This Is The Farm Blog

When we first started farming, most of my guidance came from books. Eliot Coleman, Helen and Scott Nearing, etc....

Helen and Scott Nearing, for example, believed in producing only what they needed to pay the bills. They had visitors come to their farm to work, play the flute, smoke a joint - whatever....(I never read anything in the book about joints being smoked, but they sure had a sing-song sort of life.)

Eliot Coleman makes it look easy too. He claims that you don't need a tractor. A broadfork will do. Perhaps a walking tractor, but for heaven's sake, you don't need a tractor.

So...it seemed to me that we'd be able to earn a living at this farming thing. Never, in my wildest dreams did i imagine the work would be so challenging. It IS possible to earn a living at this, so let me not discourage anyone with my rant.  It is just much, much more challenging than one would imagine.

This is the last two days. Thurrsday and Friday; Up at 5 to capture 125 chickens which must be delivered to the processor. Rich on his merry way, drives 3 hours round trip. I continue work whilst he is away, feeding chickens,  untangling sheep from fence, weeding garlic, weeding spinach....you name it.  Oh, I planted tomatoes and that night we got a frost so now we get to replant them. Then off to deliver chicken to a store in town. Off to Mineral Point to deliver lamb and chicken, home, sleep. Lord knows what Rich did all day - Oprah? Bon Bons?

Next day - up at 5 again. Rich drives 3 hours round trip to pick up chickens. I feed the remaining chickens whilst he is away. Hand weed spinach. Garlic. Flowers. Weed - weed - weed. Weed the hoop house. Feed the chickens again. and again. Weed the garlic again. Then at about 4 we start to think about the market tomorrow. Harvest green garlic, cut flowers, pack the van, make pricing signs. Good grief it never ends!

None of that accounts for the bookkeeping, housekeeping, etc, that only happens now and again. Plus a few sales on eBay. An antique show next weekend. Customers calling with orders. Us calling others with orders....and on and on. Wait until my rant on 'Producer Only' Farmers Markets. One of which I am going to tomorrow at 4AM. See ya! 

Posted by jackie at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Want to know how we raise the chickens that you eat? Many people ask. So here's the scoop:

Baby chickens are ordered from a small hatchery in Iowa. We've ordered from a few places in the past, but have decided the healthiest, happiest day old chicks come from Decorah Hatchery in Iowa. They are shipped on the day they are born and arrive at our local post office the next day. They usually pull in to the Monroe post office around 4:30am, at which point our phone rings and the guy or gal at the post asks  us to come retrieve the peeping birds. We go get them. The peeps below are about 4 days old.

We raise Cornish Cross birds. They grow relatively fast, and produce a lot of white meat.  We're going to try some ole fashioned black chickens this summer too.
 
So when they come home from the post office, they go into a brooder that keeps the environmental temperatures at about 95 degrees.  They stay under the brooder for about a week without ever peeping out. After about a week, they get hot and hungry, and start coming out of the brooder. They can come out from the sides of the brooder any time they want. Our best brooder is in an old insulated horse barn. We have also converted our personal, two and a half car garage into a brooder for up to 1000 chickens.

The chickens spend weeks two & three peeping and rambling about their brooder and the space around it. 

At about week three to week three and a half, they head outside to either a stationary house, or a moveable house.  They sleep at night in their houses, and wander the pasture during the day. We put up fence that keeps raccoon, coyote, fox and the neighbor's hungry cats away.  For every 100 chickens, they get about 1/4 acre of pasture. That's a lot for chickens. Sometimes, even more.

Here's their feeder below! I am pretty sure anyone driving our Gator could open a chicken fence and have a chicken parade, because they've become used to the sound of the Gator bringing food. In order to ensure that a majority of their food comes from pasture, we sprinkle their grain right into the grass.

As for the grain they receive, we special order a mix of feed. A non GMO mix. It makes up a good percentage of their diet when they are little, and much less when they are on pasture.  

People often ask if our chicken is organic. We aren't certified. We don't really plan to be certified. Everything we do with our chicken, including the pasture on which they graze, is eligible for certification. But in order to get certified feed for our chickens, we'd have to have it trucked in from a town about 4 hours away. Your chicken would be about 5 dollars a pound at that point. So we can't do it.

Healthy, happy chickens raised here... 

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