2012 national drought and rising grain costs

During this early planning part of the year, we have been taking a hard look at all the pieces of the farm.  We’ve been crunching numbers and planning to ensure that we can grow the best possible product while keeping prices as affordable as possible and ensure that we can earn a living from the hard work of farming.

Bluebird Farm hogs and broilers will continue to be raised with certified organic grains, outside rotating through pastures, forests, and garden.  The layer hens will also live free range and on pasture; however, the layer hens will no longer receive organic grain.  We will use a non-medicated, all-grain feed that we’ve used in previous years to feed our pastured laying hens.

The 2012 drought in most of the United States caused a poor national crop of grains that are important to raise chickens and pigs. All grains prices, organic and non- organic, went up in price by 30%, and left farmers across the nation without a way to afford to feed their animals.  While many farmers and farms across the nation are still reeling from the devastating effects from the 2012 drought, we at Bluebird Farm are optimistically finding creative ways to make 2013 successful.

As we make our plans for the 2013 growing season, we’ve found that the high grain prices affected our various livestock in different ways.   Some areas of the farm have fared better than others.  The pigs look good (and taste good too!) and we are excited for another great year of vegetables.  But chickens proved to be a sticky issue.

Broilers- Tasty Pastured Chicken

Broilers are fast growing meat chickens that need very specific conditions to grow well.  We have made a variety of changes to our system to help them grow more efficiently.  However, no matter how efficiently the birds grow there is no escaping the fact that they eat lots of food!  We continue to strive to use organic feed for the broilers to ensure a pure product.  Certified organic feed is 100% chemical free and GMO-free.  We use this feed for both the hogs and broilers.  Unfortunately, upon close examination of all the costs to produce organic broilers we have had to raise our price.  The new price of $6/lb will ensure that we can continue to produce organic broilers while earning a modest income for ourselves (we discovered that in the past we were volunteering our time to raise the broilers).

We are confident that you will love our organic fed, pasture raised, free range broilers!

Layers- Fresh Pastured Eggs

We have decided to come to a compromise on the layer hens.  After looking at the numbers for the layer hens we found that in order to cover all of our costs, including organic grains, our organic eggs would cost $6.90/dozen.  While we want to use organic grains for all of our livestock we felt that almost $7/dozen is not affordable for eggs.

In order to keep our eggs at their current price we have made the difficult choice of switching to non-organic feed for our hens only.  The other option was to not raise any hens on our farm.  We will continue to use top quality, non-medicated, vegetarian feed for the pastured hens.  And of course all Bluebird Farm hens live on fresh green pasture rotated with sheep and pigs.  These hens live outdoors in the sunshine and fresh air with plenty to scratch and peck.  Our chicken wagon coop provides the hens with a mobile house around the pastures and fields of the farm. 

Bluebird Farm hogs and broilers will continue to be raised with certified organic grains, outside rotating through pastures, forests, and garden.  The layer hens will also live free range and on pasture; however, the layer hens will no longer receive organic grain. 

Each season we work hard to continue to raise the highest quality animals and vegetables at affordable prices that will ensure that Bluebird Farm continues into the future.  Above all we want to work with you, our customers, to build an open and honest food system that produces healthy food for us all.

We’re growing for you,

William and Marie

Late summer on the Farm

September just flew by! The season’s last Morganton Farmers’ Market on Saturday October 1^st. From then on, we’ll have vegetables, chicken, eggs, and pork at Farmer Fridays at the Catawba Valley Brewing Company on Friday afternoons from 4-6:00 pm. We will continue to have vegetables like lettuce, Swiss chard, lettuce mix, kale, and radishes as the cooler weather continues. Conover and Hickory markets continue through the mix of October.

Short Days

As the days shorten we can practically see the plants’ growth slow. Lettuce, arugula, and radishes that would have practically exploded form the ground in May are now slowly growing. A whole week after germination and the seedlings still only have their first set of leaves. Shorter days mean we can start work later and end a little earlier. But there is still plenty to do harvesting, cleaning up, and seeding cover crops. That means we have to run around faster while we do work to make sure we get it all done. The changing of the seasons does make us think of cooler days with a resting farm. Until then you can still find us out in the field.

Sweet Potato Harvest

Today we harvested sweet potatoes. We thought we were just looking for the colorful roots of sweet potatoes. But the harvest turned into an insect and spider safari. Sweet potatoes form a dense canopy of vines providing a great habitat for all kinds of critters. One of the more exciting finds of the day was a small salamander hiding in the debris on the soil surface. A gross find was a whole section of garden bed filled with large white grubs. We collected them as we dug through the soil and fed them to the layer hens-they loved them! We also found more of our arch-nemeses the squash bugs. They had headed into the cover of the sweet potatoes to begin bedding down for winter. In the cooler weather they are slow movers and we could easily squish them! Another exciting find in the jungle were hoards of young wolf spiders. Wolf spiders are the large brown spiders that move very quickly along the ground. They are great generalist predators to have in the garden. The whole surface of the soil had hundreds of little spiders (their bodies were only the size of a pencil led with legs extending out to the diameter of a dime.

Late Summer Color from tithonia or mexican sunflower

Some of the insects we found were pests, but many of them like the spiders are beneficial creatures. Amphibians like toads and salamanders that we find in the garden also play helpful roles eating insects. This entire micro-ecosystem would not be possible with the extensive use of poisons for weeds or insects. Organic practices allow beneficial insects and animals to thrive because there is a diverse base of prey species. When they live in a good balance together problems are kept to a minimum while the whole farm ecosystem thrives.

Sweet Potatoes

Not just for sweet potato casserole! These tasty jewels are great baked, boiled, or incorporated with black beans and perhaps chorizo sausage for a tasty main dish. We harvested several varieties with imaginative names such as Ginseng, Carolina Ruby, Bradshaw, and Covington. Like many fruits and vegetables the grand variety of sweet potatoes has been reduced to only a few commercially available. As usual these varieties are selected for transport and storage ability, not necessarily flavor.

Sweet Potato Jungle with harvested potatoes in background

Baby Lettuce

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Tired tomatoes

What does chemical free mean?

In the garden this week the weeds grew. It is amazing how we turn our back on the weeds for a week or two and they are suddenly knee high! In some ways the dry, hot days have been helpful. They make the weeds grow more slowly and die more easily when hoed out. In the paths of the big field we had planted a clover cover crop. In some areas it has done well, outcompeting weeds and blooming nicely (the blooms help attract beneficial insects). But in others the clover didn’t take as well and the weeds quickly filled the void (nature does not like bare ground). No the weeds are kind of like a cover crop as long as we don’t allow them to seed, so we mowed them all down. Many weed seeds can survive for up to 7 years in the soil without germinating. This is called the weed seed bank. Every time you till seeds are brought to the surface to grow. This is like a withdrawal form the bank. If you allow the weeds to seed this is like a deposit. Unlike most accounts, this is one where you don’t want to make any deposits. Overtime, if no plants go to seed we can reduce the number of weeds we have to contend with.

Depleting the weed seed bank is the primary weed control strategy available to organic farmers. In the short term we can weed, cultivate, and mow. But in the long run that is time consuming and tiresome. By eliminating the seeds we can prevent a problem before it occurs. Weeds are such a challenging problem that even farmers who have reduced or even eliminated pesticide use cannot imagine giving up their herbicides. This has led to some confusing labeling in the marketplace. Is “pesticide free” the same as “chemical free.” In either case is the farmer still using chemical fertilizers? (because the fertilizers don’t typically come into direct contact with the plant many farmers will say “chemical free, except fertilizers”). There are responsible and irresponsible ways to use many of the chemical tools at our disposal at farmers. But, as confusing as this sounds, never assume that a broad statement like “chemical free” means the vegetables were raised in anything like a balanced organic system. Always ask.

At Bluebird Farm we raise all of our produce following the organic standards for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and all other growing techniques. In addition we strive to work with the ecology of the soil, our plants, and insects instead of against them. We work to establish patterns that encourage our vegetables instead of discouraging weeds. We try to increase beneficial insect populations instead of eliminate pest insects. In other words we are trying to build a positive ecological system of growth rather than a negative system of suppression.