Today is the first day of May.  Spring has been here a few weeks, it’s time for new beginnings. The grass is growing, calving season is over,  we have one group of chickens almost done and another group almost half way. It’s a beautiful site to look out the front window and see all the baby calves playing in the lush green pastures.  Nothing is as relaxing to sit on the front porch and look out at what God has blessed us with.

Another new beginning for us this year will be Turkeys. We are only doing one group of them for Thanksgiving. We are asking for deposits on them to help offset the startup on them and to make sure we don’t end up with a bunch of them taking up valuable freezer space. If you are interested in one, let us know, we will take orders till Mid-July, after that there will be no guarantee if we can provide one.

I posted an article on our FB page about Tyson cutting antibiotics in their products. We do not feed any antibiotics for a couple reasons. One is we don’t believe in it. We want the cleanest meat possible for both ourselves and our customers. The other main reason is that our animals don’t need it. It might not make them grow as fast, but the flavor is so much greater when they are given time to mature and absorb all the nutrients from their pasture. We will periodically treat an animal if they get sick, but that is very seldom, maybe 1 in 50 animals.

Summer will be here shortly, by the end of the month, we will already be thinking about and getting ready for winter. We typically start cutting hay around Memorial Day. We will also be into our breeding season for the cows. From Memorial Day to the 4th of July is by far our busiest time on the farm. We artificial breed most of our cows over this 35-40 day time period. this requires a good bit of time, checking heat, rounding them up on an almost daily basis, and breeding them.  We artificial breed so we can use the best grass based genetics available.  We couldn’t afford to buy one of the bulls we use ($10,000+), but by artificial breeding I can breed them all for just a few hundred dollars, and use multiple bulls.

Don’t forget, Farmers Market season starts tomorrow.