A short (!) story about the history of our farm, farming practices and life....To start we lived in Hong Kong for 10 years where hubby worked for an airline.....Our story begins in the spring of 2006 when we took the plunge and bought a strawberry farm....

Evolution of an Organic Strawberry Farm…..

When we left Hong Kong for Canada we promised our kids there would be trees to climb. In Hong Kong trees and lawns were for show, and playing on them was frowned upon. We wanted property and fresh air. I wanted my kids to find frogs and robin eggs. Build forts and play kick the can. Make mud pies and grow sunflowers. I wanted to open the door in the morning and wave goodbye to their backs as they rushed off to do whoknowswhat! I wanted to ring a cowbell or bang a gong at dinnertime and hope they were still alive and kicking, ok I digress. We were trying to escape the rampant pollution, the acid rain, the meat and fish fed carcinogens and sold to the HK people, the fruit and veggies sprayed with who knows what and really for fresh air. The pollution was sickening (and my kids were ALWAYS sick). When we got to Canada and started looking property prices had soared and everything was JUST out of our reach. Buying a property with an income seemed like a good idea, and someone (sometimes I'd like to shoot him) told us strawberry farming was easy. We didn't know then it would become a lifestyle for us and an epiphany of the harm man can impose on the good earth.

So the two or three months before we take possession of our farm we go into a frenzy of research to try and figure out what we need to do when. Part of our Purchase & Sale Agreement was a "Berry Course" where The Seller/Farmer Guy walked us through the farm and instructed us. It became quite clear on that day that our idea of a Berry Course and his idea of a Berry Course were completely different. He told us about strawberries but neglected the gooseberries, currants and raspberries (we figured out after we took possession.) Doh! He didn't give me as much full in depth info as I wanted and craved. We had provincial agriculture berry publications by then and were more aware of the general schedule. But he was very vague and nonchalant almost. Farmer Guy must have just been shaking his head at us when we were looking at the farm implements. Seriously, we'd point at a cultivator and ask "What is this? What do you do with it? When do you do it?" and then move on to the next implement. I can still picture the giggle forming on his face and he was a very serious old country dutch farmer. I don't know what hubby was thinking but I guess I knew he'd be able to figure it all out. I mean really PTO on a tractor - no problem! (PTO=Power take off, very important part of a tractor and implements it uses.....very dangerous and well, I had NO IDEA what a PTO was!) We had to BUY a tractor and implements as we were moving from Hong Kong and taking over a strawberry farm, with an 8 month old, a 2 year old and a 4 year old....... WERE WE NUTS????? (Remember - Strawberry Farming is EASY!!!) Near the end of our "Berry Course" Farmer guy told hubby that there was a pest in the strawberries but it was under control and he would tell us exactly what we needed to do to control it ourselves. This became a pivotal moment in our strawberry farm odyssey and we didn't even know it.

Farmer guy left the farm in early April taking with him 10,000 plants that he dug up from the rows in the field. A 200 foot row planted with 120 plants will give you about 2000 plants the next year! So when we move on to the farm and we plant 4500 strawberry plants as per instructions from farmer guy in bare dirt he had prepared for us. We have help from Linda-a special lady raised on a farm and who has worked on valley farms for her whole life…. We dig up his first year rows and replant them 20 inches apart in rows 50 inches apart 200 feet long. It takes 3 of us a week. We phoned everyone we knew for help babysitting. The two older boys had diggers in the field beside us for hours. They loved every minute! (It felt like heaven to have kids be able to play outside all day with minimal supervision and no bugs attacking them!)
The next job was putting fencing around our two huge deep steep irrigation ponds. With 3 young boys and upick customers coming on the farm the wide open ponds made us very very nervous. Not a fun job but seriously necessary.
Then we sit back and watch everything grow. I mean the strawberries and raspberries that is. No weeds grew. The strawberry plants flourished weedless and the aisles between our raspberries looked like a moonscape. I spent a few days in the raspberries tying up fruiting canes and eventually we put down straw in the aisles of the strawberries. We really didn’t have to do much. It WAS easy. The spring was hot and the strawberries were ripening in early June.
The hardest jobs were hubby’s. He had to figure out the tractor, implements and irrigation. ACK! We had to track down and purchase aluminium ‘hand move’ irrigation pipe so we could water our fields. Which farmer guy told us we wouldn’t have to do much. Another misconception. We put an ad in the paper and miraculously someone called us with exactly what we needed. The 40 foot sections of pipe 1500 feet in all were delivered, by tractor in June. Hubby then had to figure out how to set them up and get the water flowing. I had NO IDEA there was so much involved in setting up farm sprinklers – PSI, water flow, gallons per minute, evaporation, run off. And it being a hot hot spring and turning into an even hotter summer, we had to water, a lot. And that’s a lot of sets and a lot of pipe to move around. I can balance a 40’ pipe on my shoulder pretty darn good thank you very much.
I hate to admit but we followed the farmer guy’s chemical application advice the first year, well nearly. He gave us a list of sprays we needed and when we needed to spray. So we ordered them all and hubby practiced with water in the sprayer behind the tractor until he knew how to spray ( a whole ‘nother skill that blows me away!) Then he went out and bought a rain suit, a respirator, a rain hat, boots and goggles. He looked like he was going out to fight aliens. I took the kids off the farm. I remember reassuring our neighbour that we weren’t doing anything different than farmer guy, who sprayed without protection. We never did follow his program exactly for insecticides and fungicides. I remember hubby saying to me “God, I feel terrible, I got out and looked at the bugs and there was this cute little white spider that sits in the strawberry flower, and it was dying…..” We never did get herbicides on the fields. Just couldn’t figure out a good time – all we could read said if you did it wrong you’d affect the strawberry plants….
So all is going according to schedule, the berries are reddening and then we noticed some problems. Strawberry rows next to our new plantings were dropping dead, with reddening berries on them. HAY………What’s going on? Farmer guy didn’t tell us about this happening, did he? We called and he told us it was the bugs.  We also noticed other parts of the field going down. We called them “crop circles.” The evil Weevil. You know, the bug he told us he had under control. The bug he neglected to tell us caused him to pile up the entire farm’s strawberry plants and burn in 2002. (Some of his staff told us later on in the summer)
We started to research.
So we spent a lot of time researching and researching and bugging (pun unintended) the BC Agriculture Berry Specialist. Who knew of our farm and its problems. Isn’t that special?!

The saga continues with a different branch of problems involving the highways department and their road salt storage shed on the property just uphill from us…..

Salt and Strawberries. Do not mix. Ever. It means decreased yields. Big time.
So before we buy the place we hear there may be “salt storage problems” at the highways department (HD) next to us. Hubby does some research and discovers that salt and strawberry farms are a lethal combination. Hubby bee lines for the main office of said HD and is reassured that they follow all environmental protocol, their buildings and standard operating procedures are by the book and we have nothing to worry about.
Our first summer on the farm was hot hot hot and dry dry dry. We had to irrigate a lot often. We had two fields that it was just not possible to pump water to with the aluminum hand move. Hubby, the master of figuring things out, installs a drip irrigation system on those two fields. (Even though Farmer guy told us “Drip irrigation doesn’t work”) So we use a small gas pump to pump water from our upper pond to one field that had 200 blackberry plants, 150 blueberry plants, gooseberry plants and ½ acre of strawberries. We use a city water hose to feed the drip tape on the smaller field with 1/6 acre of strawberries. As the summer progressed the upper field began to look worse and worse. Seriously the plants were blackening. We thought we were overwatering, we thought we were underwatering, we really had no idea what was wrong being the strawberry newbies that we were….But one 20 foot section of one row that had no drip tape on it (we ran out) was looking gorgeous. The field that we were using city water on and watering the same amount also looked marvellous. HMMMMMMMMMM
    Late in the summer we recalled that farmer guy told us that the upper pond was a “spring” and we could hear water running in to it – even after 3 months of no rain. We thought it would be a great idea if we dug a ditch between the upper and lower pond and use the constantly running spring to fill the lower pond to pump on the rest of our fields. As the digger guy dug the ditch and the water gushed from the upper pond into the lower pond it was like the tide going out. A salty seaweed smell wafted out of the now almost empty pond. The lightbulb went on (finally). SALT. STORAGE. PROBLEMS.
    We tested the water, we had independent testers test the water. It was off the clock for saltiness. Like 90% decrease in yield salty. Like ½ acre dead strawberries, dead blackberries, dead blueberries…..Yep, now we know why Farmer guy’s drip irrigation didn’t work. I didn’t sleep that winter.
    One day on the road that fall I saw a broken down salt truck outside the HD. I got the camera and got some great shots. Of salt. Falling off the truck. Everywhere. It looked like it had snowed on the truck. They loaded the trucks and then bounce across the parking lot to the exit. Basically from one side of their property to the other, the length of our property. Did I mention they are uphill from us and that it rains a lot in the winter here….
    We contacted a lawyer.
    Who advised us that dealing with the problem ourselves would be “the most economical” way to get a settlement. So with their help we draft a letter and by the next week we had a meeting set up with the HD management.
We later find out that after Don’s first visit to their offices they went into a frenzy of salt control and stupidly they now tell us all about it. (I guess we came across as dumb hick strawberry farmers!) They built a “dutch ditch” and they put up cement blocks so “the guys” would wash the salt trucks over the bladder (to contain salt) not just in the parking lot. So much for standard operating environmental procedures. They offer us the moon in work done….new irrigation ponds anywhere we wanted, bypass ditches, ditches on their property but they disagree on the amount we are claiming in costs – ie. Lost income, replacement costs and loss of value of our contaminated property. Not to mention Pain and suffering and lack of sleep.

The next spring they start work with their heavy machinery by building a road through the woods from their place to ours. A great admission of guilt I’d say. In fact they flat out told us the salt was from them. They filled in our upper pond, built a ditch the entire length of our property to divert water, leveled and graded where the pond used to be, put in culverts, pumped our lower pond and filled it with freshwater, and ok’d us to have a well drilled. (They still have not reimbursed us for the well which was essentially dry.)
    As time goes on we realize more and more the damages are far reaching and never ending. No fresh water on our property (livestock would die drinking this water) where once we’d had a nearly endless supply is costly. We have huge well established trees beside the bypass ditch dying now. Our claims for damages keep going up every time we send them another letter. And they start offering us what we wanted in the first place. If we sign a full release. Which we refuse, of course. We consult our lawyer again and as of now have started full on legal proceedings. Their general manager told us at one point he does training seminars on salt for their BC wide company – and he talks about “The berry farm we salted”. Great.

Bugs bugs and more bugs coming next…..

So what about these dang bugs on our farm? After doing (almost) all farmer guy said, and not really knowing but kinda guessing what he sprayed on the fields in April, we were really really unhappy with the spraying. We were a bit exasperated at the fact that we left HK for the kids’ health and here we were on a farm that required mega spraying.
    During our first season all our gooseberries and currants dropped their berries prematurely, and guess what, it was due to a “currant Fruit fly” that comes up out of the soil in the spring, lays an egg in the flower, the maggot grows in and with the berry, causes premature drop, the maggot eats the berry till it’s full, then burrows into the ground for the winter, and then does it all over the next year….And guess what the solution is? Diazonon. Sprayed 2 or 3 times, during bloom, and on developing berries. It’s nasty. We rototilled all our currants and gooseberries. Just not willing to do the necessary sprays, gas mask and all.
    So, I digress, as usual, we did a bunch of research about our weevils. We found a lot of neat information and some of it very depressing. In Ontario, government entomologists built barriers between infected fields and new fields to see if they could block the onslaught. Weevils only walk. Weevils do not need to mate to reproduce. After 3 years a commercial strawberry patch is tilled in. At this point all the weevils that have been living and building their population in the three year old strawberries start walking until they find the closest food. Like the rows next door. Which explains the dying rows beside our newly planted rows (that used to be 3rd year plants that were tilled in the season before). Each weevil lays 500 or so eggs. The most weevils are out just at or after strawberry season and you need to “get em” (read spray) before they lay eggs. Grubs (immature stage) in the soil are near impossible to kill. Adult Weevils are nocturnal. Weevils are very very hard to kill, even with sprays. HUH??? Nocturnal? Hard to kill??? So basically all the sprays are basically a big fat WASTE OF TIME since spray was done during the day mostly preseason, and KILLING all the BENEFICIAL bugs that keeping a ‘checks and balances’ system going out there in nature.

Weevils walk. Adult weevils like to eat strawberry leaves, after eating enough they lay their eggs at the base of the strawberry plant, their grubs hatch 14 days later and begin eating fine strawberry roots eventually stunting and killing fields. They eat all fall and go dormant for the winter. Once the soil warms in the spring they become active again and eat eat eat roots (killing plants with berries) until they become adults, conveniently (NOT!) during strawberry season. So not only were we planting next to tilled in 3rd year strawberries, we were moving plants from one field to another, presumably moving weevils and or their eggs around the fields as well.
I found an entomologist’s report, with an interesting idea. Build a physical barrier. A description told us how to do it. I got excited. And I read about parasitic nematodes. They enter and kill weevil grubs under the correct conditions. I hassled hubby. I phoned the BC Government Entomologist. I told her we wanted to stop spraying and go organic and how could we? Wow. Her response was not what I expected, or was it. She said we had no choice, we had to spray the hell out of the weevils. Spray spray spray. There was NO other way. I described the barrier to her. She said they’ll just walk over it. I asked about nematodes. She was negative. I hung up super bummed out. Luckily, the barrier was not difficult to build. And hubby was up to it, what a guy.
Basically we have 2 acres of strawberries at one end of our farm. One acre of it we had JUST planted beside 3 year old strawberry plants that appeared to be badly infected with weevils and were starting to drop (by harvest these rows were DEAD with big red beautiful looking but FOUL tasting berries on them - try explaining to customers "Don't pick those!"). Something had to be done – We would be tilling these rows in and the bugs had to walk somewhere to eat and didn’t our new plants look yummy!

We made the following decisions: 1) We had to stop digging up plants from established rows and infecting our new fields by replanting the plants. We purchased 7500 strawberry plants (at .12 Cents each). 2) The farm had to be divided into age related sections with “barriers” between them to halt the spread of the weevils. Currently the ages of rows within each field were completely random and mixed up based on what farmer guy dug up when and replanted…..3) Any old plantings would NOT be tilled until the fall to halt the mass migration of bugs from old fields to new.
4) Build the barrier according to instructions. So now we have a 200 foot piece of aluminum flashing embedded in the soil with 10 inches or so sticking out with ice cream buckets embedded in the soil at both ends as drop traps. There is salty soapy water in each bucket. The flashing has grease along the top inch.
Each morning I head out with my mini fish net and fish out bugs. I also start a spreadsheet (based on the Ontario Berry Specialist’s – they caught 800 bugs over 6 weeks….) At first I don’t catch many, but then start getting 2 or 3, then 10, then 18, then one night I get 60! Am I excited or what???!!! Then I start getting two and three HUNDRED a night. I email the berry specialist. The numbers keep going up, and when we till the field in August the number skyrockets to ARE YOU READY????????? 2500 in one night!!! And yes, I counted them. And yes I have pictures.
The kids and I headed out every morning. We found that the bugs liked hiding under things. So all along the barrier we laid leaves and in the morning we would go along, lift a leaf and scoop up bugs. Who “play dead” just to make it easier for us. By the end of the summer, when I’m sick of counting, our spreadsheet ends at about 22,000 weevils, with probably another 2-4000 caught and not inputted. NO WONDER THE ROWS BESIDE TILLED AREAS DROP THE NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!!! I can’t explain the anger I felt at the Government Entomologist (you know, the one who told me a barrier would be useless?!)
At night we would go out with flashlights. The weevils were like zombies from the dawn of the dead. Every inch there was a weevil walking walking slowly marching along the barrier. They are clumsy – they would try and climb it, fall, or hit the grease and fall, or fall into the bucket. It was scary, depressing and exciting.
Once the Berry specialist heard of our bugs he had us send them to a research company (read pesticide testers) in Vancouver, but they had to be alive. So our soapy salty water traps became greased buckets (no bug likes grease) and we sent, daily, our bugs on the bus to Vancouver. They only escaped once. Only 800 of them. We started duct taping and packing the yoghurt containers much better after that. We can’t imagine what some poor passenger found in their suitcase!
At the beginning, upon fishing them out of the salty soapy water, I would count the bugs and dump their corpses on the driveway. One day my nephew wanted to see them so we went back to the dump spot. They weren’t there. The BUGGERS were still alive, got up and marched away. I’m so glad I found this out when numbers were low.
The kids loved to carry their own buckets and “catch” bugs too. August would lift a leaf and yell “I found the MOTHER LODE!!!!” Sometimes he’d get more than me. I was always scared they would drop the buckets on the way back down the driveway. Luckily this only happened once. See frantic farmer lady picking up pebble like, dead-playing weevils frantically from matching driveway!
I spoke to the berry scientist lady and told her I was sure we had 4 species of weevils and was told no way. I sent them to her. Guess who was right.
We planted a cover crop in the field and pulled the barrier out the next spring.
I don’t know my writing makes it clear what happened but basically we learned all we could about the habits and life cycle of our weevil, and then used this information to outsmart them. Even the pesticide research company guys who were sending our bugs to said things to us like “these bugs are hard to kill, they get up and keep going” and “When you spray them they’ll go down for 3 days and then get up and go again” Spraying them was only killing the GOOD bugs in our fields. These bad ones were allowed to reproduce unchecked.
We have sent our spreadsheets to 3 different university/government berry agencies with descriptions of our barriers at their request.
I began corresponding with Richard Cowles, the original barrier guy. He took our data and told us we were “Pioneers in Cultural Controls of Weevils”
We haven’t sprayed insecticides since.
Now ask me if my kids understand Life Cycles, Insects, Ecology, Farming, Counting, Pests....you name it!


These were the affected strawberry plants, these rows were the worst in our fields.  As summer comes on they turn yellow and die with ripe berries on them.....

So 25,000 or so weevils decided to walk towards our barrier, what about the 25,000 or so weevils who walked the other way??

Turns out if you whine enough to the government something can be done. We were in contact constantly with the BC Government Berry Specialist about our weevil problem. Mostly getting advice we didn’t want (Spray!), but still he realized we had a bad problem and short of ploughing in all the strawberries there appeared to be limited options for us. He volunteered to have 1000 experimental plants sent to us that were developed to be weevil resistant. CANYOUBELIEVEIT? Yep, 1000 plants showed up on the bus. We ploughed in the worst section of our field, where there was the most weevil damage and planted the plants, like a big target for the buggers! So 25,000 bugs walked one way to our barrier and 25,000 went the other to the “weevil resistant” plants. The plants on the other side of our weevil resistant plants were only 2 years old but already showing damage, so we had plans to plough them in….Last year (2008) we dug up plants from around our farm to check for grubs (weevil larvae) before obvious damage showed above ground. Seriously we had never seen such amazing root systems. Our first year on the farm the roots we checked out were PITIFUL in comparison – but we didn’t know any better. Apparently weevil resistant strawberry plants are, well, resistant! The harvest from them was AMAZING! The plants from the barrier protected field were and remain unbelievably strong and healthy into their second year and we are hoping for the same into their third and last season. (2010) In 2009 we were able to commercially order the weevil resistant variety and planted them as “trap rows” around the varieties we like better. So between 1 and 2 year old fields, on either side of ditches, etc, we plant 3 rows of weevil resistant plants to stop the “migration” of our arch enemy, the evil weevil!

So as we learn more and more about farming I read more and more about the health of the soil being the basis of healthy farms and healthy and disease/pest resistant plants. I read about farm here on the Journey to Forever website library. The farm in Yorkshire sounded like a bit of deja vu. Pounds and pounds of fertilizer, harvest of pounds and pounds of strawberries and then add on the use of insecticides just to make matters worse. Our farm was in big trouble! It was all starting to make sense.

 I was fascinated and inspired. Perhaps too inspired. I got on the phone with friends who had pigs every summer and asked questions. I got the name of their supplier and called him. It was mid June and really too late to be trying to locate pigs for the summer. The supplier said he could provide us with pigs in 3 weeks or so. Don was kind of going along with me….until 3 days later when the supplier called ready to deliver our pigs, and we had just opened our UPICK Strawberries. We had no fence, no pen, no shelter, no food, no idea about watering them, no nothing and NO IDEA of what we were doing. I had done a lot of reading online, but still not the same as the real thing. The truck arrived backed up to our greenhouse and delivered our 8 pigs into our puppy pen. A pen made from straw bales. Not very stable. And we had customers on the fields, staff to direct and pigs to organize. Don was well I don’t know how to describe someone who has to figure out how to fence, feed and water the pigs at the start of our busiest craziest season!!

We knew the best way was an electric fence. Pigs are smart. They also need to be trained to the fence. I read you had to build a small electric fenced area with chicken wire as a secondary fence. When the pig first hits the electric fence, he bolts….into the chicken wire. He learns pretty darn quick not to bolt. Don went out, bought necessary fencing supplies and built a great electric fence but without the secondary fence….. And then stood back and watched me carry a 45 lb pig up to his new pen. It promptly shat on me and screamed in my ear (equivalent to a 747 taking off!) the whole way. Nice. I put it down and we stood back to watch. It hit the electric fence and bolted…..freedom! On the farm! Full of ripe red strawberries! See two book/internet farmers scrambling after baby pig, who likes to scream, with customers wondering WHATTHEHECK is going on!! He put up the chicken wire. And stood back to watch me move the rest of the pigs. I was able to move 2 more pigs before he gave in and helped me……they are strong!!!

The pigs did their job. When strawberry harvest was over we put them on the 3 year old plants and they TOOK THEM DOWN! It was incredible. We now get pigs every year and they are part of our “soil building” program along with compost, horse/cow manure and green cover crops……. We like to think they also are breaking the bug life cycle….

We hate weevils here. With a passion. All my kids know what they look like and what to do to them when they find one. Squish it. Dead. Really dead. These bugs are incredible. The summer we collected the 25,000 or so of them I left some in a bucket in the greenhouse. With no holes. All winter. Temperatures were freezing all winter. -10 or so. And they were alive the next spring.
So how do we kill them?
My research showed that biological control in the form of parasitic nematodes was a viable option. (The microscopic nematodes - and yes we all had a look at them swimming around with our microscope - invade the grub by swimming in mouth or anus, multiply and explode out to find more grubs to infect, sounds perfect eh?) I pushed and pushed and pushed. Hubby did a bunch of research. Richard Cowles (barrier guy) made some recommendations. We ordered one BILLION, yes ONE BILLION, nematodes to spray on our fields. Conditions have to be right. Not too cold, grubs in the soil for the nematodes to infect and nice wet weather after spraying. Sunlight kills them so spraying should be done at night. Picture farmer lady sitting on the back of the tractor, in the dark, with a flashlight and a spraying wand between her legs with the PTO spinning (very dangerous) with hubby driving tractor up and down each and every row for 6 hours in the dark on a rainy evening in September. Sore sore butt. Cold cold mama.
Conditions were PERFECT. We were ecstatic. And 2 days later it got hot and didn't rain for 4 weeks. We found no infected grubs.
We ended up ploughing in one field that was only 2 years old as we could see it was severely affected even in September.....
Will we try nematodes again? I hope so. We didn’t apply them in 2009. We may not need to consider applying them again as we are not seeing the same problems in the fields as when we first took over.

On a final note, the last couple of years, in our opinion our fields have NEVER looked better (if you don’t count rampant weed growth), we have NO dead spots/crop circles. NONE. Every other year there have been patches that were unpickable. 2007, the second year we had the farm was such a downer. It has only improved since then with a direct correlation to the decrease in spraying we do. Go figure.

UPDATES

Organic Fungicides

In 2009 we had conditions that somehow led to a 10-20% loss in our harvest. We can’t put our finger on exactly what led to the botrytis build up, but we need to do something to hold it in check, especially if we have a wet season.  In 2010 we will be using a certified organic fungicide called “Serenade.” I say fungicide because it kills the fungus, but it is NOT a chemical. You can read about it here, here and here. We are hoping that 2010 is our best season yet!

Ducks??

What would you do if you had a slug problem? Like a serious slug problem. Last summer we had a problem with botrytis (mold) on our strawberries. The slugs were part of the reason...they travel from berry to berry sampling, sampling and spreading....
So today after discovering that my peas-that-have-not-germinated have and are leafless, we brought out the slug bait (Certified organic and safe (?!)...)......which works in a personal veggie garden, but on 3 acres of strawberries????
Truly sustainable and organic solution??
Ducks.
Hubby got online....usedcomoxvalley or something like that.....
We've got 6 khaki campbell ducklings!  They've already been served a buffet of baby slugs and a finely chopped mixture of WEEDS!!!!  I hope they're hungry!
Ducks love slugs. I hope they love LOTS of slugs. And I mean LOTS - at dusk the slugs just came out of everywhere, it's freaky....One staff strawberry picker we had carried each and every one off the field and saved them, others picked them into their "moldy" berry buckets and fed them to the pigs, slugs were a serious issue last year.
I chatted with the farmer providing us with the ducklings (ever tried to get OFF the phone when you're chatting with a farmer??) and I got an earful....I asked if they ate as many slugs as Indian Runners....he said "Well I don't have a slug problem..." I guess my question is answered then. He went on to say that they lay an egg a day every day of the year. His are free range but sleep in a small shed. They lay their eggs before he lets them out in the morning at 9. He herds them in at night and locks them in to prevent loss to predators.
Since my dogs appear to be chicken and geese friendly now, (Thank you Joel Salatin, zapping collar appears to have worked after 2 training sessions.....) what's a few more birds running around the farm.....
Did I mention hubby ordered 50 broilers and 25 turkeys....arriving on the 30th....
We have..I mean he has to get building, we have some poultry sheds to get up and runnning...He's blaming me of course. I don't remember ordering them.....