When my wife and I decided to start a small farm business the list of things we desired for our farm was long. I would be lying if I said that the slow progress was sometimes frustrating. We wanted to make it all happen right away, but the building of the dream has been slow.
I love making things, and every time we expanded and added chickens to our farm, it gave me an opportunity to refine my coop building design and make something with my hands. Some of my designs proved to be effective, and some, not so much. Like the time I tried to build a large coop with lightweight material, and then found out the light weight material was not as durable.
I don't want to trash the lightweight material, as on the next attempt I learned that if I reinforced it properly, the material proved effective at keeping the weight down, and we like mobile coops. I also found that making a coop mobile required better wheels than the cheap plastic ones. One by one, we slowly figured out what worked best for our coops.
Another area where the Lord was teaching us patience was in the raising of chicks to laying hens. Depending on the breed of chicken, the age of laying maturity can be between 16 and 28 weeks. We have Rhode Island Reds which come of age at 17-18 weeks, and Ameraucana's that develop between 24 and 26 weeks. This means that we have between four and six months of caring for the animals before we ever see an egg.
It can be so easy to lose sight of the goal when we have to weight for the results to pay off. It would have been easy to throw in the towel at several points along the way, but every time we felt like it wasn't worth it, we would take one small step toward where we wanted to go. These baby steps began to add up over the last few years.
One thing my wife and I like to pride ourselves on is the ability to learn new things. This even means learning hard lessons, like when a dog killed over 20 of our hens. This taught us the importance of reinforcing fencing. We learned that the max capacity of our brooder box is between 35-40. Each of these lessons allowed us to grow and become more effective. None of them came through a giant leap, but with small consistent steps in the right direction.
If we keep taking the right steps, we will eventually achieve our goals. What goals are you pursuing, and which steps are you taking to get there?
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