urban Agriculture class and while they may not be going into agriculture as their career, he said they are in “various areas of the environmental department. We have several different tracks, so this gives them exposure though because it’s very important for them to know.”
He said the students enjoy seeing how this farm operates.
Two of the students, Austin Wise, a junior, and John Robert-Boyd, a senior, told of some of the things they enjoyed about their time at the farm.
Robert-Boyd said it was a “great experience and beautiful land, the way she’s cultivated it” and while he didn’t know what it was like from the beginning when they got it, seeing it now and how it’s grown, “it’s beautiful.”
Wise said that the day had been “such an informative and entertaining experience out here.”
Plus, he said, they got to see a lot of cool animals and learn many facts, and “experience the beautiful nature and landscape and learn “some of the stuff they are doing out here to support sustainable farming” to which Robert-Boyd added it was also “cool to see the farmer support the nature and the nature support the farmer.”
When asked if either were planning to go into some sort of agriculture as a career, Robert-Boyd said he was in natural resource management, so it was possible. It “goes hand in hand.”
When the groups visit the farm, Jessica said she hopes they see “a different style of agriculture than traditional agriculture, and they would kind of get a feeling of where food comes from” and see there is a humane way to raise livestock even if it is raising it for meat.
She also wants to “spark their interest in agriculture” as there is a critical need for young people to become involved in agriculture “seeing that it’s a profitable enterprise,” she said, “seeing that people are passionate about what they do and what it looks like when you’re out there.”
