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We have had a week or so of totally gorgeous weather. Everything on the farm (including me) is really happy about it! Strawberries are coming! And radishes! And peas! We had two hens go broody this year so we have two batches of little peepers running around being raised by mamas, with no [...] No pictures today because we spent the weekend — which turned out to be the nicest weekend of the year so far — holed up inside working on business plans and spreadsheets and other similarly boring things. But I did go visit the goats, which I don’t do daily anymore since I stopped [...] We got out into the yard for several hours today. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week — minus the tiny and adorable Pacific Tree Frog who hopped away before I could get a picture. Cut back the mint so the new shoots can grow Added some compost to the rhubarb Rhubarb again [...] Peas say it’s spring Bees doing their own thing This is a swarm I captured, and I didn’t have frames for the box that I threw together for them. Before I could get frames, they took over the empty space and built their Gaudí-Gehry thing. I didn’t expect them to survive, so I [...] This past season was our fourth year of raising broiler chickens in chicken tractors on rented pasture. In that time, we’ve refined our chicken tractor style to suit our needs, but the tractor design could be used in lots of different farm setups and environments. Important! Please note that this tractor style is [...] Sorry we’ve been incommunicado lately; there’s been a conference or other out-of-town event nearly every weekend since the beginning of the year. It’s learning-and-networking-event time for farmers from about November to about March, so the craziness should be wrapping up soon, for which I am thankful. Here’s a list of the events I [...] :( Pig manure reveals more reason to worry about antibiotics. Scientists monitored antibiotic residues in manure from three different pig farms. They found plenty, but not at exceptionally high levels. Tiedje then tested those manure samples, looking for genes that make bacteria resistant to particular antibiotics. That’s when he hit the jackpot: He found [...] “Why We Can’t See Inside Poultry Production, and What Might Change if We Could,” by Maryn McKenna and posted on Wired, is depressingly unsurprising to me, but worth reading. In the past months, there have been several troubling research reports, from different parts of the world, exploring aspects of the same problem: Multi-drug resistant [...] We make a lot of our own sausage, bacon, and other charcuterie. We also try to cook by weight when baking, and the daily goat milk yield is measured by weight too. And when we are packing our freshly-processed chickens and turkeys, we use the scale to estimate weights to track the growth rates [...] Our happy pig pile Dropstone Farms, with Erik Lindbergh and Laurel Powell of Wardwell Farm, has a limited amount of pork available, which will be ready in the next few days. The pigs have been happily pastured at Wardwell Farm, and fed organic grains, kitchen scraps, cider- and beer-making leftovers, and garden residue. [...] We are doing just one batch of chicken this year, and here it is! Most of the details are as in previous years. It’s all explained here. The most pressingly relevant is that processing day(s) are August 25 and 26, and September 1 and 2. You can pick up on the 26th (Sunday) [...] Wow, I guess I have been meaning to post and then putting it off for several weeks now … oops. We have a batch of ~140 chickens this year and we will be selling ~100 of them — SOON. However, I realized a week ago that I forgot to renew our permit to [...] |
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