Farm News and Mary Ann's Blog
Guess where I was last night!
Give up?
I was a speaker at Natural Harvest Food Coop. I spoke for nearly an hour about local meat. The Co-op's Board has made it a mission to learn more about the local food economy this year. So following thier monthly meetings they are inviting speakers. They were very attentive and very kind. I was awfully nervous!
There were even a couple people in attendance who weren't Board members and didn't even have to be there! (Thanks for coming, Janna, Gina, and the nice couple from the Cook end of Lake Vermilion who's names I can't remember!)
Do you know about the Co-op? It's a great store. We are so lucky to have such a well stocked treasure. Remember you don't have to be a member to shop there - like the sign say's : Open to the Public.
I brought a camera with me so I could take a picture of the store. But I left it on the back seat of my car. Sorry.
It was a fun night. Thanks for having me Natural Harvest.
These are the hogs we'll be butchering in March and April. Don't they look happy? They have lots of room to run and play. They love the spring sunshine.
You'll notice there are two pretty distinct sizes. They were born about 6 weeks apart, I think.
Once the first batch has been butchered and weighed, we'll be able to figure out when the second batch should be ready. Someday we'll have a scale so we can be more exact about our butcher weights, but for now it's all by eye.
It's that time of year!
We'll be butchering in March and April. I'll start calling by the folks who have already told us that they wanted to get pork from our next butchering. If you are interested, please call 218-984-3235.
Hogs are available by the half or whole. We have more information on our pork page on the website, but don't be afraid to call or email me for more information. We are always happy to answer questions - especially for people who are new to ordering meat directly from a farmer.
After April, we won't have pork by the whole or half until fall (2010) !!
Hopefully with our new faster connection, our new computer, and the changes the web page service has made to make
photos easier to upload, I can blog more often.
Our computer was soooooo slow and full of stuff. Recently DSL became available to those of us who live on a dead end road off a dead
end road off a county road. So, moments ago 2 nice fellows left here after hooking us up.
What a difference.
Please note that our email address has changed to wycoff@frontier.com
Check back soon to see what else we've been up to here on the farm.
Monday morning when I went to the barn at 5:30 to start chores, I heard a wonderful sound inside - the soft low moo of a mama cow talking to her newborn. There is nothing like that ever so peaceful sound.
We had been anxiously awaiting our milk cow's calf and really, really hoping for a heifer (female) calf so that one day we can milk her, too. Our plan was for our youngest daughter, Maggie, to bottle feed it and halter train it so that she could be shown at the County Fair next year. She would be tame and trained to be easily handled for milking when she grew and gave us a calf of her own. Of course, if it was a boy dairy calf it would only be destined to be meat so we couldn't make a pet of him. We really really wanted a heifer.
I came around the corner in the barn Monday morning to see Roo, our milk cow, standing quietly over a still wet calf. She was attentitvely licking off the calf, and the calf was laying down with it's head upright and alert. All was well.
I went to get some clean straw to spread out to cover the messes, and as I spread it around I checked to see what Roo had given us. It was a girl! I went in the house to wake Maggie so she could get started with her calf. 13 year old Maggie was so thrilled so see it take it's first steps and drink it's first bottle. She named her Rosie.
We are proud to welcome Rosie to Bear Creek Acres
We are thrilled to say that our chickens are have been very well received again this year, and the preorders for the August chickens ( and a neighborhood fox) have pretty much taken care of all the chickens. We had hoped to have a few extra to bring to the Farmer's Markets and sell off the farm, but I don't think we will .
I placed the order for our next batch of chicks last week, and they are due to arrive here on August 5th. Since it take 9 or 10 weeks for them to grow, and then we need to allow time for them to be processed I think we are looking at them being ready for pickup October 9 or October 16. We already have folks getting on the list, and we really don't want to run out. Well, I guess we do want to run out....we sure don't want to have too many. But we don't want too few. See our predicament? We're a pretty small potatoes operation. Chickens take up a lot of freezer space , and the last thing we want is to have 150 too many birds. So we try to really pace our production to what we are pretty darn sure we can sell in a reasonable period of time.
Anyway, I guess if we were to get a zillion preorders in the next couple weeks, we'd still have time to get another batch of chicks started. The weather window for pasture chicken raising in Embarrass, MN is pretty short. You may have heard how cold we get around here. Last year,we brought our last batch to the butcher November 2nd, and we are hoping to finish up chickens a little earlier this year.
I guess what I am trying to say is ....we welcome you to pre-order some chickens. After these fall birds go...there are no more until June/July of 2010. Wow....that just blows me away. It sounds soooo far away. That's the cool part of farming, though. There is always more to learn and ways to improve.
And there's always next year to try again.
Next summer we'll have to raise more.
Mostly in the summer they turn over up some fresh dirt and plop down either in the sun or shade, but when they want some shelter they head for these little gizmos called Port-a-Huts. Toss some straw in , and the pigs love them. Shannon moves them about using the bucket on our tractor. You can put on doors that cover 1/2 the front, but as you can see our hogs tend to blow them right off. One down....three to go .
It's that time of year. Time to get on the chicken list! We have already pretty much sold our first 150 birds. Right now we are raising a double batch that will be ready around the first week in August. About 1/2 of them are spoken for. No order is too big or too small. If you are interested in ordering chicken, please call the farm 218-984-3235 and ask your questions. I have included some information here on the website as well.
By ordering in advance you are doing us a huge favor. When we start a batch of chickens we have to order our day old chicks about 2 weeks in advance, then feed them for 9 weeks or so, bring them to be processed and pick them up a few days later. Once we bring them home we have to have enough freezer space to hold them until customers can get them. With this long lead time we are hesitant to start a new batch until we're pretty sure the batch before them is sold. Last year we underestimated demand and ran out of chickens way too early.
As always our chickens are raised on pasture in chicken tractors. They eat a nice clean feed that contains no hormones, no antibiotics and no animal by products. They are processed under inspection at Nelson-Shine Produce in Brainerd. The Nelson family has been wonderful to work with and has never let us down. The birds are so cleanly processed and well packaged!
The average chicken is 5 pounds, and the off the farm price is $2.50 a pound for whole chickens.
A while ago, our youngest daughter Maggie and I made rhubarb juice using our Mehu -Liisa which is a Finnish juice extractor pot thing. It works really great.
We also made 4 batches of strawberry jam and 2 big batches of strawberry sauce using berries that we bought from Nelson-Shine produce.
Nelson's is where we bring our chickens for processing. Shannon and I brought our chickens there one Sunday to be processed, and found them just starting strawberry season. One of Ron and Barb’s older boys, 23 year old Nick has just been discharged from the National Guard after two tours in Iraq. He and his bride have decided to start farming near the family home. In the meantime, they have bought a few cows and started a strawberry operation on Nick’s home place.These berries had just been picked as we arrived in Brainerd. Maggie and I made 2 batches of jam and sauce on Monday. It was so good that when Jack and I went to retrieve the frozen birds, we bought 2 more flats of berries! Those I made into a big batch of stawberry sauce.
Recently Shannon single handedly moved the hogs from a pasture on the far side of the barn to a fresh pasture. It involved rounding them up, closing them into a pen, and convincing about 20 hogs that it's in their best interest to run up a narrow chute and hop into a trailer. Finally, he pulled the stock trailer over to their new digs. Wish I had photos of Shannon in his overalls and straw hat red-faced and chasing hogs, but I have to leave it to your imagination. If I'd been here to take photos, he wouldn't have had to chase and run because I would have helped him - and the photos would like be rather dull.
So, you'll have to settle for Happy Hogs in nice fresh dirt.
If you have an area that's full of brush that you want gone, for say ...a garden, then you need hogs. Hogs like nothing better than to keep busy rooting up every stump and rock while they eat the grass and it's roots. They don't eat the alder but they make it easier for us to clean it up. Once hogs have been on a piece of land long enough they turn it into a moonscape. It's tilled dirt with nothing but rocks laying on top.
A couple years ago this pen was cleared by some hogs, then the following year we planted some corn and clover in it , expanded it and turned cows into it so the cattle could eat it down. Now this years hogs have work to do in the expanded area. This makes for Happy Hogs.