I've had many people ask me what they should do with all of the cream on their milk.  I've also had many inquiries about making butter.  

The first thing you can do is simply shake your jar of milk before each use to mix the cream back into the milk.  Because whole raw milk is not homogenized the cream rises to the top.  If you shake before use, all of that creamy goodness will be evenly distributed throughout the milk.  Your second option is to skim your milk.  After your milk has sat overnight in the refrigerator, take a soup ladle and slowly dip it just below the surface of the cream.  Keep doing this until you have all the cream ladled out.  I like to use straight cream in my coffee in the morning, to make butter, to make ice cream or use it in some decadent soup recipes.  Cream also freezes well so you can put it in the freezer to use on a later date.  When you defrost frozen cream, you may notice some separation but it will mix back together just fine.

I've had many people ask me about making butter so I put together this little video.  I've never made any sort of instructional video before so I hope people find this useful.    

Happy Holidays

Enjoy the Season

Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays from Faye Farm's!  We would like to thank all of our family, friends and patrons who have supported and encouraged us in 2009.  Your business and friendship mean a lot to Mark and I and we are looking forward to all that 2010 holds for us.  

One of the great things of living on a farm is that we can celebrate the joys of the season all year long!   At Faye Farms we do not seek to standardize our production to eliminate seasonal and artistic differences in colors, textures, or flavor.  Rather, we celebrate the differences!  The milk produced from dry hay in the winter will naturally differ in flavor, color and butterfat content from milk produced by grazing the lush green grasses of spring.  The hog harvested after grazing down green cornstalks will be different than the hog harvested following an autumn of gleaning windfall nuts, fruits and garden vegetables.  One batch of homemade soap may vary in color and fragrance from another, as every batch is an artist's creation.  

We hope that you will enjoy celebrating these, and many more, differences with us. Please know that we are working hard for you to produce healthy, natural products and will continue to grow to meet your needs in the coming years.

Have a safe and happy holiday season!
Mark and Heather Faye   

We have added to the chicken flock!  I only have around 70 hens right now and that is hopelessly inadequate to supply all my customers with eggs.  To make matters worse my hens have just gone through a molt so there has really been an egg shortage at the farm.  So 6 weeks ago I had some Rhode Island Red chicks shipped to me through the mail.  I have never raised this breed before but I figured many of the hybrid laying hens come from RIR foundation stock so they must be really good birds.  So far the chicks are proving to be very hearty, fast growing little birds.  They are already almost all feathered out.  They soon will be outgrowing their brooder (a.k.a old stock tank) and will have to be moved to their own special room in the chicken coop.  I always take joy in watching little baby chicks. They have very comical antics.  From what I have read RIR's start laying when they are 5 months old.  So that would put the first eggs coming from this group sometime in March.  

I'm also seriously considering starting another batch of chicks once this group is moved out of the brooder.  It is much easier for me to raise chicks in the winter.  Every spring I try to hatch out as many of my own chicks as I can but it is always a challenge.  You see, the snakes come out in full force right about the same time that all my hens decide to go broody.  The snakes are very smart about their dining practices as well.  They leave a nest of eggs alone until they are just about to hatch.  It's very frustrating to check on a clutch of eggs, get excited because the chicks are peeping in the eggs, and then come back the next morning to find them all gone!  Right now all the snakes are hibernating so I don't have to worry about my chicks getting eaten.  

Another thing that I have figured out is that hybrid laying hens just don't work in our particular situation.  When we moved down here I bought a huge batch of chicks.  Half were Black Australorps and half were a hybrid called Golden Stars.  After a year and half I only have a handful of the Golden Stars left.  It seems like all the sense was bred out of them.  They were all picked off by predators.  The Black Australorps had sense enough to keep themselves safe.  So I will continue to try the different heritage breeds of chickens to find what works best on our farm and stick with those.  These birds take a bit longer to mature and may not lay as many eggs but a live bird will give me a lot more eggs than a dead bird.  Not to mention, the heritage breeds make for nice stewing birds when their egg laying careers are done.  

On November 21st I will be at the Xi Upsilon Craft show in Arkansas City.  It is in the Agri Business Building at 712 West Washington from 9:00-4:00.  Support local crafters and get your Christmas shopping done early.  I'll have lots of soap and gift baskets available.  Come try out some of my new scents!  

I really think that October and November got flip-flopped.  So much of October was cold and wet.  November has started off so sunny and warm.  It's absolutely glorious outside!  During these beautiful days we have been busy working on fencing.  We finally got enough of our 40 across the road fenced that we put our dry cows and heifers over there.  Mark and I have such a sense of accomplishment watching our cows graze across the road.  For the first two summers that we spent on this farm we had hired someone to cut and bale this 40.  This just drove me nuts!  Why waste all that fuel to do a job that the cows were perfectly capable of doing.  But of course there was no fence so we had to bale it.  We never baled this 40 this summer so there is lots of stockpiled Brome and Prairie Grass for the cows to eat.  We still have more work to do on fencing.  We eventually want the entire 40 fenced with a permanent 5 strand barbed wire fence.  We recently got a big chunk of this done but still need to fence the front half of this 40.  This section won't be as easy though since we have to tear out the old barbed wire fence.  We have a hot wire on this section for now.  What I love so much about a small family farm is that there are so many projects that we can involve the kids in.  We had the kids out with us building a great deal of this fence.  They did plenty of nail pounding, attaching fence clips, and making sure the wire wasn't snagged on grass when being tightened.  They did their fair share of playing as well.  We even had the family dog, Prairie, out with us.  I think she appreciated spending quality family time as much as we did.

13 acres of our 40 is native Prairie Grass.  This is what the buffalo used to live off of.  It looks brown and dead but still has lots of nutritional value.  When we put the cows in this section of Prairie Grass we noticed that the first thing they did was to eat the seed tops off of the tall grasses.