Lookback on Fall 2024

We had a very typical fall here on the farm. September and October are usually very busy, and luckily November was a slow month to get caught up.

We started September out with a big change, I stopped doing my weekly deliveries to the Twin Cities. Since we started farming in 2012, I have been doing deliveries of our products to the metro area. When I stopped I was going down every week, plus 1 weekend day a month, meeting customers at our 26 locations. It was very effective way to grow our farm. But we had grown out of the system we had developed, and would need to purchase a different larger delivery vehicle or expand to deliver more days. Neither of which I was looking forward to.

We started working with Regional Food System, RFS, in Blaine and hired their service to store some of our products and deliver orders to our customers doorsteps. We are also able to offer many other organic grocery items from their store to our customers, making the home deliveries more efficient for RFS and convenient for our customers.

Alexandre Family Farm laying hens on pasture

In September we also went to northern CA for a 2-day laying hen workshop through APPPA – American Pastured Poultry Producers Association. The farm, Alexandre Family Farm, runs about 20,000 laying hens on pasture moving them daily. For some perspective, we have a flock of 500 laying hens. We wanted to see the operation firsthand and learn some efficiencies we could use on our farm. Maybe even inspiration to grow our flock someday.

Flying over their farm - red arrow is the poultry shelters on pasture, orange arrow is the Egg Farm buildings, blue arrow is the dairy

Our mobile range coops, MRC

Our last batch of broilers were processed in September and started our long 2 months of many animal processing days. These involve loading animals to transport to the processor, driving them to the processer, unloading, returning to the processor to pick up meat, and then back to the farm and eventually to the customer. It is a lot of driving and some heavy lifting. At the end of the growing season, it is a lot of hard labor before it can be on your plate.

So, October was a lot of that as well. Processing the last of our pigs, and retiring the large flock of laying hens that were in the egg train on pasture. Of the 40 pigs we raised, 32 went custom as halves or wholes to customers. That takes logistics to get every customer their pork, it is one of the tasks that I don’t look forward to each year. We want to make this process easier on us for next year, but I don’t have any good ideas on that yet.

The egg train with laying hens

November rolled around, thankfully, and I was able to start enjoying the more time I had being on the farm now that I wasn’t doing weekly deliveries! This is actually the earliest in the off season that I had enough time to start feeling creative and get excited about planning the next season. That usually doesn’t happen until January, and mainly because it was absolutely necessary at that point to plan that year’s growing season. I truly appreciate the more time I have right now.

Rose with the calves, Sam on the left and Porky on the right

Our warm fall has let Ryan accomplish many of the tasks we wanted to get done before frozen ground takes hold. We were pretty close to accomplishing the list. But I feel that farmers will never have a list that gets finished. The cattle are setup on pasture for bale grazing with access to the one frost free waterer by the winter chicken house. We have one of our mobile range coops ready and setup for spring arrivals of ready to lay pullets. Some cleaning up and rearranging in the farmyard. (Just a never-ending task) The pig intake pen is almost setup, but snow isn’t covering the ground yet, so we have time!

My wish list to accomplish this winter is:

• Finish the egg washing room. Do you remember when we started that? Hopefully not, it’s been too long.
• Figure out which projects we are going to prioritize and can accomplish for improvements this next year. And how we are going to fund them. We of course have many ideas, but we can’t do it all.
• Do more writing and figure out how I’m going to keep in touch with my customers who I use to see weekly!

Now next quarter I’m going to check back in on this list and see how we did. If I publish it, things will get done! Right?!?