Sugar Creek Farm

aka, “Mystery on Sugar Creek”

Matt and Olivia were out in the pasture yesterday, trying to separate a wiley heifer that had broken out of the stocker calves’ part of the pasture and into the mama cows’ part of the pasture, when they stumbled upon this treasure alongside the creek.

Surely the multiple floods unearthed this unusual find. The question is, where did it come from? How did an ocean artifact – and a large one at that – find it’s way into a creek in the middle of the country, about as far away from an ocean as you can get?

It’s remarkably sized, and remarkably intact. Is it just someone else’s vacation souveneir, washed from their home in these epic floods? Could be. But the top part of the shell looks like it has started to fossilize. Would that indicate that the shell has been buried in the silty bottom of Sugar Creek for many, many years, finally brought to the surface by the flood waters?

The mystery remains…where do you think it came from?

3 years ago:

Just as beautiful as a bouquet of flowers

Say what? My firstborn is a teenager? I haven’t quite come to grips with it.

She’ll be starting 8th grade in a few weeks. She’s happy to be at the top of the food chain of middle school. I’m already dreading next year when I’ll have a high schooler. Granted, she’s young for her grade. We could have sent her to pre-K, but we were afraid she’d be bored academically. And we never expected her to be an athlete, so we weren’t concerned about her physically being smaller than her peers.

I mean, look at this little girly girl!

She was such a girly girl that she absolutely refused to wear bluejeans until about third grade. Once, when I was behind on laundry^*, all that was clean was a pair of jeans. I made her put them on, and then she cried and cried and said, “I look like a boy!” So we pulled out the least dirty outfit she owned and she wore that to school.

So can you blame us for never imagining that we’d spend our summer days watching this:

Or our fall days at volleyball meets, our mid-winter days at basketball games, our late-winter days at volleyball meets, our spring days at track meets, and some more volleyball thrown into summer for good measure?

She does still have the girly girl element going on, always tying a cute ribbon of some kind around her ponytail.

She’s a hard worker, a good friend, a gifted singer. We couldn’t ask for a more wonderful daughter. (Yet somehow we lucked out and got 2, but I’ll save that for the other one’s birthday 2 months from today!)

Happy Birthday, Maddog!

And one more just for fun:

^*(I can’t even type that without laughing…yeah, right, just that one time, a long time ago, when somehow I was behind on laundry. What I remember about the day Madeline was born was that we had no clean clothes at home and my mom came over and did hours and hours of laundry and had it all done when we came home from the hospital. And last week, when I wrote about being behind on my laundry, my mom called me up and offered^** to come over and do laundry for me. In 13 years, some things haven’t changed!)

^**(Even though it was extremely generous of my mom to offer to do my laundry, I didn’t take her up on her offer. Because I would have felt like a big loser. Instead I taught Madeline to do the laundry, complete with step-by-step written instructions taped to the wall, and she got it all caught up and saved us. Why doesn’t that make me feel like a loser? I don’t know.)

2 years ago:

Twelve

The long-awaited day has arrived – our story in Country Gardens magazine hit the newsstands! I knew it was supposed to be this week, so I actually went to the store looking for it last night. No luck, so I grilled the teenagers working there about when the magazines are restocked. “Tuesdays usually,” came the reply (along with a funny look.)

So Madeline and I headed back to the local “Food Pride” grocery tonight:

There it was! Right beneath the National Enquirer.

And there’s our story! Yes, I showed it to everyone I knew in the checkout line. And also people I don’t know.

And here it is at the checkout, along with the butter we needed for our bacon-chive mashed potatoes tonight.

You just never know where blogging might lead you 🙂

4 years ago:

OLS Week 5

Flowers from last week’s farmers market

I haven’t really had a lot to say about the farm lately, have I? That’s mostly because things are relatively quiet around here. Which is good, since June & July are so busy for our kids!

Sure, the pasture has flooded 3 times (and fence has been rebuilt 3 times.) There’s one particular steer that has somehow wound up in the garden. Twice. The third batch of 150 chicks arrived today. But nobody’s calving or farrowing, the garden is just starting to crank into high gear, chores are the easiest and least time-consuming of any time of the year.

One thing we’ve been dealing with is these crazy grain markets. It’s not really possible to try and time anything – if the animals are hungry they’ve got to be fed, even if corn is $7.03/bu today. Yes, we really did pay $7.03/bu for a load of corn last month. In the month of June we made 3 feed purchases from our local elevator. Between the first and last purchases corn went up $1/bu, and soybean meal went up $3.20/hundred. I about passed out when I opened our bill. How to deal with such rapid and dramatic increases in our costs?

We didn’t raise prices on chickens last year, and we should have raised them 20 cents/#. So this year we raised them 30 cents/#. As the price of grain has risen this summer we’ve raised our price on chicken 2 more times, 10 cents/# each time. So now we’re 50 cents/# over what we were last year. And part of me feels bad about that, because I know what it’s like to try and feed a family on a budget. The lovely thing is that people are entirely understanding. “Well of course you have to raise your prices,” they say.

Despite the increases in price we’ve made, we’re making half the profit per bird we used to 3 or 4 years ago. So even with grain prices back down a bit lately, we probably won’t readjust our chicken price downward.

We’re waiting to set a final on-the-hoof price for pork and beef until closer to butchering time, when we can see what we’ve got into them. But it’s hard when people inquire about ordering a whole hog or quarter of beef. Of course they want to know what it’s going to cost them, and I hate saying “I don’t know yet.”

The main farm activity right now is attending our 2 farmers markets. With the economy I wasn’t sure what kind of year we would have there. We’re first-timers at our Saturday market, so it’s hard to tell. But this is our second year at our Friday market, and we’ve already exceeded last year’s total gross sales and net profit for the entire season. This is encouraging, especially considering how much our feed and gas costs have increased over last year. Of course looking at gross sales is a little bit flukey, because simply raising prices increases your gross sales for the same amount of meat. And of course net profit is probably the most important, but doesn’t give you a true picture of sales volume.

One thing I haven’t done is compare total pounds of meat sold last year compared to this year. I know it’s higher, but the computer scientist me wants some numbers. Matt’s been keeping track of this year’s pounds, number of packages, and gross sales broken down by beef, pork & chicken and also by market location broken down by week. So Madeline’s going to input last year’s numbers into a spreadsheet for me and then we can compare. I think for our business pounds of meat sold will be the truest measure of our business for year-to-year comparisons.

So that’s the state of the farm, so far this farmer’s market season! The unpredictable grain markets get me down, but our farmer’s market customers keep me optimistic. I’ve got a few ideas in my head about possible changes to our business for next year. But that will have to wait for another post 🙂

2 years ago:

Salad bar

We have this thing with our neighbor. We trade cats. Last week they gave us kittens, whose mother we gave them as a kitten. Follow?

Prince Louie and Princess Sonia will hopefully catch many mice in the years to come. For now their chief task is imbuing our front porch with cuteness.

3 years ago:

Rubbing elbows

So backing up a little… One of the tasks we slipped in before the craziness of the county fair was the pre-breeding work with the cattle. It’s a task my brother always helps us with, and as it turned out the stars just happened to align our schedules on the afternoon of July 4th.

The little bull calves become steers, and everyone – calves, cows and bull – gets vaccinated. And the bull finally gets let out of his bachelor pad to begin his duties.

The first step was getting the cows and calves rounded up out of the pasture and up into the yard. No pictures here, because I was out there doing my cowgirl thing. I’m the first to tell you, I’m not much of a cowgirl. I was raised on a hog farm. But all in all that part went pretty smoothly. Then we gate-cut the cows back out into the pasture, leaving the calves behind. That part wasn’t going so smoothly, but fortunately my brother showed up about that time and came to my rescue right about the time I was ready to drop into the fetal position right there in the cattle yard.

Then we ran the calves into the alleyway of the corncrib, where the chute was waiting at the end. Getting a calf to enter the chute, going the right direction, without any of his herdmates along, is harder than it looks! You have to give them just enough of an opening at the end of the chute that they think freedom is right there, and at the right moment catch them in a sort of head lock.

Then Matt holds the tail up, while my brother does the banding.

If I do say so myself, we’ve got some real good-doing calves. Look how big they are already! I think this is probably Dimitry

This is really a 3-person job, but my dad was screening his calls busy that day so I was sort of his stand-in. Initially Matt wanted me to stand in the alleyway behind that little herd of wiley calves. I scoffed at him. So he did it, and this is what happened to him:

One particular calf kicked at him 9 times, and on the 10th time finally nailed him in the shin. This swelled up and turned all sorts of pretty colors the next day. That particular calf’s mother may be on the list for culling this fall.

Olivia got enlisted to help, since Madeline quickly volunteered to babysit Rafe plus my brother’s punks. As always, she dresses awfully nice for farm chores.

This is her “EWWWWW, you’re doing WHAT to those calves?!?” look.

This is her “Seriously?!?” look.

And this is her “No, really!” look.

Now the bull doesn’t really fit through that chute. So the plan was for Matt to run him into the alleyway, where my brother would reach over the top of the alleyway wall and shoot him. At this point Olivia & I hightailed it into the crib, scaredy cats that we are, where I took these pictures through the slats in the crib.

As you can see, the bull was not real down with that plan. But eventually human persevered over bovine, shots were administered, and Mr. Bull finally got his Independence Day and was back with his harem.

2 years ago

Well that was interesting

I think this duck has taken on more than she can handle. Reminds me of myself these days! Fortunately for her, a hen came along and is now sitting on all of these eggs with her. Wonder if I can get a hen to come and help with my laundry…

1 year ago:

OLS Week 3 (or, “Swiss Chard, not sure I like ye”)

The fair is over for another year, and it was a hectic, exhausting, fun week! Here’s some highlights:

Olivia’s first year in 4-H, and first horse show – a 2-day event. She and I also did our first overnight in the horse barn. The horse 4-H club does night patrols of the fairgrounds, so we had fun riding horses around in the middle of the night.

She came away with 8 blues and 4 reds.

And a trophy for “Tallest horse with the shortest rider.” At one point in the show the announcer asked if she was getting tired yet, climbing on and off that big horse!

She did pretty well, considering how many of their workouts were cancelled due to rain. There were some classes she’d never even seen until the day of the show, and had to just watch the senior class and figure out what she was supposed to do. Now she’s got things to work on for next year. And she’s already lobbying for a new horse, that’s just a little bit younger and a little bit faster.

We’ll have a new marketing slogan now – Sugar Creek Farm Purple Ribbon Beef! Olivia took our best 3 steers and entered a Stocker Pen of 3. She was, of course, the only “All Natural” producer. The judge took note of her 2.04-pound daily rate of gain, remarking that was real good for natural beef and gave her a purple ribbon (compared to the commodity producers who had something like a 3.8.)

Madeline earned 4 blue ribbons in the swine show.

Olivia entered Ike in the dog show this year – his 4th year of showing – and won Junior Best in Show for Obedience, and Junior Best Handler.

Ava, on the other hand, will need another year of work to become the show dog that her “brother” is! So Madeline’s got some things to work on, too.

Rafe was understandably tired of attending all these shows by the end of the week. He remarked sadly, “Nobody watches me do anything.” But then he found out that his open class broccoli entry won a Best in Show purple ribbon. That helped 🙂

Madeline, singing the National Anthem before the Leadership League (which she’s a member of) and County Council inductions. She also sang in Share-the-Fun again this year, but didn’t get picked for state fair this time around. I’ll try and get the video of her performance posted to You Tube soon – she did really awesome, but I guess just wasn’t what this particular judge was looking for.

So it’s a wrap, and the girls are already thinking ahead to next year!

4 years ago:

Rain, rain, come this way

We’re under a little hiatus here during our county fair this week. We’ll be back once the craziness subsides. You can check out our fair here!

County Fair, 2005:

Last week the second batch of 150 broiler chickens went to the processor. (And I’m happy to say that batch one had already sold out at farmers market the week before!)

There’s a lot of handling with chickens. They can’t be herded like the hogs or cattle – you basically have to handle them one at a time.

First we unpack them from the hatchery boxes into the brooder. At 3-1/2 weeks we load them from brooder to trailer, and then from trailer to pasture pen. At butchering time we load them from pasture pen to trailer, and then from trailer to cages at the processing plant. The next day we load the chilled birds from the processing plant into the car, and then from the car into racks at the locker to be frozen. The next day after that we pick them up frozen from the locker and load them into the car, and once home we load them from the car into our freezers.

At butchering time here’s the system we’ve developed for wrangling the birds into the trailer. First we run a hog panel from one edge of their shed out to the perimeter fencing. Here’s Olivia holding up the panel (and looking rather nicely dressed considering the task at hand):

Then we run another hog panel from the other edge of their shed out to the opposite side of the perimiter fencing. This limits the space the birds have to get away from us. Matt’s holding up this panel while Rafe contemplates which chicken will be next in the trailer. Rafe likes to wear heavy gloves – those chickens can scratch!

The kids usually take turns between holding up fence panels and catching chickens. Madeline has a strong dislike for chickens and is usually the loudest complainer. I tried to sell her on the fact that chicken wrangling is a good workout for her arm and shoulder muscles, and she can probably thank those chickens for improving her softball pitch. But I don’t think she bought it. (In fact she’s not even in these pictures because she volunteered to do all the hog and cattle chores for Matt just so that she could get out of at least part of loading the chickens!)

The trailer is backed up right outside the fence and we place them inside, one at a time.

Once at the processor the kids and I catch them in the trailer and hand them to Matt, who puts them in the processor’s cages. He gets the raw end of the deal, because the birds tend to poop on him as they’re being put in the cages.

Definitely a team effort, and all that labor makes those birds all the more tastier!

3 years ago: