August 2024 Update

What's going on at Farmcraft:

It’s been a perfectly good Spring & Summer of raising super wholesome, healthful and delicious farm products at Farmcraft. Andrea & Luke are managing many enterprises – hens, meat chickens, meat pigs, sows, milk cows, beef cattle, calves, orchard, small fruit, greens and other vegetables. Everything is organically raised / grown. Deep organic. We’re not into any of the chemicals or vaccinations that USDA organic allows. We believe that a lot (most) food out there causes disease. We are trying (and, I think, succeeding) to produce food that is entirely wholesome and unadulterated – food that is healing and health promoting, food that provides daily vitality and long-term well being, food of outstanding quality and taste. It has been and still is fun every day, the farm ecosystem is a beautiful place for the plants, animals & wildlife, and we are so happy to have had many of our customers out to the farm this Summer for product pickups, tours and parties.

Where can you find us:

We are at the Sheboygan Farmer's Market (Fountain Park) every Saturday from 8am - 1pm. See us there for our best selection of meat and produce. If you would rather buy wholesome food via on-farm pickup, that's great! For on-farm pickup, you can either buy online, or, if you're not seeing what you want on the website, send us a text, email or give us a call. On-farm order pickup is available 7 days a week from 7am-7pm.

What do we have:

Beef, Chicken, Eggs, Pork, Milk, Vegetables, Tree Fruit, Sometimes Even More Stuff:

Beef 100% Grassfed, raised organically, 100% outdoors on pasture. We butchered 1 animal this year. The beef is quite delicious and wholesome. In 2025, we will likely again butcher 1 animal. He was born on our farm in 2023 and will also be delicious and entirely wholesome and unadulterated. We are currently raising 5 bottle calves. 4 of them will be beef in 2026. Hopefully we will raise 15 bottle calves next year. This comes out to: 2024 - 1 beef. 2025 - 1 beef. 2026 - 4 beeves. 2027 - 15 beeves. As in, likely we will have some cuts available sporadically in 2024, 2025 and 2026. In 2027 we will have half and whole beeves available, and we'll start selling halves/wholes in 2026.

Born and Raised at Farmcraft Pasture-Raised and Organic-Fed Pork. We are butchering 21 pigs in 2024. Two-Thirds of of the pigs went to/are going to Slo Food Market in Sheboygan. The rest we sold as cuts. It's really special stuff. Organic-fed is exceedingly rare for pork. It's expensive to feed pigs organically, but it's the only way that we find acceptable. Our pigs live outdoors exclusively, year round, and they thrive. No vaccinations, antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals, no agricultural chemicals like pesticides or herbicides. It's as wholesome and ethical as anything in the world, and chock full of vital energy, nutrients and savory flavor. We are sold out of pork now through January 2025. We'll butcher 35 or so pigs in 2025, so in 2025 we should have cuts available more regularly and possibly some halves/wholes available as well.

Pasture Raised, Organic Fed Chicken. We raised 600 meat chickens this year. Like everything else, it is raised as wholesome as we know how. This means daily moves to fresh pasture, organic feed and minerals, sunshine and shade, plenty of room, plenty of clean water and fresh air. Of the 600, about 150 chickens were cut into parts - thighs, wings, legs and boneless/skinless breasts. The parts cost more per pound than the whole birds. We have to pay to have them butchered that way, and because some weight is lost. So, it's more expensive to buy the parts. Parts - convenient. Whole birds - less $ and opportunity for delicious & nutritious bone broth. I expect that we will have parts and whole birds available at least through the start of Winter.

Pasture Raised, Organic Fed Eggs. We keep a fair few hens at Farmcraft. We collect about 70 dozen eggs each week. The hens sleep in a mobile coop that is predator proof. During the day, they roam and forage our pasture buffet of plants, roots, bugs & minerals. The hens lay eggs in the mobile coop's nestboxes. The eggs stay clean in the nestboxes, so we don't wash them. We collect the eggs every afternoon. Every evening at dark, the hens go back into the coop. Every week we move the coop to a different area of the farm, so that the manure is spread and so the hens have fresh pastures to forage. During the winter (November - March) the hens go in our hoop house and live on top of mulch about 12" deep. For those 5 months they scratch in the soil and mulch, and they are fed high quality hay and organic feed. This is true pastured poultry – moved frequently outside on fresh pasture for most of the year, inside a clean and naturally-lit building with living compost/mulch/soil under them for the snow season. Our eggs are mostly spoken for this 2024 Summer. We will have some at the Farmer's market on occasion. Later this Fall and Winter I expect we will have more dozens at the Farmer's market again. We are pretty much happy with the number of hens we have now. We could probably sell more eggs during the summer, but I’m not certain about the winter, and we would need to consider the size of our pastures, how much feed and manure we want on our pastures, if we want to build another mobile coop, if we want to handle and package more eggs every week, if the hoop house can house more hens for the winter… Our current situation is a good situation for now. Probably we’ll keep the same amount of hens next year.

Deep Organic Vegetables. We have a garden and a hoop house full of veggies. Or veggies and fruits, depending on what you call a tomato. By deep organic, I mean the original intention of organic. Grown in the earth, in living soil, focusing on feeding the soil and focusing on whole ecosystem health, so that the plants are naturally healthy and robust and so the food is nourishing, health promoting and delicious. Every week we sell 100 pounds, more or less, of cherry and heirloom tomatoes, 20 pounds of salad mix, 50 heads of lettuce, sometimes arugula, mustard greens, kale, green onions, patty pans, basil, cucumbers. Right now we have some peaches and Asian pears, too. In future years, as our trees grow, we expect to have more and more tree fruit (apples, pears, peaches, plums, etc). We’re not sure how much market gardening we will do next year, as far as salad greens go. It is satisfying to provide salad greens that people really seem to enjoy, and to have them available every week, but it’s a lot of labor for the amount of revenue we are producing. While I’m not sure about salad greens, I’m relatively certain that we will keep growing and selling tomatoes.

Milk. We have one milk cow. She provides a huge amount of Andrea & Luke’s weekly intake of nourishment, as well as some beautiful nourishment for the community. We’ll probably keep a second or third milk cow in the future, like next year or the year after. Maybe we’ll even have a handful. But who knows? It’s a lot of work, and while I believe 100% grass-milk it is the most nourishing food we can harvest from our earth and to make it available to the community is a beautiful and worthwhile service, I don’t know that a small milk cow herd is economically viable at anywhere near current milk prices, even organic grass-milk prices, not to mention the regulatory can of worms that would be our new world if we choose to make milk a regular part of our business at Farmcraft. The cows are magical to work with, grazing cattle is a gentle way to farm the land, and fresh (raw) 100% grass-milk is unmatched in its nourishment and wholesomeness. But the labor and $ numbers just seem very difficult. All that to say, we have 1 milk cow now, we don’t have any additional milk available right now, and the size of our future milk cow herd is uncertain.

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 That’s a wrap! Thanks for reading our update. Hopefully you found some entertainment, or got to know us better, or received some clarity on when you’ll finally be able to enjoy Farmcraft bacon & eggs again.