Full Belly Farm

On Monday evening Amanda and I arrived at Full Belly Farm in Guinda, CA, about 2.5 hours Northeast of Bolinas, as the sun was setting and got a quick tour of only a small portion of this very large organic farm. Nolan is about two month's into his one year internship there and is loving it. As an intern he is set up with his own yurt and is provided with the freshest food imaginable. Every day he sets out to complete a WIDE variety of tasks throughout the farm, doing work where needed, which means he's being exposed to and is developing an extremely diverse set of skills.

After getting bucked at by a cow, walking into half a dozen walk-in refrigerators to collect dinner-making ingredients, and eating wild boar burritos, we settled nicely into the yurt for the evening.

The next day we followed Nolan around for his animal chore duties. First off was milking the cows, Arnica and Pinto Bean. I'd never done this before and it took some getting used to, but I can see how you could get the hang of it and be super fast like Nolan (and Antonio in the video).






This calf loved to suckle on fingers


This goat really needed Nolan's help


After milking the two cows we strained it


And put it into jars. That's about 6 gallons a day this time of year for the two cows. They can't sell it because it's unpasteurized, but it is delicious indeed.


Then Cookie and her piglets needed some feeding


I'm unsure of the exact number, but they have around 500 chickens on the farm, some escape, so there was a lot of chicken wrangling through the day


The chickens were so hungry and excited they bowled the fence over, don't worry, Nolan controlled them


We later helped him chop the artichokes off of the plants to prevent a waste of energy on producing flowers


Pretty though


Later we collected eggs! Here they live:












One day's worth:


There are lots of walnuts on the farm, and this is how they get them down: SHAKE 'EM!


THANKS NOLAN!