Chickens, Turkeys, No Broadband, O My

First, I must apologize for letting so much time lapse between posts. It is complicated by that fact that we do not and will not have hard-wired internet in our home for the foreseeable future. We were told that internet was available when we chose the site, but it turns out that was wrong, so I have been dependent upon my phone's data plan. We are looking at other options, but have not settled on anything.

We are still putting the business back together after the move. I am eternally grateful to our longtime customers who have reached out to us and helped keep us solvent as we relaunch the business in September. Part of that relaunch, is a new website, which is up right now, but still needs some tweaking. We are working with a new locker this year, Story City locker, which is allowing us to offer a number of new products including chicken, basil, and garlic sausages, smoked turkey halves that are free of sodium nitrates and nitrites, beef sticks, beef frankfurters, and summer sausage. All and all it is exciting to be able to offer such a wide range of new and revised products. We also got our long-time poultry processor to to package cut-up chickens in parts. That means you can now buy bone-in chicken breasts (4 per package), chicken thighs (4 per package), chicken wings (8 per package), chicken legs (4 per package), and chicken backs and necks (4 each per package).

As production seasons go, it has been pretty good. Our first batch of chickens did quite well in the pasture and missed the coolest parts of spring and some of the hottest parts of summer. The turkeys have also done quite well. They just hit five weeks and moved out to the pasture this week.

Chickens in the Chicken Tractor

Full Chicken Pasture Setup

Turkeys at Two Weeks in the Brooder

Turkeys just Moved Outdoors

The cattle have been doing well. The fertility of our pastures is much much better then the old farm, but not so much better that we can shrug off the loss of twenty acres. That has meant feeding a little hay this summer to let the grass recover. We will process four animals this year, and should have a full restock of beef available in late August.

Cattle on the West Pasture

We hosted aPractical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) field day back in June. We had over twenty people out at the farm and talked about building high-tensile electric fence and do some demonstration work. PFI did a nice write-up on the field day. 

Hosted a PFI Field Day

The kids are doing well as summer begins winding down. We have family camp, the state fair, and the next thing you know, school is going to start. Having both children at home is challenging and managing them better along with the farm business is something I still could use to improve on.

Picking Flowers

Investigating Butterflies

Sorry for taking so long to fill people in. We are still here, we do still have the products you love, and we hope to see you soon at a delivery near you.

Building a New Routine, Take Two

Well it has been a very long time since I have posted. It would have help if the first iteration of this post had not been lost to depths of the internet.  This has been the longest break since I started blogging several years ago. A lot has happened since the last post. Zane was born in November, we closed out our 2012 season, I have flirted with off-farm full-time employment, and we have stared to look toward the 2013 production season.

Zane was born in November, one day early. That happened to be the Des Moines delivery day for Thanksgiving turkeys. Janice blazed through labor and was done by early afternoon. Not long after things settled down, I looked at here and ask, "are you OK here, because I could still do our deliveries." She said she had nurses and would be fine. So, just after Zane was born I was racing back home to get orders packed and get into Des Moines. I made it back that evening just after my folks arrived.

Zane is doing well. He is a big boy (90 percentile for height and weight). He is a pretty mellow guy and most people who interact with of him, think of him as a pretty serious baby. That being said, he reliably cracks his big grin when he is being difficult or when he gets his diaper changed.

Hazel & Zane lying on the bed

Hazel is still adjusting to the change & wants to be held more. She is not used to sharing Daddy. She is getting better at helping, but you do have to channel it toward some thing productive that she can handle at this point. I am glad he is such a stout boy as I am slightly less concerned about her inadvertently hurting him.

Right now, the farm is in a winter holding pattern. The cattle are out on their winter pasture and the sheep are in their winter yard. We bolstered our limited hay supply back in November by purchasing 18 bales at auction and hauling them all to the farm ourselves. Based on our current trajectory, our hay should run out in early April. That is about a week or two before what I would prefer, so we might have to buy a couple bales in March.

Cattle grazing on their winter pasture

Sheep in their winter yard

We have not been working outside a great deal. Much of our time goes to juggling children. I have consolidated all of our layers into the new building, but I still have some work that I would like to do for the layers.  Jim, our supper helper, has been out a few times and we got steel cut and put up around the tractor. When we built the chicken building it became apparent that a simple lean to could be added for the tractor to keep it out of the elements. We finally got steel walls put up on that end of the structure. The building still has some trim work and eaves on the outside and more roosting racks and nesting boxes inside. After that we need to bring water around to the building, tile the area around the building and finally rock the high traffic areas.

Tractor storage now complete with walls

I interviewed for two off-farm full-time jobs in December. One of them, I did not get, and the one is on hold for for a few months while the organization works out some internal issues. I don't know what will happen on that front, but it will have an impact on the business and we will keep our customers in the loop if things shift around.  I will discuss some of the changes we are talking about below and how full-time work might affect things.

Looking at 2013, we will be raising fewer poultry. We raised three batches of broilers this year and next year we will only plan on two batches. We still have quite a few broilers in the freezers and with two children, I am not sure if I can juggle three batches of chickens. If I am working full-time, this will likely drop to a single batch of broilers. We will also reduce the number of turkeys we raise and change our chick supplier. We have attempted to raise 150 to 200 turkeys the last two years and we have been punished for it. The turkeys have been so variable and that volatility has been very hard on our business. In 2013, I think our goal will be 60 to 80 turkeys. I hope we are able to focus on them more as they grow up and have much better survival rates coming into the fall.

The biggest question for 2013, is what will become of our sheep herd.  We once had a herd of over 40 head and now we are now down to 12 head.   We culled our herd aggressively as we struggled through the past two years. This culling helped us bottom out through the worst of our struggles. What we have left are our best ewes and their daughters. We have made gains with our ewes, but the loss of our breeding rams has put us back to square one on the male side of our breeding program. Sheep are easy on water, but require a great deal of work  to fence and they can more easily over graze pasture then cattle.

The biggest problem is that lamb have not been a very profitable enterprise for us. We raise hair sheep and they are smaller then wool sheep, but have a more mild flavor. Unfortunately, we pay the same price to butcher a sheep with out smaller animals as folks with larger animals, so the locker ends up getting around 1/4 to 1/3 of the sale value of the lamb as processing fees. Because sheep need special fencing, it takes a lot more time to rotate them and as such they do not yield a very compelling return on my time. If I am working full-time, then this product offering will be phased out.

For 2013, we are looking to double down on cattle. Cattle are easier to fence, and if you have the water infrastructure in place, it is as easy to water 4 animals as it is to water 12 animals. We are working with the NRCS EQIP program to expand our watering system in 2013. We will likely use our PFI SIP money to complete that task. Right now, we are trying to locate some quality grass-feed steers that we can bring on farm to bolster our production as we try to build our herd up to the point that we have consistent supply levels. When we send out our customer newsletter in March, we will ask people if they are interested in purchasing quarters of beef. If you are, we will ask for a $500 deposit. This money will help secure a supply of cattle and help us to continue to recapitalize the business after several rough years.

Well that pretty much brings things up to date. I am struggling to get a handle on having two children at home and I am a bit nervous about what happens when you add in our production season. Stay tuned as we move into 2013 and build a new routine.

A Quiet January, Just Kidding

Much of late December was focused on the development of our buisness plan over the next three years. This plan was focused on growing our beef enterprise, maintaining our poultry production at comparable levels to what we are producing and reducing the number of sheep we raise to a bare minimum, while continuing to bring infrastructure on line to make it easier to chore. Janice and I shared this plan at the Practical Farmers of Iowa Annual conference in early January.

Practical Farmers of Iowa Presentation

We picked up a grass-fed bull to breed our cattle, he is an Angus/Jersey cross. We also have had 5 lambs so far with three more ewes due in the near term. I think we will be selling off four more ewe lambs, bringing our herd down to 12 ewes. We have to sit down and finalize our poultry schedule for next year so we can get chick orders in early next month.

Our new bull, Carl (he is the all black one)

Two lambs just after birth, from one of our best ewes

The weather has been unusually warm and will continue to be unusually warm into the foreseeable future. Our usual daily high for this time of year is right around 30 degrees. The forecast below is for the last week of January and the first week of February, it is unheard of. I am not complaining, it is great when you live in the country not to have to fight snow all winter, especially considering that we have had some very rough winter over the past few years. I said I was not going to complain, but here it comes. The one problem with this nice weather is you can keep wanting to work outside. Normally winter is a lot of time not working (doing non-farming things, like hobbies), but not this year.

Mild weather continues

Around the farm, we have built some fence, been working on the chicken building, and burning off some of our many brush piles from last winter. The chicken building still needs some interior sheeting work, exterior metal sheeting around the tractor, ventilation system, eave work, roosting racks for the laying hens, and some finishing touches here and there, but it is getting much closer. 

Hazel outside on the snow

The weather has given me a few days here and there, where it is warm enough to take Hazel outside. I like having her outside and not cooped up in the house so much. She has proven to be very afraid of snow (she was afraid of grass too) and won't touch it and does not like to walk on it. I took the opportunity recently to try to get Hazel familiar with the snow (a word she loves to say). She has having a good time stepping on it and mashing it up with her boots, I suspect that is because it was making it go away. It is late and I too must go away (sleep), but stay tuned. 

Every Farmer Has the Pasture They Deserve

Well the Practical Farmers of Iowa Field Day or Pasture Walk is behind us. Terry Gompert was great and offered excellent feed back. This is a compilation of what Terry talked about and showed us as well as a few of my own thoughts.  First off, one of the fundamental things that I and many others struggle with is asking the right questions.  It is not a matter of, I wish I did not have this weed in my pasture, but a matter of why is it there? Is it really all that bad?

One of the fundamentals we discussed was about soil life. The plants above the earth, really are an expression of the soil life below ground, and the management applied to it. In Iowa and much of the Midwest, most of our soil is denuded of soil minerals (at least in the top 6 to 18 inches) and of soil life.

Many deep rooted plants (like many of our native prairie plants and many of our noxious pasture weeds) are deep rooted plants. They are able to cycle nutrients from the lower soil profiles to the surface where they can be put back into the soil. How are they put back into the soil? Either by having the animal eat them and pass them or by having them be knocked down by livestock and added to the littler layer above the soil. This litter layer has two zones that we observed. A primary surface layer, where litter looks like light colored dead vegetation and a second layer where it was not soil and not the light colored surface layer. It was interesting to see the definition between the second litter layer and the soil. Terry took the spade to the ground and cut out a chunk several times so we could see these layers.

The second litter layer was about an inch on much of our unburned and unplowed land. Terry said that is good, considering that much of Iowa has none or has a very thin second litter layer. Part of the reason Iowa has little litter layer is that tillage destroys litter and many of our traditional grazers like their pastures to look like a golf corse (the litter layer is not added to because the grass is never really allowed to grow to any real height). Terry said, that we should aim for this layer to be much larger, say 12 to 18 inches. This litter benefits the pasture by holding moisture, eliminating all most all runoff, by helping to keep the soil cool (soil life starts to dies around 80 degrees), and by serving as great material for many of our predominant cool-season pasture grasses to root into.

Leadplant a Deep Rooted Native Legume in Our Pasture

Soil life ranges from soil microbes, to the various dung beetles, up to badgers. Farmers in this state spend so much of their time killing this life and replacing it with expensive inputs. Anhydrous ammonia is a common nitrogen input that is applied in the fall or the spring by injecting it into the soil. It is used to boost corn (a very nitrogen demanding crop) yields. Anhydrous ammonia kills soil microbial life, the natural nitrogen fixers. You ever wonder why organic research that compares cropping systems on land that has had it soil life killed, makes organics looks do bad? Anhydrous ammonia was originally used to harden the ground so we could make quick landing strips, vegetation also happened to grow back very quickly and the soldiers noted it and took that back to their farms.

On our farm, the one thing we need to be careful of is wormers. All chemical wormers are toxic to dung beetles and we need everyone of those we can get. We did see a few dung beetles in some of our week to two week old cow patties. Dung beetles take dung and roll it into holes in the ground where they lay their eggs in them. Dung beetles are one of the best things you can have for spreading a manure patty around and getting it into the soil, short of another cow's foot.

I learned a few things about the plants on above the soil. I learned that a close graze encourages legume regrowth and that leaving more standing residue encourages grass regrowth. A diverse pasture is a healthy one. This is in contrast with my forages education that says 3 to 4 species is optimal and more then that is not really adding much (I am now unlearning what I leaned in school), but Terry says some of the best  pastures he has been in have over a hundred species in them. We are replicating a native ecosystem so we should have as much diversity as we can, especially amongst deep rooted plants. That will promote nutrient cycling, create more efficient layered forage canopies, and promote soil life and wildlife diversity.

I learned how to read a cow patties. The perfect shape is round with a divot in the center. You want it to be able to see the fiber in it and have a deep brownish-yellow color in the center. A greener center is a sign that the animals are getting to much protein and not enough roughage so graze them where they are at longer.

When looking at our farm specially, Terry said, "keep doing what you are doing and be observant." Terry liked that we move our livestock daily, that our chicken pens are like the ultimate pasture rejuvenators, and that we have very diverse pastures. He encouraged me to run my chickens in a mobile coop behind the cattle in rotations, something we would like to do, but are not yet there. I need to be careful that we are giving enough rest time between grazings to some of our less persistent pastures, because regrowth was coming back very very slowly on parts of the north side of the farm. Terry also told me not to worry about the annual weeds I was getting in some of my pastures and were all over in my 12.5 acre planting. We walked the field and many of my seedlings had gone to seed this ear. Terry said, "graze it next June or July so this years seed can get worked into the soil and the stand will be better established." Terry also though the cattle looked good and fleshy on our pastures. It is good to get some good feedback and to know that all the work is paying off. I love the expression Terry used so I wanted to repeat it here, "every farmer has the pasture they deserve."

Getting Ready & A Surprise

We are getting ready to co-host a Practical Farmers of Iowa grazing pasture walk with Terry Gompert. Terry is part of Nebraska Extension and is a holistic management expert. We are expecting around 30 to 40 fellow farmers to came and look over the farm tomorrow afternoon. Needless to say, we have been trying to spruce the place a bit. The yard is looking decent, despite the large swamps that exist in it, and some of things that have been lying around the yard have gotten picked up and put away. It is nice too, that the flood water has gone down and the roads are all open again. All that remains is a brown landscape around the river valley and a plethora of mosquitos.

The conditions within our chicken building are improving. The wet ground has receded a bit. I put tile in the north half of the building, but could not get the standing water to flow through the muck and into the tile so I dug some drainage channels that have allowed me to get much of the water out of the building. Since the tractor is living outside, because it is to wet to get the tractor into the building without getting it stuck, I have moved much of the chicken stuff into the area the tractor would normally be parked and out of the murky north end of the building.

There is no Tractor only Chickens

I have resolved to never have have this problem again with this building as I am making plans to tear it down next spring. From one of my old poultry production books from the 1940's, I have adapted plans for a 30x20 dedicated poultry building. The new building will have a concrete floor, and will have a 20x20 space for laying hens and a 10x20 space for sperate brooders. I want to insulate the building, have washable walls, and large doors so I can take a small skid loader into the building to clean it out. Janice won't let me have a skid loader to begin on the foundation until my fencing project is done; she is a smart woman. She is also working on a materials list for the building so we can use Craiglist to buy needed parts and try to keep the overall cost down to around $2500.  I hope to have the foundation pored before winter so we can work on framing over the winter. The building will allow us to have clean brooders to keep illness down, and raise the laying flock to 150 birds. The bump in laying hens translates into between six and seven thousand dollars in egg sales a year.

New Chicken Building Floor Plan

Turkeys are doing alright. I pushed the last batch outside, because an illness had set in amongst the inside birds and I wanted to get them away from it. We lost several birds due to smothering outside. I think we are currently looking at finishing around 75 birds, down from last years 120 birds. I am seriously considering moving away from the giant white turkeys and using only bronze turkeys. If we do that, we will raise our turkey price from $3.50 per pound to around $3.90 per pound. This will be something that we will survey our customers about at the end of the production year.
                                                                                                      

Second Turkey Batch out on Pasture

Our last batch of chickens have been the complete opposite of the turkeys. They came, they took off well and all 175 of them are still here. They are still inside, but will likely be moving outside next weekend, weather permitting.

Lastly, our surprise. Last night, I went out to the pasture and I came upon a new heifer calf. We had a cow that was purchased exposed, but just never calved. I presumed that she had not been bred, because I expected the calf back in July and had given up on it. I am still trying to figure out how I am going to breed the other two cows that are still nursing. I have a sire selected and can purchase straws of his semen, but I have little experience with artificial insemination so am not fully sure how to precede. Well that is it for now, but let me know if you have any questions, comments, or thoughts.

New Heifer Calf, With No Stripe

New Calf close up

Thinking Warm Thoughts

On the farm we have about 8 inches of snow on the ground. There is a storm rolling in today with another 6 inches expected on top of what we already have and high wind tonight (40 mph 64 kmph) to blow it around and add drifting to our current weather challenges. This is not unusual, the real problem has been the frigid weather that won't let up. It has been about 20 degrees below normal. Our nightly lows have been around -2 to -10 F (-18 to -23 C) or more for the last week. Our highs have rarely broken 10 F (-12 C). Friday will have a high of -2 F and a low of -12F (-18 to -24 C). We have had to fire-up the space heater that is stowed in our craw space, and open the wall behind the bath tub to keep pipes from freezing. I kid that our heater takes little 5 minute cat naps through out the day. We are having our walls injected with foam insulation in the spring (can't do it sooner as the foam is water soluble) so I hope we do not have to live through another winter with a very cold house.

This weather is especially hard on our livestock. My primary concern is the cattle since they live outside. I re-bedded their potable huts with straw so they can try to warm up out of the snow. I also unloaded a large stack of small square bales next to the cattle pen to make my life easier in the coming days.

The sheep are still inside adding heat to a frigid building that the poultry live in. The lambs are doing fine and looking great. We loose a few eggs every day to having them freeze solid and split in half, but not so many eggs that we are hurting.

Yesterday, I bought and unloaded 48 small-square bales of hay in the building and formed the aforementioned stack next to the cattle pen. I just barely made it to Janice's ultrasound in the afternoon. I got the truck stuck and had to break out the tire chains my mother got me for Christmas to liberate my self. I know the likely sex of our child, but we are holding that information close to our breast until the baby shower in mid-February when Janice will have a big reveal.

Out the window, I see the the snow has just started. The Practical Farmers of Iowa Annual Conference is at the end of the week and I am looking forward to catching up with a few frinds and colleges.