cfsa farm tour braeburn/cane creek farm

Our first stop on the CFSA Farm Tour was Wells Branch Farm in Alamance County. Wells Branch is a combination of Braeburn Farm and Cane Creek Farm. The farm consists of roughly 500 acres built up over time with the purchase of fourteen smaller farms. The owner of Braeburn, Charles Sydnor, is working on getting a conservation easement for the farm in order to protect it from ever being developed. Charles is also involved in restoring the wetlands on the farm using wetland mitigation resources. This is basically a trade from a developer looking to build in a wetland area to a place in need of restoration. The result is, in theory, no net loss in wetlands.

We started our tour on the back of biodiesel burning hay wagon, winding up and down through pasture roads and crossing through small rocky creeks. We were accompanied along the way by various sizes of dogs, all of which wanted to get a ride on the wagon.

Our first stop was the farm store where both Braeburn and Cane Creek sell their meats out of a walk in freezer and walk in cooler. They offer grass-fed beef, pork, sausage, hotdogs, chicken and turkey. Cane Creek focuses on the pigs, chickens and turkeys. They raise heritage breeds of animals, including the Ossabaw Island Hog, which is descendant from the hogs left by the Spanish in the 1500′s on Ossabaw Island in Georgia. Cane Creek Farm is run by Eliza MacLean who also runs the store.

The next stop was to the goat pasture where a bunch of new kids were running around with their moms.

I’m not sure how old the kids were, but they weren’t all that big.

Goat kids are sickeningly cute especially when they are well taken care of and allowed to run around like the crazy animals that they are.

You can see that they really aren’t very big yet –

I got to see a few minutes of head-butting between a couple of goats.

Last stop was by the grazing cow herd. These are part of Braeburn’s grass-fed New Zealand Red Devon herd. While we didn’t come across any, Charles said that donkeys are used as guard animals on the farm.

The cows are rotated daily to one of the thirty fifteen-acre pastures. The pastures remain ungrazed for twenty-nine days in between sessions.

Charles passed along a few interesting beef facts –

• One half of every cow will become ground beef.
• The term “ground beef” means that the beef came from a single cow while “hamburger” means a mixture of meats from lean milk cows and the fat from feedlot cows.
• Out of a 1200 pound cow only eight pounds will be tenderloin, which explains the price of that cut.

All of the meat products from the farm are available at the farm store, Piedmont area restaurants and farmer’s markets as well as Chatham Marketplace. Hopefully we will bring in some of their products to Tidal Creek as well.