With the farrowing behind us this week we can talk about the 17 piglets running around the pasture and the mayhem that ensues!  Mama pigs are doing great and we also share the final castration update for the season as we finish off that chore.  We also talk about the broiler chickens that are here.  Our Cornish X chicks arrived early and we're not ready!!

In the CoopCast Community we give a nice thank you to our listeners who helped us by sharing their experience and letting us know we were not alone.  It was a cool feeling!  We also mention a great comment from a US Veteran on our Memorial Day post on Facebook. Ohh, Andy shares a gun range story about some not so savvy pistol shooting (smack talk - the shooting was great!).

Finally we tour the veggie patch and talk about row covers and hoops.  Kelli shares some of the pros: Protect from cold sun and bugs, Better growth on some stuff and some of the cons: Hard to see in-Need to check in on plants, Blowing off, Getting torn

This has been a week of extreme conditions on the farm physically as well as one of the most emotionally challenging weeks of farming yet.  The vegetables have had to deal with a freeze of 28F one day and 90+ a few days later... any way you look at that, it's a challenge.  On top of the wild weather we had to navigate piglet castration when the mama wants nothing to do with humans and icing on the cake was a proven sow who has issues while farrowing and needed help delivering 8 more piglets!

This was a busy week on the farm.  In fact, we don't even have time to talk about the vegetable gardening this week!  Our gilt, Katniss, farrowed her first litter of pigs and we take you through the experience from noticing her first signs of farrowing all the way through dealing with mom and piglets post-farrowing.  We reflect on this farrowing experience versus our first farrowing with our sow last year - and there's quite a difference!   Share in our joy and disappointment as we deal with an aggressively protective mom and how that behavior is affecting our ability to care for the animals.  We await the next farrowing coming later in the week.  We also briefly touch on the arrival of turkey poults and egg layer chicks this week as well.

This week we talk about our new YouTube series we will be publishing over the next several months called "Five Minutes on the Farm".  We set up some new fencing for the pigs and Andy longs for more permanent fences on the farm. We are getting ready for piglet farrowing in the next week and we talk a little about the new pig waterer we built. We briefly stop by the veggie patch to talk gardening and asparagus and raspberry plants.

The CoopCast Community has a followup on the "Milk Rant" from CoopCast 067 and the listener response in CoopCast 068.  We also respond to a suggestion from a listener regarding farm tours and interns.

This weeks concludes with a Rumination about GMO's.  We challenge the listener to consider that the concept of a GMO is not categorically bad - there are some really good things that come from GMO's in the world and we touch on a few of them.

Things around the farm have been getting busy as the vegetable gardening season is off to is start.  Finally we have the peas planted - sugar snap and snow so far.  We have also been picking from the asparagus patch and enjoying some fresh spring vegetables. We talk about a trip to the Amish greenhouse and Amish WalMart.  At the same time we have been fighting rats in the barn with increasing urgency as we are just a few weeks away from chicks and poults brooding in the barn.

Then in the CoopCast Community we tease a little bit about the fact we are building something that we hope will really help out on the farm...  to see what it is check out our Facebook page.  We talk about some "quiet criticism" our last CoopCast received and rant a little.  We also answer Luke's question about owning vs buying pigs for meat production.

Finally we conclude with a Farm U all about GMO's and the testing of food for the presence of genetically modified organisms.  This segment is not opinion or discussion based noise about GMO's rather a factual "from the lab" discussion of how Dr. Farmer Kelli is actually testing foods for GMO corn and soy.

This weeks farming updates show that things are quickly picking up speed as spring marches on.  We started last week offering our pastured broilers up for sale and had them all accounted for in 2 days.  We also have been fixing some of our permanent fencing that winter was not kind to.  As part of the fencing work we opened a spring pasture for the pigs and will be moving them for farrowing in another week or so.  Updates include a quick stop in the vegetable garden section of the farm where we have been busy making soil blocks and starting seeds in the greenhouse.  Up next is actually getting peas planted in the garden!

The CoopCast Community this week is a rapid fire segment...  Where we discuss how "nice" it was that some of the Boston police brought a homeowner with children some milk...
http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?pageType=national&url=http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57580635/photograph-of-boston-police-officer-delivering-milk-to-family-during-lockdown-goes-viral/&feed_id=1&videoid=37&catid=57580635
We respond to a listener that asked about the new names the pork and beef producers are putting on meat.
#farmerandy riffs on customers who ask the question "is there soy in your feed".
Brent from CT is happy we aren't "worm worshipping hippies" and so are we.
And Jon pointed out that  taping farm cruelty is now a crime here in NY.

Our final segment is a Rumination on balancing transparency with privacy.  Where do you draw the line when you farm is also your home?  It's a more difficult question than you might think.

This weeks farming updates include a lot of rain and finally a little warmth.  We were about to get the snow fence down and watch the pastures start to turn a little green.  We started allowing customers to pre-order pastured chickens this week and we are almost already sold out.  We found a dead chicken in the coop...  looks like a heart attack.  In the green house we have been potting up tomatoes and making soil blocks.

The Farmers Choice segment this week answers the question we posed in CoopCast 065 about how do manage a sick pig. In the segment we:
Follow up on pig illness
Share some of the thoughts our listeners had like call vet, ask Walter, check poop
Share what the farmers did which included emailed Walter, posted on boards, called who we bought from, talked to large animal vet
We found that the Pigsite and Merck vet manual were quite helpful
Penicillin and tetracycline - when antibiotics and the farm work together.

In a Farm U segment we talk about the notion out there that you can "breed resistance" to disease into your animals and how that's not really accurate.
Resistance to disease/ building a better herd has a role in breeding but genetics isn't the whole story.  The stauts of host- Nutrition, stress, normal flora, etc all impact the likelihood of an animal getting sick when exposed to the pathogen.  In most cases it's less about genetics and "resistance" and more about infectious dose of the organism.

Our farming updates this week suggest that maybe just a little Spring is on the way here at Chicken Thistle Farm. We took some time to clean out the chick wagon. We have also spent some time cleaning up the asparagus patch and getting the greenhouse ready for some seedlings. Then there's an update on the pigs and their gestation progress.

We then move to the Veggie Patch and talk a little vegetable gardening as the seasons slowly turn. We talk seedlings, seed starting and soil blocks. Getting things ready in the greenhouse is a challenge as it seems to have been taken over by rodents following the cold winter. We also answer a few questions about starting peas in the springtime garden and discuss our seed starting worksheet in our project library on the chickenthistlefarm.com website.

Our last segment is The Farmers Choice where this week we share part of the story of when one of our pigs went down sick and ask you, the aspiring farmer, what would YOU do?

Our farming updates this week include several things.  Like the new animal on the farm, our new Border Terrier puppy Cricket.  The Brother to Watson. (get it?).  Kelli shares her adventures from last week while Andy was away on business and the "while traveling" farm emergency she had to manage.  We complain about the fact it's early April and there's still snow on the ground.  We also have a discussion around pricing your products (pastured meats and other naturally farmed goods) and making sure you ask what you should be getting.  A little farm marketing advice about how discounting your brand isn't a good idea.

If you haven't check us out on Facebook, Twitter or our web site...  the fact is we are NOT raising Ostriches or Gators...  that was an April Fools joke.

The "In the News" segment we talk about the big uproar in the media about the fact that dairy producers want to add sweeteners to their milk and be held to the same labeling standards as the rest of the beverage industry (gasp).  Then we turn our attention to the "Monsanto Protection Act" and not so much about how it will impact food safety but rather from a bigger picture of how government behaving like this isn't necessarily in the best interest of it's citizens.

 "Monsanto Protection Act" primer - http://investorplace.com/investorpolitics/the-monsanto-protection-act-only-in-america/

This week our farming podcast talks about how we (the farmers) manage to get away on a vaction while entrusting the farm to capable hands. Who says farming needs to be all work and no play. There's a set of steps we undergo to ensure the farm is ready to be watched and we share a bunch of those.

We share our story about a farmers market we visited while on vacation in sunny Florida.  It was interesting for us to deal with how the farmer becomes the consumer.

There's a new segment this week called "Remember When"... where we talk about how we start off little chicks to grow them into healthy birds.

Finally, our last segment this week is an "In the News" where we discuss how China, Russia and otehr countries have banned the import of a bunch of US raised meats because of the usage of a chemical called Ractopamine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine