How we farm at Coyle organic farm.

May 2021 revised

The spelt flour, rye flour and corn meal are stone ground at temperatures less than 90 degrees F. We also sift out the trash for the chickens but keep all the bran for health reasons. The resultant baked product may not be as fluffy with the bran in but you can always sift out the bran.

This is a very difficult lifestyle to maintain with endless chores, many maintenance issues, lack of income for quality food, a changing climate that produces too much rain or too long a drought. There is a huge issue of difficult internet problems and the fraudulent activities going on everywhere . Our bank accounts have been hacked as well as our emails which make farm life sometimes difficult using the internet which is required by all governments now.

This being said I love the basic lifestyle of not having to drive to work, arrange my own day, spend time with the animals, the good food, being outdoors every day and seeing things grow.

I am sincere in believing that the many problems in the world all point to becoming self sufficient in farming. Farming to grow food is my main aim. Becoming more local is my other incentive since if I can deliver food to people who live close by then I save a lot in not having a vehicle to deliver and in fact if I can do it by bicycle so much the better.

We grow our own sunflower oil seeds, spelt and rye flour seeds organically. We also have heritage chickens for eggs and a Dexter cow along with cats to keep the mice in order.

Crop rotations, cover crops, minimal plowing and carefully observing the fields are the farming practices we follow. We only use only sunshine to dry our crops. I no till plant sunflowers into crimped rye which reduces the weeds almost nothing.

We are not certified organic but adhere to regenerative farm principles.

I use horses as a source of energy in the fields or for logging. I still use tractors fueled with sunflower oil to finish some field work with a hope that horses will eventually do everything.

We cut our own wood from our wood lot using horses to pull the logs to a central spot where we cut it into firewood lengths. Here we are using a single horse to do light logging.

In the fall I plant rye with various cover crops such as white clover and peas which over winters and yields green plants in late February for the horses to eat. To cut down on the weeds and provide green manure I continually clip the field with a horse drawn sickle mower or swather. I broadcast red clover in the sunflower stubble with great success as this gives the horses lots of red clover to eat which I fence off once they have trampled and eaten about half.

I use the horses to maintain the fields. The horses are fenced off with an electric fence in a large pasture.

We mill spelt flour from the spelt we grow on the farm. Spelt has a hull and must be taken off to get the seeds that we will then mill for flour. Spelt is planted in the fall and is harvested in August of the following year. We automated the flour making by adding an auger to take the milled grain to our sifter. The mill rotates at a slow speed to keep the flour temperature between 80 and 90 degrees F. Like our pressing of the oils we only press once a month to order. All bottles and bags of flour are marked with the date of pressing or milling.