Springtime is one of my favorite seasons on the farm. The grass is so vibrantly green, fruit blossoms burst forth on the trees and even when storms come through, which has been pretty frequently as of late, the storm blue sky of an approaching thunder-boomer just makes all of the Spring colors pop.

Spring also is the season of unpredictable temperatures as Mother Nature fights to regulate her moods; sometimes she’s warm and inviting and others she gives a cold shoulder and even tosses snowflakes around.

It also is during this season that we farmers start to look forward to planting our crops and raising baby animals. Always with the hope that if the weather changes it isn’t too drastic of a shift. Nothing is more nerve wracking than getting fragile seeds into the ground, which sprout forth during a period of several warm days, only to be zapped back by an unexpected freeze.

Typically the first part of April is when the meat chicks, what I call meat seeds, that I’ve ordered back in January, arrive. The days prior to their arrival at our wonderful postal service, I’m on baby alert. I watch the weather obsessively, cringing when I hear of a cold snap headed our way. The tracking feature on the hatchery’s website goes up a few quarter clicks as I frequently check the shipment of chicks making their journey from Polk, Ohio, down to our little post office.

My obsession is not unwarranted, a few years back there was a shipment of 100 chicks which took a complete detour from their origin in Ohio to Pennsylvania and then back to their Indiana destination. While the birds were touring the upper part of the country, there also was a hard freeze that happened and when the chicks were finally delivered to the local post office, the postmaster called with a solemn voice — telling me that he was pretty sure there were still some alive in the box but he wasn’t sure how many.

Not one of the most positive times on the farm, but that year three quarters of the shipment didn’t survive. Not only was it a hard loss emotionally but everything had to be adjusted for the rest of the year.

You see, before the meat seeds arrive, the processing date needs to be set well in advance so that everything works in perfect timing. When that amount of livestock is lost, it requires a call to the processor for a number adjustment and then the need to set another processing date for the replacements which will arrive when the hatchery says they are available (sometimes not for a month or two). So a kink in the process really created havoc that year.

All this being said, I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of 100 new meat seeds that are to be delivered in the next day or so and, guess what, another cold snap has descended upon us. I’m hounding the hatchery for tracking information and have set up the brooder boxes that the little fluff balls will call home for the first three weeks of their life. I’ll finally relax when I know the chicks are in the mail and headed my way without any problems. Hopefully that’s soon.

Until next time …