A Farmer Talking About The Weather?!
Good Day Everyone, we hope that you have enjoyed this lovely spring weather. The melt is almost finished out at the farm, and we look to be heading into a dry spring. This can pose some big challenges for us if our dugout fails to fill, or if the rains/wet snow stays away and the soil starts to get dry as it thaws. The up side is we should start to see green grass sooner than later, which means our laying hens get to go out to pasture sooner. Once they hit the grass their yolks will deepen in colour and flavour.
Insect Fed
For those that follow us on Instagram may have seen that we are expanding our efforts to feed a biologically appropriate diet to our laying hens. In this case we are giving the ladies and our roos dried soldier fly larvae as a protein supplement. You may be wondering why, given that eggs in the grocery store boldly state "vegetarian fed" these days.
Chickens are what we call obligate omnivores. This means in order to be healthy they must eat a diet of both plant and animal food sources. When they are only fed vegetarian feed they become deficient in a number of key animo acids and their health is reduced.
Conventional and organic feed are both plant based, and are often chronically short in those key amino acids. These amino acids are not found in plants, so in order to get them into plant based feeds artificial sources need to be added or the animals simply do without. We have found that this leads to feather health and behavioural problems (particularly feather plucking and eating - a mild form of cannibalism).
This is why we have made the decision to include insects as part of our flock diet during winter months when foraging for insects in our climate and within their winter barn housing is impossible. Our hope is this also translates into higher quality eggs in winter months.
In keeping with our regenerative agriculture practices and our love of local economics the dried grubs we source come from within 100km of our farm, and are raised using pre-consumer food waste products. You can learn more at Enterra.
Transition To New Farm Store & Website
Just a reminder that in 2 weeks we will be transitioning off of the Harvie web store platform on to our new website and store. Your current subscriptions will NOT be auto renewed, so we do ask that you head over to https://www.happinessbytheacre.ca/store and sign up for the subscriptions you would prefer. Don't worry we are going to help you along as best we can, if you have questions or concerns please text or call Marcus at 403-796-8293.
Locally Yours,
Marcus, Sarah, Samuel, Boaz
