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

May was one of our biggest months ever as far as farm stats go as well as overall progress to the business. We covered all of our monthly operation costs, plus 39%! Many of you saw that we now offer extended local delivery as well as nationwide shipping! This was a huge leap for the business with the biggest hurdles being sourcing boxes, insulators, and ice packs for a decent price. The barrier to entry was very big because of the minimum order requirement for supplies, but we'll certainly be well-stocked on supplies for a while! Our first shipping orders will be going out this week to some friends and family just to test the integrity of the insulators. One delivery will go to the Texas panhandle, and one to Missouri. This is the perfect time to test things out as it's starting to get hot outside. Let's get into this month's stats.

We sold:

•  10 lbs of chicken
  
•  12 lbs of beef
  
•  57 lbs of pork
  
•  75 dozen eggs
  
•  6 dozen duck eggs
  
•  5 jars of lard, 1 jar of chicken broth

We gave away:

•  5 packages of duck eggs

•  2 jars of lard
  
•  56 dozen chicken eggs
  
  ... whoa, time out! Why are we giving stuff away??

Good question. Eggs are simply hard to sell now that egg prices have stabilized in the grocery stores. We're still selling roughly 70-80 dozen eggs per month, which hasn't changed. But the hens are laying WAY more now in the summer months, and so our market reach is saturated. We were short on our regular supply of eggs for the Argyle market, so we certainly could have made those sales there, but we only had 14 dozen available that day, mostly because we gave away 41 dozen the week before to all the vendors from the Sanger market. To be honest, we barely had room in the fridge to bring that many home and hold them for another week, plus all the eggs the hens would lay that week (we're getting 50 dozen or so per week!). So we gave away eggs to customers and vendors all day. We've also started feeding dozens to the pigs and dogs. We just don't have room for all of them knowing that we can't seem to sell more than 80 dozen per month. It's a pretty big hit to our overall sales, yes, but we made a lot of people happy those days we gave away dozens. Eggs just don't sell as well at the Sanger market, so we were simply overstocked. It's about $400 of missed sales, but we still had a banger of a month even without it!

Animals:

•  56 turkey poults hatched, 21 turkey poults were sold. We have lots of turkey poults right now with dozens more in the incubator! (If you're a local farm raising turkeys for Thanksgiving customers, reach out to us... we offer a 65% discount on turkey poults to other producers for bulk poult purchases!)
  
  
•  A batch of broilers is going to the butcher this week! We'll be fully restocked on chicken this Friday, but not by much. We've lost 30% of the birds in this batch and it was a small batch to begin with. Most were lost to rain and the birds not getting under their shelter. If these had been Freedom Rangers, they would have survived. But we've only been able to get Cornish Cross, and they're extra dumb, and extra delicate because they don't feather out like normal chickens. Another batch will go to the butcher June 26th. In fact, after these two batches of cornish, we will never raise them again. They're too inconsistent. We were just trying to get any chicken we could into the pipeline since we couldn't get Freedom Rangers this spring.
  
  
•  Cows, cows, cows! We acquired some new females for our herd. One is bred and the other has a calf at her side. That was the calf that got stepped on by his mama shortly after arriving. It wasn't ideal for both of them to travel that soon, but we were trying to help out as the farm they came from was flooding. The calf has made a full recovery with a minimal limp. We also brought on 2 more steers from other Dexter breeders for our beef pipeline. Both have low tenderness scores, so both will be destined for ground beef only. Both have about a year of growing to do. We certainly have the grass to feed them this year! We're up to 14 head, including Elvis, our bull.
  
  
•  Our two new breeding female Dexters got their tenderness scores back and both scored 6's. This is reasonable, and expected, and can certainly produce good beef in their offspring! We bought these two females just for their muscle capacity and milk production as our other females lack muscle bulk. Hopefully, we can target better hanging weights on future steers through these girls.
  
  
•  We are sending our 28 month old steer to the butcher on June 25th. He had a decent tenderness score of a 6, so he will be made into all cuts. We will be fully restocked on beef mid-July!
  
  
•  One of our unregistered female goats had a blown teat, which meant an increased risk for mastitis. We opted to take her to the butcher instead of selling her and making her into someone else's problem. We won't get much meat off of her, but we did get her pelt to a taxidermist to make into a rug. She had a gorgeous pelt. RIP Snookie. 

•  We weaned our last set of baby goats for the season. We're keeping 4 females to grow out for breeding, one buck that we wethered to be a buddy for Prince and Topaz (our breeding bucks), and one doeling with a teat deformity that we will grow out for meat. Her mama was the one we took to the butcher, so we likely caught a breedable defect in time and removed it from our breeding stock so that those defects don't get sold to customers buying goat kids from us.
• Elvis, our new bull is here to get some final show prep training for the upcoming National Dexter Show in Oklahoma! He sure is gorgeous!

We introduced our 2nd breeding boar for our Kunekune herd! Kai had a rough start here and injured his back either in transport, or shortly after arriving here. With the help of our vet, he made a full recovery. We were afraid he would be expensive meat for our personal freezer. We got lucky. We'll also be pulling hairs on him to send in for his tenderness tests. There's a good chance he'll score well just like the rest of our herd!

Business News:

•  Of course, the biggest news of the month was our announcement of extended delivery to all of DFW, Texas, and nationwide!
  
  
•  Google reviews were given by several of our regular customers and we couldn't be more appreciative! In fact, they all got a free item in exchange for their reviews! Thank you, all! 
  
  
•  I completely overhauled our website as well as descriptions for all of our products. This was to help boost our SEO and help us appear in more local search results for pasture raised meats in north Texas. It has already helped a lot and boosted our Google interactions by 98%, website clicks by 165%, directions requests by 60%, and sales by 0%! 

 All in due time, I'm sure. The problem with any small business is getting people to notice we exist, especially without a storefront. We'll get there.

We're sailing into June in anticipation of the National Dexter Show in 3 weeks. We'll be taking Elvis with us and hopefully, he'll be ready for the show ring in time. Otherwise, he'll be there in the barn for everyone to look at and admire. He is going to be an outstanding bull!

We'll see you all at next month's stats update!