Making Chicken Soup

  Back at the beginning of April our local feed store was having a customer appreciation promotion. If you bought a bag of Start and Grow, they gave you 10 baby chicks for free. Since we are such wonderful customers (read that: we give them all our monies every week), the owner let us get two bags of feed and therefore 20 free chicks! Since we were already very well stocked on egg laying hens, we decided to get a batch of "meat birds." These fast growing chickens are bred specifically to turn into little round butterball shaped chickens in a few short weeks. 

  In anticipation of the promotion, the feed store had lots and lots of chickens, and although they are very good about keeping their chicks fed and watered and warm, that many chicks means lots and lots of poops. The little birds I carefully selected and brought home were filthy!

  Let me pause here to talk very quickly about picking out chicks. We have had very good luck with buying poultry from our feed store. They tend to be healthy, and we don't have to worry about paying for or waiting for the chicks to be shipped to us in the mail. (We have had bad experiences with mailed chicks in the past)

  I like to hand pick which chicks come home with me. I look for the chicks who are actively eating or drinking. Looking up out of the box at the world is good too. A sickly chick will generally be hunkered down with one or both eyes shut so I never select a sleeping chick if I can help it. Once I pick out a chick in the brooder, I inspect it closely. Make sure both eyes are open and clean with no crusts around the edges. Check to make sure both feet are normal with the toes all pointing in the right direction (you'd be surprised!). Then I flip the chick over. First I check the umbilical area. Umbilical hernias and infections can happen in chickens believe it or not. Finally, I check the vent (a.k.a. the poop chute) to make sure it is clean and free of any indication of loose stool. Diarrhea in a bird so young and tiny can kill them quick!

Ok, back to the story....

  Since these chicks were going to be brooded outside in the poultry house with a heat lamp, I decided to bathe the chicks. Little chicks are so cute and fluffy for a good reason beyond making us want to love them and squeeze them until they pop! All that fuzzy fluff helps to keep them warm. Crusted down fluff leaves exposed skin for warmth to escape so that meant bath time for the chickies.

  Each chick got rubbed down under warm water in the bathroom sink then I used the hair dryer set on low to get them all dry and extra fluffy. Can't have these little ones catching a chill!

Rialey inspecting my handiwork. 

"It's a chicken."

  Here they are all fluffy clean and ready for their next adventure.

These pictures were taken several weeks ago. Stay tuned for pictures of how these cute little fluff balls are turning into meat monster chickens!

Rialey Update

  I am well overdue for an update about Rialey, our new farmdog. She's about six and a half months old now and is fully into her "teenage years."

 She has gone from my sweet, do anything I ask puppy into a total wild woman. She likes to run over ducks at top speed for no good reason. I have to keep a close eye or she will run the whole flock of sheep from one pasture to another. She loves to run and run and run around the backyard generally annoying the older dogs into games of tag and keep away. She and Barley play endless games of bite-y face and full body wrestling. The other day I even caught her standing ON a chicken. Not trying to harm it in any way, just ya know, using it as a step stool. Rest assured that the chicken was none the worse for it.

  All that said, she's still shaping up to be a really awesome farmdog and general helper. She loves bringing me things. Every evening after dinner, she picks up everyone's bowls and delivers them to either myself or Big Onion (whoever has the best treats of course). She will also carry feed scoop, cups, and small tools so that I have a free hand to deal with pen doors and livestock.

  She comes out with us and Luna for chores every day. She is quickly picking up the rhythms of the farm and seems to understand when something is out of place. One day, I was feeding the bunnies in the pasture pen when a little one hopped right over my foot and out the door. Before I could turn around, put down everything I had in my hands, and get the door secured again, Rialey was right there on that bunny. For a second I was afraid she would try to grab the little thing, but instead she swung around in front of the bunny and put one of her big old muddy paws right on its head as if to say, "Stop right there, mister!" The bewildered bunny stopped right in its tracks and Rialey plopped down right in front of it with a paw on either side and held it there until I could scoop up the errant little thing and put it back into the enclosure. Without Rialey's quick actions, I don't know how I would have caught the little guy.

  She has gone out to a few obedience lessons, mostly for socialization. She has a number of dog friends that she loves to play and wrestle with. She is still learning to trust new people, but is to the point now that she will happily approach most people and accept pets as long as they don't reach over her head too quickly (something to work on). We also went out for one herding lesson. She had a great time working sheep that were much calmer than the ones we have here. I was proud of the confidence she showed working in a strange situation with new people and livestock around. By the end of the lesson she was going around the group and lifting them out of the corners something that is not easy for even an experienced dog to do.

  Around the house she is a total snuggle pup. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that she often sleeps in the bed with us, something that none of the other pups do. She is already bigger than Luna. Right now she is weighing in right around 35lbs, and I suspect once she fills out she will be in the 45-50lb range. Exactly the size dog we were hoping for!

  Overall, we are thrilled to have Rialey here on the farm and look forward to many years of working together. Thanks again to Caroline Betts of Middle Tree English Shepherds for sending this special girl our way! 

Tough times

A week or two ago we had a gardener at my office pulling weeds and generally sprucing up the greenery. As I was leaving, I noticed that he had a nice full bag of freshly pulled greenery. Since I know my boss does not spray any pesticides in her garden, I asked the man if I could take the bag for my animals to munch on. He said it was mostly clover and grassy weeds, that he was happy for me to take it.

  I tucked the bag into the back of my car, brought it home, and propped the open bag against the pasture fence. Before I had a chance to really dig through it, the goats had discovered the bag and started pulling out and nibbling on the contents....

New Goat in Town

  Our goat milk situation was looking rather bleak. Our only two goats in milk right now are CAE positive, and this disease just destroys a goat's milking ability. Josie is down to one pathetically small milking a day, and Thea, despite being a Saanen, only gives us a little over a quart a day. The younger girls are not ready to be bred yet (not that we have a buck to breed them around anyway!).

  Big Onion and I had just started talking about looking for a new adult goat to add to the herd when an ad popped up in our of our facebook groups for a LaMacha doe for sale who was IN MILK. She was a reasonable price and just a little over an hour away from us. The owners said she was just a little too big and headstrong for them to handle.

  We packed up my Element with the usual livestock moving gear: a tarp covered with hay and shavings and an x-pen set up to keep the animals from trying to climb into our laps or knock out the back window and headed out to meet this big doe.

 Her owners had a small, family farm with sheep, goats, cows, and kids. Many of their goats had kidded recently, and it was time to thin the herd a bit. They had a bunch of adorable little nubian-eared kids running around! I swear I didn't once try to sneak one under my shirt and into the car...really!

  Helen, the LaMancha doe we had come to meet, had just had quadruplets a month before. Two had already been sold and the other two were being bottle fed. After a great visit and some minor goat wrangling, we loaded the big girl into the car and headed home.

 We have learned the hard way that quarantining any new animal that comes to the farm is very important so Helen spend her first week or so here living in the backyard pen away from the other goats. Her previous owners had already wormed her the day we picked her up, otherwise we would have done that as well to kill any worms she carried and keep them from spreading to our herd.

  The only problem with the backyard pen is it has no milk stand. Helen surprised us by jumping right up onto an old cart we had in her pen and being a perfect angle for milking from the get-go. Boy does she make more milk than our current girls! She is also very sweet and people oriented. She loves being around us and getting lots of scratches.

  Although she was great for milking, she is definitely one headstrong goat. She does not lead by the collar well and if she decides there is some place she wants to be, she just goes no matter who is in her way. She is also very wary of the dogs. I thought she was just afraid of them until she gave poor Rialey a serious headbutting! Don't worry, the puppy is fine and even gave Helen a good nip on the shoulder (her first grip!) in retaliation not long after!

 

   Helen is a pure bred LaMancha with those silly still little 'mancha ears and no horns. I think this makes her look like she has a tiny alien head. Right now we are trying to decide whether to change her name. Helen seems like much too polite and demure a name for such a big, tough doe.

I'm leaning towards Nancy or Eleanor. What do you guys think? 

Long stays are boring

Luna and Rialey practicing long stays out in the pasture. 

Rialey thinks long stays are boooring!

Gwen, on the other hand, has mastered the art!

Outside duck processing

  A couple weeks ago we made the hard decision to give up our poultry exemption that allows us to legally butcher and sell our our processed birds here on the farm. It was a tough choice for us to make because around here we make every effort to assure the our animals have very happy lives to the very last moment possible. The idea of putting their deaths in the hands of others was one that we did not make lightly.

  Unfortunately, Big Onion and I only have so much time. We found that we were putting off and dreading processing days. They ate up hours of our rare and valuable weekends together. Time that could be spent on projects to improve the farm. They also left us drained both mentally and physically.

  We are very lucky to have a facility just the next town over that specializes in processing ducks and chickens. We have been buying some of our duck parts from there to make our raw ground duck pet food for over a year now. We have a very good relationship with the people who run this facility, and they were kind enough to give me a tour and walk me through every step of the process. The facility is immaculately clean and all processing is done under the constant supervision of a USDA inspector to ensure not only that proper procedure and food handling rules are enforced, but also that the welfare and safety of the animals is kept a high priority.

  With all of this in mind, we decided it was high time to part with some of the drakes (male ducks) in our flocks. The last batch of pekins that we raised was over half male. We also had a number of older boys that tended to be rough on the ladies come mating season. We sorted out all of these males using exercise pens and Luna and put them in Buzz and Bonnie's old pen over night.

  Bright and early the next morning I packed them up in crates and brought them over to the facility. I was lucky that I got there at just the right time. Everything was set up and ready to go and our birds ended up being processed as soon as I dropped them off.

  We were able to pick up beautifully packaged, vacuum sealed bird two days later that we didn't have to pluck ourselves (that's the best part!). We ate one ourselves, the dogs got the few older birds, and a some of our regular egg customers snapped up the rest!

~~~

Special thanks to all our customers who purchased these ducks from us! I hope you enjoyed them as much as we did ours!

Pillow fight

See all those white spots in the pasture?

Those are all little white feathers. 

I think it's pretty clear that our birds have been molting.

That or someone has been having pillow fights 

in our pastures after dark and not inviting us!