By Ben Jensen, Livestock Manager
Happy spring everyone! Or at least I think it’s spring…the sun actually peeked out for about 4 minutes the other day and I got a raging sunburn.
Things here in the barn are going very well! We are nearly done lambing, and as of writing this I have 32 happy healthy lambs on the ground with only 4 or 5 more ewes left to go. I’m very much looking forward to turnout day to get those girls out of my hair. Why? Well, if you haven’t been in the barn at sheep feeding time (which in their mind’s eye is about every 15 minutes), let me clue you in: they are extremely loud, and they are extremely persistent. But they have all been very good mothers, many of them first timers, and I look forward to seeing the lambs grow like weeds out on pasture.
We are milking 40 cows and have a great looking bunch of young stock and replacement heifers growing up, getting ready to join the ranks of the big girls and earn the title of “ol milk cow”. We’re doing our best to keep ’em all fed, bred, happy and healthy. Come watch us pick 40 milk cows worth of manure off our bedded pack 3 times a day, it’s enchanting!
I’ve got about 150 Cornish broilers growing up in the brooder on their first leg of the relatively short journey to a 6 pound roaster cooking up in the oven. Our big chicken tractors are set up and ready to host our juicy little buddies who ought to be out to “dump fertilizer” all over the periphery of the garden plots. Hopefully we can crack that 50 degree mark next week and they can go feast on bugs and grass. Our first processing date this season is June 22, so look for our delicious pasture-raised-with-an-ocean-view chickens in the farm stand at that time. And they tend to sell fast.
We are all chomping at the bit to get all our critters turned out to grass, but Mother Nature is taking her time drying things out and giving us adequate sunlight to actually grow grass. Not a darn thing we can do about that though, can we? We’ve got plenty of feed and bedding, so we bide our time and continue with our winter confinement routine and watch the weather forecast.
Come down and see our calves, cows, heifers, lambs, rams, ewes, broilers, hens, does, and wethers sometime…better bring a rain coat.
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