What's Next for the Genuine Faux Farm Poultry?

It's official, we've had several hard freezes at the Genuine Faux Farm.  We're down to only one flock of poultry (the laying hens).  The number of hours of daylight are less than the number of hours of darkness.

It is now time for Farmer Delusional Syndrome to kick in!

Yes, the season is starting a bit earlier for us than it has in the years prior.  But, that's simply a function of how we've changed the roles our farm plays in our lives.  At present, Tammy's job at Wartburg and mine with the Pesticide Action Network take up more of our time and energy than the farm does - whether we want them to or not.  We aren't doing much with season extension this Fall and we are soon going to take the excess of our long-season crops to the Food Bank.

So, that means we can start thinking ahead to 2024.

What's in store for GFF Poultry?

Our poultry flocks often come up first during our off-season planning sessions.  This is partly because we need to be prepared to order chicks and it is also due to the fact that poultry very much impact our ability to leave the farm whenever we wish.

We were pleased with how our single flock of 125 broilers did during the late season slot we chose this year.  They were healthy and the pastures handled them well.  It also meant that we didn't have the issue of competing priorities in May through mid-July, when vegetable crops are often in need of as much of our attentions as we can give.

On the other hand, we have some adjustments to make for our hen flocks and we did miss having turkeys this past year.  So, we will be doing things differently in 2024.

First, we will be re-introducing turkeys to the farm.  The flock will be much smaller than it was.  In the past we've started with 75 turklets, which usually resulted in 65-70 birds at the time we took them to "the Park."  Next year, we're going to keep the number low enough that we will only need to take one truck trip to the processor.  That's probably no more than thirty birds.

I liked how the late slot for broilers went, so we'll probably do that again in 2024.  But, if we're adding turkeys, I need to prepare a different pasture situation for the broilers.  While that's not horribly difficult, it does remind me (and anyone who reads this) that every decision we make probably has a host of implications.  And each implication probably involves a set of tasks.  And that's where we have to be careful, because we're not going to have access to much more time than we had this year.

The laying hen question

The broilers and the turkeys were actually the easiest part of our discussions this year.  We have a rough plan that both of us have agreed to, in principle. Though we could decide differently as we discuss other things.  It's the laying hens, surprisingly, that are encouraging us to explore a bit more this year.

On one side of the ball is the fact that we have now raised laying hens for twenty years on the farm.  They're practically a given.  We do still like to maintain contact with the good people on our egg and veggie email list and we do like selling quality eggs on a regular basis.  We also have a pretty good infrastructure set up to handle the birds, we have experience, and we have the appropriate skills.  And, we love eating our own farm-fresh eggs each morning for breakfast and using them in Tammy's weekly bread-baking.

On the other is this - the daily and year-round process of managing a laying flock can wear on you and encourage you to consider taking a break or explore ways to rejuvenate your interest.

One thing we placed back on the table that had been there many years ago was establishing a flock of laying hens that is a cold-hearty breed that can also be big enough for some meat production.  The idea here would be to begin allowing some of the flock to raise chicks so we can maintain our own flock, rather than buying chicks each year.

The down-side is that most breeds we would consider lay eggs less frequently than those we use for egg production.  So, we would either have to go with a much larger flock (probably not what we want) or we would scale back eggs sales or we would have two flocks.  If we went this direction, we might move to either selling some chicks (or young birds as they start to lay) to others.  I don't know - it's just in the idea stage.

Another alternative is to plan for a period where we either have no hens or we have a flock that is only as big as we need to supply our own eggs.  In some ways, it makes little sense for us to cut back to just a few birds for ourselves when our tools are set up to handle the current scale.  After all, you still need to care for the birds every day if you have five or fifty.  On the other hand, if we have five birds, we most certainly won't be washing five dozen egg a day and we won't have to track egg email sales.

The reality?

In the end, the reality of the situation is that we will likely have poultry on the farm in some form or another as long as we live here.  One key reason is that we do rely on the poultry we raise for our food.  We've both gotten so used to quality eggs and poultry meat that we have a hard time eating poultry sourced anywhere other than a place that uses similar practices to ours.

From the farm's financial perspective, poultry sales are not critical to our well-being.  However, it is true that our poultry meat and eggs become less expensive for us to eat if we also raise extra for sales purposes.  I think that's a pretty realistic and healthy reason to continue - just as it is healthy to consider HOW we should continue.

And so, that's what we're doing.  We're looking at our history and we're looking at options for our future.  As far as 2024 is concerned, it looks like our future (and maybe yours) will have some turkey, broiler chickens, and eggs in it.