Art & Furniture
At Stride Design, we have a passion for both contemporary design and true sustainability....
Visit Stride Design
Beef
We have a Brown Swiss family dairy cow that we breed to a beef cow. We raise the calf for 14 months, normally butchering just before winter. At no time does the calf get grain, only grass and milk. We separate the calf and cow each night, allowing us to milk in the morning. This produces ample milk for us and a healthy, fast growing calf. Because we only raise one calf at a time, the meat is in very limited supply. To watch a dairy cow and her calf bond for a full year is amazing. Again here, the ...
Pork
We raise English Large Black Pigs because they eat grass without rooting up our pasture too much. We feed them whey and just enough of our grain to prevent them from rooting. They will definitely root if they are short on grain. The most important part of this breed is how docile they are. Our kids can scratch the sows and even the boar at any time.
Their meat is the best we have ever eaten. We did not eat store bought pork for 20 years, for obvious reasons. We mix up a ration similar to our chickens and feed them ...
Contact
For 2013 we will be attending markets once per month. We will be at Brewer, Westboro, Manotick and Main St. We will shortly be posting the exact dates on our website.
And visit us year round at our retail store, 20 minutes from downtown Ottawa, located at 2696 9th Line Road, one mile east of the village of Metcalfe, Ontario. The store is open Sunday afternoons and any time by appointment, just call to make sure we’re here.
Please note: Eggs are only available at the store, first come, first serve, starting at noon. Please don't ask us to reserve some for you, unfortunately ...
Home
Trespassers are welcome. Our farm is open to the public on sunday afternoons or by appointment. We raise chickens, eggs, pigs, very limited supply of beef from one of our dairy cows and most importantly grain. We process our grain into flour and rolled/steel cut oats right in front of you. Our animals are moved daily onto a fresh piece of grass.
If you cannot inspect where your food is produced, does that raise questions?
We hope we can help you in your food choices and can recommend other producers who "get it".
Here is a great chef who sums up how and ...
Eggs
We try to raise the best eggs we can. We try to copy "Joel". If you want to learn more watch this great ted talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9UaP1AsMI
For 2013 we have implemented a new policy, eggs cannot be reserved. We offer them first come, first serve, starting at noon on Sundays at our store. If you want to bring your kids, they can always collect their own.
A recent article in Mother Earth News reported on tests done on “pastured” eggs vs. factory farm eggs. Here are some of the ways in which a pastured egg is healthier:
1⁄3 less cholesterol
1⁄4 less saturated fat
2⁄3 more ...
Grain
Grain growing is our primary farming activity. We strive to grow as many types of grain as possible. We have successfully sourced seed, planted, cultivated, harvested and cleaned: oats, barley, hard red spring wheat, hard winter wheat, soft spring wheat, winter wheat, corn for grits, durum wheat, Red Fife wheat, buckwheat, silver hull buckwheat, Polish wheat, fall and spring rye, triticale, yellow and brown mustard, and flax. We are attempting to grow sorghum, pearl millet, amaranth, and quinoa. There are so many errors that can be made in the whole process that our failure rate is much higher than it ...
Chicken
We raise our quota limit of chickens each year (300). We raise them in the same fashion as Joel Salatin (the famous chicken farmer featured in Michael Pollan’s books and in Food Inc.). They are started in the loft of our barn for 2 to 3 weeks, before they are put onto pasture depending upon the weather. They are moved in moveable cages once per day and twice near the end. We feed them commercial organic starter mixed with our own grain. We base our ration on wheat which does not meet human consumption testing. We mix a ration with ...
Sustainability
Renewable Energy Equipment We Use
Twenty years ago we went off-grid and purchased our first three solar panels. From there we gradually increased the size of our system to the point where we now have roughly 3kW worth of solar photovoltaic (PV), one 600W wind generator (Whisper) on an 80-foot tower, one 6600W antique wind generator (Swiss-made Elektro). Half of our panels are mounted on a semi-manual tracker, which stands about 45-feet tall through the roof of our barn and rotates at half the speed of the hour hand on the clock (lots of gearing down). We have to reset it ...
