Consolidated Kansas

[Kramer Farms]

You're Invited! https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=3985166#p3985166

Don't miss out on this one.

There will be over 400 cages of poultry for you to look through. Peacocks, pheasants, pigeons, and of course all kinds of chickens.

 

[Nana2KJS]

Well .. after nearly 6 weeks apart while Gracie recovered from a dog attack, and a rather rocky reunion, Nellie and Gracie are pseudo friends again. They were actually sharing the dirt bath corner this evening.

Gracie is still wearing an apron to protect the damage on her back, but Nellie has finally accepted her return.

So what's going on in the rest of Oz these days?

 

[averytds]

Glad they've called a truce.

Nothing much going on here. 7 new chicks last week. Some chicks hatching within the next day or two. More eggs coming this week. Same old, same old.

 

[Kansaseq]

Glad the girls are getting along once again. Had my own chicken tragedy 2 weeks ago. Left a door AND a gate open and one of my Speckled Sussex hens was attacked by my least aggressive dog. I was able to bring her to work with me, sew her up, and get her on antibiotics and pain meds. She did really well, and is mostly healed now, though I still have her segregated in a dog kennel. She spent most of her convalescence in my bathroom, under a tub full of babies. She was mostly a quiet and willing patient, but towards the end, she did NOT enjoy her injections very much. She was glad to go out side again.
A few days later, one of my beautiful EE pulletsgot over a 6' and an 8' fence during the night. When I let my dogs out (all 3 this time), they got her. I was really upset, but very grateful I had put 3 of her eggs in the incubator. The day she died, all 3 of her babies hatched, so at least I have some of her kids. Such is life.

 

[Katy]

Busy with spring field work, corn planting, and calving here. Now that we could use some rain we can't seem to get any more than a sprinkle. And of course hatching chicks and working in the gardens.

 

[schellie69]

Hello from Salina, it has been a rough winter on me and my chickens (lost a bantam to the cold) but got 4 new babies 2 austalops and 2 black star sex link have a roo coming in the mail this week so that will finish out my flock of 15 all I am allowed in town I am hoping when DH gets done with school we will be moving to Texas and I am getting a farm not settling for less this time. I hope everyone survived the winter We are working on our new coop and raised garden this month can't wait to start planting. Just thought i would pop in an say hello.

 

[mikeksfarmer]

Hey all! Its been weeks since I had time to read the comments much less post any thing.
As to a couple of weeks ago; I agree no birds from any one elses flock comming to my farm. But wondering what you all think about eggs. Are you safe bringing home eggs for hatching? A friend has some copper and cocoo sp? Maurans and I want some eggs to hatch.

Did get some hatchery ducks this spring, Three types they are growing like weeds. I was planning to eat a few of them but, not sure I can now. All my chickens are doing well and loving spring.
Well back out to the garden to plant.
Later all

 

[Katy]

Quote:
There are some diseases that pass thru an egg, but to get the breeds I wanted to get...and good quality birds without having to drive thousands of miles to get them, eggs were the best option for me. If you know the person you're buying from and are comfortable with his husbandy and biosecirity methods you're more than likely going to be safe getting hatching eggs.

It's spelled Cuckoo Marans.

 

[PaulaJoAnne]

Help needed in Kansas

I am going to copy in the newsletter that my parents were just given.
I am sorry it is a bit long, but the full story is needed, so you can see what is being asked for.

This family lives very close to Lawrence, and is in desparate need of help finding land for the farm.
They live just a few minutes from my parents, and they buy milk from them.
If anyone has any ideas, contact info is in the web link.
Thanks!!

http://www.gasperfarm.com/
Hello All!
First let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, we're canceling Saturday's drop-off; we have no way to get there and need to spend the time working on the truck. And well frankly, the last several weeks we haven't made enough to cover gas, much less support us. So if you want any food before the May 1st drop-off you are welcome to come out to the farm. Second, many of you have been asking about milk. The first cow to calve will be going anytime now so stay tuned, watch this space for information on how to get milk.
Our next drop-off on April 24th is cancelled. Please make plans to pick up at the farm. Thanks!

A lot of you are new to the farm so I'm going to give you our full story; where we've been and where we're going. But its long so I'll start with the conclusion. Despite all of our best efforts we are loosing our rental land and cannot find a new place for our animals to graze and us to live. If we cannot find a place within the next month we will be forced to shut down the farm. You all have come here looking for food that is local, healthy, great tasting, humane, organic and more. And you've found it. But without your help we cannot produce it. If you want to see food like ours produced here in Kansas and want to help save our farm email or call us for information on how you can help or read through to the bottom of this email for some ideas.
So our story...

My wife Susan and I grew up in eastern Montana. Most farmers up there, like in much of the country, tell their children not to go into farming. There's just no future in it. And they are right. The vast majority of farmers are supported by off the farm income and often farm at a loss. Its part of why food is so cheap: all the profits go to Big Ag. My father left the farm and told his boys if we wanted to farm we should win the lottery or marry the only daughter of a rich farmer. Well I don't gamble and Susan is the youngest of 14, so I messed that one up. But we wanted to farm and raise our children on a farm. Susan and I got engineering degrees at SDSM&T in Rapid City, SD. When the company I worked for there folded I got a job with a company in Olathe. Thats how we ended up in KS. Plan A was for us both to work to save money and buy land. But we were resolved for Susan to stay at home and raise our children. Daniel came in 2004. Susan managed to finish college but never took a full time job.

Plan B was to buy some land with a mortgage. When we moved here to Kansas in 2005 we bought 5 acres with a house and barn at the peak of the market in Linwood. Expensive but I was paid well and we could afford it. We got a milk cow from a lady listed on realmilk.com and also bought some chickens and feeder pigs. We both loved milk and especially raw milk and I'd heard it was healthier. When we got the cow we found out about the demand for raw milk, healthy food and the just beginning to blossom local food movement. Farmers were direct marketing food to consumers, skipping the middle men and actually making a living. Hope for the future.

In that same year we got here Susan began to get very very sick. She lost all energy. She became unsafe to drive. She had two early miscarriages and lost the ability to get pregnant. At its worst she started losing her memory. She had no short term memory. She'd lay around all day on the couch, unable to really care much for Daniel and unable to remember to do even a single task. To this day she doesn't remember a whole lot from that time. We would later find out she was coming down with Lupus and had fried her adrenals and thyroid. But that was just the manifestation of underlying issues. The real cause was the same thing causing all the other novel chronic diseases that are destroying America's health. The diseases are varied, but they all share two things in common: they were rare or unknown just a couple of generations ago, and they have their root cause in pharmaceuticals, bad diets, and pollution.

At church we met a couple. The wife had almost died of Chrones disease. For those of you not familiar with it, it is basically a progressive infection of the colon. It is thought by many to be caused Johnes disease in dairy cattle that has jumped the species gap due to pasteurization (one the the reason's I'd decided several years prior to get a cow). There basically is no conventional treatment. Sure there are some nasty drug cocktails that keep it in remission, for a time. But they can't cure it and the standard fall back treatment is to basically cut away your colon one piece at a time until you die of starvation. Not pleasant. But this person was able to put it into remission with the aid of diet and a Chiropractor who practices Applied Kenisology and the use of nutritional supplements and homeopaths. We had sent Susan to a couple conventional docs, they were clueless as to her problem. So off to the AK doc. We initially were seeing him several times a week and he was the beginning of a multi-year path to recovery for Susan. We eventually hit a wall with him in the healing process. It was about that time Susan was able to get pregnant with Nathan. But while she was able to get pregnant, she was not healthy enough to carry. That is when we found another AK doc in Lawrence, Doctor Tate Janssen. He got Susan stable and prevented a miscarriage. It was for this reason we named him Nathanael, Gift of God, for Susan was not supposed to be able to get pregnant.

Now it wasn't just the AK docs that got Susan healthy. Prayer and faith in God played a major role. And so did diet. The diet our friend used to put her Chrones in remission (an impossible task according to conventional medicine) was the WAPF, or Nourishing Traditions diet. The Weston A. Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org) is a non-profit dedicated to spreading the discoveries of an Ohio Dentist of the same name. Back in the 30's Dr. Price traveled the world studying isolated populations of non-industrialized peoples. He found that the groups eating traditional diets of unprocessed, nutrient-dense whole foods had very very few cavities and none of the diseases the industrialized nations suffered from then or now. He also had the opportunity to study some groups where there were people living side by side, some eating traditionally and some imported western food, and to see the resultant cavities and facial structure changes. And while the actual foods varied from area to area around the world they all had significant commonalities and were nutritionally identical. (http://www.westonaprice.org/Characteristics-of-Traditional-Diets.html) This is a diet that is tied to human evolution and real world results and is not some modern invention, fad or corporate agenda. This diet rejects process foods, white flour, corn syrup, preservatives, and vegetarian/veganism and favors animal fats, whole foods, raw dairy, bone broths, bread made from soaked, sprouted or fermented grains and other traditional food preparations. It is this diet that has helped many many people recover their health. The previous things helped Susan dig out of her hole of sickness. This diet restored her health. And on this very high fat diet Susan lost over 60 pounds. Nourishing Traditions is a cookbook written by the founder of WAPF and is highly recommended.

So with the discovery of organic food, healthy food and local food we found a calling. There are a great many people suffering today and there is much more demand for local healthy food than there is supply. And as we produced more than we could eat ourselves we began selling to friends and people who sought us out for raw milk, grassfed beef, and other health building foods. But raising beef & dairy cattle and hogs on pasture is very land intensive. Eventually we outgrew our 5 acres. After discovering the writings of Greg Judy we decided to rent the land we needed to farm. Farm land prices were spiking, we had resolved to reject debt and live debt free, and the price of land near Kansas City is way higher than can be paid for with farming.

So Plan C started with the neighbors 6 acres. We did that for a year but when he lost it to the bank we lost use of it. After talking with about every neighbor within 5 miles of us we finally found 100 acres 2 miles from us. We came 1 month from having to shut down the farm and almost took a job managing an organic farm in KY. We rented that during 2008 and that year we welcomed Timothy to the world. It was the first year we finished beeves and we started expanding our hogs. But after a year the landlord decided he didn't want to have to cross our fences to go fishing or 4 wheeling and so we lost that. But we managed to secured access to our current rental property of 80 acres about 3 miles from our house. This brings us to 2009 and our current nightmare.

Many of you have expressed how much you love our newsletter. Some have said you farm vicariously though it. Others have said you get tired just reading it and don't know how we do it with all the problems. We try to share the joys and let downs of farming, but we really only share a portion of the disappointments; it would be too depressing to read otherwise. 2009 was a tough year. I spent much of 2008 working overtime to try and save the company I worked for. By the end of the year I was physically burned out. As thanks the company laid me off in January '09 due to the economy. We tried to find a job I could take but that failed. We had figured the farm might be able to support us by May '09 so we toughed it out. Long story short the farm supported us, but we lived well below the poverty line and there wasn't enough money to pay the mortgage. As of now, April 2010, we have just a couple of months before the foreclosure is resolved and house and land auctioned off.

This is especially painful because after 5 years of multispecies grazing with cows, hogs, and chickens the fertility of our 5 acres is amazing. Our grass growth is 2 - 4 weeks ahead of the neighbors. Early this week before the rain I had knee high, dark, lush, sweet grass. Our rental property in contrast is at less than an inch in many spots. In 2009 many parts of it produced less forage all year than my grass does in two weeks. I get 5 grazings in here and only 1 to 1 and a half over there. This is what happens when you hay a property for 20 years; no fertility, weeds, and nutrient imbalances. But it is worse than that. One of the main farm ponds was contaminated with coliform from the septic field and killed a horse, several sheep, and countless laying hens. And the poor fertility has wreaked havoc on my animals, causing slow gain, weight loss and more animal health issues. But with the lack of available land I'm paying twice the market rate for land a fifth of normal productivity. But it gets worse. The owner lives there and while she was all gung-ho about someone farming it organically as we moved in all we heard were continual complaints and attempts to micromanage. She liked the idea of having a farm but the reality of an actual farm didn't jive with her expectations of suburban perfection.

By the end of 2009 we figured she wouldn't want us back. We looked but could find nothing rental wise. Because we're not willing to go into debt, and the farm doesn't make enough to pay a mortgage anyway, we moved to Plan D: find an investor. The theory is the investor buys the property and you rent it with an option to buy (or some other variation). They get a good return on their money, help support organic farming (ethical investing) and the farmer secures long term access to land. This is very important to us as our planning is very permaculture influenced and there are many things we'd like to do that won't see fruition for 50 years or more. And just from a grazing standpoint it is hard to do grass finishing and impossible to do 100% grassfed dairy on pasture until you've had 3 or 4 years of rotational or mob grazing. And so year to year rental properties that you can loose to development or the whim of a landlord just doesn't work.

We had some success connecting with investors. But four or five investors later, including a couple of 'sure things', and after hundreds of hours blown working to make a deal and find a property everything fell through. So back to the landlord we went. She wanted us to keep renting but agreed that if we stopped renting the lands surrounding her house it be more pleasant for all. And with the foreclosure imminent she agreed to let us park a yurt in the back pasture. So we thought we had a solution and a plan for the future. We had a place to live and graze our animals and we figured we'd save money to buy a farm after the housing and farm market had deflated (Plan E).

But it wasn't to be. The hard winter and awful forage wrecked havoc on the cows and chickens over winter. And though we spent the last several months fencing and working to pull back, the micromanaging and complaints continued and expanded. And then Tuesday we find out she rented the crop ground on the farm out to a conventional farmer. She led us to believe she was committed to organic, and we contractually promised to organically manage her farm. But we couldn't afford to rent the crop portion of the property. This cropland is adjacent to our market garden and our pastures; meaning chemical drift will contaminate our food and fodder and continue to sicken the land and the animals. To make matters worse the chemical runoff from these fields will drain across our pastures and right into the ponds watering our livestock. It just is not tenable. We have to leave and within the month. We cannot expose ourselves, our animals, or you to that through the food.

But we have no where to go. All our efforts to find land have failed. We are not alone. We know of others who have not been able to get into farming for lack of land. We know of farms in this area that have closed for lack of land. Previous times we ran out of land we started looking for other options in other states. But each time we found land just in time and I turned down farm management jobs in KY and NJ. In the process of researching one in PA I found a rental property that was mine if I wanted it. How ironic, over the Internet I can find land out on the crowded eastern seaboard but here in the heartland I come up empty. But we don't want to leave this area. We like it here. We've formed a network with other local farmers. We've made many friends and have helped many people eat healthier and restore their health.

I have one hope left and that is all of you. Every year we have been farming demand and interest has increased significantly. More and more people are waking up to the diseases the modern diet is inflicting upon us. More and more people are waking up to the animal and environmental abuses in our current food system. In 2009 and 2010 the most common phrase I heard from new inquires was 'I just saw Food Inc and I can't buy that food anymore'. And on the production side we couldn't be more pleased with our food. We're working the kinks out of the system and the food quality has been amazing. People haven't tasted pork this good in decades and we're making headway into the restaurants with it. We've heard from several people that our chicken and 100% grassfed raw milk are the best they've ever tasted. Having tasted the milk and chicken of many local farmers I can't but agree. Its not the money that drives me to spend nearly every waking hour doing farm work. It is the stories from you who have been so affected by our food. Nothing I have ever done before has made such a positive difference in peoples lives.

What will become of us and our farm? I do not know. Maybe we'll find a farm to manage somewhere. Maybe we'll find land to rent in another state. Maybe we'll end up homeless, living in a tent along the river and grazing our dairy cow along the highway. I really don't know right now. What I do know is that if we're still going to be producing food for the people of Kansas, our solution must come through you all. We've pored our lives and everything we have into this endeavor but we've hit the end of our rope and can't make it work by ourselves.

How can you help? Well you tell me, because what I've done so far hasn't worked. But if you don't have any ideas I have a couple of suggestions:

Help us find a rental property. The depressing thing is there is oodles of land sitting empty around here not being used. All too often it is just too hard to get a hold of the person, they've locked it into CRP, they don't want farming messing up the viewscape, or they can't stand the thought of having pigs grazing it or a farmer living on it. But sometimes it is just a matter of knowing the right person and you all know people we don't. We can do a cash lease or trade for some of the best food around.
Help us buy a property. If you want to just give a gift to help then great! But otherwise we can put together an investment that will be more secure and have a better return than most traditional investments. Any amount of money will help if we all work together on this. You might be surprised about how little it will take. If you are poorer than we are but still want to help maybe you know an angel investor who is interested in putting their money to work making a real difference in peoples lives and the environment.
Help us find really cheap property. Most land is overpriced with respect to its agricultural value. But in times past old farmers would help new ones get started by selling the land at a reasonable price or even working along side them and transitioning the business over to them via sweat equity. There is a fair bit of land listed for sale, but most is locked up by the Realtors and is too expensive. But we might be able to scrape together to buy a smaller property at the right price.

As to what land. We're looking for any land, 1 - 80 acres in size and of any composition so long as it is not within a city limits. It can be in either Kansas or Missouri but will preferably be within 100 mi of Kansas City.

We wouldn't have made it this far without all of your help, support, and encouragement. However this turns out, thank you.

 

[Katy]

That is the problem with trying to build a farm with only rented ground.....you can lose it for a variety of reasons. Honestly unless an investor has money to lose and wants a tax write off for the loss I'd think it would be very hard to find someone willing to make that kind of investment with probably no return on their money. Our farm only has 40 acres of rented ground....not enough to make much of a difference if we lose it.....we made the decision long ago not to depend on rented ground for our farm like a lot of farmers do.