WOW.  I can't believe how long it has been since we posted to our blog.  Well, yes I can.  It['s been eight months.  There is no excuse - lots of reasons, but no excuse.  Since April, these are a few of the things that we have been up to.

HOPS AND MORE HOPS... We planted another several hundred hop rhizomes.  Two new fields and some new trellis work.

We MOVED!  We purchased Larry's parent's home from their estate last fall and finally got everything settled so we could move into the house in May.  The house is on property adjacent to our electrical business and hop farm.  We love being here on the farm where we can go from field to table in a matter of minutes.  So much nicer to leave the field and just walk a few yards to our deck to enjoy a cold one after a long day's work.

KATE BROKE HER LEG! - Call her clumsy.  One misstep and there I was with a stress fracture just below my right knee.  It was a whole week before I knew it was broken.  Too bad, because the recovery has been long since I didn't know enough to keep off it that first week.  I wasn't much help on the farm this summer.  Larry thinks maybe I planned it.  Hardly, but I do have to now admit that I've got OLD BONES!

THE MOVING WALL - We were very active in preparations and service during the Moving Wall Memorial Exhibit sponsored by the Munnsville American Legion.  Larry did a beautiful job on the lighting.  Kate coordinated 150 volunteers to read the names 24 hours a day for three days.  Work well worth it.  We have been permanently changed as a result of meeting so many of our nation's protectors and listening to the trauma and sacrifices that accompany war. 

MADISON BOUNTY - We have been drafted to be part of the Chenango-Madison Bounty Producer Protocol committee.  Interesting job trying to define producer responsibilities.  This is a great program.  Support CNY agriculture and local food producers.  Go to www.madisonbounty.com for more info.

ANIMALS EVERYWHERE - The "zoo" is expanding.  Kate raised her hand a few too many times at an auction this year and now we are up to 24 animals and counting.  Micromini pot belly pigs, bantam chickens, another miniature horse and a billy goat.   We are expecting piglets this winter, alpaca in February, reindeer and foal in spring, goats ???  Need to build a barn - a big one!

NOFA-NY - .Larry will be presenting at the annual Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York meeting in January.  The topic - "Growing Organic Beer".  He will be joined by Morgan Wolaver of Otter Creek Brewery and Heather Darby of UVM.    Lots of preparation to do in a short time.

Madison Bounty - Local Food to Your Door

We've been members of Madison Bounty for about a year now.  They carry our Bittersweet Hot and Spicy and our Spiced Northern Brown beer/malt and hops mustards.  If you haven't checked it out, please do.   With as little as a $35.00 order, they will deliver fresh local food to your home in either Madison or Chenango County.  We love the meat from our friends at Drover Hill Farms.  Jewitts Cheese has some of the best aged cheeses.  When you want the freshest foods with the least environmental impact, buy local.  Buy Madison Bounty!

We are excited to be part of the developing New York State and Madison Country Agritourism programs.  Last fall, videographers from Escapemaker.com visited our farm to learn more about our business.  Unfortunately, the harvest season was well past and there wasn't much for them to video, but we had a nice chat in the gift shop and they took a few feet of footage there.  This week, the first of four seasonal videos spotlighting tourism destinations with agricultural and local food themes was released.  Foothill Hops was one of the Madison County destinations featured in the video.  

We are grateful to Escapemaker for so wonderfully portraying our farm.  However, we didn't have an opportunity to pre-screen the video before it was released, and having now seen it, we would like to point out a few things about the segment content which are inaccurate and may be misleading.  As I said, the hop season was over and there was little, if anything, outside to photograph.  The shot of our signage and the clips of inside our gift shop were from their visit.   However, we believe the producers used images from the web to fill the void. Several images are not of our farm and we would like to explain where they came from or what they truthfully depict to the best of our ability.

(1) The image of the hops field with the hop cone superimposed is widely copied across the World Wide Web.  We believe the owner of the image is USA Hops.  If this image was used by the producers without the consent of the owner, we apologize.  Photos of our hops field in full bloom may be seen on our website at www.foothillhops.com .

(2) Unfortunately, we do not have a historic hop kiln on our property.  We dry our hops in much the same way as it was done historically, in shallow layers over a source of warm dry air, but not in a historic kiln.  We are uncertain where the picture of the interior of the hop kiln came from. 

(3) The photo of the double pyramid hop kiln is indeed from Madison County, New York, but not of our farm.  The kiln belongs to our friends and associates, Bill and Stephanie Lipsey, who are also members of the Northeast Hop Alliance.  Their kiln is in the hamlet of Poolville, approximately 15 miles from our farm.  If you are coming to visit us from a distance, we encourage you to visit the Lipsey's Drover Hill Farm and perhaps stay the night in their Victorian bed and breakfast.

(4) The picture of the young hop plant is typical of spring growth on our farm but is not from our fields.  We do not know the source of the photograph.  Pictures of our hops growing can be seen on our website at www.foothillhops.com .

(5) The producers misinterpreted statements that we have a brew shop and home brew beer with our hops to mean that we have beer for sale on premise.  We do not.  Someday we would like to have a microbrewery, but our focus for the present is on developing our hop operation, home brewing shop, and agritourism programs.   If you are looking for an icy delicious Central New York microbrew while in our area, visit Ye Olde Landmark Tavern in Bouckville for a cold one from  Cooperstown Brewery or Brewery Ommegang. The Landmark Tavern was built by the Coolidge family who began commercial hop production in New York State in 1808.

We still believe that you will not be disappointed in a visit to Madison County to learn more about both the past and present hops culture.  Please add Drover Hill Farm and Ye Olde Landmark Tavern to your itinerary and come on up!

Saturday, Feb.21 - Winter Hibernation Festival at the Great Swamp Conservancy.  If you haven't yet been there, be sure to check it out.   The Great Swamp Conservancy is a group of dedicated individuals seeking to preserve and protect the wetlands around Oneida Lake.   They have a large preserve with a barn and small museum.  Each year they raise 1500 quail and release them into the wild.  They also present educational programs regularly.

We took Bandit, our 3 year old bull reindeer, to the Hibernation Festival.  He is a great big teddy bear now without his antlers and everyone was amazed at how well behaved he was.  We were disappointed to find on arrival at the festival that he had cut the velvet on  his antler stubs and was bloody all down his right side.  It looked a lot worse than it was, but still, we were both concerned over his well being and the image that he would present to the visitors.  Everyone was very understanding and the injury gave us a great opportunity to talk about the antler velvet and how delicate it is.  Of course, there were lots of questions and the time passed very quickly.  We want to thank all the folks of the GSC for a really great experience.

Larry sent soil samples to Cornell for analysis and got the results back this week.  We were pleased to see that the NPK and trace minerals in our organic field were improving.  Our conventional field suffered a net loss in nutrients last year.   The hops in that field produced a much higher yield, and so, apparently drew more out of the soil.  We will soon be calculating fertilizer requirements and begin planning our spring field work.  Farming doesn't stop just because there is two feet of snow in the field and the temperature is 0 degrees.

Scott, Cubby and Mark have been working through the cold, harvesting locust trees from some friends' forests.  So far, they have pulled out about seventy 25 foot tall poles.  Our hope is to harvest another 100 poles within the next couple of weeks.  We use locust trees for all our poles as that gives us the option of taking any of our fields to full organic certification.  They are a bit twisty and don't make for the most beautiful field, but we know that they are not leaching any salts or oils into our soil.

I found this picture of one of our hop bines this evening and it made me wish it was August.

Yesterday we racked the Orchard Breezin' Cranberry Chianti to secondary fermentation.  Dark, rich color.  8.2% ABV.  Should be ready to bottle in a couple of weeks.  We'll save for next Christmas.

Sweet Mead - Feeling adventurous and had lots of honey in the store, so decided to try a gallon of sweet mead.  It's been in the primary for a couple of days. 

Coopers Cerveza - Our youngest daugher is interested in trying a lighter beer so Mom and Dad are making her some Cerveza.  Into the primary today with 1 pound dextrose, 1 pound light DME and 4 oz malto-dextrin as fermentables.

This video has been a long time coming.   When we first ran our hop harvester in August, we wanted to share our video with everybody.  And believe me I tried, but we had rotated the camera to get a better shot and the file was huge.  I couldn't figure out how to rotate the frames and everytime I tried to upload the file, my computer hung up.  Doesn't say much for a person that makes her living as a computer technologist, does it?  Well, I was determined to get this video posted by the New Year, so I've been poking around in Movie Maker and I found what I needed to both rotate the video and compress the file.  So here it is!

We have been planning this harvester for several years.  Larry and Jerry went to Pedersen Farms and took photos of their harvester.  Kim, Larry and I spent hours online collecting old patents for hop harvesting equipment.  Then Jerry came again to analyze the patent drawings and the photos.  He filled a notebook with sketches, including one with a hand-crank labeled "Kate".  Ha Ha.  Then to the shop with cutting torches, welders, jigs and more than a few beers. Late in the 2007 harvest , we had a machine that actually picked hops.  That machine was in a horizontal configuration and there were problems with the hops flying everywhere and the vines breaking as they went through.  But it was a start and we were encouraged.  So back to the drawing board in the winter of 2007-2008.  More research, more sketches, and more beer.  Back to the shop to build new jigs and lots of picking fingers, strip down the frame, redesign the system in a vertical configuration, find conveyor track, design trolley clamps, and build, build, build.  Thanks Scott.  Finally, with all the guys and Kim around we decided to give her a run.  I was so excited when I watched the hop laden vines go into the machine and stripped vines and hop cones come out the other end.   There were lots of "tweaks" (seems a very small word for some very big efforts) during the next few weeks - adjust the width of the throat where the hops enter the picker, build chutes to hold the hops on the conveyor, improvements to the trolley system, enclose the machine so the hops stayed inside. She works!  We picked over 500 pounds of hops with her this fall.  Quite an improvement since in any prior year we had picked no more the 50 pounds by hand.

So here is the video from August 2008.  The guys are all back in the shop working on improvements this winter.  We'll be sure to keep you informed of our progress.

Hop Harvester Maiden Run August 2008

"HOPPY" New Year Friends and Family.  Our philosophy:  There are no strangers, only friends we have not yet met.  So I guess it translates to  HOPPY New Year EVERYONE! 

We have lots of plans for 2009.  Tops on our list is moving!  Our farm is located on land surrounding Larry's business, Fisher's Electric.  We currently live about a mile away.  This fall we purchased Larry's parent's home which is on the property with the farm and the business.  We are beginning to make preparations to move there in the spring.  So much to do, it's a little bit scary - how can I possibly leave the house that has been our home for the past 32 years.  But, it's exciting to plan a new start and it will be so much more convenient to live where we spend nearly all of our waking hours. 

Have a great year everyone and we look forward to meeting you real soon.

After a very successful Christmas Eve company party featuring wine made by some of our friends (thanks Bruce, Tim and Ken), I decided to try my hand at winemaking.  I was a little nervous about making wine since I am totally new to the world of the grape, so my first attempt at the vintner's craft began with an Orchard Breein' Cranberry Chianti kit on December 27.  I was absolutely amazed at how easy it was! It's bubbling away in the primary fermenter now, so the result looks promising.  We'll let you know in April when we break open a bottle or two for my birthday.  Now that I have some idea what all those chemicals are for, maybe I'll try using up those plums I stored in the freezer last fall.

NeHA, the Northeast Hop Alliance, is alive but hasn't been particularly active in the past few years.  Increased interest in hop growing as a result of the shortages of 2008 has resulted in many inquiries from outside our membership for information...<< MORE >>