Hello, everyone.
I am a mid-50s Canadian, married, with three kids (one is a step-kid.) My wife and I bought 16.5 acres of mature, second growth A2 land in Eastern Ontario 25 years ago. We are on the floor plain of the local small river and our land floods in the spring and is wet all year. We cut out a clearing to build our house and gardens and keep a few animals.
My wife keeps gardens with fruit trees, berries, flowers, and vegetables. Most years she has lots of plants to sell in the spring and vegetables to see at the local farmer's markets. This year has been challenging for a number of reasons so the range and number of vegetables she had planted is much lower.
We have a laying flock of chickens that ranges from 30 to 50 birds. I honestly have no idea how many birds are out there right now.
We do two batches, spring and fall, or White Rock meat birds each year. We have half or more of the meat birds inspected and processed at the local abattoir so that we can legally sell them and the rest we process ourselves. It's not my favorite part of farming but it has to be done.
We also do between 10 and 40 turkeys in a single batch each year. This year we have a mix of Bronze Orlopps and Mini Whites for a total of 18 birds. The turkeys end up too big for me to pluck with my plucker so we send them all out to the abattoir to be processed.
We have done pigs in the past and were planning to have a pair of pigs this year but the challenges that I mentioned above got in the way. Instead my wife's friend has taken in our pigs and is raising them for us. We will pay for the processing and they will keep one for their troubles.