Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 15 May 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Happy Monday from Free Missouri! The warm, humid, rainy weather continues this week. We’ve had 3 inches over the past few days and are under a flood watch this evening for potential of up to 4 inches in 2 hours. I used to hate the mud that is inevitable on a farm, until the drought last summer. I now gladly accept the mud because it means the rain is falling! All of the animals are doing well. We had our first lamb of the season born yesterday morning, our Mother’s Day lamb. There are many other ewes that are so close that I told Shelley we should declare LAMBCON Delta, a play on the Force Protection Condition Measures on military bases where they declare a FPCON from Alpha through Delta with Delta meaning under attack. The top pic today is us at the market Saturday morning. We had another great market day with so many awesome conversations with new and existing friends. When we got home from the market, we moved the beef herd back onto pasture, after giving the grass time to recover. A few pics today of the beef herd on the pasture, with one of the youngest bull calf. We had guests on the farm Sunday evening for the night. Great conversations and farm tour with a former co-worker and his daughter as they passed through Missouri. Thanks for stopping by, Bogie and Mici! We weighed a few of the beef chickens last week and they are close enough to our desired weight that we plan to process them this week. We cleared a freezer for them so we can get them deep frozen and ready for sale. Last year we processed 80 birds in one day and, although we got everything done, we plan to split it into two days this time. We will do 40ish the first day and the remaining the next day. It will keep us from being so exhausted and also help in getting the birds frozen. We made some yogurt and cheese today and moved the milk cows into a fresh paddock. We will try to finish setting up for processing day and get our last plant starts in the garden before the rain begins.
I’ve bombarded you with nutritional information, some of it controversial. Don’t worry, there’s more! That said, I wanted to take a pause today in order to share personal feelings regarding the issue. We’ve been interested in eating healthy foods for over a decade and have tried to learn everything we could regarding nutritional health. A few years ago, a friend of mine who is a medical doctor and fighter pilot started posting about a ketogenic style of eating and discussed the health benefits associated. I have Crohn’s Disease and he often discussed the benefits for Crohn’s patients. So, I decided to start learning about it and eventually to give it a try. More on our keto journey later. The eye-opening, jaw-dropping, astonishing revelation for us was that the mainstream thought on nutrition might not be the best answer, and might even be the reason that we as a population are getting sicker and sicker. We researched the history of the “food pyramid,” the foundation we learned regarding nutrition. We spent hours and days on end learning everything we could. We read books, watched documentaries, watched entire conferences, learned the key players in cutting edge research regarding nutrition and consumed all we could from them. There was one specific aha moment for us and it was that we might not be destined for illness. I assumed I was destined to have a heart attack. We figured we would soon be on the metabolic disorder spectrum, and would eventually have Type 2 Diabetes, because that’s just what happens—look at the statistics. We accepted that we would have mental decline and at some point be dealing with dementia and/or Alzheimers. There was a moment when we learned that all of those things might just be a direct result of our diet. That moment was life changing for us. We may still have to deal with some or all of those things, but there was such hope in learning that it MAY NOT be inevitable. The spark of hope that by adapting what we eat may preclude even some of those things we believed we were destined to endure was enough for us to change. We’re not on a diet. We carefully choose what we eat, with extreme discretion, because we can actually be healthy as a result. We believe the Standard American Diet is directly responsible for much of the sickness in this nation (and much of the world as they slowly move to a “Western Diet”). I offer the following words of encouragement: You don’t have to accept a future of illness! You can actually change your health by what you eat!
Check out the YouTube Short of me weighing the live beef chickens!
Local Farm Report for 13 & 14 May 2023:
Harvest:
59 Chicken eggs
36 Duck eggs
3 Goose eggs
11 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
I went down a similar rabbit hole and ended up going keto. I can’t look at the grocery store the same ever again.
Ok, you wrote all that just for me. I bought some peanut butter cookies at the planting festival yesterday. How did you know that??? 😂