From the Horse's Mouth: April 2025 Farm Status Report

April Farm Stats Update:

April felt like a slow month for us with only one farmers market and the two Sanger markets getting rained out. Egg prices have stabilized at the grocery stores and so egg sales have almost completely vanished for us except for our regular core customers (who we are very grateful to have!) April was also a big month for improving our farm by bringing in some new breeding stock to our herds, plus, lots of rain has made our pasture explode! We have knee-high grass in the front half of our property where we've run pastured chickens and turkeys for the first 2 years. The rest of the property has ankle-high grass at best. Birds make all the difference to your grass! The yard is about half an acre or a little more, and is where our egg laying flock was kept the first 2 years. The grass has exploded here as well and requires weekly mowing! We are currently running 175 chickens, turkeys, and ducks directly on pasture this year to try to get the rest of the property to match the front half's grass quality. Moving them daily has been an extreme challenge with all this rain. They are about a week behind the cows in rotation right now and have been staying 3-4 days at a time in some places. There's a balancing act at play with getting them moved at the right time to provide enough fertilization to the grass without them completely destroying it. Hopefully we can dry out a little! Something else I have noticed is now that the ground is saturated and water can only run-off and not soak in, there is 0 standing water on any of the areas where the birds were in previous years. It continues to soak into the ground whereas everywhere else has .5 inches to 2 inches of standing water that just slowly runs off downhill all day. Birds are key! Let's get into the stats.

In April, we sold:

• 56 dozen eggs
• 6 dozen duck eggs
• 19lbs of chicken
• 8lbs of pork
• 2lbs of beef
• 5 jars of lard
• 1 jar of chicken broth
• 19 baby turkey poults

Product sales were very thin due to no markets and eggs getting cheap at the grocery stores again. It was the sale of the turkey poults that helped push us to break-even on our expenses for the month without going into the red. There was a little bit of cash carry-over from the March surplus, so that helped, too. So glad I held onto some turkeys last year to breed!

Additions to the farm:

• We co-purchased a new Dexter bull name Elvis with our friends the Gentry's from Ballard Family Farm in Oklahoma! This was a huge win for both our herds as Elvis brings conformation, structure, muscle volume, and a tenderness score of 9 to our beef program! He's currently at the Gentry's covering their 2 heifers. We will also be taking him to the 2025 National Dexter Show in Oklahoma in June. Wish him luck! He's got some tough competition and none of us knows how to show!
• We also bought a back-up breeding boarling named Kaitoa (Kai for short) for our pig herd. I haven't posted about him because about a day after we brought him home, he had issues with his back legs and kept falling down. We took him to the vet and the vet suspected a back injury. We aren't sure how it happened, and he wasn't doing that when we picked him up. He's been on bed rest in the barn with Domino keeping him company with daily steroid and pain injections. He had his 10th and final dose yesterday and we haven't seen him fall since the first dose. He'll stay in the barn a few more days under observation before he moves back outside. Hopefully he's going to be ok and he can stay. Otherwise, he will be very expensive meat for our personal freezer.
• Bees! So full disclosure, I accidentally squished our hive queen last year while doing a hive inspection. The colony tried to recover and replace her, but it collapsed shortly after that. By that time, no colonies were available for sale without spending a whole heck of a lot more, so we waited until this year to replace them. This new colony is AGGRESSIVE as all get out! Nothing like the calm, gentle bees from last year. They're from the same breeder, so I don't know why these are so different. We've both been stung several times already. So these guys are going to be managed with minimal interaction. They're psycho.
• Broiler chickens! We had trouble getting broilers this year due to hatchery availability, so when Tractor Supply messed up and sent 700 chicks to a non-existent address at the Boyd post office, Cowtown Chicken Co. picked them up and we were able to purchase 50 Cornish Cross chicks from them! We have a processing date of June 5th for these guys and we'll be fully restocked on June 6th with all chicken cuts!
• One more steer! I picked up an 8 month old Dexter steer for the beef pipeline from a friend for a good price. We'll see how he turns out. He's very skinny on his frame and not from lack of groceries, just genetics that lack capacity. He may end up being ground beef only. That's why we named him Burger. He'll be on the menu in Fall of 2026.
• We took 2 more hogs to freezer camp at the beginning of April. Since our favorite butcher is no longer doing USDA inspected hogs, we've been trying new butchers. We got the pork back about a week ago and we have been very impressed by this new butcher's work. Plus, they offer several more options such as maple and Italian breakfast sausage as well as original and Jalapeño and cheddar summer sausage! And y'all, they're all to die for!
• We also had to add our 5th freezer to the garage. We have 2 freezers full of about 400lbs of pork! We also have under 100lbs of beef left from the 2 fall steers, and about 100lbs of chicken left from the October butcher. The least popular chicken cuts are left and we're having trouble moving them, even offering them at almost break-even price for 2 months didn't move them. We will be switching up what we select from the butcher when it comes to chicken in order to move the less desired cuts along.

Improvements:

• I had limited ability to do farm work in April due to getting pink eye for a couple of weeks. So while I could barely see, I sat at the computer and worked really hard on our SEO and product descriptions for several days. This was long over due and hopefully it will bring more traffic from Google to our website. Google also keeps listing us as a restaurant in searches. I'm not sure why, but hopefully I've fixed that.  Hopefully, more people will see that our farm is a source of clean, ethically raised, pastured meats in North Texas! ;)
• We've been asking our regulars for Google reviews to help boost us in local search results. We're up to 7 or 8 reviews now from our awesome regulars, and we couldn't be more grateful for their awesome and thoughtful reviews! You guys are rock stars!
• We did a giveaway via Facebook Live at the beginning of April to whoever could guess the combined weaning weight of the piglets from Pebbles' litter. Sydney Evans had the closest guess at 19lbs (actual weight was 28.25lbs!) She took home a pork ribeye for her guess! Congrats Sydney!

May is off to a rockin' start, but that's info for a month from now. Thank you all for your continued support! Keep rocking, foodie rebels!