Seasons Turn

You may have noticed that I'm not particularly good at maintaining regular posts and blog entries, but I promise I am trying.

It was a busy summer, but mostly for off-farm concerns. After an incredibly wet spring, we had a particularly dry summer. Now, as the days begin to shorten, we take time to assess and prepare for the harvest season.

You may also have noticed we don't currently do a lot with fruits and vegetables. This isn't because we don't want to, but they take more time and effort to do well than we have available most of the time. Our garden efforts failed rather spectacularly this year, aside from a few pounds of onions. So, our harvest season this year centers around meat. The mobile butcher is booked and two of our pigs are going to fill the freezers of six different Oklahoma families, including us. Our first batch of cockerels and drakes are about to finish their molt and be ready to go to freezers for winter once we get a good cold spell.

We ordered and hatched out probably 50 or so straight run chicks and 30-ish straight run ducklings this spring, specifically so we could select the best to keep and turn the rest into delicious, healthy food for our families and community. Most of the hens will be kept, but many of the drakes and cockerels will become dinner. We don't do this to be cruel, we give them the best life we can while we have them, but having too many drakes and roosters is stressful for hens and bad for flock health overall. Every year, around this time, we see lots of posts in various social media groups about people trying to give away, re-home, or even just dumping their spare roosters. This is bad for the roosters well being and, I think, a terrible waste of good healthy food.

We raise our animals on a whole grain feed we purchase from another small business here in Oklahoma, which our animals love and we think does very well for them. Despite our desire for completely corn and soy free feeds, we've run out of our preferred feed and had to make ends meet a few times, and that means feeding what we can access, including feeds containing corn and soy. That doesn't mean that we aren't still striving to have corn and soy free animals for our customers and ourselves, but sometimes life happens. We'd never let our animals go hungry just because we don't have the food we want to feed them.

I can hear some of you asking, "Why don't you just free range?" and we have, in years past, but it quickly became apparent that free ranging without a good livestock guardian dog to protect the flocks is akin to just throwing away good money, even with roosters to protect the flock. We have lots of predators in our area, including owls, hawks, foxes, coyotes, skunks, possum, and raccoons. We lost a dozen fledglings to a raccoon in a single night this spring, which I think I mentioned in a previous blog post. We've lost three guinea fowl in a single day, and though I can't be sure they didn't just wander away, there were some suspicious piles of feathers.

I know that some people are uncomfortable being too close to their food, but for me, I think it's the most ethical way to consume meat. I know what my animals eat, and I do my utmost to give them a good quality of life right through to the moment I end it. That's right, I do most of the slaughtering myself, here on Dice Goblin Farms. I believe that it's best for our animals to be in familiar places, with familiar people, from the time they're hatched or born to the time they die, and of course I give them the quickest, cleanest, most painless end I possibly can. It's my way of honoring the life we're taking by respecting it's gravity and loss, even through to letting as little as possible go to waste. Unfortunately, this is why we struggle to list things in our store section, because we are not allowed to retail meat that's been slaughtered and processed outside of a USDA facility, or sell it across state lines. If you want some of our meats, please contact us and arrange for your deposit and to pick your meat up from us after it's finished.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions, and I hope we'll see and hear from some of you soon!