Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 2 January 2024…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and HAPPY NEW YEAR from Air2Ground Farms! I sincerely hope you all had a wonderful celebration to start 2024. The weather continues to be low 20’s in the mornings but somewhere in the 40’s by afternoon. It looks like this trend will continue for a couple of weeks, at least. This morning, Shelley went to Springfield with Rebekah so Makaylah and I went to feed hay to the beef herd—top pic. The next 2 pics are Lucy, frost covering her fur, happy to finally not be panting. She hates the heat and will be in the water trough trying to stay cool if the temps get anywhere near 40. She loves this time of year! The last pic is Happy, our Jersey milk cow. Happy is doing very well these days and is about 11 weeks from her due date. The rest of the animals are doing very well also. It’s almost time for the layer pullets to move out of their current enclosure into a poultry net. We’ll lock them into their chick-shaw one night soon and then move them the following morning. We really enjoy it when the different animals move onto fresh ground!
I’ve been talking about it for a while now, but we finally did it. We moved the 3 ewe lambs into the pasture with the ewe flock. After that, we processed the 3 ram lambs. We loaded all of them into the trailer, just like you saw in the YouTube video of us loading the other lambs. I went into the trailer with them and used the swing gate inside to separate the ewes from the rams. We put the ewes at the back of the trailer with the rams in the front. We then pulled the trailer to the gate of the pasture with the ewe flock and opened both gates. Their flocking instinct is so great that they immediately exited the trailer and joined the flock. Done. We then pulled the trailer to the area where we process the beef chickens. I’ll spare you the details but Dad and I used the loader on the tractor to lift the lambs so we could process them. We halved the carcass and then I moved them into one of our freezers, cold but then turned off, to chill and rest. We let them rest two days. Yesterday, Dad and I continued processing by removing the meat from the bones. We left a few bones in, as “leg of lamb” but that was all. The rest of the meat we either cut into chunks for kebabs/stew or into pieces to be ground. Shelley joined in and ground the pieces and then Mom made 1.5-2 pound packs and vacuum sealed them. We had the ribs for dinner last night. We seasoned with lemon juice and our favorite sugar-free & MSG-free seasoning, Farm Dust (Affiliate Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3tAZJeR ), and grilled them. They were amazing! It took Dad and I about 2 hours and 15 minutes to dispatch and skin them and then it took us all about 6 hours to finish processing the meat. Overall, the entire process was a huge success and we will do on-farm processing for ourselves again. There is something about growing and processing your own food from birth to freezer that, although difficult, is so very satisfying!
Check out Monday’s Q&A Podcast where we discuss why we don’t farrow pigs, and other things we’ve said “no” to on the farm! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z8TzxLwyXA&t=10s
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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