Just How Different Are We?

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 23 May 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Tuesday from Free Missouri! Another beautiful perfect spring day in the Ozarks. The animals are doing very well today. We had 2 more lambs overnight and 1 during the day. The pic with the black ewe and two lambs were last night’s addition. The pic with the large black ewe is one that is yet to lamb—any day now. We have 21 on the ground now with a half dozen or so ewes still to go. In preparation for the reporter today, we set up a new paddock for the ewes and lambs. We did all of the work but didn’t move them yet, leaving the big event for when the reporter got here. After a bit of conversation, we convinced him to walk with us to move the sheep as it would make better pictures. The sheep always love to move to fresh grass, I mean always. Except when there is a reporter around. In that case, they don’t want to move at all. They want to stand there and yell. We finally convinced a few to move to the new paddock and we got some pics but the “big sheep move event” was a big flop. Those of you with kids understand, they never perform for the grandparents like you want them to. We moved a batch of incubator chicks into the big layer yard with their chick-shaw. They hung around for a couple of hours and then went through the net back to their old coop. The last batch did the same thing. We will keep moving them back until they get too big to fit through the net. We moved the beef herd onto the hill across the creek. There is quite a bit of grass for them to eat but they don’t like being on the hill. We’ll leave them there for a day or so and then move them back across the creek. I haven’t mentioned the cats in a while. We love having cats around! Since we’ve had the cats, we have no issues with mice and literally tons of feed sits out for the taking, if you’re a mouse. That said, at the moment we’re overflowing with cats. People talk about the fertility of rabbits but never seem to mention cats. Interesting…. We currently have 7ish cats and 15ish little kittens. As I said, we do NOT have a problem with mice! I was finally able to get the side-by side working, but it wasn’t the battery or the fuel pump. The thing that did the trick was blowing compressed air through the breather tubes from the gas tank. I don’t know. Taking off the gas cap didn’t work but clearing the tubes did—the world may never know. We made milk and pork deliveries, and had folks come to the farm to pick up milk and meat.

When you start doing a thing, it is novel and seems different. As time passes, it becomes normal and even seems that probably everyone is doing it. For us, the farm-to-fork, or farm-to-table, or barn-to-door, or whatever the phrase of the day is, now seems normal. Shelley and I were discussing this fact just his morning and so I did a bit of checking to see just how ‘normal’ this thing is. The first statistic I came across was that the farmer direct to consumer market in the United States is almost a $3 Billion annual market. I thought, see I knew what we are doing isn’t that different. I then researched what the annual market is for all farming in the United States and found that it is about $165 Billion. A bit of quick calculator math showed me that the direct-to-consumer market is 1.8% of the total farming market. Said differently, 98.2% of all farming is different than what we are doing. I suddenly felt less ‘normal.’ I think the thing that we find the most encouraging about this venture we are on is that we are finding a lot of folks that are just as excited as we are about good food. They are appreciative that we are here and doing this thing. We are receiving amazing feedback about our products. Probably the most amazing feedback is when people come back to buy more the next week. This thing we are doing is different, about as far different as you can get from our comfort zone of national defense. That said, it is good and it is encouraging that others think it is good too.

Local Farm Report for 22 May 2023:

Harvest:

34 Chicken eggs

19 Duck eggs

1 Goose egg

5 1/2 Gallons of milk

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley