Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 25 April 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Good evening from Air2Ground Farms! Another busy day on the farm today. Morning rounds went well with the exception of a dead ewe. She was healthy, pregnant, and seemingly fine, with the exception of being dead. It is as if she just dropped dead. The most likely reason is a broken neck from violent head-butting. We noticed her butting lately and think she must have gotten hit just wrong enough to knock her dead. The bottom three pics are the flerd this evening in their new paddock. The rest of the animals are doing really well. We moved the flerd across the creek yesterday without incident. We also took down the piglet training pen and hog loading area and moved all of the hog panels, T-posts, troughs, waterers, pallets, and platforms to the new area we are going to use. We cut a gap in a barbed wire fence to open the wooded area we want to use. After we cut the gap, we cut down a few trees and trimmed up some others in order to give us room to work building the new area. We are excited for the hog impact on this section of woods and see great grazing potential in a few years. The rest of our day today was spent going to the processor to pick up the 5 hogs and delivering 1 1/2 hogs to customers. Evening rounds complete, I have a moment to write.
I want to share our hog processing numbers again but first, look at those freezers! After delivering to customers, we put 523 pounds of meat into Air2Ground freezers and we purchased one of the hogs and put 180 pounds into our freezer. We delivered 285 pounds. Another 988 pounds of pork today! Add that to the pork from the last 5 hogs a month ago and that's a literal ton of pork in a month! This time, our biggest weighed in at 340 pounds and the smallest was 280. Our average weight was 302.4 for the 5 hogs and the average hanging weight was 229.8. That gives us an average conversion rate of 76%. A reminder from last month, the industry average conversion is 72%. We are really happy to be besting the industrial pork producers in our conversions! It means that for every ounce of food that we put into our hogs, we are getting a better rate of return in the form of edible pork than the big guys. Our average per hog processing fee was $350.08. That fee is based on their hanging weight and varies based on how much additional processing must be done, like curing bacon, smoking brats, etc. At the end of this day, our freezers are quite full. Nonetheless, that is the last pork we will bring in until the next batch goes to the processor in the fall. One of our daughters commented that we have to be pretty good at gambling, or mind reading. We make an educated guess as to how much of what we want from the processor. There are 9 different flavors of sausage, 10 flavors of brats, regular cure for bacon or natural cure (nitrate and nitrite free), whole hams-half hams-ham roasts-ham steaks-ham cutlets, shoulder Boston butts-shoulder steaks, loin roasts-loin chops-tenderloin chops, you get the picture. The one thing we are sure of...if there was a way to get an entire hog processed into bacon, we would do it! Check out our YouTube Video where we discuss things to know when ordering a whole hog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPwC5Mox0sk&t=1s
We made a couple of YouTube Shorts. One of the flerd crossing the creek and another that is getting quite a few views of me getting slapped in the face by Happy's tail as I am milking her.
Flerd Creek Crossing- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pY1n35ZSIm0
Psycho tail slapped- https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IfxLew1XY68
Local Farm Report for 24 April 2023:
Harvest:
23 Chicken eggs
10 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
2 Guinea eggs
5 3/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
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