Over 50 persons gathered at Brookview Farm in Goochland County on October 12, 2002 to learn about production and marketing of natural meats and eggs at a field program jointly sponsored by the Virginia Association for Biological Farming and Virginia Cooperative Extension. Sandy and Rossie Fisher are the owners and operators of Brookview Farm. Sandy Fisher manages 1200 acres, 600 of which are certified organic. The other 600 acres are leased from neighbors and are managed organically even though those acres are not certified.

      The Field Day began with a welcome from Robert Harper, Extension Agent-Animal Science for Goochland and Powhatan Counties. Robert introduced Sandy and Rossie Fisher who quickly told about the history of Brookview Farm. Katherine Smith, President of VABF also welcomed the crowd and spoke about the association. Then everyone hiked across the pastures to the first stop, which was a discussion about Virginia's Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP). John Myers from the state NRCS office is the director of CREP in Virginia and made the presentation. The goal of the CREP program is to improve water quality and treat environmentally sensitive areas by promoting the voluntary establishment of forested streamside buffers and filter strips. At Brookview Farm, Sandy and Rossie have enrolled 23.9 acres of riparian forest buffers in the program for the next 14 years. They used government cost-share funds to buffer 14,400 feet of stream banks. They received cost share assistance for installation of pipelines to watering troughs and for installation of 13,029 feet of fences to keep cattle off of their stream banks. They also received cost-share assistance for planting thousands of oak trees in these riparian buffers. All Virginia landowners who graze cattle in fields alongside of large or small creeks should look into this program. Interested persons should contact their local USDA Service Center and talk with a NRCS or FSA representative.

      The Field Day participants continued over a hill to Sandy Fisher's farm-scale composting operation. Compost is the central element of Sandy Fisher's pasture management program. He applies eight tons of compost per acre per year as a surface application on all of his pastures to maintain 4% organic matter in his pasture soils. He applies this compost with two manure spreaders that stay in operation constantly. Sandy Fisher's composting operation is extremely simple. He gets huge shipments of leaves and brush from the Henrico Dept. of Waste Management and the University of Richmond. Brookview also has a horse stall custom cleaning business and he uses the sawdust he collects in his composting as well. A skid-steer loader is used to push these yard wastes into windrows that are 12 foot wide and 300 foot long. He feeds large round bales of hay to his cattle in between the windrows of compost. The cattle naturally fertilize and inoculate the windrows with manure and urine. Everything is open to the weather. This is not carefully controlled microbial compost. He just piles up huge windrows of leaves, waters them and pushes them around until they heat up and rot. The farm manager used the skid-steer loader to turn a few piles and steam rolled out of them, indicating that the piles really were heating up. Sandy leases a brush chipper twice a year to grind the brush piles into chips and also has leased a large loader to load trucks when many thousands of yards of compost need to be moved quickly.

      The Field Day audience returned to the barn for a demonstration called Appropriate Technology for Organic Farming. Sandy is a mechanic and an inventor. He showed the participants his homemade grinder that the farm grinds chicken feed with, his homemade barbeque grill that can cook a whole bull and his homemade horse stall vacuuming machine. That is an amazing machine. Instead of using a pitchfork to clean out a horse stall, Sandy goes in with his vacuum and sucks it all out in five minutes time. The vacuum blows the material into a truck as it is removed from the stall. He charges $75 an hour to clean out horse stalls and brings excellent compost material back to his farm. Participants also viewed Brookview's Ag-Bag machine that they use to make baleage on their pastures and hay fields. Sandy appreciates the flexibility of making baleage, especially in the fall when it is harder to make hay. The grouped viewed a pull type water wagon that Sandy built to water his trees that were planted for CREP. Sandy also explained his refrigerated box truck that pulls a stock trailer. He hauls bulls to the processing plant in the trailer and picks up packaged beef to bring home in the refrigerated box truck. Before he had this set up he had to make two trips to the processing plant for the one trip he can now make.

      Sandy pointed out a huge tank that contained soy diesel fuel. He gets this fuel from Bill Talliaferro with Montague Farms in Essex County. Sandy runs his tractors on 10-20 % soy diesel mixed with regular fuel. He said that the exhaust from the tractor smells like french fries when he uses the soy diesel. He said that this is such a clean burning fuel that he actually runs it in dirty engines to clean out engine deposits.

      All of the Field Day participants took a break for lunch at noon. Rossie Fisher and Diana Liebisch served their delicious grass-fed, organic beef barbeque. During the lunch hour a presentation and discussion about "Preserving farmland from development" was conducted by Katie Flannagan with the Monacan Soil and Water Conservation District/ Land for Water's Sake program. Katie talked about the efforts their partners are making to conserve farmland in Goochland and Powhatan Counties. She spoke about the differences between agriculture zoning, agriculture districts and conservation easements. She talked about the programs conducted by American Farmland Trust. Rossie Fisher then told the audience in specific terms how she and Sandy were able to place Brookview Farm under a conservation easement, which protects their land from development until infinity. She spoke about the legal process they had to go through but assured everyone that it was not difficult or expensive.

      After lunch the crowd walked over to another pasture full of portable pens for poultry. Klaus Liebisch, Brookview farm manager told the Field Day participants how they produce organic eggs from their flock of 400 hens. He moves his heavy portable pens every day with a tractor. His most productive egg layers are a cross between Rhode Island Reds and Shaver Chickens. Klaus said that he buys young hens ready to start laying for $4.00 each. He expects each of them to produce one egg a day for a 180 day laying period. Sandy sells the eggs for $3.00 per dozen at the farm and he sells out every week. Sandy feeds all of his poultry flaxseed to increase the level of Omega -3 fatty acids. He believes that the Omega-3 fatty acids in his eggs help reduce risk of heart disease. The poultry certainly looked healthy from eating flaxseed.

      The audience climbed up in wagons to ride over to a distant pasture to see Sandy's cattle. He keeps about 135 brood cows - Brangus and Brahman/Charolais cross. The Field Day participants saw a wild crowd of cattle of all colors mixed together. A number of them had big curved horns. The one characteristic that was common to them was a long ear that signifies the Brahma blood in his herd. Sandy said that he raises Brangus and Brahma crosses because we need to raise cattle in Virginia that are resistant to heat stress. He said that none of his cattle have ever been treated for internal parasites. He said that his calves never have scours or pinkeye. The young calves get one vaccination with Barvac 7. He said that the taste of the Brangus meat is distinctive and delicious. Sandy has his bull calves processed when they are 14 to 15 months of age at 950 pounds. Since he needs slaughter weight animals coming along all the time he does not use a breeding season. He keeps three bulls in with his cows all of the time and his cows drop calves throughout the year. Sandy said that with that Brahma blood in his herd, he never has any trouble with calving. When asked why he does not castrate and raise steers rather than bulls, Sandy said that bulls make more effective growth of high protein muscle on grass than steers do. He said that only a few of his cattle are wild and need special caution in handling them.

      The final discussion at our Natural Meats Field Day was held at the store at Brookview Farm where consumers buy vacuum packaged cuts of beef, Omega-3 organic eggs, cut flowers and fresh vegetables. Sandy Fisher sells quite a bit of meat at the 17th Street Market in Richmond. He sells hamburger for $3.00 per pound to Good Foods health food stores at two different locations. The same hamburger sells for $3.50 a lb. At the 17th Street Market. He has his cattle processed at a USDA inspected slaughter facility in Harrisonburg. Mr. Fisher said that the single greatest barrier to direct marketing of natural meats in Virginia is the very limited number of processors in the state. Sandy said that he pays $.35 a lb. for processing and $.10 a lb. for packaging. He sells 70% of his beef in the traditional markets and 30% directly to the health food stores or directly to his customers. Sandy talked about how much time it took for him to be approved to use his "Virginia Lean" label on his beef. He said that he hired a trademark lawyer to conduct a search to make sure that no one else had already laid claim to that trademark name.

      The audience thanked Sandy and Rossie Fisher for being such excellent hosts and the Natural Meats Field Day came to a close.