June 26, 2020
June 26, 2020
This dry, hot weather has slowed down the pasture growth substantially. It's nice to not have to mow the front lawn, because the grass isn't growing, but it's another thing to hope your animals don't run out of food, because their pasture isn't growing. Very soon, we will start picking up the left over vegetables each day, from a couple of local farmstands. The vegetables, along with what they forage from their woodland pasture, will keep the pigs well fed all summer. The sheep however, rely on grass all summer, and for that we are hoping for rain. A nice gentle rain a few nights a week, just enough for our pastures to grow, but not so much as to interfere with your picnic...
June 20, 2020
When I heard about the enormous meat packing plants shutting down because of Covid 19 - I felt bad for the workers but not for the mega corporations that own the plants. It never occurred to me that their "misfortune" would trickle down to me.
Many of those animals that couldn't be processed by the huge plants, were either euthanized or trucked to smaller plants around the country. Farmers who normally used the smaller plants to process their animals, are now shipping their animals to the micro plants that we normally use.
Where as I usually made processing (slaughter) dates a couple months in advance - I now need to make them 16 months in advance. I am making appointments for animals whose parents haven't even been born yet. And instead of driving 20 minutes to drop the animal off, we will now have to drive 2 hours in both directions hauling a livestock trailer, and then back again 2 hours in both directions to pick up the finished product.
June 13, 2020
Silvopasture is the practice of combining forestry and livestock grazing in a mutually beneficial way.
Our Mountain Spring Road pasture has become a wonderful example of this. The combination of pigs, sheep and chickens being rotated through the area (that was once so heavily infested with multiflora rose I couldn't walk through it)- has now become an extraordinarily rich pasture happily coexisting with a fairly dense forest canopy. Pocket ponds, created by the pigs wallowing in the mud, are now filled with water and provide drinking holes for the sheep, and habitat for frogs.
It's a lot more work to keep the fencing maintained in a forested area, but it feels like the effort is finally paying off. It makes my heart sing!
June 6, 2020
We have animals on pasture in 3 different locations, which means every day we spend time, in each place, walking through the pasture checking fences for faults and breaks, checking that the animals all have water, and plenty of grass to eat. One of the most important things we do each day is to "simply" observe. - Each of our animals has a way of letting us know when it's not feeling 100%.
For pigs, the easiest indicator is their tail. A straight tail means the pig is stressed. It could be a momentary spat with a sibling (being chased off a prime feeding spot) - once it's resolved the tail goes back to being it's happy curly self. Or it could be a sign that human intervention is needed.
With our sheep I can tell by their ears. Shetland Sheep have normally "perky" ears , If the ears are drooping it means something is seriously wrong. I can also tell something is wrong, if they are slow to get up when I move the Border Collie past them, or if they are off by themselves, away from the flock. Happiest for me is when they are all quietly, chewing their cud in the shade, having eaten all they can for now.
Regardless of the daily checks, each month we pen them up and check their inner eye lids for signs of anemia- which is a visible clue that they have a significant parasite load and need to be treated with a dewormer- and it's also a sign that we need to speed up our pasture rotations in order to stay ahead of the parasite cycle.
Last week we penned them all and tagged all the ears of lambs born this year. It's a federal requirement , in an effort to keep track of all the sheep in the U.S. - and it also helps us keep track of the genetics, and general health of each animal.