Cedar Meadow Farm Newsletter

Summer 2007

As it is already July and I find myself writing the June/July Newsletter, I can only reflect on how busy we have been these past three months.  As a new business, we are constantly striving to improve not only our product line and customer service, but also our infrastructure as well.  For those of you who have not had an opportunity to visit us at the farm, we are in the process if building from the ground up - literally.  Only two short years ago, we found an ideal piece of land where we wanted to build our home and develop our business.  In this time span, we have managed to clear the land and build a home for us to live in.  Meanwhile, we are also installing fencing for the animals and build appropriate homes for them to live in.  We've had some difficult growing pains but have a solid vision and a clear path of where we want to go from here.  It's been very exciting for us and we appreciate all the support we get from our customers.  We are looking forward to growing and providing you with the best product we possibly can.

This past spring, we had remarkable interest in our "henhouse-ready" pullets.  We will certainly keep this as one of our product offerings each year.  Though a very labor intensive project for us, we find that welcoming others into a small piece of farm life is well worth the effort.  We recognize that it is often difficult for families to find places to buy two or three chickens, and even harder to find some of the more unusual breeds.  If you have a particular variety of bird you would like to have us offer, please let us know.  With advance planning, we can get you nearly any kind of chicken you could possibly imagine!

Our venture into ducks and geese turned out to be a disaster - not for the animals, but for our garden!  We had the vision that our ducks would live in the half of the garden we had laying fallow for the year, with occasional forays into the active garden to help keep the insects and weeds down.  What we didn't count on was their ability to sneak through the fence and devour all our eggplant, cabbage, peppers, asparagus, onions, parsley, and carrots.  It was a rather discouraging experience and, needless to say, more than half of the garden is laying fallow this year.  Nevertheless, we enjoy having the ducks around.  They are now provided with fresh greens (of our choice, not theirs) every day.  Our first round of ducks have sold out completely, but we will have more available in mid to late August.  We are hoping that we may be able to offer duck eggs again by the end of the fall.

During the last week in June, we processed our first round of broiler chickens.  We have just re-configured our processing station and are pleased to report that it is working extremely well.  We have great plans for refining it even further during the winter months.  Food Safety is our number one priority and we are confident that we provide you with a product that is not only delicious, but is handled with your health and safety in mind.

We are quite pleased to announce our first hatchlings ever at the farm.  We tried our hand at breeding turkeys.  This is not as easy as it sounds - we had some Toms ready for action, but unreceptive hens.  We had other hens who were laying prolific amounts of eggs but weren't at all interested in sitting on them.  Given that most of our personal belongings are sitting in storage units, we were unable to locate our incubator.  As it turns out we found a broody White Leghorn  who was more than happy to incubate some eggs for us.  We were pleasantly surprised when four poults hatched.  Surprisingly enough, when we decided to give up on the breeding, we put all the turkeys out together.  Wouldn't you know that old Fluffy the slate gray decided to start sitting on a giant clutch of eggs?  Who knows what crosses we'll get but the end of the month could be interesting.

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, we are the recipients of a grant from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Researsch and Education) and have officially started our study of the effect of various pastured poultry housing techniques on two varieties of birds:  a fast growing genotype and a slow growing genotype broiler chicken.  We are excited to see how this study turns out and would be happy to share our findings with you - just let us know.

Julia Cronin, owner/manager of the farm gave two lectures recently, speaking about the plight of the American Family Farm and how to help preserve this cornerstone of our society.  The talks were incredibly well recieved by a diverse group of attendees.  If you would like more information about the content of these lectures, we would be pleased to share the details with you.  If you would like us to come speak at your event, contact us with specific details.  We are able to speak to the topics of:  Heritage Breeds Conservancy, Sourcing Locally Grown Products, Alternative and Sustainable Agricultural Practices, Misleading Labeling Practices used by Agribusiness, and a general overview of farming trends in America from 1850 until today.

The grass continues to grow, the animals are thriving, and we are staying very busy down at the farm.  We know you all have busy lives too but hope you will come visit us some weekend soon.  Just give us a call or send us an e-mail and we'll hold aside a broiler chicken and a dozen eggs for you.

Enjoy your summer - We know we will.

Wishing you all health and happiness,

Brian and Julia Cronin