This time on The 'Steadcast:   The Farmkids and I visit the "What IF Festival" in downtown Colorado Springs, updates from the farm, more on what the solution was to the well water crisis for Colorado small farms, and The Pasture-Raised Life segment “Meet your Meat.”

First off, I'd like to give a shout out to some original listeners who stuck by us and got right back on the podcast bike with us. Now, that's a phrase I've never quite understood: it's just like riding a bike... like it's supposed to be easy to get back to it after you've been away from it for a while. Because have you ever watched someone who hasn't ridden a bike for a few years get back on a bike? They look like drunken idiots for the first few blocks, and if they're doing it on a beach bike path or something, there's a good chance a rollerblader is going to be eating a set of handlebars along the way. So, in that case getting back to a weekly schedule on the 'Steadcast is indeed like riding a bike, because we're wabbling and cursing our way through the first few. More cursing off-mic at Audacity and Wordpress, but you get the idea.

So I thought I had a point there... right, right... shout outs! One of the early adopter listeners, Ed of the St Louis area, is doing good stuff on social media with his own efforts at homesteading. Check out Coriander Fields on Facebook to see what he's been up to. We also received a visitor post on the Gray Area Farm facebook page from Rebecca, who says she's originally from Eugene, Oregon... which, as a staunch USC Trojans family we'll forgive the Oregon Ducks reference... but she's now in Istanbul, where she listens to the Steadcast which she says gives her a taste of home. So hey Ed, hey Rebecca. There are many more early listeners who are clearly back with us based on social media likes and the geolocate stuff on the server logs. I also want to give a shout out to Yosef and his crew at Ahavah Farm for a great share on Facebook that brought a few new people over.

The 50 new chickens we had shipped to us a couple months ago are almost ready to start laying eggs. Probably another two weeks or so. A back-of-the-envelope calc shows we would probably get about 16 dozen eggs a week out of them, which means the really ad-hoc way we've been selling eggs so far is going to be changing. Until now, we've had situations where people have been either really annoyed that we'd already pre-sold the eggs we bring to Falcon or on the flipside we come back home with some unsold. Therefore, we're introducing an egg CSA program that we're calling “rent a hen,” so people can rely on getting their eggs and we can rely on getting their money, to put it somewhat callously.

We still have a couple shares of pork available, as we mentioned last week. We're somewhat confused by Lollipop because we haven't seen her come into heat yet. She totally should have, because she's plenty old enough. But because of her coloration and behaviors it's been difficult to tell. Meanwhile, the younger ones that are destined for freezer camp have been cycling and if you scratch their ears just right they'll go into standing heat. Which... is kinda disturbing that these girls think I'm just that sexy as a boar that they'll go into standing heat that quickly. But... when you got it, you got it, I guess. Anyway, with lollipop we definitely want to start tracking her cycle because artificial insemination supplies are.. shall we say... perishable.... and wicked expensive. Like $200 a dose expensive. Sure we could let her hang out with a local boar for a few days, but our goal with her is to really start getting a super-awesome genetic line of piglets and breeding stock so we can get awesome pork and awesome show pigs a few years down the line for Travis for 4-H.

One of the better meteorologists around here is saying that the long term models show we're probably going to be getting some s...