Annual Update: Production
The 2024 season was a great season in production despite being a very challenging season in weather! We're hoping for favorable conditions AND good management this year but that's not all up to us!
Integration between Produce and Livestock
One of our goals for 2025 is to do more integration with our livestock and veggie fields. It's a super complex dance of field conditions, timing food safety windows (90/120 days from manure application to harvest date), animal fencing, and more. Nat grazed more cover cropped veggie fields last year than ever and we hope to continue that trend. Complicated though it is, Nat has gained a lot of skills here and he even gave a talk at the latest VABF conference on this very topic! If we can do well with this, it may look like a decrease in the amount of bought-in "inputs" like fertilizers in the future.
Grant Funding from the American Farmland Trust
Another way we're trying to reduce future inputs and increase production is through continuing to develop our precision nutrient management strategies. We got some grant funding from the American Farmland Trust Healthy Soils Grant Program for this project this year.
Traditionally, we use soil tests as the basis for our nutrient plans but that's only part of the story. Just because a nutrient occurs in the soil does not mean it is easy for a plant to uptake it. We'll be adding sap/tissue testing on targeted crops to help us get a better picture of what's going on.
The second prong of our program is addressing targeted nutrient issues with foliar feeding. We've done work with foliar feeding and "fertigation" in the past and it's been very useful! Plants uptake nutrients through their leaves VERY quickly (compared to through the root system) and so it can be a very targeted way to see quick results. When we apply [organic compliant] pesticides, leaf application is also the method. In the past, whenever we do this, it is with a backpack sprayer which holds 5 gallons max. It's hard on the body of the person performing the job and it's slow! This grant is providing funds for a boom sprayer (which goes on a tractor) to make this much more efficient!
The final prong of our program is the acknowledgement that minerals are only part of the solution. We'll be experimenting with some seed treatments and "soil primers" that incorporate microbiology in hopes that this will jump start our soil health! The funds will be covering the liquid inputs themselves as well as the boom sprayer to apply them.
We'll be, whenever possible, trialing the use of these products right beside a "control" patch so that we can monitor for differences. We have plans to integrate some of these strategies in our pastures, and in our production areas: both cropped and cover-cropped. The end goal of all this is more productive veggie fields, more biomass produced by our cover crops, and more forage quantity and quality in the pastures. When plants are provided proper nutrition they can focus on growing roots and maximizing photosynthesis. In our wildest dreams, we might be able to cut back on the amount of dry fertilizer we're spreading at the beginning of the season.
Broilers take 2 (or 3? or 4? depending on how you count)
We're honing in on the best way for us to produce and provide chicken to our customers without it disrupting our other enterprises or becoming a money pit. Back in 2015-2017, we raised and processed broiler chickens ourselves. While we loved providing chicken, the processing days always felt like such a monumental feat that took a toll on our staff and the veggie operation as a whole. There were a couple of years where we didn't raise or sell chicken at all. Post pandemic, we picked up a chicken vendor and built up a pretty good market for retail chicken really quickly! With some other local farms getting out of the chicken business at the time, we saw a real gap in the market. At the same time, we were wanting to be able to round out hours to bring on a second full time livestock assistant onto the farm.
In 2023, we began our partnership with Blackbird Farms, a co-operative entity that's still being developed. We agreed to grow out birds here at Bellair, and then Blackbird would process them in their Montross facility, and we sold them back here at Bellair. It was an almost perfect arrangement and you can read more about what we were thinking about that in the moment in this old blog post.
While lots of things were working out with the Blackbird partnership (great product, we continued to build our market of chicken buyers, we loved that we didn't have to slaughter and that we had birds on the ground here dropping fertility), in the end it was not the perfect fit. Having the processing facility so far away was eating at margins for both parties. We also were having trouble price-matching with our partners as they had a more affordable feed source than we do in this part of the state. In the end, it was a numbers-based decision and we had lost too much money attempting to do it in that way.
However, the cooperative model that Chris, Dan and the Blackbird team are building was still inspirational in that the DIY-processing is not set in stone! We were able to find a partner closer to Bellair and we've basically recreated a mini version of what we were doing before. The 2024 season, we ran 6 sets of birds down to our new partner in for processing and labeled the birds with our own Bellair label. The numbers are in and the enterprise is breaking even!
There are still some bugs to work out related to getting feed and chore costs down and that's what we'll be working on this winter by setting ourselves up to receive feed in bulk and building a new style of broiler coop which should reduce chore labor.
We're excited about all that, of course, but much more thrilling is that this winter, we're going to be starting a long-awaited program of making chicken stock from the carcasses, feet and necks that are a by-product (albeit a high-value one) from our parted-out birds. Most farms don't have a ready outlet for these items and so we'll be able to capture that value! It's one of the times when the complexity of our business pays off! Look for our chicken stock in the Barn Store and online.
Bellair Kitchens Hard Launch
The chicken stock is a great segway into talking about Bellair Kitchens, a project long in the making. We gained access to the building where this kitchen is located two winters ago and it has taken a long time to get ready for this project because we are doing it in a low-investment way. But all that has paid off as we're ready to launch with very minimal funds invested! The chicken stock mentioned earlier is definitely our "flagship product" out of this space, but we also plan to make so many other wonderful things in there!
Kitchen Manager Mackenzie has been busily building recipes and she was such a trooper through the long slog of paperwork and details needed to get our permitting done. Now that's behind her, she's looking forward to getting in there and actually making some stuff!
Most of the recipes that Mackenzie will be making will focus on using up bulk seasonal produce. When cucumbers are flowing, maybe it's pickles or relish. When basil is booming, maybe it's pesto! She's already planned a full season of recipes that are simple, with minimal off-farm ingredients and maximum local-veggie taste. We'll start slow, but who knows the bounds of what she'll create in there!
We'll be selling Mackenzie's creations in two ways: as a part of our Bellair Kitchens Add-on Shares as well as for retail sale out of the Barn Store. First up is chicken stock, available now!
