a3

Poultry Schooner

2010-09-15T11:22:00.001-04:00

We looked at the mobile shelters used by our good friends at Cognito Farms. Then we shamelessly stole their basic plan.

We found an old boat trailer that was too screwed up to carry a boat around and scrounged through our various scrap piles and the ruins of our old shelter.

This is the result.

We planed to build it one Saturday. We finished it after two full weekends. I'll admit to muttering a few four letter words in the process.

It is a collection of used materials set mostly at 87 degree angles. Any competent carpenter would be appalled, but the chickens seem to like it just fine.

The back part, under the tarp, is a varmint proof (we hope) roosting area. The chickens get shut in there at night. We let them out in the daytime. Food and water is outside. The chickens access the nest boxes from the inside. We open the doors from the outside to collect the eggs.

We don't need to clean the shelter, other than the nest boxes sometimes. The floor is cage metal so the poop just falls throught onto the ground.

We just move the whole thing to a new place every few days. We have a hitch on the tractor three point so we can move it without even getting off the tractor.

At the moment we have twenty something hens and a couple of roosters. The shelter can accommodate more birds than that, up to maybe fifty at the most.

The trip to easter dinner

2010-04-01T18:27:00.005-04:00

I took a trip to the butcher shop yesterday. Some of the last of the market lambs needed to start their journey to Easter dinner.

The butcher shop we use is over near the County seat, about a 45 minute drive.

There are TWO bear crossing signs on the route. I think that's cool all by itself, even though I've never seen a bear near one of them.

I'm not at all sure how a warning like that is supposed to help you cope with encountering a bear on the road.

I know the deer crossing signs are there to remind us to keep a gambrel and a skinning knife in the trunk.

My little truck and trailer would not do well in a deer encounter much less one with a bear.

Maybe someday the sheep will buy me a dually one ton with a goose neck featherlight stock trailer, but I doubt it will happen any time soon. Anyway a rig like that would look a little silly with a load of three lambs.

Our farm tools and implements are required to have a high "funk" factor. The battered old red trailer has that!

Flowering grass

2010-03-31T13:49:00.003-04:00

This is a picture I took of my neighbor's hayfield just South of our place. I was at the road end of our driveway when I took it. The flowering plants are actually the hay crop, Coastal Bermuda grass.

Last year at this time the field was clear plowed ground. Lewis, the owner of this farm told me that after he tilled the field he did not seed it with anything at all. It seems that the rhizomes of the plant will lay inert for years and grow when ever conditions are right.

This had been a Bermuda grass pasture for quite some time, the the Bahia grass, which is the other common pasture grass in the area, was choking it out in places. The tillage was done to knock the Bahia back and help the Bermuda take over again.

It flowered up after the last rain. Everyone who stops here asks me what kind of wildflower it is. They have a hard time believing that is just grass.

Bummers at Breakfast

2010-03-30T12:57:00.002-04:00

These are the bummers. They have just finished breakfast.

One of these is a rejected twin. The other two are siblings from the same ewe, who looks after them but has mastitis and can't feed them properly.

So we feed them. They think we are mama.

You know the nursery rime "Mary had a little lamb ... and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go". Mary's lamb was a bummer.

Looking after bummers is quite a bit of work for the month or so that we feed them. Even after that they are quite tame. Keeping a bummer ewe as breeding stock can be handy because they will follow you around and make it easier to move the heard around. Keeping a bummer ram is a bad idea. They are still rams but will not be shy of people. They can be dangerous, and will likely knock you on your ass if you don't shovel the feed to them as fast as they think you should.

However, the good thing about ram lambs, bummers or not, is that they are delicious!

Planting the succotash patch

2010-03-29T13:18:00.010-04:00

I decided to call it the succotash patch. Mixed vegetables, corn and cow peas in this case. I picked the seed at the farm supply store from the plastic barrels they have there, yellow dent open pollinated corn and Mississippi Silver field peas, because the seeds are about the same size. I wanted to mix them together and plant them in the same row. That's what I did.

When I bought the planter, I stopped on the way home with the wood pallet of boxes and big angle iron parts in the back of the pickup. I stopped at a little place at the edge of town where the Old Glory Feed Store used to be.

An old man and his wife live there along with a horse, two mules, a few head of cattle and a number of nanny goats and kids. The old man is an ornery old guy, former Marine, farmer, trucker, and at 83 has forgotten more about most things than I will every know.

I don't know much about planters, but I know they're fussy and planting row crops is a two man job, provided at least one of them knows what he's doing. I wanted help and you just can't get better backup than an old Marine. He started learning this stuff in the 1930's behind a mule, from his dad, who was an old guy at the time.

I like to listen to the old folks. They know stuff and will take the time to share it with me. My neighbor, a professional musician who is my age, says it makes them immortal, to pass on what they know. My neighbor is right, even if that's not why they do it. I think they do it just because it's the right thing to do. Sometimes they are surprised when I show an interest. I'm not sure what that implies about guys my age, but I am sure it isn't anything good.

That was a few weeks ago. The planter came with a little instruction book. I read the book and put it together.

Saturday morning the ground was ready for seed.

We took the planter out with the hoppers empty and adjusted the angle of the planting foot and the packing wheel to the ground. We went back by the shop and set the spacing between the seeds by installing the appropriate gear on the drive shaft and installed the plate for the size of seed we used. Back at the field we gave it a try and discovered the plate that was supposed to keep the planting depth even would dive under the surface every little while on the uneven ground. We took it off. We next found that the disk at the side of the fertilizer spill chute would snag the grass roots and trash in the field and mess things up. We took it off. The spill chute itself then started snagging the trash. We took it off. Planting too deep. Adjusted the top link up and put a limit to the downward travel of the three point hitch.

Finally we found the sweet spot. It was about noon.

I engaged the apparatus and went off down the row. The old man followed behind on foot for a ways just to watch things work. Every few rows I'd stop and he would check the seed and fertilizer, adjusting the application rate at first until it suited him. He filled the hoppers when they needed it, he would snap the lid back on the hopper and tell me over the tractor noise, "Off you go son!". We were done well before supper time.

The first thing I noticed about finishing this job was that their was not much to show that anything had been done. Just the tracks over the ground. The old man pointed out that we had less stuff in the bags than we had when we started. "Might be something will grow", he said. Might be.

Dirt Farming?

2010-03-26T13:38:00.005-04:00

Aside from a vegetable garden, I've never done any dirt farming. By "dirt farming" I just mean anything that involved plowing and planting things in rows.

This is happening because I wanted a way to put more weight on the lambs before they get to market age.

Most small sheep farms just buy feed and add it to the pasture diet of the lambs. This is not something I want to do because many of my customers prefer that the meat they buy has not been feed much grain, and no genetically modified feed at all. All the corn and soy available commercially contain these things.

The main problem of raising row crops on a small farm in the expense for the equipment needed to do it. That equipment includes tillage equipment, planting equipment, weeding (herbicide sprayers and/or some sort of cultivator), and harvesting equipment. Of all this equipment the harvesting tools are usually the most expensive.

My plan is to use the lambs as the harvesting equipment. To harvest the crop, I plan to use electric fencing to allow the lambs into the field a bit at a time and allow them to eat it down to the ground.

So I'm planting about three acres into corn and cow peas. I have a two disk plow, a tiller for my little tractor, and I bought a planter/cultivator just for this and future such projects.

Planting should take place tomorrow, I'll post about it.

Shearing Day

2009-05-08T16:31:00.003-04:00

It was shearing day here on the a3farm.

OK, so it happened about two weeks ago now, but no one has recently accused me of being punctual about keeping up this blog.

I got a call on a Thursday evening from Elmer, the professional sheep shearer that we have hired the last few years.

He was in the area and needed a days work, could I be ready for him? I got ready.

I can shear sheep. I have sheared sheep. They don't like it much and neither do I.

When I shear a sheep they look like they have been run over by a lawn mower. They are generally bleeding in several spots. So am I. Usually we don't require stitches. Usually. I can do about ten sheep in a long weekend.

When Elmer shears a sheep he just sits it down on its butt and basically undresses it. It takes only a minute or two. The sheep doesn't seem to mind. Sometimes it barley seems to notice.

We worked most of the day, him shearing and me just making sure he had a constant supply of sheep. He trimmed all their hoofs while he was at it.

Many of our sheep are hair breeds or wool breeds crossed with hair breeds. They don't all need to be sheared but most of them do.

Except for about a dozen Florida Native ewes, the wool is not worth keeping. We shear them just to make them more comfortable in the summer heat. Most of the wool winds up in the compost pile.

He trimmed the hoofs of 71 head, all our adult ewes. He sheared 44 head. After doing all that he had an appointment at another farm nearby to do another 30 head or so. It was all done before dinner.

Some jobs it's best to hire done. I paid his fee and was glad to do it.

Is the Bald Egale endangered?

2009-04-23T08:40:00.002-04:00

I don't know the official status of these creatures, but we have several more than we really need around here. What is becoming endangered here is laying hens.

For some years now we have been watching bald eagles fly over the farm as part of their commute. Apparently they nest in the thick woods to the south of us and fish in the lakes to our north. We enjoyed seeing them and until recently they never caused us a problem.

We have occasionally lost chickens to hawks. We found that hawks can be deterred by setting up strings with old computer CD's hanging from them in the chicken yard. This is the same thing your grandmother used to do when she set up pie plates to keep the birds out of her vegetable garden. The plates (or CD's) reflect sunlight at odd angles and tend to ward off birds including hawks.

Eagles are much braver than hawks I guess. They ignore the CD's and sometimes even knock them down when they drop in for a meal. An adult hen is too big for an eagle to carry off so they just eat about the top third of the chicken and leave the rest.

When hawks prey on the chickens they perch nearby for quite some time, apparently to make sure there is no danger. The roosters usually see them and raise an alarm causing all the chickens to run into their roosting shelter. The eagles do something similar at least some of the time, but from much farther away. This goes unnoticed by the roosters.

My bride tried to look up methods of scaring off eagles on the internet. Everything she found indicates that the only way to keep eagles from eating your chickens once they start is to run out of chickens.

It is illegal to kill eagles of course, which we knew. I would not do so even if it was mandatory. According to one source a federal permit is required to "harass" an eagle.

Just so you know, the loud noises, clapping, and gunfire you hear around the farm are part of our program to build up the self esteem of the raptor population and encourage them to renew their interest in fishing.

A permit? Good lord, we have some real intellectual giants working for the Feds don't we.

Lambing Season

2009-02-27T16:10:00.002-05:00

In past years I would do a post for each new lamb born. Last year I did a post for the first half dozen and then just a more general post for all the rest.

The operation is big enough now that lambing is a season rather than an event or even a series of events.

We moved up the date we expected lambs this year by two months.

This was because we wanted a bit more age on the lambs when the stress of the hot summer weather set in. Last year most of the lambs were quite small when tropical storm fay hit us. The adult sheep and even the oldest lambs seemed to do OK, but the young ones suffered. We lost some and some of the others were slower growing out than they normally are.

The down side of lambing now is that the grass is dormant, feed is all hay we put up or bought, plus what ever supplements we provide. We give a small amount of soy meal to the ewes to help them with the nutritional requirements of lactation. That and free choice hay cost money.

Still, lambing has been going well and the whole flock seem to be in good condition even if our bank account is getting a bit thin.

We have 70 some lambs so far and expect to wind up with somewhere around 100.

Our ewes tend to be younger than is typical, we have been keeping ewe lambs for breeding stock for the most part to build up the size of the flock. Several of the first timers don't quite seem to have a handle on the motherhood thing. We have three young ewes penned up with their twin lambs to prevent them from totally rejecting one of them.

There are only two bottle bummers so far, one is being looked after by it's mama, who has some mastitis and and just does not have enough milk to feed it. The other is just a lamb that is not claimed by anyone that we put in with one or our reluctant mothers.

We had one ewe who had trouble with a very large single lamb. We tried to help, to pull the lamb, but only wound up chasing the ewe around the pasture while the poor lamb rode around with its head out the window, so to speak. After the ewe struggled with this for several hours my brothers family arrived for a visit from their home up north. My two nieces, 16 and 11, helped me catch her. I had warned the girls that the lamb may well be dead, but when we caught the now exhausted ewe, I pulled the lamb. It was alive and before long stumbled to its feet. The ewe was tired but otherwise fine.

My nieces, city kids, have told the story to everyone since and seem to think this whole farm thing is pretty cool.

Putting up hay

2008-10-24T11:12:00.005-04:00

OK, so I am way behind on posting, better late than never I guess. We put up hay about two weeks ago and here finally is the write up.

Here are photos of the cutting, baling, and hauling.

Our old and small equipment did a good job, but as is most often with small equipment the work was slower than it would have been with big equipment.

As is also often the case with old equipment, we had to stop and fix things several times during the process.

Having said that, the hay is in the barn and there is enough to last the sheep through the winter.

Lots of help was received this year from big brother Jon, who came up for several days and worked like a dog the whole time.

The quote of the week from him: "I can't believe some people actually do this for a living!"

Misters Cooney and Nelson, the legendary "Over the hill gang" were on hand to bolt the machinery back together every time it fell apart, which was fairly often.

I'm grateful to everyone for all the help.

There is nothing like a barn full of hay to give me that "No matter what happens, we can make it" sort of feeling.

Fall

2008-10-02T08:26:00.004-04:00

I generally think of fall as the beginning of the yearly cycle of the farm. The cycle could be said to start and end at any point during the year I guess, but in my mind it starts in the fall because that is breeding season.

Photo: One of the breeding groups, this one with our mature Katahhid ram

The ewes have spent the summer in a rotational grazing pattern after having their lambs weaned off them in the early summer. They have dried off and regained the condition they lost due to lambing and lactation. They are in good shape.

We have four rams we are using for breeding this season on about seventy ewes. Two of these rams are mature rams we have used for several years now. The other two are young rams we bought this year.

The ewes were separated into four groups. This was done in such a way as to:

Prevent inbreeding; rams are not bred to ewes they are related to.
Yearling ewes are bred, where possible (see 1 above) to a ram likely to through a smaller lamb.
More mature ewes with a good lambing history are bred to rams likely to through big, fast growing lambs.
For purebred ewes, to produce purebred lambs.

For us, two Katahdin rams are used to produce big fast growing lambs and two Florida Native rams are used to produce smaller lambs. The only purebred ewes we have are Florida Native so obliviously we use a purebred Florida Native ram on them.

So that's what farming is about!

2008-08-15T14:32:00.005-04:00

If anyone asks why we are into farming, we can show them this. Warning, it's full of profanity but really funny IMHO.

The rest of the story about lambs

2008-08-11T17:11:00.003-04:00

Looking at this badly neglected blog, I see I left off with the Florida Native lambs.

We did have other lambs, about 70 of them. Here they are last weekend as we moved them out from working them going back to their pasture.

We have yet to separate the lambs by gender, that will happen in two or three weeks. Then we'll put the ewe lambs in with the mature ewes. Over time we'll decide which of the ewe lambs to market and which to retain for future breeding.

We have 70 mature ewes now, 5 of which we a culling. We want to grow to about 100 breeding ewes eventually, but we don't need to get to that number in a single year.

The ram lambs will all go to market sometime close to Christmas.

On another positive note, it looks like we will have plenty of hay this year without having to buy any. We did a deal with a friend to sharecrop our ground with his nice new equipment. Lots of big round bales.

I'll still be able to get a second cutting of small square bales come October.

Last of the Florida Native lambs

2008-03-31T09:00:00.002-04:00

Ewe # 33 had a single ewe lamb on the 28th of March. It weighed 8 pounds and was tagged # 507.

Herd Dog Clinic

2008-03-20T17:57:00.003-04:00

Another farm not too far from us held a herd dog clinic last Saturday and we took pepper and spent the day there.

Pepper is an English Shepard that is over a year old now.

He knows all the basic obedience commands, and mostly he follows them, but he has a big wide stubborn streak.

He is around sheep every day here but has no idea about herding them, because I have no idea how to train him for that.

And that's where the clinic comes in.

John Carter and his wife hosted the affair, with Mr. Maurice MacGregor as the trainer.

Mr. MacGregor is an old Irish guy what has been training herd dogs all his life.

The photos here show the basic exercise used to get the dog to circle either left of right around a group of sheep.

With several ewes in a round pen, get the dog to circle and give him the commands when he's already doing the action.

The goal is to get him opposite you moving from your 10:00 o'clock to your 2:00 positions trying to push the sheep to you.

Pepper did well, showing the necessary instinct.

There is hope for him, all I need to do is learn to train him and get him working with someone who knows how. Like Mr. MacGreror.

Thurday's Lamb

2008-03-14T08:57:00.003-04:00

A single ram lamb tagged #506.

The mother is Florida Native ewe #4, 10 pounds at birth.

Tuesday's Lamb

2008-03-14T08:53:00.003-04:00

This is the biggest lamb ever born on our farm, 12 pounds a birth!

Born Tuesday to Florida Native ewe # 11. A single ram lamb tagged #505.

Floirida Native Ewe Lamb

2008-03-08T11:03:00.002-05:00

Ewe # /11 had a ewe lamb we tagged #504.

It weighs 9 lbs.

In the last 24 hours it has rained almost 3 1/2 inches. The wind is gusting to 45 mph.

Mama and baby act like they could do it all over again tomorrow.

First Lambs

2008-03-02T14:53:00.006-05:00

Dam 53518/16 #501 Ram Lamb 8 1/2 lbs.

Born 3/2/08 early am about 3 or 4am.

The six Florida Native ewes we bought a few months baqck have started lambing. The other ewes aren't due for another siz weeks or so.

Dam 53518/12 had twin ewe lambs about mid-morning. The weighed in a 6.5 lbs each.

A funny day with firearms

2008-02-20T10:29:00.001-05:00

You see there was this rooster. He was one of the yard birds I wrote about in another post.

At the start there were three yard birds. Then a hawk got the smallest cockerel before it was full grown.

The other cockerel and a hen have been wandering about the farm since then without any interference from me.

Eventually they started to get into some bags of feed I had stored in the barn, tearing open the bags and making a mess.

I decided to off the rooster, now a full grown Rhode Island Red about 18 inches tall. My hope was that the hen would then find her way back to the main flock to get some company.

I decided to off him a few weeks back but never seemed to get around to it.

Yesterday I was going out to take care of the peeps and saw that the yard birds were close by. I have feed stored near there too; I didn’t want them to get into it so I decided it was time to do the chore.

I shooed them out of the shed and waited for the rooster to wander some distance from the hen.

I used the small revolver I carry with me all the time and shot him from about five yards away.

He jumped up as if frightened by the noise and ran off to a place several hundred yards away. He left a few feathers behind but otherwise showed no other signs of injury.

I though I must have missed him although I couldn’t quite see how I could have at that distance.

Like most shooters I don’t practice as much as I should. It worried me.

It was not possible for me to do anything more about him in the time I had. I needed to get back to work.

Later that evening I went out to do the other chores and noticed he was still in the place I had seen him last, now dead as Cesar.

Chickens are famous for running around for a time after having their heads chopped off, so I guess it’s not as hard to kill them as it is to convinced them that they have undergone a change of state.

My bride bought me that pistol for my birthday last year. I’ve shot some paper targets with it as well as a few grapefruits. None of those things got up and ran away after I shot them.

The gun is primarily intended as a self defense piece. It is a Smith & Wesson 38 special snub nose revolver and was loaded with ammo intended for self defense use.

If I’m ever forced to use it on some 300 pound bad guy named Bubba I hope it makes a more immediate impression on him than it did on that rooster!

Morning Chores

2008-02-19T16:15:00.004-05:00

Just lately sunrise has been happening about the time I get going.

Also just lately the White Rock pullets I’m raising have taken to roosting in the nest box of the poultry schooner.

This totally soils the nesting material.

So I rigged up a way to shut them out of the nest box at night.

This necessitates opening the nest box back up first thing in the morning.

Today I refilled the feeder and took a few pictures.

These six Florida Native ewes are going to lamb soon.

So they are on a bit of pasture that is over seeded with rye grass, away from the other ewes.

This way they get a little better nutrition.

More Peeps

2008-02-08T16:09:00.000-05:00

Early today the Post Office called to tell me that my day old chicks had arived. This is the second batch of 50 Cornish cross birds I've done this year.

The last batch was brooded in an old 250 gallon cattle tank I happen to have. I have a single battery brooder as well, but that was full of young laying pullets at the time.

It generally takes two weeks to brood broiler peeps to the point where they are feathered out enough to put out on the pasture.

Keeping 50 peeps in the cattle tank was OK for the first week, the second week it was not clean enough to suit me. This time 25 peeps are in the cattle tank and 25 in the battery brooder.

I have a deal now with some friends who also raise broilers. They start a batch one month; I start a batch the next month, and so on. We sell to a common pool of customers, butchering the birds here at my farm.

I expect we’ll keep this going until the real hot weather comes, late May I think.

Sometimes when I plant, things grow

2008-02-06T16:52:00.000-05:00

Way back in the olden days, when I wrote the last post, the photo with the plowed ground now is growing grass.

It is not a big enough plot to support our flock of seventy something ewes, but it's big enough for a few.

A while ago we bought a half dozen full blood Florida Native ewes. They had been bred by a Florida Native ram that came from the University of Florida flock.

They are set to lamb about the end of the month which is sooner than our production ewes. So they are on the green grass.

The laying hens and their roosters are nearby.

Next year I intend to plow and plant the whole field, so I am keeping the chickens there to fertilize the ground.

I ordered a batch of 50 broilers yesterday and will run them back there too

Harvest and Planting

2007-11-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

It works out that harvest season and planting season are the same season around here. That makes for a very busy time on the farm.

The summer rain cycle ended a bit later than normal (yea right, normal weather, sure!).

In mid October we had almost no hay in the barn. I crossed my fingers and cut one hay field. That was immediately followed by just over six inches of rain in a week.

The rain stopped and I doubled my bet, cutting a second field and just let the first lay there and attempt to dry out.

I set the rake to tedder mode (just to toss the hay around without putting it in a windrow) and fluffed up the rained on hay. Then raked up the fresh cut hay. Then baled it all up, about 125 small square bales from each field.

The we went to work on the planting.

I plowed up about an acre. It got disked and run over with a spring tooth harrow and made into a smooth seed bed. I broadcast both winter rye and Rye grass (Gulf) separately then ran the drag over it.

Another acre just got torn up with the spring tooth harrow and seeded the same way.

The idea is to see if the extra work of plowing is justified by the resulting growth.

The cooler dry weather continued through last week when the last hay field was cut, raked, baled and put up. The barn is nearly full.

The future of food

2007-10-02T12:43:00.000-04:00

Herrick over at The Deliberate Agrarian sent the DVD "The Future of Food" around to a list of folks with blogs. The idea was, as I recall, was to watch it and do a review on the blog.

I watched it and here is the review.

It describes a set of problems, then suggests what can be done to improve things.

As for the problems, the subject matter of the DVD is basically the application of technology to food products in the last decade or so.

This includes emergence of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in plants used as food and/or feed crops. It also briefly talks about the same sort of thing with animals.

It deals with this in the context of the centralization of the ownership of the large agribusiness corporations.

It also make the point that patents have been granted to corporations for living organisms, all be it genetically modified organisms, for the first time, within the last decade.

These patents are being protected with harsh measures, basically big companies suing the socks off ordinary farmers.

I don't exactly where the description of a problem, any problem, crosses a line into OHMYGODWEAREALLGOINGTODIE!!!!!! territory, but I think this film gets very close at several places.

That's a shame, because in my opinion, it isn't necessary.

It contains a bunch of throw away lines that add no information and actually serve as a distraction and, for me at least, and caused me to question the credibility of the rest of the information presented.

For example, when pointing out that farmers spray herbicides on their crops, a fact that will surprise no one, they describe 2/4D as "a chemical similar to agent orange".

Well, 2/4D and agent orange are both broad leaf herbicides, so I guess the statement is true enough, but the implication is that agent orange was a scary substance used as a weapon in war, so we should all be afraid of this other stuff as well.

As I said, all this over the top stuff isn't necessary. It runs the risk or causing the viewer to dismiss the whole message as the rantings of a bunch of tin foil hat wearing nut jobs.

I am still not sure what the agenda of the folks that produced this film are.

Here's the deal in my opinion.

All this gene splicing that has been done cannot be undone.

I don't know for sure that this presents any danger to the public. I don't know for sure that is does not.

The pro GMO interests claim that this is all perfectly safe and overall a good thing. They claim science supports their position.

The science they site is beyond the ability of the average person, beyond my ability at least, to evaluate in detail.

They are not of course, disinterested parties. They profit from this technology, selling it or using it.

The film makes the point, not anywhere strongly enough in my view, that the gains provided by this technology do nothing for the consumer. GMO vegetables are not "better" or more nutritious that traditional food.

It is only better from the point of view of the producer. It is (at least in theory) cheaper and less trouble to grow.

The ordinary consumer, anyone is our society today, is exposed to lots of "scientific evidence" to support any number of claims.

Not all of it can be true, science is used to support lots of contrary claims.

From "global warming" to the "heartbreak of psoriasis", junk science is everywhere.

Everyone knows that much of the "scientific evidence" there hear is crap, the problem is that it is difficult or impossible to tell the junk science from the sound science.

Consumers are sceptical, and rightly so.

And herein lies the good news.

Those of use who are willing and able to provide food to the marketplace that does use this technology find a ready market for our product.

We do not need to prove that bio technology is a bad thing, we just need to truthfully claim that we don't use it.

This whole situation presents the small scale farmer an opportunity that we did not have before. That I think is a good thing.

More Farm Toys

2007-09-26T15:14:00.000-04:00

One requirement for a farm toy is that must be "funky". Well, this one's funky.

This is an essential tool in wheelchair accessible farming, which as we all know, is a goal of just hoards of people.

This is what it looks like, and old electric golf cart. I use it to zoom around the farm.

Our farm is all flat grass land. This would be useless in steep, rough country.

It is set up so that I can toss my wheelchair into the back, the blue box behind the seat, without taking it apart.

Before I got this, I just used my pickup truck to get around the place.

That works fine, but I have to take the wheelchair apart and fold it up every time I get in and out of the truck. On a normal day of running around and working on the farm, that happens about a thousand times.

I like the gator UTV's and similar vehicles people use for this kind of task, but I'm just too cheap to buy one. This thing is old and relatively cheap. And funky, of course.

Yard Birds

2007-09-25T14:15:00.000-04:00

Several years ago when we started raising a few chickens we had one hen who would escape over my electronet fence and hang out in the barn and the adjoining barnyard all day.

Every evening she would go back over the fence and roost with the other birds.

Mama named this hen "Harriet" as in Harriet Tubman, on account of all the escaping she was doing.

Now any hen who goes over the fence is called Harriet.

This year we had a different hen that did that. This hen would also lay eggs in a mostly unused corner of the barn. We didn't notice the eggs at the time.

Eventually, she want broody and hatched some of the eggs.

She is now a yard bird. She show no interest in re-joining the rest of the flock. She stays out with her chicks all the time.

So this is Harriet.

Family farm, farming family

2007-09-24T13:13:00.000-04:00

Some time back one of my brothers digitized a bunch of photos and other documents that had once belonged to my father. He sent us all a copy.

Thanks Jay.

I had not seen most of this before.

This first photo is my grandfather in front of his dairy barn. My guess is that the picture is from the 1930's.

I don't remember ever having seen this barn. I've been to this farm many times. By the time of my earliest memories it was my uncle Al's farm.

As far as I can recall, uncle Al never raised any livestock at all, just row crops.

My dad did talk about the dairy business a few times that I can remember. If you had asked him to list all the jobs he would never want to have, I'm sure dairy farming would come in first.

His beef (no pun intended) with dairy work was that it involved getting up WAY to early in the morning. Pop was one of the most completely nocturnal people I have ever known.

This is my dad with a dairy calf. It would be from the late 1930's, dad was born in 1929.

My dad was the youngest of eight children. The family farm was (and still is) in Southern Minnesota.

Uncle Al took over the farm from his father. Eventually my cousin Mark took it over from his dad. Cousin Mark lives and farms there still.

My grandfather never spent much time in school. He want as far as the seventh grade I was told.

He wasn't too impressed with what he saw formal education doing for his friends and other farmers he knew. Many times he had seen the children of other farmers go off to school and then come back and try to implement what they had learned at the Ag school at the land grant Universities.

This seemed to always result in that farm taking on lots of debt and eventually failing completely.

According to my dad, grandpa offered to pay him to stay on the farm and skip school.

No doubt that had a lot to do with why pop left the farm and went to school. He stayed at school so long he wound up with a PHD and a faculty job. Contrary runs in my family.

Still he could not stop being a farm kid. By the 1960's he had seven children, six of them boys. We lived in Southeast Ohio, pop was on the faculty of Ohio University.

He bought a farm, actually three adjoining farms, a total of 392 acres in S.E. Ohio. He would joke that it was either that or put a bail bondsman on retainer, to keep his kids out of trouble.

Very recently I read reference to a farmer stereotype. You know, some yokel with three teeth who is too stupid to do anything else.

That is not at all the way I was taught to view farmers. Pop said many times that in his line of work it was necessary only to know how to teach and to know a lot about whatever subject you were teaching.

A farmer, on the other hand, must know Biology, Agronomy, Meteorology, Economics, Chemistry, Mechanics, and a long list of other subjects. And if you got any of it wrong, or worse yet, just had a bit of bad luck, no payday for you.

It's a lot easier just to be a College Professor.

Anyway, that how I wound up bailing hay, building fences, chasing girls, and drinking beer during my teenage years. As opposed to just chasing girls and drinking beer like most kids I knew at the time.

That is why I still play at farmer. I blame my dad. And his dad, and his dad.

Farm Toys

2007-09-23T16:30:00.000-04:00

A while back, my old friend Mr. Cooney came across a "disk plow" that he thought would work with my small tractor. We made a deal.

I had never heard of a disk plow. A plow, yes, a disk, yes, but never a disk plow.

On my dad's farm we made hay and we planted fence posts, but we never plowed anything.

This is a disk plow.

I used it to till the little garden patch where I grew corn and cow peas this spring.

It did a nice job I think, in this light sandy soil we have here.

The plan is to plant it into something I can use to help finish my market lambs.

I would like to get to the point where I don't have to buy supplemental feed for anything.

Finishing lambs is the first thing to do in that regard because I have customers that want meat that has never been fed any GMO or conventionally fertilized/sprayed feed.

Most customers don't need that but those who do will pay a premium for it.

American Farmer

2007-09-23T15:55:00.001-04:00

Way back in the 18th century, a book was written made up of letters between an American Farmer and a European. It was intended, at least in part to explain Americans to those across the pond.

More information about Letters from and American Farmer. I had read it years ago as no doubt many of you have.

Anyway, a blog I often read that previously had nothing to do with agriculture is using this as a basis for a discussion thread that, from what I've seen of this blog in the past, will be interesting.

I have no idea where the discussion will lead, but it would seem that Mrs du Toit has "discovered" our little corner of the universe.

Having been in and around farming all my life, I forget what weird zoo specimens we must seem to be to those who have never been exposed to things agrarian, which is to say, most everyone.

Long time, no post.

2007-09-23T14:01:00.000-04:00

Nothing has been added to this blog all summer. It's not that nothing is happening here, just that I got bored with the blog and seemed to always have something I'd rather do that create a new post.

So far I had mostly limited my posting to issues directly related to farming. I think I will not stick quite as closely to that rule as I have in the past.

I read lots of "How To" sorts of information on the subjects related to agriculture, and of course almost never put the suggestions made there into practice.

Folks write, as I have done in the past, about what they do on their operation, and of course it worked well in the situation described, but likely would not be a "best practice" in a different situation.

In farming there are almost always many, many correct ways of doing a thing. A farm is the ultimate cosmic gizmo and there are so many variables in play at any given time that no two situations are ever the same.

So, I intend to at least try to include a lot more than just the "what" but also "why" and all manor of musings that go along with the avocation of agriculture.

Intensive rotational grazing

2007-07-05T15:29:00.000-04:00

Since weaning I have begun a new form of rotational grazing.

It involves using electric nets (from Premier) to contain sheep on a rather small paddock for a period of just a few days.

This is not a new idea of course, but it involves more frequent moves than what has been done here in the past.

The fencing is comprised of 164 ft sections of net set up two nets long and half a net wide. This works out to something over half an acre. The photo shows two such paddocks (click on the picture to enlarge), the near one populated by this springs lambs, about 50 of them.

I have just enough netting to set up two paddocks and leap frog over the active paddock.

Much of what I am attempting I got from the book “Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence” by Bill Murphy. I think I bought the book from the Stockman grass farmer web site.

Like all the other “How to” books I’ve seen on farming, it does not offer a system I can use on our farm as it is. It does not pretend to do that.

The author lives in Vermont, a very different climate than ours here in North Florida. So the details of his system may not work here but the basic principals are the same.

The main idea is to use the livestock to maximize the production of the grass, rather than using the grass to maximize the growth of the livestock. That does not mean that the livestock are not important, but the idea is to focus on the grass.

Anyway, there is lots of good information out there on rotational grazing. What I am trying to do is adapt them to fit my situation.

For me, that means finding way to make these frequent moves without too much work. We farm part time here and time is always in short supply.

I’m using 2 50-gallon rubber water troughs and filling them from a 65-gallon plastic tank a carry in the back of my pickup. I fill it with a garden hose at the house and just use gravity to get the water from the tank to the trough.

To move the netting I just lay it on the grass and drag it along to its new location and set it up there. If I try and gather it up to move it, I get a tangle that takes a long time to un-snarl.

The move process is still clumsy but I hope to smooth it out with a bit of practice.

Fence line Weaning

2007-07-03T17:02:00.000-04:00

There have been lots of farm happenings that should have found their way into this blog, but have not.

We hired a professional sheep sheerer this year for example.

He averaged three minutes per sheep. It sometimes takes me ten times that long.

Anyway, this post is about weaning. We did that the weekend of June 22.

We put all the sheep through the chute and wormed the ones that needed it.

Now that summer has started and the weather is hot and wet, we need to do this about every three weeks. Most sheep will not need to be wormed, but the ones that do can go down fast if we don’t take care of it.

This time we sorted the lambs from thier mammas as we worked them.

Then we took the ewes down one side of the fence and the lambs down the other, back to the pasture they had just left (for the ewes) and the one next to it (for the lambs).

In theory this reduces the stress of weaning to it’s minimum. I guess that’s true, but the next few days were a bit noisy in any case.

Now the lambs are being moved in a very short rotational grazing pattern. More on that in the next post.

Suits and Farming

2007-06-18T12:23:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite people to read is Victor Davis Hanson. This is my good fortune because even though I stay busy, he seems to be busier still. Every time I’m in the mood he has plenty of new material for me to look at. The man writes prolifically.

In the not too distant past he has commented on farm politics as well as the lack of historical knowledge of the MBA crowd. See http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/2007/05/19/not_with_a_bang.php and http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/2007/03/22/post_12.php .

I farm part time and do software engineering as my day job. I do the software work from my office here on the farm for the most part. A sweet situation if I do say so myself.

I started doing software, programming and system administration mostly, some systems analysis, twenty some years ago as a Telephone Company employee (GTE). It’s reasonably interesting work and the money’s good.

I’ve met quite a number of MBA types over the years, collectively known as “suits” among the geeks and propeller heads that inhabit the cubicles of the corporate world.

I’ve been working within the same technical niche for all this time, software systems used to manage voice/data networks.

I’ve changed employers four or five times, but I still work with many of the same people I did years ago, and serve many of the same customers. The people that stay are the technical people.

Suits invariably have a planning horizon that does not extend past the end of the quarter, and time in place on any given job that is not much longer. I don’t know where they come from or where they go, I just notice that they don’t stay around long.

This all leads to the subject of historical prospective. See, I’m trying at least to tie this thing together.

I got interested a few years back in Civil War history, and the period leading up to it. I did a bunch of reading and ran into some ideas I had not come across before.

It seems that in the early 19th century there was considerable discomfort in some quarters with the whole notion of working for wages.

For one thing, almost no one did it. The vast majority of people were farmers and of course, self employed. Most other people were artisans of some sort, or merchants.

Cobblers, blacksmiths, store keepers, and the like. Wage labor is a product of the industrial revolution, a new thing at the time.

The thought was that if you were not in control of your own time, you were slave.

Slavery was a common enough situation at the time, not just black chattel slavery in the South, but all sorts of indenture and servitude. The sort of thing people endured to repay debt or learn a trade.

Selling your time by the hour was thought to be something like whoring.

Obviously, this became by far the most common way to earn a living. All of us who have done it have felt at times like the whoring theory had something to it.

This brings us to farming. The sort of farming we do here, part time though it is, is pay cash for all inputs, and direct market everything we don’t consume ourselves.

Yes, it’s easier to do this with an off farm income, would not be possible with out it for most folks like me. Still, the USDA’s own statistics show that most farmers today are folks like me.

And this brings us to farm politics, even though the reader may have lost all hope I’d get back to that.

Like I said, most people who farm are like me, part time or a member of a farming family with considerable off farm income.

One habit I have is watching farm shows on TV. Most of this stuff is mainstream agribusiness.

If all one knew of farming was learned from these shows, a casual observer could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that agriculture is mostly run by the Federal Government as a mater of national policy. They might even worry that a long congressional recess could cause famine, if we don’t all die of bird flu first.

Or that would be the case if anyone took this political noise at face value, but of course we expect the same sort of doublespeak with the politics of agribusiness that we get with the politics of anything else.

See http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson021002.html for some or Mr. Hanson’s observations (from the Wall Street Journal).

What is discussed in Washington under the guise of agriculture has little in common with what comes to mind when people think of farming.

Certainly farmers like me are not much involved in the politics of agriculture, at least not by choice.

For example, most of the money in the last several farm bills is spent of things like food stamps and school lunch programs. Much of the rest is subsidies paid for commodity crops that the market does not want at the threshold price set by fiat in the farm bill.

Please understand, I don’t believe that the government should spend this money differently than they do now, change things so I get a bigger cut.

This is like any number of government programs that do more harm than good and would just go away if it was up to me. I also know it is not up to me.

My observation is that meaningful change in agricultural practice is not just difficult, it is almost always illegal.

As near as I can tell, regulations about how farming, or the processing and sale of farm products such as food items, must be done are crafted when bureaucrats are told how established market shareholders do things and then decree “This is how it must be done”.

Doing things differently, also known as innovation, therefore becomes illegal.

Taking any product all the way from production to the final consumer without going through some organization big enough to have lawyer on staff is a risk.

There is simply no way to be sure you know what the rules are.

The risk is that at any time some entity you never knew existed may decide you are doing something wrong and hassle you for it.

This could result in anything from a scolding to losing your farm and/or doing jail time.

The odds are you won’t be bothered, if you do things on a small scale and keep your customers happy. Bureaucrats are not prone to go out of their way to do much of anything, even if they can. They have no real reason to notice the existence of most farmers, even less reason to cause them problems, still it can and does happen.

This keeps most small-scale producers out of the retail market, and greatly slows the pace of innovation. That is too bad, because new ideas and practices are needed in agriculture more than in most industries.

I advocate just going ahead, and when I think an idea is good enough, that is what I do. Farming is all about risk after all. We deal with heat, cold, drought, flood, and all the rest.

Last of the lambs born

2007-05-06T17:58:00.000-04:00

I'd been tying to keep up to date with lambing information but (obviously) have failed again.

April 27 ewe # 427 had twins, a white ram lamb and a black ewe lamb. We tagged them 66 and 67 respectively.

On April 28 a yearling ewe with # 42 had a single ewe lamb we tagged 68.

Nothing happened birth wise until May 4, when ewe 410, the last mature ewe yet to lamb, had a single ewe lamb.

That will probably do it for the season.

We had 10 yearling ewes in the herd this spring, four of them had lambs, the other 6 most likely will not. We have had about this sort of result with yearlings in the past and consider it to be acceptable.

It is possible one or more of the yearlings will lamb later. We left the rams in with the herd for quite a while over the winter, just because it was convenient to do so.

Any way, with a herd of 30 mature ewes and 10 yearlings we had a lamb crop of 49. We have 21 ram lambs and 28 ewe lambs.

Only one did not survive. Over all we had very few problems and a relatively sort lambing season compared to what we have been through in the past.

No records were broken for productivity either high or low. We certainly had fewer twins, as a percentage of the crop, than last year.

We are pleased with the crop so far. Now all we have to do is get them to market age and sold. So far, so good.

Single Ram Lamb

2007-04-27T06:39:00.000-04:00

Thursday (4/26) ewe #428 had a single ram lamb. She had no problems and needed no help.

Local Wildlife

2007-04-26T17:36:00.000-04:00

My bride was out in the pasture with the camera the other day and got some pictures of this eagle.

We see it around from time to time, it no doubt nests within a few miles of here.
Click on the photo to enlarge.

Five more lambs since Sunday

2007-04-26T06:58:00.000-04:00

Monday ewe #413 had a ram lamb tagged 32.

My bride pulled it, perhaps unnecessarily.

In any case, ewe and lamb are fine.

Tuesday ewe #104 had a single ewe lamb.

A large black ewe lamb.

Also on Tuesday, the yearling ewe #15 had a ram lamb tagged 62.

On Wednesday, ewe #60 had twins, both female.

This ewe was so enormous we had her picked as the one we thought would lamb first.

She was one of the last, obviously.

The lambs were good size, but certainly set no records. Go figure.

Catching Up with the Lambing data

2007-04-22T19:02:00.000-04:00

Man, I've let this get out of date. Things have been busy, both with lambing and otherwise.

Thursday (4/19) ewe #37, who is herself only a year old had a single ewe lamb we tagged 58.

This ewe (the mother, that is) did everything she could to turn this lamb into a bummer.

Although she did not reject the lamb outright she would not allow it to nurse.

We made a field jug out of a cattle panel in the corner of the pasture and penned them up. Then we put a rope halter on the mama and tied her to the fence so she could not stop the lamb from nursing. The lamb nursed this way several times a day for a couple of days before the mama allowed it to feed with out being tied up.

Ewe #415 also had a single on Thursday. She had a lamb last year, the first of the season as it happens. She had no problems and needed no help.

On Friday ewe #8, another yearling, had a single ram lamb that was tagged #5. She did fine and needed no help.

Saturday ewe #802 had twins, one male and one female, tagged 17 and 16 respectively. No problems.

Today (Sunday) ewe #437 had twins. She went off by herself under a tree to lamb, as they often do. By the time we noticed, one lamb was fine but the other was dead. Both were ewes, we tagged the survivor 18.

Single ewe lamb

2007-04-19T06:19:00.000-04:00

At some point yesterday, ewe number 169 had a single lamb. It is a female and was tagged # 56.

I wasn't around for the event. When feeding last evening she was well back away from the others and did not come all the way in to eat.

The lamb was up following its mama and except for the fact that it had no ear tag it could have been any of the 30 some lambs we have bouncing around the pasture now.

By the way, we don't just look at the lamb to decide who the sire is. We ran the ewes and rams in separate breeding groups last fall for breeding season.

Two Single Lambs

2007-04-18T06:48:00.000-04:00

The ewes gave us Monday off, I guess the with the cold front over the weekend anyone who was close went ahead and lambed.

Tuesday (April 17th) ewe #411 had a single ram lamb that we tagged 54.

In the evening ewe #155 had a single ram lamb that we tagged 55.

My bride thought this last lamb was taking too long and should be pulled. I didn't think so.

We pulled the lamb. Mother and lamb are fine.

It was getting dark by the time we got a picture of 155. My camera doesn't do well in low light so I won't post that one.

Another single ewe lamb

2007-04-16T08:42:00.000-04:00

Late last night, nine or ten o’clock, ewe #416 had a single black ewe lamb.

The lamb was tagged #53 and is a female.

Six more lambs and the day ain’t over yet

2007-04-15T13:44:00.000-04:00

A cold front came through at daybreak. By 9:30 we got over and inch of rain. Man, we needed it.

We have noticed that weather changes seem to cause lambs.

Ewe # 59 and a single ewe lamb tagged 46.

Ewe #414, who we call grandma because she is the mother of our black breeding ram, had twin ewe lambs tagged 47 and 48.

These lambs are the first “Holstein” lambs of the season.

Ewe #6, who spends most of her time training the other sheep to go through electric fences, had a single ewe lamb we tagged number 49.

She had it on the wrong side of the fence of course.

Ewe #1, my bride’s special pet, had twins. One ewe lamb tagged 50 and a ram lamb tagged 51.

All this before noon.

Four sets of twins

2007-04-15T07:48:00.000-04:00

It was a beautiful day for lambing here at the a3farm and indeed lots of lambing was done.

Four different ewes delivered twins. All the ewes from the new bunch we bought last spring, all had had lambs before but not here. They had been on a winter lambing schedule at the Oak Lane Farm where we got them. Most are three year olds.

Ewe 103 had twin ewe lambs.

Ewe 419 also had twin ewe lambs.

Ewe 432 had twin ram lambs.

Ewe 435 had one of each.

Ewe 435 was the first one this year that needed any help.

My bride went to check the sheep just at daybreak while I was working on my first cup of coffee. She came back in saying she needed help. The lamb needed to be pulled and the momma sheep wasn’t going to stand still and cooperate.

The first lamb, the female as it turned out, had one front leg tucked back under her. She had her head and one front hoof out and got stuck right about there.

The mother is rather small and still had a second lamb in her so there was no room to reach around and straighten things out. I have great big hands, which didn’t help.

New lambs are built like gumby dolls, flexible in ways that you never expect. That’s a good thing at times like this. For a while I thought that leg was attached to a different lamb, but eventually I decided it was the right front leg of the lamb that had emerged to its shoulder.

Eventually I got her eased all the way out and as far as I could tell she had all the usual parts in the usual places. She was still breathing too.

I set her over by the mothers head, and after mom rested a while she decided she could take it from there. She started cleaning the lamb, and then had the other one a few minutes later without problem.

We didn't get pictures of everything. The picture here is one of the group from yesterday, but I'm not sure which one.

Two ewes and a ram

2007-04-13T06:43:00.000-04:00

Thursday the 12th ewe #106 had twin ewe lambs sometime before noon.

They were tagged 29 and 30.

Later in the day ewe #3 had a single ram lamb.

He was tagged number 31.

Single Ram Lamb

2007-04-12T06:32:00.000-04:00

Tuesday before noon ewe #412 had a single ram lamb. We tagged it number 28. No picture yet.

Twins

2007-04-11T06:27:00.000-04:00

About 24 hours ago our ewe #2, the funny looking blue faces Leicester, had a set of twins.

They are a ewe lamb numbered 26 and a ram lamb numbered 27.

Neither was weighed (the scale is officially dead) but both are quite small, in the five pound something range. The mother is also small and the lambs seem healthy.

Sorry about the photo, it was taken at a distance in poor light.

Lots of lambs

2007-04-09T11:54:00.000-04:00

Last evening about suppertime ewe # 115 delivered twin ram lambs. We numbered them 11 and 14.

She had no problems and needed no help. She is also one of the new group of ewes we bought last spring.

This morning at daybreak we had five more lambs on the ground.

Ewe # 4 had twin ewe lambs. They are numbered 21 and 22.

Ewe #170 and twins as well, one ram and one ewe. They are numbered 23 and 24.

Ewe #400 had a single ewe lamb. She is numbered 25.

No weights on any of these yet, the scale was acting up but it seems OK now.

We have two breeding rams, one white Kathadin and one black that is mostly Florida Native. It’s easy to tell who sired who.

Lambing season starts Easter Sunday.

2007-04-08T18:20:00.000-04:00

The plan was to move the ewes to new ground so the lambs will be exposed to fewer pathogens when they hit the ground.

We got the fences set up and went to get the sheep from the dry lot where we have been penning them up at night.

We found the first lambs of the season in the dry lot with everyone else.

No one explained to them about pathogens, so they simply proceeded to bounce around the way new lambs do.

The Ewe was #101, we tagged the lambs #9, a ram lamb @ 7lbs 1 oz, and #10, a ewe lamb @ 6lbs 15oz.

While we were at it we moved the chickens to new ground as well.

One down, thirty nine to go.

You all may be seeing lots of baby pictures in the near future.

Scratch the ground and shoot up the sheep

2007-04-02T09:38:00.000-04:00

Over the winter the chickens were more or less confined in an area for the pasture near the house.

Lots of junk hay was tossed in for bedding. This area is destined to be this years corn and cowpea patch.

The original post is here: Big honking chicken tractor

Mr. Nelson brought his funky old Farmall tractor over and disked it all up.

He is 50% of the “Over the hill gang” that sometimes helps out around here, Mr. Cooney being the other half. Both these guys are 80 years old and have forgotten more about farming that I ever hope to know.

I asked him why the tractor wasn’t red like they usually are. He said that he has this one dressed up like the ones that the hi-way department had for mowing the roadside back in the day.

He shows this tractor and some old hit and miss engines he has at the County fair and such places.

Mr. Nelson is the guy who keeps my 1960 vintage New Holland hay baler going.

Saturday was spent watching Mr. Nelson work and fixing some fence. Sunday we gave the ewes their yearly CD/T vaccine boosters and helped butcher out friends Rhonda and Brian’s last nine broiler chickens.

Us part time farmers must sometimes do things when we can rather than when we should, but we muddle through somehow.

Small World; Who’s a farmer?

2007-03-29T13:00:00.000-04:00

Quite a few years ago now I came across a title in a bin full of marked down hardback books at a chain bookstore outlet near where I lived. I had never heard of the author but the subject matter had to do with farming so I picked it up.

It told the story of a young California farmer trying to continue and grow a family farm that had already been in place for several generations.

That plot line by itself would be enough to interest me, but the author, aside from being a farm kid was an academic, specifically an authority on classical civilizations (Greece, Rome, etc) in the California University system.

The book contained some interesting information about the ancient Greek Yeoman farmer and comparisons to the modern family farmer that has become more and more stressed these past few decades.

Anything that portrays individualism in a positive light is sure to get my approval. I very much enjoyed the book.

I have a good friend who I lent the book to after it came up in conversation. He took it home and read it. His wife pointed out that the author had been published lately in the National Review magazine. The author is, for those who haven’t figured it out already, Victor Davis Hanson. The book was “Fields without Dreams”.

He still writes prolifically, here: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/ and other places. Most of what I see out there is political. I often agree with him, I often disagree. I always admire his well-reasoned logic.

I think he sees himself as a farmer more than an author or an academic. I think he would give the title of farmer a loftier status than the others. I have not seen him say that in so many words, but that’s how I read him.

He did a blog entry the other day that touched one the subject of “Mad Farmers” that gave me a chuckle.

Was it really Raining?

2007-03-27T09:40:00.000-04:00

I'm fairly sure it rained around here once, long ago.

In the last post I said we got nearly half and inch. Guess how much we have had since then. That dry dusty cough was the answer.

I just looked at the ten day forecast. A 10% chance of rain was the biggest number in the whole forecast.

I read on the other farm blogs that everyone is struggling through mud season. If you are in that situation, please feel free to send some of that moisture down here.

It's Raining!

2007-03-16T10:21:00.000-04:00

Rain and just in the nick of time. We have had about one half inch of rain since last night.

If I listen close I swear I can hear the grass grow.

I have a load of supplemental feed coming today for the ewes to get them through lambing and lactation.

But there should be no need to supply forage, and a good thing to, since one thing I have in common with everyone else around here is that I am out of hay.

How to buy a bull

2007-03-13T17:11:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has attempted to raise livestock for any length of time is all too aware that even though we do all we can as far as animal husbandry goes, some times the beastie just insists on dying.

Sometimes this is caused by some mistake, but that is a different matter. We can and do expend great amounts of effort to create an environment where our stock can be healthy and productive. Past that, their survival is just not up to us as farmers.

A friend’s bad time with kidding got me thinking about this. This person keeps goats primarly for livestock shows.

I was at a place last weekend where folks were discussing livestock for show, like the 4H kids do. I know nothing about show stock. I’ve never done it, never been around it.

The notion of looking at a group of animals and by that contact alone passing judgment on which is best always struck me as odd.

Show stock seems to have the same relationship to production stock that theology has to religion; that is, none that's obvious. *

Judging stock by its looks seems odd to me because my dad used to tell a story about how to buy a bull. To be honest I though this was a long dull story when I was growing up. He told the story many times.

It went like this; there was this farmer who had a reputation all over the area for being able to find and buy the best bulls. He had done this for many years and as far as anyone could remember he never got a bad one.

He was present at a sale where several bulls were on offer and was asked by a group of prospective buyers how they could tell which was best. They asked about size, top line, muscling, color, and stance, any and all the physical attributes of a bull.

They asked the old farmer all sorts of questions about bulls but they couldn’t seem to keep him on topic. He had all sorts of unrelated questions he wanted answered.

Who is the seller? Have you been to his place? Is it extravagant and showy or simple and functional? Have you met his family? Have you gone to the town where he does business and asked about him?

What do the production records tell you about the animal? Does he through good calves? Has he been bred to heifers and if so how did they do?

My dad would go on and on about the things that needed answering before even looking at the bull, no doubt that’s why I though the story was so dull.

At every point, with each new fact learned, if the result was negative, the old farmer’s advice was to give up on the bull and look for a different one. No need to even look at the beast unless all the background checked out well.

The punch line of the story was that when the prospective buyer finally did look at the bull, the advice was "If you like it you buy it".

The fact that I listened to this story many times growing up does not make me an expert on show stock of course.

I can’t help but suspect that what was selected for in breeding these animals has not been the sorts of pro-survival traits that are used for production stock.

* I came up with this line, something shamelessly stolen from R. Heinlein on a different subject, when I was composing this post in the shower the other day. When I wrote it down I forgot the line. I do shower regularly, so I remembered it this morning.

Maintenance Mode

2007-03-12T10:03:00.000-04:00

We have been in sort of a maintenance mode for the past several months here at the A3 farm.

The cattle have been next door with my neighbor’s herd all winter. Each day we feed horse, dogs, cats and sheep.

We collect eggs. We feed the laying hens when they need it. Since Mid January we’ve had broiler chickens to feed water and move each day.

Some of the equipment has been serviced and some fencing work done. Mostly farm work has been as minimal as farm work ever gets.

I’ve done two business trips related to my day job. One trip was to Arizona, which was pretty, and one to the DC suburbs, which was not. OK, Montgomery County Maryland is fine for those who like that sort of thing, but traffic and snow are two things I would be happy to do without.

Things here on the farm are about to change from maintenance mode to the more usual state of affairs, which is “way too much to do and not enough time to do it”.

The laying hens have been moved away from their winter quarters, that spot is ready to disk.

I started processing the broilers yesterday and will finish, I hope, next weekend.

It’s time to get more feed into the ewes, lambing is just a month off.

The grass will start to grow if we ever get rain.

All the hay we put up last summer is gone.

I bought two rolls of peanut hay, not perennial peanut, regular peanut. We have one lonesome roll of it left.

If we get rain any time soon it will be enough. If we don’t get rain I think I’ll take the ewes down to the welfare office and sign them up for food stamps :-).

One great thing about farm living is that the seasons have meaning beyond switching the thermostat from heat to AC and back. Even down here where we have fewer seasons than some places.

Just to get everyone in the mood for lambing, a new calf was born Saturday across the fence on the neighbor’s place.

January Broilers

2007-02-01T10:18:00.000-05:00

I got a new batch of broiler peeps a little over two weeks ago. These are Cornish Cross meat type chickens.

I have a small battery brooder that is about the right size for a batch of 25 chicks. That’s where these birds have been since I got them.

This is the first time I’ve started a batch in mid winter. At other times of the year I leave them in the brooder no more than two weeks. They grow so fast they get too big for it.

I left them in the brooder almost three weeks this time because we had a cold snap and I thought it might be too much for them to be in the pasture pen. It was just an overnight frost, only the second this year.

I put them on the pasture yesterday. Overnight lows were in the forties. They seem fine today.

I think the bigger they get the better they will handle cold. I know that in the summer the heat is a real problem for older birds.

I have customers that want chicken. I’m out myself.

Pepper

2007-01-30T09:59:00.000-05:00

This 11-week-old English Shepard pup moved in with us on Sunday. The goal is to train him into a general-purpose farm dog that can herd sheep when necessary.

The name “Pepper” was chosen after we got him home and was not even suggested before that. I told my bride quite sometime before we got him that I thought I’d call him “Bubba”.

She said that it was going to be my dog and I could give him any name I wanted to, but that I didn’t want to name him Bubba. Then she gave me that look that means, “Drop it or I’ll have to hurt you”. So much for the name Bubba.

I considered trying to come up with a name that played off of how the dog looked. I also considered coming up with a name that had something to do with his job as a farm dog.

He is a black dog with a little white, like salt and pepper. But Pepper is the name of the Ben Johnson character in the John Wayne movie “Chisum”. The Pepper character is the trail boss/ranch foreman.

Way back in the mid 70’s my dad and his business partner ran about 3000 sheep open range style on a bunch of leased coal company land in Southern Ohio. This was done with horses, several 19 and 20 year old kids, and one very well trained Border Collie.

I was one of the 19 year old kids, and that dog was better than wonderful in that situation but it needed full time work or it would go crazy. In my opinion Border Collies are just like that, they can’t be really happy with out a full time job.

We met some women that raise English Shepard’s at one of the Meat Sheep Alliance meetings a few years ago. That breed seemed like the a calmed down Boarder Collie, able to cope with herding and other farm chores but also able to cope with snoozing on my office floor while I play computer geek.

We made a deal with the breeders some time ago for a pup, and this is it; Pepper.

Zap the beasties - for their own good

2007-01-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to learn rotational grazing since we started fooling with sheep a few years back.

The farm is divided into three different pastures with permanent fence. The leased land would count as one more pasture I guess.

I subdivided the big home pasture, 10 acres give or take, into four paddocks with temporary electric fences.

I subdivided the leased land into four paddocks originally using the same sort of fencing. I have since dropped that down to two paddocks. This is because there are only two water sources over there and sharing them between paddocks was not working too well.

What I have is a bunch of small pastures rather than a proper rotational grazing system.

I still have a very low stocking rate. Something like half of what this land should carry. I want to grow my way larger instead of buying my way larger.

In the late fall I was having trouble with the sheep moving through the electric fences.

I tried several things to fix this including changing from plastic twine to 14 gage aluminum.

I went to three strands from two on the rented land. I got a better energizer.

I had a notion that the sandy soil and the dry weather had something to do with it but I had no idea what to do about it.

So a few weeks ago I was reading though book "Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence" by Bill Murphy. He teaches a much more intense form of rotational grazing than I have been using. No suprise he uses electric fences.

At one point he states that in dry sandy soils as many as ten grounding rods may be needed. He recommends grounding to a metal culvert under a roadway or an unused well casing.

My energizer was connected to one grounding rod. I moved the unit back to the well house for our old (no longer in use) well. I has a two inch galvanized well casing about 80 feet deep.

All the paddock fences are hot now even though most of the gates are open. So far they seem to be staying well clear of them although I haven't seen any of them get shocked.

So far so good.

Winter is for projects

2007-01-17T19:54:00.000-05:00

The warm season grasses are dormant. The cool season grasses are slowly starting to grow but are not yet ready for grazing. There is no hay to make. Lambing is still months away. Breeding is done.

Sounds like there’s not much to do on the farm, right? Wrong!

The tractor needs it’s fluids changed. The chicken pens need repair. Several gates are dragging the ground and hard to use. The generator won’t start. The barn lot fence needs fixing. Last springs ram lambs are market age. All the ewes need a pedicure.

Most of these things have been done this winter and the others are in progress.

This far south a January day could be 80 degrees (yesterday) or it could be in the thirties (today). I’ve got a fresh batch of broiler chickens in the brooder. I hope they don’t turn into just so many little peep-sickles.

All the market lambs are sold but five. I’m tempted to have them butchered before I sell them. They are cheaper to keep in the freezer that in the pasture, but it is best to sell them live if I can.

This year all lambs have been sold directly to the consumer, nothing went to the sale barn.

I’m trying to work out a way to sell meat by the cut rather than by the head but I don’t think I’ll have that worked out before this lot is gone.

All together this is plenty enough to fill these short winter days.

Big honking chicken tractor

2006-12-18T10:36:00.000-05:00

Last year I did an experiment where I grew some OP corn and some cowpeas.

This year I plan to scale the whole thing up quite a bit.

Last week we move our laying hens to the spot where the row crop patch will be.

Into this space we dumped most of the hay that got rained on last summer.

The idea is that between a six inch deep layer of mulch hay and thirty some chickens scratching around and fertilizing the place, the ground will be plowed and far better for growing things in than the beach sand that we have in place of topsoil in this part of the country.

I plan to plant corn in rows thirty inches apart with cowpeas between each row.

Both these photos show the same spot of ground.

I’m hoping that with the mulch and the chickens I can get away with just sticking the seeds into the ground. I don’t own a plow and don’t really want to.

I’m hoping for two crops, one about the forth of July, one in the late fall.

I’ll harvest the summer crop by turning newly weaned lambs into it, a little at a time. They can eat everything down to the ground. This should keep them from loosing condition at weaning time, and even put some weight on them.

The fall crop should help finish them.

Like lambs to the slaughter

2006-12-05T16:17:00.000-05:00

This is not “like” lambs to slaughter, it IS lambs to the slaughter.

Five ram lambs whet to the butcher shop the Tuesday after thanksgiving.

These five were sold to six different customers. Two people split the largest one.

We picked up three of them today, including the big one with two owners.

One of these is in our freezer here at the farm so that the lady that bought it can pick it up at her leisure. She has an intense job that made it impossible for her to get it during the week.

We still have eight market lambs left. Any that have not been sold before the Dec 16 livestock sale go to auction then.

Winter Annuals

2006-11-20T15:05:00.000-05:00

Conspiring with one of my neighbors last weekend we planted some winter annuals on parts of both our places.

We planted by simply broadcasting seed on pastures that had been deliberately over grazed this fall. Then we used a drag to try and cause better seed soil contact. We planted equal parts oats, rye grass and wheat.

They tell me that we should have done this a bit earlier according to the University studies. Considering we have had no rain since I was a good bit younger (or so it seems) I don’t see how it could matter.

Now we just have to wait and see what happens. If we do get rain I expect the resulting growth will help a lot in the early spring. Otherwise we just spread so much birdseed.

You pay your money and you take your chances, that’s farming.

This is the first time I’ve tried to do this, but it’s something that was commonly done in the area when farms were more self-sufficient than they are now.

It was also very common to make hay on a small scale the way I am doing it. These days most of the cattle farms just buy hay. This year there was a drought year and there is no hay to buy.

There will be a lot of brood cows going to market before spring.

We have hay, enough to get us through even if the winter annuals don’t perform well, barley. This is not because I’m smarter than most, but just because I like old hay equipment and doing things the way the old folks did them.

It’s better to be lucky than good.

A Different Christmas Poem

2006-11-18T08:29:00.000-05:00

I usually limit this blog to farming related topics, but that's my rule, so I get to break it. Enjoy.

A Different Christmas Poem

The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.

Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.

My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,
But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.

My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.

A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.

"What are you doing?" I asked without fear,
"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts..
To the window that danced with a warm fire's light
Then he sighed and he said "Its really all right,
I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night."

"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,
That separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.

My Gramps died at 'Pearl on a day in December,"
Then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of 'Nam',
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.

I've not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white, and blue... an American flag.

I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home.
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.

I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother..
Who stand at the front against any and all,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall."

"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright,
Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."
"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,
"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?

It seems all too little for all that you've done,
For being away from your wife and your son."
Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
"Just tell us you love us, and never forget.

To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone,
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.
For when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled.

Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us."

LCDR Jeff Giles, SC, USN
30th Naval Construction Regiment
OIC, Logistics Cell One
Al Taqqadum, Iraq

Farmers Market

2006-11-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

After two weeks I judge the new farmers market to be a success.

No one is getting rich there, especially me, but it allows me to sell all my eggs and get some good face time in with potential customers for other things.

I need to get some pictures or the actual market.

It runs each Friday from 4 to 7 PM. Midmorning I go up and park the trailer as a sort of announcement. This is the trailer set up in my barn. I thought a hayride look would be good.

My public demands it!

2006-11-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

My last blog post was quite some time ago indeed. Today I got this comment:

Cheryl said...

Now, you can't just leave your 2 blog fans in suspenders like this. How about an update? ;)

Cheryl
WA state

How about that? I’ve been missed. Time to get back into gear.

There have been lots of things happening on and around the farm with the obvious exception of blog postings.

We have established something of a new routine here with the sheep herd. At the MSA meeting (see previous post) we learned a lot about internal parasites and how to manage them.

The ofending vermin is Haemonchus contortus, commonly known as the barberpole worm.

This visious little beasty is a major problem here with our hot wet climate. We have lost several sheep to this bug.

One fact about how it works struck me. It lays on the ground and is rather inert until the grass becoms wet. It then “swims” up the grass blade where it can be eaten by a sheep.

If the grass is dry it is very unlikely that the sheep will ingest the parasite.

Our sheep tend to graze heavly right at daybreak, no doubt because it is cooler than later in the day. Dew is usually very heavy here. If you walk a pasture early in the day it will soak through your clothes.

Sheep in the dry lot

The new routine is this, in the evening the sheep get penned up in the dry lot not to be release til the dew burns off the next day, typically about 10:00 AM.

We are now at the beginning o f breeding season. The ewes are divided into two groups, each with one of the rams. The market lambs are in yet another group.

The ewes and the rams have been on opposite sides of a fence for a week or so. They have been making kissy noises back and forth all that time.

Judging by the activity so far, lambing season should be short and early next spring.

Three of the 14 market lambs have been sold to 4 different people, the ultimate consumers.

I'm still working out the logistics of getting animals to the butcher and meat to the customers but we will get it done somehow.

I just came back from a visit to the butcher shop I'll be working with. It is a very nice little operation. Clean and professionally run. I was impressed.

Fall 2006 Florida MSA Conference

2006-10-24T14:50:00.000-04:00

MSA is an acronym for Meat Sheep Alliance.

The fall conference was a two-day affair last Friday and Saturday, October 20 and 21.

Actually Thursday was an optional trip to the Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie Georgia so it could be said that the conference was three days long. We didn’t take the trip so can’t comment on that part of the event.

Other than the field trip, the conference was held at Lake City Community College.

I was surprised to see that part of the setup included quite a number of live animals, specifically sheep and sheep dogs.

Lake City has no Ag school and no ready-made facilities for containing livestock. Pens were set up in and around a large truck garage.

Several talks and classes were given by a lineup of imported heavy hitters in the realm of sheep husbandry. Several Veterinarians with advanced specialties, as well as PhD’s in Breeding and Genetics.

When I listen to land grant University types talking about farm policy I either get angry or go to sleep. These guys were not that type.

These folks are over educated farm kids with a passion for livestock and dirt (among other things) under their fingernails. Coming from me, this is a complement.

We took a class in FAMACHA, which is an approach to parasite control that minimizes the use of anthelmintics (chemical wormers).

We saw a herding dog demonstration.

The dogs were show dogs primarily.

Trailer, Sheep, Dog .. No fences .. don't try this at home.

Farm dogs do some (fewer) of the same things, but they do them all day long (if needed) and in all sorts of conditions.

I need one of these (farm type) dogs.

Different breeds of sheep common in this area were present.

Florida Native a.k.a. Gulf Coast Native sheep

Eggs and other farm stuff

2006-10-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

A lot has been going on here at the A3 farm, with the obvious exception of keeping the blog entries up to date.

My bride and I both took last week off from our non-farm jobs and mostly spent the time on farm related tasks (big surprise).

We did a few things to get ready from the opening of the farmers market on November third.

We are selling eggs at the market. We plan to use my brides lap top computer to show photos and maybe videos of our production system.

I made a video that proves 1) Steven Spielberg is safe in his job, and 2) I’m a sucker for corny old Bob Wills tunes, even those done by Asleep at the Wheel.

It is in Windows Media Format.

Link to video

We also spent two days at the fall meeting of the Florida Meat Sheep Alliance, held this time at Lake City Community College. I’ll do a separate post about this. I got some good pictures.

Bovine boogie

2006-10-05T11:55:00.000-04:00

I don’t own a bull. I own two cows and a calf.

My next-door neighbor keeps 10 cows and a bull. His bull is a nice one that he named turbo. Every bit of two thousand pounds of vary large farm animal.

We often help each other out, I check his stock when he leaves town for example.

Last year he let me run my cows in with his to get them bred. We did this at midsummer when he had more grass than he could use.

This year rain has been scarce, except when I am trying to make hay of course. His pasture is not holding up too well.

My ground is still under stocked and I have some grass to spare. So this year we are running our cattle together on some of my ground. We turned them all in on Monday.

Just now I came by and saw my two cows and his bull lounging under the big shade tree.

Is it just my optimistic nature, or do they look like they have all just finished having a cigarette?

Home made peeps

2006-10-05T11:30:00.000-04:00

A while ago I figured out that in order to sell eggs at the new farmers market I would need to offer them as fertilized hatching eggs rather than table eggs.

This is, for the most part, a dodge to avoid AG department busybodies who seem to believe that eggs come from factories and therefore prohibit anyone who doesn’t have a factory from selling eggs. They don’t know about chickens apparently.

Well, I may be forced to play wink and nod, but I wanted to know if such a claim would be true. So I borrowed a small incubator from a friend and installed four-dozen eggs in it.

I keep two roosters with my laying hens, so the eggs should indeed be fertile. Up to now I have never hatched any.

Well, I more or less forgot about them. Every few days I’d roll them around in the incubator. I lost track of when I put them in there.

Yesterday they started to hatch. I knew they were supposed to hatch of course, but I was still surprised.

I was at the feed store yesterday buying feed for the laying hens. It never entered my mind to get chick starter.

I went out just now and got starter feed, then put the ones that have hatched into the brooder.

Ten have hatched so far.

Aerial Photography courtesy of google earth

2006-10-04T13:19:00.000-04:00

If you have never played with google earth then you still have a good bit to learn about wasting time.

Having said that, if you are lucky enough to live in a place where the satellites take a close look it is possible to get some good aerial photos of home (or just about anywhere else).

I pulled this photo of our farm and did an edit of it. Cool, huh?

I added indications of where the rotational grazing paddocks are, where water is available, and where the various buildings are.

The upper and lower left is adjoining land that we don’t use. The center left is land that belongs to my neighbor that we graze. It is subdivided into two paddocks at the moment. The large rectangle at the right is our land.

A busy weekend for farm work.

2006-10-02T10:55:00.000-04:00

We moved the laying hens first thing Saturday morning.

Chickens in thier new location

Then we went off to Lake City to buy a new breeding ram.

Our friends Lewis and Janice had several rams they were willing to sell.

We picked out a nice Katahdin ram about a year and a half old.

The new Katahdin ram (click on photo to enlarge)

Katahdin is a hair sheep breed (no wool therefore no shearing required) that does fairly well in our climate.

Sunday we did a bunch of fencing work replacing some two-strand electric twine paddock fences with three-strand 14-gage aluminum wire.

These fences needed to be upgraded because some of the twine was failing from UV exposure, and because we now know that this is where we want the fence to be for quite a while into the future.

We were not sure where the best place was when we put in the twine fencing. Twine can be moved, wire cannot.

Some of the new three strand fence

In the evening we penned up the cattle in the barn. The Vet is coming today to vaccinate the calf and to de-horn its mama. The mama is a fairly tame beast, but I don’t need to get gored even by accident.

More hay

2006-09-25T10:12:00.000-04:00

I cut about five more acres of hay Wednesday and Thursday evenings, raked it Friday, and baled it up on Saturday.

The baler had a problem with the knotter, but only after the job was almost finished.

I just stopped at that point and arranged to get it fixed.

By 8:30 or so Saturday it was all in the barn.

My bride is a very accomplished hay stacker.

I just drive the truck and make helpful suggestions.

Funky old cedar tree

2006-09-21T13:06:00.000-04:00

I was cutting hay last evening and admiring the weird old tree in the back paddock.

Make hay while the sun shines

2006-09-18T09:07:00.000-04:00

Well, at least while the rain holds off.

The forecast at midweek last week was for rain Wednesday followed by clear dry weather until at least today.

It did indeed rain Wednesday, but from then it was cloudy most of the day and even a bit threatening in the late afternoons. But here’s the thing, no actual rain.

This set up a rare occurrence here on the A3 farm, hay that gets from the field to the barn without getting rained on at all.

I cut two paddocks, one Thursday evening and one Friday evening.

I raked them both up on Saturday. One was bailed Saturday the other Sunday.

We loaded it all in the barn Sunday, the first batch early, the second batch in the late evening.

It is a bit easier to work outside now that the high temperatures for the day is just in the high eighties.

That’s about ten degrees cooler than it has been. Morning and evenings are really quite pleasant.

Selling eggs

2006-09-05T11:41:00.000-04:00

I’ve written here about the fact that a new farmers market is being established near here and my interest in selling eggs there.

Here are some interesting developments on that front.

As is often the case in the Byzantine realm of public regulation selling eggs is both allowed and forbidden.

First the forbidden part, sent to the market manager as the result of official inquiry:

Guidelines for Selling Eggs

1) Facility must have an annual food permit.
2) Facility must have an approved water and sewage system that meets requirement for a food processor. A residential system is not acceptable.
3) Facility must be separate from living quarters.
4) Facility must have hot and cold water of sufficient quantity to meet processing requirements.
5) Processor must use a USDA approved shell egg sanitizer and have the appropriate test kit.
6) Facility must be equipped with equipment to properly wash and air dry the eggs. The temperature of the wash water must always be 10 degrees F or greater than the temperature of the eggs. The temperature of the wash water must be a minimum of 90 degrees F. The temperature of the approved sanitizer must be at least 10 degrees F greater than the wash water temperature. Appropriate records must be maintained for this procedure.
7) Facility must meet all requirements of the Food Code.
8) Facility must have a three compartment sink to wash, rinse, and sanitize equipment.
9) Eggs cannot be sold in cartons. They can only be sold in bulk or in flats.
10) Facility must have cooling capability to store the eggs at 41 degrees F or less.
11) A placard must be displayed at the point of sale stating the following: “These eggs have not been graded as to quality and weight”. The placard must be not smaller than 7 inches by 7 inches in size.
12) The unclassified eggs (washed eggs which have not been graded for size and quality) may have no more checks, dirties, leakers, or loss than those allowed for Florida Grade B eggs.
13) Nest eggs (eggs that have not been washed, sized, or graded for quality) may not be sold to retail outlets, consumers, or public eating places.

February
1, 2006

What I get from this is that no one has told that Ag Dept folks about chickens. They think eggs come from factories and if you don’t have a factory you can’t sell eggs.

Next comes the allowed part:

Sell the eggs as fertile hatching eggs. Meaning that they are intended to be used to hatch new chicks and are therefore not food. The “guidelines” above then do not apply.

Then of course if someone buys such an egg and then in total disregard for all public health guidelines, actually eats it, the vendor is not involved.

I’m not sure which side of the looking glass this is, but it is your tax dollars at work.

OK so what about that hay

2006-09-05T11:20:00.000-04:00

So this is how things turned out with the continuing saga of the back hay field.

I got most of it baled up, all but what would have been 15 or 20 bales + or -.

Out of that most was not feed quality, so I have maybe 50 bales of feed hay and 125 or 150 bales of mulch.

I would have preferred to use it all as feed but I have use for mulch.

On top of that is the fact that this pasture has been under grazed for the past few years, and when it was cut the grass was just left to decompose in the field. The result was a lot of thatch over the turf.

A lot of that thatch wound up in this hay. Getting it up off the field will do very good things for the pasture allowing the rain to soak in better and the soil to breath a bit, all good.

What I intend to do with all that mulch is to spread it in a thick layer over and area I intend to plant in corn and cowpeas next spring. I let it sit that way all winter, probably run chickens over the area. That should kill the grass and retain moisture in the soil so I can plant it no till in the spring, no need to plow or any of that. That’s my theory anyway; we’ll see how it goes.

Dank

2006-08-28T09:14:00.000-04:00

It seems like I spent the whole weekend removing and attaching implements on the back of the tractor.

I took the mower off, put the rake on, took the rake off, and attached the baler. You get the idea.

I finished cutting the hay Friday evening. Then of course it rained shortly after I finished. When hay is freshly cut rain doesn’t damage it nearly as much as if it happens after it is dry.

I raked it up it up Saturday morning then waited for it to finish drying out. I’m still waiting.

It has not rained on the hayfield since Friday evening late. I’m not sure the grass can tell, it is as humid as the bottom of a lake. It’s just not drying out.

If I’m going to get it baled and off the field while it still makes good feed I’ll need better luck than I’ve had so far. I may have a large load of mulch on my hands.

More hay to make

2006-08-24T14:58:00.000-04:00

The weather forecast is for hot and humid conditions with 30 to 40 percent chance of afternoon or evening thunderstorms.

This was for forecast in June and will be the forecast until October. Unless there is a hurricane bearing down on us, that is Florida in the summer time.

I check the forecast frequently before I try to go out and do farm work. I have no idea why.

Tuesday evening shortly after five o’clock I came out of the bathroom and saw through the south window, out of the corner of my eye, without really paying attention, some calves my neighbor keeps in the pasture across the road from my house running more or less in my direction.

I intended to go out and start to cut hay in the back pasture.

I had spent all afternoon in my office with a good view to the north. The sky was partly cloudy. That means I could look at big black clouds or clear blue sky, my choice and no need to move my head much.

I went to the front door, put on my hat, opened the door and noticed the lambs in our front pasture running towards me. They were trying, without success, to outrun the rain formed into a squall line moving up the driveway. The calves across the road were already soaked and had given up the race.

It rained for less than an hour. The rain gauge in the front flower bed recorded just over and inch.

Wednesday just past noon another brief shower gave us a soaking. By about six o’clock I was out cutting hay. The tractor doesn’t kick up much dust under these conditions you see.

With our sandy soil and temperatures in the nineties, things get tolerably dry quickly.

Anyway, so much for the drought.

I got the field a bit less than half cut.

Hay in the barn

2006-08-22T09:25:00.000-04:00

The over the hill gang showed up as promised Monday to do all the adjustments on the hay baler.

They got here a little before noon and left about three o’clock.

When they left, not only were the adjustments made, all the hay in the field was baled and stacked in the barn. All this while I was stuck in my office with a phone in my ear.

Who says you can’t get good help these days!

It was a fairly small load of hay, less than 50 bales, but it looked better than I thought it would after being rained on.

I went right back out last evening and mounted the mower back on the tractor and sharpened the blades.

I intend to start cutting the larger field all the way at the back of our land this evening.

Making Rain

2006-08-19T19:28:00.000-04:00

I’m going to rent myself out as a rainmaker.

If I go to some desert area, all that needs to happen to turn it into a beach is for me to cut hay.

It’s been so dry here for most of the summer that the sand fleas are farting dust, and now this.

Friday evening about dusk one of those little thunderstorms that is about 100 yards wide dumped about an inch of rain on my hayfield.

I turned the windrows over Saturday morning, but there is so much humidity in the air nothing is drying out. There was another quick shower in the afternoon but I don’t think it made any difference.

It will be Monday before it’s ready to bale.

All suited up with no way to make hay.

Monday, when I go back to being a computer geek instead of a farmer.

Oh well, the joys of farming part time are many.

My crew, the world famous over the hill gang, a.k.a. Misters Cooney and Nelson are going to make enough hay to insure the equipment is all adjusted up and working properly. This is because they worked on the knotter and bale chamber over the winter.

Making Hay

2006-08-18T16:14:00.000-04:00

Last year I had trouble putting up hay, getting enough time without rain for the hay to cure was almost impossible. The best hay I put up had been rained on once.

So far this year it looks like that wont be a problem. It has been so dry that in some places it is barley necessary to cut it to get it to dry out. It is almost straw in the field.

I’m starting with the center field on our land. I cut it Tuesday evening, raked it last night. The plan is to bale it up Saturday.

This is just a small field, about three acres. It is also the only field I baled last year.

It produced about 250 bales then, it will not produce nearly as much this year.

The plan is to bale up another field next week that is just less that twice this big next week. That is if everything goes well with this first field.

About time!

2006-08-14T16:09:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom!) probably think I’ve died or broke my typing finger or something.

I’m here and all my digits are in working order.

What we (the whole local part of the family and myself) have done however is something that keepers of livestock almost never get to do, that is to leave the farm for several days at a time.

We all went out to Colorado for a family event that was a combination family reunion and celebration of the 50th wedding anniversary for my aunt and uncle.

Our friend and sometimes co-conspirator Mr. Cooney came by and took care of the daily chores and checked on all the critters.

That made it possible. We are grateful and very lucky to have such friends.

Recent farm news:

Friends with a straight run batch of Buff-Orrington chickens brought the cockerels over to be converted from obnoxious little ankle peckers into tasty little fryers.

The job was done with very little trouble in just a couple of hours thanks to the whiz bang plucking machine.

----

We had a bad episode where the some of the sheep developed internal parasites that had become resistant to the Ivomec drench we have been using.

We wormed them at the same time we weaned the lambs. I miss diagnosed the problem as weaning stress, the result being three dead sheep.

I did eventually figure out what was going on and re-treated all those that needed it with a different drug.

They all seem to have responded well to that treatment.

----

This week’s goal is to get the hay crop underway. I plan to cut evenings this week, rake on Friday evening and bale over the weekend.

We have been struggling with very little rain lately, almost but not quite a full-blown drought.

I have noticed that one thing that is more effective than a rain dance or even scheduling a parade is for me to cut hay.

That has been known to cause flash floods. It would almost be worth it.

Chicken Labels

2006-07-24T15:49:00.000-04:00

Sunday afternoon it rained.

I was pretty much worn out from all that working in the heat so I took that for an excuse to flop down in my easy chair and look at the TV.

You have to understand that while I do look at the tube from time to time, it has been many years since I was able to sit through most of the nonsense it shows. I just look at documentaries and ball games, and those filtered through the TiVo.

I wound up looking at a couple of farm shows from RFDTV. They were conventional Agribusiness shows put on by different State Farm Bureau organizations.

This all got me thinking about chickens.

According to Farm Bureau the current price for eggs is thirty some cents per dozen. Broilers are going for a similar price per pound. Really.

That’s the whole story from the Commodity Ag report. What is not part of that number I feel sure is the fact that I get 2.50 a pound for broilers and the same price for a dozen eggs.

I recently read a blurb on the Internet posted by my State Extension Service that stated flatly that there were no independent egg producers in my State. None, really.

The poultry industry, be it eggs or broilers, is one of the worlds most tightly integrated markets. It all goes thorough two or three huge companies. Farmers contract with them to raise poultry under tightly controlled circumstances in monstrous numbers.

There are more people raising small numbers of chickens in farmyards and suburban backyards by far than there are factory style poultry farmers. Of course the factory farmers raise such large numbers of birds that they account for the overwhelming majority of the poultry out there.

It seems likely to me that even the Extension Service people are aware that some people have backyard flocks. If pressed they would probably admit that it is possible that some of the eggs and meat from these flocks is bought and sold.

This activity doesn’t get included in the numbers because somehow it doesn’t count. It is not agribusiness. I’m not arguing that it should count; I’m not arguing at all, I’m just making observations.

I was at a grocery store near here a while ago. I noticed that they had more than the standard eggs on offer. They had brown eggs, cage free eggs, organic eggs, and a few other variations.

Someone has figured out that some people will pay a premium price for eggs that are special. Clearly the shopper is being invited to believe that these eggs are produced in a way that is closer to a backyard flock than a food factory.

In the last decade or so many laws have been passed controlling the clams made on those fancy egg carton labels.

This was not done for the benefit of those keepers of backyard flocks.

It was done to help the big integrators pretend they are keepers of backyard flocks, or near enough as to make no difference.

This, it seems to me, is the whole point of the “organic food” industry.

Back in the day if someone told you that something was organic, it was a simple if somewhat imprecise way of saying that it was produced using old fashioned, artisan techniques, and was not immersed in petrochemicals or hosed down with any sort of nuclear waste.

Now if you see a food label that claims the contents are organic, what is required for that product to qualify for that label is precisely defined by statute, but probably does not mean what the casual customer thinks it means.

It is a sham intended to make the customer think he or she is getting something they are not.

To get through all the red tape required to qualify for organic labeling requires resources that are not available to small-scale producers, absolutely including the willingness to wade through all that bureaucracy.

If you imagine organic food, I bet the image you conjure up is of items that do not even have labels.

For someone who cares where his or her food comes from, the only sure way to know is to raise it your self or get it directly from the producer. This would have to be a producer who has shown you the details of production, or at least earned your trust.

Agribusiness can’t do this. What they can do is come up with whatever sort of marketing drive that folks seem to like.

That’s what organic labeling is.

Weekend Update

2006-07-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

This weekend we weaned the lambs. We sorted them off from their mothers and moved the mothers in with the dry ewes. We left the lambs where they were, in the barn and dry lot. Before we separated them they had access to the whole paddock that the barn is in, now they don’t. The ewes are about 100 yards away.

This is not fence line weaning, but there has been a bit less trauma than I expected. As expected, the ewes are more upset by it than the lambs.

The next project was to finish putting a floor in the hoop house the laying hens use for roosting. The hoop house is made from two cattle panels bent over a 8ft by 8ft frame with a tarp over the top. It has chicken wire walls on the ends with a door in one end. There is nothing inside but roosting perches. I have a separate little structure for the nesting boxes, and all the feed and water is outside.

The reason for the floor is to make it easy to move the chickens from place to place. The floor is 1 x 2 inch cage wire over 2 x 4 inch floor joists. It is not necessary to clean it out because the poop just falls through the wire floor to the ground.

To move the chickens I just go out after dark and shut the door. The next morning I can just tow the whole thing behind my pickup to a new location.

We did this Sunday morning shifting them to the garden spot near the house. The garden is done for now until the temperatures cool down a bit in the fall. I picked all the corn and most of the cowpeas but left the corn stalks and pea plants intact. This gives the chickens some shade and interesting places to scratch around in.

Processing Poultry

2006-07-14T12:03:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I processed the first batch of broiler chickens we have raised this year.

The good news is that all the paying customers got the chickens they wanted and seemed very happy about it. The bad news is that there was none left for me.

We need more chickens and soon to fix that.

I made a little video of the process, it runs a little over 12 minutes. If you have any sort of broadband connection and don’t mind the realities of converting live birds into food then you may want to have a look. It is in windows media format.

Chicken Processing video clip

Fourth of July weekend

2006-07-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed that posting is getting more and more sparse as summer comes on. That is not because nothing is going on, it’s because so much is going on I just haven’t been taking the time to write about it.

Dave, my best pal from our old address, came up with his family for part of the Fourth of July weekend.

It was especially good to see his oldest son Alex, who was on a short leave after finishing his second year at West Point.

Cadets don’t get summers off. It just amazes me that some one so young can have so much on the ball.

----

The big news as to farming is the new gadget we just got. A Chinese mousetrap for sheep that allows us to trim hoofs without getting beat up.

We wormed all the lambs and wet ewes and trimmed all the hoofs on those ewes on the Fourth.

We try not to herd sheep around here on the theory that it is better to lead than to follow.

Here is my bride AKA “The Corn Goddess” leading the beasties to their pedicure session.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.
----

Around the house and around the farm we use tools and equipment all the time to accomplish what we want to do.

I’ve noticed that at any given time some of these contraptions are broken.

At the moment my riding lawn mower and my weed whacker are both in the shop. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that the most critical piece of equipment on the place is out of commission.

That’s right, my easy chair is busted! Bummer!

Farmers Market?

2006-06-27T15:56:00.000-04:00

I get occasional junk mail from the County Agent. This is actually the extension service from the Ag school at the University of Florida. I’m not sure how that is different from the County Agent, but I guess it is.

Last week I got a newsletter that contained a little blurb about a meeting that was scheduled for Friday evening about possibly starting a farmers market in one of the little towns about 4 or 5 miles from our place.

I thought this might be a good place to market my eggs. My bride and I went to check it out.

I guess I expected a bunch of farmers and market gardeners discussing who grows what and how to make sure prospective customers have a wide array of things to buy.

What went on was rather different.

There were two or three other farmers. There were half a dozen quazi official types. The Mayor of the town was there. The County agent, like I said, as well as his counterpart from the next county over. One woman was some sort of expert on starting farmers markets. I couldn’t tell if she worked for some level of government or was a freelance consultant.

The discussion was all about parking, permits, license and whether it (the farmers market) should be run by the city or some corporate entity that would need to be created.

One lady did mention that she approved of farmers markets because the food there was usually better than what is on offer at the grocery store. Other than that I don’t think anyone mentioned what would be sold there or where it would come from.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that the best way to get me muttering four letter words under my breath is to expose me to any sort of bureaucracy. Mostly under my breath.

Around here farmers markets are mainly in the cities. In rural areas like where we are folks just put up roadside stands if they want to sell something. I’ve considered doing this myself but I don’t think we have enough of a product line to make it worth stopping at or enough time to run it properly.

It is also possible that a farmers market could provide some cover from the risk of official ambush.

WARNING! RANT ALERT! WARNING! (This next bit is an attempt at humor, how successful the attempt is left to the reader) :-)

What I mean by official ambush is something like this; we have a willing buyer and a willing seller agreeing to transfer ownership of some property at a mutually agreeable price.

Next thing you know, some third party shows up and identifies themselves as a duly appointed representative of the Bureau of Broccoli, Bean Sprouts, Bok Choy, and other vegetables having names beginning with the letter “B”. They demand to know where your form 544C/2 is.

Perhaps this joker can simply be referred to the market manager on the grounds that the market itself is protected by an official entity exempt from their authority.

It is also possible that the market manager, thinking of his own career, may decide to condemn in the strongest term any vendor who would dare contemplate working the market without a proper form 544C/2.

Busted! Conspiracy to commit agriculture! Bad Farmer!

END OF RANT

So we'll see where this all goes. Obviously I’m skeptical but I do have some hope this could be useful. Stay tuned.

Low stress chicken

2006-06-15T12:12:00.000-04:00

I like fried chicken as it happens. But I don’t care for it until it is purposely cooked up.

The other day the temperature got up into the high nineties, along with the humidity. This is typical Florida summertime stuff, just a little early is all.

Most of the critters here just find a shady place to lie about through the hottest part of the day, no problem. These Cornish Cross broiler chickens are not as hearty as normal chickens though and I had a few that used the heat as an excuse to drop dead.

Prematurely fried chicken, not good.

In the past I just raised these birds in the fall. Temperatures would get lower as the birds grew bigger and I didn’t have any problems.

I have a fan in my shop that I used years ago when I would tune up an air-cooled Motorcycle engine. It kept it from overheating when I ran it for a long while when it was not moving.

The chickens seem to enjoy it. They are obviously much more comfortable.

No more heat stress.

They sit in front of the fan like a dog with its head out the car window.

My young laying hens coped with the heat just fine, but then tropical storm Alberto came by and blew the roof off their pen.

I was intending to remove the pen to integrate them with the older hens. This just caused that plan to speed up.

No smashed hens by the way.

There has been less fighting among the hens than I expected, the young ones have accepted a lower spot in the pecking order, and that seemed to satisfy the older (and larger) hens.

In the nearby photo they are all roosting together in the hoop house.

When the farm bill comes due

2006-06-12T14:24:00.000-04:00

Have you heard that work has begun on the new farm bill? Our esteemed public servants have begun the process of setting out place cards at the public trough.

Meetings are taking place between the captains of corporate agribusiness and public sector types that oversee things like food stamps and school lunches.

Of course this has almost nothing to do with farming and everything to do with politics, but before its over those of us who do raise crops and/or livestock will likely have a whole new set of things to worry about and defend ourselves against.

This unholy alliance between the corporate hustlers and the poverty pimps will probably not be content to simply plunder the public treasury and let it go at that, at least they have not done so in the past.

I can’t guess what new problems these folks will send our way.

When I was a kid people commonly made jokes about how the government paid farmers not to grow crops. They paid by the acre you see, so if you didn’t grow 1000 acres of corn you got more money than if you didn’t grow only 100 acres of corn.

The latest batch of foolishness makes that look reasonable. Now I’m supposed to install radio id chips in my livestock and notify the Feds when my horse goes out for a trail ride. All at my own expense of course. We call this NAIS.

And then there’s the bird flu. The chickens on my farm are not locked up in some warehouse like the ones that belong to Tyson’s. At the first sign of trouble you can bet the Ag department folks will drive right past any number of giant poultry gulags on their way to destroy my birds and any other backyard flocks in the area.

I guess they think my chickens may pop off to visit relatives in China and come home with a social disease.

I was reading the other day that most customers for direct-marketed alternative agricultural products are women who are involved with home schooling. I hadn’t noticed that before, but it agrees with my experience. From all points of the political compass mind you, but all home school folks.

It used to be that keeping your kids out of public school was a major legal problem. People did jail time for it. It was considered a form of child abuse and still is in several states. Just like selling raw milk and on farm butchering of livestock.

I would rather have a seat on the old picket fence than deal with what seems like the endless stream of petty tyrannies being launched at the small farmer.

Some advocate the formation of some sort of political special interest group to defend our selves, a sort of anti-establishment establishment I guess. Still, this lifestyle is as much about individualism as anything. I’ve never been much of a joiner.

So we must out smart them, fortunately that’s not too hard.

I would never sell poultry that was not processed in a licensed and approved facility, you know, with 4000 sq ft of heated and air conditioned floor space and ADA compliant bath rooms, men and ladies. But if you would like to contract with me to raise a live bird for you, I can clean it for you for free when the time comes.

I would never sell un-pasteurized milk, but if you want to buy a part interest in this cow, what you do with your milk is your business.

At no point in my life have I learned so much so fast as I have here on the farm. Talk about home schooling.

Updates on the poultry and the garden

2006-06-11T14:56:00.000-04:00

It's Sunday afternoon and normally I'd be out working.

But the temperature outside at the moment is almost exactly at the boiling point of human flesh, so I thought I’d goof off and update the blog here in my cozy air conditioned office.

I did postings for each batch of chickens when they arrived as day old peeps but have not mentioned their progress.

I also mentioned when I planted the garden but have not done an update on that project either.

First an update on the garden.

This is not a regular vegetable garden; it’s a small-scale field crop experiment. It is a very basic planting.

I know zip about field crops, my experience with plant agriculture consists of watching the occasional houseplant die of neglect.

My goal is to replace some or all of the feed we buy for the livestock. This should be possible for the sheep at least, because they don’t need much feed beyond the forage that we have plenty of. The chickens are a different story.

I planted corn and cowpeas.

Peas alone, corn alone, and corn and peas mixed. Corn was planted in rows about 30 inches apart, cowpeas down the middle of the rows.

The peas did fine on thier own, the corn and peas mixed did well. The corn alone did poorly. The soil here is not very good, beach sand with very little else in it.

The laying hens.

Today I started the process of mixing the young laying hens and the older ones. They have been next to each other since the young ones came out of the brooder separated by some poultry netting. I joined the netting so they are now in one big enclosure but I left both pens inside for now.

This was done after the nearby picture was taken.

I added roosting space to the hoop house and will remove the small pen sometime soon.

Chickens can be rather vicious to strange birds, best to do the integration gradually.

Broilers

These birds are the radishes of the animal kingdom. They start out tiny, grow huge and are harvested in almost no time.

I just raise these in a scaled down Salatin style pen that I move to a new patch of grass each day. These are about halfway between the egg and the dinner plate.

Lambing season is now over

2006-05-30T09:09:00.000-04:00

The last of the ewes has had her lambs. Ewe number 416 had twin ram lambs late last night. They weighed in at 10lbs 2oz and 9lbs 7oz.

So here is how we did on the season. We started with 16 breed ewes.

One miscarried about 6 weeks before she was due. She had had a lamb born dead last year. She was moved in with the dry ewes and will be culled.

We had 14 ram lambs and 12 ewe lambs, a total of 26 lambs. I figure that to be a 168.75% lambing rate, respectable especially considering that most of the ewes are first time mamas.

And one heifer calf for good measure.

A little time for the bovine

2006-05-29T12:22:00.000-04:00

In the interest of diversity and multi-species grazing, we present this little beast, born this morning at 10:30 or so.

Annie the heifer is now Annie the cow. The calf is a heifer.

The whole neighborhood was in on the event. John, my neighbor to the east and the owner of Turbo, the bull that is the daddy of this calf, called me to tell me of the event. He had witnessed the birth from his field just across the fence.

Shortly after that Stan and Michelle, our neighbors to the West happened by and inspected the new calf and all the new lambs.

Two sets of twins

2006-05-26T09:23:00.000-04:00

Last evening ewe number 5 had a set of twins, both female. One weighed 8lbs 13oz the other 7lbs even. This ewe is a Katahdin St Croix cross.

Early today ewe number 1 had one ram lamb and one ewe lamb weighing 8lbs 8oz and 6lbs 14oz respectively. This ewe is a Katahdin Barbados cross and is my wife’s special pet.

This leaves just one ewe that has yet to lamb. She is still out there doing a very convincing impersonation of Java the Hut.

Here is a bonus picture from the “Too cute not to publish” file.

Single lamb

2006-05-24T12:39:00.000-04:00

Ewe number 414 had a single ram lamb weighing 7lbs 9oz. She is one of the ewes that lambed last year.

I bet both my readers will be relived when lambing is over and I put some more variety back in this blog. Me too. Only three ewes left, soon I hope.

Two ewes, three lambs

2006-05-23T09:35:00.000-04:00

We have this black-headed Dorper ewe with tag number 411. She has a puppy-chewed ear. My bride calls her floppy.

We have been telling each other for weeks that she was going to lamb any minute. She was enormous and had developed a bag like a Holstein.

Last night was the night. She seemed like she was OK to me, but my bride wanted to hang out with her and did.

She had twins that weighed 11 lbs 4 oz and 9 lbs even, over 20 lbs of lamb, she had every right to be huge!

Early today ewe number 410 a single lamb at 10 lbs 4 oz. This ewe is rather small and she had some trouble with this monster. One hoof was folded back; they should come out with both front hooves and the nose together. Again my bride played midwife and other than one very exhausted ewe, everybody’s fine.

The lamb is only minutes old in this picture, mama hasn’t even cleaned it off yet.

Yet another set of twin lambs

2006-05-18T10:58:00.000-04:00

Our ewe number 2, a funny looking beast which is at least part Blue Faced Leicester, gave birth to twin lambs, one male one female, early today.

We are now at the break-even point, fifteen lambs from fifteen ewes.

The good news is that six of the fifteen ewes have not yet lambed. Some of the remaining ewes are simply enormous! They are either going to have a litter of six or fifty pound lambs.

Broiler Chickens

2006-05-18T09:49:00.000-04:00

I’d been meaning to order a batch of broilers for the last few weeks but just never seemed to get around to it.

We have none left in our freezer; I gave the last one to a woman who wanted to get on my customer list and had a special event she wanted chicken for.

I haven’t been pushing the broiler enterprise very hard; I’ve just done 50 a year for the last two years.

Still people really like these chickens and the chicken customers often end up buying other things and referring new chicken customers.

I have good facilities for raising up to a few hundred birds a year, not good enough for more than that. I built the Whizbang Pucker last summer. If I grow the enterprise much I’ll need to build the scalder.

I got a call the other day from a (prospective) new customer, and that finally motivated me to place the order.

I use Welp Hatchery, the same place I got the new layers. These birds are Cornish Cross peeps and after being hatched Tuesday showed up at the Post Office today. The Post Office called about 7AM asking me to come pick them up.

They are in the brooder now.

Lambs being cute

2006-05-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

Here is a short (about 5 minutes) video clip that we hope gives you a chuckle. If you have a slow connection you may want to pass on this, but it works OK on DSL.

Lambs being cute video clip

Bonus Lamb

2006-05-17T10:04:00.000-04:00

Ewe number 6 was the first lamb born here last year.

In fact she is still just under one year old.

She is fairly small and I did not even think she was pregnant.

This morning early she had a single rather small ram lamb. They both seem to be doing fine.

I had not been counting her among the ewes yet to lamb. As a matter of fact I was planning to mover her in with the dry ewes as soon as it was practical, no reason to give extra feed to an open ewe.

Just for this she gets to stay on the feed. This is a bonus!

Expansion is happening

2006-05-16T15:13:00.000-04:00

Monday a new batch of breeding ewes arrived on the farm. We brought in 19 two and three year old production ewes.

All these girls had lambs last winter, so everyone has at least some experience. They include a mix of different breeds, very much like the ewes we already have.

Another dozen ewes are due here this weekend. This last bunch is the Florida Natives that we are going to sharecrop with the Oak Lane Farm.