The times, yes they change. But we can choose that we will either change with time, or we can get stuck in a rut, spinning our tires, and never moving on from where we are currently at. My wife and I sat down a week or so ago and had a long heart to heart about our farm. As we talked and really communicated with each other for the first time in quite a while about the farm, we realized that we were both overwhelmed and not happy with the way things were going. So, we decided to make some changes.
The biggest change for us farm wise is probably with sheep. When we started farming together a few years ago, it looked like there would be a good market for lamb. As we have gotten in to it, and have built our flock up to 25 animals, we have found that our lambs are not selling anywhere near as well as we thought they would. We are spending a large amount of time caring for our breeding stock and investing a lot of money in feed, and we are not getting anywhere near that amount back in sales. We have decided to cut our losses and sell off most, if not all of our flock. We started selling them a week ago, and in that time we have gone from 25 animals, to only 6 at this time. We are not sure how many we are going to keep, if any, but we have a buyer possibly lined up for 2 of the ones we have left, and 1 of the other ones will be sold once we get her fattened back up from nursing the twins that she raised this year. We may keep the last three, which is a three generation trio of ewes from our farm, but we are not positive about this yet.
We currently have 14 pigs, and have decided that they will be going to market as they reach a good size, and from now on we will be raising only one or two pigs a year, one to fill our freezer and one to possibly sell to pay the processing cost for ours. We spend a lot of time driving to various breweries and stores to pick up spent grain and produce to raise all of the pigs, and cutting down on the number that we raise will allow us to greatly reduce the amount of time we spend on that, while intensively focusing on the quality of the animals that we do raise.
We are continuing to reduce the number of rabbits that we are keeping. This is a process that has been ongoing for several months. At the beginning of the summer we had a bit over 100 rabbits, and at this time we are down to 10. We may get out of rabbits altogether, but we are still deciding on that for sure. The kids have a couple that they will probably keep as pets, and we may keep a breeding pair of our Flemish Giants, just because they are cool. (Ok, mostly just because I like having huge rabbits, and I think they are cool.)
Our flock of birds is also getting a huge makeover. We have accumulated a large amount of chickens, ducks, geese, guinea hens, peacocks and pigeons. There is no reason for us to keep all of them, especially with winter coming up. During the nice weather it is pretty easy for us to free range most of our flock, but during the nasty winter months we have limited space to keep everything. So this week we started weeding through our birds and selling off the ones that we don’t want or need for something. We took two of our four peacocks, four geese, several ducks and some pigeons to the auction. Over the next several weeks we will be reducing our numbers of birds even more. We eat and sell a ton of eggs, so we probably won’t reduce the number of chickens too much, but everything else will end up way less numerous.
Our ultimate goal in all of this is to be able to provide the best possible food for our family for the most reasonable cost that we can. The ability to generate a little bit of income along the way is always a plus, but we are no longer going to be trying to do that at the expense of missing out on the other things that we feel are important. We will still be farming, but we will not be spending every minute of every day off working on it. We will be investing in our kids and in making memories with them as our first priority. We are going to continue to streamline what we do and make our farm work for us, rather than running ourselves into the ground working for our farm. No, we don’t think it is easy, and no we don’t think we will not have to work. We are just going to focus our work on areas that we agree are actually worth our investment.