We Have Patients!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 6 October 2024…

Hey Y’all!!


Good afternoon and happy Sunday from Air2Ground Farms! WE HAVE PATIENTS! Because of our patients, I thank you for having patience with my delay in getting you the weekly blog. I have a couple of Fast-jet Friday pics for you…even if it’s Sunday! The fast jets today are the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle. I showed you a night takeoff last week and discussed the afterburner stages and the formation lights. These two pics show you a couple of more angles of those cool aspects of the jet. Both were taken as the jets were taking off from RAF Lakenheath, UK this week. Our biggest farm news is that Shelley is restricted to using crutches for the foreseeable future. On Sep 30, we were working cows and as she climbed over a cattle panel, it flexed under her and she came down on her left knee, buckling it sideways and outward…all the way to the ground. It was not a pretty sight and has done some significant, although unknown at this time, damage. We went to the Emergency Department in Springfield where they did an X-Ray (no broken bones) and sent her away with crutches, pain meds, and a referral to orthopedics. She has an appointment this week on Thursday where hopefully we can find out more info from an MRI about the extent of the damage. She is in good spirits but is getting antsy with not being able to help around the farm. My parents dropped everything they were doing and rushed over here to help for a couple of weeks. The next big farm news is that one of our dairy heifers, Artie, had a calf last night. It is a nice looking, healthy, A2/A2 Jersey Bull Calf. We now have decisions to make regarding the calf…do we keep an A2/A2 Jersey Bull so that we can sustain our A2/A2 line, or make him a steer and have some amazing beef? Thankfully, we have a couple of months to mull that decision over before we have to do anything drastic. We will process the LAST batch of beef chickens tomorrow! We are going to have a bit of a seminar where we will teach a local couple how to process their own birds. We are looking forward to that and are most looking forward to the break from moving chickens every day. We will discuss and decide how many meat birds we will do next year. If I had to guess, it will probably be around 800 or so chickens and 2-3 dozen turkeys. We also had another litter of piglets this week! She had 10 and 5 are still alive and doing very well. That gives us 22 piglets on the ground with 1 more guilt to have hers soon. We need to castrate the males and are about a week from weaning the first batch of 5. Starting the 2nd of December, we have appointments at the butcher for 1 beef, 4 hogs, and 4 lambs each month for the next 5 months (exhausting our lamb supply) at which point we transition to just a beef and 4 hogs. We take a beef to the processor tomorrow and 4 hogs in 2 weeks. We’re well on a path to keeping Air2Ground Meats’ freezers full of amazing meat for our local community!

This week’s video is our take on my MeMe’s vanilla ice cream recipe…Keto/Farm Style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fh24SHt9wg

This week’s podcast was a discussion on the fragility of our food supply chain, brought on by the dockworkers’ strike. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jsqOOrZEI

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley