Dear friends and customers, Thank you all for your great support for our family farm and our natural way of raising animals. Most of you gave us some feedback about our products and for sure about the unsatisfying delivery situation. Please, let us know right away if something is not like you expect it to be. We are still learning, we are still developing our herd into a reliable source of high quality meat (we know as a fact that the nutritional value is as high as it can get, but the tenderness is not always as it should be, we think). We are still struggling with our computer problems (most of our early costomers addresses are lost), we do not like the way our meat is cut (next year we will have another inspected slaughter house nearby and that will improve this situation) and we are just 2 people doing all the work. Our son Florian is still sick with his pericarditis and most of the time on the road seeing doctors. Sometimes he can help with the office work and he did some deliveries. But when he is hopefully healthy again he will be back flying and then there is even less help. On top of this we are not getting younger and everything starts to take longer than it used to. So we decided to sell a viable part of our place (750 acres) to pay out our mortgage. If Rainer can stop working off the farm to pay for the mortgage we will have more time on the remaining (1200 acres) ranch and can do a better job with our customers.
We hope to find a buyer who is also into bio-dynamic farming and then we could join into the marketing of our products. Otherwise we had a great year with perfect weather for haying, but a little bit to dry for grazing. We had for the first time 400 organic cattle for custom grazing and even better: 185 of them are staying on our place for winterfeeding. Our pigs were very productive, the early litters were like always raised in the barn with heatlamps but later on 5 of the sows farrowed totally on their own out in the bush. They raised all the little guys but you can imagine the difficulty of castrating... Three of our Icelandic Horses attended breeding evaluations (in Vernon and in Boise, Idaho) and got very good notes. Another 3 were sold to nice people in Alberta and Washington. They were trained by Melanie Schellenberg, Lisi and Jelena Ohm from www.vindsdalur.ca and sold by Phil and Robyn Hood from www.icefarm.com . In 2006 we had just one foal (5 in 2005) and next year we are expecting 3.
Our grass fed cow herd is growing slowly but surely. We decided 2 years ago to not follow the canadian habit to breed one year old females as replacements but wait until they are pretty much grown out and breed them as 2 year olds. Therefor this year we had only 21 calves from the older mothercows. You can clearly see the Galloway influence in this years calf crop. We spent 2 weeks in Alberta and BC looking for a replacement for our Galloway bull (butchered in the fall of 2005) but could not find any bull who would meet our criteria. So we used one of our own 9 bulls which all look better suited for a grass finishing herd than the grain pampered bulls we saw.
We spent again lots of time attending bio-dynamic courses, organic AGM's and will continue doing so in the next year as well. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and the very best for the New Year 2007! Rainer & Gigi Krumsiek Raising beef and pork in harmony with nature.
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