The organic corn for our first batch of whiskey and moonshine has started poking out of Short Mountain! Even better news: the goats didn’t find a way to it. John Whittemore says we’ll have to figure something out to deal with crows.

This Friday and Saturday (May 19-20), stop by our booth at Good Ole Days of Cannon County on the square in Woodbury. John will be there most of the time and will be offering a discount on our Spring Planting 2011 t-shirts celebrating our first planting. John’s talented family will be among those performing at this annual community event.

Every Saturday in April, a few of our friends with the Middle Tennessee Mule Skinners Association are bringing their human care takers out to the farm to disc and plant our first organic corn crops.

The weather couldn’t have been more nice up on the mountain. Here’s some video from yesterday featuring the hard work of five mule teams belonging to Andy, Buddy, Terry, Mike and Doug. Here’s more in photos:

About every weekend in April, a few local mule teams from the Middle Tennessee Muleskinners Association will give us a hand discing and planting 7 acres of organic corn on the farm.

The Farmer’s Almanac said moon phases favor May 3 – May 10 for planting corn in Woodbury, TN. Some tell us to wait until the the oak leaf buds are as big as a squirrel’s ears, but after this weekend we can’t stand to wait any longer.

Nature has its way of telling you when it’s right. It’s an old fashioned way of doing things up on the mountain, but it gets the job done.

Our t-shirts are here! Celebrate Spring Planting 2011 with a t-shirt from our online General Store, or email John Whittemore (if you can’t catch him in town) or call him 615-971-4925.

These shirts are made in the USA and screen printed in Murfreesboro, TN. They commemorate this year’s Spring planting of our first organic corn with some very special help from our friends and neighbors at the Middle Tennessee Muleskinners Association.

We’ve got an awesome local crew working on this 1,900 square feet building that will soon become the distillery’s stillhouse #1.

This stillhouse will allow us to test formulas and processes, train people, host meetings and workshops and serve as transition space for the main facility. Stillhouse #1 should be complete in April. Right about when it’s as uncomfortable as it can get to cook a batch of moonshine should be about when we’re ready.

Sometime before the stillhouse is built it’s planting time on Short Mountain. It takes a farmer’s instinct to know just the right time to plant and good old American muscle to get it done. We’re 19 days away from Spring, and there’s about 7 acres of organic corn we’ve got to get planted if we’re going to cook it this year.  Wait until you see the mule team we’re fueling up to plant our corn.

Fermentation expert and Cannon County resident Sandor Katz has been working on the farm for some time introducing the use of organic composts and compost teas to our agricultural processes. It’s one of the many sustainable agricultural values future visitors will experience at Short Mountain Distillery.

Sandor was recently featured in the November 22 edition of The New Yorker magazine for his work advancing a live-culture food revolution. As the article notes, Sandor’s two books – “Wild Fermentation” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved” are must reads for a new generation of underground food activists.

We are very fortunate to have Sandor working with us as we begin integrating centuries old distilling practices with the 300 acre farm.

IT’S ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY: Last week, Sandor whipped up a big brew of compost tea that Billy and John sprayed on the newly plowed organic corn field. The practice will be repeated regularly and replace an unsustainable and costly practice of applying chemical fertilizer to the farm environment.

The processes Sandor is putting in place now will eventually transform some of Short Mountain Distillery’s grain product into an environmentally safe fertilizer. The process is amazing to watch and demonstrates a genuine bottom-up level of care for the life of the farm and quality of spirits we will produce.

Besides whiskey and moonshine, the process of distillation creates a usable grain product that is perfect for farm life. The grain mash from the distillery can be consumed by farm animals as well as crops. The distillery will produce tons of grain product annually.

HOW IT’S DONE: To get the grain into a consumable product for crops, the grain will first be fed to livestock whose manure will be composted with other organic material.

Next, the manure and other organic materials and allowed to compost. This process requires turning the pile so the composting kills pathogens but not overheat and kill the microbes.

Once the compost process is complete, a portion then goes into a large “tea bag” and is left to aerate in a large cistern of water while the rest is used as a soil amendment. The resulting frothy tea, teaming with cultivated microbes, are sprayed onto the field where they continue digesting organic matter into usable nutrition for crops.

Billy Kaufman holds dirt John Whittemore plowed for the distillery.

This isn’t exactly what corporate America would call an official ground breaking, but in its own special way that’s exactly what it is.

Local farmer John Whittemore started early Friday morning plowing the rich farm land where Short Mountain Distillery’s first organic corn crops will be planted this coming Spring.

The spot is roughly 4 acres on the future home of the distillery, nestled in the rolling hills of Short Mountain in Cannon County. The distillery will need well over 100 tons of corn a year to make our fine Tennessee whiskey and moonshine, and we intend to get every bit of it from Cannon County and surrounding Tennessee farms.

We know we won’t get all of our corn organic at first. Over time, we want to help farmers we work with adopt more sustainable practices and help preserve our agricultural heritage for generations to come.

We also know the yield might not be as good as the corn Jack Daniel’s and George Dickel have shipped in from other states, but we also know what we’re producing is something we’re all producing together.

That’s what makes this unofficial ground breaking so special when you think about it, because this is where it all begins. This is the start of something real and something wholeheartedly Tennessee.