Piglets!
The next chapter of Carver Family Farms has begun. Farrowing pigs is a new enterprise that we are excited about! 10 healthy pigs were born to our first gilt on February 3, 2022. We have two more pregnant gilts that are due soon. Why farrow?
Author: Lyle Carver
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Snow!
I love living and farming in Virginia! We like to call our home county "God's Country." After growing up in Florida, I truly appreciate living somewhere that experiences all four seasons. Snow is beautiful and I enjoy exactly one snow per winter. We have now exceeded that and personally I am ready to move on to Spring. This winter has already thrown significantly more challenges at us than all of last winter combined.The Snow is beautiful! It makes for fun pictures and we did enjoy some sledding this year. Snow is a good example of why we do not raise our pastured chickens in the winter. We choose not to fight nature. If we had birds on pasture during the two recent snow storms, we would've either had to raise them indoors (no longer pastured) or we would've experienced catastrophic losses and difficult/dangerous farm chores on the iced over snow. We will start back with our meat chickens in early Spring.Even though our poultry is seasonal, our pigs are a year round enterprise. We have pigs during the winter and they thrive! The snow does not phase them in the slightest. They love the hay that we supply for them to bed down in. They stay warm as they bed in "pig piles" covered in hay. They have a shelter but it is more for our peace of mind than the pigs. As long as they have sufficient access to hay they can handle any winter weather that Virginia can throw at them. The frozen ground is problematic for some of our infrastructure projects but we do them as the weather allows and are constantly learning and improving.This time of year is a great time to focus on healthy eating and cooking new things. We eat pork or chicken from the farm nearly every day. We make bone broth year round but we seem to go through it more rapidly in the winter as we make soups and chilis. I also drink a mug of hot bone broth every day. In the near future, we will write more about our weekly menu and showcase how we eat almost all protein from Carver Family Farms.In the future we will have cattle and sheep as additional year round enterprises. We are excited to learn and grow! I hope you will join us on this journey of healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people.
Happy New Year!
We are off to a snow covered start to 2022. This means we are longing for warmer days and green grass. At the same time we are enjoying the harvest from 2021 and making plans for 2022. We hope and expect 2022 will be our healthiest year yet. Healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people will continue to be our focus. Here are some goals/changes for 2022...
Fall Pig Update
One of our main goals at Carver Family Farms is to allow our customers to fill their freezers with bulk orders and enjoy the same benefits that our family does. So we were quite pleased that of the 6 remaining hogs: 3 were purchased as whole hogs and the other 3 were purchased as "half hogs" by six families. We also ended up with a waiting list so we have already added more feeder pigs that will be ready in the Spring.
October 2021 Update
Fall is here! We raise two batches of fall "meat chickens." Our first batch (400+) of fall chicks transitioned to the processor last week and our second batch (300+) is on pasture for three more weeks. Our brooders are closed down until Spring because we farm with nature and don't try to raise chicks when they cannot comfortably be outdoors. Our pigs are growing well and enjoying apples and acorns to supplement their ration of non gmo hog feed.
