New Enterprise!!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 9 April 2024…

Hey Y’all!!

Good evening and happy Tuesday from Air2Ground Farms! We’re in the middle of a few days of rain but we have some 80 degree days in the near future! Great news for grass farmers! So much is happening on the farm these days! The Ava Farmers Market on Saturday was a big success and we really enjoyed folks walking straight up to us and knowing exactly what they wanted to buy. The top pic is a new ram lamb, black with only a few white dots. We currently have 23 ewe lambs and 14 ram lambs. There are an additional 6 lambs that I have not yet tagged. Babies and mommas are still doing very well. The next pic is an area we built for the lambs to get into that the ewes cannot enter. We have some straw for them to play in with some good brome hay for them to eat. On Friday, we pick up 1,000 pounds of GMO-Free sheep feed that we will start feeding the lambs in that area. Holding the ewes and lambs in the paddock near the house has been amazing this year. In the past, we’ve let them lamb wherever they happened to be in the grazing rotation which wasn’t great for taking care of the lambs. We had a family visit the farm to pick out their ram lamb to go with a few ewe lambs and a wether that they will get to start their own flock. They will come back at weaning to pick out their ewes. The next two pics are our new calves in the beef herd! Two of our heifers both had little bull calves. They did everything all by themselves with no assistance from the farmers. That is one of the reasons we picked this particular breed, the Red Devon. They are great mothers that are able to have their calves without assistance. Happy, our A2/A2 Jersey, and her calf are both doing well. Yesterday, we started officially “calf sharing.” That is where we put the calf away in the evening while we are feeding Happy and then the calf is separated until after we milk in the morning, at which point the calf gets to be with mom throughout the day. Then the process starts over with the calf being separated in the evening. It is working very well. We are getting a bit over 2 gallons of milk each day. We have customers that are eager to get back on the subscription list for GMO-free, raw, A2/A2, whole cream, Jersey milk! We’re putting together a plan for how to best schedule things with more demand than supply. Both groups of beef chicks are doing well. The first batch will move onto the pasture at the end of this week and the next batch will replace them in the big brooder. We took one hog to the processor yesterday. Those of you who are regular readers should be wondering what is going on with only one hog going to the processor and four hogs ready to go…

Where to begin? We have an amazing relationship/friendship with another local farmer whose business is breeding registered Berkshire hogs. They then sell piglets as feeders, to us and others, and raise some that they process as pork, like we do. They recently decided that they were ready to retire from farming and are selling their business. They assured us that the family who was buying their business is a great family and would continue to sell us feeders. Nevertheless, the interruption of feeder pig availability made us question our previous decision to NOT farrow pigs. Of the four hogs we had remaining to go to the processor yesterday, three of them are guilts (females who haven’t had piglets). In order to ease our minds regarding the quality of piglet we are accustomed to receiving, we decided that we were going to keep the guilts and artificially inseminate them. This decision goes against our longstanding firm refusal to farrow piglets on the farm, but it was better than the alternative. Less than 2 hours after making that decision, our friend called us and said the deal fell through and the family was not going to buy his business. He then offered for us to buy him out. At this point, I’m sure you can see where this is going. So, we decided that we would buy his breeding stock of a boar and two sows. We also agreed to take over his booth at the Forsyth Farmers Market. Starting next month, Shelley and I will split up on Saturday mornings with one of us taking the Ava market and the other taking the Forsyth market. AND, we are now in the Pure Heritage Berkshire Hog breeding business! We’ve got a New Enterprise!

Check out yesterday’s Dust’er Mud podcast where my mom, Linda, gives us all an update on her breast cancer situation post mastectomy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwbhgKlSVtQ

Cheers!


Psycho & Shelley