Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Spring
Warning - picture-heavy post ahead.
Spring on the farm is both exciting and exhausting. There is so much going on after winter has passed, everything starting up all at once. This is to give you some idea of what we’ve been up to, and why my posting has been a bit scarce lately.
As I am sure you will notice, I am not the world’s best photographer. I see things for what they are, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. My photography tends to reflect that, for better or for worse.
We have varying success with different breeds of animals. I can’t tell you why exactly, but with very few exceptions we’ve always been successful with milk cows.
About four years ago, we decided to get a milk cow just for family use. We found a local farmer, bought a Jersey-cross from him, had her delivered, and all was well. We asked this farmer if the cow was used to electric fences, and if a single strand would be sufficient. Of course, he said, that’s how his farm was laid out.
That lasted about thirty minutes. The cow went right through the fence, looking for her herd. Given that she didn’t know us, she wouldn’t hold still for us as we tried to catch her. We chased her around the neighborhood for about four hours before finally trapping her in someone’s barn. At that point, we didn’t even know how to get her home, so I called the farmer, in somewhat of a panic, asking if he could come haul her back to our place for us. He grudgingly agreed. He unloaded her, and we immediately tied her up.
Over the next couple days, it became abundantly clear that we were in over our heads. This cow had torn a teat while running through the forest. Between the injury, the new environment, and our inexperience, she had no interest in letting us milk her. When a thousand pound animal is dead-set against being milked, there’s not much you can do about it.
Without milking her, we were afraid one of two things were going to happen. One, she would dry up and be a huge useless mouth to feed. Two, she would get mastitis, an udder infection sometimes caused by being insufficiently milked out, and we could end up with a dead cow. Again I went hat in hand to the farmer, asking him to bail us out by taking the cow back. He did, and I gave him some money for his trouble. I didn’t give him nearly enough.
After licking our wounds for awhile, we worked up some courage and tried again. This time, with a calf. We went back to that same farmer, who I am surprised let us back on his farm, and bought a ten day old calf, just weaned. We bottle-fed her, took care of her, and nurtured her, until she grew into a beast affectionately nicknamed “Moose”. Every bovine on our farm now is descended from that cow.
The picture above shows the two calves born this year, daughter and grandson of that original cow. The one on the left is about a week and a half old, and the one on the right is about eight hours old. I admit, there is a certain amount of pride we feel in how far we’ve come.
This is Moose, aka Wensleydale, out on pasture. We grass-fed our livestock as much as possible, leaving them on pasture from April to November unless drought strikes. They are happier, cleaner, more healthy, and it saves us the work and expense of cutting hay and bringing it to them.
Goats are frustrating animals. Well-trained cattle are hardy, easy to work, easy to keep contained, and mostly non-destructive to their surroundings. Goats have none of these admirable qualities. Being upland animals rather than prairie animals, they are used to a different environment and a more mineral-rich diet than what can be naturally provided in my area. We do our best to supplement their feed, but still, something always seems to be missing. Worse, because goats are smaller animals with no real commercial purpose, for many years they’ve been bred for pets and show animals rather than for livestock. They require coddling, and we have neither the time nor the inclination to do that. Some members of our family are not able to drink cow milk, so we keep the goats around for them. However, they are an exercise in frustration, with many more failures than successes. Pictured here are three of the six kids born this year.
Sheep are similar to goats in that they are from a more upland area, with the resulting difficulty in getting them feed with an appropriate nutrient profile. However, they are much more interesting and beautiful animals from my point of view. Easier to fence, not willfully destructive (except for the occasional ram in rut), while being independent and smart in their own sheep-like way. We chose to keep Icelandic sheep because of their intelligence and their ability to withstand cold weather. Because of the diet issues, we have not had a lot of success with them, but we still keep them around for meat and wool.
One of our more ambitious projects this year is a rather large garden. We’ve tried gardening many times before, only to fail miserably as the summer wears on and more important things come up. One thing that I never before realized that is now obvious in hindsight - gardening is nowhere near as easy at one might think. Till, plant, water, harvest. Right? Nope. All of that, and hundreds of little details to coax your plants towards producing something edible.
Out of everything we’ve done, the garden has been most instructive in terms of teaching us how much knowledge of food production has been lost on current generations. We are book-learners - if we want to do something, we find a book on the topic and dive in. That didn’t work at all when it came to gardening. This year, my wife is working with a friend on the garden, going to bare ground to as much preserved food as possible for both our families. This friend learned to garden from her Japanese father, who learned to garden from his father. No one in our families is available to teach us, so we use the resources available to us and end up with knowledge that isn’t even a part of our own culture. It’s a small world here in this melting pot that is America.
Would you believe that most chickens these days are bred so heavily for commercial purposes that they won’t even reproduce if left to their own devices? We’ve tried for years to create a self-sustaining flock of chickens. This year, we are trying a few birds of several different breeds, hoping to find one that is hardy, able to reproduce, and still produces enough meat and eggs to pay their way. Also in that brooder are a hundred and some “junk birds” - males of egg-laying breeds that are “useless” and therefore are dirt cheap. We’re raising them this year as cheap meat, and to see if birds from egg-laying breeds have enough meat on them to make them worthwhile.
Pigs are another difficult animal, though they are one that we cannot live without. Pork is one of our favorite meats, and unfortunately, we are finding piglets increasingly hard to come by. Pigs are destructive because they love to dig. Therefore, they need to be kept in fairly expensive specialized housing. At least, the three hundred pound breeding animals do. Few people breed pigs, and it seems that over time, more and more of the smaller producers are getting out of the business. We are left buying piglets from large producers that breed fragile unhealthy animals that have never seen the light of day. Our pigs are raised in a large pen in the woods, so they get fresh air and natural shade. We are finding though that if they were born and weaned in an enclosed facility, the mortality rate upon switching to our method is unacceptably high. Primitive housing for pigs may be less efficient, but it makes for healthier animals and much higher quality meat. I fear for the future, as our options in this area become fewer and fewer. I do not want to have to raise piglets myself.
The tractors.
We own plenty of hay field for our needs, but we are right on the edge of being too small to make owning, storing, and repairing a tractor of our own cost-effective. We end up paying a couple thousand dollars a year to hire someone to cut and bale our hay. We’ve decided to remedy this situation, while taking a slightly different road to meet our needs. Due to the fact that we are a fairly small operation, we don’t necessarily need the power and efficiency that a tractor provides. Therefore, we have the ability to try a less time-efficient, but more cost-effective route - horses and horse drawn equipment. There are quite a few Amish people in our area, and though the network is sometimes hard to tap into, there are quite a few local resources for primitive yet highly sophisticated and functional equipment. Last fall we bought a pair of trained draft horses, and since then, we’ve been rounding up older haying equipment.
We’re finding that haying with horses is easier said than done. Tractors go when you tell them to - horses aren’t necessarily quite so cooperative. These horses are well-trained, but they are easily frightened by loose dogs in the neighborhood. We are currently working on getting the horses to trust us to protect them, and to obey us even under difficult circumstances. It’s a difficult and frustrating situation, depending on two “tractors” with minds of their own, but I suspect it will be very rewarding when it is all worked out.
We’ve got a few other minor operations underway - rabbits, beehives, etc - but that’s enough to give you a flavor of what’s going on around here. Yes, it’s a lot of work. If it were economically feasible, I’d be doing it full-time. The sense of accomplishment on the farm is nothing at all like the satisfaction one gets from a desk job. It is definitely more efficient to work the desk job and to buy food that someone else has raised. However, life is about more than simple efficiency. It is also about satisfying work, a peaceful environment in which to live, and a healthy and stimulating place to raise kids.
You could never convince me to go back to the city.
Comments
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Lovely post. Nice to see pictures to bring memories current and corrected.
I’m with you on the garden thing--have always loved it. Ours is doing better this year than ever before (despite all the pains and difficulties in getting it in). Kim went out with me to weed last night, after the rain stopped and the weather was cooler. I don’t think he’d ever done that before (to a veggie garden). My beds are raised, so it doesn’t require bending to do it.
“This is actually quite nice” he said to me. He explained how it was nice to participate in making our food grow, and how just touching the soil felt good.
I told him “Yeah, that’s why we do it. Every gardener in the world hates weeding, but touching the soil makes up for it.”
Actually, I hate gardening, even if playing in dirt is fun. I do it for the output, not because I take any joy in the tasks themselves. Same for cooking. I HATE cooking, but if I want food cooked properly and within my budget, I have to do it myself… same for designing, sewing, parenting, schooling, etc.
But that’s where it ends. I, as you know, have as much desire to work on a farm as I do to live in prison. I would love to be a gentlewoman farmer, and have other people do the work, while I watch it all from the comfort of an air conditioned room, with a nice cup of hot tea.
It is still interesting to read about your love of it. I can get it. I just don’t share it. But, just like touching the soil feels good in ways you cannot explain to others, so does reading about how other people find that little bit of contentment and pleasure in their lives, even if you don’t find pleasure that same way.
Mrs. du Toit | 5/28/2008 04:19 PM CDT -
I miss the farm. Maybe this year we will get things set up for a garden next year. No real experience growing edible plants (spent a lot of my youth on a dairy farm)so I should kill a lot of plants. Hopefully learn something from it, and do something productive.
Cobar | 5/28/2008 11:14 PM CDT -
Yes, a lovely and somewhat terrifying post - Lost knowledge of food production, chickens that will not reproduce on their own, no small producers of piglets- all this reinforces my fears about our “just in time’ food distribution network, so heavily dependent (entirely dependent?) on diesel fuel and the modern highway system.
Read somewhere that the average food item is transported more than 1000 miles from grower to consumer. Sometimes I think we are engaged in building a ever higher house of cards.
Kudos’s on your efforts, it is an amazing amount of work! Do your raise the male offspring of your milk cows as steers for meat?raven | 5/29/2008 07:51 AM CDT -
Oddly enough, this is the first year we’ve had a bull calf. Last year’s heifer calf is genetically 3/4 a beef breed, so we will be eating her. And yes, the bull calf born this year will be for beef.
I should also add that we do not keep a bull. We hired someone to artificially inseminate our cow the first year, but after that, they decided that we lived too far out in the boonies for them to want to be coming out every year. So my wife got trained on how to do it, and we rent a nitrogen tank every year and buy a few straws of semen of whatever breed we want. This year - Brown Swiss.
We do our own butchering too, for everything except hogs and beef. They are heavy enough that we just don’t have the facilities to handle them ourselves. We would like to remedy that in the future, however.
American Farmer | 5/29/2008 11:52 AM CDT -
A rural friend told me once that he’d had good luck one year tilling his garden by turning the pigs loose in it. Another year, he had horrible luck, because he left them in too long, and they trod the soil too compact.
Sounds like an interesting, free tiller, though.
Weetabix | 5/29/2008 12:03 PM CDT -
We do deep bedding for the horses, cows, and goats in the winter, meaning we just keep on throwing bedding in there until it gets a foot or more thick. It starts to compost which creates heat, which in turn keeps the animals warmer and reduces our feed requirements. It gets really packed down by spring, making it VERY hard to clean out by hand.
We figured we’d get smart one year, so in the spring we moved the grazers out to pasture and put the piglets in the yard to turn up the bedding. We figured once they loosened it up, it would be cake to dig it out.
Once they were big enough to turn the bedding, they were also big enough that they were NOT going to move. Pigs are stubborn destructive creatures. If they don’t want to go, they are not going to go. That yard was home, and home it stayed until slaughter time.
By the end of the year, they had completely destroyed that yard and shed. They dug it out so well that it is still a low spot collecting water, even after 50 bales of straw. These days, the pigs get their own yard someplace where I don’t care how much earthmoving they do.
I’ve heard of people digging ponds, finding that they aren’t watertight, and then using pigs to compact the soil until the pond will hold water. Never tried it myself.
American Farmer | 5/29/2008 02:17 PM CDT -
It’s still fairly common to see pigs raised outdoors in small farm operations in western Canada ... don;t see anything but mega-farm operations in the parts of northern US that I’m familiar with. You can (seemingly) smell the large operations from several hundred miles away, while the small farms around us in Alberta just smelled like a farm ... you knew they had animals.
I can’t bring myself to do deep bedding ... I recall my first year of high school ... working on a dairy farm for the summer. My first job was to dig out the sty ... where I was shovelling two feet of compacted swine “compost”. I cannot abide dirty bedding, so we switched to sawdust (just picked up a load today for a neighbor, I’m good for another month myself) ... easy to cleana and provides decent cover for the rubber mats.
Your comments about the horses being harder to steer made me chuckle. No offense intended ... but I’ve found that just because the animals were trained to respond to certain commands doesn’t mean the operator is real good at the communication required (yet). LOL ... the training requires both parties be in synch.
I envy you the breadth of the operation ... you’re doing what I’ve always considered a real family farm to be ... lots of animal husbandry to go with the crop production.
Now if I could just convince my wife that the horses are edible and it would solve the suprplus stud problem we have ..... LOLpete in Midland | 5/30/2008 12:32 PM CDT -
No offense taken - I’m quite sure more than half the problem with the horses is me. I’m a total novice with them, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can without screwing them up too badly.
American Farmer | 5/30/2008 12:53 PM CDT -
Some years ago when I got the first minis for my wife, I took her to another owners place to get some lessons. It was actually funny seeing how a trained horse reacted to a trained operator ... and then to my wife who was as green as spring grass.
Everytime she decides it’s time to “practice” again, after I do all the harnessing and hooking up .... I lead the horse, while she sits in the cart and uses the reins ... and I try to anticipate what she’s going to do so I don’t confuse the poor horse.
One advantage to minis ... if they get the bit in their teeth ... I’m STILL bigger than they are ... LOL
pete in Midland | 6/2/2008 04:09 PM CDT -
One of our more ambitious projects this year is a rather large garden. We’ve tried gardening many times before, only to fail miserably as the summer wears on and more important things come up. One thing that I never before realized that is now obvious in hindsight - gardening is nowhere near as easy at one might think. Till, plant, water, harvest. Right? Nope. All of that, and hundreds of little details to coax your plants towards producing something edible.
Well, besides the few things you mentioned, plus fertilizing, weeding, and treating for pests, I can’t think of anything else that we ever did to get a very successful garden when I was young. My father always had so much garden that we would give food away all summer and STILL have enough to can and freeze everything under the sun. I think he used almost an acre for his garden, for the three of us, plus giving away to the neighbors, family, friends, etc. Looking back, if I had been more on the ball, I could have made a tidy living in the summer just by harvesting what we didn’t use and selling it at a farmer’s market.
WayneB | 6/4/2008 09:35 AM CDT -
I love spring!
Abel | 6/22/2008 07:35 AM CDT
