Rural/Farm Life

It makes me tired just looking at all you have planned.

Will your 30 people be working on the farm? You will need them. I know they say a lot of farming once established can take care of itself but not with constantly changing temperatures, droughts, new insect invasions, blights, mildew and life span changes.

Chickens lay pretty well until they reach 2 years old. You can slaughter them then and use them for soup. The meat is pretty tough though and our freezers ended up filling up with a lot of old tough birds. But you can hopefully plan better.

How do you plan to slaughter your 240 meat chickens? In TN no slaughter house within 100 miles of me will take chickens. I'm lucky to be able to process 20 chickens in 8 hours with another person helping. But I'm slow. The Menonite women, who were a lot faster, use a plucker but they can be expensive. They do process a lot more chickens. And they had about 10 people working on it when I asked them for training.

Potatoes still have the blight so be careful about where you get your plants or seed potatoes from. We had only one good year before the blight hit us. After that it came back every year. We ended up planting twice as many seed potatoes or plants than we ended up harvesting. One year the blight wiped it all out. But we learned to be constantly on the look out for a plant with blight and ruthlessly destroy it. Crop rotation didn't help much because on 14 acres the gardens were pretty much right next to each other.

And after the potato blight ravished our potatoes it of course attacked our tomatoes.

And then there's the weeding. The never ending weeding.

But with enough labor and determination, a farm can thrive with a capable manager.