2015 By The Numbers

At the beginning of each year, we like to look back to see if we can better manage things by looking at trends, statistics, and facts.  We pray that we'll be good stewards of things that the Good Lord has given us to manage.  As a result we try to read and gain knowledge and improve each day.  Another thing we do is maintain records.  Although it can be tedious, good record-keeping is vital in determining what works and what doesn't work year after year.

Our utility room is the primary work area of our home.  We wash and dry clothes there.  We pour milk there and wash the milking buckets and milking rags there. We store our egg cartons for packing away our daily egg production there.  We germinate all of our tomato, eggplant, and pepper seeds there.  We have a deep freeze chest freezer where we store a lot of our meat, vegetables and fruit there. There's one more thing we do in the utility room.

It is there where we have charts to track our egg and milk production as well as rainfall totals.  The charts are on a magnet attached to the door of the freezer.  Each day we dutifully chart totals and at the beginning of the next year, we record the totals.  I've thought about automating it by maintaining the charts in an Excel spreadsheet, but files can be lost or destroyed.  A chart maintained by hand, complete with different handwriting and ink colors on various lines, shows imperfections and mistakes.  These imperfections and mistakes remind me that that's who we are.  We are quite imperfect and fail quite often, but we keep going even though the results may not be pretty.

Anyway, today during lunch I transferred all the handwritten data into Excel, to quickly provide sums, averages, and see trends over the past three years we've been keeping records.  Here is our story:

For year ended December 31, 2015, our hens produced 9,155 eggs or 763 dozen eggs in total. Although I can't count them because they won't stand still while I'm counting, I'd guesstimate that we have about 65 laying hens running around the pasture, clucking, pooping, and doing other such fun hen things.  They are chased by 7 roosters who are quite amorous and when they aren't running from the roosters, the girls lay eggs for us.

Not surprisingly, over a three year average, the best month for egg production is April.  If I had to give an educated guess why, I would say that in April, the pasture has lush grass.  Spring has sprung and the tender, nutritious grass, along with bugs, worms and other delicacies give the hens maximum nutrition, allowing them to fill the nesting boxes with beautiful brown, green and blue eggs.

We'd be able to increase our egg production during the winter months if we kept a light on for them. Their laying quantities reduce significantly as the days get shorter since a hen requires a certain amount (research shows 15 hours per day) of daylight to maintain peak egg laying.  We choose not to do that and give the girls a 'rest' during the winter.  We do look forward to the longer days of spring and the resulting increase in egg production.  Our historical records show that this increase begins abruptly in very late January/early February.  We'll see if this trend continues...

Now let's take a look at rainfall totals.

Although we can't do a single thing about rainfall, it is interesting to track rainfall totals.  Rainfall averages over time for our zip code shows that on average, it rains 60.35 inches per year - a tad above 5 feet in a year!  If you average our rainfall we recorded over 2013 - 2014 (two year time period), that is right on the money: 60.25 inches.  However, in 2015 we had a full 9 inches more of rainfall in the year, totaling 69.05 inches or almost 6 feet of rainfall.  That's almost a foot more rainfall than we got last year! March continues to be our driest month, but the 13 inches of rain in April 2015 propels it to be the new 3 year average wettest month, replacing the previous two year average wettest month of January.

Overall, we just got more rain this year, despite June, July, and August being drier than normal.  That explains why the barnyard is a muddy, soupy mess.  Let's look on the bright side, though.  Our aquifers ought to be fully recharged now. California is in a drought.  I'd rather have too much rainfall than not enough.