Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 9 Feb 2023...
Hey Y'all! Check out our website: https://www.air2groundfarms.com . We added the "Delicacy Shop" a with very limited supply of lamb.
Happy Thursday morning from Air2Ground Farms! The creek is flowing quickly this morning after ~2 inches of rain yesterday. The hogs are loving the mud! In the area of our woods where they are, they have a flat area on top, a downhill slope, and their food and water is at the bottom. They always have the ability to get to high ground to get out of the mud, should they choose. It is important that they have the ability to get dry. That said, they have been enjoying the muddy ground and are covered in it, reference pic above! Hogs that live indoors on concrete their entire lives have no opportunity to act like hogs and have to be fed supplements so that they get the minerals they would naturally get by rooting in the dirt. Our hogs are GOOD-TO-GO in that area! The wind is blowing fairly hard this morning, enough that one of the poultry nets was down and "Teeter" the guard goose got out and was wandering outside her fence. The geese are significantly more intelligent than the other birds on the farm. I walked up to her, explained that it was time for her to go back into her yard, and she squatted down so I could pick her up. No running, flapping, squawking, etc. So I picked her up and set her back into her yard, gave her a pet on the back, and she waddled off to enjoy her breakfast. The other animals are all good! Yesterday, Shelley made a run into town to deliver some bacon for The Little Farm Store. I spent the entire day on the computer. I worked on the website, set up a new shop (the Delicacy Shop which has our lamb), added eggs and milk to the Neighborhood Shop for our local Missouri friends and family, and started working an app through Spaces by Wix. If you haven't visited the website in a while, check it out! The other computer was buzzing with expense entries as we try to finalize things for taxes. We also made a couple pounds of cheese. We vacuum sealed over 9 pounds of cheese last night, bottom pic! We had some friends visit the farm this morning that came out to pick up some milk and eggs. We had a great visit and they also left with some pork! Thank you! Today we will continue our inside focus of computer work and doing things with milk. We will deliver some milk and eggs when we go to town this evening for Makaylah's taekwondo practice.
Yesterday I left you with the question of "Are you free to consume anything you want?" I want to chat a bit more about that concept. I am not talking about the extremes of eating dog poop or anything like that, just consider normal human food or drink, like raw milk. We have a lot of friends and family in Florida. Do you think we can sell you any of the raw milk from our farm? No, we cannot. Not really surprising, with restrictions on interstate commerce and all. I'm sure you can just go to your nearby Florida dairy farmer and buy milk, right? No again. In Florida, raw milk can only be sold as pet food. How about our Maryland friends, you can surely buy raw milk? Nope. Raw milk sales are illegal by statute and herdshare distribution is prohibited by regulation. If the producer is registered with the state, they can sell it as pet food. Louisiana, same as Maryland. In North Carolina, herdsharing is legal, as is sales of raw milk as pet food. Herdsharing is a workaround where the farmer sells 'shares' of his cow. So you can buy 1/10th of the cow and thus 1/10 of the milk belongs to you. You cannot; however, purchase anything additional from that same cow. Nevada--forget about it! Raw milk sales are illegal unless a county milk commission approves a producer and none are approved (only 1 county even has a milk commission). Well I can buy it as pet food, right? Not in Nevada. By state law, the only way to sell raw milk as pet food is if a toxic dye is added to denature the milk...but you can buy recreational marijuana from a state licensed retail store. Here in Missouri, on-farm sales of raw milk are legal as is raw cream. Want a great resource to learn more about raw milk, check out realmilk.com a Weston A. Price project. One of the things they do is track deaths from milk over the past fifty years. According to medical literature, Raw milk=0, Pasteurized milk=73. They have a map function that will show you your nearest place to buy raw milk as well as a map that details the raw milk regulations by state. We are going to research how we can be added to the list of rogue Americans producing this highly regulated beverage! Back to my original question...now do you feel free? #FoodFreedom Tomorrow I will discuss raw milk products; soon I will move on to meats.
Shelley's YouTube Short for the day is: The Sound of Making Milk. Check it out and subscribe!
Local Farm Report for 8 Feb 2023:
Harvest:
20 Chicken eggs
3 Duck eggs
5 Gallons of milk
Sales:
N/A
Cheers!
Rich & Shelley
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