Calving Time

Last week we had our first calf and early this week we had our second. The two are both little bulls. They are very hard to find in the over grown pastures and since the mothers are held in by a single poly line, they can roam a bit. I have not seen the two calves together yet. In fact I can go days without seeing any of them. I would feel better if I could see them more easily.

One of two little bull calves

With the dry weather (we have not had a good rain for around 7-8 weeks and the forecast does not have much chance in it), the grass has stopped growing and now all that is growing are the weeds. We have a lot of  bull thistle, horseweed, western ragweed, and heath aster out in the pasture. Some of it can get up to 8 feet tall (I am a bit over 6 feet tall). I have been hammering the pasture with sheep to try and bring things under control. The sheep are doing a pretty good job, but the remaining skeletons of the weeds will likely have to be mowed off as I am finding it hard to move my chicken pens over them. Times like this, makes me regret selling my pasture mower, but I did sell it to buy more sheep.

South Pasture Before Sheep

South Pasture After Sheep

I am still trying to get the turkeys outside. They are just over 4 weeks old and ready to start outside living. They are bottled up in the brooder with some young chickens. Hazel loves the birds (not as much as the cows and the sheep) so now that she can motor across the yard, she wants to go up to the garage and see the brooder. 

Hazel and the baby chickens

Other then that, not too much to report. Janice has had me putting on a new screen door on the house as the old one was starting to fall apart. I rather like the new door. That is it for now. Here is hopping I can get my turkeys outside today. 

Removing the old door

New storm door

Getting Our Groove On

Well we have made some progress around here in the last two weeks. Our chickens and turkeys continue to develop well.  I moved 175 Chickens moved out to pasture this last weekend and they are doing good. I lost one to a predator and then caught it the next night. It was an opossum. We are trapping every night because of the heavy predator pressure we have had all year. We have even had coon hunters walk our timber and clear out two of the four they came across.

The first batch of 2011 to make it this far, now this is more like it

The turkeys still rule the brooder with 165 of them still in the garage/brooder. They are very large for turkeys of there age and I am really liking the new brooder set-up. I just can't wait for it operating next year in the new building.

Turkeys hanging out in the garage at three weeks of age

Today, we get our last batch of chickens for the year. They will have to share some space with the turkeys so we will see how that goes. On the rest of the farm, Jim was out last weekend and we put the remaining rafters in place and began to frame the internal wall. We need to get the windows and doors framed and then get the boards in place that the roof steel will sit on. My hope is that for our annual customer work day on September 17th, that we will be putting up steel roofing that day. 

All the rafters for the chicken building are now in place

The mower is in the garage and if you can imagine what opening the garage door might be like with 160 turkeys in there, you can understand why I have nor mowed my yard for a month. That is why the sheep are doing it for me right now. I just need to follow them around with the weed wacker/eater and tidy things up a bit. It works ok, but you can't get every spot.

Sheep grazing the yard, mower takes the month off

Other then that, we have been just hanging in there as things accelerate around here. If you are big fans of my daughter Hazel, you should check out my wife's blog as she has some footage of Hazel making sheep noises around the sheep. When the sheep were right up by the house, Hazel could just stand there and watch them and make realistic noises back at them for twenty to thirty minutes easy. Other then that, I did manage to get one thing off my farm to-do list. I put the martin house back up. It has been lying round for over a year since it's pole rotted off in its old location and it fell to the earth. It is now towering over the young orchard and taller then ever. I did get some help from Michael in Ames to raise the thing up into position, so thank you for that. That martin house is just one of those things that I wanted to get done and Janice views as completely not important. She is probably right, but it is now done so I am happy.

The martin house goes back up after a year in the shed

Well that is all for now. I need to go get ready for little chickens that should be here in about an hour. Until next time.

End of July Update

We are leaving a steamy July behind and beginning an steamy August. We have 175 broiler chickens and 165 turkeys in our brooder. Since the chicken building is not functional yet, we converted the garage into a brooder. The garage has been working well as a brooder. I wish the building had a window so I could vent it easier. The meat chickens should be ready to move outside tomorrow or Tuesday. The birds are a little young, but with evening temperatures around 70 degrees, I think things will be fine. The pens got moved today into positions and necessary maintenance needs to be performed to keep the old pens moving. The outside pens are on the list of things that should be replaced next year. 

New Chicken Brooder Set-up in the Garage

With the heat I have not been too active outside. One lamb died, but other than that we have been doing alright. I usually come in from choring saturated with sweat. I am going through one shirt in the morning and one to two shirts at night. When I come inside, Hazel tells me she wants to go outside by bringing me her shoes and then bringing me my shoes. It is cute, but the last thing I want to do is go back outside after doing chores. Hazel usually gets her way, at least for a few minutes. Hazel is also working on climbing up and down the stairs. She is very good at going up stairs and is alright at going down them. She has been climbing on top of the coolers and playing on top of them recently. It is quite cute until she starts to fuss to seek help getting down. That is our short July update. Things will be busy here in the coming weeks with birds back on pasture. We will have our chicken available in early September so stay in touch. 

Hazel Playing on a Cooler Lid

Building a Farm

You know there are some things I would caution new farmers when considering buying a farm. Looking at the potential is the desire of any would be land owner, but a full assessment of your farm deficiencies and/or the amount of time and work to realize that farm's potential is needed. We were admittedly naive in approaching our farm, but we are slowly working through the deficiencies in terms of buildings, fencing, and water systems. We should have addressed more of our infrastructure needs up front before we had animals, but then you don't have any revenue. Instead we muck through life trying to have animals and build infrastructure all at the same time.

One of our unaddressed needs has been our subpar brooder set-up. I have lost over 400 small chickens this year to a combination of disease, smothering and predators. The major problem with our current building is that we can not separate our brooders from our mature laying hens. So there are instances when young birds are exposed to the droppings of mature birds. Access to dropping of mature birds is a  terrible disease and parasite source for the new chicks. Our new chicken building will have an internal wall to separate brooding from laying. The new building will also be tighter and easier to make sure predators can not enter it. The building is coming along. The rafters are about half up, the windows need to be framed, and the internal wall needs to be constructed, then the wrap and sheeting can go up. Many thanks to Jim form Pella for his ongoing help in constructing the building.

  Current status of the poultry building

The poultry building will not be ready in time for the arrival of our replacement broiler chicks or our turkeys so plan B is being implemented. Our garage is being converted into a larger brooder with two brooder cells and Janice's car is being moved outside. My step-father-in-law, Michael, helped assemble the first brooder hood yesterday. It is a 4'x4' brooder hood almost exact to its original on a 1942 design. It should work well for 180 broiler chicks. We will build a 6'x4' brooder for our turkeys in the next week.

Top view of the new brooder hood

Bottom view of the new brooder

Our sheep and cattle are working though the rental property to the north of us. We did get out neighbor to the south to cut hay for us off another piece of rented ground to the north. 

Nine bales stacked up for winter

I am still balancing work three days a week with the farm, Hazel and Janice. It can be very taxing at times. I am deeply concerned with how this juggling act will continue going into the fall when I will have two batches of chickens and turkeys to wrangle with at the same time as everything else I am doing now. 

Hazel is doing well. She has really left the baby stage and is working up to the toddler stage. He talks a lot, but only a few words are discernible. Mostly daddy, kitty, and ball. She is as fun as ever and is working on some new teeth. I can't image doing this with out Janice and Hazel. These past two years have been very challenging, but those two lady keep me moving forward day after day.

Reading to Hazel

Up Goes the Walls

We have made substantial progress on a couple of fronts and taken a few steps back as well.

We had a chicken coop raising party this weekend and got two of the walls (the long ones) up and framed. We will go back and do some cutting work to slip the windows in. I need to thank Super Jim from Pella, our regular helper who did much to guide the endeavor, and Janice's co workers Greg and Drew, and Greg's fiance Melanie. I learned a lot and I think a good time was had by all. Thanks you guys & gal for your help.

Attaching wall studs for the south wall (before raising the wall)

The finished product, two walls up in one afternoon

One of our goals for this year was to remove the Barbados ewes from our herd and process or sell all but one of the rams. As of yesterday, that has been done. We butchered 4 rams two weeks ago, sold off 5 ewes last week, and I sold and delivered 6 ewes and a ram yesterday. I did also sell my good young Katahdin Dorper cross ram that we were considering keeping. Other then that I butchered our steer this week. Needless to say, we have have moved a lot of animals this last week. The Sheep herd was at 48 animals and is now down to 31 counting our one ram. We are not getting out of sheep, we are getting rid of the bottom 30% of our herd and our extra rams. We also brought down our grazing pressure from around 15 AU to around 11 AU, so we should have more grass as we move into the leaner times this summer. 

Nice Katahdin Dorper Cross Ram I sold (I will kinda miss him)

Our Steer on the trailer (I will miss miss him)

Where we have been struggling is with our chickens. We have had very heavy predator pressure. From foxes to raccoons. We have been trapping, but it is very hard to get a handle on those issues, especially foxes. To make matters worse, we have had an illness or developmental problems with our second batch of broilers. The building we are using  and have been using is not very sanitary. It has adult birds and chicks in too close a proximity to each other. The new building will have a divided wall. The brooder side of the new building needs to be operational by mid-July so we can put our turkeys in it. The very slow development and high mortality has me deeply concerned about our July delivery dates and our cash flow moving into the late summer and early fall. Our beef and lamb is going to have to cover the spread, but our poultry building is also eating up our available funds. To make matters worse, the clutch is stuck on the tractor and I am going to need that thing soon to move new hay out of the field. As always, there are significant challenges that continue to dog us. I am hopeful though seeing some progress of the chicken building. We shall see what the back half of June has in store for us.

Caught between Mortar and Pestle

Farming has not been easy or generous recently. Our primary energizer (8 Joule output) is broken. It stopped working a month ago and it is out being repaired. The back-up energizer (2 Joule output) is not doing the best job of containing our animals and they have been out a lot recently. Other then that, we are still hurting from our chicken debacle (hatchery sending us the wrong type of birds). We have also had heavy predator pressure form the raccoons on our layers so our egg production is limping along again.

The sheep are out, again

On the upside, we did get rid of one of the  raccoons, we did butch four sheep (however their carcasses were diminutive), and we might be selling some sheep off. I am trying to butcher and sell my sheep numbers down. The goal is to purge most of the Barbados blood in the herd and bring us back to where we should be. This will reduce our total herd down by 40%.

There just has not been much upside to farming this year yet. Nothing seems to be going well and we seem to find struggles in what should be simple for us. We are looking at ways (like getting rid of the lower quality sheep) to help the situation. Customer deliveries start up again in two weeks so I am looking forward to catching up with our customers.

May Progress & Challenges

We are moving forward through the month of May. We are making great progress on farm building despite me working. We have had several folks out helping so I want thank: Mark Bancroft, Jeremy Bennett, Michael Carter, Adam Faeth, and super helper Jim Stumo for coming out to work on our sheep handling system. We started off a couple of weeks ago by having the pad for the chicken building pored by a local firm. I am still waiting on the bill for that.

Concrete pad for the future chicken house and divided brooder

Next we started to define the sheep wintering area just behind (north) of the chicken house. The perimeter fence is made of hog panels secured to two wooden posts and supported along the way by two steel posts.

Sheep Winter Facilities Perimeter Fence

We later stared to frame a "Bud Box" handling system that can deal with both cattle and sheep. The "Bud Box" uses natural animal behavior to create an easy way to move livestock into lanes to be worked. 

Handling Lanes: Sheep on the Left & Cattle on the Right

There still is a few more posts and some earth work to go in the crude form. Then pieces of treated plywood and gates need to be screwed/hung and then we are in business. I hope to get it functional in the next few weeks. 

The grazing side of the business has been going OK. The weather has been difficult and full of fluctuations. In the last two weeks, we have gone from heavy freezes at night to 90 degree days and back to near freezing again. In general spring started off well and then things got cold for several weeks before getting hot and dry with lots of wind. From the stand point of a farmer dependent on grass growth, things have been pretty poor. The cold held back growth and the dry warmth did not help. Things are starting to improve now that it finally rained. We have grazed much of the north end of the farm and one of the rental properties up there as well. Now I am working my way though the south end of the farm. 

Water tank, hoses, and tank leaving the North end of the farm following the herd

Sheep Herd Grazing on the Base of the South Hill 

On the poultry side of things of things we have been struggling. Our death loss from smothering is unusually high from all of this cold weather. I am looking forward to having the new chicken house built so I have more control over the birds environment. Even with the high high death loss, something far more worrying has me concerned about broilers. I am concerned that they might no be broilers. Typically a broiler at two weeks become an eating pooping fat machine.

Our Current Broilers, Almost Four Weeks Old

May 12th, 2009 Broilers at about three weeks of age

The pictures are not of the same perspective, but the tiny birds of 2011 have nothing on the stocky broilers of the past. I think the hatchery sent me laying hens and i have 50 broiler orders to place in four weeks. I have to do some scrambling or pushing of orders back to figure out how to deal with this.

The laying hens have also had to deal with heavy predator pressures. I have a couple of large aggressive raccoons. They have killed a few hens and I have been stalking them at night with the semi-automatic 22 because they are very bold pest. I hope to find an answer to my raccoon problems and my lack of broilers soon. 

Layers out for a Dirt Bath