What Happens When You Don’t Feed the Ducks On Time
This morning we were off to a bit of a late start, that means only about 30 minutes behind, no big deal. Well that is unless you are a duck waiting on your sprouted sunflower seeds.
No commentsA Question on Outdoor Cooking Options – Leads to a Lesson for Small Farm Owners
Our Favorite Portable Camp Stove
As you might imagine as local small farmers that also try to buy what we don’t produce from other local producers we live a very healthy food centric life. That leads to my other passion cooking. I love to cook even more I think than to eat what I cook.
Another thing I enjoy is cooking out doors. We do this with grills, smokers, in a fire pit, with rocket stoves and portable stove tops.
Recently on my podcast, The Survival Podcast, we had a question about portable propane stoves.
I recommended the one pictured above, The Ranger II by Camp Chef. It is a phenomenal stove and I recommend it for many reasons. First if your stove is electric you should have a back up way to cook. This stove is the most flexible one that still has full sized stove power I have ever found. It is absolutely safe to use indoors as well if the power is out and it is cold outside. Next though if you are stuck with an electric stove, you will find yourself wanting to cook with this stove frequently and likely outside. The best part is it sells for just under 100 bucks and ships free if you have Amazon Prime.
A Combination Unit that May Not Be the Best Option.
Anyway a person who listened to my podcast, asked about this stove/oven combination. Made by the same people so I am sure it is absolutely top quality. So hey why not add an oven. The issue is the stove top itself is only a 7000 BTU burner set vs a 17000 BTU burner set and the stove with the over costs over 100 dollars more.
Also while the oven is nice, it isn’t very flexible, and it isn’t very large either. Next the unit is a lot bigger so it is less convenient to just whip up some sausage and eggs on the deck on a sleepy Sunday morning with.
Some really like “all in one” type things well my take is a bit different. Again we have two goals when we add items to our on farm cookware.
~ One – Enhance our quality of life, give ourselves more fun options and when it comes to outdoors stuff, that includes options for camping or tail gating too.
~ Two – Improve our ability to deal with disasters and power outages if we need a back up cooking method.
So when asked about this I think a lot more about flexibility, adaptability and functionality along with good old fashioned frugality. In fact I have a slogan, always be frugal but never be cheap.
Here is the solution I put together.
Say I am happy to spend 213 bucks to up this part of my lifestyle and preps at the same time. Instead of buying a weaker stove, I would do this.
A Simple 30 Dollar Camp Oven
First I would buy the stove I recommend, http://bit.ly/pro-stove-1
Next I would buy one of these http://www.walmart.com/ip/Coleman-Portable-Camp-Oven/895626
It is only 30 bucks! It also folds down when not in use to be only 2 inches high. You can put it on your cook top, put it on a grill, use fire coals from a camp fire, you are not restricted just to gas. It is cheaper, works just as good, has a little bit more interior space and is dramatically more flexible.
Also a heck of a lot lighter.
Now I now still have 85 dollars!
So I go get myself a nice 6 quart dutch oven with a rimmed top, like this, http://amzn.to/1PpuuSL for 60 bucks shipped free by the way on Amazon Prime.
I still have 15 bucks left over! I can get a good dutch oven lid lifter tool with it for 11 bucks. Or if I don’t need one I could buy some food to get started cooking with my new stuff.
I now have the best small cook stove I know of, a camp oven that I can cook with and a dutch oven that I can use as an oven or make something like pot roast, stew or chili. If camping I can camp fire cook and still bring my stove and make eggs with that or say fried potatoes. I am not relying on just one thing that can break I am now sitting with three options. On top of it all my stove itself is more convenient so I am going to use it more.
So what does this all have to do with being a small farmer?
As a small farmer this is how you have to think about everything you do. We have to function stack our feeding, our egg collection, etc. for efficiency. Our new quail aviary will not just produce quail but grow food for the quail to cut our feed cost while improving product quality and it will also grow food for people too. On top of that it will produce compost all while giving the quail the freedom to really be quail they way they most like to be. Room to run, play and fly. Something we can show our customers that justifies the premium local food sells for.
The days of the giant farm in my opinion are coming to an end. Too much damage to soil, the product quality has been in decline steadily for over 50 years. Less nutrients in our food, less flavor too. The food may visually look good but it doesn’t taste to me like it did even back in the 80s.
We are encouraged daily by people that want to do business with us because they want more quality. What is even more encouraging is people doing it themselves and we see it daily. People asking for advice and getting started, some with just a small personal flock of chickens or quail and others doing far more then we do on our little 3 acre duck farm.
The key though is you have to THINK as a small producer. There is an often stated claim that small farms can’t be profitable, there is some truth to that, because many are not. But you can be viable if you work hard to make one thing do many things, or use the same investment to get multiple redundant solutions. To us this is the way forward for small farms. The systems are disinterested in our success, the corporations of the world want big food, big pharma, big everything. To succeed as small farmers we need more than big dreams and big ideas, we need efficiency and agility. This type of thought process is how we get that done.
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One of the Easiest Ways to Be Prepared
Sleek, Simple and it Works!
It looks like something out of Star Trek with a complex name to boot, but the Ivation Sleek 3-in-1 Emergency Black-Out Motion-Sensing Light and Torch is actually easier to use then a toaster.
All you do is plug it in and it does the rest. Once it is dark a motion sensor turns it on when it senses any movement. Lighting up your dark hall way or dark storage building automatically. It gets better though, if the power goes off it turns on automatically. This helps you find your other lights, candles, etc, without breaking your neck. I mean we all know power tends to fail at times like when you are just getting out of the shower.
But hey you need to get to your gear, well all you do is pick this little gadget up off its charger, push a button and you have a flash light you can take with you. Always fully charged.
We have used various types of Power Failure Lights for many years, they really are a blessing. This latest one though solves a lot of problems. First the lights are LED, this makes them low draw and extends battery life. And with this type of use their life expectancy is though the roof. Next the battery is lithium ion. This is a big deal, every other version we have tried used NiCads and being charged constantly would eventually either kill them, kill how long they lasted or in some cases actually make the light come on and stay on even when it was switched to off.
Living in Texas storm season is really two seasons, bad storm season and normal storm season. So we are adding a couple of these a month over time to our homestead. First in the house but eventually I will have some in both shops and one in the duck house.
These are available on Amazon Prime so they ship free if you are a member.
Get a few and the next time the power goes out you will have no stubbed toes, no scared kids when the lights go out and you can raid the fridge without turning on any lights after hours.
Get the Ivation Sleek 3-in-1 Emergency Black-Out Motion-Sensing Light and Torch here.
No commentsNew Pricing and Egg Updates for 2016
Well guys the new year is upon us and it is time to update everyone on some things.
First we are raising our price to an even 8 dollars a dozen for all customers. We have granted special pricing to a few customers over the last year and we have been in general selling at 7.50 a dozen. That said we remain constantly sold out and our work load and expenses dictate that we move to a uniform pricing model. As owners of a small farm we spend a lot of hours and a lot of money to produce a premium product, we try to balance this in setting our price. This new price is fair and about 4 dollars less then duck eggs at Whole Foods when and if you can find them there.
Next for at least 30-45 more days we are going to continue to not take new customers. Unfortunately several weeks ago a coyote killed over 24 of our ducks and our 2 geese. Jack was able to eventually shoot the coyote and she is no longer a threat. But this came at the absolute worse time of the year. In the winter ducks simply lay less, many of the birds we lost were mature layers. We have not taken new customers in about a month at this point and it will be at least that long before we take any new customers.
Following the above, current customers will have longer wait times for at least another month and we have an absolute hard limit of 4 dozen eggs per customer. In some instances as we work down our list we may offer some customers say 2 dozen for the time being. We are doing all we can to be fair to every customer and do so with our currently limited production.
We have taken measures to rectify the situation. First we installed artificial timed lights, this is helping but the effect is limited. One cannot force a duck to lay and frankly we would not do so if we could. The health and happiness of our animals is our top priority. We brought in new birds this fall that will also begin to lay in February and over the next 60 days laying of all the birds will increase as part of the natural cycle.
Additionally we purchased 8 mature muscovy ducks and 15 that are about 4 months old at considerable expense as a stop gap. These girls are laying a bit right now and should be at full on capacity by the beginning of February.
As a final note we are no longer going to be offering a deposit return on egg cartons. The program just wasn’t that popular and our cost on cartons in quantity is only 28 cents a unit, in doing a 50 cent return program we were costing ourselves money. Small farms can’t do that over the long term.
I do want to say that we absolutely love all of our customers. We love being a place your kids can come to and see where their food comes from, we love hearing about how our product is improving your health or in many cases making eating eggs possible for some who can’t eat chicken eggs.
We will be working hard to bring more to you in the coming months. We currently have 60 plus quail in house that should start laying in about a month and will be adding quail eggs to our offering. We will also be bringing out a line of amazing loose leaf teas and possibly baby and micro green salad mixes by March.
Thanks to everyone who has been kind enough to offer us your business. And thank you for understanding this is real farming, there are times of limited production. For those that wish to become customers when production ramps back up, just fill out our email update form on the right. We will let you know when production comes back up.
one commentS2 – Duck Chronicles Episode Twelve – Into The Chocolate Muscovy World We Delve
Today in Season Two – The Duck Chronicles Episode Twelve – Into The Chocolate Muscovy World We Delve After losing more than 20 total birds to a coyote we have gone into recovery mode. The coyote is dead, you can see that in Adjunct Nine here, http://bit.ly/1TvrLuQ
To deal with this loss we just purchased a total of 16 young muscovies, many are chocolate and gray phase birds. The oldest among them (about 6) will be laying for us by the end of January, the rest should be laying in March, this will help us catch up with our loses.
This will also avoid the need to brood young birds in the winter like we did last year. We will be adding more Welsh Harlequins and 300 Layers and perhaps some silver apple yards, now in March, that will put them into laying in August right when the muscovies go to full stop.
We also just got 8 inches of rain in about three days from the remnants of Hurricane Sandra, while this storm was weak sauce overall it brought a TON of rain our way, way too much as usual way to fast.
This means 2015 was the wettest year on record in our area and yet we still had a five month drought between the spring and fall monsoons. Welcome to north Texas weather! Oh the weather guessers say our rainfall for this month was 2.55 inches, they really don’t do a very good job, our three day total came from measuring water collected in a 6 foot kiddie pool over those three days in an open field.
Fox and Dana also make several appearances, they are both coming along very well and doing just great in learning to trust people after their feral kittenhood. Fox has learned to leave the ducks alone; Dana is likely one butt kicking by Arnold, Hans or Franz from finally understanding that as well.
Remember you can see every episode of The Duck Chronicles from both Seasons So Far at DuckChronicles.com
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