Relocating a Farm

For those who feel like our decision to launch our egg production operation seems a little sudden, allow me to give you some backstory.  A few weeks ago, John was introduced through a mutual acquaintance to a family that had attempted to upstart a farm very similar in scope to the one we have envisioned.  Unfortunately, a series of accidents left the farm's primary caretaker unable to continue the farm.  This left them with some very nice equipment and animals that were only a few months old and only gently used. 

For essentially 1/2 of retail, they were trying to liquidate their farm.  So, while we were planning to construct our large chicken wagon in the spring, here stood a good-quality one, ready for use.  BUT, it couldn't be sold without the chickens it currently houses.  And, they are great, productive breeds that are just beginning to lay and have been raised free-range.  It was an offer just too good to pass up.

Additionally, we purchased from them a load of fencing, some feeders, a goat care/corral system, various other items, and Molly, a 7-month-old Great Pyrenees who has been serving as guardian to both sheep and chickens. (Yes, the kids are VERY excited!  More info on Molly later this week.)

 

 

 

The liquidating farm was two hours away in Yellville, Arkansas.  So, we caravanned there early Saturday morning and began the loading process.  There's really no conventional way to haul a chicken wagon this large, so the guys constructed this plan that got the job done!

A couple hours after arrival, we were all loaded up and ready to head back to our farm.  The whole load consisted of 3 trucks, 2 trailers, 1 chicken wagon, tons of equipment, 100+ chickens, 1 giant dog, 3 adults, and 3 children.

(Thank you to the best father-in-law ever for his great help with all this madness! If you ever need to haul a chicken wagon 2 hours along all kinds of road, he's your man!)

 

We were quite a spectacle.

 

As crazy as this day seemed, the real excitement came once we got home to the farm.  Sam backed the trailer carrying the chicken wagon into the temporary fencing we'd constructed for it.  Then, we just had to figure out how to get it off the trailer.  Unfortunately, we were on a little bit of a decline, too.  We decided that the three of us could probably control its weight and steer it off the wagon as its momentum brought it down.  We were wrong.  John and Sam were on each side of the back of the wagon, and I was in the middle, doing my best to steer it as it came down.  The sheer weight of the wagon coming off the trailer was more than we expected, and it just came barreling off the trailer pushing us back into the temporary fencing we'd erected.  In the madness, I got tripped up and was going to the ground.  Because I was between the other two fellas, I was headed under the out-of-control wagon.  That's when my amazing husband shoved and kicked me aside so that I rolled out of the wagon's path.  Though John and Sam were able to stop the wagon, John was unfortunately injured in the process.  The top of his foot is swollen pretty badly.  We thought yesterday that it might be broken, but he wanted to ice it and see how it felt the next morning.  Now, it's still pretty tender and swollen but is better than it was last night, so he's thinking it's not a break.

 

The whole incident shook us up pretty good.  And needless to say, the kids were pretty freaked out.  They each needed some extra attention last night, and we decided to treat ourselves to a family dinner out once we had everything  unloaded.  I don't really want to think about what might've happened, but I am surely thankful that we were protected from what could've been.

 

Seriously, there's never a dull moment around here!

 

Now, to clip the wings of 100+ chickens . . . .

 

 

Thanksgiving Week Challenge

(Disclaimer:  If some of this sounds familiar, it's because pieces of it were borrowed from last year's post.)

Thanksgiving will be here soon!  That means that we're all busy planning our menus and making our grocery lists and readying our tables.  Most of us will gather with family and friends and eat amazing, comfort food until our belts need loosening.  Let us not forget in this season of thankfulness the many who will not be joining us in our overindulgence. 

World hunger statistics are sobering, to say the least.  I like this video because it uses the numbers to get our attention rather than the emotionally evocative images involved with so many of the world hunger videos we've been subjected to over the years.   One child dies hungry every 6 seconds.  Now that's sobering.  How many children would that be during just our Thanksgiving meal alone? 

As our family met to discuss how we wanted to approach feeding the hungry this holiday, I mentioned this statistic to Girl 1.  She just looked at me and started slowly counting as the tears welled up in her eyes. 

I don't mean to be a downer this holiday.  I do mean to challenge you to do something about the plight of the needy.  So, I'm doing what the video asks of me and telling a friend (who will hopefully tell a friend who will hopefully tell a friend, etc.). 

Our family plans to do our part this season by donating to Bread for the World.  We plan to raise the money for this the same way we did last year.  And, you can do it, too -- without even having to reach into your pocketbook (what is a pocketbook exactly?  Does anyone even really use one?)  You want to know how, don't you?  Well, lean in.  And promise not to tell MeeMee that we plan to do it again this year.  Promise?  Okay.

We plan to eat Ramen noodles every night for a week.  The grocery money saved will be donated and help to feed others.  We do this in an attempt to better understand the plight of the hungry.  Now, rice and beans would be a much more appropriate meal if we were trying to eat the way most of the hungry world eats.  But, my kids won't eat rice and beans.  They just won't.  And, contrary to what MeeMee seems to believe, we do plan to feed our kids this week.  (Bless her, she's only got their  best interests at heart!)  We choose Ramen because it's about the cheapest thing I can think of to feed us that we will all eat.  Also, it probably pretty closely approximates the way our closest hungry neighbors eat. 

Why the same thing every night of the week?  When you're truly hungry, food diversity is a luxury you do not have.  You eat what is available, and often it's the same thing . . . over and over again.

The week leading up to Thanksgiving seems a fitting time to undergo this challenge and prayerful focus.  So, we will begin this coming Wednesday and continue until the following Tuesday, two days prior to Thanksgiving.  (Ideally, we would run it right up through Wednesday, the day before the holiday, but it just doesn't fit our schedule this year.)  To focus our mealtimes on the task at hand, we will begin each of our seven evening meals together with a special prayer.  (This was my favorite part last year!) Here are links to the beautiful prayers we intend to use this year.

Wednesday -- Sharing our Abundance
Thursday -- That We May Be Satisfied
Friday -- Prayer of Confession
Saturday --  May I Hunger Enough
Sunday -- Traditional Native American Prayer
Monday and Tuesday (this link contains two separate prayers) --  Prayers at the Table

Will you join with us?  Put your own spin on it.  Eat something else.  Or, don't change the way you eat at all but click on the prayers when you sit down to the table each night and join with us as we pray for the hungry of our world.

Clean Taco Soup

Well, it's cold outside.  And, I've got a freezer full of grass-fed beef since our half of Georgie came home from the meat packaging plant (I don't know. It's just what the kids decided to name him).  So, it seems like a good time to make a big pot of Clean Taco Soup.

Lots of taco soup recipes will invite you to toss in a packet of store-bought taco seasoning mix.  I could do without the unrecognizable ingredients found in some packets; plus, all the ingredients needed to create the same effect are waiting patiently in my spice cabinet.

So, forgo the packet and make your Taco Soup the clean way, using whole ingredients that you recognize.

Throw it all in a CrockPot:

1-1.5 lb. cooked ground beef
a can black beans, rinsed and drained (or 1/2 lb. dry beans, cooked)
a can/jar diced tomatoes
box/jar of your favorite broth (I used chicken because I have a ton made up right now)
1 can corn, drained or 1 c. frozen
1 Tbs. each of chili powder, ground cumin, garlic powder, and onion powder
1/2 to 1 tsp. crushed red pepper
salt to taste

Give it at least a few hours in the CrockPot, but you could leave it all day on low, if necessary.  Serve it up alongside a salad or as a stand alone meal with shredded cheddar and tortilla chips.  Yum!

It fogged up the lens of my camera. :)

Everyone gobbled it up.  But, Girl 1, who has a tendency to eat like a bird, kept going back for more and was the last one to push away from the table.  "It's like Mexican chili!"  Yep, it's pretty tough to beat!

Change is Brewing: Brood Farm Site Will Launch Soon

This picture is unrelated to the content of this post, but I think posts without pics are dull.  ;)

If you're one who enjoys the blog but avoids change at all costs, you may want to crawl into a hole right now or mentally take a little visit to your happy place.

As we prepare for our farm to grow, we feel it's time for the blog to move.  We will soon be launching a full-fledged Brood Farm website.  And, if I may brag on my techy hubby a moment, it's a pretty cool one.  It's still under construction, but I'm loving the way it looks and reads!

We want the blog to feature prominently there, so its web address will need to change.  This is not a big deal.  The blog may look a little different.  The way you have to get there may change, but its content, pics, and all my crazy ramblings will be business as usual.

If you, say, access the blog daily via a button on the home screen of your iPad (Mamaw, I'm talking to you now ;), you'll need to create a new button using the new web address and delete the old one.  Or, ask one of your super-handy grandkids to help you out.  ;) 

When the new site goes live, I will feature a link to it from this blog.  We're looking at some time next week most likely.  This will give those of you who've visited the hole or your happy place some time to adjust to this new reality.

Now, those of you who use FaceBook to link up to the blog each day are probably getting all snooty right now as you think, "This doesn't affect me, I just click in FB and it magically takes me where I need to go, so I'll barely even notice this change."  Not so fast.

We will also be launching a Brood Farm Facebook account. This is something I've been wanting to do for awhile now.  It will allow me to separate my farm dealings from my personal life a bit.  If I want to share with you the funny things my kids say, I'll do that as Ashley Carroll Beller, as usual.  If I want to tell you about how the chickens got out yesterday and our lawnmover friend and I had to herd them all back into their pen using soccer nets, I'll probably do that via Brood Farm.  All blog posts, which are really about farm life (with a healthy dose of personal life because, let's face it, it's hard to keep them entirely separate) will be posted via Brood Farm. 

So, if you think my human kids are really cute and would like to see pics of them at dance competition, on the soccer field, or in their superhero costumes, but could do without all the commentary regarding my goat kids in the backyard, continue to be friends with Ashley Carroll Beller and enjoy your newly decluttered newsfeed as you'll no longer have to endure daily links to the blog.

I have a pretty strict FaceBook policy which I've used for awhile and think it serves to protect me well.  I can be friends with any woman all day long, but I am only friends with men who are related to me.  Sometimes, this has seemed like a policy that's a little over the top (like when one of my good friends' 60-year-old dad friend-requested me), but I feel like it's a policy that I self-employ for my protection and once I start making exceptions, things get muddied. 

So, having a Brood Farm FB account makes it possible for anyone to "like" what's happening on the farm, get farm updates, schedule egg delivery, and more without necessarily also having to be my "friend."  And, let's be honest, just because you'd like to have fresh eggs delivered weekly, doesn't mean you also want to have to endure my posting about how my too-juicy burgers fell through the grates of the grill last night.

So, we're headed toward this next big stage, but for those of you who have a nostalgia for the past, www.broodingon.blogspot.com will remain available with all its 602 past posts.  Additionally, all the posts to date will be imported to the new site, so you can search for them there as well. 

We are really hoping to use the Brood Farm FB site to generate lots of interest in our egg sales, so when you see it go live, please "like" and "share" it to your little heart's desire! 

Okay.  Enough for today.  Don't be scared.  Change can be good.  I think once you see the new site, you'll agree!

Homemade Organic Chicken Feed

Our hens live a pretty cushy life.  They get lots of goodies, including garden goodies, kitchen veggie scraps, and fresh ground to forage.  And, though, we've always made an effort to use feed that is antibiotic free, we've never taken it the extra step and gone full-out organic for their feed.  This is for two main reasons, I guess:

1.  It's VERY expensive.  We're talking 3 to 4 times as expensive as the feed we use now.

2.  It's not readily available to us, so to add to the already high feed cost, we'd have to pay for shipping. 

 

I did, though, find a recipe for homemade organic chicken feed that I wanted to try out.  I was able to get all ingredients but two from my food coop (which means that this feed is actually human food!).  The last two ingredients came via Amazon.  You gottta love Prime!

The recipe is a mix of 10 different ingredients, so we had to use shovels and our hands to mix it all up in our giant feed bin.  I was a little bit afraid that Girl 2 might fall in, but she was a big help in getting it all mixed together.

The recipe calls for the following wholesome ingredients:

oat groats

sunflower seeds

hard red wheat berries

soft white wheat berries

hulled millet

sesame seed

flax seed

rye berries

brewer's yeast

kelp granules

 

And, of course, all ingredients are organic. 

It just looks like a bunch of seeds -- which, if you think about it, is what chicken feed ought to look like.  They are birds, after all. 

 

The gals are absolutely loving their new feed.  So far, I can't tell that they're picking around any of the ingredients, so I assume they like it all.  How it will affect their laying habits remains to be seen.

 

This particular mix cost us a pretty penny to put together and is just intended to be an experiment for now.  I would have to figure out a more economical way to source the ingredients before I could entertain continuing with this recipe in the long-term.

http://www.gardenbetty.com/2012/06/garden-bettys-homemade-whole-grain-chicken-feed/

A Fence-Building Weekend

Brrrr.  It's cold out there today.  Looks like the cooler weather may now be upon us for awhile.  This just makes me even more thankful for the weather we had this past weekend. 

We were able to make use of our long weekend together by stringing up about a half-mile of electric fencing at the new farm.  It was our first attempt at working with these new fencing materials, and we had a lot of fun together figuring it all out.

We were able to make use of these cute little pigtail posts (can you see the tops of the white posts?)

And these reels of electric wire and polywire

And, of course, the solar energizer that makes it live.

Here you can see the pigtail posts as they await use in the garage.

 

This fencing is designed to be temporary.  We put it up along the road and property line until we can get the permanent fencing complete.  We're steadily working on that as well, but with corner posts that need to be 4 ft. deep to accommodate high-tensile fencing, it's a slow process. :)

 

Of course, the three youngest of us bounced between helping with the fence and exploring the farm.  I wonder if I'll ever get over the sight of them coming up over the hill toward us with their hands full of walking sticks, binoculars, field guides, and hand-drawn maps of all their secret trails. 

The New Chicken Wagon

Here's a sneak peak at the new chicken wagon we'll be bringing home next Saturday (along with the 100+ chickens who sleep inside). 

This amazing contraption is large enough to provide sleeping/egg laying space for nearly 200 chickens and is easily moved from place to place so that we can allow them constant access to fresh foraging ground. 

 

These chickens are happy and healthy and on the cusp of egg-laying age.  What a very exciting enterprise!  Brood Farm egg production.  Ready or not, here we go!