Flexibility is Key...

We planned to grow our last batch of chickens on organic feeds.  We'd hoped this would open up another avenue to more customers.  Unfortunately, when I went to place the order they were unable to fill the order until 3 weeks past when I needed it.  I planned for what I thought would be plenty of lead time for ordering, but unfortunately it didn't work out and since the chicks were set to arrive soon and the feed wasn't going to arrive until 3 weeks after that it made a huge complication.

We had limited options at that point.  We could feed them regular non-organic feeds 3-4 weeks until organic arrived?  Then they wouldn't be completely organically fed chickens.  We could try to buy organic feed locally, at 30% more expensive than planned, to fill the gap for a few weeks.  That would have been a hassle and I wouldn't be able to keep the costs in check to raise the chickens at a reasonable price for the customer.  It felt like there was no way to win if we wanted to stick with the organic plan.

We decided the best thing would be to raise the absolute best chicken we could with the current ration we've been using, which is a non-medicated fryer ration.  We will finish the year out with the same methods we've been using.   Then, next year we could order feeds earlier, maybe even raise most all of them on organic feed if we have a demand for it.

Next year's plan is to order feed and chicks with the $ we have saved to start next year's broiler operation.  This will have several benefits:

#1  It would be a lot less stressful for us to have all the feed here when the chicks arrive so we know it will be available and there won't be supply shortage surprises or last minute stress in finding the right feeds at the right price.

#2 If we keep the allotted feed portions separated for each batch we can see how we did on our estimation of feed per batch.   This will help us set accurate pricing as well as keep our numbers accurate for our records.

#3 If we buy what we need at the beginning of the project we can take advantage of bulk feed pricing.  Even if we only buy half of what we need for the year upfront, then the other half once we've sold 1 or 2 batches of chickens for the year.  This could save us 10-20% on our feed prices which would be helpful.  Currently we've been buying 5-10 of the 50# bags at a time as we can afford to since we are paying for it from our normal budget each month which can be quite the strain!

#4 Not having that additional strain on our normal budget would be most helpful!

With all the changes and some hassle today trying to order feed, and learning that organic wasn't going to work out for this batch, I still feel incredibly positive about the whole meat chicken operation.  I feel blessed to be creating a healthy food for local families.

We are close to the final 8 week count down on our 2013 year of raising meat chickens!  We are excited to finish up and see how we ended up as far as profit margins, costs to raise each chicken on average, our mortality rates and all the other fun data we can muster up from the project.  Once this last batch is processed we will enjoy greatly simplified chores, and THAT is something to celebrate and appreciate!

The Farm Binder...

How do you keep information organized and accessible when you need it?  That is what I had to figure out recently.  With all the details I needed to keep track of with these farm projects I needed a central location to organize everything.  I am not a naturally organized person, it is something I had to learn and force myself into at first.  Now I appreciate the work in setting it up, because I am confident where the information is at all times.  It takes about 30 mins. to 1 hour per week updating it to keep things current and organized.

I set up a farm binder.  It helps me manage the farm projects quite well.  Actually, I make it help me manage things, since the binder doesn't do anything if I don't.   This 3" binder has everything we need...

 Goals are the first page to keep us focused!  We have a giving record/farm tour record inside the front flap to keep track of how we've been able to do with our #1 goal of blessing others by giving, sharing experiences, sharing the bounty, donating cash etc.   That giving log is my very favorite to add entries into!

There is a calendar so I can keep track of when I need to order things, how old the meat birds are, when to move them onto pasture, when our chicken processing dates are, when we planted what seeds, when to plant what into the garden according to last frost date etc.  It really feels a little like my 2nd brain some days.

Each farm category has it's own balance sheet where I keep track of expenses and income.  There is one for broilers, turkeys, rabbits, laying hens, garden, fruits, hay/pasture, horses, pigs, and farm improvements.

We also have a large envelope hole punched and put in the binder to keep track of all our receipts for the year.  So when tax time comes around we aren't scrambling!  We write a quick note on each receipt before popping it into the envelope.

We keep track of a few memories and farm improvements with picture pages.  I can see this being a keepsake as well as record of important info.  We will always have this 2013 binder to look back on our first official year with our farm adventure!

 The most valuable part is this handy little log I started around the first of the year.  This is the daily log where I keep track of what we are learning, some issues we run into and how we solved them, what the animals are being fed and how much, figures for future projects.  It serves as a journal of what we've accomplished as well.

Here is the daily log.

I put tabs along the bottom to section it off into the farm project categories.

Here is a page from the pig section.

Hopefully I stay on track and keep track of all the info for the year.  It has been enjoyable so far so I expect I will be able to keep it up.

Hope you enjoyed the peek into how I keep things organized around here!

Learning to Pace Ourselves...

Turns out that having this much garden area to weed, so many nursery plants to tend, large areas of lawn to mow, irrigation pipes to change, animals to feed, and things that need water is a lot of hard work.  I knew that going into it, but I don't think I had realized just how much time each and every day it would take to keep up.

So much time, in fact, that it makes it difficult to get the kids' schooling done on a consistent basis each and every week.  We've been on a great consistent schedule all year but when late March came we found it difficult to remain focused on school lessons.  We've probably only been able to finish a whole week of schooling 3 out of the last 6 weeks.  The 3 other weeks we might have only completely at most 1-2 days of lessons and the rest of the week was swallowed up by projects, chores, and town errands.

I have been feeling conflicted about not being able to be consistent, on one hand we've been enjoying the lighter school schedule and more time doing hands on things.  Yet, I'm feeling some worry that if we don't keep up on math and reading and learning new skills we'll fall behind.

Several options keep floating around in my head.  For instance, maybe stopping for summer break early and picking back up late July.   Or possibly cut back to just math and reading for a could months and let go of some other subjects for a while.  Or keep schooling on a lighter schedule (a couple days a week) all summer long and not take a larger break.

Overall, I'd say this is our best school year yet as far as consistency goes, and as far as depth in learning and lessons.  This is also the strongest our scripture and spiritual aspects of schooling have been.  That being said, it still isn't where I'd consider it ideal.  I might never attain my ideal of what school would be in a year because I have a tendency to have unrealistic expectations.

I enjoy reading this book to the boys.

If I can wrap my head around the bigger picture, and not just focus on lesson numbers, scope and sequence, and grade level expectations.... sometimes I think that these kids are learning more than they ever could from book lessons in our everyday activities!  We could just make the farm projects the lessons for a while, similar to what we have been doing already but adding more intentional lessons to it (Shhh they won't even know they are doing school).  Make them calculate the things, measure, divide, find %'s etc.  Make them weigh and measure things to do with the farm.  Help them with patience, perseverance, and proper techniques of skills that will serve them later into life.

I think we already do all this pretty well, but I know I could amp it up another notch to make it even more useful....which would mean me taking the time to help them to do more when it comes to the math, figuring, estimating for projects.  They are very hands-on with helping me, we work through problems together, talk about how to solve issues.  I know they are learning so much, but I still worry about all that proper book learning too.  Reading, writing, and math especially concern me at this time.

I sense the kids are just as much out of school mode as I am, if I try to force it in a traditional sense (books, worksheets, and formal lessons) we will likely all suffer and so will the farm projects.  I have been thinking about how much they'd REALLY learn if their heads and hearts are outside.  Then, I think about how often as a child in public school we actually finished an entire textbook.  Food for thought I guess.

Sometimes, I think they'd really enjoy having a tutor come once or twice a week, they might like having someone other than Mom have them do learning things.  I would like having a little pressure taken off and lightening the load some too, plus, having someone help me gauge progress would be nice.  I have faith that God will give me the strength to educate these children if I continue to seek to be obedient to Him.  Who knows, maybe He will send me a tutor for a little divine help too!

As you can see, we are learning how important it is to pace ourselves.  I used to commonly fall into the all-or-nothing trap, where I thought getting it all done equaled success, and getting only some of it done equaled a failure.  I am getting wiser as I go along and I am learning that progress is progress and should be celebrated even if it wasn't as much as I'd have liked to have gotten done.  Something is always better than nothing when it comes to working hard, setting goals, and staying focused long term.

Bees for Sweets...

Yesterday we had a busy day of errands in town.  When we arrived home we found a note on our front door.  It was to tell us to please not irrigate anymore tonight, that they'd be by later that night to deliver the bees. 

Are you wondering how we came to have bees coming onto our property?  Are we becoming bee keepers?  No, not really, you see my parents have had bees set up on their place, and they shared a quart of the honey with us for Christmas last year.  On the quart jar was the contact info for the company with the bees.  So I contacted them to see if I could buy some honey from them because it was really good!  Local honey is supposed to be very good for you in moderation of course, plus I always like supporting a local business as well.

When I contacted him, he informed me they only sell commercially at this time, in large 50+ gallon barrels.  Whoa!  Ya I didn't think I needed that much honey! Ha Ha.  He said that they just give the land owners where they have bees set up a case of honey as "rent".  So we talked a while and I asked him if he thought setting up bees on our 5 acres would be a good idea, or if we had the right kind of location for his bees.  He ended up coming that same day to evaluate the site.  He was very nice and it seemed like a good fit so we decided to go ahead and try having bees here.  It felt like a nice way to add one more resource to our pantry from diversifying our property.  This is nice because it is a passive thing for us, these people will do everything with the bees when they are here and we get some honey at the end of the year.  Works great for us, because while I have a small interest in keeping bees one day I really don't want to take on anything else this year.  This gets us some experience around bees, a chance to learn from professionals, and all the benefits we really wanted from them...the

honey.

We think they will like this....

This morning at 2 a.m. we woke up slightly when we heard the truck rumble up into the driveway.  Thankfully, they knew where they were headed as they had scoped it all out earlier, even set a way point on the GPS, and they moved the irrigation pipe and hoses out of the way to be prepared for the late-night drop.  I assume the only way to move bees is at night while they are sleeping and calm.  We are learning already!

You can see they are a ways out in the upper corner of the field, thankfully!

We got brave and went to investigate a little closer.  There are quite a few!  You can see they are all strapped onto pallets.  They had a forklift on their trailer and they unloaded them with that.  Pretty neat set up really.

The zoom lens closed the distance some but it is a little fuzzy.  You can imagine I wasn't feeling real brave to want to get a close up here huh?

We discovered they appreciate the small leak in one of our irrigation risers near their hives.  They were covered all over the wet ground.  They will also likely appreciate the wet grass from irrigating but I am not sure how the kids and I will do when we go change pipe.  This might be a one time only season of having bees if it proves too painful!  Sturdy boots are a must as are long pants. 

I hope to capture a few pictures of them in various places as the summer goes on.  Maybe even some close ups on sunflowers or something.

Are you scared to come see us now?  I would totally understand if you were.  So far they aren't an issue for us and no one except the dog has gotten stung.

Getting Closer...

The garden is getting closer to being ready to be fully planted for the year.  We have to re-till up a few blocks of space because the grass and weeds have taken over a little.  So we will get it tilled up again and then we can plant both seeds and starts we have already gotten growing.

Those tomatoes, and peppers are really getting big in their pots and I'd like to get them off the front porch and snuggled in the ground soon.  It is much easier to water in the ground than in 100+ small pots.  We are looking forward to all kinds of tomatoes and peppers, as well as flowers and other veggies.

We will also have many other seeds to plant as well.  We'd like to get the beans, corn, squash, cucumbers and pumpkins planted in the next 2 weeks as well.  We planted the cooler crops already like kohlrabi, broccoli, cauliflower,  carrots, onions, potatoes, spinach, swiss chard, radishes  and peas.  Most of those earlier crops are up now so we should start seeing some growth each day.

It is fun to tour the garden and see what all is starting to come up.  For a while the garden was this large brown area of soil with straw paths breaking it up a little, it just wasn't that interesting to look at.  We all agree we are ready to see lots of green plans thriving out there now.  We are figuring out the watering patterns and schedules better each week too.  With the field irrigation going we can run 2-3 sprinklers at a time so we have great water pressure, but we have to plan it all out because we have over an acre to keep watered with those 3 sprinklers.

I will post pictures as I take them of the plants popping up and keep you updated on the progress.

1 Chicken = Many Meals...

In an effort to have a good balance between frugal and healthful, I've been thinking about ways to stretch 1 chicken into many meals.  Since we've dove in head first into producing our own chickens for both our own food supply and for customers as well, we want to round up some useful resources.

Admittedly with 4 kids when we roast 1 chicken it is picked clean in one meal.  However, if I cook up the whole bird and use the meat in various meals through the week it will go much farther.  So this is what I have set out to do, find ideas and recipes to help stretch the chicken out some and enjoy the health benefits of tasty pasture raised chickens.  I thought some of our customers might like the same ideas.

So here are a few links to some resources I found for just this sort of thing.  I'd probably see myself making only a couple meals from each of these posts, every family likes different types of meals so I would likely combine a few different posts to come up with our own style or plan.  This is just for some brainstorming and to help get some ideas flowing.  Go through your favorite family recipes with these ideas in mind and come up with your own list of meals to make from 1 chicken.

This post claims to stretch 1 chicken into something like 22 meals. 

I chicken into 5 meals.  ( I could see doing all these meals.)

Some more tasty ideas.

Another great post by one of my favorite money saving bloggers!

I will add more posts as I find them.

Let me know if you try any recipes and how you liked them.  If you have your own to add I'd love to see them in the comments section!

Processing Day 1st Batch of Chickens...

Whew, we did it!  We were able to process all 42 chickens today.  We have a few sore backs and some stiff shoulders, but overall it went really well and I'd call it a success.  We have some more adjustments to make on the chicken plucker, but I think we have it all figured out now.   I just placed the order for the parts we need, and it will be up and running by the next batch.   The first 2 hours we were just trying to figure out what we were doing and who did what role the best.  A couple of us did a few job swaps and finally found a good rhythm to the process.

We were able to process all 42 chickens in 5 1/2 hours but I think we could have cut that down to about 3 hours if we had a mechanical plucker.

Here Tobers and Whippersnapper are sanitizing a food grade barrel to be used as a ice tank to chill the birds when they are all done.

They also hauled all the birds from the field to the processing area on the wagon with a cage strapped to it.

Sharpening knives, a very important prep step.

Always important to line the crew out.  Actually, we were probably just standing around listening to a tall tale. 

Mr. Wonderful did most of the killing part.  I started out in that role but soon decided that was not my calling.  I filled in when I was needing in that role, but it wasn't my first choice.  I preferred the gutting part much better, which really surprised me!

Sunshine did a lot of the scalding process, which helps loosen the feathers for the plucking part. This involves dunking the chickens in hot water for around a minute.

Plucking was time consuming, but by the end everyone got quite good at it.  Mr. Wonderful's sister and her boyfriend helped do a lot of the plucking which was a godsend!  We ended up plucking the birds by hand the old fashioned way.  Whew, what a job.  I am so thankful we had extra help because I am pretty sure we'd have felt really overwhelmed otherwise. Here is Mr. Wonderful just finishing up plucking a bird.

Then, on to the next phase, evisceration process (removing legs, heads and then gutting, and rinsing it all out).  Sunshine and Spud Man working hard.

Somebody is not going to be very happy I posted a picture with his hand up a backside of a chicken!  Hee Hee  It's just proof of what great help we had!

Many hands make light work. 

Sunshine working on getting those legs off.

Proof I did some work, and didn't just take pictures all day!

A frig full of chicken meat!  Luckily we have an extra frig to store them in to chill out until the customers come.

Mr. Wonderful showing off 2 of the finished birds in their shrink bags.

We are glad you could join us on the processing day fun!  Overall it was a very rewarding day and of course we figured out ways to do it better and faster next time.  We won't have to wait long, the next time is just weeks away!

I can't wait to have a few chicken meals this week and try a few new recipes too.

The 1st Meat Chickens are Ready!

The meat chickens are ready to be processed this weekend!  We weighed them this morning and they are the perfect size at between 6 lbs-7 1/4 lbs. They should hopefully average around 4.75 to 5.5 lbs after processing.  We were shooting for that average 5 lbs size and it looks like we got it.

I am excited, relieved, and proud of our efforts because we didn't even have to feed them longer than the standard 8 weeks either. We've cared for them several times daily for the last 8 weeks, pondered if we are doing things right, if they are gaining at the right rate, etc.  If you can't tell already, it feels really good to have them ready on time and the size we wanted!

They are starting to really fill up the movable pen now, the picture is a little deceiving because they all love to be in the sunshine part of the pen in the mornings and they come forward so they look majorly crowded in there.  In the night they all huddle towards the back as close as they can to one another.  Whenever we move the pen they race to the front where the fresh feed goes in each day.

I am a little apprehensive about processing this weekend because we don't quite have the chicken plucker up to full speed, it might require a little creative use rather than just plopping them in and turning the switch.  We might also have to hand pluck them.....which will make it take a little longer.  We will see how difficult it is to do it that way.  If nothing else this first batch will make us very thankful for a mechanical plucker for our future batches.  That is all part of it, learning to use what you have to get the job done the best way you can.

I am very much looking forward to this weekend and learning how to more efficiently process chickens.  When I am in town today, I will buy lots of ice so we are sure to be ready.  We have a propane stove and a full tank to heat the water for the scalding pots (scalding helps loosen the feathers to pluck easier), several large canner pots for scalding, several 1/2 barrels for chill tanks to get them cooled down quickly after processing, and we have the bags all ready for after processing.  Can't wait to have the whole assembly line set up, sanitized and ready to go.  We saved just a few chickens for ourselves this batch so we better get all the mistakes out of the way in the first few chickens so all the rest will look nice and pretty for the paying customers.

I will keep you posted on how it all goes.  I am sure there is bound to be some humor and mishaps involved!