Category Archives: Farm Animals

Meal Worms

It is always a big experiment around here.
Wanting to add some healthy protein to our chicken’s diet we decided to play around with meal worms. Yes, we are growing meal worms,  in plastic totes, in our house.
From what Dadzoo (or farmer Mike) has researched they are really easy to grow.  They need some type of medium to craw around in, a food source, a water source and warmth.
We prepared a big plastic tote with wood chips, dog food and some lettuce.  We originally wanted to use wheat germ for food and bedding but it is taking awhile to get here so this is what we have for now.
The new wiggly babies seems to like their home and hopefully we will soon see beetles, that will lay eggs, that will turn into meal worms, that will be fed to chickens or left grown into beetles.

It’s the circle of life, y’all.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Chickens!

Spring is such a busy, exciting time on the farm, there are so many different things going on.  Preparing for planting, planting and all the baby animals. This year we will have two sets of goats born, 36 new chicks and we are planning on adding piggies. We will be doubling our flock this year, to better serve our customers as our eggs are always in high demand. When ordering chickens I like to do things a little differently than most, my highest priority isn’t production.  I pick my birds for the color of eggs they lay, how they look (I love variety in the barnyard), how common they are and their willingness to free range and brood.  One breed that I have been ordering for years now is the Delaware, they are on conservation lists as breeds that are in danger of being lost.  They are a pretty, plump, duel purpose (meaning they lay eggs and are good for meat) breed out of Delaware (hence the name) that were once common on family farms that are now disappearing in favor of commercial breeds. I like my flock to be diverse, my eggs colorful and fun, and my birds hearty and willing to free range.

All of our chicks come from Murry McMurray Hatchery.  I have been ordering from them for over 10 years when I first started out with a little flock in my suburban back yard.  I’ve always been happy with the quality of chicks and if there has been a problem they were pleasant, friendly to work with and quick to make things right. The pictures on this post come from their site and are the chickens we will be adding.  If you are wanting to start a flock I highly recommend them and you can find them here: https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html

Chickens

Chickens have a very important roll here on the farm. One of the first purchases we made when we moved here was a bunch of baby chicks shipped in when they were a day old, soon we had a big chicken coop up and our relationship with chickens on the farm began. We had kept chickens at our old house, but this was going to be different.  Before we only kept 10 or 12 chicken and they were housed in a small coop with a tiny yard and fed kitchen scraps and basic chicken feed. Here we had 30+ chickens, they had free access to the entire five acres, we did still feel them kitchen scraps and chicken feed, but they were also eating bugs, weeds and grass.

This year has been what I like to call a “building year”. Chickens are at the peak of their production when they are one and two years old and then fade off a different rates depending on the breed, feed and how the winters are managed. To keep up egg production, without a period of lag, new chickens need to be added to the flock yearly or at least every other year and the old hens culled out. After the first few years we had gotten off track and this past fall our girls were tired and old, some hens had just finished their fourth summer, it was time for retirement, to the stew pot. We kept about five hens and a rooster, the rooster had been hatched and raised here on the farm and so had a couple of the hens and then there were a few favorites that got to stay. It was nice to only care for six chickens over the winter, but I did miss fresh eggs, especially as I bought boxes of eggs from Costco.

This spring we started the flock over fresh with a new bunch of little pullets and recently they began to lay eggs.  New pullet eggs are small and cute and I just love them.  The plan is that next summer we will have enough to start selling them again.

Not only do chicken provide eggs and a little bit of income from eggs, they are little workers. They can clear a plot of land from weeds in an afternoon and turn a pile of manure, straw and pine shavings into usable compost in a couple weeks. Tomorrow I will manually turn the compost pile they have been currently working on and I anticipate it will be ready to be moved and covered with a tarp while it waits to be used and a new pile started. Our little flock is valuable part of our quest to build fertility and practice regenerative agriculture.

Growing Soil

One of my main jobs here on the farm, my main focus, what everything comes down to is the health of the soil. It doesn’t matter what the freeze dates are, the rates of germination, how many pounds of beans harvested per row if my soil isn’t healthy and nurtured.  I can’t have big harvests, beautiful plants or nutritious thriving vegetables if my soil is dead. I spend a lot of time looking at dirt, putting my hands in dirt, observing my garden beds, analyzing and planning, sometimes for years down the road. I want good, rich, dark soil, full of organic matter and life, worms, mushrooms, mold and microbes. The problem is that we are in a desert and our soil doesn’t come that way naturally, therefore is takes a lot of planning and focused effort to achieve that in an organic healthy way.

The ladies getting to work on a newly built compost pile.

To do this we use many different permaculture methods. One method is the classic composting, nothing organic goes to waste here, from kitchen scraps to weeds, it’s all recycled in some way to help enrich the land. We use chickens extensively in our composting program.  We also compost in place and do traditional compost piles, but the chicken composting is what I’d like to talk about today.

In the chicken yard we make a simple pile: horse manure, goat manure and bedding, old leaves, kitchen scraps, weeds and lawn clippings (be cautious using lawn clipping in compost, if there is any weed killer on it, it can cause problems in the garden, I know I’ve experienced it first hand). We do this for a couple weeks, adding food scraps and weeds, especially those that have seeds.  The chicken then scratch through the pile, mixing it, eating weed seeds and leaving their droppings to further enrich the compost. Every morning when my son goes out to do his chicken chores he rakes the pile up high and the chickens get to work mixing it all up again.

A pullet working on a new compost pile, she will help breakdown all those leaves and hay.

In about a week the pile looks like this picture below, and in two weeks it will be finished and ready to apply to the garden beds.  About 10 days to 2 weeks after  a pile is started I make a new one and so it goes through the season.  Black gold made by my feathered friends and farm hands.

When done right the compost is hot to the touch and steams when the core is opened, this will help kill weed seeds and speeds up the compost process.

Everyone Has a Job to Do

Everything on the farm has a at least two jobs to do.  Sometimes it’s as simple as: provide protection and company, like our dog and cat.  Sometimes it’s more complex: provide fruit, shelter for birds, attract beneficial insects, produce bio mass and shade, like the apple trees in our orchard.

Rabbits happily grazing in their mobile cage.

Even the rabbits have more than one job. Our rabbits are meat rabbits, breed to feed my family, but that isn’t the job I love them the most for.  They are quite efficient at turning grass into fertilizer. One of the benefits of rabbit manure is that it’s is what’s termed “cold”, meaning it’s not so high in nitrogen, like poultry or cow manure that it needs to be composted first, it can go directly on the garden and planted in.  I have some rabbits in cages and when their trays are cleaned I do put it directly in the garden, but this year we experimented with “pasturing” our grow outs. I’ve been so happy with the results.

The path of grazed meadow, this is what it looks like as we move it.

We simply built large, open changes with wire bottoms, to keep the rabbits digging out and predators from digging in.  Everyday their cage is moved to a different patch of ground in the Orchard Meadow, they keep the grass clipped and leave their fertilizer behind.  I’ve been so happy with the results, the meadow has never been as lush and our feed bill is much lower than normal.  We do still give them pellets, the grass isn’t quite enough, but it’s a great, healthy supplement.

Meadow that had the rabbits on it about two weeks ago, you can still see the grass is shorter, but growing in nicely.

 

Baby Day is the Best Day

 

We got our first trio of goats about three years ago this spring.  Our own little heard, one little doe and her two weathered brothers.  From the beginning we planned on breeding our little dolly and building a heard of small dairy goats. Visions of gourmet cheese and rosie faced children with milk mustaches from our own animals danced in my head.

Of course we had to wait for little Dolly to grow up.  In the meantime we fed our little goats, played with them, let them eat weeds and graze the orchard. There is almost nothing more amusing than watching baby goats play.

When Miss Dolly was about a year and a half old it was time to breed her, we found a buck and waited for her to come into heat. I was also very, very pregnant and not so great at getting down to the goat pasture to check on her. We made a couple attempts at breeding, but neither she or the buck were interested and I, hugely pregnant, gave up for that season.  It was probably the best, I was very busy that next spring with a new baby of my own.

Instead we purchased two new wee baby goats.  We named them Billy and Daisy.  Billy is our heard buck and Daisy one of our moms.  That also made breeding Dolly much easier, we just let them live together over the winter and let the breeding happen naturally.

Then one warm Sunday morning in April I got a text just as we were settling the family in their seats at church and the opening song started.  The text said “we have babies!” Clearly I had to go check it all out! Really though, I did feel like I needed to go check on our Dolly and make sure everything went well and see if she needed any help and check on the babies.  When I got there she was proudly cleaning her three little kids, she had those babies without any problems, like a veteran mother! Three little baby bucks (I had hoped for a doe, but I guess we will try again next season). Instead of pulling the babies and milking mom right away we allowed her to raise them, I didn’t want to bottle feed babies or sell them so young and I feel they do better if they are with her.  At around eight weeks old we started the weaning process and I learned how to milk a goat.  That has been an adventure and a story for another time.  It has been so fun to have little goats around again.

 

Goats on Pasture

The Goats are almost three months old now and fully weaned, its time they go to pasture and be trained on the line.
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Part of the purpose of our goats is weed control and sustainable grazing. Grazing animals can be very destructive to the land if their grazing isn’t focused and managed.  On the flip side, land that isn’t grazed by herbivores will become over grown and unhealthy, quickly pulling more from the soil then adding back.  They synergy between the grasslands and its herbivores is slowly becoming recognized and honored.
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When a herbivore eats the grass the roots of the grass die back a little, leaving organic matter and open channels in the soil for beneficial microbes to feast on and water to run down.  Then there is a flush of new grown, invigorating the grass, making it stronger and producing more roots to break up the soil and provide for those microbes I love so much.  In turn the herbivore leaves its manure, full of nutrients and seeds to further bless the land.  A pasture can be easily over grazed, if animals are kept on it continually with out a rest period, it becomes distressed and can’t sustain new growth. That is where management comes in.  We no longer have vast prairies with massive herds of buffalo and birds doing the job, we now have to facilitate the process, by using rotational grazing and letting the pasture rest in between grazing.
IMG_6694Here on our farm we don’t have vast pastures, we have small meadows and paddocks, but that same principle applies, just on a smaller scale.  We set the goats out daily to graze, watching carefully so as not to over tax the land and then move our animals so the plot can rest and rejuvenate, making it more fertile and productive.

Spring Babies

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We all love the babies here on the farm and the last of the spring babies have arrived!  Rabbits can be bred all year long, but they tend to struggle in the heat and a pregnancy only adds to the difficulty, so we take a break in the heat of the summer. We also take a break in the cold of the winter, not because it hard on the rabbits, they love the cold, but it is a bit more difficult to manage kits in the freezing weather, they need to be kept very warm and it is easy for a kit to chill and die very quickly. So here we are the very last litter of the spring birthing season, they get to hang out in the house with us during the heat of the day and in the evening they get to go be with mom until morning.  Rabbits only feed their babies once or twice a day and spend the rest of the time ignoring them.  It is a survival instinct, by only visiting the nest once a day they don’t attract predators to their babies. Once the baby’s eyes open, at about ten days, they will become adventurous and follow mom around.  When the babies are six weeks old they are separated by sex and moved into big grow out pens to wait until they are big enough to process.

How do I feel about processing our own meat. I don’t love it, and the day I do will be the day I quit eating meat. Rabbits are prey animals, they are meant to be eaten to fulfill the measure of their creation.  Our rabbits are very much loved and cared for and when the time is right humanly dispatched and processed, then eaten with much honor and thanksgiving.

Goats

Guest Post by
Kit 

On May 28, we had some new additions to the farm, three little baby goats. At only a month old, they had never been away from their mother, we had to become their moms. First we named them, we took a family vote. We all decided on Dolly for the girl, she is the most stubborn, and she gets her way. We have to hold her the most and get her used to us handling her because we will be milking her in the future. Then there is Jeb, he is the one with big black patches on him, he has the biggest horns and just likes to play. Lastly we have the runt, Jethro, he looks just like Dolly, but he is the littlest and just likes to be around us.

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Dolly the little girl

They totally depend on us just like they had with their mother. So we had to get them used to us so they thought of us as family, and they would trust us so we can feed and milk them. We got them and we just played with them, all the little kids were holding them. They really loved all the attention. we got little harnesses for them, so we can let them graze and can control where they go. Then we showed them their house and the yard they would stay in and graze.

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Jed learning how to use a bottle

Because we are their “moms” we have to feed them just like their mother did. It was hard to get them to take the bottle, we had to get them to open their mouths and to actually stay drinking it. It was very messy. When we first started they would hardly have anything, and they needed three ounces each feeding, three times a day. Now that they have been with us for a week and a half, they have figured it all out. We got special goat bottles that are more like what they are used to so it got easier.
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Now we just hold the bottle out and they come and know how it all works, they even follow us when we have the bottle. That’s how we get them back into the yard now, just hold out a bottle and they will go where you want them to. Dolly took the longest to figure it out, and she wasn’t eating as much as her brothers, or what she needed to at all. She just figured it all out today, things have to happen when she wants them to or not at all.
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The first night we had them, they got out! lucky they didn’t want to explore, and just went to the house. we fixed the gate so they can’t get out anymore. one day we went out for their feeding and Jethro had his head stuck in the gate. Who knows what other surprises will happen with them. One thing the goats really like is to be held, one time Dolly was sitting on my lap and she fell asleep. First day we got them, Jethro let me hold him like a baby.
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It’s really cool and funny to see how much personality they each have. Jethro really likes to nibble on our clothes, fingers, and even hair, if he can get to it. Dolly always plays “king of the hill” (or in this case log, rocks, or even our backs if we are bending over) she can pretty much climb everywhere and beats her brothers at it. Jeb is just there, he kinda does his own thing but he is the first to get the bottle when ever he can just pushes Jethro out of the way.
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