Business Cards

So I had designed some very simple, but nice enough looking cards on the computer using LibraOffice. Then ran out and bought some card stock from walmart, not expensive either. So we were going to be able to produce our own business cards for a few cents plus my labour. Then I learned something about my laser printer... this model has a problem, you can't print on card stock, the ink rubs off. Which is especially bad with business cards, since they go in your pocket or wallets, outs were blank in a few weeks.

So some friends suggested we try Vista Print, and I'm so glad we did! I'd rather have gone with a local print shop, but the prices were not reasonable for our tiny business; and the big box store prices were just insane. I mostly like vista print because I was able to upload our logo with no problem.

We got 250 business cards, glossy, colour, with a map on the back for under $40 including shipping. I've got about half a dozen that aren't any good out of the bunch (wrong shade/off-cut) but for the price I'm not complaining. These cards look more professional then the ones I made, and I feel like a real business handing them out to people.

Vista Print also does tons of amazing stamps, stickers, shirts, really inexpensively (The car decals were really tempting!). It was pretty difficult just to order the business cards and not get anything else, but I wanted to see how it looked in print first.

We're going to look into having some cloth grocery bags made to go with our beef quarters, but I haven't been able to find a company that can do them at a reasonable price. Maybe I'll just buy an ink-jet and go with iron ons, we'll see (and suggestions more then welcome!!).

Egg Sorting

Cartons all lined up
nested one inside the other

Since we're now getting about a dozen eggs a day, I have a new daily task! Sorting & cleaning eggs.

When you're selling from home/farm-gate you don't need to size or grade your eggs, but I find it's a lot easier for customers. We have 4 carton sizes

Jumbos: +72g
X-Large: 64g+
Large: 57g+
Small & Medium is anything below and I don't sell anything less then about 45g.

I also don't sell anything more then 80g, I just find they are too big and break too easily.

We don't wash any of our eggs. I only remove any stray feathers or small amount of dirt with a dry cloth.

Little bit of dirt on this egg

Using a commercial egg wash, or a bleach solution is good for cleaning eggs but it also removed the natural 'bloom'. This is a thin layer on the outside of the egg that prevents water loss and bacteria. So un-washed eggs last longer.

If you'd like to clean them you can wash them as soon as you get home with a bleach solution = 15ml/4 litre standard household (5%) bleach.

Sand paper marks

Most of the eggs come out of the coop clean, those that have a tiny bit of dirt or dis-colouration I just take a bit of sand-paper and remove that.

Anything that's really dirty (like an egg laid on the coop floor) becomes a lovely treat for the dogs. In fact they are so into the eggs they follow on my heels as soon as I leave the coop until I'm finish grading eggs. I've had a few eggs stolen out of my un-attended baskets as well!

It's a good idea to give your eggs a quick wash with water or dish-soap before you want to eat them. I generally don't, depending on what I'm using them for.

Natural Speckles

Our eggs are fertilized, at least they are supposed to be, we have a lot of hens for two roosters! That does not change the nutritional value or taste of the eggs in any way. The eggs are collected several times a day so they never have a chance to develop.

Once the eggs are all cleaned up & weighed it's time to candle them. I do this with a flash light and a little stand I made from a toilet-paper tube. You can see the egg in the picture is beautiful! You want to make sure the egg is fresh (no large air pockets) and is free from internal spots. Sometimes a little bit of blood or protein gets inside an egg as it's forming, they are fine too eat, but unsightly so I try very hard to make sure none of customers end up with any of them.

If you're unsure if your egg is fresh or not, place it in a small glass of water.

If it floats chuck it out! 

If it sinks, it's good to eat.

Mother Earth News did an egg study a while ago showing you could keep unwashed fertile eggs on the counter-top for 6 months and still eat them. Please don't do that!! But our farm-fresh eggs should be good well past the time it takes you to eat them up.

Our house carton is always interesting, it's full of the largest, smallest, wrinkly, speckled, ugly eggs.

Can't stop talking about eggs!

First of all, we have duck eggs!!

I hope the gif is dancing
He's supposed to be dancing

Duck egg!

I've been waiting for them to start laying because they are under the lights with the chickens. Winter isn't really the best time for little ducklings to be born, but the coop is quite warm at night with all the chickens in there so I think we can do it. I hope we can.

For now I'm collecting the eggs and we've got a few people interested in purchasing them to eat. I haven't had one yet, but I hear they are richer then a chicken egg, and don't give you the egg burps. I have already heard people who are allergic to chicken eggs can eat duck eggs, but please don't take my word for that one!

The other thing I want to talk about is our Marran eggs. We still haven't really determined that our girls are real marrans, and if they are they are 'poor' quality ones because their eggs aren't dark enough. One BIG bonus I will say about them, over the black/red stars, is that their eggs shells are so smooth!

I don't know if this is a diet thing, or just a genetic thing, but the marran & polish eggs are incredibly easy to clean, the dirt just slides right off. With the black/red eggs, who have rough shells, I have to scrub away at the shells with sand paper to get the dirt off.

We don't wash our eggs for sale because doing that removed the 'bloom' from the outside of the egg. That is a thin layer on the outside of the egg that helps to keep is fresher longer.

Sandpaper marks

Mother Earth News did an egg study showing they could leave unwashed chicken eggs on the counter at room temperature for up to 6 months and they were still edible. Again, don't take my word for it, and please don't try it!

So I gently wipe off the eggs with a dry cloth, sand paper any stubborn dirt, candle, sort & store. I'll do a whole post about this to show my process soon.

In the coop again

New Egg Cartons

Very impressed with Berry Hill! Our order & shipping were carried out really quickly, they're in Canada too and we got our cartons only a few days after I ordered them.

We bought 50 regular egg cartons, but they do hold the xls just fine, the jumbos are stretching it a bit.

So we're selling a few dozen eggs a week already!

The new waterer

Set us back about $70, but I really like our new waterer & wish we'd bought one a long time ago. Definitely worth the money!

It's very easy to fill (as long as you read the instructions first...), the chickens love it because the water stays clean, and it holds a lot of water so I don't need to re-fill every day even.

I really like this one because it's deep enough for the ducks to easily drink out of it. We bought the 7 gallon (their last bucket was about 2.5 gallons).

New leg Bands

Along with the egg cartons I got some leg bands so we can tell some of the chikens apart.

Momma EE #1 and #2 are now really
EEs #1 and #2

One of the new black stars

I found the trickiest part was catching the chickens & getting the leg bands on right side up. These are the wrap around kind that don't require any special tools.

The green ones are a tiny bit too big for the chickens, I should have gotten one size down; but none have fallen off yet.  The blue ones fit the little EEs perfectly.

I banded our 4 EEs as well as the 5 black & whites (4 marrans & 1 BPR) and the 3 black stars. I didn't band the red stars because they're all going into the stock pot (we may keep one or two, we'll decide that later).

It's already been great because I can tell which ladies are laying eggs! (If I catch them in the act)

Don't they look cute!?

The chick creep

I did this when we got our first chicks too, it provides the little guys a safe place to get away from all the adults, as well as feeding them the chick starter where the adults can't steal it all. Momma EEs have already figured out this is a safe place where the chicks can get feed, so they've been leaving one at a time to go eat themselves, while the other chick-sits.

New Site

I've launched our new site, and would like to introduce our new farm name: Booth Boys Barn.ca. With that we've released our price list, but I'd like to go into that in a little more depth here.

MEAT	AVERAGE WEIGHT	OUR PRICE	RECENT SUPERMARKET PRICE	EFAO AVERAGE PRICE
Chicken	3-5 Kg	$7.50/kg	$5.58/kg - not organic, not free range	7.99/kg - Dundas, organic
Eggs	Dozen	$4	$3 not organic, not free range	$6 doz - Dundas, organic
Beef	Variable	$10/Kg all cuts	Variable $4 for ground beef to $20++ for steak/roast  not organic	$16.12/Kg Eastern Ontario, organic

Recent supermarket prices are not on sale, at a very large international chain store known for it's low prices. Those are the actual prices of meat in our area from Oct 21st. The "EFAO prices" are from then EFAO website (go to "market prices"). They do a survey of local farms selling at farm gate and have an average for prices in the area.

These prices are just to start and we may be adjusting our prices over the years, as things change.

I thought I'd provide this list for people just starting up, or maybe some people with more experience that want to yell at me. We don't have anything available now, but in the spring we'll be opening up a farm-shop on site.

Everything is farm-pick-up-only as per Ontario law. 

We're also hoping to have turkey next year, and our goal is to get some pork in as well. Depends on how things go.

I really wanted to auction off Billy's first fleece as a fund-raiser to get him some ewes to play with (funny story... Billy is a rig, yeah we messed that one up good!!). Since wool is under a farm-gate only regulation I'm happy to keep it & knit something lovely. Or maybe I'll make a little sheep toy and we'll do something with that instead.

Egg Schedule

Blank Schedule.xlsx Excel

Blank Schedule.ods Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc.

Blank Shedule.pdf

In honor of our little EE, I have to share, some of my crazy-person digital records. The excel sheets will automatically give you 30 days of dates to fill in, you can change anything by just replacing it with your own text (egg colour for example).

I just put in the number of eggs I've collected in the corresponding boxes, and the ones momma EE are sitting on have an "x".

Keeping good records will help you determine very quickly if there are any problems in your flock. Either nutritional, or if a predator is bothering them, and you're getting a drop-off in production.

I can tell you my EEs are very prolific, but my buff is amazing! She's given us eggs 8 out of the last 9 days, while Coco (the cochin) has only given us 5 tiny little eggs in the same time.

In the next few years, I'm hoping to develop some software that would be helpful keep track of everything in a multi-species farm like ours. Reminders for worming, records for egg & meat production, and breeding. There is some software available for large farms, they are species specific and intended for big productions. I'm hoping mine will be free-use, and flexible; but don't hold your breath for a release, it's a big job.

For now, I've got my crazy-person spread sheets for everything.

Logo for the Farm

Just been too busy this week to get any crafting done, I've been working on our business plan for the farm. Suddenly I wish I'd paid more attention in those super boring business classes.... no, no, I really don't!!

I've also been working on our farm logo, it's pretty far from being done. I'm still at the stage where I'm going to draw about a dozen different ones before I give it all up and go back to my first one.

If you're looking to have a logo designed for your farm a good way to go is: 99designs.com. It's a competitive site, where you offer your business up to a whole bunch of designers who then send in their proposals and you chose the winner. You can buy yourself a professionally done logo for less then $100.

If you're going to market anything, even if you're just a little farm, not planning on selling much of anything, a logo brands your business and helps to separate you from the pack. You want something sleek and stylish, that reflects your business and your philosophies. You can certainly draw something yourself, but make sure you educate yourself about design philosophy first (and there is tons of information on the internet for that).

In my "spare" time (which no longer exists) I do web/logo design & marketing for farms. I'm always happy to give out help because I do it as a passion, not a job. So if you've got any questions you can ask, or I'd send you to my website but I've been so busy with the farm it's down... otherwise it would be: DesigNes.ca. Right now there is nothing there, it's way down on the "to do" list right now.