Want to visit?

Kat doing a goat milking demo in 2012

We are busy getting ready for the Third Annual Livingston County Farm Crawl, which will be held next weekend, August 23 and 24 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. In addition to visiting our farm, you can also visit four other nearby family farms.

Set-up of our soap and wool the first year

Why are we doing this? Well, it all started when I was complaining to a friend one day. You see, we used to get quite a few phone calls and emails from total strangers who wanted to come see our farm in person because they'd seen our website or read one of my books or seen an article and so on. At first it was a lot of fun! But after the tenth or fifteenth time, you start to realize that nothing gets done when you're walking around with visitors chatting -- even when they volunteer to help you, because really, they don't know what they're doing so it takes longer to explain things to them than it would to just do it yourself. So, I decided to set aside a few days each summer just for visitors. Whenever someone would contact me about visiting, I'd suggest that they come on one of our Open Farm days. We did that for a few years, and then one day I was complaining to a farm friend in Iowa about how much work it was to get the farm all gussied up just for a dozen or so visitors. And she said, "Why don't you have a farm crawl?" A what?

I guess pubs are few and far between in Iowa, so instead of pub crawls they do farm crawls. It made sense that if a few farms got together to promote a day where people could visit multiple farms, we would get more visitors. There were four farms total, and we figured that if each of us could get 10 or 20 people to come, that would be 40 to 80 for all four farms. We were all very surprised and excited when we had 300 visitors that first year!

Last year another farm joined, making a total of five farms for people to visit, and this year we've decided to go from Saturday only to Sunday also. If the number of visitors continues to grow, it could get a little crazy on a single day.

You can visit the official Farm Crawl website to see the map and list of farms, which includes what you will see at each farm and what will be available to buy. Here is what will be happening on Antiquity Oaks:

Available to purchase: vegetables, eggs (both chicken and duck), goat milk soap made with organic oils, Shetland wool roving, Shetland and llama yarn, raw Shetland fleeces, Old English Southdown wool batting, naturally colored sheepskins, llama and wool rugs, books on raising livestock, gardening, homesteading, etc. Credit cards accepted.

Demonstrations:

Saturday, 10:30 a.m. Goat milking
Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Solar oven cooking demo
Saturday, 2 p.m. Mozzarella making
Sunday, 11 a.m. Scything (cutting grass hay with a scythe)
Sunday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Solar oven cooking demo
Sunday, 3 p.m. Goat milking