What do I mean by that?  Recently we took possession of 6 new heifers.  Now, six heifers doesn’t look like much on paper but it’s a whole new deal for us.  Rotational grazing.  Mob stocking.  Hoping and praying that the green stuff growing in our fields is appetizing to our hooved animals.  We have to learn how to move fence, how to move the water tank, how to troubleshoot shorts in our fencing, how to watch for problem weeds and to monitor how full the cows are.  Again, on paper, no big deal.  But in real life, learning all of that all at once is a bit daunting.  Learning all of that while keeping the food cooked, the dishes washed, the laundry folded, the kids educated and the business growing is pretty rough (though she does it all while looking great).

So we simplified.  We scheduled our production for the year and made sure several things were finished or on break before the heifers arrived.  The broilers are in the freezer.  No more chicken tractor chores.  The pigs went to market.  No more planning and moving pig pastures…or working pig pasture recovery into our grazing schedule.  We planned ahead, knowing our spring is busy and staging things out so we could learn new skills away from the pressure of existing skills.  Now, there’s no getting away from housework or even garden work but just freeing her from checking broilers 3-4x per day and liberating her from her fear of 300 pound hogs lightens her workload enough that she can afford to focus on these new heifers just when they need it without shorting the kids of the time they need.

The goats were scheduled to be sold in December.  The two females finally left today.  Once they are gone we’ll be down to just ducks, cows and layers.  Over time we’ll work pigs back into the rotation.  In the fall we’ll do another big batch of broilers.  In between we’ll attend Cattle Grazing University, Chism Heritage Farm campus, and the school of hard knocks.  Experience is a great teacher.  I have read every grazing book I could get my hands on and I’ve learned more in the last week than ever before.

I think pigs, turkeys, goats and broilers all have a place in our lives, in our business and on our farm but we can only ask so much of ourselves.  At regular intervals we plan time to review what we are doing, why we are doing it and verifying that we are making the best use of our time.  Are we happy or just busy?  It makes me happy to see the pigs run in the pasture.  I enjoy butchering chickens with my children.  I love our goats.  That said, today I’m content to watch the cows eat grass.  They have a lot to teach me and require my full attention.

Most importantly, I have to consider my wife.  This is our dream, not simply mine.  I can’t abuse her with hard labor and expect her to remain enthusiastic.

We are attempting to hatch our own replacement layers this year.  Approximately 20% of the eggs we get are not New Hampshire eggs.  50% of those remaining will be males.  And we shouldn’t expect to hatch more than about 75% of the eggs we set.  That means I probably only get 12 pullets every hatch.  I’ll be hatching for a while.  It would be better if I would just go separate those two hens from the flock but the kids like the striped chicks.

For now we are brooding in a 300 gallon Rubbermaid trough in the back room.  Really, this is just a place to keep the chicks warm until we free up brooder space in the greenhouse.  (AKA we kick the ducks out).  We’ll need nicer weather before we do that.

This is an awful lot of fun and could be the beginning of generations of NHR chickens on our farm.  Their mothers and fathers (plural) have survived 2-3 years of heat, cold, wet and dry.  Some of their peers didn’t make it.  Hopefully, in a few generations, we’ll have birds that are genetically predisposed to success on our farm.

Red birds?  Red cows?  I sense a trend.

We had been grazing the cows across the bottom on both sides of the creek.  They would need snorkels to graze down there now.  Fortunately we had some high ground well rested.  In fact, it’s perfect.  Lots of diversity.

And this is where we had pigs last October!  Pig manure is great!  It also helps to have pasture in reserve just in case.  This has been resting since we last grazed through in January.  Just think of the root systems!  Think of the grass those cows will trample into the soil!  Think of the water I’m holding now and how much more I’ll hold in the future!  And those girls will get fat!

The creek attempted to claim our fencing but we got it untangled, recovered our posts and moved everything up hill.  I had to cross the creek on a fallen walnut tree but we got the job done.  The creek in the picture is down two feet from where it was last night.  The current flood emphasized the need for me to keep fallen branches cleaned up down there as they tangled up our fencing and clogged up the gate that keeps the cows in where the creek hits our property line.  I say creek but it’s not a creek.  It’s the branch.  I know.  City kid.

Regular readers know that farming is only one of many things we do.  We are so busy working and playing, it’s hard to find time to write.  Bear with us.

UPDATE:

My lovely bride took this picture at the peak of the flood yesterday.  Can you see the mouse?

These girls know how to eat.  Our Jerseys will look right past second cutting alfalfa.  The Shorthorns licked it right up.  It was pretty amazing.

Once they were full of hay we opened up a new strip of pasture and turned the girls out with the Jerseys.  I have to say, I was a little nervous.  Each of the heifers had a strongly negative experience with our electric fence before we turned them out and had been in electric fence previously but…still nervous.  So far so good.

Needless to say they went right to work eating everything in sight.  It was late afternoon before we put them out and their bellies were full of hay so I had little fear of bloat.  Everybody seemed to get along.  I only had to stop them from pacing the fence once.  Just me in a lawn chair with a camera.  They seem gentle.  Not pets but they don’t mind me being in the same zip code with them.  Big bellies, big butts, short legs.  They will mature a little on the heavy side for our ideal and they aren’t specifically bred for performance on fescue but…good looking cows.

So.  Now we’re hanging on for dear life.  Rolling through spring pasture.  Huge, heavy hoofprints pushing organic material deep into the pastures.  Pretty cool.  I need them to really abuse a section of pasture or two but I have to be careful not to stress them.  They’ve been on a hot feed in a feedlot for the past few months.  Grass-only is quite the change.  Further, we’re having trouble keeping May (the skinny Jersey) in condition.  She’s doing better right now but she’s not as much of an agressive eater as the other 7 cows.

Wish us luck and feel free to offer advice.

Sunday was awful.  Awful.  The wind picked up and I felt like I was fighting the scalder all day long.  Just awful.

As a quick review, we really like our Featherman equipment but you have to know its limitations.

The Featherman kill cones are awesome.  We find cleanup is easier if we fill the base with sawdust before we begin but the cones themselves owe me nothing.  The plucker may be the best thing ever.  Compared to the Whizbang we used before, the Featherman plucker is a dream.  Where before the birds would tear, legs would get stuck or the belt would fall off, with this beauty there is no belt, the fingers are very soft and we have never had a leg (or head) fall through.  On top of that I suspect, were one so inclined, the plucker would work on the moon.  Really.

But now the fun part.  I’ll start by saying in the old days we used a pot on a turkey fryer in conjunction with a number of pots warming water on an electric stove.  It was awful.  I was married to the scalder, holding two birds at a time in the water, hoping I was keeping the water at a consistent temperature and trying not to splash water into the burner.  Please understand, your whole processing experience hinges on getting a good scald.  If your scald is poor, your day will be long.  You will pick feathers all the way through to packaging…slowing that process down too.  So we got the Featherman one.  Bigger burner, larger thermal mass, automatic dunker.  Should be awesome right?

Well…it is.  But only under fair conditions.  You can’t expect a miracle.  If you are working outside in a 20 mph wind on a 30 degree morning you should hold off for better weather.  That was reinforced for us yesterday.  The first 10 or 12 birds were great.  From then on it was all downhill.  At 30 we decided to call it and go eat an early lunch as the propane tank had frozen.  The kids and I even fit in some goof-off time.  I fell asleep playing video games with them.  The kids thought it was hilarious.

By 1:00 the air temperature had risen enough that the scalder was back on top of its game…but out of propane.  I changed tanks, heated some water on the stove to kickstart the process and we dove into the work.  We worked at a slow pace as we were tired from processing the day before and finished up 115 birds by 3.

Beyond just understanding the limitations of the equipment, over the years we have made a few adjustments to make things better.  Let me start with the scalder:

• Work with the weather.  If it’s cold and windy either move indoors or wait until it is not cold and windy.  Similarly, if you want to play baseball at night, turn on bright lights or hold off till daytime.  I don’t know why this is so hard for me to remember.
• If the birds dress out above 4 pounds each you can only put one bird in each basket.  Smaller birds can double up.  The roto-dunker motor can only do so much lifting.
• Refill the water frequently.  Keep it full.  Refill with warm water if available to keep the burner from working so hard.
• There is an overflow location on your scalder.  Plug it.
• Be sure your scalder is parked level.  Even 1/4″ out of level and you risk the birds falling out.

Other processing tips?

• Sharp knives.  If your knives are razor sharp you do less cutting or sawing.  Less work means less tired.  Less tired is more good.
• Keep a bucket of water near kill station to clean your kill knife(-ves).  I now keep a gallon bucket of warm, soapy water on top of the kill station and drop my knife in every kill.  It is just more pleasant to use a knife that isn’t coated in dried blood.
• Be careful what you sell.  Years ago we offered a group of Asian customers more than we could deliver at a profit.  We offered chicken with feet and head still attached.  They loved it but the bird didn’t fit in a gallon Ziploc bag.  Again, it sold well but was inconvenient for us.  Sometimes customers ask for heads or feet or gizzards.  It would be nice to sell every part of the bird but there are no free lunches.  At some point we have to say no.
• Don’t use gallon Ziploc bags.
• Say no.  Yeah, I know.  Look.  Pencil it out.  It may sound like a great idea but every new idea takes more time.  And more energy.  And more packaging.  I have better things to do with my time than split gizzards.  Maybe when the kids are older.
• If you are going to cut up a bird make sure you are getting paid to do so.  The total of the bird cut into parts should be greater than the price of the bird intact.  If it’s not, either raise your prices or stop wasting your time.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.
• Give yourself enough time.  We can kill 100 birds in about the same time it takes us to clean up from killing any number of birds.  Clean up takes longer than you expect.  Plan for it.  After we clean up we shower, change and begin packaging the birds.  Again, this can take more time than you expect at a time when you are already tired.
• Plan to rest.  Chicken processing is intense, hard, heavy work.  I kill, scald and pluck.  That means I pick up each 7 pound bird when I pack it in a crate, load it into a cone, place it in the scalder, move it to the plucker and carry it to foot removal and final picking.  Along the way I pull the head.  Let’ me tell you, I’m sore the next day.  Plan to rest.

Other tips:
We (I) have made (make) a lot of stupid decisions…usually based on emotion.  Fear can keep you in bed.  Carelessness can cause major injury.  Short tempers can damage your relationship with your children…er…co-workers.  Raising chickens can make you swear off raising chickens.  But fear is paralyzing.  Fear is the mind killer.  Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.  Confront your fears.  Chicks will die for no apparent reason.  Chickens may not always die quickly.  A dying chicken will fling poop in your face.  You will cut your finger.  Some customers may complain about your prices.  Freezers full of meat may thaw.  You may lose money.  Your family may say, “I told you so”.  Once those fears are counted and compelled, they can quickly be dispelled.  Don’t be afraid.

Let me know if you have any additional tips for butchering day.  It’s hard work but little changes to the routine can make it better.  It seems to get better for us each year, beyond the kids growing up and becoming more helpful.

The cows are hard at work but really prefer to graze in the later hours of the day.  We still feed hay in the morning and Julie is milking once/day every other day, letting the calves take the rest.  The ground is soft from pigs and rain and there is a hoof print at least every square foot and a manure pat every square yard.  I have high hopes for this slope as it recovers.  The cows get a series of 20×20 areas throughout the day, anything they grazed 4 days ago gets fenced out.  They have room to move around, find a place to lay down and always fresh grazing.  The 4-day old grazing needs to be protected as it is beginning to recover.

The cows are regaining condition quickly.  They had about 3 weeks on the eastern face of this hill ending with the top of the hill.  That was largely a stand of henbit, chickweed, fodder oats, fescue and a mix of clovers.  That hill will now rest for at least 45 days before the cows see it again.  Later in the summer it will be more like a 90 day rest period.  I look forward to grazing this again in June…before it gets too hot as there is little shade on the slope.

Good night cows.  We have nearly 3″ of rain in the forecast for the next 30 hours.  I’ll do my best to keep your hooves on fresh ground and your bellies full.

After this hill we’ll take the cows back over West of the cemetery and work our way to the West.  Hopefully when we get there they will be joined by some new friends.  More on that another time.

Sorry the pictures are dark.  I had to take pictures after chores were finished…after I got off work.  Lots to do getting ready for the next round of monsoon.

I’m glad you asked.  Have you seen the Walmart cheer?  We don’t do that.  We walk or bike down to the alfalfa field (half mile?) and are greeted by the entire flock.  Then there are a couple of checks we do every time.

1. Are any layers dead?  It happens.  Something penetrates our fence, enduring the pain of electrocution in desperation for a free chicken dinner.  Or it flies in.  Whichever.  But it happens rarely but sometimes birds die.

2. Do they have water?

3. Do they have feed?  We now keep a 300# pasture feeder in the field.  We only feed the birds once each week.  It’s great.

4. Do they have shell?  No shell means broken eggs.

Then we check the chicken tractors.

2. Do they have water?  Do the birds have access to that water?

3. Are any broilers dead?  It’s rare but it does happen.  Most commonly happens when they are very young and pile on top of each other.  It can happen when they get just about butcher weight.  But it can also happen after a heavy rainstorm.  You will know because the birds will probably be laying on their face.  We have only had two deaths in a chicken tractor related to predation.  One morning we found two dead chickens in the same tractor.  They were young birds.  One was killed by talons of a predator through the chicken wire side.  The other was crushed under a pile of chickens trying to get away from the owl.  However, the owl never returned.  He banged into the side of the tractor and left a pile of his own feathers on the ground.  You may also find a bird laying on its back and looking purple.  Heart attack.  We had an americauna rooster die of a heart attack so it’s not just a CX thing.

4. Do they have feed?  We always feed the broilers.  I want to know if I fed them too much or not enough last time.  I want to offer them too much feed…but only a little too much.

Feed or not, I pull the feeders from the chicken tractors one at a time.  Then I use the dolly to move each tractor forward, waiting on the chickens to move, being careful not to run over any birds.  We find this goes better in the cool of the morning when the birds are hungry than in the evening when they are fat and the temperature is higher.  The dolly was a trade for 8 chickens.  He made it from sucker rod, angle iron and lawn mower wheels.

The layer houses also need moved because they too make serious deposits on the ground.

Feeders are filled and replaced, the water is filled again and we’re done for a couple of hours when we come back to feed and water again.  The broilers need our attention about every four hours or so.  If they go short on water they die.  If they go short on feed they don’t grow the way we need them to.

We can easily get away with checking the layers once/day when we gather the eggs.  All it takes is excess feed and water capacity.  But the broilers need our attention regularly.  Consequently we’re shortening our broiler production windows.  Keeping the two groups of birds together saves on time, reduces our fencing needs and limits waste from the broiler feeders.  Any food that hits the ground gets picked up by the layers eventually.

I am grazing my cows on remaining stockpile.  Mostly though, I’m packing them into a small area and feeding them hay.  I’m pushing carbon into the soil mostly on countour to the hill slope.  Will it work?  Well…it should.  We’ll see.  Maybe you’ll see the difference in the pasture over the next few years.

Normally I start taking pictures as I leave the house.  I’ll start todays’ walk by the horse barn instead.  Last month I took a picture of a down locust tree in a sea of fescue nubbins.  We burned the tree then overseeded with clover, orchardgrass, timothy and two kinds of rye grass and here’s what it looks like now (though the camera is pointed more to the right).

The horses ate it down to the nubbins but it’s coming back well and it’s coming back with additional diversity.  The real miracle here was that the horses showed me around 20 or so honey locust saplings.  BTW, the picture above is almost the same shot as the one in this picture.  I’ve cut a lot of hedge in the last year.  There is a lot more to cut…and this is just one of my hedge forests.  Many of the stumps are sprouting so I’ll have an ongoing supply of thorns and firewood in 5-10 years.  Also, a pair of rabbits are living in the brush pile we built last year, though I only see them when I am out walking at night.

The plan is to allow this to sit idle until July or so.  Once the drought hits I’ll have a stockpile of grass for the cows to tromp and eat through.  There are about 2 acres here.  With luck, that will be just the bridge I need to allow my main pastures to recover fully.  Then we’ll graze this again over the winter.  Next year we’ll allow a different patch of land to go.  This builds up carbon over time, allows ground-nesting birds to have a home and helps us keep our cows fat.

The top of the hill was also grazed by the horses but not as intensively.  It’s still a thick mass of fescue but was well pounded by running, playing horses and heavily manured.  Good enough.

But there are still clumps of moss growing on the North face of the hill.  Where there is moss there is not grass.  Where there are hooves there is no moss.  I need more hooves…more pressure…to allow the grass to compete.

On the topic of hedge, below the cemetery I cut out a single hedge tree that fell over and continued growing.  One tree, laying on its side, killing grass over a 40′ circle.  This tree was the source of the pile of wood featured in a recent Facebook post.  There is still an equal amount of wood waiting for me to cut now.  I have opened up more area for grazing and rid myself of a sick tree but cost myself small game habitat.  That’s why I build brush piles.  Quail and rabbits need shelter.  If I won’t allow dead and dying trees to create that shelter naturally I have to do it myself.  I also can’t continue cutting out undesirable trees without replacing them with something else or planning for their regrowth .  More on that in a future post.

The cows grazed their way through the bottom in January.  There wasn’t much out there for them to eat as it was a serious weed patch, as was most of the pasture before we began.  We spent an afternoon pulling sprouts out with a tractor last winter.  This year it was just graze and let it grow.  It’s growing.  But I’ll need some pressure to keep the weeds at bay and give the grasses a competitive advantage.  To be honest, I’m a little worried.  Goldenrod, ragweed and burrdock are clearly dominant down here.  I don’t want it to look like this:

There’s a little wedge of pasture West of our house by the road.  When you come to our farm, this is what you see.  Looks great, doesn’t it?  I need to get a tractor in there to pull out the snags and rip out the sprouts but the whole thing is a thorny mess.  Just like the bottom used to be.  It’s an awful lot like work.  I try to let the cows do as much of it as I can.

The pigs are in their final pasture position before shipping on Tuesday.  You can see the kind of disturbance they create.  That’s what we hire them to do.  Right now I’m not grinding their feed.  Among other things, they get cracked corn, roasted soybeans and whole oats.  The oats are still whole when they come back out.  In a few weeks I’ll have a rich, strong stand of oats on my slope for the cows to graze through…thanks to the pigs plowing, manuring and seeding.

The layer flock is in the same fence with the broilers on the alfalfa field.  You can see an outline in the picture above showing where the chicken tractor had been moments before.  The layers rush in to scratch through the manure and to gobble up any feed the broilers wasted.  Both this and the neighbor’s alfalfa fields look purple right now from all the henbit blooms (and buzzing with bees).  The hens bit the henbit here.  None of it is left within the fenced area.  The alfalfa is nibbled back but recovers quickly.  Doing this may be risky in terms of the lifetime of the alfalfa stand but we not only get 4 cuttings of alfalfa here, we also get 500 chickens per acre and …I don’t even know how many dozen eggs, not to mention the fertility the birds put back into the soil.  Am I hurting my alfalfa stand?  I really don’t think so.

Back to the cows.  Molly is chewing here cud in the sunlight.  Life is good.  You can see the distant hillside still recovering from the pigs who were there until October or November.  I see this less as a problem and more as a matter of time.  There is manure, carbon, seeds and living plant roots out there.  With help from cow hooves I’m sure the scars will heal quickly.  I present the grass in the foreground as evidence.  Those same pigs were there in August.  The cows aren’t scheduled to return to the cemetery hill until late May or even June.

Mostly fescue but it’s growing.  There is a fair amount of clover mixed in as well.  We’ll get there.

I spent the winter gathering horse, pig, rabbit and chicken manure…all mixed with sawdust and straw.  We turned that pile a couple of times and watched the temperature vary.

I don’t own a broadfork but I might make one.  As a substitute I used my pitchfork to loosen the soil 12″ deep.  I didn’t turn the soil, I just broke it up a bit.  Then we began delivering manure one fork full at a time.

One 12 year old, one 36 year old and a couple of pitchforks.  The youngest two used rakes.  Julie and the oldest daughter were at a hair appointment.  Can you believe that?

So we worked.

…and worked…

…until finally mom showed up and we let her do the rest.  Mom took over planting onions, cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower and sent me off to find something else that was heavy and needed moving.  Like the brooder.

The center row is currently vacant but we’ll plant peas there tomorrow.  The next row to the right is this year’s potato row so that’s on tomorrow’s list too.  We also plan to plant tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse tomorrow-ish.  Once again, rows need to be cleaned out before we can start.  Ugh.

I’m very pleased with the amount of work we accomplished in a very short time.  The garden is well established, we just have to maintain the fertility year by year.  Everything needs a good covering of wood chips and we’ll coast through this growing season as we usually do…light weeding on Sundays, ignoring it otherwise.  Just add water.