A New Venture
A photo of me with two of my (believe-it-or-not!) rabbits…that’s right, these wooly creatures are two of my English Angora does, Buffy Summers (left) and Nancy Drew (right).
Hi there! My name is Laura, and I’m the face behind Wing & Wool Farm…well, one of them anyways. I started this small farm, based in Olean, NY, last year and if you follow along over on Instagram you might be familiar with some of the other faces that are a part of this little venture, too.
My husband, Ben, is a General Contractor by day and an all around saint for supporting me with all of my continual, new farming ideas…he helps me build, raise, and harvest, all while coming up with innovative and creative ways to do it all better the next time. He’s extremely knowledgable about building anything—from the structure all the way up through the electrical, plumbing, and other mechanical systems, and I’m going to be picking his brain to have him share some of his insights and tips to help around your own backyard farm or homestead by helping you be more self-sufficient and sustainable…any of these topics sound interesting:
Ben helping out in the field after making a much-needed repair, and welding a crack in our brush hog.
DIY Geothermal Heat
Automate your Chicken Scalder
How to Turn a Stream into a Generator
How to Build a Chicken Coop
Tractor and other Farm Equipment Repair
In fact, if you have a farm or homestead-related question or topic idea for us, let us know! We’d love to cover it if we have the answers (and if we don’t, we’ll research and learn right along with you!)
Some other faces that make a frequent appearance in all things farm-related, as they are the real stars of the show around here, belong to our Poultry! Although we’ve raised chickens casually for many, many years, we’ve recently increased our flock to over 100 Chickens, and added Khaki Campbell ducks, Coturnix Quails, and Brown Chinese Geese to the mix. We sell our eggs locally as a pastured, corn and soy-free option for folks in our area, and because we are NPIP-AI Certified Clean, also plan to start selling hatching eggs and chicks very soon, too!
The rest of these beautiful, butt-nuggets, laid by our birds are nutritious powerhouses that go through a process to extract all of the wonderful, most-beneficial components of the egg’s nutrition for use in our Egg Alchemy Skincare.
Although it feels like our Poultry are our most abundant livestock on the farm, a different winged-creature is actually more populous—honeybees! My father, Steve, manages our natural, untreated hives from which we use the honey and wax in our skincare products, and plan to begin selling locally.
You’ve now met the “Wing” of our Farm, but what about the “Wool”? Well, our Fiber-production is based around rabbits—specifically English and Satin Angoras! Most people don’t know that rabbits are producers of prolific quantities of extremely soft and silky wool, which is actually 7 times warmer than sheep’s wool! We harvest it through a humane and gentle process called “plucking” that is actually a rather enjoyable experience for our herd of 23. This prime fiber is then hand-spun into yarn, or simply sold bulk for DIY-spinners.
A litter of Satin Angora bunnies, known as “kits”.
“Nancy Drew”, an Opal English Angora, after having her wool harvested by a gentle process called “plucking”.
Finally, our Farm wouldn’t be complete without our fur-babes—our 5 dogs and 6 cats. In no particular order, our dogs include “Red” an English Mastiff, “Dino” a German Boxer, “Baron” a Brittany, “Lily” a beagle-mix, and “Mila” a Pomeranian. Truthfully, there is a particular order to that list—size! Red clocks in as our heaviest dog at 185 pounds, and Mila weighs in at only 11 pounds. I now realize that we don’t have as many good pictures of the cats as we should, but here you’ll see our tiger cat, Olive, and our pair of tuxedo cat brothers, Cliff and Norm (Cheers, anyone??).
So, thank you for joining us! It was fun to share a little bit about ourselves, and if you’d like to share, too, we’d love to hear a little bit about you and your farming, homesteading, animal-loving, DIY-ing hopes, dreams, and ideas! Leave us a comment below, find us over on Instagram, or Contact Us through the website. We’re looking forward to sharing with you and growing as a community of like-minded people looking to help each other to learn and succeed at living a more fulfilling life.
Even an overgrown patch of Peonies is a source of so much beauty and enjoyment on our farm.
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Author: Laura
Farmer/Artist/Biologist, and founder of Wing & Wool Farm and Egg Alchemy Skincare…all around animal-lover, passionate about pastured-poultry, humanely-harvested wool, and sharing the joy and magic of a fulfilling, homesteading lifestyle.