It is January and, what happens every year is happening again this year. I am afflicted with Farmer Delusional Syndrome (FDS). I have formed, or am forming, in my mind and on paper, how the coming year at the Genuine Faux Farm will unfold. And I can tell you right now it is going to be glorious!
The rows will all be straight and perfectly cultivated. I won’t miss the timing on anything. There will be no sickness that alters our time lines. We will never feel too tired to get a task done and we most certainly will not suffer from the “don’t wannas.” And, of course, it all starts with my “flawless” plan.
Yeah. Maybe not.
But, it is true that a farm like ours does operate under a complex plan each and every year. That yearly plan is part of a five year plan and is made up of a bunch of weekly plans. By now, I am quite certain I will never discover the perfect plan - nor will I perfectly follow the plan we have. Yet the plan is necessary because it gives us the guidance to respond to what life brings us.
And so, I wanted to share with you a portion of our 2025 Genuine Faux Farm growing plan as it stands right now.
The Overview
I sometimes wonder what life was like before we moved to the farm. I ask myself questions like - did we come up with plans that went into this much detail each year before we thought 100 feet was a “short row?” The answer is “no.” It’s not that we weren’t planning. Both of us were involved in education, which requires the development of course plans (syllabi). And as a software engineer, there were project plans. But there was nothing as all-encompassing as our farm plans can be.
A Genuine Faux Farm plan includes most aspects of our lives by necessity. For example, any plan for our farm must account for Tammy’s teaching job at Wartburg and operate in tandem with my work at the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network. Since we LIVE in the farm house, our daily farm work impacts or is impacted by our home life. And, since we do actively farm, we also have to consider times when we anticipate (or hope) to leave the farm for any reason.
It’s about the valuable and limited resources that are time and energy. If we have a decent plan, we can hope not to overspend those resources. But, if experience is any indicator, our plans will require at least double our allotment… okay, triple. I am hoping this year’s plan keeps us at double.
I thought I would share some of the highlights of the 2025 plan with all of you. Then, at the end of the year, we’ll take a look and see how we’ve done. It sounds like a fun exercise now. We’ll see how I feel about reviewing the year when December comes.
I’m guessing I won’t have time or energy to do it…
Poultry in Motion 2025
It’s always easiest to discuss the poultry plan because it’s so much easier to sum it up than the other aspects of the farm. And, the 2025 poultry plan may be much simpler than it has been for some time depending on an important wildcard - will there be a processor we can access during the coming year?
After many years managing Martzahn’s in Greene, Ardie has announced her well-earned retirement. Not only has Greene been a good location for us, we have always been impressed by the work they have done with our meat birds. Unfortunately, our alternatives for processing might not be close enough for us to continue with that enterprise.
So, the open question is - will there be a new person stepping into Ardie’s position? If the answer is yes, we expect to raise a flock of broilers next season (probably with an October processing date). If there is no Martzahn’s - then it becomes unlikely that we will raise any meat birds.
For those who enjoy getting turkeys from us, we will not be raising turkeys in 2025 regardless of the status of a processor. We need a year to work on the infrastructure for raising turkeys on the farm. The turkey room needs work and the fencing for the pasture needs to be upgraded. We also feel that we need to work on the access between the pasture and the turkey room. These are all things that are impossible to do when we have the birds and they are necessary repairs and improvements if we wish to raise them efficiently in the future (possibly 2026).
And finally, there is the laying flock.
Our current laying flock is doing extremely well, producing beyond our current egg lists demands (so if you’re looking for eggs get on the list!). We have fleshed out the year’s egg and veggie sale days and will include that in our next egg email. In fact, I’ll put that at the bottom of this article for those of you who live in the area.
The current hen flock (about 75 birds) is an experimental one, with two new (to us) breeds - Sapphire Gem and Delaware. The remaining hens are Isa Browns along with a few Americauna and California Whites thrown in for fun.
The experiment was to learn the temperaments of the new breeds and determine if their production levels were appropriate for our farm. The ultimate goal may be to move towards maintaining our own line of hens, rather than importing chicks each season. Thus far there is no decision on that front.
To simplify our poultry year further, we are not bringing in hen chicks this year. This runs the risk of production diving below demand late in the year - but we run that risk with predators, disease, and/or any number of factors every year. But, again, we have repairs and modifications to pastures and infrastructure that will be made easier if we aren’t dealing with two hen flocks in 2025.
Crop Talk
Our annual veggie crops have, frankly, taken a back seat to the poultry in recent years simply because livestock and poultry demands are often seen as more immediate than the needs of plants. The birds need food, water and shelter every day, whereas plants can often get by without daily attention. And, frankly, poultry have more definite start and end points, making them easier to manage in some ways.
That doesn’t mean we haven’t had some excellent crops that were made available to people in our sales list. We have also continued to improve our ability to get produce to the food bank and food pantry - a goal we have become more comfortable with each year.
This year, for the first time, we are working on a growing schedule that will match up with the food pantry schedule in hopes that we can hit certain crop peaks just in time to bring it for distribution each month. We are hoping to have something for as many months of 2025 as we possibly can. We started things off well by delivering 64 dozen eggs this past Tuesday!
There should be plenty of produce for those who are interested. Sales will continue to be through our egg and veggie email sales list. We are not planning on returning to farmers’ markets, nor are we reviving the CSA (farm share) program. However, if there are people interested in providing some labor in exchange for produce, we could be interested in working out an agreement.
We will be putting both high tunnels into production, but both structures need new plastic and some repairs (do you see a theme developing?). We also expect to grow in the Ye Olde Garden Plot, Middle Earth and Freyr South (yes we name our fields). We will be reclaiming part of the Eastfarthing for production while resting Freyr North with some cover crops.
We are in the process of determining our seed orders and they should be complete by the end of this coming weekend. We already have our seed potatoes ordered and know we will be growing both Red and Blue Adirondack potatoes. I’m also personally excited to be bringing back German Butterball to the Genuine Faux Farm in 2025. This past year was a very poor potato year - the early rains rotted much of the potatoes out. So, I am determined to see better results this year.
Ah yes… farming. There is always next year.
The Best of the Rest
It’s usually about this point when I realize how much there is that I could write about. It’s also about the point in time when I remember that the only people who have this much interest in the minutiae of the farm are the two farmers who live at the Genuine Faux Farm.
The good news is - you can stop reading at any point and I won’t know how much you read. Nor will I hear you sighing in exasperation as I go off on tangents that do not really interest you. How great is that?!?
Now, where was I?
We do anticipate having bees again this coming year. We entered the cold months with four hives and will be ecstatic if ONE of them survives the winter. I will say that three seemed like they might be strong enough once we hit September/October. But, I am not an expert in the field - so I’ll hold my optimism back for now. The last time we had a hive that looked good as late as March, we had a deep freeze that effectively terminated the remaining bees and many of the early flowers they needed for food.
We are also going to give another try to putting a green house growing area on to the south side of the Poultry Pavillion (an old machine shed where we house poultry). The issue there has been getting contractors to run some services to the building. There will be at least one seed crop at the farm and we will continue to maintain our orchard trees. We will try to prepare an area for a pollinator planting and we expect to put in some more trees and bushes in certain parts of the farm.
But, overall, the theme of the year is going to be infrastructure and repair. This includes, but is not limited to, our farm house. While we have made significant progress over the past five years, we are both growing impatient to get on the other side of many of these projects. Those of you who have done major work on your own homes can probably relate to living in a construction zone and finally deciding you’ve had enough of it.
And now that I’ve outlined these things, I am realizing that I have failed to keep our plans to only double our allotment of time and energy. I guess it will be interesting to see how this resolves as we go through the year.
Thank you for considering my thoughts and words. Have a great day and a fine weekend!
The 2025 anticipated Egg and Veg Sale Schedule
January 2nd & 22nd
February 5th & 19th
March 5th & 19th
April 2nd 18th & 30th
first week of May - anticipated plant sale
May 21st
June 4th & 18th
July 2nd & 23rd
August 6th & 20th
September 3rd & 17th
October 1st & 22nd
November 5th & 19th
December 3rd & 17th
If you wish to be added to our egg and veg sale email list, send a note to genuinefauxfarm AT gmail DOT com.
Thanks Rob! This reminds me of annual “Plan of Work” meetings we had each year with our state parks and wildlife areas. We would ask site superintendents to perform certain natural resource tasks each year, including personnel required, timing of work, and total hours required. Some sites were masters at committing to doing ANYTHING we asked with only the notation of “TMD” - Time and Material Dependent.
In time, we learned that really was just a polite way of saying “NGH” - Never Going to Happen!
Here's to the best year ever in 2025!