On the job training

When we started Namaste Farm, my husband and I were not farmers. Oh sure, we raised some vegetables in the yard of our rental property, but everything we know now has been learned mostly from on the job training. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes we fail, but we always learn something from the experience. That’s the way it has been with the introduction of ducks to our flock. We have been successfully selling both chickens and eggs to our customers for several years. The customers requested ducks and duck eggs. We decided to give it a try.

If you have followed the duck story on our blog, you’ve seen the pictures of those cute ducklings we purchased this spring with the hopes of producing both meat and eggs for our customers. Believe me, I did all the research online that I could, but at some point you have to actually try things and see how they work out. The duck experiment has not worked out. We still have some of the ducks and haven’t gotten to the production of eggs, but the meat experiment is over.

Most people don’t really want to imagine how their meat arrives at their table. If you have ever seen factory farming, you may have changed your mind about eating meat altogether. We have committed to raising our animals and poultry under the best conditions, so that when the time comes for them to be slaughtered, by us or by others, we can say that they had the best possible lives. With the ducks, besides all the added expense and time that we hadn’t really counted on, the final processing was just not worth the result in many ways. Processing is a very nice word for slaughter, and I’ll leave it at that.

We are left with a small flock of all the breeds we got, including several of the Pekins that were supposed to be our meat birds. We are hopeful that duck eggs turn out to be part of our business, although creating a place for the ducks to lay the eggs where they can live outside as ducks could prove to be challenging. I’ll be telling that story in a future blog post. At Namaste Farm, we remain committed to farming in a way that is responsible and respectful towards our land and our livestock. The epic of meat ducks has come to an end.