Our new baby chicks have arrived!  We ordered 100 baby chicks from Privett Hatchery in New Mexico.  They were shipped on a Monday and arrived the following Wednesday.  Our order arrived in two days and all 100 were alive and chirping when I opened the box.  We are not keeping all 100, we split the order with a couple friends in order to meet the minimum order requirements. 
     The minimum order for chickens from Privett is 25 which fills one corner of the shipping box seen here.  With 25 baby chicks packed into the corner they generate enough heat to keep each other warm during shipping.  When we checked around for someone to split the order with, three other families wanted to order, so we ended up with a full box of 100 baby chicks.  I could hear the chicks chirping in the background when the post office called to tell me.....

This Yanmar tractor is our main workhorse here at the yardstead.  This has been a great little tractor.  We have had a lot of interest in our Yanmar tractor articles, so I thought I would post this article with more detail about this model.  The YM1300d is a 16hp 4wd tractor with gear transmisison and 13hp PTO.  It weights approximately 1135 lbs. 
     When I was shoping for a tractor, I had never heard of Yanmar, so I did a little research and found out a good bit about Yanmar tractors.  Yanmar was founded in 1912.  In 1930 they designed their first diesel engine and  built the first small horizontal diesel engine in the world in 1933.  Yanmar manufactured a number of compact tractor models for John Deere and by 1986 had shipped over 100,000 tractors to the US for John Deere alone.  Today Yanmar is considered a world leader in the diesel engine market, with their engines under the hood of many tractors by numerous manufacturers.