Howell Farm's Peace Corps alumni include director Pete Watson and historical farmer Rob Flory. This year, the Peace Corps celebrates its 50th anniversary.

From April 30 to June 19, Howell Living History Farm is hosting a photo and painting exhibit titled "Images from the Peace Corps Experience." Learn more about it here:

http://www.nj.com/news/local/index.ssf/2011/04/around_the_towns_lambertville.html

Howell Farm follows a traditional crop rotation that’s fairly easy to remember: “C.O.W.S.” Turn-of-the-century farmers planted a field in corn one year, oats the next, wheat the next, and then left the field as sod every fourth year. This rotation was a natural cycle that helped keep the soil fertile and pests at bay.

One of Howell Farm’s lowest fields was planted in corn last year, so it’s due for oats this year. The usual goal is to have the oats planted by Good Friday. This spring has been so wet, however, that everything’s been pushed back. The ground is just now starting to dry out enough to plow. Our farmers were out in the field plowing with the draft horses this morning, followed by an afternoon plowing session with the oxen.

The weather this spring has been affecting all the local farmers: historical and modern alike. Many of the farmers report that their plantings are about two weeks behind schedule.

Earlier this month, Howell Farm welcomed two new workhorses to the barn.

“Tom” is a 4-year-old bay-colored gelding, and “Jeb” is an 11-year-old chestnut gelding. All indications so far are that these horses are perfect gentlemen—they are well-trained and get along well with the other horses.

Tom and Jeb weigh 1,500 to 1,600 pounds each, which is slightly smaller that Jack, Chester, Bill, and Jess, Howell Farm’s other workhorses, who weigh 1,700 pounds and up. It was always the opinion of Halsey Genung, Howell Farm’s first horseman, that these slightly smaller horses were more historically accurate to a 1900s farmstead. Their smaller sizes made them good all-purpose horses—they could perform farm work, serve as driving horses, and also be ridden.

The new team is taking the place of Barney and Mac, who spent many years pulling a walking plow at Howell Farm. Now aging into their mid-twenties, the inseparable pair will spend their retirement roaming the pastures of a horse farm in Andover, New York. Old horses heading “out to the pasture” might sound like a euphemism, but in this case it’s really true. Howell Farm director Pete Watson and Howell Farm historical farmer Jeremy Mills recently took the ride upstate with Barney and Mac and delivered them to Jim and Dana Kruser at Greenwood Hill Farm. It was a reunion of old friends. (When Jim and Dana were Howell Farm volunteers from 1995 to 2001, Barney and Mac were the horses they used to drive carriage rides for weekend visitors.)

Howell Farm intern Emese Salopek reports that making butter is “not as complicated as people think it is.”

Here’s the butter-making process churned down to 10 simple steps.

1. Milk the cow. At Howell Farm, this means Daisy, a Jersey, a breed known for the high butterfat content of its milk.

2. Put the milk in a large milk jug, where the cream will begin to rise to the top. (The milk must be raw milk. This process doesn’t work with homogenized milk.) The milk jug at Howell Farm has special tubing attached, which helps once it’s time to drain off the skim milk.

3. Refrigerate the milk jug and wait 2 to 3 days for all the cream to rise to the top.

4. Drain all skim milk out of the milk jug and feed it to the pigs. (At least, that’s what we do with it at Howell Farm.)

5. Pour the cream into large, clean jars. (We use half-gallon mason jars.) Leave some room for the cream to slosh around.

6. Slosh the cream until it takes on the consistency of butter. At Howell Farm, Farmer Rob has designed a motorized milk sloshing machine. But you can also slosh the jars by hand, or put the jars in your backpack (or saddle bags) and walk or ride around with them for a while.

7. Once a butterball begins to form, pour excess buttermilk out of jar. Wash the butterball off with cold water. Feed buttermilk to the pigs.

8. Put the butterball into a clean bowl and use some sort of tool (we use wooden paddles) to squeeze all the excess buttermilk out of the butterball. Feed the buttermilk to the pigs.

9. Add salt, to taste. Mix it in well.

10. Enjoy.

Steam engines began appearing on New Jersey farms in the late 1800s. These engines turned flywheels or cranks, which through a series of pulleys and belts provided power to labor-saving farm machines. These machines includes wheat threshers, fodder choppers, grain mills and water pumps.

Prior to these technologies, farms such as Howell Farm relied on animal traction and a machine of gears often called a “ring power” or “sweep.” If you’ve seen the movie “Conan the Barbarian” and remember a young Conan walking around in circles while pushing a large wheel, that’s the general idea.

Coles Roberts, a New Jersey farmer and agricultural historian, recently donated an antique ring power to Howell Farm. The machine looks as if it hasn’t been used in about 100 years. The task has fallen to Rob Flory, one of Howell Farm’s equipment gurus, to take it apart, clean it, and put it all back together. The Howell Farm interns are lending a hand as well.

In the photos above, you can see Rob and his son Martin, a mechanic in training, starting to disassemble the machine. Check back for updates as this project progresses.

Check out the tabs at the top of the page for some "Furrow" content of yesteryear you may have missed:

Motion Pictures: Videos taken at Howell Farm.

Barnyard Stories: Essays by Howell Farm interns and volunteers.

Furrow Archives: "Today at Howell Farm" and "Crop Report" posts from 2009 and 2010.

Farmbedded Archives: Intern Jared Flesher's blog from his stay at Howell Farm in 2008.

Jack and Chester (two 1,700-pound Belgian draft horses) helped plow up the Chestnut Community Garden in downtown Trenton today. More than 80 schoolchildren from Cadwalader Elementary School helped steer the plow. After all the kids took a turn, gardeners from the community finished the job.