admine9519, Author at Morning Song Farm - Page 18 of 44

OK, son Frankie–always interested in all thinks related to economics;  is excited to see that his allowance source (the egg “division” here at Morning Song ) has demonstrated an equilibrium between supply and demand. We’ve taken on 5 new orders; and until our juvenile chickens are laying consistently in a few more months; he says we can’t fill any more.

Thanks so much to all of you who are allowing us to raise chickens as they should be raised. A side note; I was inspected yesterday for our CCOF Organic Certification, and I asked Shannon Murphy, our inspector, about what it would take to have our chickens certified organic. I was pretty sure what her answer would be, but I wanted to hear it from her. She couldn’t quote the pricetag; but since Morning Song Farm offers sactuary to an occassional homeless chicken we can never become certified organic. She said we’d have to get rid of all our chickens, start over with just hatched, day old chicks and then document from Day One that there never again was any chicken from the “outside.”  That’s not consistent with our mission here, so we’ll just carry on uncertified.

As I mentioned in my last blog, Couscou the llama who guards our chickens, discovered how tasty Modesto Milling’s Organic Soy-Free chicken feed is; (unlike conventional chicken feed; Modesto Mill’s smells delicious) and ate quite the stomach full, easily doubling our chicken feed costs this month before we figured it out. For the last couple days I was baffled why he wouldn’t accept any of the weed treats I offered him. Not interested!(?) Not after 50 pounds of chicken feed for breakfast, Farmer Donna! Words were exchanged between Frankie and the crew here, as everyone was saying they fed the chickens, but darn it if there never was any feed in that barn. Bad llama! Frankie, who is assigned the duty of lugging 50 pound sacks of Modesto feed; came up with an inspired solution: the feed tray now goes INSIDE the old baby chick enclosure with the lid wide open. Chickens can hop inside, but Couscous is way too big.

The excitement here at MSF never ceases!

I’ve posted a second harvest ticket this week because we had to switch things around a bit between Tuesday and Wednesday. Only Tuesday large share subscribers received the giant zuchs. I’m going to allow our zuch garden to provide another batch of giants, and hand out to Wednesday large shares either this coming week or next.

Eggs! We now have increased our egg productin to the point where we can accept 5 or 6 more orders a week! If you’d like to have a weekly dozen or half dozen added to your CSA box, email us!

Our eggs are remarkably special. First, we feed them with a top-notch, certified orgtanic, soy-free feed (from Modesto Mills) along with garden and orchard scraps. Chickens love melons and oranges, by the way! They’re free to roam inside a coyote-proof enclosure and have a large red barn to escape the elements and roost in at night. We have a pet llama, Couscou, who shares their space and protects them as well. Since Couscou moved in, we haven’t had a single bird lost to owls, or other predators. Couscou has discovered he likes chicken feed, unfortunately; and our feed costs have soared, however. We’re working on outsmarting him today!

The eggs themselves are rainbow colored, and come from heirloom chickens that aren’t “culled” when they stop laying. In factory egg production facilities, chickens’ egg yields are documented and when the feed to yield ratio drops to al certain points, the chickenis removed from the facility and killed. Part of the cost of our eggs includes the cost of feeding our chickens as pets for life. We don’t have any way of knowing which chicken is “high” yielding vs. “low” yielding, anyway; as they are truly free-ranged. (Even Certified Organic, factory free range eggs will leave you incredulous at the low bar definition of “free range.”) Each chicken has a favorite nest, and nests are shared. Because our chickens have plenty of space to live; they aren’t stressed and don’t peck at each other or require antibiotics. In commercial facilities, they do; and part of their beaks are removed, which is just inhumane.

Although as tiny producers, we don’t intend to invest in the cost of getting our chicken facility certified orgtanic, their feed and living conditions meet and exceed the requirements to be certified. At most, we provide eggs for 15 or so families each week, and at some point hope to double that.

If you’d like to be included as an egg add-on subscriber; the cost is $4 for half dozen and $8 for a full dozen, which we add to your CSA invoice. We don’t provide our eggs to non-subscribers.

We’re excited to have our late Sungold tomatoes in this week’s shares for all. They’re among the sweetest cherry tomatoes we can grow, and we grow them every year. We’re just beginning to harvest limes, at last. You’ll find them only in the large shares, and in a couple weeks, we hope to have them across the board. This is the last week for Asian pears. We don’t have ladders tall enough to reach the highest parts of our pear trees, so the highest fruit is now being pecked by birds. We had plenty to put in all boxes for weeks, so don’t mind sharing a few hundred pounds with the birds. They have to eat, too!

What’s coming up: apples, persimmons, pomegranites, passion fruit, dragon fruit, guavas and navel oranges. In the gardens: brocolli, eggplant, beets, lettuces, radish, carrots, and more. As most of you know, we have 10 acres of macadamias but not a whole lot of nuts because of a squirrel population that we can’t control organically. We do hope to have enough nuts to put in boxes, but it’s too soon to tell what the harvest will be.