We Bought a Farm: Our products & More news

We've got a new page up and going for our farm. It features OUR PRODUCTS! What we are selling! So exciting to see this dream becoming a reality.

Our chickens are producing about 40 eggs a day. Multiply this by days of the week and you have 280 eggs! That's 23 dozen for all of you a little slow on math (like me!) We as a family eat maybe six dozen a week leaving 17 to sell. Between my homeschool friends and JB's coworkers, we have sold them even before the chickens lay them.

Our goal is always just to pay for our feed costs. It costs us about $60 a week to feed these chickens organically. Non organically fed chicken can be done so for closer to $10 a week. (Gives you a little insight into why organic food costs so much more.) That means that at $4 a dozen, we need to sell about 15 dozen eggs a week to break even. We are doing that and making a tiny bit extra. So cool.

We are also getting about 4-6 duck eggs a day or about 2-3 dozen a week. We keep a dozen and have 2 dozen to sell. We have 3 different customers who are regularly buying these as well. We were really hoping that we could sell our products without needing to go to a farmer's market as this is just extra time we don't have. And sure enough, we've been doing great with direct-to-consumer.

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO FIND A FARMER IN YOUR AREA THAT YOU CAN SUPPORT!!! Trust me, we LOVE to be able to do this for people that really love what we are doing. So many have said, "Thank you for making the quality of food that I want to eat but can't grow myself." So great! I don't want to sell eggs to just anyone. We want to sell them to people who really know what they are getting and appreciate what goes into it.

We are also getting ready to bring in broiler chickens again in April. We have ultimately decided to do 300 chickens this year. (We did 200 last year.) We are trying to increase ourselves slowly. We are also going to be doing about 50 turkeys which is new for us.

Oh and did I mention that our geese are sitting on a nest? Not sure if they will hatch, but the kids are sure having fun thinking about little geese running around. We hope to raise the geese for meat. We have put some nesting boxes in for our ducks too, but so far, they are laying in there but no "going broody" which means one decides to sit. Until they sit, we will keep eating them.

And our friend Karen, whose ram we borrowed, has seen 7 babies come into her sheep herd in the last few weeks. We are therefore hopeful that the ram we borrowed, did his job here as well and that this spring we will get to see some new sheep here at Bauernhof Kitsteiner.

The last bit of news is Volunteers. We are about to start having a slew of volunteers coming to help us here on the farm. This is very exciting for us as we have so many things we want to do but really need more time in the day to get it done. These volunteers are a mixture of people who want to learn about Permaculture and those who simply want to experience America. I'll make sure to introduce them all to you on the Blog!