My dad, Jeffery Pitts, is an entrepreneur. He started his own business, a farm. It is called Middle Eden. About ten and a half years ago my mom and dad bought 16 acres of land, half forest half pasture. We didn’t move there because it didn’t have a house on it. We lived five minutes away. The first animals that my dad put out on the land were seven sheep and two steers. Over the last ten years we have grown our flock and we average around forty sheep a year, we stopped having steers after our first two. We’ve raised hundreds of chickens. We had rabbits for several years but we sold the rest earlier this year. We have also raised ducks and we got two piglets a year and a half ago.
This is how we made money on all of these animals. First I’ll talk about sheep. Every year, in December, we take some of our male sheep to the butcher. We sell some of the meat but we keep most of it. Sometimes we butcher females, but we usually just keep them so that they will give us more lambs. Steers are castrated male cows. We only had two steers, Brownie and Oreo, because it was too much work and cost too much money, but we got a lot of meat from those two steers which we both sold and kept. We have had a lot of chickens, some were meat chickens that we butchered when they were really big, but most of them are egg laying chickens. We get a lot of eggs from our chickens. We try to sell some of them but since it is winter our chickens have started laying less eggs, but they will start laying more eggs in spring. A few months ago we incubated around a dozen eggs that we are keeping at our house until it gets warmer, because it is really cold outside right now. We had rabbits for several years and we made some money off them by breeding them and selling the babies. We sold the rest of them earlier this year because my brother who took care of them started going to college and I had to take care of them for him. A few years ago we got 15 ducks and sold their eggs, but one by one they flew away because they were a wild breed of duck. We got piglets one and a half years a go and we are going to butcher them in a week.
They overcame many obstacles such as coyotes killing our lambs, other wild animals eating our ducks and chickens, and pesky neighbors calling the police because they didn’t like the way we were raising our animals. There are other obstacles that occurred but these are the main ones that my parents overcame.