changes are coming
It’s been four years since we brought home our baby chicks. Since then, we’ve added, lost, added some more, lost some more and then kept adding even more. I remember when Chris had finished the addition to the newly built chicken coop that we built into the side of our spare garage. He said, “you can fit 50 birds in here comfortably”, to which I responded, “it needs to fit 100”. I had read and heard all about chicken math and I was taking it seriously. Here we are four years later and we have probably more than 100 birds. We’ve hatched chicks and ducklings, we exchanged coffee and chicken processing for additional layers/meat birds. And we’ve made an attempt at raising turkey’s. We kinda suck at that one. We attempted to raise 10 turkeys last year in time for the holidays. We didn’t realize we needed to wait for them to hatch after we placed the order, so that delayed us about three weeks. They ended up arriving way too close to Thanksgiving, so we decided they would be Christmas turkey’s. Needless to say, we didn’t have Christmas turkey’s either. In fact the last one just ended up dying on its own and he never really grew. Womp womp. I was recently telling some fellow farmers about how we lost six of the 10 turkeys while they were in the brooder. I have no clue where they went, they were just gone. I suspected that they got through our mesh separator between them and the big chickens, but I never saw little turkeys roaming around. We’ve since moved our brooder into our new feed barn, it’s much larger and even easier to take care of everyone now. yay!
Baby Chicks learning from momma
Special shout out to our egg subscribers! Yes we sort of secretly started doing egg subscriptions, not only did it take the pressure off of having to bring eggs to the markets, it has allowed us to track our eggs, and have a constant sales outlet. This winter was difficult, we seemed to have struggled with production, in addition to that Riley and Addie are able to find the eggs before we do, and the hens free range, so it’s a daily Easter egg hunt for us. Ducks don’t seem to lay in winter, at least ours didn’t. They seems to like to hide their eggs and they can’t do that when the ground is frozen. We’re considering a duck egg subscription, it may be seasonal considering their inability to lay last winter. If you would like to join our egg subscription, please sign up here and we will let you know when a spot opens up.
Goats, boy did this one blow up on me. I think in hindsight, I would have kept my mouth shut about wanting goats. We have a few that are just so sweet and I love them, they love the pets on their nose and between the horns. The pigs have made me really appreciate the goats, but in my opinion we have too many. However, with the goat grazing we have to have too many. We’ve made some small changes to our goat program, first we started breeding some of the Kiko’s last Spring for Fall babies, they seem to be thriving, even the two who might be half Nigerian Dwarf, another Womp Womp. We are in the process of clearing out a bunch of pine trees, or 90’ death traps, we cannot pay someone to take them. Seriously. So Chris went and bought a Skidsteer to just tackle the project himself. But then he had the idea that we could team the skidsteer up with the goats - Munchers And Mulchers - oh yeah! He said there were so many requests that went beyond what the goats could or would do, so in those cases we could be a double threat to those invasive plants, and overgrown things. (I’m not the vegetation expert that Chris has become). So keep an eye out for the goats and the skidsteer this Summer! We’re also hoping to try our hand at goat yoga this year, we’re working on making the goats friendly enough to want to hang with humans.
Introducing
Munchers and Mulchers! Click here for more information
Pigs, the love hate relationship with these guys has become more real. These feelings are only because they just got out of their fence while Chris was gone and Riley just sat and watched. She bounced around a little to pretend like she was doing something, but in the end, it was me. I finally got 20 of the 21 pigs back in their fence and then had to deal with the Boar, who did not want to be dealt with. He gave me a quick warning and we agreed he could continue rooting around in the backyard. I was eventually able to get him into our small dog yard before it got too dark. He got out a few hours later by pushing his way through the metal fence so he could sleep outside of the electric fence next to his girlfriends. We’re in this sweet spot of not having enough pigs to start the market season with, and wondering if we have enough freezer space for when all the meat comes in. We had a lot of requests last year for whole and half hogs, so hopefully we’ll be able to accommodate those this year as well. Part of the project Chris is working on in our back woods is to clear more land for the pigs to gorge on some radishes. We’re also looking for a nut source to help us finish the pigs, trust me, this will be worth it if we can make it work, for now, we’ve moved them over to a soy free non-gmo feed.
The cows on pasture last year - 2023
Cows, last year 2 of our three Heifers became momma’s. Lucy and Lane, are getting big and have some good wind pipes. They express their feelings about their hay situation when we walk by them. About half way through a bail they give us warning moo. Any less than that, they start to get uncomfortable with the food situation, and the vocals get a little more exercised. I still haven’t made friends with anyone but the bull, who I don’t exactly want to make friends with. He gets a little too excited for my comfort when we go into their area. Last week Kurt had Chris trapped in a corner and I had to distract him so Chris could hop out. Luckily Kurt doesn’t have horns. Our steer is looking good, he will be ready early this summer and we’ll have our first, extremely limited supply of Dexter beef. We should be having some more calves this May, but beef is an even slower growing meat than the goats and even the Mangalitsa pigs, so we’re probably another summer from having any real inventory. We’re all looking forward to them getting back on that summer pasture, which we think should be next week, yay warm weather! I’m not sure how to try and make friends with the girls when they go back out there, hopefully Chris will have made a little more than a dent in the backwoods so we can keep the calves back there with the goats. I want to try and milk the cows, but I’m realizing this is going to take time.
Bigger changes, we finally got our commercial kitchen approved by MDARD!! Before Chris started thinking about converting the chicken garage to a commercial kitchen/warehouse he worked for nine months with EGLE to get an exemption to dump water from a bucket onto our ground. We’re on a septic system and we cannot dump water from washing eggs or cleaning out a chicken back into our system. So he submitted the request and worked tirelessly with all entities. Nine short(ish) months later, the state created an exemption for small farms like ours to be able to process chickens for retail! We are thrilled to have this opportunity and our customers can look forward to FRESH-NEVER-FROZEN chickens once a month at the Saturday markets. Because we have a commercial kitchen now, we can also make some ready to cook meals. Any chicken left over from the Saturday markets will be turned into a meal for our Wednesday markets and possibly Saturday markets. We will be experimenting a lot with our meats this summer and all the ways we can pull together some ready to cook meals. My goal is to figure out how to make brats! I’ve already made a large batch of salt free chicken broth (no sugar added thank you very much). I’ll be making some beef bone broth next, and we will make sure to get all the fat rendered down as well. Big things are happening in the kitchen! This has been a huge goal of mine since we basically started the farm.
Putting the kitchen to use
Fresh ingredients and our FBF Chicken make the perfect Chicken Broth. Sodium and Sugar free. Currently this is available at the Farmer’s Markets, we are working on meeting the testing requirements to sell online.
Shipping, we finally found a platform specifically for farmers. Chop Local, they are newer and growing. They have been amazing to work with thus far and have been helping us figure out how to ship our meats. We had struggled with our packaging for a bit so we delayed the launch of that platform, but we are officially live and ready for meat orders. (If you have any styrofoam coolers you’re willing to donate, we’ll take them!) We are currently trying to figure out how to continue shipping the coffee without requiring a minimum order to save on shipping costs. Otherwise we’re really excited to join Chop Local and have another opportunity to get our meats out there.
You’re hired! We have officially hired our very first intern. I’m so grateful for the help, and yes, a little nervous, but McKenzie is super sweet and came to the interview ready to be on the farm. She fell in love with Sadie and Bob and the cats got to love on her too. She starts in May and you’ll possibly get to meet her at the markets. We’ll let her introduce herself once she starts. May cannot get here soon enough!
We still have a few more goals up our sleeves, and I think we will make them happen. If you’re not signed up for our newsletter make sure you do that before the market season. We will let our subscribers know when the fresh chickens will be at the markets, and even some subscriber only specials. Only a couple of weeks until market seasons starts!