The agenda will include the following:
-Cover crop programs using oats, peas, radish and clover
-Strip till and compost application updates
-Crop rotation variations using wheat, barley, corn, millet, sunflowers, & feed peas
-Paramagnetism in soil and crop programs
-Use of resonators for “charged” water and fertilizer
-Equipment, including strip till, planter, cultivator, compost spreader
-Grazing programs updates, using rotational and mob grazing
-Pasture poultry.

Sponsors of the tour include High Plains OCIA, NRCS, NSAS and Wyatt Ag Ventures.
Directions to the farm: from Ogallala, 10 miles south on Hiway 61 to Road 769 and 1/2 mile west.

Dennis Demmel
308-352-4078
cell 352-6138

Marianna Peeler holds a small fresh egg laid by one of her newest hens.

That’s right people, we’re expanding.  What started as a blog to follow a single hog from birth on the farm to food on the table, has grown into a blog covering all things related to Slow Food South Texas.

While you wouldn’t know it from the frequency of my posts I have been busy.  Most recently, I just returned from a visit to Peeler Farms where Marianna Peeler gave me a tour of her family farm, and her fields of pasture raised poultry.  Just like Mark and Kelley Escobedos’ heritage pork, Marianna Peeler’s animals are raised the old-fashioned way, and are going to be featured during the 2012 Slow Food South Texas harvest gala.

The laying hens in pasture doing what they do best, hunting for grubs and insects.

While this hectic schedule means that for now you will just have to settle for a few teaser photos I promise to post a more in-depth article of my tour soon.  Once again I would like to give express my gratitude to all the South Texas local farmers providing good, clean, fair food to their communities.  A special heartfelt thank you to Mark and Kelley Escobedo of South Texas Heritage Pork and Marianna Peeler of Peeler Farms, who continue to put up with my prying eyes, intruding lens and greenhorn questions.

Today I had the chance to hear and see a very inspiring man, by the name of Joel Salatin.  Joel is basically self sustainable farmer in Virgina, USA, who is making a living and employing others on their “mega farm”.  He has great ideas and views as to how to get the most out of our land without using and abusing it.  They have  pigs, cows, chickens, turkeys, and even rabbits, all producing and helping rejuvenate the soils and the land, giving back what they use from it without chemicals.  If you are at all interested in this kind of thing it is definitely worth checking out their great website http://www.polyfacefarms.com or better yet, going to visit the Polyface Farm!

I have been on a quest lately to try to be as self sustainable as possible.  Number one, to know exactly what is going in our families mouths.  And  Number two, to help save money.  Really it does not take much to have a few chickens, and if I can just talk my hubby into letting us have a couple of pigs ….  We raise our own grass-fed beef and a lot of our meat comes from wild game we harvest ourselves and have just started to butcher our selves.  We keep as big of a garden as we can handle, some times bigger…LOL!  We don’t use a huge amount of grains because of diet restrictions, so I don’t feel that it is real viable at this point to look into that.  So really I just need to get them flippin chickens!!  Eeeekkk I wish I wasn’t so damn terrified of them!  LOL  I have sketched out some designs that I hope will allow me to raise poulets for eating as well as a few laying hens with out too much stress…  ON ME!!  LOL!  They will be what is called ”pasture poultry”, as they will be raised by moving their living quarters to fresh vegetation regularly.  I am very excited as well as terrified to jump into this adventure!    I will try to keep up with the blog better and post my experiences in becoming more self sustainable!!

So far, I am really enjoying raising these turkeys. Watch the video and you will see why.

If you want to order one of our turkeys for Thanksgiving, head over to our turkey page on The Foragers.

I have raised a few turkeys over the years, but this is my first big push into turkey production. I had so many people call last year around Thanksgiving that I just couldn’t not raise some turkeys this year. Plus as a bonus for our CSA members, we will to offer these turkeys at a substantial discount. It pays to be a member – err, which ad did I steal that slogan from?

You will see the poults (baby turkeys) in the brooder in this video and they will stay there for the next 2-3 weeks depending on the weather. They are a little slower to hit the pasture than chickens, but once out there, they are going to be grass eating machines. Rather than run these guys in coops like I do the chickens, these turkeys will be contained only by a portable fence to keep them in and predators out. I will have a portable roost in the center of the pen and the whole combo will be moved often to a new area. It will be an adventure for sure.

If you want to pre-order a turkey, head over to The Foragers.

We are lucky to live in a small town that allows chickens within the city limits. Our four Buff Orpington hens provide us with an average of two eggs a day. Only on a two week cold spell  of sub zero days/nights did they stop laying. Two or three eggs per day works out great for me, because I eat two fried (butter in a cast iron skillet) about every other day. This allows a few of the eggs to end up in some of my wife’s excellent desserts, etc.

Anyway, winter (especially when the days start getting longer) is a great time to start planning for the spring thaw on a farm: gardeners are hovering over the latest seed catalog, ranchers are counting how many bales of hay they have left and crop farmers are pondering the price of seed corn.

As a small grass farmer, I am reading books like Joel Salatin’s Salad Bar Beef. In this book Joel lays out a strong foundation for creating a farm where the animals do most of the work through harvesting the forage present.  At Polyface Farms, the farm of many faces, there is room for many animals to complete the natural cycle of things.  Pigs, rabbits, turkeys, chickens, and cows all work together to increase the fertility of the land and create a marketable product.  It is a great book that gets me excited about some changes I want to make in my little grass beef operation. Besides some small changes in the way I move animals through our grazing system, I am most excited about adding different animals to our farm, especially “pasture poultry”.

As you can tell from nightly chores, we have dabbled in chickens this past year, but these have been barnyard chickens on a small scale.  True to Joel’s passion of adding to the enjoyment and productivity of farming, pasture poultry is simply getting chickens to clean up after your cows as they move through the rotational grazing setup. This benefits the cows, the farm and the chickens.  The chickens scratch through the cowpies, removing fly larva which helps the cows have less flies to fight off.  The land gets the benefit of cow pies being spread out over a larger area and integrated in the soil more quickly.  The chickens get to eat what they like to eat: grasshoppers, crickets and other bugs.

Chickens are new to me and present some challenges to ponder.  Do you raise meat chickens or layers or both?  How many do you buy?  These are just a few of the beginning questions I have to research over the next few weeks.  It is great being a grass farmer with new opportunities right around the corner.

If you have any helpful ideas about pasture poultry please leave them in the comments below.  Have a great day!

I have broken down our thoughts into three main categories (Production, Marketing, and Cash flow) which I will post over three days. Here is Part 3- Cash flow

Cash flow is the last thing to consider in our planning process for 2010. We need to add dollars to each and every one of the issues we have mentioned in the last two posts and not only do we need to add dollar values but we also need to predict when those dollars will be spent/earned. True financial crisis’s happen when cash flow goes negative, not when balance sheets go negative. Luckily, we love spreadsheets and can spend hours fiddling with the numbers and scenarios. We know there is some debate over the best spreadsheet software, but right now we have to say that Excel 2007 rocks our world. It is tough verbally describe this mathematical portion of our pondering, but it is by far the most important part of planning. You have to make sure that you are going to be in the black month in and month out and should mean that you end the year in the black as well. There is no point in doing something for nothing. It is much cheaper and easier to do nothing for nothing. But if you want to do something and earn something, the price is planning (and of course all of the other costs as well).

Here are some cash flow questions that we are pondering for next year:

• Production
  • How much does it cost to finish the animal?
  • How does that cost coincide with cash flow?
• Marketing
  • How much does it cost to sell that animal?
  • How much does it cost to store that animal
    • We have walk in freezer but it ain’t a cavern. If we over produce and undersell we have to utilize a commercial freezer and that costs money.
• Overall
  • How much gross and net does each animal make me based on a number of different scenarios?
  • Can we figure out a reasonable scenario that keeps our cash flow in the black for the whole year?

We have broken down our operation and our planning process into three nice and tidy categories, but the reality is that it is much more interrelated than this. We haven’t mentioned any sort of back office considerations like insurance, LLC costs, advertising, range rent, etc.  Nor we have accounted for the vagaries of Mother Nature. How this winter turns out (lots of rain, no rain, rain at the wrong time, rain at the right time) will dramatically change our plans for 2010.

Our point with this series of posts is to show how much planning and forethought goes into producing high quality meats and a sustainable, profitable business. We are not doing this by the seat of our pants nor could we even if we wanted to. But we are open to change and relish the opportunities that lie within the ever-offing tomorrow.

I have broken down our thoughts into three main categories (Production, Marketing, and Cash flow) which I will post over three days. Here is Part 2- Marketing

If I were a conventional rancher, we could stop at the end of Part 1 with our production questions because once the animals got to a certain weight/age; we would sell them into the conventional market and never think about them again.  That is not the case here, we sell everything that we produce straight to our customers and that opens a whole other can of worms that need to be considered.

First thing that we need to consider is how much we are going to sell. We know that our beef sells really well. We have been selling it for years and people know and love our beef and we could sell three times the amount we can grow. Lamb sales are less than beef, but still good and are increasing as more people realize how wonderful good grass-fed lamb can be. Our free range pork was new this year and considering people are just discovering it, sales have been quite good. Our pasture raised chicken sales were a bit off from our prediction this year, but the sales were good enough to keep on with producing them. We think our chicken sale issues came from poor marketing, not flavor (not with how good our chicken is).

We have attached some numbers to how much we think we are going to sell next year. The question is when those sales are going to occur? Farmer Market sales tend to be in the summer and fall. Bulk sales are in the spring and summer. And our new Meat CSA should spread the sales out over the whole year but it is a new enterprise so we can’t plan around it very well.  Knowing when our sales are going to occur is critical when we get around to our cash flow plan (part three) as well as informing our production needs.

Here are some marketing questions that we are pondering for next year:

• How much volume will our existing markets move? Is that enough?
• We think we need to expand our marketing. Should we consider more FM’s requiring extra help or should we spend our time pushing our CSA?
• Are our prices right? Do they need to go higher or lower? Essentially, we are considering “do I want to trade margin for volume?” i.e. sell fewer pounds but make more per pound or sell more pounds but make less per pound? This question of course is relative; we are not going to be Tyson anytime soon or ever.

Questions for you, our loyal reader:

• Would you like to see us at a farmers market near you? If so, how far would you travel to get some our delicious meats?
• Do you have a favorite farmer’s market? Do you know of a farmer’s market that would appreciate our meat?

I have broken down our thoughts into three main categories (Production, Marketing, and Cash flow) which I will post over the next three days. Here is Part 1 – Production

A large part of the reason that we are planning for next year now is that meat we sell comes from animals we grow and animals grow slowly. You need to plan months if not years in advance to make sure that you have your production system matching your marketing system. To wit, grass-fed lamb takes 12-14 months to go from conception to harvest, grass-fed steers see that time upped to around 24-36 months, free-range pigs take about as long as a lamb and the speed racers of our production world are the pasture raised broilers which take 8-14 weeks depending on the breed.

The other tricky part to planning our production for next year is to make sure that the animal’s last day coincides with the right season. For instance, our grass-fed beef is only harvested off of our lush spring pasture, which lasts for about 90 days. So we need to plan three years in advance to make sure that our steers start the spring weighing about 900lbs in order to meet the harvest deadline. As you can guess that is a tough juggling act. Each of the species we raise have their own harvest season, and each needs to be raised in a honest, conscientious way that arranges their production cycle to best suit their needs and best suits our needs.

Here are some production questions that we are pondering for next year:

• Should we plant some pasture that would allow for early spring grazing for the beef or plant some pasture that would extend spring into early summer? Both? And what does that type of planting offer to the other animals?
• If we plant pasture, what sort of infrastructure does that require? Fencing, irrigation, etc.
• Is planting pasture worth it? Do we have the time to make it work and work well? No point in doing it half assed – that would just be money and time down the drain.
• Should we sell our spring lambs on the hoof now or finish them next spring and sell them as grass-fed?
• Drought has reduced our cowherd to the point where next year we won’t have much beef to sell. Should we consider sourcing steers from another grass-fed operation that fits our production criteria or just say this is what nature allowed us to produce?
• We have 15 pigs on pasture now, but our prediction is for us to sell about 3x that many next year. Should we load up on those weaners over the winter and have them ready for harvest early next summer or should we stagger them throughout the year?
• Our chicken supply feels comfortable right now, but we are thinking that next year we might have to change our production practices away from organic feed to a high quality but non-organic feed to bring the cost down. That would be a tough decision because we strongly believe in non-GMO grain but if we can’t sell organic chickens then we shouldn’t grow them

Questions for you, our loyal reader:

• Would you feel comfortable buying beef from us that we bought from another sustainable rancher?
• Which would rather eat: a chicken fed an organic feed or a chicken fed a high quality, but non organic feed?

Freezer - The freezer has been a bit of a larger task that I first thought it would be. Back in the spring, John and I planned to spend a couple of weekends and a few evenings putting the whole thing together. That turns out to be a massive underestimation of the actual amount of work necessary to build a walk in freezer. Adam (our intern) and I have spent just about two full weeks on it so far. Week 1 was cleaning, layout, and shopping. Week 2 has been construction, electrical, and hopefully refrigeration.  Right now, the freezer has walls but no ceiling, the trench is dug for the electrical and the contractor is supposed to be working on it this afternoon, and our freezer guy says we are next on his list. It won’t all come together tomorrow, but it sure seems like next week, we will have a functioning walk-in freezer.

Refrigerated Trailer – Holly (my fiancée) was cruising on craigslist earlier in the week and found a refrigerated trailer for sale.  An odd find to be blogging about you might think, but to me it is a magical find. Have you ever pondered the logistics of transporting hundreds of pounds of meat around? Well, there are good solutions and workable solutions. So far, I have been surviving with chest freezers in the back of the truck to transport meat around, which is a workable solution, but involves a lot of lifting of both meat and freezers. While I am young and stupid, someday I want to grow up to be old, wise, and not lifting 60lbs boxes of meat all the way up into a chest freezer in the back of my truck. Hence, my delight in this potential trailer, that I finally have a good solution. Let’s just hope I didn’t jinx the sale with this post.

Chicken updates – Our last batch of 2009 chickens are two weeks away from harvest. I am looking forward to this harvest and testing all of the updates to our processing line. Since our last big harvest, we have added a printing scale which saves us having to hand calculate all prices, devised a way to transport 200 chickens to the processing unit, and streamlined our chilling process. (Thank you, refrigerated trailer). This may be an odd reason to be excited about harvest, but the reality is that if we want Barbarosa Ranchers to be a success, we need to get this part of our operation down to a manageable task. Currently, it is doable, but requires hard long days with only moderate output. In the future, we need this process to result in high output and only require regular hours of labor. Every time we harvest, we move closer to that end goal and I love to make progress, so hence my excitement over our upcoming processing weekend.

Turkey thoughts — I have been too busy with building a freezer to have gotten turkey poults in time for T-day. Right now, if I bought them next week they would be ready for Christmas. However, I am hesitant to buy more than my family and friends can eat because I am worried if people would be willing the pay the price that I would have to charge for the turkey.

Before I shock you with the price, let’s consider what attributes our turkeys will have; free range, organic, sustainably family farmed, allowed to roam and roast like turkeys should, and absolutely delicious. You think our chicken is good? Try what we can do with turkey.

Now the price sketch: A turkey poult costs $4, organic feed for one turkey is $40, labor is right around $50. So the basic break-even puts a whole 20lb turkey right around $100. So now you can see that a free range organic turkey isn’t cheap. The question is — Is it worth it? If I knew that people would say yes, then I am off to the races. But since I don’t know, I am hemming and hawing. If anyone wants to pre-order a turkey for Christmas, contact me.

Next week looks to be Adam’s last week out here on the ranch, funding for his program is running out. I hope that we can finish off the section of fencing we started back when he first showed up.  But that is only my hope for next week; plans have a way of going out the window out here. All I know is that next week is going to be fun, exhausting, and rewarding.