Bringing Home Ducklings (for Future Eggs), Hens Ramping Up, Goat Antics, Shady Silvopastures for Cattle & Pigs

It’s been eventful couple of weeks on and off the farm with an American Pastured Poultry Producers Association event in Memphis, followed by bringing home ducklings from the hatchery that hosted the event, plus our new flock is finally ramping up their egg laying, the goats are grazing and browsing with a side of mischief and drama as usual and the piglets moved to a shady woods section, across the ditch from the cattle.

It can be tough to get off the farm for events and conferences, but man are we always glad when we do!

APPPA is a non-profit trade organization that encourages the production, processing, marketing, and purchasing of poultry raised on pasture. We’ve been involved since 2021 or so and have learned a lot from their annual conferences (Grant has spoken at a few, too) and maybe gotten even more out of the camaraderie with fellow pasture-based farmers.

Although egg laying hens is just one of several enterprises, typically the content of the conference covers broader themes for small farms like ours that are direct marketing to consumers. Better than some of the other industry groups out there, in our opinion.

This year they are endeavoring to host more one-day regional events outside of the annual conference and this was one of the first, hosted by Metzer Farms, a hatchery specializing in ducks in Cordova, Tenn., outside of Memphis.

Metzer was started by owner, Mark Metzer’s grandfather as a small duck farm in Salinas, Calif. Or rather, as he describes it, his grandfather tinkered with using ducks in his garden and selling some to the local community and then his father built it into a farm with several breeding flocks of ducks and a hatchery.

And because of logistics around shipping poultry, Mark and his wife Katy expanded the operation by building an entirely new hatchery outside of Memphis.

The United States Postal Service doesn’t own any of its own planes, so it contracts to FedEx and UPS. And FedEx handles all live animals shipped in the mail, so nearly every box of live chicks, ducklings, turkey poults, etc. go through Memphis. Even if they start out on the West Coast, only to end up back on the West Coast.

In case you’re not familiar, the reason that just hatched poultry can be shipped is because they don’t need to eat or drink for about 72 hours as they still are nourished by the yolk sack that they haven’t fully absorbed in their abdomen. This is because a momma hen will stay on her nest until as many chicks or ducklings hatch as possible and there can be a variation as large as three days because she takes everyone off the nest to eat and drink.

So humans figured this out at a certain point and realized that this could enable us to ship live poultry right when they hatch (in incubators rather than under a hen).

But when deciding to expand, Metzer made the strategic decision to build their new facility in Memphis to drastically lesson the time their birds spend in the mail. Just because they can survive without eating or drinking for 72+ hours doesn’t mean they don’t do better if you can shorten that!

The hatchery tour was absolutely fascinating. A lot of farm events involve farm tours of other producers, but seeing other critical aspects of the industry are a nice change of pace and really eye opening.

Besides the tour, Grant and another farmer gave quick sessions on sales and on farm events and their was also a duck processing demonstration.

And like I said, possibly the best part was all the informal chats with fellow farmers! We came back refreshed and renewed!

And we also came back with ducklings!

Some of you original customers may remember that we offered duck eggs from our own farm back in 2017-2019 or so.

We had a flock of Khaki Campbells, which are brown ducks that are fairly prolific layers. The ducks eventually kept breaking out of their fence and as they got older and their laying declined, we let them hang out by the ponds. Then inexplicably, they decided to join our chicken flock, so they finished out their days in a mixed flock of chickens and ducks.

By that point our friend Ashley at A&A Acres had a large flock of laying ducks, so we bought her eggs instead of getting another flock of our own.

During Hurricane Ida, a fence came down on Ashley’s place and it was time for the duck venture, a shared enterprise with her neighbor to come to an end for various reasons.

So we’ve been sort of meaning to find another duck egg vendor since then.

In the meantime, we also bought the 45 acres next to our original land and that means we haven’t run our laying chickens through all of the fields and some are in desperate need of the additional fertilizer that poultry manure provides (and the scratching and pecking, or in the case of ducks, kind of drilling with their beaks).

Some of our fields are super low in the middle and hold water in spots with heavy rains. We really, they’re perfect for ducks, who don’t mind getting wet and are of course a lot more hardy in rainfall (including cold rains in the winter) than chickens.

So it felt like it was time to start a duck venture again!

These ducklings are mostly Khaki Campbells, with another hybrid breed white layer mixed in, as well. They start laying at 5-7 months of age and the decreasing daylight that we’ll be having by then may affect it. So we expect duck eggs to be available by the end of November at the earliest, or maybe as late as the end of January. Stay tuned!

I do love a mixed flock of chickens, but there is something so beautiful about a bunch of uniform red hens with their bright red combs on pasture, right?

The new flock is finally ramping up their laying! They started with about six eggs a couple of weeks ago (the overachiever first hens to start laying), and then held steady at about 5-6 dozen for two weeks or so and now they’re at more like 17.5 dozen a day. Their full production with everyone laying should bring them to over 30 dozen, so we still aren’t quite there yet.

So you’ll see more and more small pullet eggs available. This breed seems to skip the smallest size eggs, so mediums we usually mix in with larger eggs in the mixed sizes.

The rest of the birds and all the chicks in the brooder are doing well, too. We still have some issues with predation, but it’s tamped down from the spring peak with our extra measures we’ve implemented.

And the breeding flock of Barred Rocks are plugging away, too, and we’re about to load up the incubator with another round of their eggs this week!

Oh, my precious goats. As I mentioned last time, we had them in the house field for a little over a week and it was honestly a blast to see more of their antics every and through the windows.

We also moved the piglets out of the farrowing barn paddock while they were over here.

One the last day in this field, one of the farrowing stall doors was open when it started to rain.

I was inside the house and thought of it just a few seconds too late. I booked it out of the house to get that door closed, but they had beat me there.

Why was it a problem that they went in there? Well, there are 106 of them and they hate getting rained on so much that they would all try to cram into the 10 foot by 10 foot stall even if it meant crushing their own kids!

So I hustled and opened the other two stalls and shoved some out to move over into those stalls to space them out at least.

Then I realized there was still hog feed in one stall (we had a piglet quarantined after an injury, so he wasn’t eating every last speck like the group of 30 was!) and I was worried about them eating too much and bloating. It was kind of chaotic.

But luckily the rain didn’t last long and I was able to push them out of the stall with the hog feed.

Then we decided that since it was cool from the rain, it was a good time to move them all the way down the internal road to the next field.

I started walking down to get a bucket from Grant to lure them, but they all (or so I thought) followed me even without that.

Then I realized some of the youngest kids didn’t actually follow the herd and were still in various points on the path down from the farrowing barn to the internal road.

I got behind them and tried herd them to where they needed to go, but they were too scared to go out into the internal road and they could no longer hear or see the rest of the herd.

So then we herded them back up to the hog barn and into the open stall. Grant went and got the farm truck and we loaded them into the back and brought them to their moms. It was quite an afternoon!

And funnily enough, of the 18 youngest kids born at the end of April and in May, all of the ones that didn’t go with the herd were bucklings. The doelings all figured it out! But then again, I did a count and remembered that there’s only five doelings in that group and 13 bucklings, so there’s that. Five bucklings did figure it out!

Later this week, Grant also started chopping and dropping some saplings and tall brush and vines in some of our swales/ditches for the goats. The goal is to open up the bank of the swale to more light so both the bank and the bottom of the swale can grow more vegetation when not full of water.

It needs to be fully vegetated to be able to graze it effectively without erosion. More plants and their root systems hold soil in place!

Patient Penny the goat. I felt like these deserved their own spot. She is such a calm and sweet momma and this cycle, her kids seem especially intent on constantly jumping on her when she’s not grazing, whether she’s sitting or standing.

And just for fun, here’s Penny’s history: she is a fourth generation from our original herd. There was Domino, who had Oreo, who had Pepper, who had Penny in December of 2020 (a few days before my dear Uma was born to Lemon).

She had twins on her first kidding in February 2022, then triplets the next year (on the same exact day of the year), then twins in January of 2024, a single in November of 2024 and now more twins in May of 2024. Actually there was a mysterious stillborn mostly white kid on the day she kidded (a day that other goats kidded, too, though), so bless her, she may have actually carried triplets again.

Anyway, she’s quite a goat!

And the other momma getting jumped on is actually Penny’s younger sister, Pepperoni! Runs in the family, I guess.

Meanwhile the cattle are busy making their daily or every other day moves to the next field or wedge of the field.

And right now they’re in a very shaded section of our place that was once basically a pine monoculture that was crowding out all other life. Back in 2016, right when we were starting out, a Wildlife and Fisheries biologist called the section essentially ecologically dead.

There was no real food for rabbits, deer or birds, there were wasn’t even any squirrel activity and the insect activity (other than tons of mosquitoes) was fairly limited, too. Diversity is the lifeblood of functioning ecosystems and this has a lot of pine and not much else. Presumably the soil microbes and fungal life were suffering, as well. Everything is connect and built on each other in the cycle of producers, consumers and decomposers.

Anyway, one of the main things we did in endeavoring to build back a more functioning silvopasture ecosystem was to thin out of some pine trees with a chain saw and run pigs through to root up the dormant seed back, properly disturb the soil and then let it rest. We also have seeded it with winter annuals like rye grass and grazed the goats and cattle through their since the initial hog activity.

There’s some pines that the pigs killed with their rooting that we need to cut down still and there’s still more forbes and brush than grasses in here, but overall there’s way more diversity (and lots more wildlife) and lots more growing and seeing that progress is always so satisfying.

The piglets moved from the farrowing barn paddock to the tree line section next to the hoophouse where we often house the goats.

There’s tons of hay waste interspersed with composting goat manure that we’re spreading out with the bobcat to fertilize the trees and let the pigs root through and further spread and break down.

They have been exposed to hot line within the hog panels since birth, but we didn’t quite trust them yet to be fenced with hot line alone. So we set up more panels with hot line on the inside for about a week, then extended their area with two stranded of hot fence and they are doing amazing! No fence breaks and their happily foraging and bounding through the tall grass and weeds.

I’m really proud of this group of piglets and they have nice, not very skittish temperaments to be around.

Meanwhile their dad and moms are in another wooded section with plenty of shade and wallows, too. And they’ve eaten a lot of forage in their paddock and so really seemed to enjoy the wild lettuce, goldenrod and elderberry leaves I was tossing to them the other night!