Greetings everyone!

Hope this spring newsletter finds you well. Winter seems to have zipped by and we are looking forward to another productive year. Already our brooders are full of little chirping critters and the grass is greening up a bit. Here are a few new things and some changes for 2008:

As our kids are growing older they are getting more involved on the farm. Our son Sami has started a duck project and hopes to have duck eggs available by July. He plans on helping man our farmer’s market booth in Blacksburg and selling his eggs there.

Natasha, our oldest, plans on starting a small flock of Bourbon Red turkeys, a heritage breed, and seeing how well they do for Thanksgiving. Raising heritage breeds is expensive and takes twice as long as commercial breeds, but there is value in preserving our country’s genetic diversity. Bourbon Reds are beautiful birds and some prefer their taste to the more modern breed of broad breasted whites.

Another minor change is the way we will be selling our hogs. Thanks to cumbersome regulations designed for large factory farms and applied indiscriminately to small farms as well, we will no longer be permitted to kill the hogs on our farm, nor to sell them by hanging weight as we have done in the past. Instead we will have them processed at Thompson’s Meat Packing here in Floyd and will sell them by the head. Contact us for more details.

Because of further regulations our rabbit will no longer be available at Nico’s Ristorante as it was last year. For this reason and others, we are downsizing our rabbit operation, though we will still have it for sale here and at market. Another change with the rabbits is that we have decided to forego the labor-intensive step of putting the rabbits out in pens on the pasture. We will continue to scythe fresh pasture twice daily and bring it to them instead. This really should not affect taste or health in any significant way, but we thought you should be aware of this change.

You may also notice the increase in price across the board for all our products. The simple explanation is that the cost of feed is skyrocketing. Between the US dollar weakening, which entices other countries to buy more and more of our grain and leaves less available for domestic needs, and the oil-intensive ethanol projects buying up huge quantities of corn, feed prices continue to rise at alarming rates. For instance, in the first half of 2006 one ton of layer feed (without counting in the nutritional supplements we add that also grow more expensive) consistently cost $228.00. As of Feb ’08 it cost $348.25. All that to say we appreciate your understanding as we do our best to keep healthy food available and affordable while still making a living, but also want you to be aware that because of the fluctuating economy we may have to raise prices again as the year progresses.

Peace,
Sarah & Cedric Shannon