Remember counting beans in a jar?

How many turkeys do you see????

Turkeys struggling, now resolved.

We had one problem worth mentioning with the new turkey pen in the barn. Having such a wide variety of ages living together is not a good idea. In nature it doesn't work that way, as all eggs hatch within days of each other. Once we have turkeys a couple of weeks old they were large enough to trample the newborns. We lost several to this unfortunate reality.

My first response was to move the larger ones out to the orchard area into an old rabbit hutch for protection from the weather. That fails miserably when a few turkeys didn't make it through the cold night. Too much change in temperature too quickly. So we moved them back into the barn.

The next step was to put a couple of 4x8 sheet of plywood together to build a wall to separate the youngers form the olders. Each side had a heater, food, water. This seems to work well! w have not lost a single little one since this change was made.

Out turkeys numbers are lower than we had hoped but we should still end up between 100 and 150 turkeys for sale later this year. Be sure to reserve yours early!

Family visiting the farm

Just when I committed to get caught up on posting, the week comes when we have family visiting the farm. My mom, all of our adult children, and my grandchildren are all staying for a little family reunion (not so little when you have 8 kids!). So far it has been fabulous spending time together and being able to share both ways where our lives have gone. Very likely there won't be much in the way of farm postings until after next week though :)

Times like these remind us that what is really important is our creator, our family, and our relationships.

Hard boiled egg smell

Here is a curious note. We eat eggs, lots of them. Fried, scrambled, omelet, boiled, etc. Our eggs are completely free range, and completely soy free, and mostly corn free, fed only organic grains and food scraps. The majority of their diet is from spending their days roaming the yard and pasture consuming everything that moves.

When we travel and are forced to eat breakfast in restaurants, it becomes obvious how different these farm eggs are from factory eggs. It always amazes the kids that factory eggs have yellow yolks. Chickens eggs do NOT naturally have yellow yolks! Instead they are bright orange. Yellow is a sign of a nutritionally deprived egg. But recently I noticed something else different about the eggs from factories served in restaurants.... they smell bad.

Hard boiled factory eggs have a  distinctive sulfur smell. Careful cooking an lessen it to a great degree (don't overcook) but the aroma is still there. We noticed this more than ever this Easter when we bought some cheap factory eggs for coloring. The "egg smell" was overwhelming. But a few days alter when hard boiling our own natural eggs, there was virtually no smell a all. We have tested this several times with the same results. The conclusion - factory produced eggs smell bad when boiled. True free range soy free eggs do not.

This truly makes me wonder what is chemically different in the factory eggs. I am pretty sure it is from the commercial feed used to produce factory eggs, but cant be sure. Our chickens roam over a couple of acres of grass, bugs, and dirt in the sunshine and fresh air where factory egg chickens spend their life in little confined spaces full of noxious odors that are legally unhealthy for factory workers to breathe, fed commercially produced feed made of the cheapest ingredients available (mostly soy and corn, genetically altered to allow extensive pesticide use).

It could be the soy connection. I do not know the science behind it but I do know that feeding abundance of soy to chickens, even organic soy, produces different eggs than feeding a chicken's natural foods. The soy eggs are much more prone to trigger allergies, so they are obviously chemically different from natural eggs. (chickens do not naturally eat soy).

Bottom line, I don't understand this one, but can conclude that another difference between factory and natural eggs is that factory eggs smell bad when boiled, natural eggs do not.

April enjoying a spring water fountain

We turned on a hose to soak a corner of the pasture and April took advantage for a cool drink. Hogs just love drinking from a hose !