Our new flock of twenty-five laying chicks (including an all white Leghorn rooster) arrived last week. This coming spring we are striving for higher egg production so we ordered mostly Black Star females with a few Red Stars, Leghorns and Buff Orphingtons added to the mix. We have been looking into raising the chicks on a soured milk diet which means feeding the chicks raw milk that has clabbered or soured, meaning fermented.  Clabbering raw milk is easy.  We just fill a quart jar or two with some of the fresh milk from the mornings milking (either goat or cow will do), screw on a lid and leave on the window sill for a couple of days until the curds separate from the whey.  

Raw milk is loaded with enzymes and probiotics.  When raw milk starts to sour, it simply means that beneficial bacteria called probiotics have started to use up all the lactose or milk sugar which casues the milk to no longer taste sweet.  Soured raw milk has a higher level of probiotics which have initiated the fermentation or clabbering of the milk.  (By the way, this only works with raw milk.  When store bought pasteurized milk goes bad it becomes a huge food borne illness risk to consume it and should be thrown out.)

All these probiotics can be used as a prophylactic against disease and illness, boosting the immune system and growing stronger, healthier birds.  We are looking forward to an abundance of eggs in the spring.   

p.s. It is still an amazing thing to think of how much the family cow adds to the homestead, everyone on the farm benefits from the by products!    

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Now that we are finally receiving the long awaited rain (hurray!!), the race is on to get winter chores done.  Weve been amending beds with manure, heavily mulching, building compost piles everywhere, and transplanting lots of starts from the green houses to the beds.  After going at this small farming business for almost four years now, we are honing in and getting organized.  Our seed list has narrowed as we have learned a thing or two about what we like to eat and preserve, what types of plants grow well here, and what we can plant that will give us a large yield with little energy input/water.  

The changing climate and weather patterns are forcing us to rethink everything.  For us that means starting to establish our food forests and for annuals, keeping it simple.  Growing the staples (beans, potatoes, squash, brassicas, and eggs) can keep us well fed all year long. Of course well plant some of our other favorites, but the bulk will be these five.  

Since runners beans are hardy, produce a large harvest that can be eaten fresh or dried, and can become perennials, there are big hopes to plant them all over the garden this year. Scarlet runners, painted ladies and many more varieties to climb the fences.  

Yukon Gold is our preferred variety

Potatoes are probably the biggest crop we want to grow.  Our family consumes masses of them and with growing boys its always good to have some around as a base for a meal, especially when we are trying to cut back on wheat.  Plus they thrive here, our big dilemma is that the gophers love them as much as we do.  Were still searching for a solution to that problem.  

Eggs are versatile, reliable, dont need refrigeration, and can be grown off the compost, extra vegis and waste products from our farm.  They are our main source of protein given half of us dont eat meat.  Every breakfast around here includes eggs with a variation of avocado and toast, porridge, or potatoes.  

winter squash grows exceptionally well in our garden

A list of other crops that are easy and grow well for us in our soil and climate are zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkins, winter squash (Oregon Sweet Meat is our favorite), red and yellow onions, garlic, quinoa, amaranth, and artichokes.  Planting vegis that need more hydration near the grey water is key and well be dry farming tomatoes again this year. These rainy days are perfect for planning and dreaming of the garden to come....

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The poultry run has been pretty quiet for the last several months.  In autumn we processed all the old birds who were no longer laying.  The one long day we spent processing was an unwelcome chore but what a relief when it was all over and the freezer was full of chicken and duck for the winter stock.  Last August we bought twenty five laying chicks and our new flock has grown fabulously.  Raised on a soured milk diet, they are now almost five months and we expect them to begin laying soon.  We are ecstatic to have reached our goal of completely cutting off store bought feed! For about four months we have been feeding a combination of spent grain (fermented non-gmo barley that we get for free from a local brewery), vegis from the garden, organic green bin waste, our kitchen scraps-including fish and meat, and clabbored milk.  After doing a bunch of reading and combing the internet for recipes/ratios of homemade feed made with spent grain we really didnt find much useful information so we have been experimenting with trial and error.  What we learned is that our birds all love the spent grain but when fed to the younger pullets they had bloody stool within a day.  So we kept to the sour milk diet while they were growing with a supplement of organic grower crumble. Once they reached 6-8 weeks they transitioned from the brooder to the run and started on spent grain combined with vegis, etc.  They are all looking happy and healthy.  It will be exciting to find out how well they will lay on this diet.  Since we especially chose high production breeds this time around we are hoping for lots of yummy eggs.  I have to admit, I miss all the colors of the old flock.  The three breeds we chose are not as bright; white leghorns, red and black sexlinks, as well as our one random Americauna who gives us her periodic green egg.

We have big plans for the run to be an experimental food forest with apple, olive, fig and mulberry trees, Siberian pea shrubs, bamboo, comfrey and several nitrogen fixing cover crops to support the trees and give the poultry a little forage.  Everything is so dry, the chickens and ducks will be happy to be surrounded by more greenery.  In the meantime we will build a massive compost pile in the run for the chickens to scratch, turn, and feed off of then they will be pastured through our small orchard while we transform their habitat. 

Check out this clip of a very cool, inspiring video about feeding chickens without grain. 

Other ideas...were thinking of ordering Bourban Red turkeys and geese in a couple of months.  It will be so fun to have a bustling poultry yard again!

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We have been fortunate to arrange a weekly pick up spent barley from a local brewery that purchases their grain from a company with sustainable practices and uses non-gmo grain. After researching high and low, we have not found much information out there on the amount of spent grain that can be added to the diets of poultry and ruminants on the small farm scene.  So we have been experimenting with the spent barley as a supplemental livestock feed over the last few weeks and have made some interesting observations.  Our laying hens and ducks eat all the wet grain we give them but do not seem to be laying more eggs with the change in diet.  The goats and cows LOVE the grain!  They were not previously getting any grain and were fed mostly alfalfa and orchard grass. The addition of spent grain has significantly increased their daily milk production.  We have been giving it only with morning feedings, starting out with small amounts and increasing slowly to allow their systems to adjust to the new food.  

Since spent grain has already gone through a mashing and lautering process, it is much easier to digest than regular grain as the hulls have already been broken down leaving behind some carbohydrates and mostly proteins.  For us, this is basically a free protein rich feed we can give our animals that cuts our feed bills in half. One of our goals over the next few months will be to work out proper ratios of other ingredients to create our own nourishing layer mix with spent barley as the base.  Ideally these will be ingredients we can grow ourselves or source locally.  

Joel Salatin says something interesting about feeding spent grain to dairy cattle.  When the Industrial Revolution was changing the infrastructure of cities, dairies sprang up around breweries in order to feed the distillers grain to the cattle.  However, it made the pH of the cattles rumen much more acidic and changed the milk.  I imagine this was with cattle fed on only spent grain or a large amount.  We will see how it goes with adding it in as a supplement in moderation along with continuing the same amount of hay and fresh vegis.  

Feeding our animals what we produce (or recycling others waste products that we can obtain close by for free) is all part of our bigger plan.  Cutting back on purchasing commercial layer pellets and adding spent grain to the equation brings us a few steps closer to our goal of obtaining a closed loop system on our small farm.  

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