Another great day, and more progress toward meeting our goals

Great day of work today. Micah really contributed a lot while we worked on fixing a chicken tractor and finishing up the fencing around the new hen house. Farming is a great way to spend time with your children and enjoy an abundance of teaching and learning opportunities as well. The layers are really starting to grow, and we are moving them closer each day to the hen house so that they will be able to run cage free very soon. As one of our shareholders and fellow Quakers reminded me, when chickens get to eat naturally by picking through the grasses and other natural edibles, they produce eggs that are incredibly high in Omega 3. By September, we will have two grown layer flocks, and will have a lot of eggs for next season’s shareholders.
I said we were working on hen house fencing, and perhaps I should explain. We use portable tarp shelters for our layer hens, and they are easy for predators to get into by digging underneath the bottom edge of the tarp. To prevent this, we erect a welded wire fence around the outside of the shelter, and then lay chicken wire on the ground extending out from the welded wire. We zip-tie the chicken wire to the welded wire, then use tent stakes to keep the chicken wire tight to the ground. This has been effective in preventing raccoons from digging through into the hen house, unless you forget to shut the welded wire fence gate.
An interesting thing happened about a week and a half ago, and I didn’t write about it because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. We lost a chicken from our layer flock, most likely because I didn’t feel like closing up the hen house (AS STATED ABOVE). Predators always return to the scene of their kill the very next night, so, as usual, I waited outside to hunt the predator. What I suspected would be a coyote (you can tell by the manner of the kill) turned out to be something entirely different. It was a huge fox! I was unable to raise my shotgun in time to shoot it cleanly, and so the fox went its own way. It did not return, but I got to thinking. It is one thing to kill a raccoon or a skunk, or a coyote. It is entirely another manner to shoot a beautiful animal like this fox that I saw in our pasture. Also, I think that many of our shareholders would feel the same way had they saw this animal. At any rate, the fox did not return, but I had to admit that this might pose a problem later in the season, and I can’t have predators circling the farm and helping themselves to chickens and who knows what else. So, I decided to make a significant investment in hopes of eliminating the need to kill predators.
I invested in a solar powered blinked LED light that guarantees to keep predators away from the area surrounding it. One light will not work, you need one every hundred feet or so, at least that is what is recommended. So we now own six of these lights at a cost of $34 each. This was a significant expense for our farm, but in the end, I hope that it eliminates any shareholder concerns about the need to eradicate predators. I also hope it will allow me to get to sleep at night during the summer, as raccoons and such don’t come out until 1 or 2AM.
Broilers come this Wednesday, and should be ready for pickup in eight weeks. We have a lot of fencing decisions to make before the sheep come, and we are going to feed out Jersey bull calves for beef for next year. We anticipated getting beef steers, but the prices for stock were nearly $600 more than we had budgeted for. We will need to save for breeding stock if we want to get any steers bred for beef. At any rate, the Jerseys are very pretty to look at, and they do well on grass, though they can be somewhat small, Hope to see you soon at Sandhill, bye for now.

More winter work

We’ve been getting some things done this week. Jenn is off in Mexico, and Scot has taken the week off from work to be with the kids. What an opportunity to get farm work done. We have already completed the new chicken tractor frames. As mentioned below, we are using PVC pipe this season instead of wood, and we altered the design in other ways as well. All that is left to do is get the frames outside, reassemble them, and add the chicken wire and tarp roofs. Our first broilers should be ordered in April.
March 8 is the date that we will pick up the layer hens. We are getting Black Australorps this season, a brown egg layer and heritage breed. Jenn picked out the breed. As for the new hen house, we were lucky enough to save over $200 by finding the portable garage that we favor for housing chickens on Craigslist. Scot was very excited. We now need one more, and are waiting for it to show up on the same site. They normally cost $360.
We have made contact with the person we are purchasing lambs from, and will probably go with the one-year-old ewes in May, and then add a ram and a wether later in the season when it is time to breed. Along with the lamb project, Rosa and Micah are preparing to buy their own chicks when they arrive ate the farm store. Incidentally, we have decided to make our feed purchases from a local chain store, Family Farm and Home, instead of through the local cooperative. As we have mentioned below, we would rather purchase grain grown locally, but the folks at the coops around here are just plain unfriendly toward us. At FF@H, we have developed relationships with the employees, and the grain comes from Armada, Michigan, over in Macomb County. There was a third choice, Floyd the Feed man, who is very friendly and the least expensive, but he sells Purina Brand feed, which is far from being a local product.
This First Day is Micah’s birthday, and he will get a cake, and probably get to pick out a present at the farm store. As you can tell by the picture above, taken last year, Micah is partial to the John Deere equipment he sees driving along our back roads all year. While we could not ever use such machinery, we did get a used John Deere riding mower, which Micah likes to drive around on with Scot during lawn mowing days. He then rakes up the grass and feeds it to the steer. By the way, this is not an endorsement of John Deere products :)

Snow Days on the Farm

We recently had three great snow days on the farm. More than anything, these days were the silver lining in an otherwise cloudy situation. For two days of the week, I didn’t have enough gas in the car to make the 45 mile drive to my internship in Holland. On the third snow day, the weather was so bad that my supervisor instructed me not to make the drive. So, I lost valuable internship hours and was unable to spend valuable time with clients. Because of the circumstances, it was quite embarrassing.
However, since Jenn was home all three days, and we home school the three youngest children, we were together as a family with three days of unscheduled opportunity. So what happens on a farm during snow days? Well, since we have plenty of food in the house, we didn’t need to shopping or anything like that so we were able to stay home and enjoy the snow. Of course, we had to feed the laying hens and the eight barn cats, but other than those chores, we were able to build snowmen, make full family dinners, do a lot of reading to each other, clean our bedroom, write content for blogs, create art, engage in Bible study, shovel snow together, rescue chickens caught in the snow, feed suet to the winter birds, listen to a music by diverse bands like The Crossing, Talking Heads, and Mudhoney and Motorhead, Taylor Swift, and Parliament.
Snow days are a good time to take naps, and tell stories about infamous blizzards of the past. All of our children were born during winter, so we had snow stories for each birth of the youngest three children. We remember broken arms caused by huge icicles, sledding accidents caused by huge trees, and hockey game cancellations caused by huge storms.
A great thing about blizzards, however, is something rarely talked about on our farm or by others, for that matter. The great things are that we are in a warm place with food, heat, hot water, transportation, and most of all, each other. That is a blessing that many people don’t share. That’s why giving, especially the sharing of time, can be such a blessing to others.