Haskins Family Farm

It is a bit scary to have to travel away from the farm, and leave it in the hands of someone else, even if that someone else is your spouse. But as it turns out, I had nothing to worry about.

 Several weeks prior to finding out that I had to travel this past week, we made an appointment to take a pig to the processor. Normally, loading pigs for their "appointment" is an "all hands on deck" family affair, requiring everyone's help to get the pig from the pasture onto the trailer and over to the processor. With me being away for this difficult work evolution, I offered to take the "hit" with the processor and reschedule (processors don't like to have their appointments changed). Mary (my spouse) said, no that she would try.

 Well, here in Virginia we have had a lot of rain this spring, something we sorely need but which makes loading pigs in a pasture somewhat difficult as you might imagine. After getting the truck stuck in the pasture (I have no idea where) she did manage to get the pig to the processor, with time to spare! Not two months ago, I had to take two days of vacation off to get one pig loaded! Thank goodness this one cooperated....

I was pleasently surprised to not find any other "disasters" waiting for me when I got back. And they only lost one or two chicks of a 125 bird order that arrived this week while I was away, to boot!

So we ordered 20 poults (baby turkeys) that arrived this week. Well, actually, we did get 20 turkeys but 13 were dead when we picked them up at the post office. We got a call from the USPS expediter at 11pm (!!) Wednesday night from the local sorting center who said "I've got some turkeys here and I don't they all made it". (That was an understatement.)

Turkeys are one of the hardest birds to brood. Their immune system develops much slower than chickens. A chicken's immune system is fully in place at 4 weeks; a turkey takes twice that amount of time. As one of the apprentices for Polyface says, "Turkeys live to find new ways to die." There is a lot of truth to that statement!

Last season, with our 35 heritage breed turkeys, we lost 10 in the first three days, had the hatchery ship us 10 replacements, and ended up with 27 live birds to butcher at Thanksgiving. (Almost every hatchery has a policy that they will refund or replace any birds that die within 48-72 hours of arrival at the farm.) Several (but not all) of the final 8 that died were later in the season due to my errors ie, too many birds in too small of space.

Both chicks and poults are very susceptible to chilling, and wind exascerbates this problem. Unfortunately, all of our buildings are very drafty and we must use extra heat lamps in our brooders during winter brooding to compensate for this. In fact, we have the latest batch of poults in our basement in order to ensure we don't lose any!

We lost 1/3 of our last couple of batches of chicks before we figured out the effect that wind has on brooding birds. It has been an expensive learning experience, brooding birds on a relative large scale in the winter here in Virginia!!

Ever have one of those "aha" moments? I had one recently when I thought hard about what is a "farm stand"? Is it something physical or something "virtual"? I struggled with for some time after Mary suggested we finally get a farm stand going. I wanted to get it started quickly, and we just don't have the cycles right now to do all the stuff required for a "traditional" stand (display case, physical area).

 What I realized was that a farm stand can be as simple as committing to being available at a routine/recurring time and place for customers to purchase products. (Obviously, you gotta have the products too.) It's really that simple. Of course, you can get much more elaborate than that, with a dedicated building, glass front cases, cash register, bathrooms, etc. but fundamentally it's just a committment to have products available to the customers at a specified time/time interval.