Even though it’s winter, we’ve been very busy around the farm! Here’s a summary of just some of the activities from the past few weeks:
New Dairy Goat!
Hello, my name is Adrienne, and I have a livestock problem. If you’ve been with us for a while, you may have heard us say 2015 is to be “the year of the garden”. 2014 was the year of livestock, with the acquisition of laying hens, meat chickens, ducks, goats, hogs, and rabbits. Well, I just can’t say no to more livestock, but at least I’m not expanding into more species!
So a couple weeks ago when I was approached with the opportunity to trade a few of our Silver Fox rabbits for a registered Alpine doe, I took it. We had decided to be open to dairy goats this year if the opportunity presented itself, and here it was! So a few rabbits left the farm, and Andromeda came to us!
Andromeda in her favorite spot: on top of her house!
Andromeda was living in a herd of does at her old farm, so the first day or so she was crying for her friends, much like a puppy cries the first night you bring it home.
I’ve been handfeeding her daily, though, and we’re becoming fast friends!
Andromeda eating an apple from my hand.
We have high hopes of building a quality, registered Alpine goat herd this year. Look forward to some fresh milk!
Chicks on the Way!
Since I’m crazy, we ordered 100 laying hen chickens to arrive this week. Well, the real reason we did it is that we don’t have enough eggs to meet demand, and we were dissatisfied with the selection of hens available in the area. Most of the hens available are pullets that are debeaked and raised in practically factory farm conditions. There is no way we’d support that type of enterprise, plus from a pragmatic standpoint, those birds could very well be sick and bring diseases to our farm!
Example of Our Red Sex Link Laying Hens
So for these reasons, we ordered 100 red sex link chicks. We are willing to sell some to interested parties in the area, so if you’re interested read this page! We went with red sex links because they mature quickly and start laying sooner, plus they are highly productive layers. We’ve run the numbers, and it’s tough to break even on egg sales. Birds need to be really productive to make it work.
Livestock Carrier
We made a livestock carrier for the truckbed out of cattle panels and quicklinks!
Livestock carrier
We used goat panels since we know we’ll be transporting goats, plus they’ll hold hogs, too. The carrier is 4ft wide by 8ft long by 4ft high. We cut the panels to length using a metal cutting blade on our circular saw.
This whole thing cost us less than $100 in materials, while comparable premade carriers cost several hundred dollars. Ours also has the advantage of collapsing down when you undo some of the quicklinks and fold the panels onto each other.
Hog Drama
We came back from vacation a few weeks ago, and noticed one of our gilts had these crazy hairless patches on her shoulders.
Hairless patch on shoulder
We asked around and watched the hogs, and determined the hair issue was from the other gilt in the same pen pushing this one around. So we took the one getting hassled to a different pen! The hair has been growing in, and she seems just fine.
Goat Health Maintenance
With the addition of the new goat, we took some time to do a routine health check on our goats. Every month of so we take each goat individually, trim its hooves, and check its eyelids using the FAMACHA test protocol to see the goat’s parasite load.
Eyelid check!
This time, we did something new: gave the goats copper! We’ve been interested in giving the goats copper boluses, and we finally made it happen. After much research, we determined that our area is probably low in copper levels because most of the United States is too low in copper to meet goats’ needs. We ordered copper boluses for goats from Amazon. UltraCruz Goat Copper Bolus for adults, 25 x 4 grams
To give the goats the copper, we tested both the marshmallow and peanut butter methods. Out of the two, we preferred the marshmallow as it was less messy. Both worked well, but I would note it’s best to give the marshmallow as one piece. With one goat we had ripped the marshmallow in half and put copper in both halves; the goat ate the first half just fine, but wasn’t interested in it a second time.
Marshmallows prepared with copper, and Molly “helping”
We are hoping the copper will boost overall wellness, as well as lower parasite load. We’ll check the eyelids in another couple of weeks to see if there’s any improvement.
Cold Weather
We’ve had some cold weather recently! It was so cold, I even busted out the hand warmers to keep my hands from freezing during morning chores. The cold weather meant snow stuck around for several days, which isn’t too common around here. Overall the livestock handled it pretty well.
It’s cold! We should get extra feed…
The ducks seem untroubled by snow or cold. They still venture out around the yard, and even venture into the water bowls for baths! Overall we’ve been very happy with our venture into ducks, even if they are louder than we anticipated.
Ducks in snow
Whiskey seems to not mind the cold, either.
Let’s play!
Harley’s let her in the house on some really cold nights, though, and she seems to like that too!
It’s so warm and cozy in here!
Laundry Room Update
We really like the idea of growing fodder for livestock feed, and we’ve been playing around with that. We determined the garage was too cold to effectively grow fodder, and developed a plan to from some on racks in the laundry room. Well, that meant that first we should repaint the room, which has been on the to-do list for a while.
Laundry room getting repainted
So the laundry room paint job is done, but we’re still working on those racks for the fodder. Harley spent most of last weekend cutting wood for this project, along with some others we have in the works.
Friday on the Farm
Would you like to learn what’s going on at the farm each week? Starting this week, you can look forward to “Friday on the Farm” posts every Friday, summarizing our adventures and activities over the past week! Come back this Friday, February 6th for our first installment!
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