Back in the Egg Biz Big Time, Woods Pigs, Sleek Cattle, Goats, Vermont Farm Visit & More!

At long last, we’re on a much better trajectory for our egg operation than any point in the last year! And the pigs are still doing great in the woods, the cattle are fat and absolutely glistening on summer forage and the goat herd continues to thrive on lush pastures, too. Plus some insights from visiting Maple Wind Farm in Vermont.

After a rough stretch with our laying hens, it’s nice to see our walk in cooler filled up again and to be making eggs deliveries to lots of old and new wholesale customers! In addition to Celtica Bakery, Levee Baking Co., La Boulangerie, Le Moyne Bistro, Peche and Plates restaurants and the Well Cafe at the Spyre Center, Flour Moon Bagels joined the egg roster last week!

Over nine years of having chickens on our farm land, many of those years constantly adding more birds to meet demand for eggs, we found that the sweet spot for us is three separate flocks of roughly 400-500 birds per flock.

There was a point where we ran two mobile coops next to each other, but we decided that with our periods of heavy rainfall and soil type, we are better off with maxing out at 500 birds per field so they don’t make as much impact on a small area of land before moving them on to the next section. We use four pieces of electric net fence at a time, for quarter acre grids each rotation.

As we settled into these three flocks, we also eventually settled into replacing one flock per year, getting new chicks in all at once in the late winter or early spring. That way they would grow up and start laying by late summer and be laying large size eggs by the fall, when the older birds started to slow down their production due to molting and declining daylight hours.

It was nice to just be ordering birds from a hatchery and dealing with the post office shipping the chicks just once a year and to be getting the volume price breaks for ordering 450-550 chicks at a time.

But last year, we ran into some major flaws of this system. As I have written about in the past, the flock we got as day-old chicks in February 2022 were problematic as soon as we put them out on pasture. Like all the flocks before, we raised them first in our brooders for a few weeks and then our hoophouse until they started laying.

They immediately started flying over and burrowing under the net fence to forage and lay their eggs in the tall cogon grass along the ditch. It seemed like a temporary problem, adjusting to being out on pasture and we just kept putting them back in at night.

But the problems continued. Knowing what I know now, I wish we would have immediately rounded up all the birds that regularly got out and sold them. Contained in an enclosed backyard coop at night, they would have done fine as backyard layers.

But we needed the eggs and we figured we could train them and they’d settle in like all the birds before!

They didn’t settle in. A portion of them kept getting out and they’d apparently fly out after we put them back in at night. And that started bringing in more and more predators. Those birds got picked off and eventually the predators started being bolder, going under the electric net fences at night.

Through the winter, spring and early summer, we added additional electric fence around each flock, set more and more traps and Grant even had to do some night hunting stints.

Things are now much more under control! And for the first time in years, as well, we got older birds in some another farm in Florida. These hens came to us at 16 weeks and started laying about 6 weeks later.

They are now responsible for the majority of our eggs, with a laying rate of more than 75%, even in this brutal heat.

The other thing we evaluated in the doldrums of not having enough eggs was whether relying on one hatchery order a year still made sense.

We decided to get a large incubator and play around with hatching eggs here, particularly to be able to replace birds throughout the year if we lost several at once to predators. We brought in a few trial batches of hatching eggs from another farm who has a breeding flock of heritage crosses that they’ve selected to do well on pasture (i.e. be good foragers and be smart with aerial predation). We’ve had some solid, successful hatches from those! And we sold those to cash flow the cost of the incubator and the eggs.

Then we got a much larger batch of eggs from the same farm and had another great hatch with those. We sold all the young roosters and now the young pullets are now 10 weeks old and moved into an upgraded deep litter hoophouse that we used to use for pigs. We will raise them in there until they start laying.

Meanwhile, we also pulled off our own breeding flock of Barred Rock hens and roosters. We’ve hatched two rounds of eggs from them and loaded another round in the incubator last week.

All in all, we’re back to the egg production we’d like to see this time of year and now have more young pullets hatched here waiting in the wings to start laying as the other birds slack off a bit come fall and winter.

With farming, there’s always more potential curveballs, but we’re looking forward to a bit more stability and control of our flocks than with our past practices! And that means a more steady supply of eggs for you, the fellow farmers we sell to and our restaurant and bakery partners.

Next up, we are planning to update our coops to a new design. Stay tuned on that!

The pigs are living it up the best they can in the peak of summer. The breeder group — our three sows and our boar — is still in a thick section of pines and shrubs, with a ton of cogon grass to root up.

There’s been a few times in the last week where I’ve wondered where they are and found them in the back corner intently rooting and apparently so focused that I startled them just by approaching! I’ve looked around at the plants in the area and I do think it’s the cogon grass’s rhizome root system they’re eating! Which is exactly why we have them here right now, so win win.

Their piglets (who of course aren’t really piglets anymore), are continuing their march along a tree line section on the opposite side of the farm and they seem to be as happy as can be for the peak of summer, too!

We’re finally getting close to processing more beef soon. They’ve been ready for awhile, but we have so much lush summer forage and not quite a budget to buy in more steers at these historically high cattle and beef prices.

I plan to dive into this in more depth on a future blog, but the beef cattle are the only enterprise where the commodity market and pricing trends do affect an operation like hours. At least because we did not have the capital to buy a large breeding herd to start and generally it makes much more sense financially to buy steers to finish on grass than to have enough grass and land for a mama cow, her calf and her previous one or two calves that are still putting on weight. And this is even more true when you have soil that needs a lot of recovery from decades of abuse.

So the herd is making one more lap around the farm and when they make it back to the paddock with the loading corral in a few weeks, we will bring in some very glossy and fat steers for steaks and roasts and all the cuts, as well a cull cow or two for plenty of ground beef.

Grant has continued to mow the fields behind the goats, as well. Initially he wanted to play around with clipping just twice a year, but we’ve seen so many positives out of it, that he is continuing with this practice after every goat rotation this summer.

We move the cattle through first to take their pick of the best grasses and forbs and then the goats follow behind a few days to weeks after. They go after more of the vines, shrubs, saplings and brush as well as some of the remaining grasses and forbs.

And then Grant mows the field. We have so much really stemmy, woody plants (including stems where the goats strip all the leaves off, but don’t eat or knock down the stem) that laying all that down as mulch and letting more grasses grow back really seems to help with our pasture development.

Because we don’t have that many cattle right now, there would be some thought about making hay out of some of the fields, but the reality is that the quality of that hay still isn’t where it would need to be to justify the cost of making it and laying it all down as mulch still has a much higher value as organic matter for the soil than reaping off the hay. Eventually that may change!

My beloved goat herd is continuing to impress me this summer with their hardiness and health, including all the late born kids!

And because we have fewer cattle and not a much of a budget to replace them, it is coming in handy to at least have a larger goat herd than we’ve had in several years to keep up with all the forage.

The goats have gone through our first two major fields the past two weeks and they’re currently in the field with Flock 3. We had such beautiful and tall stands of milo growing that we had to cut in front of the flock so there wasn’t too much intimating tall grass for them. And it also helps ensure they don’t lay their eggs in secret nests that we don’t discover until it’s too late!

So the goats’ night time corral is at one side of the field where everything is shorter from recent chicken rotations, but they spend most of day grazing on the opposite side of the field where things are taller. And of course, they spend the peak of the afternoon in the shade of the willow and pines.

Two weeks ago, a big reason we went to Vermont was to finally visit our friends at Maple Wind Farm. We met Bruce and Beth, along with a few other Vermont farmer at the National Grazing Lands Coalition Conference in Myrtle Beach in 2021 and have stayed in touch since, especially since they are also involved with the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association (APPPA), too.

The visit was great since Maple Wind is just five minutes down the road from our friends’ house where we were staying.

Maple Wind has grown veggies, produced maple syrup and raised cattle, pigs, sheep and more over the years, but these days, their main focus is poultry — egg layers, broilers and turkeys.

They also have a USDA processing plant on farm for their poultry and they process for 30 other farms in the New England area, as well.

It’s always great to connect with likeminded farmers and see their operations and all the tweaks and changes they’ve made of the years. Iron sharpens iron, as they say!

The most interesting thing for me was their upgraded coops for their egg layers, where the net fence moves with the coop, saving a ton of labor. Three Brothers Farm in Wisconsin seems to have started this model and they have presented on it at the APPPA conference. With our flat ground, it would be a possibility and something to look into.

Finally, who doesn’t love flowers? I love the swamp mallow that grows wild all over the farm right now — the blossoms look like okra flowers since they’re both in the hibiscus family!

And my zinnias in my little house garden are still going off, joined by some cheery sunflowers.