From the Horse's Mouth: February Farm Status Report

Good morning, Foodie Rebels! February was another amazing month for us, though not as spectacular as January as far as an income report on the meat sales goes, but it still turned into a great month! For February, 73% of our operating costs were covered by meat and egg sales. While that left us short, it was supplemented with the sale of ALL of our goat kids born on the farm in December and January, plus some! If you include the sale of those goat kids, 100% of our monthly operating costs were covered, plus 50%! Half of that income pays us back by 50% with the cost to care for the mama goats during pregnancy and nursing while the other 50% is profit. While I'm not a fan of covering operating costs with livestock sales, it does exist as a way to prop up the meat business during slow downs. Let's get into the stats.

We sold:

• 75 dozen eggs
• 20lbs of chicken and beef
• 8 goat kids
• 2 yearling keeper does from last year (one turned out to be pregnant!)
• 1 broken towable seed spreader for dirt cheap

We traded:

• 1 doe kid born here for a buck kid to be a future herd sire for us from KD KIDS 

Births:

• 4 doe kids
• 4 kunekune piglets
• All of these were born during that nasty cold snap and ALL survived! 

We processed:

• 3 wether goats for meat for our freezer
• 1 female breeding emu that just had to do something stupid and get herself unalivedIn all, we downsized by 14 goats this month and added 4 more doelings that were born! We plan to downsize more and get out of unregistered goats completely, so 5 more will be leaving over the course of the next few months. We are keeping the 4 registerable doelings born this month as replacements for the mamas that are leaving.

Improvements:

• With the sale of all the goats kids, we invested in a nice tool to help with the hours of cleaning eggs by hand and purchased a Little Egg Scrubber to cut those hours down to minutes, especially with market days coming up quickly.
• We retired 11 breeding quality heritage breed hens and 2 roosters 6 months early and donated them to Reed Chicken Ranch for a young entrepreneur's breeding program and replaced them with 10 Production Red laying age pullets from Wise County Chicken Farm to boost our egg production.
• After getting results of our soil tests for our pastures, we spread 1000lbs of Kansas Gray Salt and 1000lbs of bentonite clay onto all of our pastures to slightly raise the soil pH and to replace some of the minerals that we are deficient in.
• We purchased 1 metal framed chicken tractor that was in disrepair for dirt cheap to keep scaling up our meat production.
• We burned some more fallen tree branches, skeletons of 2 deer that Sadie drug under the fence and onto our property, and some other wood scraps to make another 10 gallons of biochar for our soil.
• We joined the AKKPS - The American KuneKune Pig Society Exclusive Breeder list for our pigs!

Looking forward in March:

• The Downtown Sanger Farmers Market starts back up! We'll see you on Saturday, March 15th!
• We are sending 2 hogs to the processor on Tuesday this week, so we'll be fully restocked on pork by mid-month, and *maybe* in time for the Sanger market.
• We have 50 cornish cross chicks coming in the mail this week and should be fully restocked on chicken by the end of April. (We tried to get Freedom Rangers again, but when we went to order, they were sold out for the next 6 months!)
• Dave from Big Little Farm will be here at the end of March to spray his worm tea fertilizer when the grass comes back.
• We will begin doing rotational grazing again by the end of this month with the cows, pigs, and chickens when the grass starts to come in.
• We collected hair samples from our 3 calves born this past fall to see where their tenderness scores fall.
• We also collected hair samples from our 4 breeding hogs to do the same tenderness and other production traits on genetic markers. We'll see results for all of these samples by April.
• We started incubating our keeper turkey's eggs so that we can pay to feed the breeders and supply our own turkeys for our Thanksgiving meat sales this year! We almost didn't have turkey last year because the hatchery we ordered from had to put down most of their flocks for bird flu in June. We got lucky and were still able to get some and held onto 6 to breed for this year.It was a busy month, and a productive month and March will be no different.

A HUGE thank you goes to all of our customers supporting our meat program and another big thank you goes to all of the families who purchased goats from us this month! We value your support and especially those of you who are repeat customers (which has been most of you!)

We also went from 1300 followers to 1400 followers on Facebook in February! I think Facebook is being more relaxed and not throttling farm pages as much as it used to. I've put no effort into growing followers for over 6 months, and they just started flowing in. Some are local individuals, most are other farms like us. Thank you for following us and we hope to be an inspiration on your journeys! 

Have an amazing month, and we'll talk again for the April stat report!

#dfw #dfwfoodie #dallasfortworth