April 17, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Patience and Kindness

These aren’t my kids. These aren’t my cows. This isn’t my farm. I don’t even know these people…but I would like to meet them. This isn’t an average dairy. Nothing about these videos is typical…but it should be.

These kids do a great job of walking you through their tiny dairy and their herd, though they filmed these in shake-o-vision…lol.

Patience and Kindness.

We found these videos when we were reviewing milkers. We’re going to milk two goats and a cow this year, four goats and two cows next year. That’s a lot of work for my poor wife’s hands so we’re going to upgrade. They use two of the milkers we were looking at.

Embedding is turned off for part 1 so you’ll have to follow the link.

Here’s part 2. Look out for the cow rear and also notice the milker that is like those used 90 years ago. Nothing like a lasting quality product.

There are lots of things I would do differently but we learned a lot watching their videos. Again, I don’t know who these people are but I’m going to try to meet them. Shoot, they only live 12 hours away. They haven’t just taught their kids to work, they have taught their kids working is fun and that the animals are to be respected and loved. They are inspiring greatness in their children. Well done.

Patience and Kindness.

April 17, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Market Day or The Great Pig Rodeo

So there I was. Backed up to the chute at the locker. There was a gap between the chute and the trailer but not so much that I was worried. Then Eyeliner broke through. He didn’t walk down the hallway, he made a break for it. 7 adults with a rope and a few muttered curses corralled, chased and herded the pig. Nobody lost their temper but nobody was amused.

…20 minutes later we unloaded Blue. More carefully this time.

Ah, the joys of keeping a 300 pound intelligent animal that doesn’t have a handle.

It didn’t start this way. It started pretty well in fact. I made a long, thin corral of pig quick fence leading from their pasture to the trailer.

You can see in the second picture I have narrowed the corral so the pigs can’t wander away to explore. Any exploring they do will be around the trailer. We put a straw bale at the rear of the trailer so the pigs could step up easier and put a little food inside to coax them in. It didn’t take long and Eyeliner’s curiosity got the best of him. Once Eyeliner was in, Blue decided breakfast sounded pretty good but he wasn’t willing to put his back legs in the trailer. I jumped the gun, grabbed him by the back legs and tried to wheelbarrow him in. Well…it was a good plan.

Eyeliner stayed put. In fact, I closed Eyeliner in the front half of the trailer. Blue wasn’t having any more. Ultimately, we used sorting boards and pizza to get him back to the trailer. Then I just picked him up and helped him in. Lifting 220 pounds of weight is well within my range. Lifting 220 pounds of wriggling mass when there is nothing to hang on to is something else.

I love keeping pigs. I just like having them around. I like the noises they make. I like the disturbance they bring to the pasture. I like that they are always so happy to see me…I mean, I bring them food and scratch their ears for 5 months. They think I’m the greatest person in the world. I make them lie down in green pastures, they tear it up and I give them another green pasture. Don’t worry, the clods will be rolled flat with cow hooves, the grass will grow back stronger than ever before and the thorny trees will die. Die! DIE!!!!! Sorry…

Anyway, are you with me here? I like these animals. Today could have gone much worse but it could have gone better. Again, nobody lost their temper, no animals were abused and the bacon will be great but I know I can make this better for my pigs. To this point, our pig operation has been an experiment. I have been reluctant to make any investments in permanent handling equipment. I even house the pigs under pallets and tarp for crying out loud. I think it is time to reopen our copy of Humane Livestock Handling and get cracking on a real loading chute. As convenient as the pig quick fence is, a real loading chute would be better for all parties involved.

Joel Salatin says his animals have a “wonderful life and one bad day.” I want to cut that down to a few bad seconds. My loading and unloading has to get better.

One more thing, this is Blue.

When we first got Blue he had a rupture (hernia) in his penis. It was swollen, had three distinct bulges, was dragging the ground and had a red, raw, bloody patch where it hit the ground. This weakness would have killed him in confinement. We gave him no antibiotics and no medications. We did rub a Neosporin-like salve on the wound the first day but beyond that he has been on his own. We were afraid we would have to butcher him at about 60 pounds but he came out of it. It was just a matter of changing his conditions, his feed and his feeding schedule.

Good old Blue.

It has been 2 hours. I already miss the pigs. I need to make a phone call to make arrangements for the next group.

April 15, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Ghosts of Processing Equipment Past

We have used a variety of homemade equipment for several years. Today we remembered why we were upgrading away from it.

We use transport boxes and kill cones we got from this APPPA article. The transport boxes are great. I cut them out and my then 10 year old son assembled them. I probably need more than 10 but where do you store empty boxes when they are not in use? When we were much smaller we used a wagon to tote the boxes around.

The cones listed in the link above could be better. I won’t say they were awful but they aren’t great. They served their purpose for two years but needed a lot of attention along the way. $35 seemed like a lot of money for a cone but I now believe it is worth the it.

We have been using a turkey fryer or the side burner on our old hand-me-down grill to keep our scald water hot. This could be better. Normally we also keep several pots of boiling water on the stove so we can replenish the water when it cools down. Cool water leads to an incomplete scald and and unhappy Steward pulling wing and tail feathers with a pliers.

Then we move to the Whizbang plucker. Really, this isn’t a bad little unit and can be used to amaze your friends but it’s not good for more than 20 birds at a time. After about 20 birds you need to move it away from the pile of feathers or the mass of feathers will knock the belt off the drive pulley. This gets old when you are trying to process 150 birds. A belt tensioner would be a good addition.

We got a stainless steel table from some friends. It is awesome and will continue to be a part of our process. However, Mrs. Steward’s back gets sore eviscerating chickens at this table all morning. She wants to move to hanging shackles. Hanging shackles it is.

We needed to find an upgrade solution that was a good value and met our current and near-term production needs. I am not processing 400 chickens/hour. I just need equipment appropriate to keep three adults and a child or two busy for a couple of hours in the morning. Something that will get about 80% of our capacity so we don’t kill ourselves. We are going with a package from Featherman Equipment. After today’s fiasco I can’t wait for it to get here. It should arrive Tuesday. We don’t plan to process until Saturday…if we can wait that long.

I would like to add that we weren’t even considering Featherman Equipment until we met with David (the owner) at a recent conference. His price, quality and proximity all favored his product. Plus, the videos he put on Youtube years ago showed us everything that the books couldn’t quite describe. The videos alone make him a hero in our book. His prices put him over the top.

April 15, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Vocabulary word: Audible

Normally, this kind of post belongs at the 20 Acre Academy but I’ll post it here.

Audible.

Used in a sentence:

I lifted the metal top of the chicken tractor with my left hand and heard an audible pop as the wind blew the electric fence against my back.

or another sentence:

Language I normally contain may have been audible by the pond as my left arm began to tingle.

Just so you know, this solar charger kicks like a mule. I’m going to relocate the fence. Whew!

April 14, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

What should this cost?

What should a chicken cost? Mr. Steward, you sell a chicken for about $15. I can buy one at the supermarket for $7. Why should I pay more?

Thank you for asking.

Mine is better. Need more detail than that?

Efficiency. Everyone who has seen Fight Club knows that waste is a thief. Efficiency is key. Profit is the reward for efficiency. If I, as a chicken producer, can make my chicken more efficiently I can either lower my price or keep it high so I can make more money. My profit margins are ultimately driven by either my direct competitors or by consumer substitutions (beef vs. chicken). I am driven to increase efficiency to punish my competitors…rewarding consumers who buy my product. You with me so far?

But what happens when we allow our motivation for efficiency (profit) to override morality?

This is called Free Range/Cage Free...

Highly Efficient...

Not only are the chickens packed in, they are typically fed the remains of other manufacturing processes, not whole grains, and subtheraputic levels of antibiotics. They get the remains of the corn that has already been made into ethanol, corn oil, corn syrup or ??? They are not in the sunlight. They don’t have their large talons in the grass.

Because I am a moral man I cannot go beyond a certain level of efficiency. These are biological, not mechanical structures. My chickens are healthy, given enough room to grow and play, and are given a healthy diet consisting primarily of locally grown whole grains sans antibiotics. As they eat grass, alfalfa and bugs they make a mess. I move them away from that mess daily onto fresh grass, alfalfa and new bugs. This is good for the chicken and great for the soil and local ecology but fairly inefficient. I am not trying to feed the world…maybe 25 families. My lack of scale and efficiency raises my sale price. You can either be efficient or moral. I chose not to compromise my morality.

If you, as a moral consumer, think it is important to buy a healthy chicken that was raised in a way that is beneficial to the environment you will not only be willing to pay more for this bird, you will refuse to buy from efficient, but immoral producers. An unmedicated chicken raised on pasture in small numbers, fed whole grains and treated respectfully costs more money. It also tastes better and is healthier to eat. That’s a lot easier to swallow.

This thinking may also apply to t-shirts but that’s another conversation for another day.

April 11, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Doing it All Wrong!

I’m doing it wrong. All of it. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Grandpa didn’t do it this way. Dad doesn’t do it this way. None of the neighbors do it this way. It’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m going to either go broke or wear myself out doing this. Oh, the things people say to me…

“You’re going to kill that beautiful alfalfa stand running chickens over it like that.”

“You can’t sell enough chickens to make a living. Even if you could, the workload would kill you.”

“Nobody is going to pay $X for eggs.”

“You’re a smart guy with a good job. Why do you want to be a farmer?”

“You’re not a farmer. You don’t till soil.”

“We can’t feed the world farming the way you do it.”

“Who has the time to move the cows several times each day? That’s a lot of work.”

“What do you mean you’re only feeding your cows grass?”

“Who in their right mind would want to milk a goat?”

“Raw milk will kill you. Look at our ancestors…they’re all dead!” (OK, that was a joke.)

“Did you see [Popular Reality Show] last night? No? What do you do out there? I would DIE without my TV!”

“How can you just kill a chicken? I mean, it’s alive. I couldn’t eat anything that used to be alive.”

“Oh. You home school your kids. You’re one of those people.”

“Even if it pollutes drinking water and helps to destroy the Earth, a flushing toilet is a basic human right!”

“I just can’t imagine why you would want to live out here.” (Nevermind that they live here voluntarily…)

“Well, you’ll learn. No, just go on ahead and do that. I tried it once. You’ll learn.”

“Your kids will hate you for this.”

“I used to think like that.”

Yup. Again, feel free to move out to the stix, buy a little scrap of land and try to make it productive. Be sure to have thick skin, write down your vision and be in total unity with your spouse/business partner/whatever. Well-intentioned friends, family and neighbors will fearlessly tell you how wrong you are, how quickly you will go broke and what a mess you will make of things if you do it your way. Find a way to filter their input while maintaining relationships. You need those people, even if they tend to be negative.

Not everything you do will work. Not every idea is great. Once in a while your detractors will be right. Don’t be defeated. There will be awful days when you feel like a total failure, when you have wasted significant sums of money, when your dreams become nightmares or when that little goat you spent a week feeding, loving and worrying over dies in your arms…poor Shivers. A friend recently filled a 5-gallon bucket with dead baby chicks. He analyzed the problem, made some adjustments and worked to do better. Don’t be defeated.

Finally, never tell the next generation, “I used to think like that” or “I tried that once”. Tell them to keep improving. Expect them to keep looking for new ways to solve old problems. Button your lip as you help them back to their feet.

April 10, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

Where are the goats?

The goats finished cleaning up their pasture and since I have a vacation day today I thought we should go ahead and move them a day early. They moved to an extra-large area loaded with field pennycress, thistle and Osage orange and honey locust saplings.

This opened a new place for the layers to run and play. The pasture below looked like the picture above three days ago.

Finally, here’s a shot of the pasture the chickens left behind. Fewer bugs, even fewer weeds, lots of additional nitrogen and plenty of disturbance. Now it’s time for rest.

Disturbance and rest. Disturbance and rest. The greater the intensity, the longer the recovery period. Disturbance and rest. This applies to your own body, not just to grass and dirt. Did you experience intense physical disturbance today or just rest?

April 10, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

The Hare Pen Part 2

Why a part 2? Because I am very happy with what I see out there.

Black Gold. Deposited in neat little rows on my grass. I don’t even have to haul it.

This is where the hare pen sat all night, surrounded by polywire. The manure isn’t very evenly distributed but that really doesn’t matter. The earthworms say thanks.

The longer you leave them in one place the more manure they put down but the more pellets they will eat. If you’re looking to lower your feed bill, move them more frequently. If you are trying to increase fertility quickly, you could carry in pellets, hay, fresh clippings. We are just using them to trim up small patches of grass around the garden. It’s nice not to run the lawn mower.

April 9, 2012 by Head Farm Steward

The Hare Pen

My oldest son has been wanting to build one of these for a while. I took a little vacation time to wrap up some things around the farm and this project was on the list. It’s a hare pen. It measures 6’x3′ and is 24″ tall on one side, 18″ tall on the other. 3/4″x1″ slats are screwed to the bottom on 3″ centers. That’s as much of a plan as you’re going to get anywhere. This is enough room for 8-12 rabbits.

The roof is covered with three scraps of metal we found out back. The two on the ends are nailed on, the middle one is nailed to a couple of boards to give it weight but floats freely and is easily removable so we can load and unload it easily.

At least 70% of the floor space is open to the ground. The rabbits are free to graze to their heart’s content, though they also have access to pellets. We move them a couple of times each day, leaving their manure behind to add to our fertility.

Here are a few links I used to put together my own hare pen. I have fewer ribs than the original Salatin pen but it seems to work fine. My kids can manage it on their own.

Grady’s post on Hare Pens.

Video of the Hare Pen in action (from 1:08 till about 3:00)

Survival Podcast Start at around 31 minutes for this detail.