These folks have been Godsends to us as we’ve muddled through small-scale farming, visiting us, training us, giving us advice, and even helping us teach our kids about agriculture.

Who are these amazing unsung heroes?  They’re the folks at the Merrimack County Cooperative Extension Office, the local branch of the statewide University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension!

How they get to all the things they do, I’m really not sure.  As we approach the first year on our little farm:

1. A forester has walked our woods with us to help us with our forest management plan.
2. A poultry inspector has tested our flock as part of the NPIP.
3. The office has tested our soils and made recommendations for improvement.
4. We’ve received advice on garden management and care.
5. We participated in a seminar on goat care (and are starting another 5-week series)
6. In the next few months, we are attending clinics on fruit tree pruning, gardening, forages and pasture management, and more.
7. We’ve pored over the volumes of information available on their website, and used some of their curriculum to supplement our homeschool program.
8. All of our kids are immersed in 4-H activities ranging from animal sciences to riding to crafts.

I’m pretty sure there are things I’m leaving out.  The bottom line is: EVERY one of these activities is supported to some extent (or entirely) by the county extension office, for a minimal fee if not free.  This is all made possible by the superb staff as well as a huge network of volunteers they coordinate.  We have been overwhelmed by how active and involved these people are and are indebted to them for their help.

Here is a video they produced to tell a bit more of what they do:

We have a long way to go at the Flying T, but we’d be much further behind without their support.  So, we’re taking this time to say THANK YOU to Deb, Nancy, Dot, Tim, Mary, Amy, and all the rest of the unsung heroes at the extension office that do so much with so little!

How about you?  Do you have an active and involved extension office, and how do you rely on them?

Thank you, Granny, for nominating us for the Versatile Blogger Award.

As many of you know, Granny’s Parlour is a blog written from Vermont about many of the simpler and wonderful things in country life.  On a given day, her posts might include a recipe, a look at a holiday tradition, gardening tips, or thoughts about the history behind an event.  She is also particularly faithful in promoting blogs other than her own and offering sweet encouragement to writers in her weekend reviews.

As this is the first time our blog has been honored, here’s a little history behind it:

The Versatile Blogger Award started, I believe, only a few months ago as a fun way to publicize and recognize fellow writers in the blogosphere.

The RULES for the Versatile Blogger Award:

1. Add the award to your blog.
2. Thank the blogger who gave it to you.
3. Mention seven random things about yourself. (see below)
4. List the rules.
5. Award to 15 bloggers.
6. Inform each of those 15 by leaving a comment on their blog.

The seven random things about us… oh, so much is random!

1. Five years ago, only our oldest daughter believed we’d ever actually own a horse.
2. None of us imagined we’d own more than one horse… and definitely not goats, ducks, and chickens!
3. We don’t have cable, and we often sit around the wood stove listening to the radio, playing games, or reading books. This isn’t a religious belief, per se. We just couldn’t justify paying all that money for… well, cable. 
4. My wife once worked at the complaint department of a colostomy products company. Think about that.
5. She has also had jobs in which she tracked marsupial mice through a rain forest, herded buffalo, wrestled deer, and drove “deuce-and-a-half” trucks.
6. I served as a fighter pilot, earned my masters degree through a seminary, and continue to meet more folks who have done the same.  
7. I believe one of the best ways to form tomorrow’s leaders is to get today’s youth together with yesterday’s heroes.

The 15 Bloggers we’re nominating in three categories, recognizing that the lines that define these groups often blur:

Farming How To Blogs:

1. Slow Money Farm – Life, Farm, Food
2. Lessons Learned from the Flock
3. mikethechickenvet

Life on the Homestead and Farm:

4. Adventures in Farmgirl Chic
5. Eden Hills’s Blog
6. Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
7. citygone
8. Learning The Old Ways
9. HOMESTEADING – Downsized | Baby Steps to Life’s Independence
10. Chicks With Ticks….
11. seventhacreheaven
12. City Girl Farming Blog
13. The Adaptive Curmudgeon’s Blog 

And lastly, a couple “Agvocates”:

14. Pearl Snaps’ Ponderings
15. Agriculture Proud

Small-scale farming is not a big money maker, and as we’ve put together our 5-year plan, we can see that we’ll have to get a bit bigger before we can realize any significant profits.  However, based on just the past few months, eggs are a good place to start.

With proper care, we’re finding that our original flock of Rhode Island Reds and Araucanas (10 pullets, one cockerel total) produces an average of about 8 eggs a day.  That’s about 20 dozen per month.  The young flock consists of 12 Barred Rock pullets and their cockerel, and up till now, they’ve been eating and not producing.  Supplemental feed for the combined flock runs him about $25/mo…  less in the growing season and  more in the Winter due to availability of forage.  So the rough cost of production is about $1.25 per dozen.

You just can't get fresher eggs than these!

Out of that 20 dozen, our family uses about 8 a month and gives away another 2.  We pay him at production cost for those.  The remaining 10 dozen have sold pretty easily at $3/dozen, so combined with the ~$12 we pay him for the eggs we use, he’s been clearing a bit under $20 a month.  Of this, he puts a good portion in his “giving” jar (currently he’s giving that to missions in Haiti, but he’s looking at other places for the future), and splits the rest between his “saving” and “spending” jars.

Well, this week, the Barred Rocks started dropping an egg or two, which means pretty soon our production will double.  His first thought was, “that’s OK, it won’t be too hard to sell twice as many eggs.”  However, we had to explain to him that although his production is doubling, the number of eggs he’ll have to sell will actually triple (because we don’t plan on upping our family consumption to 20 dozen a month!).

So, it’s on to more marketing.  He’s already made a deal with the local feed store to buy his eggs, but they only pay $1.50.  That’s enough to make a small profit, especially since his cost per dozen should drop significantly now that he doesn’t have so many unproductive mouths to feed, but it’s not nearly as nice as $3.

This whole process has become a supplement to our homeschool curriculum, as he’s not just learning animal science, but  math, accounting, business skills, marketing, and communications also.  And of course, he’s learning a lot about both personal and social responsibility, lessons that will be even more important throughout his life than the “three R’s.”  Regardless of what some might say, that kind of agricultural education certainly doesn’t seem useless to us!

If he can manage to sell 30 dozen a month at the going rate, that’s about $75 a month profit.  That might bump up a little if he’s successful in raising chicks this Spring.  That’s too bad for a backyard business, especially if you’re a Cub Scout.

Do you raise chickens or other livestock on a small scale, and if so, do you do it for profit, as a hobby, or both?  How do you market your products?  I’d also love to hear other ideas for getting kids involved in business and financial planning at an early age.  Thanks for stopping by, reading, and commenting!

Unemployable? (Photo by Jack Dykinga, USDA Agricultural Research Service)

One basis of this claim the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ (NACE) 2012 Job Outlook study, compiled from a survey of employers (Loose says “almost 1,000 employers,” though NACE states the study included 244 respondents) regarding their future hiring plans.  Also included were job projections from 2008-2018 from the Department of Labor as well as numbers of degrees awarded in 2008-2009 from Newsweek‘s similarly-titled slideshow, “20 Most Useless Degrees,” which put Ag as #3 behind Journalism (oh the irony) and Horticulture.

From the DoL numbers, farm manager opportunities are expected to drop by 5% between 2008 and 2018, a cut of roughly 64,000 out of 1.2M positions.  Over that same period, the nation might see 125,000 more brand-new college graduates with Agriculture degrees.

Why bother? (Photo by Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service)

A few alibis:

1) I don’t dispute these numbers.  But if you think “Farm Manager” is the only career opportunity for a person with an Ag degree, you don’t understand Ag… which may be the problem here.  And according to Michelle Singletary’s recent Washington Post editorial, and another from the NYT, Ag is currently one of the degrees with the lowest unemployment rate in the US.  But I am not going to discuss that further… now… I don’t think…

2) [late edit] Aw heck, why not… another article by Purdue and the USDA states, “During 2010–15, five percent more college graduates with expertise in agricultural and food systems, renewable energy, and the environment will be needed when compared to 2005-10…”

3) I don’t have an Ag degree, and actually feel a bit slighted because NACE, DoL, and Newsweek didn’t even bother to address the prospects for the millions of us with our undergrad degrees in mathematics and Masters from seminary.

4) I’m not going to rant about our sad environment in which participate in, understand, and value agriculture so little… Well, I am going to rant, but not today.

Instead, I want to take some issue with the angle from which these articles address the data.

The idea fronted by Loose and Newsweek is that these degrees are valueless because there are so many more degrees being awarded than are needed in the job market.  Now this argument would make a lot of sense if we were talking about printing money.  If we were, I’d recommend What Happened to Penny Candy? as a superb foundation upon which to start the conversation.

About $90,000 pictured - a bit more than what a 4-year degree will cost you for in-state tuition, books, fees, and living expenses at a public university. It won't even cover tuition at the average private school. (Image from Braintrack.com)

If a degree is simply an asset – a piece of paper in which we invest in the hopes that it will provide future earnings – I’d say these articles were right on the mark.  To be honest, this is how some folks have looked at a college degree for many years – spend (or worse, borrow), tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a couple words one can put on a resume that will provide a healthy ROI.  Scarily, others buy one of these “investments” without considering the potential ROI at all.

However, that’s not what a degree is, especially today.  If you merely invest $120,000 on a degree from the other end of the NACE spectrum, say Chemical Engineering, and complete the requirements for that degree, you may have more opportunities after graduation than your classmate that did the same but earned a degree in Agriculture.  However, you won’t have nearly the opportunities of a person in any degree program who invested not only his or her money, but other assets such as time (building experiences in focused internships, employment and volunteerism) and relationships (what we call “networking” these days).

These articles also ignore a good portion of the NACE report, addressing only the degrees, not the skills employers are looking for in this highly competitive environment.  You can click here for a digest of those, but they include the ability to “work in a team,” “make decisions and solve problems,” “communicate inside and outside the organization,” and “influence others.”  You don’t learn this stuff in a book.  Those skills, friends, are the difference between a mere “education” and a comprehensive “training” experience, or as one of my seminary professors put it, “information” vs. “formation.”

If we think of a degree as simply a financial investment, a ticket to a job, we are missing the boat.  Well, actually, we won’t miss all the boats – we’ll be on one with the vast majority of other college graduates who act similarly – but unfortunately it is more likely to be one named Titanic or Costa Concordia than Mayflower.

All Aboard! (Image by Carnival Cruise Lines)

What if, instead, we looked at the degree program from a more multifaceted approach?  Certainly we should consider the financial costs, future opportunities, and potential return on investment.  However, we also should consider what we are willing to invest in time, effort, and relationships, and how we can use the years in which we invest these assets to distinguish ourselves from the crowds.

For sure, some college degrees are more marketable than others, but I like the approach of Singletary’s Washington Post editorial better.

“Too many students aren’t sure what job they could get after four, five or even six years of studying a certain major and racking up education loans. Many aren’t getting on-the-job training while they are in school or during their semester or summer breaks. As a result, questions about employment opportunities or what type of job they have the skills to attain are met with blank stares or the typical, ‘I don’t know.’ …A college education is not an investment in your future if you are taking out loans just for the college experience. It’s not an investment if you’re not coupling your education with training. It’s not an investment if you aren’t researching which fields are creating good-paying jobs now and 30 years from now.”

Is an Agriculture degree useless?  Yes, just like all the rest.  Is investment put towards earning an Agriculture degree useless?  Well, that depends on what you’re willing to invest.

[Edit... this article has understandably sparked a bit of "interest" in the Agvocate blogosphere.  As I come across some of the more interesting responses, I'll link them below]

Agriculture Now

Allen Levine (Huffington Post)

“I Studied Agriculture and I Have a Job” Facebook Page (Over 3,000 members in less than a day!)

Figuring out the Plot

Economix Blog at NYT - This one shows that recent Ag grads have the LOWEST unemployment rate for all except those with education and health-related degrees!

Feel free to suggest more!

Aww, Dad, you stopped right before the best part!

Anyways, while Dad and Mr. G were hitching up the trailer and whatnot, my siblings, our friends, and I decided to take a walk with the horses in the G’s field. This was partly for our exercise and partly so that Mr. Anti-Trailer wouldn’t see the scary metal box that these crazy humans made him stand in.

FREEEEDOMMMMMM!!!!

After a little while, Jasper decided to walk off, pulling my sister so hard that she dropped his lead rope. We recaught him and walked on.

When we returned, the two G girls were each proudly walking a horse (with help). While I put Zip’s trailer halter on, the youngest of our friends, who was scratching Zip’s neck, much to his snorty pleasure, looked up a me and said, “I think I’m addicted to horses.”

Horse hugs

We pushed all the stuff we’d used back into the trailer (five or so bales of hay make it hard to do this), and took out our trusty Handy Stick. We knew we were ready for anything a twelve-hundred pound horse with a sharp pair of hooves could throw at us.

As usual, we weren’t.

Jasper usually knows that Mom is boss. But, it depends on her tone of voice. If she says “Mister Jabba-Wabba baby, do you wanna get in da twaiwer?” then he will refuse for the rest of the session. If she says “Come on, buster. Let’s get in,” he says “Whoa. She means business here.” (OK, I’m exaggerating – Mom never talks to him like a baby – but she did learn to be firmer with him).

Who's longing who?

At least, that was how it happened in Texas when our feisty steed knew he was going to only have to stay in there, with his haybag full, for five minutes or so. But this day he said, “Wait a second. I’m not wearing my rope halter. I’m wearing the web one with the blue fuzzy things on it. and everybody’s hugging each other like they’re leaving. You know, I think I’m staying in there for a while. Nope, not gonna do it.”

Bllpbllpppptt!!!!! That's what I think about trailers!

With that, he threw out buck and a rear, and galloped off over our friends’ lush lawn. A fairy-tale picture, I know, a Horse with a long mane running, free, over a green meadow.

That is, until you notice the dangling lead and the fact that your fairy-tale mount is gamely crossing a road and going for those tasty flowers in the neighbor’s yard.

Mom, Dad and I ran after him, shaking the treats. Jasper said, “Uh-uh. I know where you’re taking me.”
Mom and Dad cornered him by going around opposite sides of the neighbor’s house, and Dad finally caught his lead rope. Jasper hung his head.

Dad now took over. After longing the escapee for a few minutes, he tried to lead Jasper into the trailer. Jasper refused.

Let me deviate from the plot. May I say that sweet old Zip had been waiting patiently in said trailer for about half an hour, now?

We longed Jasper whenever he refused to get in the trailer. After a long time (our friends, after seeing Jasper’s various bucks, kicks, and rears, decided to watch from afar) we finally got him in.

Drat! Foiled again!

We were headed to Ohio. More adventures were in store.

On the road again!

It’s not that I don’t think resolutions are important – I’ve made them, just never specifically on New Year’s day.  I guess I’ve always figured if it’s important enough to make a formal resolution to do something, one ought not wait till a certain date to get started on it.  And, I’m not saying that I don’t have a problem with procrastination – the stack of projects I’ve got waiting to get done around here proves otherwise.

This year has involved a lot of getting back to traditions that never were traditions for our family in the first place.  The most obvious is farming itself.  My parents both grew up in a farming community.  My Dad worked in the fields, most of his relatives had working farms, and his Dad co-owned the town’s Ford Tractor dealership, so I guess there is some level of family farming tradition, it just skipped my generation.

After he finished college, my Dad joined the Air Force and he and Mom started moving all over the world.  I was born at pilot training and lived in and around bases until I joined the Air Force myself, and moved my own family all over the world.  My wife grew up more rural, but was never involved in farming.  This year, however, we’ve jumped both feet into the tradition of farming that a few generations ago was the norm in this country rather than the exception.

In that spirit, I’m going to follow the New Year’s resolution tradition this year.  Here are my top ten, specifically related to the farm:

image from wikipedia

10. I’m going to learn how to weld.  When we bought the farm, we also bought a lot of the previous owner’s equipment – his tractor, implements, air compressor… the list goes on.  On that list is an arc welder, gas welder, and gas cutting torch. I haven’t welded anything in my life.  So this semester, I signed up for a class at UNH – Welding and Industrial Fabrication.  This is the fun kind of resolution!

Burning Brush in our Back Pasture

9. By spring thaw, we’ll have half of the back pasture fenced and ready to put into rotation along with the front pasture (which I’ll split into two paddocks).  This will allow us to give each paddock a proper two-week rest between grazings.  Eventually, I want to have four paddocks to rotate, but that’s a longer-term project.

Peaches, peaches, peaches!

8. We’re going to prune our apple and peach trees this February!  They’d obviously been neglected over the past few years, and this year the peaches were so productive that we lost branches due to weight.  The apples were edible, but not optimal.  By pruning correctly, we’ll have a smaller but healthier harvest.

7. This Winter, I’ll finish our farm business plan, forest management plan, and nutrient management plan. I’ve got a pretty good start on all three, but the Summer and Fall workload hit hard and I dropped work on them.  USDA paperwork is next… whew!

6. I’m going to get a hold of the growing list of construction projects and make sure they actually get done.  So far on the winter list: garage insulation, pasture hay feeder, goat grooming stand, and mobile turkey brooder/house.

5. We’ve got lots of studying to do to get ready for kidding.  They’ll come whether we’re ready or not, and I figure being ready is the better of those two options!

4. We’re going to keep diving into 4H and other extension programs, and never miss an opportunity to thank the volunteers and staff in the extension offices for their invaluable contributions.  We would be up a creek without a paddle without them – they are pure gold.

3. I’m going to get out on the tractor and horses more often.  Both of these activities help me shrug off the less important stuff that occupies my mind and put that all in better perspective.  I’m a better husband, father, and overall person when I have things in perspective.  Plus, my wife and kids love to join in on the farm work and horse riding, and that makes it even better.

2. On that note, I’m going to be more intentional about getting involved in what my wife and kids like.  Whether it’s fishing with my son, volunteering at the therapeutic riding program with my daughters, having a cup of coffee/hot chocolate with my wife, or going on a trail ride, a walk or a paddle, this farm isn’t worth the rocks the walls are built out of if we can’t work and play as a family.

1. In all of this, I’ll try not to lose the amazement of how blessed we are to have the opportunity to participate in this adventure called life, and continue to thank God for giving us that blessing.

Caveat: I just thought about the theme for this post today, and so many of the edible homemade gifts are no longer available for me to take photos!

Our kids were very active and crafty this year.  For me, they found a toy John Deere tractor at the dollar store, then decorated it with “Sculpey” clay.  It features Jessie the Boer Goat, Doc the Duck, and Chuck the Chicken Duck.

Our tractor, complete with farm animals

For my wife, one daughter used Sculpey, a reclaimed salsa jar, and imagination to build a snow globe.

Winter Wonderland

One of the big hits was something my dad made for our youngest… an old-fashioned slingshot.

Davey Crockett and his trusty slingshot (aiming at trees, not chickens)

And as always, our friends and relatives knocked us over with an amazing variety of homemade treats.  These allowed us to keep plenty of snacks and sweets available, as our house was blessedly full-to-the-brim with visitors from before Christmas to yesterday afternoon.  On display here: the few remaining cookies, buckeyes, toffee, and homemade apple cider wine!

It still amazes me that we are down to just this!

Of course, we made a lot of the gifts we sent out ourselves as well, mostly canned goods from this summer.  However, we also gave some store-bought gifts (including a trio of $5 disc sleds for the kids that were an absolute hoot on Christmas day).   A friend told us she’s thinking of doing a 100% handmade Christmas next year.  We’re wondering if we’re up to the challenge!

Though we grew up hearing this verse that starts the story of the first visitors to Christ’s birth, the only concept we had about what shepherds were in that time were idealized images of pastel-robed shepherds watching over flocks of pristinely-white sheep on verdant hillsides.

Several years ago, the Air Force sent us to Greece.  Since it was a NATO assignment and English was used at work, we didn’t get sent to language training.  We did a lot of self-study, but found our skills lacking as we were immersed into the culture.  We found a house in a small rural village, where we were one of only two American families.  It was isolating, especially for my wife (I had an instant group of comrades at work).  Our first local friend was Dimitri, a shepherd who walked his flock of sheep and goats past our house every day.  The kids would run outside when they heard the bells of his lead animals ringing outside, and Dimitri would carry on in Greek while my wife and kids answered in English.  Hand gestures were imperative for this conversation to work.

Kids speak a universal language that breaks through all barriers

Even accounting for the fact that he wore contemporary western dress instead of coarse robes, Dimitri didn’t look much like the shepherds I remembered from Sunday School, or the baby-faced nativity figurines.  His face was dark, weathered, and wrinkled from decades of sun, rain, snow, and wind.  His goats and sheep weren’t pure white, either.  Walking several miles a day in the dust of central Greece evidently isn’t conducive to fleece as white as snow.

Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was as white as... well, old plaster

An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid.” - Luke 2:9,10

Angels and shepherds evidently are quite European in visage

OK, I guess I always understood why the shepherds would be afraid.  Anyone who was sitting on a hillside one night who suddenly was presented with an angel and the “glory of the Lord” would have a right to be startled.  After all, Moses got told to be careful to hide because looking upon the glory of the Lord could be fatal – see Exodus 33.

But for shepherds, it would be even more frightening.  In Palestine at that time (and definitely near a city like Bethlehem), shepherds weren’t the elite.  That’s still the case in Greece today.  Despite the importance of their work to the Greek culture, shepherds are to a great extent outcastes.  They’re not the folks that respectable people, much less angels, go out of their way to meet – on the contrary, most would go out of their way to avoid them.  Most likely in their experience, the only time an important person came to talk to them directly was because they were in trouble… or owed taxes.

“I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” – Luke 2:10,11

For all the people?  Even the shepherds?

The Angel announced that the Savior’s birth “was good news of great joy” for all the people, and the angel was sent to speak this great news to the commonest of common, not the elite.  Who was this person?  Χριστὸς κύριος – Christos Kurios… The Messiah and Lord.

Had the angel stopped with this last sentence proclaiming the birth, I wonder what the shepherds would have thought.  Even after being told the Savior had been born to them and that this news of great joy was for all people, would they have been so bold to go see him?  It would be easy to find him, they might think – the birth of a person of such import surely would be accompanied by great pomp and circumstance, and the news would travel throughout Bethlehem as all gathered to see him.

But the angel continued, and this next sentence must have rocked the shepherds’ world!

“This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” – Luke 2:12

You and I probably grew up with the same idea of what a manger was.  We’ve got one on our mantles – made of crossed boards, filled with soft hay, and resting in-between the adoring parents who were wearing starched linen robes (Mary evidently hadn’t even broken a sweat).  The stable was westernized as well – looking a lot more like the barn behind my house than the cave, lean-to, or mud-walled structure that likely was behind the inn.  Jesus, by the way, already had long curly (golden) locks, and the cloths in which he was wrapped were bought at Macy’s.  Of course, the family would have been easy to find since with their fair skin and European faces, they definitely didn’t look like most residents of Palestine.  Why Herod had such a hard time, I don’t know.

...and that sheep must weigh 500 lbs!

Yet to shepherds who were not similarly encumbered by plastic nativity scenes, the idea of the Savior, Messiah, and Lord being wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger must have been absolutely jarring.

Stone Manger in Israel, from www.ebibleteacher.com

Now my wife, who has been a doula (labor assistant) and childbirth educator for about a decade, always says, “though we take all precautions, childbirth is never a sterile event.”  But this is taking it a bit to the extreme, isn’t it?  After all, I think we do a pretty good job of keeping the bedding for our horses, chickens, ducks, and goats in good shape, but the straight truth is that stalls don’t stay clean for long at all.  In fact, I’m somewhat convinced that our animals purposely cross their legs until just after we’ve mucked their stalls.

Even if it had been right after we’d cleaned the place; however, I don’t think our barn would be the first place we’d plan for our child’s birth.  Of course, I’m thinking from my Western, relatively privileged point of view again… for a shepherd, this might have been quite normal.  But certainly, the King of Israel wouldn’t be born in such conditions, unless God was making some kind of statement.

He was.

“Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.” – Luke 2:13,14

Glory to God indeed.  A God so great that He made all heaven and all earth, all seen and unseen.  A God who spoke from the Tempest to Job, challenging all who would question His nature, goodness, and power.  A God who remains faithful despite others’ unfaithfulness.

And a God so overcome with love for all that He would humble Himself to the most lowly of circumstances.

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”  So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.  When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told. – Luke 2:15-20

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.

This is what 10,000lbs of hay looks like... notice the goats looking longingly at the trailer

That got me thinking more.  People are shelling out good money for gym memberships… why not offer spa and fitness center services along with eggs and meat?

Meet one of our personal trainers as she demonstrates a Flying T signature move – the “45-lb dead-lift-and-heave.”

Step 1 - Select your Hay Bale

Step 2: Twist and Heave

Step 3: Follow Through

Some spas tout their “hot rock” treatments.  At the Flying T, we find cold rocks do a better job of strengthening backs.

Our middle daughter’s favorite exercise is the double bucket lift.

Another oldie-but-goodie is firewood stacking (we also offer splitting mauls to mix aerobics into your strength routine).

The wheelbarrow haul is great for legs, arms, and shoulders, while also building core strength.

Looking for more of an aerobic workout?  Chasing chickens beats windsprints any day.

No chickens were harmed in the filming of this blog

Another aerobic exercise we discovered last week was the midnight horse chase… to set it up, the kids need to forget to close the pasture gate.  The rules for the exercise are that you have to be lying in bed and can’t start chasing the horses until you hear hoofbeats running past your window.

But wait, there’s more!  Goat wrestling, fence pulling, horse saddling, hoof-picking, duck finding… we’ve got endless exercises to keep you trim and fit.

Don’t take a vacation, take a Fitness “Hay-cation!”  Contact us today!

BTW, in all seriousness, if you need quality hay delivered in Vermont or New Hampshire, we highly recommend the Daly Brothers, Kevin and Marshall: 3dfarmproducts@gmail.com.  In addition to their trailer (240 squares or 22 rounds), they also can deliver by the tractor trailer load (about 700 squares).  We don’t get anything for referrals, but tell them the Flying T sent you… and ask them how they liked the jams!

One more note – lots of farmers in New England, including the Daly’s, lost crops or didn’t get much of a 2nd cut due to all the rain late this summer, but costs are still pretty close to last year.  We’re still praying for all those down in the South and Southwest dealing with the drought.  See our poll and tell us how much hay is going for in your neck of the woods!