Heritage Turkeys Start Laying Eggs!

WooHoo! What a pleasant surprise! About a year ago we chose our breed of heritage turkey to be the Narragansett, for a variety of reasons (one of the best tasting, most docile, best mothers, largest toms, etc). Well yesterday I was happily surprised with another beneficial trait, they start laying eggs really soon!

Laying birds are regulated by hormones, which are regulated by light. Its nature's way of ensuring that babies are not born in very cold winters where they can't survive. So, each laying bird requires a certain amount of light per day to produce eggs. As winter approaches, day length shortens and they stop laying. With spring, days lengthen and egg production begins anew. Nice Cycle!

Well, we fully expected to not have eggs for another month or two without some help. In order to have turkey for sale for thanksgiving that are fully mature (6 months) we have to start now. So, I have been working on getting the turkey coop "lighted". We lock the hens in the coop at night, with bedding for making nests and laying boxes, food, water, and lights on a timer that come on early morning to lengthen the day for them. Works beautifully for chickens.

To my pleasant surprise, when I went in the turkey coop to start placing bedding and get it ready, I found 2 separate turkey eggs sitting quietly in the empty nesting boxes! Not one but two of the hens have just started laying, on the first of March! That implies that nature rates this breed ready to have poults (babies) by first of April, a good 30 to 60 days before other breeds. Woohoo!

It is also a nice confirmation that the hens chose to lay their first eggs inside the nesting boxes with NO encouragement and even no bedding! That validates our design and placement of the coop and nesting boxes.

The coop locked up with hens inside and ready to lay eggs!

The poor toms will be missing their girls for a few days

Inside view of the ladies quarters. You can see the nesting boxes along the front where we found two eggs.

Our plan is to coop the hens for a couple of days to get them used to the space and have them treat it as home (return here at night). Then we will start letting them out daytime's to graze and mate. That keeps the eggs fertilized, keep the hens exposed to enough light to lay well, and keeps the coop form being overloaded with the toms who would fight and make a mess of things!

Stay tuned to see how this works out. We are still debating between hatching naturally (under the hens) and incubating. Most likely we will do both. With 11 hens, each laying 2 to 3 eggs per week, by Christmas time we should have a nice supply of turkey for sale!

Late night visitor

We discovered a late night visitor to our farm the other night... after a series of odd occurrences. First we noticed small patches of blood occasionally in the morning with no sign of a struggle or problem, just a few drops of bright red blood. Next we noticed that our tom turkey which had a hurt leg and a limp was missing, with no signs of foul play. Bewildering... until now.

From the kitchen window about 11pm I notice a stray cat in our front yard, exploring some leftover food scraps put out for the chickens. But wait, something seemed odd. The body shape wasn't quite right. Legs were too long and the tail was way too bushy, out of proportion to the rest of the body. The animal also acted extremely edgy, sketchy. Then I realized it was not a cat, but a grey fox!

Attempts to photograph the fox have failed so far, but he is a frequent visitor. I am sure he is responsible for the missing limping turkey. I am also sure that if we don't trap him soon, we will begin missing chickens also.

Frostbite in the Greenhouse

Unfortunately we did loose a few plants in the greenhouse last week in that final winter storm. The temp here dropped to 16 a night or two, and that was just a little too cold.

Fortunately it only affected the plants on the lower shelves at the outside edge of the greenhouse. Stored there were the zucchini and cucumbers. It seems that about half of the plants are frost bitten and dying. Since I had left 2 sprouts in each bucket, many of the buckets are still ok with one live plant in it.

If there was more winter to go, it would make sense to buy a propane greenhouse heater to deal with the extra cold nights. As it is though, it doesn't seem wise to buy a heater this late in the season. All we have in there now is a tiny 1500 watt electric heater. It does its best, but 1500 watts is not much for a 1x20 greenhouse in weather below 20 degrees!

Where there's Smoke... there's pork!

I spent most of the day cleaning and scrubbing that seemed to me to be the world's biggest oven! This is the smoker oven we are investigating. It is used and has been in storage for a few years. Apparently it is best for the smoker when putting on in storage to NOT clean it. That way the layer of grease on the metal actually protects it from rust. That means, as you can imaging, that to place the oven back in operation takes a fair amount of elbow grease!

So we scrubbed, dismantled, scrubbed, washed, scrubbed, scraped, scrubbed... until shiny metal appeared! It was hard work but in the end, we have a usable smoker oven to use for our experiment in natural cures.

The fun part comes tomorrow... when the ham and bacon is hung and smoked to perfection! I can't wait to try the flavor of our homemade cures on the Red Wattle ham and bacon. We have a variety of 4 flavors to smoke and try, 3 with NO nitrates and 1 with natural nitrates.

Tomorrow is smoking day!

A Golden Opportunity to Right some Wrongs via Government!

The entire nation seems enbattled in debates and even outright fights over the national budget once again. Its all over the newspapers and radio, and in most people's conversations. Will the temporary spending bills pass? Will their pet program get cut? Will anything ever change?

A little closer to home ... I ran across the following article pleading for help to keep the sustainable farming government program from being cut:

http://sustainableagriculture.net/blog/grassroots-groups-oppose-hr1/

Reading this ... brought me to a realization. This is NOT a time to be worried about loosing funding for government programs that could actually do some good... no... this is actually a golden and rare opportunity to actually change things! Let me explain...

The secret is in this paragraph:

In addition, no cuts were proposed for two of biggest line items in the agriculture budget – commodity payments or crop insurance – while conservation, renewable energy, loans for beginning and minority farmers, and feeding programs for low income families took big hits. The letter states: “In a year of relatively high farm income, the House has focused its cuts instead upon programs that protect the environment, increase economic opportunity, serve beginning and minority farmers, and ensure proper nutrition for low-income families.”


Lets think about this. Sure.. I can admit that perhaps the programs proposed to be cut are some of the few worthwhile programs in government today. But the news here is NOT that these good programs are about to be cut.. the news is that the "bad" government programs which actually cost much more money and cause a lot of damage are NOT going to be cut! What we should be demanding is not "Don't cut my program" .. no.. We should stand up and demand " lets cut ALL farm spending equally, including commodity crop payments".

What exactly are commodity crop payments? They are the root of many of the evils in our food system today. This is where the government takes tax money from you and I, and redirects that cash in huge amounts to a particular industry that uses unsafe and unsustainable methods. Since that industry can not survive on its own, the government has to pay our tax money to the producers to keep it going. Quite literally it is the government using our hard earned cash to support business that can not exist on its own because it simply doesn't make sense, doesn't work, and can't make a profit.

Why are commodity crops so important to be supported by tax money? Well.. because they are cheap due to the support of tax money! If the cost had to be based on actual production costs, the excessive quantities of this bad "food" would disappear, and the importance of having it would disappear, shifting to proper good foods! For instance.. corn subsidies. Corn subsidies keep the monocrop corn growers in existence as they are today, slowly destroying our growing land. It is only because this "food" is so cheap that we use it to feed animals that should never eat corn, and use it in most of the foods as chemically produced substances that are unhealthy. If corn was left alone to be grown as it should (without subsidized methods) then we wouldn't use it everywhere it shouldn't be, and food would become healthier, feed animals would be healthier, health care costs would go down, farming as it should be would become more important, and the government would spend much less!

So ultimately, instead of begging for money to support "alternative farming approaches" lets simply agree to loose those programs if and only if all farm subsidies are cut the same percentage. That way sustainable farming increases dramatically in importance and market value, food gets healthier, our lands become more fertile, and the government saves much more money. Who looses in that? Only a few corporations that control the farming operations that are subsidized. The actual farmers will be fine.. they are smart and resourceful. They can produce MORE food if we removed the tax supported subsidies.

Will food costs increase? Perhaps a little, BUT that will be quickly offset by reduced health care costs. This is the big trade off we aren't getting in America.. cheap food does not nourish us as a nation, it destroys health. That is paid for by raising health care costs. Who hasn't heard of the spiraling health care costs? It is easily solvable... not through better health coverage.. but through more nutritious food, as nature intended.

So lets take this Golden opportunity to say " go ahead and cut the good programs we love... just be sure to also cut those bad ones that are doing harm every day to the world our children will inherit".