Northern Farmer

It’s lightly snowing outside at the moment, but I doubt it’ll amount to much. The weather is still rather mild for up here, if this continues I’d have to mark it down as one of the easiest winters that I’ve ever seen. We’re trying to get caught up a little this week, sometimes it’s just amazing how a person can fall behind in the jobs. I just got done calling some beef customers, telling them their ground beef is ready. Plus we butcher some more this week. There are a lot of folks who aren’t going to be getting their fingers on the money that these cattle bring and it just makes me flat out happy. The customer saves money, gets the highest quality beef anywhere, and we make a respectable profit. A win, win situation. Isn’t that the way it should be?

And talk about stuff here to keep my mind in gear, I just remembered I got to figure out all the stuff for income tax. The appointment is in a couple of weeks and we haven’t even started yet. I’ll start by trying to clean my office first, because I sure won’t find all of last years receipts with all this shelled corn and corn cobs laying around everywhere. This place is full of corn, I’ve been on a roll! I just sit here shelling corn listening to Christian Bluegrass music most evenings. Learned more about different style corn cobs these last few weeks than I did my entire previous life. One thing about Open Pollinated corn, them cobs aren’t all the same. There’s all sorts and it’s kinda interesting seeing them all, not to mention handling them. I would have to say that this years corn crop is going to be a different experience, after selecting and handling all this corn with care. But the price is right, zilch.

Our little bantams that our hen “Eve” raised up this fall, we never did have “Adam”, he’s somewhere over at the neighbors place, well they’re laying there colorfull eggs now. But it’s not a good season to set so we’re eating them little green eggs. But we’ll let them set come spring, that’s for sure. With all the different things on the horizon, like animal ID, we figure it’s time to really hit the project of reproducing our own chickens. A person just gets a funny feeling that this is going to hit the private hatcheries in years to come and even our chickens will be tracked. So besides getting our regular chickens to reproduce we do want to get a large population of bantams going here. Quite simply because they are about the best mothers in the chicken world. We’ll still order a few hundred white rocks this year for the chicken tractors, but there will be a huge effort to hatch our own Barred Rocks and Silver Laces, both with settin hens and incubator. This will be a top priority. More on that soon.

And through it all we look forward to going to church twice a week. I look back and can’t even imagine life without going to church. It used to be I’d go a handful of times a year, now we go more in two weeks than we used to in a year. Life is so much better nowadays then before. A constant adventure, and it won’t end with death. So, I’d better get to shoveling out my office, the tax man waiteth, throw on some Bluegrass Gospel and Praise the Lord!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.