May Newsletter

Our Hens Today

What did you think?One of my favorite things about the hens is just how friendly they are. They run up just to see what's new and haha to see if I scared up any bugs. It's not just great for the hens and the land though its also great for the families who enjoy our eggs. The result of this truly pasture raised regenerative model for raising hens is some incredibly nutrient rich eggs! Our growing family eats eggs for breakfast nearly every day but in spite of our 5 children's ravenous appetites for our eggs right now we have a seasonal abundance (it happens almost every Spring) and so we are offering  Free Eggs For A FriendThey are completely free.All we ask is that you don't use them for yourself, but instead give them away to family or friends that are really interested in nourishing their family well. It's a win win. They get to enjoy the best nutrient rich eggs available and get a connection to their very own farmer!Give Free Eggs For A Friend ==>NOTE (If you are currently utilizing our home delivery option for getting our pasture raised eggs since you can't order them singly, if you give one to bless another family just email myfarmers@fedfromthefarm.com and we can credit your account for you :)Thank you for supporting and sharing about our pasture based farm. It is an honor to serve you from our farm's bounty!

Our New Lake

On the farm, we plan out our regenerative grazing well ahead of time to ensure that the soil, plants, and livestock all benefit from the sybiotic relationships that exist from temporary peridic grazing between all three.Sometimes though the weather has other plans and we have to adapt. Haha case in point about two weeks ago we got just under 9 inches of rain in 36 hours. Now on our farm a majority of the rain still just soaked into the ground through healthy root channels and pore spaces from years of planned regenerative grazing. For farms for miles around us though most of that water quickly ran off and into creeks and rivers. This caused a creek on the back of our farm to flood well outside of its banks. When I went down that morning to check on the sheep I was quite surprised to see that we had a new lake on the farm!You see we have a 60 acre area of bottom ground (low elevation ground with deep soil near to a creek or river). When I got there about 25 acres was underwater!!! This was just part of it but you wan see the sheep's watering trough is underwater - haha they certainly weren't thirsty!Thankfully as the water rose the sheep just slowly meandered to the north to higher ground.  They do not like water at all and will not willingly ford even a shallow stream so I was quite glad they had not gotten cut off on one of the now islands of land that had just the day before been the higher areas of the low bottom fields!Later that afternoon, Judah and Ephraim went to look at our new lake and reported that they could not see the watering tank. I thought that was kind of strange but figured they just missed seeing it as it hadn't rained at all that day. As I pondered it for a few more hours though I got to thinking that they are actually very reliable little scouts and they know what it looks like. On a hunch I went back down there only to discover that upriver flooding had continued to pour more water into our bottom and we now had a 55 acre lake!!!!Everything in that video and pictures  that had been still land was now underwater and the sheep were at the very top of the field. A gate was promptly opened and they were let out of the low bottom fields completely onto the much drier upland fields. Thankfully everything was fine and stunningly the next day all the water had receded and our lake was gone. A new layer of top soil had been deposited on our thickly vegetated bottom fields as well which will be nice for long term fertility but in the short term made the forage quite muddy so even though we had originally planned for the sheep to graze those bottom fields for about two weeks (split into several 3-4 day subdivisions) they in fact only spent two days there. Well on the farm sometimes you just have to adapt and that's just what we did. We made a new grazing plan, skipped the rest of the bottoms for a few weeks until some rain could wash the dirt off of the grass and things could dry up a bit. Haha basically adapt and improvise. Thankfully the bottom does not flood very often (this is the first time in about 8 years) but when it does we can get a very large lake overnight + ducks :)I hope things aren't too wet your way.

Cutting Against The Grain