Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 19 April 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good Wednesday morning from Free Missouri! It’s another beautiful spring day today. Thunderstorms in the forecast tomorrow, we need the rain but can do without the storm part. The animals are all doing very well today. The milk cows continue their increased production, thoroughly enjoying the green grass. In the cow pic, you can see Happy losing her winter coat. The milk cows have been rubbing against anything they can find to get the longer hair off. In fact, all of the animals are losing their winter coat. The guardian dogs are shedding like crazy! When we pet them, hair just flies off in wads. The top 2 pics are the boys enjoying the cool concrete around the waterer yesterday afternoon in the 80+ degrees. The flerd is still awesome! We moved them yesterday afternoon without incident. The cows gathered at the edge of the temporary fence and bellowed their desire to get moving. Then as we called the sheep, they came running and made it to the new paddock before the cows. As always, the guardian dogs were the first across, running the entire perimeter and marking the new territory as theirs. We also move the beef chickens daily, giving them fresh grass to pick through. We are equally excited for the impact they have on the pasture as we are about having the poultry in the freezer. We will order more GMO-Free feed today, 1,000 pounds each of Pig Starter and Layer Ration and 500 pounds of dairy ration. If we order today, we can pick it up on Friday and get the feed started fermenting to be ready to feed the piglets when they arrive next week. We unloaded another truck full of mushroom compost onto what we are calling the pumpkin patch. It is an area that the chickens wintered on that is quite fertile with little grass. We plan to pull together mounds and put pumpkin seeds in. All of the animals enjoy pumpkins and get great nutritional value from them. One of the barn cats is in the process of having kittens, 3 at first count, in the nest box the guineas have been using to lay their eggs. I guess we’ll have to find the new spot they decide to use. We will candle the guinea eggs in the incubator today to see if they are fertile and developing. The starter on the side-by-side quit yesterday—real bummer. I ordered a replacement this morning and paid a bit extra for overnight shipping so hopefully we can get it replaced by weekend. Today we will move the flerd and start a project of building shelves for the barn.
The bottom pic is of a pile of cheese in the deep freeze that we made from our GMO-Free A2/A2 milk…over 30 pounds of it. We also have freezers with our own grass-only beef, our own GMO-Free fed pork, and our own GMO-Free fed and on-farm processed pasture raised chicken. We are very excited about our farm business and all of the different aspects of that. We are also excited about the regenerative impact we are having on our land. We love learning and practicing animal husbandry, ensuring a wonderful life for all of the different animals. All of that said, the drive behind the scenes is that we want good, healthy, nourishing food. That’s not quite right. We want the best food we can get. We don’t just want pork raised in the forest, we want it fed GMO-Free food. Not just GMO-free food; hand-fed GMO-Free fermented food…while living in the forest. You get the picture. If you attempt to buy that product, first it is almost impossible to find and if you can find it, it is prohibitively expensive. So, we decided to do it ourselves. On our farm, we are growing the best food we can. In so doing, we decided to produce more than we can possibly consume; which allows us to share with our family, friends, and community. We now have 8 families who regularly get GMO-Free, raw, whole, A2/A2 Jersey milk. We have sold GMO-Free, pasture raised eggs (chicken, duck, and goose) to dozens of families. We have our grass-only beef in 2 families’ freezers. We’ve sold grass-only lamb to over a dozen folks. We have our pork in over 50 families' freezers across 9 states. It is very cool to know that so many people are enjoying the premium product we work so hard to produce. Back to the pic of the cheese, we are truly blessed to have an abundance of amazing food.
NEW YouTube Short of the flerd:
Local Farm Report for 18 April 2023:
32 Chicken eggs
17 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
1 Guinea egg
7 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
Honestly, reading this post first gave me goosebumps, then wet eyes.
I believe what you are doing wrt your animals and food production is what was intended, from the beginning.
In my opinion, you guys are honoring the animals, the creation and the Creator with your labor.