Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 4 Feb 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Happy Saturday from Air2Ground Farms!! I hope our friends and family with 'town jobs' have a rejuvenating and relaxing day. It was another cold one this morning but the sunrise was beautiful. I tried to capture it in the last pic above but it just never does it justice. Somehow the camera just can't capture the bigness of the event. Thank you, roosters, for crowing the sun up! What would we do without you? The top two pics are of one of our blue-eyed hogs. This group of hogs is from a local farmer who breeds show hogs and he has a couple of blue-eyed sows. They make some cool looking hogs! Yesterday we made the 4 hour roundtrip to our processor to pick up the lamb. We also delivered a local order of pork on the way. Needless to say, by the time we got home and did afternoon rounds and evening milking, we didn't do anything with milk. So, we are currently 10ish gallons of milk behind in maintaining our desired inventory. We will spend most of the day today doing things with milk. Due to refrigeration space we try to keep the inventory down to no more than 4 days worth of milk. That means that at any one time, we have 20 gallons in the refrigerator and add 5 gallons each day. Throughout history, humans have consumed milk from domesticated animals and, without refrigeration, had to figure out ways to preserve the milk so that the nutrition was not wasted by spoilage. Thus we have different styles of fermentation for milk, for example cheese, yogurt, kefir, sour cream, butter, etc. The interesting part to us is learning the fermentation process and the nuances that lead to different flavors and textures. I mentioned yesterday that the higher heat when making cheese leads to a firm product with a high melting point. A similar thing happens when making yogurt. The higher the heat (still below boiling) the thicker the yogurt. We really do enjoy learning how to do this!
We picked up the first lamb we have ever taken to the processor yesterday. He was just under a year old, had never had anything to eat other than grass, hay, and alfalfa pellets (pelletized legume). He was the epitome of grass raised. We raise Katahdin sheep, a medium sized sheep, but one of the largest of the hair sheep. Our guy weighed 82 pounds live weight. He dressed at 36 pounds hanging weight and we brought home 28.1 pounds of edible meat in the cooler. We asked for no special cuts or processing that would increase our bill at the processor. It cost $153 for USDA inspected processing of our lamb that yielded 28.1 pounds of meat. I'll do the math for you; that means that for the processing only, it cost $5.44 per pound. When you consider the initial cost of the lamb, the feed required for almost a year, and the labor to ensure the lamb thrived, plus the cost of processing...it became quite obvious to us why lamb is so expensive! We are excited to sample the meat and will cook a bit of the ground lamb and a couple of the chops today. I'll let you know what we think!
Shelley posted a couple more YouTube shorts. Our goal is to share Sights and Sounds of the Farm. Check it out and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Local Farm Report for 3 Feb 2023:
Harvest:
21 Chicken eggs
9 Duck eggs
5 1/4 Gallons of milk
Sales:
2 Sliced pork jowl
3 Hickory smoked bacon
3 Ground Italian sausage
5 packs of pork rib chops
2 packs of large pork loin chops
Cheers! Rich & Shelley
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