A Week At The Fair

This past week was the Dickinson County 4H and FFA Fair. If you've ever had animals at your local or state fair you know that the same feeding and care done on the farm needs to be done at the fair. That means that chores were done at home and then done at the fair morning and night. Sometimes we split the chores and one of us stayed home to do chores and farm work while everyone else went to the fair. It makes for long days especially when you're off of your routine. The fair's a very interesting event for parents, kids and spectators. You get to see kids who have done a lot of their own work with their livestock and non-livestock projects, and others whose parents live vicariously through their kids, doing everything for them short of accepting the ribbon. The last event of the fair is the livestock sale. Area businesses and individuals bid on the animals that were shown at the fair and the money above the market price goes to the kids as premium money. Some kids, like my son George, are happy to trade the chores for the cash that comes with the sale. Other kids see an animal that they have cared for since they fed it from a bottle going on the block and ultimately end up in the food supply. It's sad to see kids cry when they have to part with their steer, heifer, sheep or pig. Okay, so I didn't see anybody cry over a pig but surely someone must have been sad to part with their swine. Maybe not but you never know.

Chicken Processing

We spent 2 days this week and 2 days last week processing chickens. We processed about 275 chickens. They were beautiful healthy chickens that looked wonderful dressed. The average chicken weighed about 5 lbs dressed and were as plump and meaty as expected. The processing went very well with help from both my brother and some of the boernsen family members. Our biggest challenge was freezer space to cool the chickens after they were processed. We ended up putting chickens in every freezer space available which became a logistical challenge for Sharon. We'll work on looking for a good used freezer to fill the gap. We've been trying to keep our customers from arriving for pick-up during the processing because we assume that most of our chicken customers would not want to see their chickens go from pasture to package. But had to asked some of our farmer and close friend customers to come by and pick-up during our processing just to make room for all of the birds needing space in the freezers to cool. It's great to have customers that grew up on a farm come by and tell us how they remember when they were young and or growing up on a farm processing chickens. No fancy pluckers or scalders for them! Just good old fashioned hand work and a pot of boiling water. We hope that our chickens live up to the high expectations of people who have experienced eating a fresh chicken raised at home in farmyards of their youth and those customers that have only had store bought chickens as well. We did have a customer call us to say that she had already eaten some of our chicken and she said that she hadn't tasted a chick so good since her days on her farm! Wow! That is awesome! That really means a lot to us and we really appreciated that encouragement. For us at Mulberry Grove Family Farm I think its fresh chicken barbecued on the grill tonight. I can't wait. Now if only the sweet corn and tomatoes were ready we would have a complete summer barbecue...

Produce

I'm getting really excited about the vegetables. Every time I go out to look at the vegetable beds I see more progress. Today we have a yellow summer squash that is at least 4" long and the bush beans have beautiful pink and purple flowers. The cucumbers are covered with yellow flowers that really set off their dark green leaves. It's amazing to see the colors and plants that started as little apparently inert seeds. The honey bees that are on our farm, owned by Boernsen Bees, are doing their part in making sure that all of the vegetable flowers are pollinated. Anybody who thinks that the world has evolved through random processes has never lived on a farm and watched the amazing interaction and complexity that works together. But I digress. The biodegradable corn-based plastic down each bed just seems to really turbo charged the growing process. The weeds along the sides of the plastic could become a real nucense when the time comes to pick, and they can really only be taken care of by hand and hoe. That is a lot of hoeing and with so much going on it is tough to get out there to hoe, but it will be good exercise for our farm crew (family labor). Next year we'll put down a cover crop like a rye that can be cut to create a good layer of mulch to keep the bare ground free from weeds. The most prolific and most hated weed is the cockle-burr. We really don't want to see that weed take control. I can only imagine them on our knees when picking! The alfalfa between the beds has worked pretty well too. George cut the alfalfa between the rows that border any vine plants. The worry there is that we have melons that are running into the alfalfa and alfalfa kind of lives in its roots, so the more you cut it the more it comes back. That means that at some point we will be searching for melons and cucumbers in the alfalfa between the beds. That issue is still a ways off, so for now we'll just try to keep the alfalfa cut back as much as possible before the vines travel too far.

Chicken Processing Test Run

We had a test run of our chicken processing process yesterday. We had a goal of determining how many chickens we think we can process in X amount of time and also to practice our processing skills. We needed to determine the amount of time it takes to process our chickens so that we can set a schedule for on-farm customer pick-ups of their fresh chickens. We found that while our skill at turning a whole chicken into a cut-up chicken became fairly efficient, the longest part of our processing was the process of what I'll call "cleaning" the bird. I use the word cleaning so as not to give a less than appealing image to a wonderfully healthy and nutritious, naturally pasture raised chicken. With our family working together we should be able to process at least 50 chickens in a day with Sharon, me and the kids working each step of the process. Our process, while not as efficient as others we have seen, will ensure a superior product in meat quality as well as appearance. Our worry is that hay will be ready to be baled at about the same time that we need to processes the chickens. We're excited about getting these wonderful birds to our customers. We think that they will be very pleased with them.