Category: Chickens

2024

well, that was a year

I had planned on crafting a quality narrative of all that happened in 2024 but the year decided to throw one last curveball at me on the way out and now I am sick, so we’ll all have to settle for this muddled quick recap of stuff that happened this year.

Horses

We added another horse to the mix by taking in Tally, a foster horse from the Minnesota Hooved Animal Rescue. The whole situation was rather more complicated than that but again, muddled quick recap. Suffice to say we now have two horses and a pony and they are still not all together in one space; add it to the 2025 goals.

Tally saying “Hi”

good fences make good “neigh”bors

Tally and Juniper

Tally and Highlight

Chickens

We got our chicks! We love our chickens way more than either of us expected. I was in love with them from day one. SO CUTE! But Nate didn’t really warm up to them until they were adults and out and about on their own. Truly enjoying everything about them!

June 12th 2024

Sept 24th 2024

Nate is a chicken whisperer

Waiting for lunch outside the garage

Cat

We got a “working cat” from Ruff Start Rescue whose job was to be rodent control because we have so many mice, voles, ground squirrels, etc. Her name is Cleo. She hates us. We haven’t actually let her fully loose yet because we’re still (for reasons I am unclear on) trying to win her over to us. At one point when I was trying to establish a positive relationship with her I watched her watch a mouse come in to her space, climb in to her food dish, and take some of her food. She was literally within a foot of her food dish (and thus the mouse) while this took place. I am ready to open the door and tell her good luck and try again but Nate is not. Goal is by the end of 2025 to have a cat on premise helping to manage the rodent population, whether it is Cleo or a different cat time will tell

Cleo hiding behind her box

That glare

Dog

We got a “working dog” from an odd sort of foster, sort of rescue, situation. His name is Otis, he is supposed to be a Great Pyrenees and a trained Livestock Guardian Dog. He is definitely a Great Pyrenees. There are entire posts that need to be written about Otis so we’ll just leave it at that for now.

Otis ignoring the horses and asking for pets

Otis with the chickens

Farm

We officially made Lantern Farm MN an LLC in May and started selling chicken eggs this fall. Again, this is a whole post (or more) of information but we are learning a lot and meeting some really great people and I am excited that I am really turning this farm from a hobby to a business. So much more to come!!!

Still working on consistency 

Dark orange yolks are the goal

Civic Duty

I was appointed to the Dayton (MN) Planning Commission at the very last meeting of 2023 and so have been serving through all of 2024. It has been a great experience and I am so very happy I did it. I have learned a ton and met so many people. Because of my work on the Planning Commission I had several people approach me to run for City Council, after a lot of hemming and hawing I decided to go for it and wound up winning a council seat and will be starting my four-year term on Jan 14th 2025. Now that I’m officially elected I’ve allowed myself to really get excited about this new role and am really looking forward to serving as a council member. 

Campaign committee evaluating the new signs

Dayton Heritage Days Parade

I have much, much more, to say on each of these topics and my plan for 2025 is to refresh and restart this website/blog (for real this time). The current plan is a brief weekly update of farm happenings that will be posted on Tuesdays along with occasional longer posts about all the various shenanigans we get up to. The longer posts will be sporadic but I’m setting a personal goal of one every other week. We’ll see how that goes.

2024 is a wrap

Cute Chicks in Your Neighborhood

First Week of Fluffy!

They are growing so fast! I had meant to start posting once a week again, but the chicks grew way faster than I realized so the first week and a half had a lot of scrambling to keep ahead of their growth and there was no time for anything, much less writing.

Day 1

Day 7

I realize we’re jumping into the middle of a story here so let us back up a bit.

As I wrote in this post back in January 2023 I have been increasingly unhappy with my current full-time job and after much thought have decided to pursue regenerative agriculture as my next career. Work towards that goal has been ongoing as I discussed a bit here, here, and here, but the efforts towards making that dream a reality have increased a lot in the last few months and is one of the many reasons why I haven’t been posting; too many things happening all at once! I will be writing more about all of that in the coming weeks/months but for now lets talk chicks.

It was clear from early research that some form of pastured poultry would be part of our regenerative farm efforts and I have been exploring what that might look like for us. Then one day, after once again not being able to buy my preferred eggs from Lakewinds Food Co-Op because they were out of stock, I decided to contact the farm in question, Acres of Eden, to see if they would be interested in some form of partnership. I was hopeful since they (A) had an amazing product, (B) are a regenerative and organic farm doing the kind of farming I want to be doing, (C) are Minnesota based, and (D) clearly have a strong market since Lakewinds was often sold-out of their eggs.  Joel and I have had a few conversations, and he has come out to our farm to look around and discuss possible partnership options. We are still working out the details of said partnership, the biggest hurdle at the moment has been navigating the organic certification process in some sort of partnership (that will be a whole series of posts on its own). But we both agreed it would be good for me to start with a “tester” batch of chicks to make sure that I did in fact want to work with poultry as my primary, or at least initial primary, focus and to get some of the kinks of raising large a (relatively) large number of birds worked out. It is one thing to read about doing something new and quite another to actually do it. Joel was going to be getting his next batch of chicks on May 9 and he was able to work with his hatchery to send 50 of his chicks my way.

At 7:00 AM on Thursday May 9, fifty ISA Brown chicks arrived for me at the Champlin Post Office.

Mind you my meeting with Joel had been only two weeks before their arrival and for someone like me two weeks isn’t a lot of time to prep and it has been abundantly clear that I was not as ready as I had hoped to be. Not that things are going badly, just that I have been in scramble mode since the end of April and that gets to be exhausting. Part of being behind from the beginning is that I did what I often do and got sucked down various rabbit holes exploring different options and plans for building brooders and I expended way too much time and energy on plans that ultimately didn’t work for me. We did get our brooder mostly built the night before they arrived. I have lots of ideas for how to improve it for the next batch of chicks so I won’t bore you with details on our first draft.

first draft brooder

It isn’t great, but it has done its job and I have learned so very much, which of course was the point of a tester batch of chicks. We got 49 of the 50 chicks through their first week of life, and a 2% mortality rate is pretty good for our first batch of chicks. Lots of sources said to expect a 5-10% mortality rate and that most of the losses would come that first week, so I’m proud of what we’ve done so far.

Here is a video showing their growth over the first week. They were starting to get wing feathers on day 2!

And here are photos from our first week together:

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 4:

Day 5:

Day 6:

Day 7:

You’ll notice there are no videos or photos for day 3. This happened to be May 11 and because the universe can be a bit of a **** (swear word of your choice) it had to also be the day the chick died, so it wasn’t a day for photos or videos of cute things. But man, oh, man! are they cute! Or were cute… they have quickly become gangly teenagers and aren’t nearly as adorable, but that first week the amount of cute in our house was almost unbearable. For the next batch of chicks I’m going to try to clear my calendar a bit because I found myself just watching them for waaaaay more time than I had available.

So flipping cute!

As always (though I don’t remember to add this each time) this post was written by a human with no assistance of any kind from AI. All the mess ups are mine, thank you very much!

And We’re Back

never too late to start again

Saturday was Leeloo’s birthday and the one year anniversary of her death. I had intended to write a whole post about her but when I sat down to write it I realized I was not up to it. Maybe next year. I still miss her every day.

Meanwhile life keeps on keeping on. A week went by with either nothing to talk about on this website or no mental/emotional energy to write about it. Then a week turned into two weeks turned into a month turned into two months, and then a whole bunch of stuff happened all of which I want to write about but I had even less mental/emotional energy to do it and not one second of free time. 

But spring semester is officially done – last set of grades were posted at 11:45 PM on Sunday (due date was noon today (Monday) so I still had twelve whole hours to spare!) – and now I have some time and energy to write about things that are way more fun than teaching (though at this point in my teaching career most everything is more fun than teaching, including picking up horse poop).

My goal is to write weekly updates again, for there has indeed been much happening all of which I’d love to talk about. One of which is we got 50 chickens!!

I am OBSESSED – they are so f*ing cute!! I will have a whole post about them coming soon (probably many posts about them), but while you wait you can obsess along with me and watch them grow day by day because I will be posting daily videos on my YouTube channel (I cannot believe I just typed the words “my YouTube channel” but that’s where they’ll be).

 

So join me once again on this adventure!  

p.s. rest assured that none of this has been written or generated by AI, all writing and content is 100% human or animal generated. Not that the chicks are writing their own posts, but their cuteness is absolutely the core of the content.