Fillin' the Freezers!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 2 October 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Monday from Air2Ground Farms! The sunny warm weather has continued and will hold through tomorrow. It looks like Wednesday is the transition day with some rain and then fall arrives Thursday. By Saturday the highs are in the 60s with the lows in the low 40s. We’ve been standard “busy” the past few days, my-bad for the lack of updates. The animals are doing well on the farm. Highlights from the past few days in no particular order… We delivered 5 lambs to the processor today and picked up the pork from the 5 hogs we delivered last Monday. The lamb will be ready next Monday and then we deliver the next 5 hogs the following Monday and that pork will be ready the following Monday. Yep, 5 Mondays in a row to the processor. BUT this is what we are doing, why we are doing, all we are doing…amazing meat in the freezer! We immediately fried some bacon and it tastes amazing. Chops to follow for supper in a few minutes. The layer chickens are a bit discombobulated. The pecking order is off, the sleeping arrangements are off, their entire world is just off. Thus, we’re getting a half-dozen eggs or so per day. I expect them to pick back up as they get used to their “new world order.” It would seem if you remove half the population, it shakes things up a bit. Betty is doing better. She is eating well and is starting to look a bit better. It takes a long time to put condition back on, much longer than it takes to loose it. Pretty much the opposite of us! We can gain weight quite quickly but it takes some doing to make it go away! I put up a bunch of pics today, the first couple of pics are Betty and Happy with Betty stuffing the hay. The next is a pic of some of our beef heifers. Following is the middle batch of beef chickens. The following 3 are the piglets enjoying a meal. Finally, delayed from Fast-Jet Friday…the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle with Hannah “HAIL” Slayton at the controls of that warhorse. She’s sporting 6x 500 pound practice bombs. You can tell they are inert by their blue paint scheme. Although filled with concrete instead of explosives, they fly perfectly and almost always go exactly where you tell them. She had a great time dropping them, as she did dropping some laser guided practice 500 pounders earlier in the week. She is making her way through the flight-lead upgrade program and will be leading 2-ships in no time.

OK, Psycho, but what are your numbers? Glad you asked.

5 Hogs:

Average live weight—282.4 pounds

Average hanging weight—190.6 pounds

Average conversion (live to hanging)—67.5%

Average freezer weight—169.7 pounds

Average conversion (live to freezer)—60%

Pounds of feed to live weight— ~2.4

Pounds of feed to freezer weight— ~3.3

As I have mentioned before, we aim to process the hogs somewhere between 250-300 pounds, so we were right where we would like to be there. We would like the conversion rates to be higher but are not at all concerned with these numbers as they are not too far outside “expected” ranges. Each hog ate somewhere around 650 pounds of feed to get them to their almost 300 pounds. The pounds of feed numbers are an estimate as we still have 5 hogs to go and I’m trying to guess the differences a few weeks make.

5 Lambs (only live and hanging weights known at this time)

Average live weight—90.8 pounds

Average hanging weight—44.6 pounds

Average conversion (live to hanging)—49%

We are very happy with the conversion rates on the lambs. Somewhere around 50% is a really good goal.

Local Farm Report for 29 & 30 Sep, 1 Oct

Harvest:

21 Chicken eggs

29 Duck eggs

7 1/4 Gallons of milk

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley