Taste Testing

I just read an interesting little article in the Stockman Grassfarmer. It said that if you taste test your milk and it seems sour and awful, the protein content in the grass is too high. This is in grass fed cows, of course. It also said that the same taste change is taking place in the fat of a beef cow also, but you don't find that out until later. I guess it could be a good thing to test or monitor the protein levels in the forage from time to time if you're 100% grass fed and trying to produce a high quality product.

Tomorrow we recieve our first batch of broilers for this year and, guess what? I am so not ready! We are planning a new place to brood them and it needs a bit of work. To say the least, I haven't started yet. I guess I'll be busy after work tomorrow.

I took a pasture walk this afternoon with one of my sons and I decided that it was a bitter sweet kind of walk. It was bitter because the grass, although green, isn't tall enough yet. It was sweet because I noticed a high percentage of the annual rye and orchard grass has taken. That is a wonderful sight. I am trying very hard not to get ahead of the game with my rotation plan, it is really testing my patience. Spring is sprining here, though, and am encouraged in that. The peach trees are beginning to bloom along with the nectarined and pears. Unfortunately I believe we may have lost two apple trees. These are young trees and we had high hopes for them.

This week we plan to purchase more bricks to expand the garden. We would like to do a little market gardening this year to see haow we might fair at the farmers market. I have put up several buckets of rabbit manure to sell and we just received our "Worm Factory" that we hope we can supplement our income with by selling worms and compost. Whatever is left, if anything, when we get done using it. In the economy of things, our goal is to have a diverse income from many different areas. It is important, however, that whatever industry we add must fit in with the other things we are doing. In other words, we don't want to add more labor, that is not cost effective, but add things that fit in with what we already do. When we look at a given enterprise, we ask, "how does this fit?" If it doesn't fit, we simplt don't take it on. Many farmers work themselves right out of business, spend themselves out of business or just plain burn out so that the kids want nothing to do with the farm when they get older. They don't want to struggle the way mom and dad did. So, it is important to make sure what you're doing fits and that you incorporate the kids so that they actually want to be a farmer like their daddy.