I am sad to report that we are not yet living on the farm land. This has been an on going battle with the double wide dealer, and weather and other trades all being behind because COVID (well the weather has nothing to do with COVID… anyway). Despite not living there, Steve didn’t want to lose another year farming while we wait to move. He bought Dolly for me as a Christmas present and she has since had her bull calf; we named him Declan. Besides Dolly, we have added twelve American Guinea hogs and two Boer goats to our five chickens. Despite every neighbor telling us that our chickens would be eaten by coyotes, they have survived for six months.
We have learned a lot already about our animals as they help us expand their pasture, how to more efficiently care for them and their temperaments with each other. We move the cows, goats and pigs at least once a week on to new land so they don’t tear it up too badly and so they have plenty of fresh forage to eat.
I thought that cows just ate grass. I was wrong. Our majestic forest cows really like to eat white oak saplings. Dolly runs the trunk of the tree along her neck until its bent enough that she can eat the leaves. As we would clear a path for her new paddock, we would give her the saplings we cut down to munch on and I know she appreciates that. On the last day she is in any particular area we spread grass seed, the idea being that she is stomping in the seeds and will help with germination so that by the time she circles around back to that area, there is something for her to eat.
The goats are still babies so they can’t really keep up with Dolly clearing and we have plans to run the cows and the goats together in the same paddock in the future.
Very overweight piggies
The pigs do an even better job with the ground. At first we were over feeding them with supplemental feed, then we put them on a diet (which they did not like very much). Now they almost exclusively forage and it’s so cool to watch them tear apart a log looking for bugs, or digging roots out of the ground. So, now we know what a healthy pig is supposed to look like (the picture is an example of a piggy that has had too much grain). The female that we are going to keep for breeding needs to lose weight if she is going to be a good breeder for us. They are the sweetest of all our animals though; they love belly scratches and they come when they whistle.
Right now we only have five chickens. We plan on getting 100 chicks once we move, because we have decide that we are going to sell eggs as one of our revenue streams. For now though, the five chickens we have are truly free range. They tend to stick close to the pigs. They love to jump in the feed buckets when we feed the other animals, and they rake through the poop when we move paddocks. It’s rather impressive to see the old paddocks after a day or two of the chickens scratching around; it’s like the poop was never there.
Anyway, we continue to grow and our processes are ever changing. I am the one who keeps telling Steve to stop buying animals while we have yet to move but overall I am very happy with what we have going on. I am happy that we have growing pasture area because of the animals doing animal things. And that, in a nut shell, is exactly what we want to do. We want to be a farm that uses nature and the balance that God already created to be productive and sustainable and healthy.
