Spring is in the air here at the Flying T. Our resident Boer Goats, Jessie and Gracie, are off at another farm for a month or so in the hopes that they make very close friends with the buck there.  That would bring us kids in September.  In their place, we welcomed two more 4-month-old full-blood Boer does, Ruby and Samy (Samantha). The Muscovy ducks started laying a few weeks ago, but weren’t sitting, so we ended up collecting a lot of them.  They’re not bad eating and very

Our 7-year-old son runs the egg business on our farm.  We paid the startup costs – buying the chicks, converting an emu hut to a coop, and buying feed and supplies.  Once the first group started laying, he took over the rest.  He now buys the food, cares for the chickens and eggs, markets the eggs, and keeps records of his production, income, and expenses. Small-scale farming is not a big money maker, and as we’ve put together our 5-year plan, we can see that we’ll have to ge

When we first started dreaming about our farm, “organic” was high in our priorities.  This flows out of our family mission, to glorify God in all ways, and to live that out on our farm by raising, managing, and using His creation in a healthy, sustainable, humane, and respectful manner.  Since we planned to produce food for others, organic certification seemed like the way to pursue this mission. Rhode Island Red Free-Ranging at the Flying T However, as we started researching

Though the most common grass used for hay in New England might be Timothy, another very common component of baled forage around here is Orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata). Orchardgrass (photo by Missouri Extension) Unlike Timothy, which takes a bit of care to get established, Orchardgrass often finds its own way into pastures and hayfields.  Propogating both by seeds and by tillers that spread from its dense, clumped bases, Orchardgrass competes well with other grasses and wee

This is the first installment in the Forage Managment section of our blog.  For more information on why I’m doing this, click here. Timothy grass (Phleum pratense, or Herd’s Grass) is most likely the base of hay you buy in New England – it’s the predominant species for most well-cared-for and cultivated hayfields around here.  This is precisely why there isn’t much of it here at the Flying T, though since I have found a few specimens here and there around the property, I susp

I spent 10 years in NATO assignments, so I’m pretty acquainted with the challenges of trying to accommodate seemingly incompatible desires.  Hey, if I could somehow deal diplomatically with both sides of the Aegean Sea dispute between Turkey and Greece, I should be able to figure out a farm, right? Right. OK, we’re not talking international incidents, but our chickens did provide us with a challenge, caused (as most challenges are) by competing agendas: 1.  We want to raise o

Our family has a weakness for free-range eggs.  You may be thinking, “what’s the big deal?  Eggs are eggs,” or “Can you really tell the difference?”  If so, you haven’t had a truly fresh, free-range egg.  I’ll have to save that discussion for a later blog post, but if you’re skeptical, just humor me through the rest of this story. Anyhow, our weakness for free-range eggs, as well as a desire to be a little closer to our food is what led us to think about bringing chickens to

You can do an Internet search of “cage-free” and “free-range” eggs or chickens and see that there really aren’t a whole lot of legal requirements to claim those titles. "Free Range" Chickens at a Factory Farm “Free range” at the Flying T means that as soon as our chicks and ducklings are safely able to live in the outdoors, we let them roam the farm. Rhode Island Red Free-Ranging at the Flying T Most of the chickens return to the coop at night to roost, and the ducks to the b