Raw Milk Dairy Member News
August 25, 2007
We are still having lots of calves. We have had two since Wednesday (a boy for D.T. and a girl for Tess) and it looks like a third will be born today or tomorrow. Then we will only have one cow left to calve in the next week or two and we'll have a break for about six to eight weeks.
With all of these calves, we have a large quantity of colostrum. A lot of it is very rich first colostrum, which has the most benefits for its consumer. Colstrum is excellent for building strong immune systems. This might be timely for those of you who have kids going back to school. Colostrum also has anti-aging properties and will help hair to grow and skin to stay healthy. You can drink the colostrum plain (it has a slightly sweeter taste than the milk, but can have a difficult texture) or mix it into a smoothie or some regular milk if you don't find it to be very palatable.
I would suggest ordering colostrum during the next week to make sure you get some before we stop calving for a while. Colostrum does freeze well also. I do it in a glass jar that is about 3/4 full so the glass won't break when the liquid freezes.
We also have lots of whole chickens available now. We harvested our old laying flock two weeks ago. We are selling these birds for $8 each. They are great for making stock or you can bake them at low temperatures. We also have a few bags of feet available for those of you who would like to use them for making stock.
We also harvested about 300 fryers. Raising these fryers has been a learning experience. We haven't completely given up, but we are definitely better with cows than chickens. When we delivered them to the butcher, we expected them to weigh between 3 and 5 lbs. Unfortunately we picked up 1.5 to 3 lb birds. Commercial chickens farmers raise the breed we had in 8 weeks and we harvested ours at 13 weeks old.
We did, however, raise superior quality meat. These chickens are soy free, and raised on organic grains. They moved around the pasture and ate lots of bugs and green growing things. They also lived in lots of sunshine. We believe you won't find a healthier or tastier bird anywhere in Colorado.
We think these chickens took longer and finished smaller due to being bred to be raised in a commercial setting on a high-soy diet. Next year, we plan to try to raise a heartier breed that might do better on pasture. If you would like to support our chicken-farming venture, the prices per bird are listed on our menu.