EggMania. Help for Farmers Rising. Corned Beef & Cabbage.

With the 70+ degree weather moving through the area today we are definitely feeling strong hints of spring coming soon. Late March into early April is typically one of the busiest times of the year on our farm, as we transition from winter housing/feeding to getting all the animals back out on the pastures. This includes moving the hens out of their winter residence in the hoophouse (see above), clearing out a foot of composted wood chips, and then setting it up for brooding meat chicks and turkey poults all summer. Plus fixing all the water lines running around the farm, and repairing the Mobile Range Coops and getting them ready for chicks coming out of the brooder. I'm getting tired just thinking about it…fortunately we have a great team to help out this year.

 

We've birthed a few new Guernsey calves in the past couple of weeks, so our milk production is very strong and on several days over the past week we haven't sold out of online milk in the morning. If you've been frustrated in the past trying to order raw milk might be worth your while to give it another try.  And we are expecting several new heifers to calve in the next few weeks which will likely increase our production even more as we transition into spring. 

 

The egg market is crazy right now. Our egg production is actually very strong for winter months, most days we are collecting over a thousand eggs each afternoon. And sometimes selling them all within an hour of the store opening the next day.  We reduced the limit from three dozen per customer down to two dozen, and then one dozen trying to keep eggs in stock so that our regular long-term farm customers could get some. 

 

Turns out many of the new faces showing up at the farm and buying ONLY eggs were coming to us not for our pasture-raised, free range, organic, corn and soy free eggs - but simply because our eggs were cheaper than the crappy CAFO eggs they had been buying at Jewel and Aldi. So we reluctantly raised prices to $9.95/dz. to discourage those price-focused customers.  That seems to have helped, we are back to a two dozen limit and will be more careful watching the market to see when we can drop our prices back down to a sustainable level once the mania subsides. 

 

Amongst all the chaos coming out of Washington in recent weeks, there have been some really valuable federal programs that have been defunded by the DOGE team.  One such program is IL-EATS, a joint federal-state program that paid mostly small local and sustainable farmers to grow healthy food for needy families and food pantries. Farmers Rising, a local non-profit that administers the program in northern Illinois, is seeking to raise $125,000 this month to fund program staff and expenses for a few weeks until funding is restored.  Please join us and donate today to help keep this important program going. 

 

We took a bunch of our grass-fed briskets over to Hometown Sausage Kitchen last week and they spiced them up and transformed them into fresh corned beef, ready for your St. Paddy's day meal. We have a limited amount available in the store this weekend… I am super excited to get mine on the stove Monday with some cabbage and black eyed peas!

 

Please excuse the mess in the farm store over the next week or so, we are doing some remodeling to add a little more shopping space for coolers and dry goods, as well as a 2nd checkout station to get folks in and out quicker. 

 

Fresh produce in the store this week includes avocadoes, lemons, red beets, apples, pears, potatoes, onions / shallots, acorn/butternut squash, yellow/red bell peppers, carrots, celery, fresh microgreens and fresh shiitake, lions mane, and oyster mushrooms.

 

We also restocked the Green Dirt feta and dirt lover brie cheese, Janie's Mill flours and new GF buckwheat flour, Bushel & Pecks  jams and hot sauces, Taza chocolate, and Deerland Dairy yogurt.

 

That's it for this week, think spring and cows grazing on green grass soon.  

 

Cliff, Anna, and the Farm Team