farm dog - Shady Grove Ranch

I’m not sure what people envision exactly, when they think about the modern farm family’s daily farming tasks. It varies widely from farm to farm, of course, but for us, one task that we do very frequently together is collect and process eggs from our mobile-pastured hens. It’s a little more complicated than just scooping up a few “cackleberries” and putting them into cartons to sell. Because we really want to raise the hens on living pasture, it is imperative that the hens get moved to new ground often so they don’t kill the vegetation in their old paddock. Not to mention the intense manure build-up that happens when you leave any animal in one place for too long!

So we move the hens a couple of times a week, which means their house moves, too. Which means we have to travel to wherever their house happens to be to collect said eggs. But there are, oh, roughly 700 chickens laying in the ballpark of 500 eggs per day, which then have to be transported from the “wilderness” back to our nice, clean, dry egg-processing room. So that’s what we do each day at the end of the day after the chickens have finished their work and are preparing to settle in for the night.

Unfortunately the hens don’t always get the memo that customers like clean, uncracked eggs with pretty little brown (or green!) shells. On rainy days (which have been in abundance this spring!), we tend to see a lot of mud tracked in from the field. I guess the hens didn’t learn to wipe their little dirty birdie feet.

So we do our best to field-sort the eggs into clean/dirty/cracked baskets, and then haul them back to the egg room for further inspection, cleaning, and packaging. Our jobs are further complicated by state requirements that we sort the eggs by size and “grade” (the size of the little air cell inside the egg). So after egg collection is when the real fun begins!

If you’ve been following our farm adventure recently, you know we have 4 young kiddos (oldest is 7!), with another on the way any day now, and we love to get them involved in what we’re doing… being that iconic farm-schooling family and all 😉 So the kids help us process eggs a few times per week, which, to my surprise, has been one of my greatest sources of pride and excitement about raising these little people into skilled, thoughtful, hardworking bigger people. My mommy-heart just swells with pride as I watch them grow in independence and self-confidence. You could liken it to polishing silver or something–it’s hard and takes a long time and a lot of elbow grease, but boy, is it gorgeous when it really starts to shine!

Anyway, I thought I’d take you on a fun photo tour of the Egg Room with the kids. Enjoy!

The first stage (after sorting) is washing the dirties. Axl works hard to keep his “hopper” full and helps alert us when a bundle of washed eggs emerge from the machine, ready to be transported to the next stage…

…then someone tall comes over and loads up the clean eggs from the conveyor and sets them in front of the fan to dry for a bit. Momma and Dadda usually tag-team this job. It’s a pretty fast-paced one because Axl is getting so good at loading up his egg-hopper!

The next stage is checking for cracks and anomalies. Shevi is great at focusing on the job and making sure he gets eyes on every side of every egg. He’s now better at spotting cracks than I am!

In fact, he’s so good at the concentration element of his task, that when I kept pestering him to look at the camera, he finally said, “Hold on! I have to finish checking all the eggs!” Oh right. Great job, kiddo! Gotta love that 7-year-old cheesy smile! 😉

After the eggs get checked for cracks, they are individually weighed (by our handy-dandy 70-year-old all-steel grading machine!) and sorted by size. A human (in this case, me!) then does one last visual check and packs them into cartons by size.

Each carton is labeled and dated and then moved to refrigeration. That’s a lot of eggs! Good work, chickens!

You may be wondering about the other half of our children–the youngest half. Yep, they’ve been with us the whole time. Their job is to keep each other and the farm dog, Toby, company on the “front porch” of our little egg room.

We hope you enjoy eating the eggs as much as we enjoy producing them! Thanks for supporting real, family farms!

We often get the question, “What breed of cows do you raise?” We never quite know how to answer because we have such a hodge-podge of breeds. Why is that? It is mostly because we have purchased breeding cows when we’ve had opportunities to obtain cows that display the physical characteristics coupled with a history of our style of husbandry that we know will produce great grass-fed beef here in our extreme East Texas climate. For us, phenotype is just as important as breed. We’ll never keep breeding a cow just because she’s a particular breed, nor would we buy a bull for that reason. There are plenty of cows within any breed that are not suitable for grass-based operations, and they should be the first on the hamburger list.

So we have lots of deep-bodied, well-fleshed Devons, Limousines, Angus, and South Poll, and of course, crosses of all of those. We’ve even got a couple of cows that have Jersey influence to get more milky offspring that raise nice fat, fast-growing calves. Every year we evaluate last year’s calf and momma cow’s condition and decide whether to breed her again or not. It doesn’t matter what breed she is, so long as she is producing healthy calves in our pasture management system.

We thought you might enjoy a photo update of our current beef herd. I couldn’t get all the cows in the pictures, but it’s a good cross-section. And there are some piggy and human pictures thrown in just for fun. Enjoy!

: Lots of happy mommas enjoying afternoon shade. Here you see Brangus, Angus, Limousine, Devon, and South Poll influence.

: Our rotationally-grazed pastures are getting better every year. This paddock is still recovering from the 2010-2013 drought.

: This Devon momma and her Devon yearling bull calf hunker down in the shrubs. Devons are known for their docility and milkiness. Clearly she has done a great job nursing this fellow!

: Here is our new (but young) herd sire, Big B. He is a nice, sleek South Poll cow known for fast growth and easy handling of hot and humid temperatures of the South.

: This little heifer is the second-born of the first calf ever born on Shady Grove Ranch. She is the daughter of a hodge-podge momma (which happens to be one of our best cows) and oru Devon bull. Soon she’ll learn to keep clear of the big cows’ rear ends.

: One group of females enjoy afternoon shade before going out to graze again. These gals are mostly Red and Black Angus.

: Here is our up-and-coming herd sire, Little G. He’s not quite mature enough for breeding, but getting close! He is a South Poll from a herd that grazes year-round and grows well on grass in Missouri.