Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 11 March 2023...
Hey Y'all!! We published our next YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSNqKqI7wa0
Good morning and a very happy Saturday to you from Air2Ground Farms! We completed rounds this morning before the rain set in. The significant report from rounds this morning is there was a Khaki Campbell duck stuck in the net. We rotate solar chargers around the different poultry areas because they are so expensive we don't have one for every net. The hogs, sheep, and beef cows must have a charger and the fourth one rotates through the different birds. A couple of weeks ago the fourth charger quit working so the birds have been without one for a while. (Side note--we use Intellishock 180 solar fence chargers from Premier One. Every time we have had an issue with a charger, Premier One has sent us replacement parts for free. We don't even pay for shipping. They are a great company!) As I mentioned, the ducks have decided that they want to be outside their yard and have figured out their fence isn't charged. So, they just squeeze through the small holes in the net. This morning, one of them tried unsuccessfully to make it through. Instead of retreating the same way it just came from, she decided to start doing alligator rolls which twisted the net tighter and tighter around her neck. We rescued her with no harm done but first thing after publishing this, we are going to get the parts replaced on the charger and put it back into service on the duck fence. We picked up the day-old meat chickens from the post office yesterday afternoon! It's always an exciting time on the farm when new animals show up. We ordered 80 male Murray's Big Red Broilers and they shipped 83. 82 arrived alive and one died overnight so we have 81 in the brooder right now. The top two pics are the birds exploring their new home. The red hue is their heat lamp. They need to stay at 95 degrees for the first week and then we reduce the temp by 5 degrees per week until they move outside. The first time we raised this breed of meat birds, Makaylah coined the monicker "Beef Chickens" due to their ultimate purpose of becoming meat in the freezer as opposed to laying eggs. That obviously was cute enough that it stuck so we now refer to our meat birds as Beef Chickens! They are amazing animals in their ability to grow. I am excited to take you on this journey as we watch these guys go from day-old fuzz-balls today to full grown, 7 pound live roasters in 10 weeks. The 80 birds will consume about 1,200 pounds of feed and will ultimately be about 400 pounds of meat. The bottom pic is the last batch we raised about a week before processing. Once they go outside, they get fresh grass daily and all of the fermented GMO-free feed they care to eat. We worked a bit on the garden yesterday spreading a truckload of mushroom compost Mom and Dad picked up in Miami OK. Today we will work inside answering the next round of questions from the accountant, bottling our first batch of Kombucha and getting the next batch going, painting doors, and doing things with milk. As I sit here typing, the incubators are beginning to peep. No chicks have emerged but we can hear them peeping inside the eggs. Too cool!
A visitor left a quote on the blog yesterday that I want to share. "The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment [clothing], may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy."--James Madison. Thank you for sharing! What an awesomely appropriate quote for the topic of food freedom. As a 25-year member of the US Armed Forces, freedom and its expression holds a special place for me. I find it interesting that while serving, I didn't feel like I was "defending freedom" or any of the cliches often associated with service. Now that I am out of the Service, I find myself struggling to contain my frustration at what seems to me to be limits on my freedom. As James Madison pointed out, there is true freedom and independence in providing your own food. It is hard to describe, but knowing that my family has an abundance of amazingly healthy food, because we are producing it, is an awesome feeling. We chose to build a farm rather than a homestead because we wanted to be able to share that amazing food with our family, friends, and community. I believe I find the current food distribution laws so frustrating because they are directly limiting my ability to share our amazing products with our friends and community which to me is a direct infringement on my freedom (which for some reason, I now feel like I spent 25 years defending ;-) ).
Check out our newest YouTube Video: Clearing Fence Regenerative Farming Style
Local Farm Report for 10 March 2023:
Harvest:
27 Chicken eggs
14 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
6 1/4 Gallons of milk
Sales:
2 Gallons of milk
2 Dozen chicken eggs
2 Pounds of sausage
Farm additions:
81 Beef Chickens
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
“There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.”
Benjamin Franklin.
If only we could keep the government from interfering with miracles.
Reading through various quotes of the Founding Fathers, it seems like they viewed food security as a responsibility of an individual rathe…