Before I share all about this year’s best Farm Hack, I’ve got to explain something!
One of the most important responsibilities that we have as your farmers, is not losing track of how many animals we have on the farm at any given time.
Why’s that, you might ask? Because not counting, or worse, miscounting, would mean that we could miss something important going on.
Take the laying hens for example. Each year, we raise about 125 laying hens – these are the gals that lay all those delicious eggs for you each week!
If we were to suddenly have fewer chickens – and the only way we’d know this is by counting them regularly – we could fail to see that that we might have a stealthy predator issue on our hands (happy this isn’t the case at the moment !).
On the flip side, though, having too many animals on the farm, or at least more than we accounted for, would be problematic too!
And here’s why…
We work with a very renowned butcher in the FLX, and just like us, they book up fast. We’re actually required to book all our appointments a whole year in advance, well before the piglets are even conceived!
Which means that if we were to somehow miscount and wind up with more pigs on the farm than we have butcher dates, we’d be in trouble, and have no one that we trust to help us with the final leg of the pigs’ journey.
I share all this because as it turns out, we’ve decided the award for the Best Farmer Hack this year has everything to do with keeping count of the animals we love so dearly. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my little stitch counter.
It was a 5 dollar investment I made years ago when I started knitting that green sweater for Greg and realized I was out of my depth! There it sat in my closet, beside the halfway completed sweater for years until one day, I passed it off to Greg, hoping it would help him with the counts we do on the farm.
Because even the best mathematician in the world would struggle getting a good head count on the birds when they all suddenly rush out of the coop first thing in morning, or on the pigs as they excitedly move onto fresh pasture every few days!
It turns out, this little clicker takes all the thinking out of the equation, and allows us to accurately count all our creatures living the good life with us. And for that, we’re most grateful.
Your Farmers,
Jenney & Greg
PS – We’ve got an awesome supply of organic and pasture raised meats at the Farm Store this week. Order ahead HERE.