Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 2 November 2024…
Hey Y’all!
Good afternoon and happy Saturday from Air2Ground Farms/Meats! Another week, another Fast-jet Friday missed…. The fast jet today is the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle, this time on the ground emerging from the British mist for an early morning sortie from RAF Lakenheath. It rained again! This time we got an inch overnight Wednesday night. The forecast is for rain to begin tomorrow and continue for the next few days with 3-4 inches expected. Our hope is that there is still time for the grass to grow before winter sets in. We plan to continue to feed hay over the next few weeks to try to allow the grass to grow and then put the grazers on pasture for a last trip around the farm before winter. We’re learning that there is a lot of art to grazing…there’s science too but it’s turning out to be as much about “this feels right” as it is about “this is right.” The animals on the farm are doing well. We moved the ewes into the paddock with the rams last week putting us on schedule for lambing starting the last week of March 2025. We still have 1 pregnant hog that is going to have babies any day. She looks like she is going to pop! The new calf I introduced last week is doing very well. The top pic today is Shelley and me in front of the beef herd enjoying freshly unrolled hay. The next 2 pics are Griz, the Jersey bull calf. He is growing and his mom Artie is falling into the milking routine like an old pro. The next pics are Tex, our boar. He’s a bit lonely in a paddock by himself but a scoop of feed helps him forget that the ladies are in the paddock across the way. We loaded 4 hogs and delivered them to the processor last Sunday evening and Monday morning. They were 300, 275, 250, and 240 pounds, the bigger 2 were perfect weight and the other 2 were a bit light. With the introduction of the hog breeding and piglet farrowing enterprise we chose to stop fermenting the feeders’ feed. That choice led to a higher feed consumption and less growth. It did save time/labor and at the time that’s what we needed. At this point, we are feeling better about the workload of the breeding enterprise and are starting to ferment their feed again. We decided to use an inoperative 21 cu/ft chest freezer as a vat to ferment large batches at a time. I’ll let you know how it works out. We chose not to record a podcast this week…
As we prepared to record our weekly podcast, Shelley was studying the outline and I was doing some last minute research and ran across a bit more information than what was on the surface. We were going to discuss the recent closure of the Pure Prairie Poultry processing facility. The abrupt closure left a couple million broiler chickens without feed and without a facility to process the birds. It also left dozens of farmers left with birds, no feed, nothing to do with the birds, and no payment for their time/labor. Pure Prairie was a new company that took advantage of tens of millions of dollars of USDA monies, both loans and grants, in order to purchase and reopen a bankrupt poultry processing facility. After a Grand Opening in July of 2024, Pure Prairie Poultry declared bankruptcy in September and after denied bankruptcy protection closed their operation in early October. This seemed to be a clear case of local farmers being left out to dry and we were eager to tell their story. Then I read an article from 2022 that detailed the formation and opening of the new company Pure Prairie Farms, the parent company of Pure Prairie Poultry. That article detailed the new paradigm this company was taking with their contract growers. Pure Prairie was a new construct wherein the farmers were part owners of the company with representation on the board. This gave me pause and caused me to start digging a bit deeper. It appears to me (although I don’t have the time or resources to investigate properly) that farmers and executives of the previously bankrupt company, Simply Essentials Poultry, formed the core of the new company Pure Prairie. When Simply Essentials went bankrupt, farmers and executives were left being owed lots of $$. Those same farmers and executives found a couple of new government programs (they were the first processing facility to receive funding under these new programs) that made millions of dollars available. Was this a way for them to recoup some of the losses from Simply Essentials bankruptcy with “free” government money? At this point, we knew this was way too messy for us to discuss on our little podcast. At the end of the day, a couple million birds were “culled,” some farmers were left owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a group of Senators/Representatives are hot on the USDA for lack of oversight. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone can get to the bottom of this mess!
This week, we demonstrated how and why to cut up a chicken, both from a consumer and producer perspective. Check it out and let me know what you think of the tutorial! https://youtu.be/ECYYyTZcLXw
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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