I am picky about where I buy my meat. Honestly, I do buy some meat at the grocery store, but only grass fed stuff from the local stores that I can trust. I never buy meat from the large chain stores. My ideal is to buy it from farms only. Or, even more ideally, someday, we’ll produce it … Read more
As a hog farmer (who appreciates heritage breeds and pigs who forage), I am concerned about this Michigan ruling. Here are some of the pigs we raised last summer. They are part-hertitage breed. We plan to eventually raise all heritage breed pigs (for natural foraging abilities, better quality meat, better bacon, better lard, etc.), and … Read more
There’s a poem in the beginning of The Encyclopedia of Country Living about the life of a homesteading woman. I want to share it with you: Mama’s Mama by: Anna Rees Henton Mama’s Mama, on a winter’s day, Milked the cows and fed them hay, Slopped the hogs, saddled the mule, And got the children … Read more
These are our beautiful, farm fresh eggs! We currently have 10 dozen eggs ready to sell. We didn’t sell any through the winter, and I wanted to make sure that we were actually making a profit on eggs, so I did some calculating today. Interestingly, I also read this post today, about how small, local … Read more
This photo was taken inside of a commercial chicken house, where chickens are not allowed to live in the light. Yum, doesn’t this make you want to eat more chicken? *photo credit In Food, Inc., there was a quote about the average chicken farmer being about $500,000 in debt (from building two chicken houses) and … Read more
Around the holidays, I had to buy some store bought eggs so that we had enough to do some Christmas baking. I buy “cage free” eggs when I have to buy them at the store. That doesn’t mean anything, though. Neither does “free range.” So what. They have a 1 foot by 1 foot space … Read more
We wanted to share with you the rough plans that my husband drew up in Visio to go with Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profits . The book describes how to build the chicken tractor in Chapter 10, The Pen, but in a paragraph form. My husband used that paragraph to draw up these plans.
Note that all of the pictures from Day 2 of butchering were taken by Farm Boy 1, our hopeful (but not very experienced) 9 year old photographer. =) Another day of butchering!! The Farmer got up and turned on the scalder at 6:30 am (Brilliant!). We were ready to start processing birds by … Read more
Warning: this post contains actual images of chicken butchering. I wouldn’t recommend looking at this while eating if you have a sensitive tummy! This was the day–we were going to butcher all 105 chickens, plus a goose, a duck or two, and maybe the turkeys. It didn’t go exactly as planned, but it was … Read more