2017 Rainfall - By The Numbers

Yesterday we talked about tracking egg production in 2017 from our flock of happy hens.  Today we look at 2017 annual rainfall.  We have a rain gauge nailed to the top of a fence post right by the cows' water trough.  I check it each day after a rain event and I record the rainfall amount in a matrix we have printed and conveniently located on the deep freeze in the utility room so that we can keep it updated.

We like to do this just because we're curious.  It also is interesting to see trends by comparing previous years and being able to see typical dry months and typical wet, soggy months.  So let's take a look.  The information below merely represents the sum of each month's rainfall in 2017:

The above shows that you can't get much drier than September was.  But at the same time, it rained enough in August for both months!

The table below compiles rainfall amounts by month and year over the previous 5 year history since we've been recording the wet stuff.

According to the Internet, Jennings, Louisiana has an average rainfall total of 60.35 inches.  However, other than 2015, we have exceeded that figure.  2016 and 2017 rainfall totals were pretty close and rain totals seem to be trending upward.  Our actual rainfall total over the previous 5 years is 69.15 inches.  Also, according to our records August is our wettest month and September is our driest month.  This is all very good information and we find it useful in planning for the timing of gardening and also lets us know when we need to keep our rubber boots handy!

2017 Egg Production - By The Numbers

We try to keep accurate records around Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  Good record-keeping helps to spot trends, good management ideas (things that went well), bad management ideas (experiments that didn't work), and just gives us benchmarks so that we can compare year to year to see how we are doing.  It is kind of like a scoreboard.  Today we'll look at the scoreboard for the hens to see how they are doing.

In looking at the statistics above, you can immediately spot a trend from month to month.  The season peaks out in early spring when the weather is nice, sunshine is plentiful, and tender plants and insects to eat are in abundance.  The eggs dwindle to nothing in the gloomiest, coldest, darkest months.  There is also a dip in egg production in the hottest months of the summer, followed by a brief rebound in early fall.

We have about 100 hens.  According to our records, in 2017 they averaged almost 100 eggs per hen.  This is really not great production, average production for the breeds of hens we have is more like 200 eggs per bird per year.  This can easily be explained.  For most of the year we didn't feed them a high protein diet.  We fed them rough and milled rice.  If I remember correctly, that provides about 12% protein.  For part of the year (beginning in the fall and winter) we did incorporate hen scratch and laying pellets that provides 17% protein.  Additionally, our hens are getting old.  As they get old, their laying slows down.

Below is a comparison table that we compile that compares egg production year over year.  The variable is the number of hens.  That differs from year to year, but I would estimate that the number of hens doesn't fluctuate by more than 10% each year.

This table shows egg production by year, by month, in total and then converted to dozens.  You can see that 2014 was the best year!  In the 5 year trend you can spot that Dec-Jan are the lowest egg production month each year and that April is the best month for egg production.

There are several things we could do to increase egg production.  We could keep lights on them all the time.  We could consistently feed them a higher protein ration.  We could get rid of all of our older birds and start with a brand new, younger flock, keeping the hens for two years before rotating out.  We could get rid of the Aracaunas (hens that lay blue and green eggs) and replace with Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks or perhaps get some white leghorns.

While we could do some of the practices mentioned above to increase egg production, we probably won't.  Why?  We currently have plenty of fresh, farm eggs to eat, to sell, and to give away at church.  We love having free range chickens.  They provide delicious, healthy eggs for us to eat and they walk around and fertilize our pasture.  They are "eggstrodinary" creatures!

Looking Back at 2016 Rainfall Totals at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm

Now Elijah said to Ahab, "Go up, eat and drink; for there is the sound of the roar of a heavy shower." 1 Kings 18:41

Hmmm...  The roar of a heavy shower.  Like Elijah and Ahab, we experienced the roars of many heavy showers in 2016 as our area received an extraordinary amount of the wet stuff.  But we'll get back to discussing that in just a minute.  We began keeping detailed records back in 2013 and each year in early January, we compile our records from the year to give us historical data that we can compare to previous years. Click HERE to read last year's post showing our records from 2015.  Detailed data helps us to identify trends and better manage the garden and livestock.  In prior years we reported our records for several items, but this year we are going to split them up into their own individual posts, starting with rainfall.

If you look at rainfall totals for our zip code, you will find that our average annual rainfall for Jennings, Louisiana is 60.35 inches.  If you average 2013 and 2014, the average of 60.35 is right on the money.  However 2015 rainfall and especially 2016 rainfall totals have skewed the average so that our average from 2013 - 2016 is actually 67.21 inches of precipitation per year.  The record-setting 2016 rainfall total was 79.30 inches or 6 foot 6 inches of rainfall for the year!  That shattered the previous years' record by a whopping 10 inches.  Check out the table I put together below:

March continues to be our driest month on average and the monsoons that fell in August 2016 made August the new wettest average month.  The August rains actually had disastrous effects on the fall garden this year.  The fall garden wasn't in at the time that the deluge hit, but that much rain delayed the planting of the fall garden until about a month later than it should have been planted.  I think later this week, I will further explain.  The rainfall amounts convinced me of two things:  I need to raise the level of the garden higher by having some additional topsoil delivered, AND I need to construct better drainage on parts of our pasture and the barn area.

Keeping Records

For some reason my old Canon Powershot SD600 digital camera is cassé (or broken, in French).  Either that or I received a defective set of batteries and they won’t take a charge.  I’ve ordered another battery just to check, but it might be time to retire the old camera.  In the meantime, the photo quality in the posts will likely be poor and I apologize for that.  I don’t have a smart phone although having a smart phone would make the camera obsolete. 

So, to the topic of today’s post, Record Keeping.  I’m a record keeper by nature.  I just like to track things.  Although I’m not an analytical person, I track all sorts of things to see trends, to chart progress, and to observe history.  I can remember back in college in the mid to late 80’s I took graph paper and taped it to the wall of the duplex I lived in while in college and charted the daily closing price of a certain stock that I had purchased with money earned showing livestock while in junior high and high school.  It was encouraging to see a nice upward trend.  Unfortunately my forays into investing have often resulted in downward trends.  But I don’t just track stock prices, I always like to track the scores of the LSU Tiger Football team on a schedule or calendar, putting a “W” or an “L” on the side of the score.

Later, when rice farming, during harvest, I was the ‘truck man.’  That meant that I drove the trucks full of rice to the storage bins.  The combine would empty the rice into the cart and the cart emptied the rice into the truck.  I knew exactly how much rice was in each truck and printed out logs to capture this information.  This was performed for each field and when you totaled up the number of barrels of rice and divided it by the acreage, we could see the yield per acre.  By knowing the average cost of production per acre and factoring in shrinkage during drying, we could ballpark the profitability of each rice field.  This gave great information that proved helpful in decision-making.

Today, on our small homestead farm, we have numerous spreadsheets that we’ve printed and keep daily tallies of rainfall, milk production, and egg production.  I also track my inventory of seeds and chart the planting date of our vegetable crops and estimated days until harvest.  This is particularly helpful in determining when to harvest those crops you can’t see from observing – crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes and peanuts.  Although we don’t track or weigh most of our vegetable crops, we do weigh our Irish Potato and Sweet Potato production.

We also observe the days that our cows go into heat and have a calendar where we note each of their cycles.  By adding roughly 21 days (18-24 days) to the date that they go in heat, we’re able to gauge when to expose them to a bull for breeding.  This has proved to be valuable information in assisting us to properly plan in timing the transport of our cows to a bull for breeding.  Now that we have a bull, it will greatly assist us in knowing the exact date to put the girl(s) into the bull pasture.

Over the course of several years, trends become visible.  We can see the traditionally wet months and dry months.  

We can see when egg production generally spikes, plateaus, and plummets.  

We can plan the timing of our annual calf crop off of the Jersey cows.  We weigh our Cornish Cross meat birds and chart the weekly weight gain of our birds to ensure that we are butchering them at the optimal time.  Obviously, there are outliers and events that disrupt trends, but all in all, we have found that record keeping is a discipline that pays dividends. 

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.