Cameron Family Farm

Just figured I would post a picture of my tractor since it happens to be one of my favorite farm "toys".  Its a 1973 Case 444 Hydraulic tractor.

It has a Kohler 14HP single cylinder air cooled engine, 3 point hitch, and Hydraulic PTO for rear implements.  These machines never ceas to amaze me with their capabilities.  I've had a lot of lawn and garden tractors from the 60's models to the newer cheap-o units.  Nothing has come close to the Case in terms of work power.

One of my favorite attachments is the tiller, its almost 4' wide and can till forward or reverse with the flip of a lever.  Does great breaking up tough soil!

So we realized last year we were keeping the birds in the hatchery far too long.  They needed to get out and have more space after only a couple of weeks but still needed heat.  Since we have decided not to raise pigs any longer the pig barn was cleaned out and washed down then prepped to house chickens!

The plan is to cut the paddock in half and use one stall for Rhode Island Reds and one for the Dark Cornish.  Still a little work to be done to be finished but in the mean time the stalls make an excellent brooder!

The heater is actually a food warmer that came with the stainless Bain Marie we converted into a food grade chill tank for our processing operation. This was originally hanging from a shelf on the top of the unit presumably for burgers and what not.

I got the idea to use this in the brooder after seeing similar units on Amazon for larger brooding areas.  This was the same shape and a slighlty higher wattage.  It keeps everything toasty warm and works perfect!

We now offer local delivery ($10 within 25 miles, $20 beyond) in Connecticut!  We have also added the ability to purchase products online and pay with PayPal!  PayPal allows you to pay with credit cards, account balance, and your checking account.  Support for Google checkout coming soon!

Well I can't believe its been a whole year since our last post!  We will have to be more pro-active this year!  Last year was a resounding success for us, we exceeded our minimum requirements and look forward to an even better 2012!

Like many others this early warming has provided us a jump start on our farming activities, it also doesn't hurt we were much better prepared this year.  First batch of corn is already in, market garden is prepped, and so is the next section of the corn field.

We just received some new breeds of birds we wanted to experiment with, some Americana's which seem popular for their tinted eggs and some Dark Cornish meat birds which provide an excellent heritage option to commercial chicken.  We also got a refresh on Rhode Island Red stock to bolster our aging breeders.

Somehow we picked up a few misc chickens over the last year that don't fit our breeding plan but for the fun of it we are going to hatch out some "barnyard mixes" to see what we get!  These interesting crosses will be available for sale at a discounted rate soon.  

Last but definately not least we have an incubator almost FULL of Narragansett turkey eggs!  Can't wait to be breeding our first batch of little turkey poults!

Well we finally have some more turkeys!  Picked up some initial breeding stock last Saturday locally for an excellent price, all pure Narragansett!

Narragansett originated in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island by crossing the domestic turkey with the Eastern wild turkey.  Narragansett turkeys were a popular commercial breed of turkeys in CT, RI, and MA up into the early 1900's at which time the bronze became more popular.

You can read more here

Check out more photos in our album, you can see the turkeys were put in a make shifty mobile pen which I whipped together out of stuff kicking around the farm.  Construction of their permanent home will begin this weekend!

Today we had a hectic morning getting everything ready for our visitors from the CT DOA, we had our poultry tagged and tested this morning as part of the voluntary state monitoring program.  While they were out they also tested and tagged the sow, she handeled it a lot better than I expected!

We also got state live poultry license in the mail the other day and from speaking with our CT DOA guests this morning we dont need any special licensing for the pigs just registering and annual monitoring.  We now have "all our ducks in a row" so to speak!  registered, licensed, and insured!

Next hurdle to clear is custom processing then on to inspected processing!

Chicks are hatching!  One is out so far and another is on its way.  We are using a hova-bator incubator from GQF.  Its the circulated air model with an automatic egg turner.  So far I am not overly impressed with the egg turner.  I think in the future we may try just the bottom half of egg cartons to hold the eggs in place and move them around by hand.

Since we only have 8 hens and only 5 RIR's for breeding the incubator is loaded in stages not all at once, another reason to ditch the egg tuner in favor of hand turning.  We may hatch some White Leghorn crosses and see how they come out.  I have seen some posts for them, not sure how popular they are.

In the pic below you can see one egg starting to hatch:

Here is our lonely chick so far:

Our initial stock of Jumbo Pekin Ducks are in!  A handful of Drakes and 1/2 the hens will be retained for breeding stock once of age.  The rest will be off to market!

One of my biggest pet peves is those sites you visit and it has one or more "Under Construction" pages with a copyright date of a year+ in the past.  While I hope that doesnt happen here we ARE under construction.  Unfortunately its timing as this is also coming into the "busy season" so we will make our best effort to update the site and get it completed to keep everything relevant and everyone informed.

We will pluck away at this site while we juggle early spring chores and the mountiain of paperwork the CT DOA throws at us!  Thanks for stopping by, feel free to drop us an email!

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I would also like to mention webs.com, being an IT professional by trade I know the amount of work that goes into a website.  For that reason I wasnt planning on making one any time soon till I stumbled on this (free to boot) service.  This thing is great, I can whip out web pages and content that look half way decent in no time.  So far my experience with them is pretty good so if your in the market for a quick, cheap, and easy website you should give them a whirl.