Farmers Market?

I get occasional junk mail from the County Agent. This is actually the extension service from the Ag school at the University of Florida. I’m not sure how that is different from the County Agent, but I guess it is.

Last week I got a newsletter that contained a little blurb about a meeting that was scheduled for Friday evening about possibly starting a farmers market in one of the little towns about 4 or 5 miles from our place.

I thought this might be a good place to market my eggs. My bride and I went to check it out.

I guess I expected a bunch of farmers and market gardeners discussing who grows what and how to make sure prospective customers have a wide array of things to buy.

What went on was rather different.

There were two or three other farmers. There were half a dozen quazi official types. The Mayor of the town was there. The County agent, like I said, as well as his counterpart from the next county over. One woman was some sort of expert on starting farmers markets. I couldn’t tell if she worked for some level of government or was a freelance consultant.

The discussion was all about parking, permits, license and whether it (the farmers market) should be run by the city or some corporate entity that would need to be created.

One lady did mention that she approved of farmers markets because the food there was usually better than what is on offer at the grocery store. Other than that I don’t think anyone mentioned what would be sold there or where it would come from.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that the best way to get me muttering four letter words under my breath is to expose me to any sort of bureaucracy. Mostly under my breath.

Around here farmers markets are mainly in the cities. In rural areas like where we are folks just put up roadside stands if they want to sell something. I’ve considered doing this myself but I don’t think we have enough of a product line to make it worth stopping at or enough time to run it properly.

It is also possible that a farmers market could provide some cover from the risk of official ambush.

WARNING! RANT ALERT! WARNING! (This next bit is an attempt at humor, how successful the attempt is left to the reader) :-)

What I mean by official ambush is something like this; we have a willing buyer and a willing seller agreeing to transfer ownership of some property at a mutually agreeable price.

Next thing you know, some third party shows up and identifies themselves as a duly appointed representative of the Bureau of Broccoli, Bean Sprouts, Bok Choy, and other vegetables having names beginning with the letter “B”. They demand to know where your form 544C/2 is.

Perhaps this joker can simply be referred to the market manager on the grounds that the market itself is protected by an official entity exempt from their authority.

It is also possible that the market manager, thinking of his own career, may decide to condemn in the strongest term any vendor who would dare contemplate working the market without a proper form 544C/2.

Busted! Conspiracy to commit agriculture! Bad Farmer!

END OF RANT

So we'll see where this all goes. Obviously I’m skeptical but I do have some hope this could be useful. Stay tuned.

Low stress chicken

I like fried chicken as it happens. But I don’t care for it until it is purposely cooked up.

The other day the temperature got up into the high nineties, along with the humidity. This is typical Florida summertime stuff, just a little early is all.

Most of the critters here just find a shady place to lie about through the hottest part of the day, no problem. These Cornish Cross broiler chickens are not as hearty as normal chickens though and I had a few that used the heat as an excuse to drop dead.

Prematurely fried chicken, not good.

In the past I just raised these birds in the fall. Temperatures would get lower as the birds grew bigger and I didn’t have any problems.

I have a fan in my shop that I used years ago when I would tune up an air-cooled Motorcycle engine. It kept it from overheating when I ran it for a long while when it was not moving.

The chickens seem to enjoy it. They are obviously much more comfortable.

No more heat stress.

They sit in front of the fan like a dog with its head out the car window.

My young laying hens coped with the heat just fine, but then tropical storm Alberto came by and blew the roof off their pen.

I was intending to remove the pen to integrate them with the older hens. This just caused that plan to speed up.

No smashed hens by the way.

There has been less fighting among the hens than I expected, the young ones have accepted a lower spot in the pecking order, and that seemed to satisfy the older (and larger) hens.

In the nearby photo they are all roosting together in the hoop house.

When the farm bill comes due

Have you heard that work has begun on the new farm bill? Our esteemed public servants have begun the process of setting out place cards at the public trough.

Meetings are taking place between the captains of corporate agribusiness and public sector types that oversee things like food stamps and school lunches.

Of course this has almost nothing to do with farming and everything to do with politics, but before its over those of us who do raise crops and/or livestock will likely have a whole new set of things to worry about and defend ourselves against.

This unholy alliance between the corporate hustlers and the poverty pimps will probably not be content to simply plunder the public treasury and let it go at that, at least they have not done so in the past.

I can’t guess what new problems these folks will send our way.

When I was a kid people commonly made jokes about how the government paid farmers not to grow crops. They paid by the acre you see, so if you didn’t grow 1000 acres of corn you got more money than if you didn’t grow only 100 acres of corn.

The latest batch of foolishness makes that look reasonable. Now I’m supposed to install radio id chips in my livestock and notify the Feds when my horse goes out for a trail ride. All at my own expense of course. We call this NAIS.

And then there’s the bird flu. The chickens on my farm are not locked up in some warehouse like the ones that belong to Tyson’s. At the first sign of trouble you can bet the Ag department folks will drive right past any number of giant poultry gulags on their way to destroy my birds and any other backyard flocks in the area.

I guess they think my chickens may pop off to visit relatives in China and come home with a social disease.

I was reading the other day that most customers for direct-marketed alternative agricultural products are women who are involved with home schooling. I hadn’t noticed that before, but it agrees with my experience. From all points of the political compass mind you, but all home school folks.

It used to be that keeping your kids out of public school was a major legal problem. People did jail time for it. It was considered a form of child abuse and still is in several states. Just like selling raw milk and on farm butchering of livestock.

I would rather have a seat on the old picket fence than deal with what seems like the endless stream of petty tyrannies being launched at the small farmer.

Some advocate the formation of some sort of political special interest group to defend our selves, a sort of anti-establishment establishment I guess. Still, this lifestyle is as much about individualism as anything. I’ve never been much of a joiner.

So we must out smart them, fortunately that’s not too hard.

I would never sell poultry that was not processed in a licensed and approved facility, you know, with 4000 sq ft of heated and air conditioned floor space and ADA compliant bath rooms, men and ladies. But if you would like to contract with me to raise a live bird for you, I can clean it for you for free when the time comes.

I would never sell un-pasteurized milk, but if you want to buy a part interest in this cow, what you do with your milk is your business.

At no point in my life have I learned so much so fast as I have here on the farm. Talk about home schooling.

Updates on the poultry and the garden

It's Sunday afternoon and normally I'd be out working.

But the temperature outside at the moment is almost exactly at the boiling point of human flesh, so I thought I’d goof off and update the blog here in my cozy air conditioned office.

I did postings for each batch of chickens when they arrived as day old peeps but have not mentioned their progress.

I also mentioned when I planted the garden but have not done an update on that project either.

First an update on the garden.

This is not a regular vegetable garden; it’s a small-scale field crop experiment. It is a very basic planting.

I know zip about field crops, my experience with plant agriculture consists of watching the occasional houseplant die of neglect.

My goal is to replace some or all of the feed we buy for the livestock. This should be possible for the sheep at least, because they don’t need much feed beyond the forage that we have plenty of. The chickens are a different story.

I planted corn and cowpeas.

Peas alone, corn alone, and corn and peas mixed. Corn was planted in rows about 30 inches apart, cowpeas down the middle of the rows.

The peas did fine on thier own, the corn and peas mixed did well. The corn alone did poorly. The soil here is not very good, beach sand with very little else in it.

The laying hens.

Today I started the process of mixing the young laying hens and the older ones. They have been next to each other since the young ones came out of the brooder separated by some poultry netting. I joined the netting so they are now in one big enclosure but I left both pens inside for now.

This was done after the nearby picture was taken.

I added roosting space to the hoop house and will remove the small pen sometime soon.

Chickens can be rather vicious to strange birds, best to do the integration gradually.

Broilers

These birds are the radishes of the animal kingdom. They start out tiny, grow huge and are harvested in almost no time.

I just raise these in a scaled down Salatin style pen that I move to a new patch of grass each day. These are about halfway between the egg and the dinner plate.

Lambing season is now over

The last of the ewes has had her lambs. Ewe number 416 had twin ram lambs late last night. They weighed in at 10lbs 2oz and 9lbs 7oz.

So here is how we did on the season. We started with 16 breed ewes.

One miscarried about 6 weeks before she was due. She had had a lamb born dead last year. She was moved in with the dry ewes and will be culled.

We had 14 ram lambs and 12 ewe lambs, a total of 26 lambs. I figure that to be a 168.75% lambing rate, respectable especially considering that most of the ewes are first time mamas.

And one heifer calf for good measure.

A little time for the bovine

In the interest of diversity and multi-species grazing, we present this little beast, born this morning at 10:30 or so.

Annie the heifer is now Annie the cow. The calf is a heifer.

The whole neighborhood was in on the event. John, my neighbor to the east and the owner of Turbo, the bull that is the daddy of this calf, called me to tell me of the event. He had witnessed the birth from his field just across the fence.

Shortly after that Stan and Michelle, our neighbors to the West happened by and inspected the new calf and all the new lambs.

Two sets of twins

Last evening ewe number 5 had a set of twins, both female. One weighed 8lbs 13oz the other 7lbs even. This ewe is a Katahdin St Croix cross.

Early today ewe number 1 had one ram lamb and one ewe lamb weighing 8lbs 8oz and 6lbs 14oz respectively. This ewe is a Katahdin Barbados cross and is my wife’s special pet.

This leaves just one ewe that has yet to lamb. She is still out there doing a very convincing impersonation of Java the Hut.

Here is a bonus picture from the “Too cute not to publish” file.

Single lamb

Ewe number 414 had a single ram lamb weighing 7lbs 9oz. She is one of the ewes that lambed last year.

I bet both my readers will be relived when lambing is over and I put some more variety back in this blog. Me too. Only three ewes left, soon I hope.

Two ewes, three lambs

We have this black-headed Dorper ewe with tag number 411. She has a puppy-chewed ear. My bride calls her floppy.

We have been telling each other for weeks that she was going to lamb any minute. She was enormous and had developed a bag like a Holstein.

Last night was the night. She seemed like she was OK to me, but my bride wanted to hang out with her and did.

She had twins that weighed 11 lbs 4 oz and 9 lbs even, over 20 lbs of lamb, she had every right to be huge!

Early today ewe number 410 a single lamb at 10 lbs 4 oz. This ewe is rather small and she had some trouble with this monster. One hoof was folded back; they should come out with both front hooves and the nose together. Again my bride played midwife and other than one very exhausted ewe, everybody’s fine.

The lamb is only minutes old in this picture, mama hasn’t even cleaned it off yet.

Yet another set of twin lambs

Our ewe number 2, a funny looking beast which is at least part Blue Faced Leicester, gave birth to twin lambs, one male one female, early today.

We are now at the break-even point, fifteen lambs from fifteen ewes.

The good news is that six of the fifteen ewes have not yet lambed. Some of the remaining ewes are simply enormous! They are either going to have a litter of six or fifty pound lambs.

Broiler Chickens

I’d been meaning to order a batch of broilers for the last few weeks but just never seemed to get around to it.

We have none left in our freezer; I gave the last one to a woman who wanted to get on my customer list and had a special event she wanted chicken for.

I haven’t been pushing the broiler enterprise very hard; I’ve just done 50 a year for the last two years.

Still people really like these chickens and the chicken customers often end up buying other things and referring new chicken customers.

I have good facilities for raising up to a few hundred birds a year, not good enough for more than that. I built the Whizbang Pucker last summer. If I grow the enterprise much I’ll need to build the scalder.

I got a call the other day from a (prospective) new customer, and that finally motivated me to place the order.

I use Welp Hatchery, the same place I got the new layers. These birds are Cornish Cross peeps and after being hatched Tuesday showed up at the Post Office today. The Post Office called about 7AM asking me to come pick them up.

They are in the brooder now.

Lambs being cute

Here is a short (about 5 minutes) video clip that we hope gives you a chuckle. If you have a slow connection you may want to pass on this, but it works OK on DSL.

Lambs being cute video clip

Bonus Lamb

Ewe number 6 was the first lamb born here last year.

In fact she is still just under one year old.

She is fairly small and I did not even think she was pregnant.

This morning early she had a single rather small ram lamb. They both seem to be doing fine.

I had not been counting her among the ewes yet to lamb. As a matter of fact I was planning to mover her in with the dry ewes as soon as it was practical, no reason to give extra feed to an open ewe.

Just for this she gets to stay on the feed. This is a bonus!

Expansion is happening

Monday a new batch of breeding ewes arrived on the farm. We brought in 19 two and three year old production ewes.

All these girls had lambs last winter, so everyone has at least some experience. They include a mix of different breeds, very much like the ewes we already have.

Another dozen ewes are due here this weekend. This last bunch is the Florida Natives that we are going to sharecrop with the Oak Lane Farm.

Sleeping in the Noonday Sun

It’s a perfect spring day, clear blue and sparkling sunshine, seventy something degrees, winds light and variable.

If you’re a critter out on the a3 farm, the thing to do is to shade up and have a little noonday snooze, or maybe a good scratch.

Nice work if you can get it.

Two more sets of twin lambs

Two more sets of twins were born last evening.

This gets us just to the half way point for this years lambing.

Ewe # 413 had two ewe lambs tagged as #14 and #15 and weighing 6lbs 8oz and 4lbs 4oz respectively.

Ewe #418 had one ewe and one ram lamb tagged #16 and #29 weighing 9lbs even and 8lbs even.

We took pictures but the light was fading and only the first set was worth posting.

Growing the sheep enterprise

It’s springtime and the grass is growing. We got some rain this week, first time in quite a long while.

While most of the country gets a spring flush where rain is abundant and the grass grows like crazy, spring here is a crap shoot, but many years is marked with drought.

We are just South of the normal West to East weather systems that the largest part of the country gets.

Here rain is reliable only in the summer when things heat up enough to give us our typical afternoon convection thunderstorm. That starts about June and ends about October or November. Then we get a LOT of rain.

Typically things are clear at dawn, temperature already over 80 degrees, humidity high. The sun heats the air over the land more quickly than over the water, we are on a peninsula a little over 100 miles wide. This warmed air rises up drawing in cooler even moister air from over the ocean. This process continues and builds on itself. By noon puffy popcorn clouds appear everywhere, by two or three they become big cumulous clouds and by five or six have developed into huge thunderheads that cut loose with heavy rain, often over an inch in about half an hour. The evening is steamy and the whole deal starts again the next day.

I have about 30 acres of very good pasture. I have about 20 adult sheep plus lambs being born now. I have two heifers, one about to calf in the next month of so, one open. I have one geriatric mare.

At this stocking rate I can pasture all the livestock, fill my barn with hay, and still spend a good part of the summer clipping pastures just to keep them from getting rank and overgrown.

I’ve been talking to some friends who also raise sheep. Unlike me, they are overstocked. I was up there (about 50 miles north of me) last evening. They have about the same amount of land as I do, but they did their lambing in January and now have over two hundred head of various sizes on their place. They have no grass at all and are still feeding hay, hay they have to buy.

This gives me an opportunity to buy some good production-breeding ewes at prices that are not often seen in a positive market like we have now. I’m buying 20 of these ewes.

Then we made an interesting side deal. I’ll explain the deal but I need to give some background.

You see everyone knows you can’t raise sheep in Florida. Just as the county agent, pick a county, any county, they will tell you pretty much the same thing. It is not true of course, but it is true that very few people do it.

Four or five hundred years ago the Spanish brought sheep here. They were the sort of sheep commonly raised in Spain at the time, closely related to the Tunis breed of today.

Some of them got loose and went native. Most did not survive, but those that did became very well adapted to the climate. They tolerate the heat and humidity of course, but their main claim to fame is that they are resistant to/ tolerant of parasites. They are now called the Florida Native, sometimes the Gulf Coast Native breed.

For many years the University of Florida Ag school had a flock of these sheep. They did studies on them, and at one point had not wormed any of them for thirty odd years.

Aside from the flock at the university, only a very few “pioneer” flocks exist. The breed is very rare. They are smaller and less prolific than the commercial breeds that are commonly raised. Agribusiness has no interest in them.

Well sometime last year the University decided to get rid of their Florida Native flock. Instead of selling them to any of the few sheep producers here in Florida, they just destroyed them, sent them to a sale up in Georgia is what I heard. I guess they couldn’t figure out how to patent the genes and get a zillion dollar grant from Monsanto or whoever.

One of the only other pioneer flocks belonged to a man named Jim Wing. His sheep were descended from the flock his grandfather had raised. There was little or no outside blood brought in during all that time. Jim was very old and sick, and last spring he died.

Most of his flock was then sold to the same folks I’m buying the new ewes from. They want very much to keep them, but of course they don’t have enough grass to do everything they want to do.

I told you I would explain the side deal, you were wrong to doubt me, but I appreciate your patience.

I’m going to take a dozen or so of these ewes over here and when the time comes breed them to a non-related Florida Native ram they also have. It’s a share crop deal, I keep the ewe lambs, and they get the ram lambs.

So this summer instead of running twenty head on the place (last years number), I’ll run seventy some odd, including the lambs.

Population Explosion

I said they would all download within ten minutes of each other.

Today could be the day.

Ewe #412 is now a mama, twice. Twin ewe lambs. There must have been a wild party about 5 months ago.

The twins now out-number the singles. This is a very good thing.

Update:

Lambs tagged as #12 and #13, 7lbs 10oz and 7lbs 7oz respectivly.

More Twins

Today at about 7:30 AM the lambs are just minutes old in this picture.

This ewe is one of the few that had a lamb last year, a single ewe lamb that we still have. This year it's twins.

She had no problems this year or last.

I have not been out myself to get a close look, my bride took the picture. I believe she said the white one is a ram lamb.

Update:

The white lamb, tagged as #28, is a ram lamb and weighs 8 lbs 15 oz. The black lamb, tagged as #11, is a ewe and weighs 5 lbs 11 oz. The mother ewe is #419.

We use small ear tags with higher numbers on the ram lambs because we send them all to market as early as we can. The ewes we keep mostly, and like to use the same tag when they are adults.

The buyers of the ram lambs prefer them as unblemished as possible, no castration, no tail docking, they put up with the ear tags but don't like them. The ultimate consumers are "ethnics" which can mean either Muslims, Jews, or Greek Orthodox people.

In Florida that is the market that pays the best, so that's where we will sell if we can. The "normal" commodity market pays at least a third less, and is so weak down here they would need to be shipped quite a distance, also expensive.

Twins

The first set of twins born on the farm. One white, one black, both ewe lambs.

There has been a long pause in the lambing around here. The last lamb was born Easter Sunday. All the ewes that should be pregnant look like they are; in fact they look like they have each swallowed a large pig. I think they will have to lamb soon or they will explode.

It has started to worry me, after all this waiting around they will probably all download within about ten minutes of each other. Most of them are first timers, heifer ewes if I can co-opt a cattle term.