What's Chirpin' on the Farm?

Peep! Peep! It's been a lot more noisy on the farm this week and in the BEST way. We got a special delivery of THIRTY chicks yesterday! 25 are for a customer, I threw in 3 Austra White pullets for our egg laying flock, and the hatchery gave us 2 mystery "bonus" birds. Don't believe chicken math is real... that's how I ended up with 30 chickens...and there's more coming 😳 It never stops being exciting to get the post office call saying our birds have arrived! Our rural post office is SMALL and the woman who works there gets as much joy out of a box of chirping chicks as I do. My mama heart gets a little bit bigger every time cute babies show up for me to take care of and watching my tiny humans raise animal babies alongside me...whew, that is next level happy.

Most of this beautiful box of birds is actually a unique order for a customer that desires slow growing, less plump, meat chickens. Dave (not so much me) has been interested in raising dual purpose, more heritage style meat chickens because they are a lot more sustainable and natural than Cornish Cross. So, when our customer approached us about trialing this style, we decided to cross the proverbial road to see what was on the other side. Admittedly, I was a little resistant at first (which is pretty typical for my homesteading journey) but I also really enjoy a good challenge. This was tricky to manage from a sales perspective (that's my department) because I needed to price a bird we've never raised, manage our financial risk, and develop a production plan...cold, hard truth... that's a lot to handle on top of my million other responsibilities (I snuck it in between sourdough stretch and folds IYKYK 😜). After working with our customer and figuring out a financially responsible plan, I was able to get to the fun part...shopping 😂

Our new meat chickens are being grown out differently than our Cornish Cross and will require different feed (Cornish Cross eat like wrestlers trying to make weight and that's the exact opposite of what we want to do with these). I also did not want to store three different types of feed so I had to get creative. I like to think I'm pretty frugal so I decided to treat my chicken feed dilemma like I would dinner at my house...one meal served different ways to accommodate many taste buds. I figured out we basically needed layer feed that had less calcium and then we could just supplement our laying flock with oyster shell. We have been buying all of our feed from a local feed mill so I called them and was able to get a custom blend that was exactly what we needed. Sourcing food from a local feed mill has been a game changer for our homestead. It's higher quality feed, less expensive than box stores, and the relationship I've been able to establish with them has proven very useful. For non-custom blends, our feed mill allows you to buy as little as one bag at a time so it's worth checking your area to see if your feed mill does the same.

This leads me to the next thing we've been up to...building a new mobile chicken tractor to hause these birds. Our Cornish Cross tractor won't work for two reasons...these birds need to roost at night and we will be using our Cornish Cross tractor for 50 birds coming in April 🤪 After a few re-designs, here's a sneak peep at what the boys have figured out so far...

David takes his apprenticeship seriously 🔨

I have spent A LOT of time talking about chickens but there is so much more going on that I want to share.

After months of perfecting my sourdough boule, I finally felt confident enough to try selling a loaf. I had my first customer sale this week and got a rave review 🙌🏼 Who knows, maybe I'll be the bread winner in the household for once 😉 I love baking and sourdough has been a fun, unique journey for me.

I was also able to trade some sourdough starter and a boule for established raspberry bushes from our cousin. Many hands make light work and my kiddos were a huge help digging holes and hauling soil to get them in the ground.

This is truly homesteading at it's finest...the next generation of homesteaders planting family roots.

Join me next week to see what's happening on the farm! Yinz won't want to miss me climbing into a water tank...or mixing cement. We're always up to this n'at!