Happy Thanksgiving...We Raised This Bird!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 29 November, 2024…

Hey Y’all!

Good afternoon and happy Fast-jet Friday from Air2Ground Farms! The fast jets today are the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle. The jets today are launching into the setting sun at RAF Lakenheath for a local overwatch sortie. The nearby British citizens are chatting online about the drones that are flying over the local bases and part of that discussion is regarding the 2-ships of F-15Es that are constantly making noise overhead keeping watch of the unidentified drones that are flying over our US assets and personnel…to include our daughter Lilli (#3), 2 son-in-laws, and 3 grandkids. Hannah “HAIL” Slayton (daughter #2) is deployed to the Middle East flying overwatch for US troops in the sand over there. It’s a crazy world these days…somehow it’s acceptable for unidentified foreign aircraft to be overhead my grandkids—I never thought I’d see this. Probably not surprisingly, no foreign aircraft are surveilling us here in heart of the Ozarks! The weather seems to have decided to be cold. We’ve been in the 20s the past few mornings with more in the forecast. I think my plan to graze the cows around the farm one more time isn’t going to work out. Although the grass is green, it isn’t growing. If we allow the animals to graze, it won’t have any chance to recover and when Spring rolls around, it will have a hard time starting to grow. Shelley and I think that we might get 1 week of grazing out of the grass now but it would probably set us back 3 weeks or more in the Spring. Looks like we’ll just keep on feeding hay and hope Spring comes early. The farm animals are, for the most part, doing well. We did lose a runt piglet yesterday but we weren’t surprised. When you have an actual runt, its digestive system often doesn’t develop fully and as they get older, it just can’t keep up with their growth and they succumb to any number of issues that inevitably develop. The pics today are of our Thanksgiving turkey.

We raised 4 Broad-breasted White turkeys this year. We got them as day-old chicks in May and processed them 19 1/2 weeks later. We decided to raise these 4 as a trial for potentially raising them for sale next year. We wanted to experience them in the brooder, on the pasture, in our processing system, and on our plates in order to make an informed decision. We’ve now completed the full test and it is a resounding YES. We will be raising turkeys for sale next year. They were easy to raise, across the board. They were more difficult than chickens to process but not prohibitively so. After our meal yesterday, we know they taste amazing! We do have a couple of lessons learned for next year, the most important of which is the desired size of the finished product. The Broad-breasted White is a commercial hybrid designed to grow quickly, much like the Cornish Cross chickens we raised this year. This breed of turkeys should be processed somewhere between 16-20 weeks of age. We chose to let them go until the latter part of the range and processed them just before 20 weeks. They ended up being too big! The 3 Toms were 26, 28, and 31 pounds with the hen being 17. We cooked the 26 pound bird for our meal yesterday and had a hard time getting it to fit into a turkey roasting pan. It didn’t fit into our electric turkey roaster. We had to use the oven and put foil over it to keep the skin from getting too done. We’ll most likely split the bigger 2 into half and smoke them on our big smoker since they won’t fit in our oven. As a result of our test this year, we’ll probably shoot for processing around the 16-week range next year hoping for around a 15 pound final product. Overall, turkeys this season were a success and we’re still happy to be growing our own food!

Our YouTube video this week shows us getting a steer and 4 lambs from local farms to augment production here on our farm. We got the beef from Kevin and Sarah at Living Traditions Homestead and the lambs from Kevin and Bonnie at K&B Croft. We discuss a local food system as an alternative to the industrial system that is making us all sick! https://youtu.be/pIQ_XHVsxSY

We plan to post our first video on the new Dust’er Mud Podcast channel this coming Tuesday morning. Be on the lookout for an amazing first podcast with some really special guests!! Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you will know when it's up. https://www.youtube.com/@DusterMudPodcast

Cheers!


Psycho & Shelley