New Farm Members!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 27 September, 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good evening and happy Wednesday from Air2Ground Farms The weather has shifted to sunny and mid-80s and is forecast to remain that way for the next week or so. We may hit 90 again this weekend. We’ve had full farm days the past few days! Monday, we started rounds early so we could leave before 0700 in order to get the hogs to the processor by 0900. We made it with a few minutes to spare but there was quite the line of trucks with livestock trailers. We finally unloaded and were able to leave by 0945 or so. The hogs weighed in well for their live weight, the heaviest was 294 and the lightest was 272. It’s great to have them close to each other and we shoot for somewhere between 250-300 pounds for processing. Thus, we were happy with their weights. Their conversion was a bit lower than some of our past batches with an average of 67.4% live weight to hanging weight. We sold 2 of the 5 as whole hogs and the rest will go in the farm’s freezers for sale by the cut. We will pick up the pork on Monday and have bacon and brats for sale again! The next batch of 5 is all sold as whole hogs. When we pick up the pork on Monday, we will deliver 5 lambs to be processed. Monday afternoon, we expanded the dairy cow paddock to give them more fresh grass. Betty seems to be doing a bit better but still looks thin, doesn’t have a great appetite, and isn’t producing much milk. We’ll keep watching her. Tuesday, we prepared for, recorded, and edited Dust’er Mud podcast Episode 9, in which we discuss freedom, independence on the farm, and interdependence with the community. For our current event, we discuss a GAO report regarding substandard military barracks. We added 51 layer chicks to the farm today! And, 4 kittens. Pics. The big event for today…we processed chickens…but not our beef chickens.

If you remember, we hatched a few batches of our own eggs. Well, the roosters from those hatchings are now big and there are/were 6 that remained from the last time we processed our “yard birds.” In addition to the superfluous roosters, we had about 35 layer hens that are over 2 years old. The past couple of days, we have fed over 50 birds in the layer pen and have only gotten around a dozen eggs. Today was the day we chose to process old hens and unneeded roosters, oh and a male goose that wasn’t doing anything but eating. Additionally, friends from the community needed a few of their old hens processed so we added them into the batch and spent the day processing birds. We successfully completed the job, with all of them in the ice-cream freezer chilling overnight to be bagged tomorrow. Processing layer hens was a new experience and actually takes longer than the young roosters we normally process. The entire internal egg-making system is, well, messy. A few things we didn’t know: the yolks develop first; there are multiple yolks of different sizes in the system at the same time; the ovaries are full of tiny eggs and are a pain to get out. We also processed a 2-year old rooster, again with learning points. All of the connective tissue is really tough, the muscle is tough, everything is tough! It took longer for him also. We had to hand-pluck quite a bit of the goose because the automatic plucker wasn’t getting the job done. He was slimmer than we thought. We were hoping for a “Christmas Goose” and think he’s more like a random weekday evening goose. Our plan is to boil most of the birds, pull the meat, make stock, and freeze all of it. This is one of those things that has been hanging around needing to be done and we finally got it done. That feels good.

Local Farm Report for 25 & 26 September 2023

Harvest:

25 Chicken eggs

12 Duck eggs

4 1/2 Gallons of milk

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley