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

Hello, Foodie Rebels! March was another amazing month for our farm. 

For March, 99.5% of our operating costs were covered by meat and egg sales! We also saw another revenue steam come online in March via the sale of our turkey eggs hatching. The sale of 8 turkey poults may not mean much, and really if you look at the cost to feed our 6 breeding birds, it only covered their feed costs by about 50% for the month, but we'll be able to make that back come Thanksgiving. We also sold some unused equipment and some unregistered nanny goats, which pushed our revenue to a 25% surplus for the month. In reality, it was just recovering some of what we had put into those, but it was still revenue. A big boost this month came from the start of the 2025 farmers markets, and it was a help because our feed costs on our pigs has gone up for a couple of reasons, not related to feed prices. We have 2 more ready to butcher hogs eating too much and they went to freeze camp on April 7th. Pebbles was also eating A LOT to keep up her milk production for her piglets. Those two things alone have pushed our feed bill up a lot this past month. We normally go through a ton of hog feed every 6-8 weeks. It's now lasting 4 weeks. That will correct itself now that the piglets have begun to wean and the last 2 hogs were processed. Let's get into last month's stats.

We sold:

• 51 dozen eggs (egg sales have slowed and we now have surplus for the farmers markets!)
• 3 dozen duck eggs
• 70lbs of chicken
• 16lbs of beef
• 24lbs of pork
• 3 quarts of chicken broth
• 8 turkey poults
• 1 wood chipper we no longer needed
• 1 small animal scale we no longer needed
• 3 unregistered nanny goats
• We traded: $150 worth of pork and beef for 4 truck loads of mulch for our composting operations

Births/Hatches:

• 3 goat kids
• 12 F10 (10th generation) Olive Egger chicks from Burberry Homestead
• 17 experimental cross breeding of chickens of our own
• 8 Black Spanish turkey poults

Improvements:

• We got test results back for our 3 Dexter calves that were born this past fall. The 2 heifers look good and scored appropriately on their tenderness tests (one a 6 and the other a 9 - jackpot!) The bull calf scored a 6 and will be moving into the beef program for fall 2026 butchering.
• We also got the test results back on our breeding pigs and we won the lottery again on genetics! They scored 7, 9, and two scored prefect 10's on tenderness! We couldn't be more happy!
• Our friends at Happy Harvest Kitchen rendered 40lbs of our pork fat into lard for sale! It's a new product for us and I hope everyone likes having the work taken out of the equation for them! I also made the most cringe video ever announcing it. I'm a farmer. Not a marketer.
• Dave from Big Little Farm came and sprayed his organic fertilizer on the pasture for our first spring application. Now if only we could get some rain, we might get some grass! Things are thin right now and we're still feeding hay to the cows! We had foot tall grass at this time last year.
• That said, rotational grazing for the cows hasn't started yet. The chickens were moved out of our garden after more repairs to the wheel system of the 2nd chicken tractor. We made some major repairs to our big chicken tractor this past month. If we tried to move it, it was going to tear it apart. I don't recommend building 12ft x 12ft wooden chicken tractors. They're too heavy and break down too quickly. The little chicken tractor needed the same wheel system upgrade.
• We started inoculating all of the biochar we've been making. This will be mixed in with our compost to help super-charge it and add a lot of carbon back into the soil. 

Looking forward in April:

• The Argyle Tx Farmers Market starts back up! It was good to see you on Saturday, April 12th!
• We are sending 2 more hogs to the processor on Monday this coming week, so we'll be well stocked on pork for the next few months. We're also looking for another freezer to buy!
• We have 15 Peroquet de Terre chicks coming in the mail the last week of April. These are a newer breed of meat chickens that we will be poison testing to see if they're good enough for our meat program. Another order of cornish cross chicks from another hatchery will arrive around the end of April.
• We had our order for 50 cornish cross chicks cancelled several times by the hatchery in March due to low hatch rates, and then they suspended their hatches for the rest of the year. So our original plan to be fully restocked on all chicken cuts by the end of April went out the window. I'm not crying over it too bad because we still have half a freezer full from our October batch. It's just not everyone's favorite cuts. Much of the backs and feet are being sold to Happy Harvest Kitchen so that Ken can make and sell broth. He gets a nice discount and I get freezer space on something that is almost impossible to sell. Win-win.
• We put our bestest boy, Tank down at the beginning of March. Losing a doggo suddenly is the worst. He had a cancerous spleen that we didn't know about that had ruptured, and he went downhill fast. Our neighbors brought their skidsteer over and we buried Tank under the oak trees out front. 

It was a busy month, and a productive month and April 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 turkey poults from us this month! We value your support and especially those of you who are repeat customers (which has been most of you!)

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

#shoplocaldfw