Across the Creek Farm

Okay, so I'm back...

2011-10-29T20:27:00.004-05:00

Wow, it's been a while hasn't it?

So keeping up kind of fell by the wayside this spring. Record-breaking/scary flooding (nearly two feet of rain over a couple of days) followed by record drought, plus a military deployment alert, and well, a lot of other stuff...and the blog kind of fell by the wayside.

But family, faith, and farm didn't and we've been steadily working on all three this year. Life's balanced and growing, and we're glad for it.

Carla (my wife) and several other people have been on me to fire the blog back up. I acquiesced when I met some random person in Kansas City, and they asked what had happened to the blog. I'll catch you up to speed over the next couple of weeks. Lots of cool things going on...I'll tell you about them soon.

New feed ration

2011-03-15T21:19:00.003-05:00

So, we've switched our feed for our meatbirds to a better ration. We're getting our feed from a source a couple of counties over. The ration is ground on spot, in the grinder above. In addition, the most of the ration is (relatively) locally grown, being grown in North Central Arkansas in the Ozarks.
The best thing about this stuff is that it's 1oo% from nature. GMO free, but beyond that, the protein in it comes from fishmeal. By the way, did you know that Certified Organic Chicken feed typically uses a synthetic, powdered protein manufactured in a lab? Yeah...well, that's true for the stuff you buy from the major organic producers that use defunct conventional chickehouse at least...

The feed above smells so great...meaty, almost like a really thick beer. It smells wholesome and really nutritious. I'll have to raise our prices around 15-20 cents/lb, which I would have had to do anyways with the sky-rocketing corn prices. We're very happy with this move.

Not Getting Crushed by Barrels of Feed

2011-03-13T09:43:00.003-05:00

We've switched rations for our meatbirds this year - we're going to a GMO free, locally grown blend of chicken feed that I can get two counties away, from a private mill tucked away in the Ozark Mtns around 70 miles away. That's a whole another story...but I get the feed loaded in 55 gal drums, and they weigh A LOT. Unloading drums out of the back of the truck with a dolly and a ramp, was pretty laborious and turned out to be really dangerous - a 350ish lb drum out or control down a ricketty ramp. I've learned if you do something dangerous enough times, at some point I'll get hurt.

At the same time, Carla was helping me, and we were both starting to get on each others' nerves, so we took a break from unloading, and each other. I happened to look over at two square bales, and well, one thing led to another and this is how we now unload heavy barrels of feed! Just roll the barrel out of the back of the truck onto the square bales. The hay cushions the barrels, and there's no opportunity to get crushed by anything round and metal. It's also really fast...sounds like a win to me.

Skunked

2011-02-27T22:00:00.002-06:00

The combination of a ridiculously bright full moon and warmer spring-like temps have brought the polecats (skunks) out in force, at least the males. I've been seeing dead skunks all over the roads as of late.
This is what happens when a potential chicken-eating critter finds a way around or toughs his way through our electric fence. The Great Pyrenees made short work of this male skunk when he got into the pasture. Needless to say, the dogs got sprayed and are pretty rank, but they seem pretty proud of themselves and I'm definatley pleased.

One thing you can see is the special claws adapted for digging on this guy. I'd never seen a skunk up close before, so it was pretty neat to get to take a look at this one.

Still Spreading Hay

2011-02-23T21:33:00.003-06:00

We've got severe storms moving in tomorrow, potentially all day long, so of course erosion's on my mind. I've been picking up old round bales of hay too far gone or too weedy for cheap, $5 bucks a pop. I finally picked up a little 12 ft trailer on craigslist for a decent price; the trailer even has a ramp, so loading the hay rounds is a lot easier. We haven't been able to get a tractor yet, so any loading of round bales has meant a strong back and luring a unsuspecting friend over for a little "help".

There was a spot in the pasture across the creek that was looking a little bald. So I took a small round bale of hay out there and patched it up.

The Boston Mtns are especially susceptible to soil erosion, and our holler definitely fits the mold when it comes to the good stuff washing down hill. The spot above is a shale out-cropping that I drive up to get to the middle and top bench. The soil's so fragile there because, well there never really was any. So plastering the area with hay not only helps to keep the soil there, but makes a great seed bed for some fescue and some hardy weeds. The best thing about using the round bales is that there's always a downhill to help spread the hay! I've been sowing ryegrass and clover and it's germinating well in the hay. The rain coming up should get the rest of the seeds jump started into germination.

By the way, if I ever cut hay off someone else's land, I'm thinking it'll be square bales!

On Facebook

2011-02-21T23:04:00.002-06:00

If you're on facebook, search out Across the Creek Farm. Be glad to know you!

Crazy Weather Swings

2011-02-20T08:17:00.003-06:00

Man, the past week or so has been crazy. The last spate of winter weather dropped over a foot of snow at our place and 20 miles north, over two feet of snow fell, breaking a state record for 24 hr snowfall amounts. The next morning, temps dropped to -20 F, and that's REALLY cold here.

Lately though, temps have been pushing into the 70s during the days and 5os into the night. The ground's even starting to dry out a little. Judging by critters, spring is coming. The spring peepers are out and the bees are finding pollen somewhere, as their pollen baskets are laden with the yellow stuff.

I think we've still got a cold snap or two in store, and judging by the year so far, I'd be suprised if we didn't have a snow or two on the horizon. It's been a rough winter here, really rough. It's been good to see though how rough things can get as we're eyeballing our surroundings are figuring out what and how we need to build. A record drought followed by record cold back to back helps in the planning.

Anyone else having an abnormal weather year?

It's Getting Ridiculously Wintry in the Holler

2011-02-04T17:37:00.003-06:00

We got socked by a winter storm here over the past week here in Northwest Arkansas. A wintry storm early Monday through Tuesday dropped a quarter inch of freezing rain, nearly an inch of sleet and then another 4-5 inches of snow. The temperature plunged into record cold, with night time temps plunging to around -10 F and daytime temps not getting out of the single digits - crazy when you consider that we were near 70 F over the weekend! Temps haven't been above freezing for quite some time now, but everyone's doing pretty well.

We're down to just one goat, Billy. The dairy does we were boarding were picked up in mid-Jan before we headed off to SSAWG. Billy's been mourning the loss of his lovely dairy doe ladies, refusing to eat and just generally bumming around. The cold weather snapped him out of it. I was pretty worried the first night of the storm...the freezing rain had coated him really well and so I brought him some crabgrass hay. (Some how in goat reasoning cedars are better shelter than a roof in freezing rain!) A full rumen is a warm rumen, and that seemed to do the trick. He's holed up in the cedar thicket above, and what he didn't eat he made a nest out of to keep him warm. With a full belly, he dried out quickly thanks to the warmth of rumenating.

The Great Pyrenees down in the bottom pasture haven't been phased in the slightest. Their thick coats are still coated in ice from the freezing rain several days back. Fredo and Alfredo's coat is so thick that the dogs' body heat is kept in tight enough to keep the ice from thawing. When it was below 0 F on morning, I caught the big male rolling around in the snow trying to scratch his back, grunting in relief when he hit those hard to reach spots.

The laying flock in the sacrifice paddock have weathered through the cold rather well. Chickens don't like snow very well, and the bottom of the coop started to get pretty crowded as no one wanted to go outside. The lowest members of the pecking order started to get knocked around a good bit, so we filled the bottom of the coop with lots of seedy hay as well. Scratching through the hay keeps the hens busy looking for seeds and their feet stay dry and off the snow. The biggest problem we've had is that the eggs have been freezing before we can get to them. Until the weather warms up a bit, we're just boiling the eggs and feeding them to the pullet hens we're raising.

We got another 3 or so inches today, and another storm is supposed to hit us the beginning of next week...

2011-01-25T19:05:00.002-06:00

So Carla and I went to Southern SAWG (Sustainable Agricultural Working Group). SSAWG is pretty much a gathering of farmers from across the Southern US. It attracts a lot of different farmers - Cajuns, young hippies, Appalachian folks, African-American ranchers, the diversity of folks is pretty amazing, as well as the types of farmers, governmental agencies, and non-profits that are there. The last time Carla and I took a vacation was in 2006. No kids, no farm, just us getting started building a life and me trying to find my bearings after serving in Iraq. Carla was long overdue for some time out away from the youngins, work, and the farm. The picture above is us on top of Lookout Mtn in Chatanooga, TN. You can tell Carla's quite happy and I'm actually getting over a cold...
It was a work trip for me. I had the privilege of leading quite an eclectic group of pastured poultrymen/women, poultry processors, and potential farmers in a discussion session over challenges in poultry processing and marketing. Some really neat/successful farmers were there, and the discussion was fantastic. The first couple of days are workshops and field trips. Carla went to a local farm that raises pastured/forested pork (note the red wattle hogs below), grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, and has a dairy where they create superb cheese. Then there's two days of 1.5 hour topical sessions, six at a time (choose your favorite/most applicable one) on topics specific to the South.

The most interesting to me were ones given by Ann Wells and Greg Brann, on Management Intensive Grazing with small ruminants and cattle, and several on pastured poultry. There was also a neat course over rabbit production from a rabbit farmer who was so Tennessee in his bearing, that he was almost an Appalachian caricature. Carla went to sessions over record-keeping and planning for retirement on the farm. There was a lot to choose from:livestock, fruit, veggies, mushrooms, policy...it was all covered.

SSAWG will be in our neck of the woods next year - down in Little Rock, AR. Hopefully, we'll see you there!

Back from Southern SAWG

2011-01-24T22:36:00.002-06:00

We're back in Arkansas from a week long excursion to Chattanooga, TN for Southern SAWG. It was a work trip for me, but Carla came along as she was in severe need of dropping the kids off at her parents and taking a vacation. What is Southern SAWG? I'll fill you in a day or two, but for right now I'm heading off for bed...

Bad Night to Give Birth

2011-01-13T19:24:00.003-06:00

I came down this morning and one of our goats, Zanzi, had had her babies during the night. Unfortunately, this was in the artic cold snap of the past few days. Zanzi's looked like she was going to pop for over a week, but of course it had to happen in the predawn hours of the coldest night of the year. She had two twins, this was the firstborn. She did her best, licking the little one clean, but the difference from being inside your mama at a balmy 104 F and then in a few seconds being in the cold a 100 degrees cooler sopping wet must have been too much. Zanzi had this one on some hay, and the second one she had in her shelter, but there was nothing she could have done. The weather's going to warm up soon, and so we'll have the next pregnant goat, Kola, up to bat in better circumstances.

The lesson from this the importance of timing the breeding. By the end of spring, I'll have another paddock to keep Billy in once I get the fence up around the logged land and next year will be better.

Cold and Heat

2011-01-12T19:41:00.006-06:00

It's cold outside...really cold. I don't care where you live, 1 degree F is dang cold. REALLLLY cold. Watering animals gets really hard in weather like this. This is way below normal for us in these parts, and this is our second day of single digit weather. Luckily, we got about an inch of snow before the cold weather set in, so at least there's a way for the critters to get some form of water in between me busting the waterers open. Eating snow is by no means ideal, but it's better than nothing. Tomorrow, the bitter cold will move on it's way, and the highs in the lower 40s come Thursday will seem down right balmly!

Ironically, with all this cold, our female Pyrenees, Feta, has gone into heat. I noticed Alfredo, our big male LGD, continuously trying "get his swerve on" with her (I say trying, b/c Feta's mastered the art of the sit-down). I checked her...and yep, she's in heat. Feta's got great instincts, as seen by her aversion of Simmey in one of his summertime romps in the pasture.

Feta, in the back, wants no part of this!

This face strikes fear in the heart of every Pyrenees pup

We're fencing off several new paddocks next year, so a bunch of new security guard pups will be highly appreciated.

Ammonia in the Brooder

2011-01-11T22:21:00.003-06:00

You know ammonia when you smell it, and if you can smell it you need to get rid of it. Ammonia's a gas that needs moisture, nitrogen, and alkalinity (vs acidity) to form. It's a problem in chicken houses, but also in the brooder for us pastured poultry growers. The nitrogen comes from excess manure that doesn't have enough carbon (from bedding) to suck it up, the moisture is usually from leaky waterers or in the humid summers, from high humidity, and the alkalinity comes from the excess calcium found in the poultry ration, whether chick-starter, grower, or laying rations. The chickens can't digest all the nutrients, and the lions share goes out the back onto the litter.

One advantage with ammonia is that every person has a built in set of sensors - the eyes and the nose. Most folks start experiencing irritation around 25-30 ppm. OSHA's getting the working limit to around 25 ppm as well, so if the ammonia's burning your eyes, throat, or lungs, then you need to do something about it. The effects are typically short term, and only do real damage after chronic exposure. If you've ever walked into a chicken house with a fieldman or CAFO farmer, the ammonia can feel like tear gas, but it won't even phase them. The olfactory sensors in their noses have literally been burned out. As you might expect, chickens don't like ammonia either, and there's been studies that show that around 15-20 ppm, chronic exposure starts decreasing the productivity of layers and the gain on meat birds.
Most ammonia spikes are due to leaky waterers, and that's our case. This year, we've pretty much stopped any moisture problems and ammonia problems by just putting a board underneath that catches any spill. A thin layer of shavings on top catches any manure, but allows it to dry out a little before I stir the damp, poopy shavings back into the surrounding dry litter. One of our big problems in the past has been letting the waterers run out as well, which creates a sloppy rush of thirsty chicks that spills water all over the place. Better husbandry leads to better husbandry I guess.

Temperature helps drive ammonia formation as well, so there's a positive for winter brooding of chicks - temps too cold to really get ammonia fired up. If you do find yourself with an ammonia problem, add lots of dry bedding and ventilate from the highest spot you can, as ammonia is slightly lighter than air and rises.

Goats Stripping

2011-01-06T20:02:00.005-06:00

Up on the middle bench. Our house is on the other side of the valley.

The dead brown stuff on the slope is the remains of this year's sericea lespedeza. The only drawback to the stuff is that it drops it's leaves, and really isn't grazable during the winter. Well, that's not entirely true. Last week, I noticed that the goats were grazing the tops of the lespedeza - turns out that they were stripping the seeds out of seed stalks. You can see our billy goat in the background, caught stripping....

The seeds are pretty small, about the size of a radish seed, and taste pretty good - kind of like a a soup pea - nutty with that legumey taste. The seeds have got to be a great protein boost for the tiny herd.

Fossil Score!

2011-01-02T10:41:00.003-06:00

On Friday, Carla and I got out to enjoy the beautiful weather after the storms. I focused my efforts on spreading straw on the raised beds, and in doing so, noticed several patches of Johnsongrass that I needed to dig out. Last year, things got away from us quite a bit, as Simmey (aka the Simster) was old enough to start seriously get into anything and everything with his newfound proficency in footing, and Carla was fully occupied with caring for our new little baby boy, Silas.

So the Johnsongrass needed to be dug out. While doing so hit a rock in some thick clay, and pulled out this monster fossil:and the flip side:Pretty awesome. I'm about 99% sure it's the remnant of an ancient branching coral. Eons ago, this whole area was a shallow sea, and this guy was once part of it. I've found a lot of fossils here on our property, but most are only the size of my thumbnail- crinoids, bits of coral, the occasional shark's tooth, but nothing like this. It's huge and about the size of my hand. Awesome.

Tornados

2010-12-31T22:59:00.002-06:00

This morning around 6 am a tornado hit a small town to the west of us in our county, a tiny crossroads village called Cincinnati. The tornado came from a fast moving storm that pummeled the county in the pre-dawn darkness. My wife was up town catching a very earlier breakfast with a friend when I was awoken by a text message from her asking where the tornado was. The power was off, there was a lot of lighining, and the wind chimes on the porch were blowning in the breeze. Then there was a steady roar like a jet engine, and I quickly threw on some overalls and grabbed the boys, some pillows and blankets, and we waited in the darkness for 5 minutes or so in the hall. If you've never woken up a 2 yr old and a 9 month old when there's an abscence of power but an abundance of full diapers - well the experience is pretty much how you'd think, except the leg the baby's on gets progressively warmer.

The power came on about an hour later, and the local news (channel 5 their pics are in the post) let us know of the destruction over towards Cincinnati. We've got a friend over there that's a pastured poultry farmer and we got started with poultry on pasture at the same time. She'd slept through the storm, only waking up after the power went out as well. She lives around a mile from Cincinnati, and when I told her the fire station had been destroyed, she remarked that was near so and so's dairy.
Turns out the old man who farmed the dairy was milking the cows when the storm struck. Sadly, there's one less dairy farmer in Washington County going into 2011.

The irony with these crazy winter storms is that the day is always so pretty afterwards. It was a beautiful day, and Carla and I got to get out and work around the house together - me in the garden and Carla brush-eating across the road.

Here's to a storm-free 2011

Overwintering Hens This Year

2010-12-29T22:46:00.004-06:00

One of the lessons I learned last year was that, over the winter, the laying hens have to be pulled off of the pasture. The pitter-patter of dozens of chicken feet over biologically dormant soil is a great way to trample a pasture into erosion and loose what little soil we have or have built up. The hens compact the soil, especially when it's wet.The other big problem is the hens need their greens in the winter and there's not much green out there. They'll keep nipping at any growth that does occur, and will kill the hardiest grass clumps - even the normally cast iron tough fescue grass. Rest is a necessity whether you're a person, family, chicken, or patch of ground.

So this year, I've got the hens housed in the training pen Carla and I built this past late spring. It's very secure, the flock has plenty of room, and once they ate all the grass that had been stored there, a friend and I covered the area with hay pretty thick to compost the chicken poop and keep the area from becoming a mud hole. The area is solid shale in some places, and so by mid spring, when the hens are put back on pasture, there'll be a real layer of fertility there to scatter clover and grass seed on.The hens are seem to be really happy with things. Shelter, no mud, safety from predators. This set up's good for around 150 hens comfortably. In the future, I'd like to overwinter the hens in a hoop house, but this'll do us for now and probably next year with flock cullings.

Fence Cost/Ft Estimation & Cost Share

2010-12-27T22:58:00.002-06:00

So I applied for cost share through the NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) for fencing this upcoming year. The federal government through the NRCS funds a portion of projects that they deem as encouraging sustainable farming. Fencing of the land we logged and are clearing for pasture is on my list of things that have to be done next year, and the feds consider strong fences - which keep livestock out of creeks and prevent lead-provoking encounters with wild predators - as something they'd theoretically like to help me with. I say theoretically, b/c the original sign-up cut off date was Oct 31 - then Nov 31, then Dec 31, and now it's Jan 7...it's frustrating b/c it's a priority thing, and I'm the kind of guy that likes to know well in advance what I'm doing next year so that I can get chew on it for a while....

Anyways, so the cost share is somewhere around 50 cts/ft for high tensile (electric) fencing. Carla and I got to talking about the hassle of dealing with the government on stuff like this, and to see if it's even something we'd do, we ran some quick numbers outloud tonight. Here's what we came up with:

One roll of 10.5 gauge high tensile wire is around 4,000 ft and cost around $120 (includes tax). The fence will have 5 strands so that means one roll of wire will complete approximately an 800 ft section of fence. That comes to about 15 cts/ft or .
I'm guessing I'll use a t-post around every 30 ft or so. More posts closer together in the steeper sections running up the hillside and fewer posts further apart running parallel with the benches. This means around 32 t-posts per 800 ft section and, assuming around $4.25 a post new (last time I scrounged up hundreds for around $1.50/post) that comes out to around $136/section in posts. Add a dollar/post for insulators, and that'll come up to $168/section for insulators and posts.
$120 + $168 = a cost of around $290/section with a cost share of $400. The extra $110 would be used for gates, gas for the truck, Quickcrete to set posts and H-braces (I'll try to find used telephone poles for the posts), etc.

So with the cost share doing all the labor myself, I'm thinking I can pretty much get my fences for free and possibly pay for the automatic post driver we'll get. Seems worth the hassle, especially compared to getting the VA to give me medical treatment for getting busted up in Iraq...now that's real frustration!

Little Hens

2010-12-26T21:05:00.003-06:00

So we got next year's batch of hen chicks a little over a week ago. This is my first time brooding chicks over the winter, and so far it's going fairly well. It's been particularly cold as of late, so I've got 4 heat lamps in there trying to keep the little girls warm.This is how the girls look when everything's going well. You can see the heat lamps, and the hens are spaced out pretty evenly underneath them. If you watch the chicks, they'll fall asleep under the lamps, some completely conked out, other dozing, until they get too hot, then they'll get up and move to the outside. The danger can come when there's not enough heat, and the chicks pile tighter and tighter in an ever smaller pile to stay warm. The result is dead chicks.

None of that so far, though temps are dipping near the single digits the next couple of nights. In a couple of weeks, the chicks'll loose their poofy down and feather out. Then they'll be tough as nails.

Wren's Thicket's Green Thumb

2010-12-21T20:38:00.003-06:00

This is our friend Deb who's running the winter market. She and her husband are pretty amazing folks. We've had single digit nighst, and multiple days in the low 20s already this year. Their high tunnel is unheated, and they produce a lot of food in the cold of winter on a less than ideal Ozark hillside.
Carla and I walked in and it was....well, like stepping into the Garden of Eden. It's pretty shocking to see that much lush, luxurious, green growth when there's so much brown and grey outside in the barren hill and mountainsides. Absolutely stunning isn't it?

120 Laying Chicks On The 'Morrow

2010-12-16T21:42:00.002-06:00

So tomorrow we'll be 120+ laying hens richer. 60 (more or less)Sex-links, 60 Rhode Island Red hens. Actually, they won't be hens, they'll be 3 day old chicks. Little balls of fluff that'll turn into big feathery rectangles of egg-layin' sassy.

I've got the brooder up and running - the lights on to warm up the litter overnight so it'll be toasty in the morning when the West Fork Post Office calls. They'll call around 6 am and let me know the birds are there. Apparently, chicks and poults are really annoying in the tiny post office. I showed up last year for 60 turkey poults and the lady that helped me told me "Thank God you're here, they're driving us nuts!". In their defense, chilly baby turkeys are loud peepers.

I'm finding that things tend to seem to grow increasingly faster and faster - kids, chickens, turkeys, tomatoes...what's it going to be like in a couple more decades.

We'll find out soon enough.

Wren's Winter Market

2010-12-12T23:52:00.003-06:00

Saturday's 9:00-noon, we're selling at the winter market for the second year. This year we're selling meatbirds, whole and halves, that we raised on pasture earlier this year as well as firewood.
There's just about everything you could want to get you through the winter at the market - meat, eggs, greens, root veggies, winter squash, jams, and more.

Simmey's getting older, he'll be 3 in a few months. He's an oversized ball of energy, but if I can get him to stop long enough to listen, he's a well-behaved toddler hurricane - that is of course when he's not yelling at customers how much he needs a bath. Above, he's munching on some popcorn. Below playing with his toy backhoe and the "pumpkin" that another vendor gave him. I like that I'm able to spend one-on-one time with Simmey more and more now whether it's working outside or selling in town. I really enjoy the winter market. The customers are nice, the vendors work together, it's just - well, enjoyable. Plus, I don't have to spend all day there. In fact, most of the folks send their orders in early.

The quest for affordable eggmobile tires

2010-12-11T13:52:00.003-06:00

So a while back, I bought a really old haywagon chassis online of Craigslist. The intent is to build an egg mobile on the chassis for one of my flocks next year. I took the rims off, and three of the tires were completely rotted out and needed to be replaced. I found a place in town that would mount tires on the rims - for $160 a piece. I almost messed my drawers. For that price I might as well just feed dollar bills to the goat herd.

A couple of weeks of searching, and I tried this place. Coincidentally, I drive past it everyday on my way to work. They deal primarily used tires, which is what I wanted. And between my limited english, and their limited Spanish, we were able to communicate enough to get things done.
Only one of the tire rims sealed the first time they tried. The other two gave them fits around the valve stems. They worked on it for a few days, and all three tire hold air fine now. Grand total w/ my grateful tip - $89 dollars. Compared to the $480 it would have cost at the other place, this was a much easier price to swallow.
The guys running this business are young, and they work hard. The business looks like it's run by 19-21 year olds, but as I mentioned before,they do great work, and have no shortage given the steady stream of customers. I wish them well for mine and their sake.

The Free Arkansan Xtmas Tree

2010-12-09T19:33:00.003-06:00

So all around town, pricey Xtmas tree lots have been opening up, with trees from Wisconsion and other places up north showing up. Some of us, and by us, I mean ourselves and some of our friends, think a little different and have for quite a while opted for using local cedars as Xtmas trees. Below you'll see one of my good friends and his father after proudly bagging a wily cedar on the top bench of my pasture. It's the biggest cedar anyone's hauled out of the pasture to date.
They've been cutting cedars for Christmas for a while now, around 25 years if I remember correctly. I hope to be cutting Christmas trees with my sons in a couple of decades. Merry Christmas!

Cleaning Up's in Thier Blood

2010-12-03T21:50:00.003-06:00

Our Great Pyrenees have done a great job keeping our pastures free of predators. Before the pups and the electric fence, we were plagued with predator attacks, and I came very close to writing the whole pastured poultry endeavor off and callling it quits. It's hard enough to make a profit, and if you're loosing birds regularly to predators, it's impossible. Old-timers told me it couldn't be done, even the ones who were hippies before hippies were cool. That year we came so close to throwing in the towel that we actually put the remaining flock up on Craigslist for sale.

So a two and a half years later, we're still here, and the two goofballs below play a part in it.
You'll notice in the picture above that Fredo, our male dog, is carrying a chicken. The chicken is dead, and he's doing what comes natural to him. Livestock guardian dogs have the need to "clean up" whenever there's a dead animal around. Sometimes it mean hauling the animal off, or often trying to eat it. This particular chicken was on the floor of the coop last night. I knew she'd be dead by the morning, so I moved her out into a pen in the pasture. Sadly, this morning she was dead as a doornail. I opened up the pen door to remove her, and before I could get in, Alfredo walked straight into the pen, picked the dead hen up, and trotted off. I guess he'd been waiting all night to get rid of the bird. Often, LGDs are blamed undeservedly for killing stock - I've been guilty of it too. But my pup crew has earned my trust.

How Chickens Say They're Hungry

2010-11-29T19:41:00.003-06:00

I pulled up to the pasture yesterday and this is the sight that met me. I forgot to check the feeders the night before, and this is what a flock of hungry chickens looks like. When a mob of hungry chickens runs toward you en mass, you feel a certain amount of empathy for grasshoppers and the rest of insectkind.

Molting Chicken

2010-11-28T15:18:00.004-06:00

So people don't think of it much, but birds need to shed their feathers just like dogs shed their hair or snakes shed their skin. That's what's going on here below. The hen in the foreground is molting, or growing new feathers. Unfortunately she chose to do so in a rainy, cold snap. It got down to 18 F that night, but she made it through okay. All mature birds will molt in the fall. This was one of the things old time breeders selected for: chicken molts in late fall - good, chicken molts all her feathers nearly at once - great. These characteristics correlate into the most productive hens - more egg for your scratch.

During the course of the year, feathers get broken, worn down, or simply wore out. The feather functions as the chicken's coat, keeping the hen (or rooster) warm in the cold, shedding rain with oil spread during preening, keeping the skin from drying out or getting sunburnt - you get the idea. A hen's laying slows down greatly during this time, and may even stop completely, but will ramp back up when she's done. This is why commercial laying CAFO's induce forced molts through stress - the producer gets a boost in production when the older hens naturally start slowing down their laying. It resets the flock. Ironically in organic CAFO (free range) operations, the regulations practically prevent forced molting the hens into a molt, so they're typically just sent to the slaughterhouse after the first lag in production, instead of getting a second period of laying out of the ladies.

We just let the hens do their thing here at our place.

Solo Heavy Post Sinking

2010-11-26T14:05:00.005-06:00

So last year, a huge locust tree was among the trees that got cut down. As I was working through the wood, cutting it for firewood, I noticed the locust and cut it into 8 foot sections. Locust, specifically black locust, is the second best wood for posts around here. Bois d'arc, also known as Osage Orange, is the best, and red cedar is in third place.

I used the lowest trunk section as a post for a gate that I'm putting in to overwinter the hens in a sacrifice paddock. This post is an absolute beast, and Carla was able to help me lift it enough to get it into the back of truck. One of the reasons that locust works so well as a post is that not only is it rot resistant, but it's dense as all get out. This post is probably around 400 lbs. Down in the pasture, I was on my own, and used the truck to get the post dropped and set up right. Once the post was in the hole, I was just a matter of backing up VERY SLOWLY, using the tailgate as a lever. It worked.
A couple of 80lbs sacks of Quick-crete later, things were good to go. A heavy rain that night ensured that the concrete set up solidly.

Gobble

2010-11-25T12:43:00.002-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

Post Killing Freeze Goat Browse

2010-11-24T20:12:00.005-06:00

So I worked all day in the hillside pasture across the creek today, setting locust posts for a gate and making the corresponding changes in the high-tensile fencing, wiring in corner insulators and rewiring the fencing. Unfortunately, however, I've now got a short somewhere, and considering the line of storms off to the west near Tulsa, I should probably scoot on down and track it.

I walked the perimeter today checking what the goats still have out there in the pasture for browse. Here's a patch of buckbrush, also called Indian Currant. It's a shrubby plant, that the goats have really been turned on to it since the killing frosts have knocked back most of the greenery. The goats really love the berries - they'll stand on their hind legs, lunge into the plants, dragging down the branches too tall to reach, and then strip the berries as a tasty reward for their efforts. You can see the herd tracking me down in the background of the pick below.
When they found me, I quickly took back seat to the buckbrush berries. When the new wore off, the goats started eating recently fallen leaves from the tree on the right. I'm not quite sure what kind of tree it is, and my guess is that it's a really big shrub species, and I definitely am at a loss when it comes to shrubbery. The goats though are still finding plenty to eat, and quite a variety as well. I'll hold off feeding the hay. Luckily, I found a guy selling some crabgrass hay for a really great price, and it's real good stuff as well. I picked up a trailer full the other day.

Had to Take The Post Down

2010-11-23T18:10:00.003-06:00

Some of you will notice that I took the last two posts down. The short & skinny of it is that it didn't take long that some very good people and organizations were put in a position that they could have been negatively affected and have some major headaches because of me. That's not cool.

So I took the posts down. I stand by everything that was said in them though, and it's a testimony to the lack of transparency and need for reform in a certain system. Money is the ultimate end to some folks, and that's their baggage. Call me an idealist, but having spent 2004-2005 in Iraq, I've seen what corporate corruption 's capable of - but you definitely can't call me naive.

Here's a link that I agree with: http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/09/scrambled-eggs-report-spotlights-systemic-abuses-in-organic-egg-production/

New Pasture Progress

2010-11-13T13:24:00.002-06:00

Here's some of the land that we cleared starting to get some growth on it. We sowed seed months ago, but with rain as scarce as it has been, it's taken a very long time for anything to sprout up. Normally around here, land cleared for timber & pasture is bulldozed to level things out. Being on a slope with so little soil, we had the loggers leave it "messy". The tree tops, leaves, and ruts have helped hold the soil in place, and once the grass and legumes get up, we can start shifting our focus from holding the soil in place to starting to clear out brush, cut firewood for next year, and get some fencing up.
I've planted ryegrass, fescue, and crimson clover. It'll be interesting to see the forbs and grasses that pop up naturally from the seedbank.

Unloading Birds at the Processor

2010-11-08T22:36:00.003-06:00

So I've been compiling a database of independent poultry processors across the nation that are available to small farmers. They are a dying breed, as increased regulation, both federal & state, coupled with a myriad of factors from the poultry industry becoming vertically integrated to a public so used to the often subsized cheap food, have slowly whittled the processors numbers down nation wide. The last independent poultry processor shut down well over a decade ago, and if it were'nt for DARP, 70 miles away in Talequah, OK and Pel-Freeze, up the interstate a county up, the nearest USDA processor would be 5 or 6 hours away. We are EXTREMELY fortunately here to have TWO within driving distance while entire states are lacking.

Clueless.

DARP workers and my left sleeve

If you know of a processor not on the database, would you mind commenting below?

Monsters in the Holler!

2010-11-01T08:26:00.003-05:00

Happy Halloween from the Spencers and their Little Monsters

Hillside Mulching

2010-10-29T22:17:00.002-05:00

So there's a lot of bare ground on some hilly slopes as a result of the logging for pastures this year. We haven't had very much rain since spring - just enough to trick a little bit of seed to sprout her and there. Poor sprouts, must be getting pretty thirsty.

So I found a guy in Elkins who'll sell me round bales of hay for $5/bale. They a year old, and have sat out in the rain. He's got dozens of them, and will sell me as much as I need/want. The bales are easy to spread...just push them out of the truck and let 'em roll. I'm doing three things in one here, for really cheap.

I'm protecting soil. I'm concentrating on the roads the skidders used to haul logs out. They're compacted, and are chutes for erosion. The hay covers the soil and stops run off.
Seeding for pastures. The hay came out of cattle pastures - mostly fescue, ryegrass, clovers, foxtail, etc. This is grass that grows well here, even in a continuous grazing system. The first step is to get grass growing to hold the soil. Maybe in a couple of years we'll worry about the finer points.
I'm fertilizing. Believe it of not, hay has a lot of nutrients - actually comparable to an equivalent weight of chicken litter except that litter has more nitrogen than the hay and the hay has more potassium (K) than the litter. The hay, as it slowly breaks down, releases it's nutrients over time instead of all at once like chemical ferts and can be taken up, even by the small seedlings. Essentially, I'm mining nutrients from someone else for $5 a pop.

Getting the hay efficiently is yet another challenge. It doesn't make sense now to buy a trailer - it would tie up a bunch of money for something that would get used only occasionally (although greatly appreciated when used). Some day, we'll end up getting one, but for right now, it makes sense just to trade firewood for trailer use with a neighbor. I've got an abundance of wood, but a paucity of trailer.

The ball sizes were different, so while Carla and I double teamed the hitches to get 'em changed. I was pretty impressed with her strength...she's one good-lookin and strong lady.
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Hay Wagon on Blocks

2010-10-23T19:37:00.003-05:00

So I bought a very old, very neglected haywagon off of Craigslist last week. It's around 60 years old and spent the last decade or two rusting in a pasture. The boards and tires were rotted out and, needless to say, it is in sore need of some love and care.

Late last night, I headed out to southern Washington county and put the wagon chassis on blocks. Before that though, I had to bust the lugnuts loose. The guy I bought the wagon from had rigged up an electric impact wrench for me to use, which sounded like a good idea.

Unfortunately, decades of neglect and rust made the only feasible way of busting the lugnuts off human power, more specifically Spence-power. Taking care not to blow my back out (thank you Operation Iraqi Freedom), I was able to use my weight to bust the nuts loose (the tires', not mine!).
Some were in there VERY securely, like the one above. I actually sheered the bolt in two us. Yeah, I got super-strength. So what?

I'm taking the rims into town on Monday and see if I can find some used tires somewhere. I doubt it, but it's worth a try. I'm not sure if I'm just going to rebuild the wagon or turn it into a Eggmobile. Probably the former. We'll see.
sd

Lost in Translation

2010-10-20T20:27:00.002-05:00

Truck means jungle gym in goat speak

Apple Picking

2010-10-19T22:08:00.004-05:00

So a week ago, we headed out to a co-worker's organic apple/pear/fruit orchard. He and his wife used to run a mail order nursery a while back, and he's an amazing resource on all things fruit. It was amazing to see what he built on his hilltop.

Northwestern Arkansas was at one point the heart of the nation's apple industry. At the start of the 20th century, there's account of nearly the whole county being bathed in white when the apples bloomed in the spring. Cider abounded, pigs gorged themselves on apple millings, and apples were packed into barrels and shipped all across the country.

Then the fruit industry packed up its bags to the Northwestern States, where the grass was greener...or at least fireblight and cedar apple rust free. The mills shut down, the factories closed, and the orchards were neglected and eventually cut. The ban on unpasterized cider in the 90s killed the last vestiges the local apple industry.

But these trees soldier on, and produce even through summers as tough as this years. I really need to plant some fruit trees...

Apples, Here we come!

Asian pears...the drought proof fruit

This is us - the Spencers

This is the usual course of family outings these days...

Tarp Goat Damage

2010-10-10T23:38:00.005-05:00

So apparently, a bent cattle panel covered with a tarp, like the one on the pen below, is an irresistible climbing challenge for a goat.

For weeks, I couldn't figure out why my tarps were falling apart. It's not like we've had any hail (or rain) in months, so any weather-derived pounding was ruled out.

What the ?

The culprit, as it turns out was an adventerous (or onery depending if you're human or caprine in nature) goat. I was feeding the layers one morning when a goat just ran up and over the hoop pens. The goat's sharp little hooves punched right through the tarp, but up and over she went. It reminded me a lot of running through snow that has a crust of ice on top.

The goat herd up on the hill, no doubt enjoying my consternation

Three steps forward, one goat hoof back.

Willie Nelson at FarmAid

2010-10-07T20:41:00.008-05:00

So work sent me to FarmAid. I met some really awesome people there. The show was at Miller Stadium in Milwaulkee, where the Brewers baseball team plays.

Front View of the StadiumLot's of room inside - around 35,000 people came
I ended up doing an interview over Sirius radio, and luckily the interview was backstage. The DJ doing the interview was from a small town in the Ozarks in Southern Missouri. When he found out that I was from a small Ozark town in Northwestern Arkansas, I was golden. I ended up staying backstage, and the producer to me to one of the best spots in house, and told me to enjoy the show. I did.From left to right - Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews throw down to "Homegrown". All together - Pretty neat!

There were a lot of bands there, but the headliners were the board members for FarmAid - Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews. It was pretty cool. Steven Tyler (Aerosmith) dropped in for a song as well. Unfortunately, my view was blocked by a piano.

His mouth scares me

Considering that the pics were taken with my iPhone, you can tell how sweet my view was. Despite how cool it was, I would have preferred to stay home and hang out with Carla and the boys. We had turned our last batch of meat birds out onto pasture just the day before...well, I don't have to explain - it's my life and I really dig it.

Last Batch of Meat Birds on Pasture

2010-10-03T01:43:00.007-05:00

Well, the last bunch of meat birds have hit the grass across the holler up in the pasture.
I'm doing some new things this batch. I've rigged a switch that enables me to use the perimeter fencing for the electric poultry netting. In the past, I've used solar/battery chargers that have had 3 faults off the top of my head:

Drained batteries - lespedeza, fescue, and various other grasses and forbs conspire to short out a weak charger, but they are absolutely no match for our high joule, low-impedance perimeter charger. No more electrically dead netting.
Grounding - with a portable charger, I was always having to move grounding rods, hammering into rock-hard soils, or else I was stringing out grounding wire all across the pasture. Now, I can just use the grounding off of the perimeter fence
Heavy Batteries - There's no heavy solar "portable" chargers with marine cycle batteries anymore. Woo Hoo!The birds now are on the second bench of the pasture, the middle bench about half-way up the hillside. Having the new truck, with 4X4 capability makes such a huge difference, it opens up so many more possibilities.

On a radio show

2010-10-02T07:48:00.002-05:00

On Tuesday, I was a guest on a radio show/podcast - Sustainable Agriculture Highlight. You may find it interesting. I stumbled over my words quite a bit, and I think it's horrible, but some others think different, so if you're up for it, feel free to download and listen.

Hogs vs BAMA

2010-09-24T23:43:00.004-05:00

You know tomorrow's game is a pretty big deal when the Goodyear blimp's in town.
A lot of the people reading this won't really care about tomorrow's college football game, but tomorrow's game here in Fayetteville pits #1 Alabama vs #10 Arkansas, the local school.

It's the big game in the nation, and so Razorback Stadium will be packed with around 72,000 people on Saturday. You know you want to cheer on Arkansas, so feel free to call the Hogs tomorrow, we're the dangerous underdog - you know you want to cheer us on.

I like college football - to me it's a lot like local food. Arkansas doesn't have, nor will it ever have a professional sports team. This is true of a lot of the big college teams, especially in the South, Mid-west - Alabama, LSU, Arkansas, Oklahoma State (my wife Carla's a graduate), Nebraska, Oregon & Oregon State, Boise St, etc - you get the idea. How about you? Who do you root for?

Today's all about the Hogs though - Woo Pig Sooie!

Dogs First Confirmed Kill

2010-09-22T22:07:00.003-05:00

Well, it's a start. Even though this little possum couldn't have done much damage now, it's comforting to know that the dogs will kill smaller potential predators. I know coyotes drive them nuts, but coons and possums can do a great deal damage to a flock as well, so their protection against the little guy brings some piece of mind.

This constitutes quite an invigorating day if you're a hen as you can see in the picture above.

Think Before you Cut

2010-09-20T20:21:00.002-05:00

I'm steadily clearing out rouge trees from the pasture. In some spots, the trees are sycamores a foot in diameter at the base, in other spots they're just really dense stands of locust, cedar, or elm, depending on the soil type, depth, and moisture. Since the pasture is on a north facing slope, some of the big sycamores were casting pretty big shadows. So I've cut them down and used the branches and logs to dam up gulleys. The leafy branches go in first and the heavy logs on top - it makes a good soil trap.

Below was a chinquapin oak that had to come down. This thing was trying to kill me. As I looked over it, there was just about every trap that could be built in this tree old barbwire strands running through the middle of the tree, a limb high up that would have caught and angled other trees down on top of me if I didn't cut this tree first...you get the idea. Dropping trees is pretty safe as long as you're alert, take your time, eye your tree, back up, eye the other trees around, and your saw is sharp. The thing that really burns you is when you do something stupid like above. This limb was holding the felled oak up, and I did a stupid cut that pinned my Husq as you can see in the picture above. It took me about an hour to extract my chainsaw, and my extraction strategy consisted of a handsaw and beating the branch with a steel t-post driver. Eventually I was able to get the saw back out. The closest calls I've had happened on felled trees in this exact situation. It's a good reminder. Spending an hour banging on a log because of stupidity helps you pay attention next time.
In between bashing the limb with the t-post driver, I noticed a rough green tree snake that had taken an unexpected earthbound trip. He got away before the chickens found him and had a snakey protein snack,

The goats were quick to munch on the tree's leaves. Normally, they don't get access to oak leaves, so it was a welcomed treat. Chinquapin oak burns hot, not as hot a hickory, but it'll keep us warm next winter after it ages a spell.

Gerald Fry - Selecting Good Grass Cattle

2010-09-16T20:11:00.005-05:00

This Saturday, I went to the local Grass Grazers Group. It's a pretty neat deal, typically they do pasture walks once every month or so, and if you want to talk about rotational grazing, this is a pretty good group to do it with. Unfortunately, like most agricultural groups around the country, there's not a lot of people in the group that have any color left in their hair. The average age of the group was probably just under 60 years.

Gerald Fry, a grazing/hay only cattle farmer from down in Rose Bud came up to speak to us about selecting good cattle. The run down of what he had to say was showing us how to select masculine bulls and feminine heifers and selecting a proportional cow. We also looked at determining meat quality through things like the thickness of the hide, etc.
This bull was judged a not great male to expand a herd. The hide was tough, his nuts were twisted, etc. The guys up above are measuring him, checking his proportions. It was guessed that he'd have a really poor tenderloin, and the meat would be tough.
This heifer was judge to be a really good, feminine cow. Turns our she was from the best cow in the farmer's herd. It was neat to hear the guys judge a farmer's cow, make guesses about the cow's performance and have the farmer grade their guess.

I've seen this same stuff work miracles breeding productivity back into turkey, laying hens, and meat breeds of chickens that have lapsed into inefficency since they've been largely replaced by modern hybrids. Ironically, a good structured cow gets dinged in the sale barn. Feedlots are in the business of selling supplements and inputs, not efficiency. They don't care if a farmer stays in business or not.

Coincidentally, I was talking to a friend last night who came over to our house, telling her about the workshop. Turns out her dad is a buyer at a sale barn in another part of the state, and he has beautiful, productive cattle, but those aren't the kind of cows he sends to the feedlot.

Have you ever noticed that old black and white pictures of cattle, sheep, etc look completely different than the same breeds today? Back in the day they looked like furry barrels.

Carla and I are looking into getting cattle in the next few years. With the new pastures opening up, we'll have around 20 acres of good pasture in a couple of years. Enough to have a small herd to feed us, and once we get past the learning curve of figuring out what we're doing, we have the option to lease land and build up a small herd. Or we may not get cattle at all. We'll make the choice when we get there.

Some Logged Land Pics

2010-09-13T18:07:00.002-05:00

This is on the northern border of the property. You can see I-540 off if you look in between the trees. The view is really opening up, and you can see the hills on the other side of the West Fork. I think it's mighty beautiful
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So the loggers are leaving a lot of treetops and small tree too small to make mini-logs than get knocked down by the skid-steer. The price on pulp is really low, and you have to haul pulp all the way down to Ashdown in the southern part of Arkansas. At $2.00/ton, I'd rather have the debris left on the ground where it'll catch soil.
This is at the foot of the property. It's going to make some beautiful pasture. I've sowed orchardgrass and some red clover already. I'm taking it easy on the clover because I don't want bloat to be a worry. Tonight Carla and I are going to go sow wheat and annual ryegrass to try and get some forages started to hold the soil. There's a lot of hickory stumps laying around, and these will throw off massive shoots (copice) for the next couple of years, which will make excellent goat browse.

Rough Green Snake

2010-09-08T20:36:00.002-05:00

The rough green snake is a pretty neat critter. It's not particularly big, but as far as snakes go, it can be pretty cute. It's emerald green because it's favorite place to hang out is in the tree tops. In late spring, the females nest in tree cavities, and will use the same spot year after year if it stay unoccupied.
This snake lives off of spiders mostly, but the occasional katydid, dragonfly, or appropriately sized tree frog can be quite the delectable treat. Green snakes are incredibly flexible, a trait that comes in quite useful when your snakey life depends on not plummeting 60 ft out of a hickory tree. You can see in the photo above just how adapted the rough green snake is to tree top life as I transfer it from a stick onto an oak sapling.

Drought Time Fun

2010-09-02T20:02:00.002-05:00

Drought Range Chickens
The Stand-Off

Kola, Alfredo, and Zanzi. Note the 3 year-old attached to the stick lurking in the background

What a life

Dozing in the Holler

2010-08-29T23:03:00.004-05:00

Zzz...I mean Vroom, vroom, clank, clank & various other dozer, not dozing sounds.

We're logging a bunch of timber off of benches and gentle slopes on our property. Above is the loading area for cut trees. A semi with a full trailer load of logs has to be able to turn around then make it out to our driveway. This'll make a great pasture in a year or so.

I'm wanting to open up some land into more pastures. One section of land I'll be opening will be southeastern facing near the house and will be an ideal place for the goats and future ruminants during the winter time due to proximity to our home and drier ground than the pasture across the creek. It'll also allow me more options when it comes to rotating pastures.

The turkeys will go on this land as well, as it's never had chickens and should be Blackhead free.

I'm using a logger that lives down the road a couple of miles. This job's small, probably only 8 or 9 acres, and he didn't mind doing it as long as we were willing to deal with no set date for logging. See, as he hauls equipment back from a bigger job, we're on the way home, and even though just a small 3 or 4 week job, it'll be worth their time. I've got to know the loggers and the crew pretty well over the past couple of months, and they're honest guys. I've walked the property with them, explained what I wanted, and they seem to be on board.

We're really nervous, for good reason, but they're not into creating moonscapes where forests would be. They'll leave trees 6 inches and below in diameter, so there should be enough light to get forest floor vegetation starting to grow next spring, and we can fine tune by taking out small trees later on. The stumps, especially the hickorys, will send alot of shoots up (copice) that'll make terrific goat forage next year. I'm looking at this as a 5 or so year project. We'll see.

What's Left of the Turkey Flock

2010-08-24T20:28:00.002-05:00

I'd have around 50 more turkeys if a disease called Blackhead wouldn't have kicked my rear.

Baby Wasps Got to Eat

2010-08-22T07:44:00.004-05:00

Here's a doting motherly wasp on my driveway. You'll notice she's got a spider in tow. Earlier she found this spider and stung it just enough to permanently paralyze it. She'll haul it back to her nest, probably made of mud in some inconvenient place on equipment or in my shop, and lay her eggs on this spider. Since the spider is paralyzed, it'll stay fresh until the wasp larva hatch. Then the babies buffet will begin. Good for the wasps, not so good for the spider. Nature's not all bunnies and rainbows is it?

Pickin' Up PawPaws & Puttin' Em in My...Desk?

2010-08-20T18:23:00.005-05:00

"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Pickin up PawPaws, Put 'em in my pocket!"
"Way down yonder in the PawPaw patch."

So I work in an old civil war home off the square in the city square in Fayetteville. On MWF, there's a hot dog stand there. Our fruit specialist where I work and I went to grab a dog the other day. He's been doing a lot of work on pawpaw fruit production lately, so we had PawPaws on our minds. He talks about pawpaws, I talk about poultry, the sheep and goat people talk about sheep and goats, the farm energy people talk about farm energy, well, you get the idea.

The fruit below is a ripe PawPaw. The PawPaw is native to the Midwestern/Eastern US. It's actually a member of a mostly tropical fruit family, even though it occurs all the way up into Michigan. The smell of a PawPaw is quite heady, like a mix between a banana & pineapple. You eat the inside which has a consistency somewhere between a ripe cantaloupe and custard and the taste is really fruity, and complex. It's quite an experience. The tree is just as interesting, with big emerald green leaves, obligate to shade as a sapling, and flowers that go after flies with a flower that smells like roadkill instead of flowers that lure pollinators with perfume
While I was getting my hot dog, guy found a pawpaw tree and picked an unripe fruit right off the square. While he was buying his hot dog, full of kraut the way God intended, I walked over to the PawPaw tree and check under it, found a ripe one lying on the ground, and snatched it up. It's the thing that looks like a potato, but it smelled heavenly.
Apparently, there are two pawpaw trees on the square, and I picked the right one while the fruit expert picked the wrong one. Yeah, I'm not gonna let that go soon! To his credit though, he gave me half of the PawPaw as a sort of finder's keeper reward.

Lots of Forages, even in a drought

2010-08-18T21:39:00.003-05:00

So after some initial hitches, we've goat a decent herd (for us) of goats down in the pasture. There's lots of good forage for them, and to be honest, most of our field is a goat paradise. I think even 30 goats wouldn't be able to keep up with the lespedeza, and there's tons of cedar to snack on in the winter.
Despite the drought, the trees and shrubs are fairing well due to their deep roots. The video below shows just how great our goat forage is - wild grape, redbud, greenbriar, and lespedeza! What a treat!

And no, despite Simmey's pumpkin, it's not Halloween - and besides, our pasture would be a horrible place for trick or treating!

Billy's Got 9 New Girlfriends

2010-08-14T21:47:00.004-05:00

So our start in goats has mirrored the land we're working - rough. First, we lost a goat when she got into the chicken feed. Then we lost two of our girls in the past month-long heat wave either because of parasites that they brought in or dehydration b/c they'd never come down the mountain to the watering area. It was frustrating, especially because I was gone on military duty for a couple of weeks, and I probably would have caught the problems. But our billy goat, Billy, has thrived. We also feel like we understand goats a lot more now - their needs, how they think, where they'll go, ie I feel like we're getting into goat husbandry.

One of my co-workers has a sheep and goat operation, and her family's become overstocked with the recent drought. So we worked out a deal where they can board some of their goats, and we'll get some of the trees and brush worked down into goat poop to start fertilizing our poor hillside soils. We'll also probably get some goat kids, as Billy has been peeing on his beard (yeah, gross to us, but hot to the goat ladies) and some of the females are starting to cycle.

Here's the new goat ladies, they're a mix of dairy and other breeds. They're in the training pen, and man, they were happy to have fresh forage. They're in the pen to make sure that they understand that the electric fence hurts, and that "Hey, I shouldn't try to push through it, because it shocks the bejezus out of me, and I don't get anywhere anyway". The training pen is fenced with both electric and field fence to make sure there's no jailbreaks.Before turning the ladies in with Billy, we wormed them. This'll kill a good deal of their worms before they get into the main pasture. With the amount of brush and forage available and the low stocking density, the goats should be okay and need no further worming. We checked Billy while we were at it too, and although he fought like crazy, as you can see above he was still willing to gobble the treats Simmey fed him. His condition was really good, but his eyelid color was pretty pale, indicative of blood loss to parasites, probably exacerbated by the month long drought and high heat/humidity.So we wormed Billy as well. It'll probably be the last time he's ever wormed. Tomorrow, we'll turn the ladies in with him, and he'll be one happy/busy buck.

Old Homesteader Well

2010-08-10T22:01:00.004-05:00

So it's been nearly a month since we had any rain. Coupled with weeks of temps often hitting the triple digit mark, this drought has really thrown a wrench in the works. The pastures are fried, and the creek that we pump our water out is dry. Even the swimming hole that isn't supposed to go dry is parched. So what to do, what to do. Well, there's an old homesteader well at the back corner of our pasture. I've avoided using it in the past, as a crazy old hermit who owns 4 acres in the middle of our property claimed that it was his side, even though when I bought the property I was told the creek was the boundary, and the well's on my side of the creek. In fact, my fenceline is like 10 ft behind the well.So the hermit guy died a couple of months back, I've never seen a survey to prove otherwise, and my animals need water. So I'm going off what I was told when I bought the property and this evening I went and checked the well out. Here it is (I'm standing in the dry creek bed).

So here's the well. There was water around 8 ft down. The well is really neat. I've never looked at it up close (it used to be covered with quite the pile of brush), but it's made out of river rock and mortar the entire way down. The family that homesteaded the holler really worked hard on this well. I couldn't see the bottom, when I pump water out, I'll measure how deep it is.

I'm Back & Tasty Meat Birds

2010-08-03T00:21:00.003-05:00

Wow. It's been a while. I was off on military duties for a while and have been catching up since I got back. I'll write about it sometime.

I'm currently canning 12 qts of tomatoes, nightime's the time to do it because today was really hot. As in record breaking hot. We broke the 100 degree mark for the first time this year. Ft. Smith, in the river valley south of the mountains, hit 107 today. And that's not even factoring in the oppressive humidity!

The weather's been so hot, even our cast iron meat birds, the Freedom Rangers, haven't been able to cope, and we've lost a few to the heat. Carla noticed today that it's too hot for them to get up and get to the waterer, and we've got them parked in the forest. Luckily, I'll take the last half of the flock to the processor on Thursday morning. We took just under 50 birds last monday to be cut up, and we've got around 50 more left that will be left whole as roasters. We're really impressed with the birds. Minus the current heat wave, we had 1 bird out of a hundred die, and the little hen had always been sickly & a runt. At 11 weeks, the average wt. was around 4.75 lbs, and the meat was still tender even cooked on the grill as you can see by the deliciousness below!T
Tomorrow, I'll put more waterers in with the chickens, and I'm filling one up with some loose ice we have. Hopefully it'll be enough. We're definitely not used to this heat up in the mountains.

Bourbon Reds, Goat Milk, and a Toddler

2010-06-29T22:57:00.002-05:00

Young Bourbon Red Turkeys
Feeding turkeys raw goats milk. Simmey made sure to point out that "Turkeys drink milk". Then of course, Simmey had to splash in it.

Goat Update

2010-06-28T22:28:00.003-05:00

So this evening, I hiked up to where I'd seen the goats yesterday with a can of feed (alfalfa & sweet mix). The goats have quite the swanky digs up in the pasture, having hollowed out a living space under a spreading grove of locust saplings.

I got the goats to eat out of my hand. Nice to know that they haven't gone feral yet!

Goats Spotted!!!

2010-06-27T16:08:00.005-05:00

So a couple of weeks ago, we turned the goats loose in the hillside pasture. A couple of days later, we were puzzled - despite walking through the pasture hollering and shaking the feed can - no goats. Hmm. An inspection of the fence showed a couple of strands out on one side of the fence. After a week of searching, well, still no goats. We were convinced that the goats had gotten out, and in our wild holler, well we figured we'd never see them again.

This morning though, as I was walking the pasture checking for any stray t-posts or strands of wire before I brush-hogged, I walked by a very munched upon thistle. Stopping dead in my tracks, I suppressed a beam of goat filled hope - nothing eats thistles around here, but I refused to get my hopes up - the goats were gone, I knew it.

Then yesterday, a neighbor was checking one of his game cameras on my property. He'd driven his four-wheeler up to the top bench of the pasture, and when he came back from checking his camera in the woods, there were 3 goats gathered around the vehicle!

Then this morning, as I was brush-hogging - goats! First under a cedar tree, then on another pass though the pasture, the herd was eyeballin' me from a grove of locust trees. At one point, the goats bounded off, and they are in excellent condition - well filled out, shiny coats gleaming in the sun.

You can see the goats just under and to the left of the cedar tree
You can see the crest of the top bench of the hillside pasture

When I got back to the house, I told Carla and she was ecstatic. It's good to know we still have the goats. Woot.

Early Blight?

2010-06-24T00:05:00.003-05:00

Some of my Marglobe tomatoes have started to show what I think is early blight. You can see the stem in the picture is black, and I'm taking that as an early blight symptom. I had 4 tomatoes like this, and I cut them all off below the infected stem. It was a little hard, b/c the plants were beautiful. I don't want the disease spreading, so I had to be ruthless. arglobe tomatoes

Dinosaur Egg?!

2010-06-15T21:16:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty sure that a dinosaur had started laying eggs down in the nesting boxes in the pasture. As you can see below, there was a chicken-sized egg without a shell among the rest of the eggs. You can get an idea in the pic below of how leathery the egg is; I'm fairly certain it's a dwarf T. Rex or possibly one of those spitting lizards off of Jurassic Park. Chickens are pretty much diminutive dinosaurs with feathers, so understand why a dinosaur would want to hang out. But as tasty as the hens are to all the other forest critters, I just can't figure out why the T. Rex hasn't eaten any of the chickens. Maybe a Pterodactyl?

Blackhead Disease Dissection

2010-06-08T22:55:00.004-05:00

So I've started losing turkey poults to disease. I noticed a week or so ago some strange turkey poops - tannish yellow and really bubbly. I would notice a turkey start to act differently - no flight distance, droopy feathers. Instantly, I suspected blackhead (Histomonas meleagridis). This is bad, very bad, as this disease can easily cause +90% mortality in turkeys.

Blackhead is a devestating disease in turkeys, and it's usually a problem attributed with having ground that was exposed to chickens. The protozoan that causes blackhead is a pretty wimpy critter, but it's got a great survival strategy. Blackhead will set up shop inside of a chicken and "hide" in cecal worms (found in all chickens), hitching a ride out of a chicken's intestinal tract when the cecal worm sends it's eggs out. The cecal worm eggs can stay dormant in the soil for up to 4 years, and the blackhead in the egg hangs out waiting. Other birds can pick up the cecal worm eggs (and the blackhead) either through ingesting soil or eating earthworms which have eaten soil with cecal worm eggs in it. Once in the intestinal tract, the blackhead emerges, and if your a turkey, well, you're in a heap of trouble. The blackhead builds up, destroying the caecal pouch in the digestive tract, where it then gets into the blood and destroys the liver.

So when suspected, blackhead is really easy to check for in turkeys.

1. Take poult in question and get some tools - utility knife and tin snips were used.

2. Open up the abdominal cavity. If you've never done this before, just cut above the anus and with shallow cuts work your way up to the breast. Once you're there, use tin snips to open up the chest cavity so you can get a good look at the liver. 3. Check the liver and caecum. Here you can see the bullseye decay spots (necrosis) indicative of blackhead, sorry about the glare. Click to enlarge to get a better view. It was really obvious in real life. to the left, you can see the gas that cases the foamy poop.

The finger thing in the guts is the caecal pouch. Normally, it would be like the other intestines (there's some right above it), but it's got a characteristicly caeseous (cheese like) substance that's packed it full. This is another blackhead give away. I didn't cut it open because it absolutely reeks.

Above is another liver view. So cecal & earthworms can lead to an outbreak in a turkey flock, but the rapid transmission in the flock is due to cloacal (ie butthole) drinking. This is a relatively new understanding of blackhead transmission, and I found it going through recent poultry science journals.

So human babies, puppies, kittens, etc chew and slobber over everything to inoculate thier systems. Turkeys also do this, but they do it in a slightly different way. It's weird, but a turkey/chicken/etc actually lets bacteria into its system by opening up the other end. This works great, unless of course your laying on top of some infected poo. Counterintuitvely, ingesting the protozoan (not in cecal eggs) doesn't seem to infect the turkey, as the acidity in the proventriculus and stomach easily knocks out the protozoan.

There's no cure for blackhead, but understanding how it works, has caused me to start moving my turkeys a lot. Hopefully this will keep other cloacal transmissions from occurring.

Pullet Predator

2010-05-24T23:36:00.003-05:00

So during this morning's chores, I found that some critter last night made a snack out of a Rhode Island Red chicken pullet. The birds were in their moveable pen, but a predator got one of the birds. A wing here, a tuft of feathers there...then the final dining spot on one of my raised bed rows next to a tomato transplant.
Predator control is yet one more thing that can sink a free range business, and I feel like we've come a long way down in the pasture. Two years ago, we lost 8 birds in a day. This year, no predation losses. This despite sightings of bobcats and howling coyote packs. The pullets under siege were up near the house, and that's more than a little disconcerting.

So step 1 is to figure out what the problem critter is. I'm thinking that it's a group of coons, possibly a large possum due to the nature of the attack. I'm ruling out a coyote, fox, or bobcat as these guys would have left only feather "blasts" (just a pile of feathers) and the culprit from last night left a wing and rather large tufts. Plus, there was a splotches of feathers here and there, so I don't think the predator was very large, as the pullets are rather small.

So I made sure the hens were up on roosts tonight and put a live trap out with baited with a can of cat food. If it's a possum or coon, there's a good chance that'll get 'em. We'll see.

Hognose snake

2010-05-22T22:57:00.003-05:00

So we've learned that when Harley barks, there's a good reason. Snake's especially seem to get her riled up. Summer's on the way, so it seems like everyday she's finding something that she feels we need to be alerted of. Yesterday it was a hognosed-snake out in front of the house.
This species is a pretty unique reptile. When disturbed, they hiss really loud and flare out like a cobra. They're by no means poisonous, but still, it's pretty intimidating, and only knuckleheads like me mess with them.

So I used to "catch" snakes, even the posionous ones when I found them. Yeah, I was THAT kid, and I'm still that guy. Pinning a snake's head down and grabbing the tail is pretty traumatic for the snake. Snakes are good to have around, as they eat rodents hanging around the farm. So for this guy/gal (I didn't check), I just backed Harley off and let the snake take a minute to make its escape.
Run away snake, run away!

Training Goats

2010-05-19T15:57:00.005-05:00

Well, the goats are here to stay.
There was a time when I wondered if that statement would be true - the staying part. As a reminder, two severe thunderstorms right before the goats got here last week had knocked out the electric fence, allowing the goats to walk through the not so shocking fence.

Carla and I got the goat pen fenced with some welded wire, in yet another thunderstorm and the pouring rain in the early morning Friday. I then carried the girl goats and semi-rode the buck back into the original goat pen, now fortified with both the welded wire and the electric fencing. The goats figured out really quick that electric fencing is worth avoiding, and that lesson learned, attacked the brush, trees, and grass stems in their pens with gusto. Elm, oak, privett, poison ivy, ox-eyed daisies, and fescue seed heads are a hit. Wild strawberries are not .
The 4 goats have been a little shy, which is understandable given their unexpectedly traumatic first day. I've got the buck eating a little sweet mix/alfalfa out of my hand. The girls are slowly coming around - darting in for a nibble then running off to munch their treats and glare at me. I can't turn them free until I know for sure that they're not scared of me, and actually look forward to seeing me and getting treats. Our pasture is rugged and overgrown, so if the goats are scared of me, I may never see them again. Before I turn the herd out, I need them to at least be interested enough to pop their heads out of whatever rose thicket or cedar grove their in for check-ups. Hopefully, I'll get to turn them out next week sometime.

Goats! You've Got to be Kidding Me

2010-05-13T22:41:00.002-05:00

Well, we've got goats, sort of. The guy we bought the goats from delivered them late this afternoon. We wormed them, and put them in the electrified goat pen that I'd just finished. Unfortunately, just an hour earlier, a thunderstorm that had a tornado warning clipped our holler (the second severe storm of the day). This thunderstorm also broke an insulator that shorted out the fence down to a mere 4 Kv. So even though I'd checked beforehand, So the goats just walked out of the pen, and after a whole lot of chasing, diving through brush, briars, and poison ivy and the occasional diving tackle, we've just about got them all penned up in a holding pen we had set up for the pasture pups. I managed to wipe out and roll down enough of a distance across enough rocks to warrant a trip to the doctor tommorrow to check for a broken wrist and a badly banged up knee that is still numb several hours later.

So very early in the morning, Carla and I are going to head down to the pasture and put up some welded wire fencing around the goat pen. This will give a physical barrier until they figure out that the hot wire is, well, hot. I fixed the broken insulator so the fence is now back in the 8 KV range again. Arghhh.

Fire

2010-05-06T21:22:00.005-05:00

So we burned a large pile of brush the other night. It's been dry lately, so the wood was just begging to ignite. As it's spring, the lush grass made it just about possible for the fire to spread, so even with a moderate breeze, we were able to burn with near impunity.

I've always loved fires, especially bonfires. I still do. Sometimes however, I catch myself staring into the flames, and I'm reminded of fires that burned over 3,000 miles away.

In the summer of 2004, I was a Specialist in a unit that spent most days escorting other units and civillians all over Iraq. Here's a pic of me back then. I was about 20 lbs heavier (all muscle my wife will lament!) and a whole lot dumber than now. I was a machine gunner/automatic rifle man, that's my M249, Annette - SN 54166, in the pic below. We spent most of our time rolling down supply routes or getting lost when we strayed off of them. I spent most of my time in a gun hatch on top of a armored Humvee. Heading north of Baghdad one summer day, something huge blew up in front of us and took out a civilian dump truck. It was an almost ridiculously huge mass of flames. Talking with some EOD guys a little later, they said it was probably a napalm roadside bomb. The insurgents had been working on getting the napalm thing down in the area, and, well, judging from the huge wall of fire that just about made me soil myself, they had got it down.

In the pic below is my buddy Myers in the lead gun truck. He's aiming at a black car that peeled out immediately after the explosion. He said it was trigger man, and he had good instincts, so it probably was - but instincts aren't enough to justify taking a life, so he never pulled the trigger. As we drove by, I saw one of the guys that somewhat escaped the fires above, some other Iraqis had him pulled out behind the group of cars above. He was melted alive like a candle. The flames were meant for us, and these innocent guys were burned alive because the triggerman was a little too jumpy. I think of the wonderful life and family that I now have, and I wonder if the men that died had wives, children, and parents that never saw their loved ones return from work.

I'm very thankful for what I have. I let myself think about these things when they come. There's perspective for me in fire.

Locust Perfume

2010-05-01T20:50:00.004-05:00

So it's mid spring, and the locust trees in the holler have exploded with blossoms. Locust trees are a leguminous pioneering species around here. They're especially thick on the fenceline of the top bench of the pasture. Locusts are one of my favorite trees around here.
The tree's blooms are really large - bigger than my hand, and smell like honey. This pic was taken right after a rain, and the moisture in the air held the flowery perfume near the ground. It was really heady stuff, but man was it wonderful.

A Good Weekend

2010-04-25T22:36:00.007-05:00

So let's just say that it's been a less than ideal couple of weeks past. It's been one catastrophe after another on the farm -but this weekend was wonderful. I sold at the market Saturday morning, and despite the buckets of rain falling from the sky, had a great time. After the storms rolled through, I went and worked on the electric fencing in the back corner of the holler. The clouds were eerie, and rolled right on by. It was beautiful.While up on the top bench, a large pack of coyotes fired up and started yelping just a little way up the holler. The pack was only about 75 yds into the woods, and I'm pretty sure they were eyeballin me as I fenced. The guard dogs were up on the bench with me so I just enjoyed listening to the "concert". It was quite a large pack of coyotes.Across the holler, the turkey hens have built a nest in some branches downhill from the house. They're remarkably camouflaged. The hens haven't taken to setting yet.
Our tom turkey keeps a look out over his ladies though nonetheless.

Cornish Cross Not for Us

2010-04-22T21:28:00.003-05:00

It's been one thing after another this season. Some of it's so ridiculous that it's comical at times. Today was the realization that the Cornish Cross Hybrid meat chicken - the same bird that every industrial poultry operation uses, has no place on our farm. We tried a small batch of 50, and they've been dropping like flies. With time constraints of family, work, & farm, I can't coddle these birds. Cornish Crosses are dumb, and I mean dumb. Raising these birds are not compatible to our values. Why did I even try them?

I made the assumption that the Cornish Crosses were the equivalent of the Broadbreasted White turkeys - they are not. Broadbreasted whites do great on pasture, or at least I've never had a problem - they gobble grass, clovers, chase,err I mean waddle, after bugs, dust bathe, etc. Despite common opinion, the turkeys won't drown in rain. They have a good life, and only one really bad 5 minutes to go out on. The chickens, however, are a whole different story; other people can raise them on pasture, but not on our farm.

Blind Turkey Poults!

2010-04-12T21:57:00.003-05:00

So it's been a really, really crazy week. I got swapped mid-week into night shifts while interviewing for another, awesome job with a really awesome agricultural non-profit organization. This other job will be much, much more farm friendly. It will also give me an opportunity to help other farmers like me. I can't believe people actually get paid to do this job...How awesome is that?! We'll see how it goes.

In the midst of everything that's been going on our turkey poults came in. There was a problem with the heritage poults, specifically the Bourbon Reds. Half of the shipment was blind! Once we figured out what was actually going on, we contacted the hatchery, Welp out of Iowa, let them know, and they're sending us more chicks. We've switched to them exclusively, because they don't charge shipping, and their customer service is awesome.

So here's a group of normal looking poults.
These are healthy Bourbon Red and Broadbreasted white poults. Below is one of the deformed poults. The eyes are a solid, eerie greenish-gray color and there's no pupils. They were runtish, and completely blind, and they all started dying at four days old - they just couldn't find food or water.
At Bruce's suggestion, I tossed in an older chick to help the little poults figure out how to scratch and find out where the food is. One of the poults took to snuggling under its wing.
Here's a shot of the Cornish Cross Meat birds heading out to pasture here in the next couple of days. They'll be food on May 19th. The growth rate is incredible in the Cornish crosses, growing so fast their feathers can't keep up.
Ugly Duckling, err Tasty Chicken!

Dog Training Invention & Birds on Pasture

2010-04-01T23:07:00.004-05:00

So last year, I had some problems with the Pyrenees eating hens. I couldn't figure out what was happening, so I hid in a patch of cedars and watched as two playful puppies followed the flock around and managed to catch a hen. They then laid down with the hen between their paws and proceeded to lick the hen, and then pull out feathers. What was happening was the pups were playing, and being affectionate (licking), but chickens are very delicate, so it didn't take much to kill the bird. Once dead, instinct kicks in and the pups eat the carcass. This is pretty common across the board for livestock guardian dogs - the guy that we're buying our goats from told me about how his Anatolian shephards quickly dispose of any stillborn goat kids. Dead animals attract predators, so the dogs are protecting their flocks/herds. Pretty neat.

But to stop inappropriate play, I came up with the idea demonstrated below. It's just a chicken wrapped in polywire fencing hooked up to a charger. The chicken is on a rubber mat, so it can't be shocked because there's no ground. A mischievous puppy, however, will complete the circuit and get popped on it's nose or mouth, and it will probably be a lesson that sticks for the rest of the pup's life.
In other news, I finally got the chickens back out to pasture yesterday. Finally!

Double Dew Claw

2010-03-30T20:15:00.002-05:00

One of the unique traits of the Great Pyrenees breed is that they have two dew claws. A lady at work who used to breed Pyrenees warned me that some times individuals in the breed can have problems with the dew claws, so they need to be checked every so often. Sure enough, I checked Feta's claw and you can see below how the rightmost dew claw had started to curve in on itself. Interestingly, Alfredo's claws didn't present a problem. Good genetics.
So while we were in the pasture trimming claws, I took a picture of the family. Feta's in the pic below, sniffing baby Silas.
Another trait with Pyrenees is that they are ridiculously affectionate towards children. Kids can pull and squeeze on their necks, tug on their massive jowls, and scream in delight, and the Pyrenees take it in stride as you can see below. The only problem is size - klutzy large dogs and uncoordinated toddlers can make for some (hilarious) wipeouts.
Good family and good dogs.

Getting Goats

2010-03-28T10:44:00.004-05:00

So yesterday I put a deposit down on a starter flock of goats. We're getting Kiko goats from John Jeffries, who breeds Kikos on his farm over across town. He's got a herd of around 50 Kikos plus a whole lot of (goat) kids running around. We looked at getting Katahdin sheep, but we went with goats for 3 reasons:1.) Land - our land is perfect goat land. The pasture that we've fenced in is full of sericia lespedeza, cedars, locust trees, briars and rose. The sericia is choking out the fescue and other grasses, and the goats will relish the browse. Parasites are inevitable in goat herds, and will be the biggest threat to our herd. S. lespediza actually acts as an anti-helmitic that kills the worm eggs and slows down the adults in the goats intestinal tract. Lespedeza is also a legume that's high in protein. One man's weed is another's resource.

2.) Price & Support - The goats are about half as expensive as the sheep we were looking at for local breeding stock. Also, John is very easy to talk to, and breaks things down easily. From experience, you never really have a clue what you're doing with livestock until you start to raise that particular animal and have to start troubleshooting problems. Having someone who can hold my hand through the first year, and whose farm gate is always open is very attractive to our family.

3.) Market - We have a good amount of connection with people who come from other countries and areas of the world where goats are valued as a meat source. I have no problem dealing with people from other cultures - and that's skill or stumbling block that's taken for granted. A friend from Trinidad recently brought Carla goat curry to try - and Carla loved it. So whether we keep the goat operation small for our own use, or want to scale it up, we've got the options either way, and we really dig that.

A Ridiculous Foot of Snow

2010-03-22T21:54:00.004-05:00

So Saturday night into Sunday, a fast moving system dumped an inch of rain and then over a foot of snow on us. The day before, it was nearly 70 degrees. Seriously, the end of March and over a foot of snow? It's depressing, and it's really screwed things up. The weather man predicted 1-3 inches. He was right, but there was an additional 9 inches he forgot to mention...
Hopefully this will be the last time this year that I have to hike up and down our road because of the snow. It's getting old.
The pups were ready to be fed. Squirt got popped by the fence last week, so you can see in the pic that he stays way, way back.
So Feta didn't wouldn't even wait for me to fill her bowl. The bucket had a bunch of goodies mixed in with their dry dog food. Apparently she was a fan!
I'm so glad that I didn't put the hens out on pasture last week - really dodged a bullet. This year's been really crazy so far. It's good to see this while just getting the farm started, because it shows me what I have to plan for worst case.

First Turkey Eggs

2010-03-17T20:15:00.005-05:00

So I've got my first turkey hen starting to lay. These are two of the Narragansett eggs. She's laying an egg about every other day or so (0.75/day). I'm guessing things will ramp up as spring starts to come in full swing. Interesting how they're camoflouged/mottled. So I've got a Tom that does his duty and a hen who lays, so we'll probably end up overwintering some more hens and another tom this year and start getting two breeding flocks going - a tom with 3 hens. That should give us around 30 eggs to hatch a week; depending on sales this year, I'd like to have around 75 turkeys for sale next year. Hatching our own poults would be cheaper - buying poults vs keeping 8 or 9 turkeys through the winter, plus the customers that buy these birds want to see them preserved, and that would be a huge added value for them.

New Pasture Coop Site

2010-03-16T21:29:00.003-05:00

So it's getting close to moving the laying flock back down to the pasture. With daylight savings, we've got a little more time in the evening, so Simmey and I went down to check the state of the pasture. Last winter, I left the hens on pasture too long, so I'm paying for it now. The grass had been stunted, and it's recovering.
Where Simmey's standing with his entourage of "puppies" is where the pasture coop will need to be moved later this week. I've got to attach some eye bolts through the 4x4 skids so I can drag it. The spot is on the edge of the pond (that doesn't hold water - thank you interstate blasting), and more importantly, relatively flat, especially for our land.

Last year, we got beat up pretty bad by the varmits. We've taken quite a few precautions this year - the massive Pyrenees above, a fence packing 15 joules and 9.5 kvolts. We're a step closer to success either way.

Bartering with Eggs

2010-03-14T11:59:00.003-05:00

So March can be a rough time for egg sales. At the Wynn's Winter Market, the other egg producers hens have stepped into full swing, and the larger Fayetteville Farmers Market won't start until April. Coming home with 15 or 20 dozen eggs can be pretty disheartening, so I've had to get pretty creative in pushing the eggs.

This week, I barter a case of wet dogfood for the pups at the local feedstore for 7 dz leftover eggs. The old man who owns the feedstore is a Korean War Vet, so he and his family tend to hook me up, having fought a tour in Iraq and all. Still doesn't make up for the broken neck & PTSD! It turns out that the dogfood is pretty high dollar stuff - IAMS. You can see a little of the label that's been taken off. The pups will love it.The temptation is to go out and pick up a grocery store or restaurant account to supply eggs. However, once the markets begin, I'll have no problem selling, and would be forced to decide between market customers or the new grocery/restaurant accounts. At the local Organic food store/co-op, it seems like they change egg vendors every month. I don't want to be that kind of producer. I want my kids to grow up to be stable, so I figure the farm should be too.

Finding Shorts - Cutoff Switch

2010-03-06T21:02:00.003-06:00

So I put a cut off switch in the pasture where the hot wire comes down from the house at the top of the holler and feeds into the fence. It looks kind of confusing in the pic below, but it works and makes sense. The hot wire comes from the right side of the pic and ties into the black insulated wire on the left side of the cedar post. The wire loop attached to the rebar/yellow insulator applies tension to the hot wire. The rebar is also flexible, putting some give into the line when deer hit the line. The black wire that wraps around the post feeds into the cut off switch. It's wrapped to keep from pulling out the switch out - once again because of the deer. A line feeds from the bottom of the switch into the fencing lines. I still need to add two more lines to finish off the fencing. They'll go on top to give the fence a height of 5 ft. The reason for the cutoff switch is to make it easier to find things like the scene below. A rotten branch fell, landing right on the line, snapping the insulator. (The bottom wire is the ground wire.) Having a cutoff switch lets me know if the shorts in the pasture fencing or the pasture running down the holler.
Who needs a gym when you can climb up and down hillside ravines all day?

The Wynn Family Winter Market

2010-03-04T19:51:00.003-06:00

fWell, little Silas has taken to his new home quite well. As you can see, he's got no problem kicking back and catching up on his zzzzs.
On another note, we've been selling all winter at a the Wynn Family winter market. Candye Wynn, avoiding the camera below, and her family started the winter market a couple of winters ago and graciously extended an offer to us to sell our eggs there this year. There's all kinds of greens, root veggies, pork, eggs, winter squashes, canned veggies and jellies, and a ton more stuff.
Oh yeah, you can also sign up for one of our free range heritage or broad-breasted turkeys for Thanksgiving. Hurry up though, because they're going fast!
On the right here is Dave Dickey. Dave's got quite the acreage of apples, fruits, and strawberries, and as you can see below winter squashes. Dave's a great guy and a joy to visit with.
The winter market will end at the end of this month, when the Fayetteville Farmers' Market starts. But until then, swing by between 9 am -noon on Saturdays at the Firefighters Association Building (the old Bus Stop) next to the Brickhouse Restaurant on the westside of Hwy 71 (S. School St), in between 9th and 15th St.

Squirt - the LGD Conscript

2010-03-01T21:22:00.004-06:00

First of all, thanks for all the kind congratulations over the birth of young Silas, my son. You guys rock! Now back to the farm...

So Squirt is our yellow dog - sort of. I say sort of because in the past year, Squirt has developed a very unique habit of waiting at a house about a mile and a half down the road for us to come home. When he see the truck or car pass, he darts back home, escorting us back up the hill to the house. After making sure we're home safely and that we don't have any treats, he turns around an trots downhill to begin the process again. It's gotten so bad that we took his collar off, because we got tired of kids catching him and calling us to go get him. He knew what he was doing, we knew what he was doing, but the residents of the nearby town of West Fork, and more importantly the Washington County Sheriff just assumed he was lost.

So a few days ago, Squirt was imprisoned in the pasture. Unwilling to endure a shock escaping from the electrified pasture border, he's been conscripted to a life wondering the hills of our pastures as a livestock guardian dog (LGD). The young Pyrenees really enjoy having him around - despite the upper cut being delivered by Alfredo in the photo below!
The Pyrenees really look up to Squirt, and Squirt has stopped trying to bolt out the gate when it's opened. In fact, he's starting to lord his status as top dog over Feta & Alfredo, picking a bowl of food at feeding time, and daring the pups to try to get a bite.

Feta & Alfredo had some run ins with hens last year that ended poorly for the hens. My hope is that the Pyrs will follow Squirt's example come this spring as Squirt has never shown the slightest interest in poultry (We've taken the birds off pasture for the winter). I've also got an interesting "invention" that should help alleviate any bad habits the Pyrs may have picked up last season with their puppyish exuberance - but more about that later.

7 lbs 14 oz New Farm Hand

2010-02-28T21:18:00.000-06:00

Silas Spencer came into the world and our family at 0010 this morning. He's our second son, and we're blessed to have him. Mom and baby are doing fine.
Welcome little guy!

Laying in Comfort

2010-02-24T21:30:00.002-06:00

One Comfy Chicken

Building Soil

2010-02-23T21:05:00.003-06:00

So after work today I rushed back to get a little work done before I had to pick up Simmey and get supper ready. So I spent an hour or so cutting down trees, trimming the trunks and carrying them down hill to line the hillside veggie beds - 8 beds, 60-50ft long & 4 ft wide. I got curious to see what my soils been up to. I ran chickens over the beds in tractors last fall and before that added a good bit of compost and manure in the spring. So here's what's happened in the meantime.
So you can see the mixing that's occurred thanks to worms and other critters. The reddish bits are clay, the black is composted organic matter that's become soil. Not bad considering the erosion issues and the fact that 2 years ago this was straight clay.

Wonder what it'll be like in 5 or 6 years?

The Pawprints Don't Lie

2010-02-16T19:28:00.004-06:00

So one benefit of all the snow lately is that it's helped me find where Feta, our female Pyrenees, has been getting out of the pasture.
Our big male, Alfredo, is too scared of the fence, but Feta is a notch or two smarter than Fredo, and always seems to find our fencing weaknesses. This time it was a high spot in the fencing were she's been able to slip under the hot-wire. Apparently I'd noticed this spot a while back, but I must not have had any insulators on me, because as you can see below, the t-post is definitely insulator poor. I fixed the problem, we'll see what Feta finds in the next week or so!

Incidentally, Feta doesn't get popped because of her ridiculously thick coat, which insulates her not only from the cold, but from conducting electricity. I just look at her a sheep/goat proofing our fence - she's practically wearing a fleece.

The snow sure does make the pasture pretty, but I still can't wait for summer!

Freezing Chicken Stock

2010-02-15T21:55:00.003-06:00

So we've just about exhausted our supply of meat chickens we put up last year, in fact, we only have 3 left. Next year, I'd like to put up around 60 birds for our own use.

We try to get the most from our birds. Mostly, we'll brine then roast them. We'll eat a bird from dinner then pick it clean. Our son, Simmey, who's nearing two, really likes to gnaw on chicken legs and wings - I think it helps with the teething. The bones go to make stock, and the chicken skin and fat from roasting as well as the fat and scum skimmed from the stock-making goes to the guard dogs in the pasture. After we've milked everything from the bones, they go to the dogs who live up by the house. Considering the feathers and other parts are composted, nothing leaves the farm. Pretty neat.

I've started freezing stock in Mason Jars, an idea I got from Throwback at Trapper Creek. I can just set it on the counter the morning that I need it and let it thaw away. As we use up pickles, the jars get reassigned for stock. It's a great use for spent lids.

Community Woodshed Raising

2010-02-11T20:44:00.007-06:00

We had a group of guys over for a workday this past weekend to help me get a woodshed up. They're all volunteers, and the only thing they got paid was some bratwurst. Each one of these guys is rock-solid, and they're the kind of guys that make you feel honored to watch your son grow up around. But on to the nuts and bolts...err rafters and nails of the shed.

The shed is a lean to built onto the side of our shop. It is made almost entirely of recycled materials - the only thing not recycled were one 2x6 rafter and the nails in the nail gun. It's 24 ft long and 10 ft wide. Total cost, including lunch was around 120 bucks.

One of our friends is a professional carpenter/generally awesome stud. His oversight made for a high quality job.For supports, we used cut up telephone poles that I salvaged from some construction work at my job. The poles were extremely heavy. They're also creosoted pretty well -the poles were first put up in 1981, but have stood the test of time. The creosote is pretty critical, b/c as you'll see below some of the poles went into wet ground, it took a good bit of manhandling to get them into place.

Some spots were wetter than others, and into the wettest spots, the most heavily creosoted poles were placed and concreted in place. 2x8 nailers were put up onto the shop wall and the rafters hung from them (sans roofing). Once the rafters were up, the fascia went up and the rafters were attatched. The pic below is kind of confusing. The fascia and the rafter are around 1/16 in too short, so we're pulling the fascia into the rafter.

My boy Simmey (left) and one of our neighbors boys, spent the day chasing ducks, catching chickens, teasing turkeys - generally just terrorizing poultry. There were a lot of boys running around having a great time- a great sight.

The finished product. I put the sheeting on on Sunday in about 2 hours. The sheeting, like the lumber was salvage from a chickenhouse teardown. Good thing I got it up when I did, as it snowed the next day.

State of Arkansas May I? Part 2

2010-02-04T08:36:00.004-06:00

I wrote HERE about my efforts dealing with the State Hwy Dept to get an easement to build a bridge on the edge of our property boundary with the state to gain vehicular access to our hillside pasture.

The results were mixed. The guys that came out were pleasant, and in my opinion, reasonable. There are rules that they have to abide by. So here's what we worked out.

When they built I-540, the state put up a gate showing an old drive at the foot of our pasture, the state will recognize that as a common use access, much like the road to our house. The issue is how to get to that gate, and how to cross the creek.

The common use access can be seen just to the left of my elbow

Any use of a bridge will require a hydrological study by a civil engineering firm (ie. spend lots of $ for someone to tell me all the things that I already know) and be built to their standards. I'd also have to create a bond for the state to hold...etc, etc, etc. There's a valid point here though, that a bridge that gets swept away will tumble down creek and become the state's problem - as happened further south of here when a guy built a huge concrete bridge and it tumbled downstream into a state bridge off Hwy 71.

The state has no problem with me driving through the creek though, as long as we concrete the crossing point to mitigate erosion and they have a hand in the planning. They'll even let me use shale outcroppings from my land to build the road. Pretty reasonable. On top of this, I think there's a bedrock shelf about 6 inches in the current crossing spot, so we may be able to avoid concreting in the streambed all together.

Ice Storm

2010-01-29T21:22:00.003-06:00

So we're surviving the storm pretty well so far. We only had about a third an inch of ice, then things switched over to snow - 5 or 6 inches so far.

Add some bales of hay to the greenhouse to keep the poultry busy and happy.

Gather eggs...won't be going to market tomorrow though

Come on Harley, lets go feed and check in with Feta & Alfredo down in the pastureA big bowl of chow seasoned with chicken drippings really hits the spot on a snowy day!

Ice, Ice, Baby

2010-01-28T21:01:00.003-06:00

A massive winter storm has blown in and is pummeling us with ice. This storm is on the anniversity of last year's tragic ice storm that destroyed NW Arkansas. We were out of power for around 13 days - some in the more remote area were out for a month.

So we're a lot more prepared this year. Generator, wood stashed away, pantry stocked, freezer (which we can now keep going) full of meat and stored veggies. We'll see how we fare.

Wish us luck!

State of Arkansas May I?

2010-01-25T20:36:00.003-06:00

This is the Interstate (I-540) overpass that borders our land. Bullard Creek bisects our land, and flows under it. All of our property is on this side of the bridge in the photo, and the photo is taken on the top bench of our pastureland. Our house is directly across the holler from where I'm standing on the other side of the creek. It's rough land for sure. If you click and enlarge the picture, to the left of the fallen locust tree in the middle of the pic, you can see my truck and an orange gooseneck trailer. The plan is to use the trailer to build a bridge over the creek. We'll cut the axles and hitch off, and set it over a deep, armored part of the creek. As flashy as the creek is, any type of culvert bridge will blow out of the streambed.Here is a frozen Bullard Creek. At the top of the pic, you can see where we're planning on putting the bridge in. The problem is that the only place that we can build it on is on state land. It's a long story that involves a hateful old hermit who's way beyond kooky.

So a permitting officer from the State Hwy Dept is coming out to inspect the site. The Hwy Dept has been out once already, and they've been very accommodating and professional. The whole process has been incredibly smooth, and we're hoping that it'll stay that way until the end. We'll know by tomorrow afternoon.

Free Bedding Hay

2010-01-20T19:44:00.007-06:00

There's a farmer over in Hogeye (can't get a more Arkansasan town name than that!) who's got an awesome old oak board barn that's got a stash of very old hay in it. The hay is over 6 years old, and it's a testament to the quality of both the hay and the barn that it is such good condition. The bales are square bales, and are stacked in the hay loft. There's no mold on any of them.

The hay isn't worth a darn for feed, and it' just been occupying space. So in a win win type situation, I go and pick up a dozen or so bales every so often - getting free beding and ground cover for covering/reseeding pasture bare spots while the farmer gets his barn cleaned out.

Now, the hay is going towards bedding for the birds in the greenhouse. The chickens will sniff..err scratch out every bit of grass or weed seed in the hay and the hay will give the carbonaceous material needed for composting the chicken poop.

Here you can see little Simmey in the greenhouse with his stuffed bear (sorry about the pic quality) playing with the chickens and turkeys. The squares are chunks of hay bales, the hens will break them apart for me on thier own. Saves labor and keeps them busy - idle beaks are the devil's tools in a plastic covered green house!

Junco Nabbed

2010-01-12T20:00:00.002-06:00

I caught this little Junco in my shop scrounging odd bits of corn. It was super light & tiny. He was easy to catch him, because he was stuck trying to fly out a window. I actually caught three more throughout the day.

Ice Cold Moves

2010-01-09T20:08:00.004-06:00

So the temperatures have plunged here in NW Arkansas, going subzero - approaching -20F if you consider the windchill. Yeah, that's way below the normal.

So, this has been a great incentive to move the chickens off of pasture. We decided to move them into the greenhouse we built the past summer. The greenhouse is a lean-to built on a slope. My plan is to let the chicken poop and hay compost down to great veggie beds for next winter, and let the chickens level things out.

Come on darlin, moving time

The pasture needs the break, with the excessive snow events, the ground has been rotating between either soggily soupy or frozen into a solid brick. The pasture needs the rest too, b/c the hens are starting to overgraze the fescue, which has been knocked back already due to the harsh winter.

So I was fixing things up, getting ready for the ladies when Tom turkey made a visit. Followed by one of his lady hens. Simeon was "helping" me in the green house and he got a big kick out of the turkeys.

Sizing up the opposition - on both sides

So right now I've got everybody in the greenhouse. I'll let the turkeys and ducks out once the weather snaps this weekend. I'll keep the hens cooped up until the spring though.

2009-12-31T23:24:00.005-06:00

The snow is finally starting to disappear around here. What's left is a soupy mess. It seems everywhere you step, you're dealing with mud. One benefit though, is that the creeks are flowing really well.

Here is a little waterfall on an seasonal creek that delineates the eastern border of our pasture. At the base of the little fall is a seep that flows from most of the year.

I love streams. I used to identify aquatic insects (macroinvertebrates) for various agencies and academics in a lab during a former job (ie I was a macroinvert taxonomist). Maybe someday I'll do so again. I've thought about doing it as a sidestream of income if the farm ever becomes my full time occupation.

Pullet Egg Size Variability

2009-12-30T19:48:00.004-06:00

A batch of our ladies has reached that special time when they start laying. I wonder sometimes what that must be like. One day you're running around chasing bugs, eating grass, then - wham! You're laying an egg. I may be imagining things, but it seems like the new layers tend to be more vocal, clucking "bawk bawk BAWUK! bawk bawk BAWUK! when the time comes. The older experianced hens tend to hop in, do thier business and hop back out like it's no big whoop.
While the hens are figuring things out, their egg sizes can be quite variable. Both these eggs were laid by pullet hens. The one on the left probably has no yolk or no white, and the egg on the right is a double yolker.

Rodent Sabotage

2009-12-27T20:25:00.004-06:00

So apparently a mouse or something decided that my chainsaw would be a great place to stash kernels of corn (also mine). When I picked up my saw, the corn falling out of the guard was the tip off of sabotage.
I'm glad I noticed it, b/c this would have seriously tore up my saw. Dang mice.

White Christmas

2009-12-25T18:38:00.006-06:00

So the rain switched over to snow last night - lots of snow. We got stuck under a small heavy band of snow that dropped just shy of 6 inches on us. To the west, a small town got 9 inches. North 20 miles they had 1 inch.

So this morning, Simmey opened his presents.

A turtle and a bear -Score!

Afterwards, I went to check on how things had fared in the holler .

The greenhouse held up really well

The veggie beds looked pretty neat under thier blanket of snow.

So I headed on down to the pasture to check on the chickens and the pups. Our driveway is steep and long - around 200 meters. So we'll be hoofing it up and down the hill for a while.

Harley leading the way

The pups seemed to really be enjoying the snow. Their white coats were pretty difficult to spot surrounded by all the snow. They were happy to see me and even happier to have some food. I could see little bits of cedar needles in thier coats from the cedar groves they sheltered in overnight.

2009-12-24T22:30:00.003-06:00

So the day started off very rainy today. We had a break in the rain, so I headed down to do some work in the pasture. It was misty and very wet

Looking up hill

Looking downhill

You can see the dead lespedeza covering the field in the pics. The green spots are where fescue is coming in. We tried some brushhogging this fall, and knocking the lespedeza out gave the grasses a chance to gain a foothold. The eroded spots are from where I let hunters travel up and down the pasture this fall.

The chickens didn't really seem to mind too much though, some of them looked like drowned rats, but they were content just looking for whatever goodies they could scavange up.

The rain picked up again and the wind shifted from out of the north. Snow is coming. Eventually I got pretty soaked, and I gave up and headed back up to the house.