1. Are your eggs washed? Yes, our eggs are washed. It is required of us (by the USDA) to wash our eggs in order to sell them. Eggs have a natural coating that keeps them fresh, and once that has been washed off- you'll need to keep them refrigerated to make them last longer. If an fresh egg hasn't been refrigerated yet- it's alright to keep it out of the fridge for about a week (the USDA won't tell you that, Grandma will). Once it's cold- gotta keep it cold.
2. Do you Reuse egg cartons? YES! We can reuse our egg cartons, or any carton that is blank. Make sure it is CLEAN. Any broken shells or cigarette ash isn't good. (No really, once we got a stack of cartons back that had been ashed in!)If it has some other farm name printed on it, we can't use it. We LOVE using our cartons over and over!
3. Are you Organic? Pasture Raised Poultry eggs and Certified Organic eggs are not entirely the same thing . We strongly believe in ecologically sustainable farming, but we are not Certified Organic. In order to be Certified, we would have to use Certified Organic grains- which unfortunately, are grown in far away countries-mostly India and China. We prefer to use grains grown in the United States, using less fossil fuels (7,000 miles across the ocean ain't no little diesel use+ the unethical regulations, or lack their of for shipping) for our chickens and turkeys. Our Beef and Lamb are 100% grass fed, and the hay we feed them is made here on the ranch. We do not use any sprays or synthetic fertilizers on our pastures, or use unnecessary medications on our animals. Usually we give extra TLC to the animals that need it, but other than that- they are out as nature intended them to be.
4. How much space do the chickens and cows have? We have about 350 acres, where we keep our chicken trailers on 'the bottom half', which is about 120 acres. There are no fences around the trailers, so if a chicken wanted to- she could walk for days in any direction. (but they like their houses, so they don't do that...) The cows and sheep have alllllllll the pasture they could want.
5. What do you do about predators? Red Tail Hawks (big fans of chicken) and the Golden Eagles (bigger fans of chickens) are some of our bigger predators. Raccoons and skunks are problems if a chicken doesn't go in her house at night. Our current nemesis is the foxes, very much like The Fantastic Mr Fox. The foxes have figured out when the doors open in the morning, and how early to come in the evening before the birds are closed in for the night.
While we do what we can, we have not had success with livestock guardian dogs, so in truth- we loose a lot of our chickens to the predators. One could say we have a passive approach to predator control, currently our strategy is a 'hope and a prayer'.
6. Do you let people come visit the farm? We are a very small operation, and generally are so busy doing chores that we don't have the ability to have tours. We also believe in keeping our herds healthy by limiting the amount of interactions they have with outside visitors. You can definitely come out and camp, though- Check out our Hipcamp page.
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