Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 12 April 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good morning from Air2Ground Farms! It’s another beautiful start to the day on the farm. Cool and sunny will give way to warm and sunny. The grass is very green and growing. The flerd will enjoy the pastures soon. The top two pics are the guilty heifers that took Shelley and me on a walk-about yesterday. Don’t they look guilty? The bottom two pics are the beef chickens enjoying fresh grass this morning. They are growing fast! They should be big enough to process in just over 4 weeks. I think the lambs are already starting to grow now that they are getting fresh grass. I think they were only eating enough hay to stay alive, barely, and not enough to actually grow. The dairy cows are enjoying their days on the pasture and have been giving us a bit more milk as thanks. The newest layer chicks are doing well in the brooder and the first batch is growing quickly in their coop outside. Today, we will clean the incubators and start a fresh batch of eggs. We aren’t going to use the bum incubator this time. We will do one incubator with chicks and one with guinea eggs. Guinea babies are called keets and we would like to give hatching keets a try. They are very fragile for the first two weeks so we don’t have our hopes up too high but maybe we can hatch a few. Do we actually enjoy the guineas? Well, they’re not the worst animals on the farm but they sure can get loud and annoying! If we’re not successful incubating, guinea eggs taste really good and we’ll just eat them from now on. They are a bit smaller than chicken eggs but rich and creamy like duck eggs. Yesterday we made a couple of trips to town and made some cheese. Today we plan to finish our next video and make more cheese.
We have received lots of complements on different aspects of what we are doing. Folks love the pork, beef, lamb, milk, and eggs. They are taken by how calm and peaceful things are here on the farm. We obviously enjoy hearing that folks think we are doing a good thing. Nevertheless, there are a few compliments that really stick out to us and made us take pause and reflect on what we are doing. The first is from then 10 year-old, animal-loving, Makaylah. Makaylah is a very emotionally sensitive soul. Not that she is fragile but that she can sense others' emotions and immediately empathize. One day when we were finished feeding the hogs in the forest, she said “If I were an animal, I would want to live on your farm.” A passing comment with no further thought given on her part, but to us, an amazing complement regarding our animal husbandry practices. Another complement that stands out to us as regenerative grazers is from a neighbor that said “Those hill pastures look better than they ever have since I have lived here. What you guys did by unrolling hay really worked!” We often stand and stare at those pastures and discuss how good we think they look. We were floored to hear that the neighbors think the same thing. Finally, this week while at the store, we had a fellow market vendor and pork customer go out of her way to tell us that our pork is amazing. So amazing, in fact, that they refused to buy pork at the store and chose to wait until Saturday so they could purchase more at the market. We think the pork is awesome and do everything we can to ensure it is a top-notch product. It is exciting to hear that other folks think so too! Three different examples of comments in passing, spoken as complements, that really reassured us in what we are doing. What I take away from this is to be more assertive in speaking those words of encouragement I may be thinking but hesitant to share for whatever reason. I challenge you to find someone today and share a true, heartfelt, compliment. It just might change their life.
We posted a couple of YouTube Shorts yesterday. One of the milk machine in the Farm Sounds series. The other is Stella on her first time in the pasture—did the poly-wire training work?
Local Farm Report for 11 April 2023:
Harvest:
28 Chicken eggs
13 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
3 Guinea eggs
6 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
I’m 11 year old Makaylah who appreciates the beauty and peacefulness on the farm as I live there knowing what it’s like, and being a part of the routines, every animal has a great stand on the farm I often say things that I think about for a while and say, but when it does, it goes over my head on the meaning of it on my parents, I realize that the compliments I give have a bigger impact than I think I often take it for granted on how they mean for other people finishing that up the farm is great The animals live very peaceful lives until they’re one day.