When Enough is Enough

Let me just state that the very worst time or year to get seriously into farming is the dead of winter.  We’ve been working toward having a working farm operation for the past several years.  When all the things started to align for us to move and make it happen, we were excited.  As the Farmer, I was intensely interested in many different projects, and I made the decision that I was going to start many projects off and see which ones we liked, which ones pay, etc.

It turns out that farming isn’t easy, and keeping livestock happy through winter is challenging, especially when I’m also trying to be a wife and a mother.  I started to feel like all areas of my life were suffering.  My small kids don’t like to be outside in uncomfortable weather, but that’s when the livestock need me the most.  The end result is that I leave the kids inside while I rush out to do my chores.  The chores ALWAYS takes longer than I plan because when I do make it out into the weather, I make absolutely sure that I do everything I need to do before returning back to the warm retreat of the house.  This usually results in dinner being late, my husband being hungry and a very grumpy household.  Everyone usually gets sorted out and sent off to bed while I head out to do yet more chores.

I immensely enjoy every part of my life.  I love my kids, I love my husband and I love my livestock, but this past week when the sheep got sheared and they were naked and looking a little thin, I started to think that maybe it was time to cut back.

Today, I got to chat with my very helpful, very knowledgeable and very supportive sister.  We talked about the tough questions, like what farming I like to do, what is too hard and what will pay the bills.  I realized that I really do like all the projects we have going on.  Milking cows and goats is my dream job.  I love being a dairy maid providing milk to local families and having a wide range of dairy products in my own home (milk, cream, butter, cheese, etc.).  The sheep, rabbits and the goats provide quality fiber to a known fiber junkie.  The excess fiber can be sold, and each of these animals can be harvested at market weight for the freezer.  That leaves me with the market animals we have going on, pigs and chickens.  Both of these projects are challenging, but they are the most worthwhile.

It then dawned on me that it’s not what I have going now that is the problem, it’s the ideas I have coming up around the future.  It takes TIME and ENERGY and MONEY to grow and expand.  Having property is like taking care of another entity, it is a living entity that grows and needs care and attention.  It is NOT something that can happen overnight or even over the course of a year.

It sounds like that to be successful I need to slow down, take a step back and enjoy what I’m working on now.  Even though it would be fun to start 10 more bee hives this winter or milk 6 more cows, it is expensive, and it takes a lot of time, work and energy.  Perhaps the smart thing would be to enjoy the projects we have going, get really good at them and then look at slowly expanding into new projects as the years roll on.  After all, I plan to live and farm this bit of land for the rest of my life.  If I work on and finish all the projects this year, what on earth am I going to work on for the rest of my time here?

I’m working on putting together a “master plan” for now and for the future so we know where we are going and how to get there.  However, I think the most important thing is that I take one day at a time and enjoy the sweet beauty that comes from working with the land and animals to create our Cast Iron Farm.

Viewpoint

Things really are starting to fall into a routine around here.  It is hard for me to believe that we’ve been living here for less than 6 months.  It seems like a lifetime, a GOOD lifetime.  It feels like we belong here, and believe me, we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.  It would be a gross understatement to say that things have been a bit challenging at times.  There has been a huge adjustment to all the different things about having a farm, having big chores to do and having animals that need us, every day of the year.  I was no stranger to these things before, but we are now dealing with a MUCH larger scale.

This morning, I was out milking the cow, just like I do every other day, and I realized that your attitude and viewpoint really matter in any given situation.  I was milking, and as usual, the cat was slowly sneaking up closer and closer so that he could get any of the milk that missed the milk bucket.  On any other day, I find it a bit of an annoyance, and I shoo him off.  Today, I let him sit next to me, and I really started to enjoy his company.  As I was getting used to the idea of letting the cat stick around, a stray chicken strolled into the milking parlor and decided to hang out.

I went out to milk a week or so ago, and I found that this one chicken had decided she didn’t like the living quarters in the coop and that she much preferred sleeping in the straw in the milk parlor.  In truth, from her viewpoint, we are in HER way.  After all, she made up a nice little nest and here I come with a milk bucket and a 1000 pound animal standing in HER bed.  Did it deter her, no, she just walked under the legs of the cow right up to the nest she had made by the head of the cow, and sat down to enjoy the show.

It made me get to thinking that the way I take these little things really say a lot about me as a person.  Rather than fret that the chickens have discovered how to fly over the fence and that the cat is trying to steal my milk, I could admire the variety and the idiosyncracies that come with working with animals.  They do each have their own little personality.  It’s kind of like a farm version of stopping to smell the roses.

In fact, for a brief moment, I figured I was in heaven.  What more is there to the simple farm life than sitting on an old milking stool milking the cow while the stray chicken and the anxious cat supervise?  It is these individual personalities that make this farming thing so darn much fun.

Shearing the Sheep and Goats

Sheep are essentially field decorations except for two or thee times a year when you have to shear them, lamb them or harvest them.  Other than that, they’d much rather be left alone.

This year, all the ewes are bred, and they are out on pasture.  They had been shorn at odd times last year and one or two were actually shedding.  I called the shearer out to get the fleeces of the sheep and the goats in a way that would render them useful for spinning.

I have clippers, and I knew I was capable of shearing myself, but I had to do an emergency shearing of the ram back in October when he got caught in some blackberries, and though I did get a usable fleece off him, I could have done a much better job.  I figured that I would watch and learn and hopefully build up my confidence in my ability to do yet another thing around the farm.

Boy! What an experience!  The person doing the shearing was fairly new at it, so she was having trouble doing it.  I learned quickly the general idea of how to do it, and realized that I really was capable enough to do the task.  She was able to get the blanket (the back and side wool) off everyone intact, and I am now the proud owner of some very stunning fiber!

That said, shearing 10 animals took almost 8 hours, so it was a LONG drawn out process.

Happily, I have some amazingly beautiful raw wool now available.  I’m happy with the variety we ended up with.  I’ve got 4 gorgeous Shetland fleeces.  I got 2 Pygora fleeces and3 Angora (mohair) fleeces.  This is all on top of the rabbit fiber that came off the rabbits last week!

Ode de Skunk

There are certain charms to living in the country but there are also certain nuisances.  It’s really the small things.  As was the case tonight.

We are working on the demolition of our once wash house so that it can be renovated into Jared’s office, AKA the headquarters of Expansion Computers.  Jared has been busy lately, so I decided to start working on it to try to get it done for him by Valentines Day.  Over the past week I’ve been working on it with Daphne’s help and we are starting to see the light at the end of the demolition tunnel.  Tonight, I decided to burn the late night oil to get it done if possible.  I got the kids in bed, the cows milked and the house in a decent order before I headed out with my James Herriot audio book to get some serious work done.

As I was getting ready to finish up for the night, I stood bolt upright to the serious scent of freshly sprayed skunk!  Living in the city over the past several years, I’d really forgotten about skunk except for those freeway drive bys where an attempted road crossing failed–and lingered.

I searched my immediate area to see if the skunk had somehow entered the wash house, and it looked clear for that.  I made a lot of noise (as if the demolition I was previously doing was at a butterfly whisper) and went into the house where, I invited our rat terrier out to do his job.

Unfortunately, he was more interested in eating the cat food in the barn than helping protect me from skunk, so I had to make a solo round through the farm at 10 at night to assure myself that we weren’t being invaded by an army of skunks.

Yep, I’m scared of skunks.  It’s a good thing that I keep the company of three dogs who will protect me, right? Pugs can take on skunks, right?

Mistakes Were Made

It is so easy to start a new project and think of how much fun it is going to be or how easy it is going to be or even the profit margin it might make.  Yeah.  Farming never really turns out the way you plan.

I’ve raised batches of meat chickens every year for our family table.  It has been occasionally hard, especially when our “farm” used to consist of a 50 by 10 foot patch of grass.  I did it, and I was successful, and I only ever had lost one chicken.  Turns out that raising chickens for meat can be a dirty and a gross job.  The Cornish Cross breed of chicken is the breed that is used by 98% of all chicken farmers today.  They were bred 50 years ago to grow VERY fast and to produce insanely large breast meat.  The thing is that these chickens are walking stomachs, and they are drones.  They have no personalities and, unlike every other animal I’ve ever worked with, there is NOBODY home.  They are ugly, hungry and they have no will to live.  True, they are delicious and they grow fast, but I was looking for something a little more in the heritage department.

This past year, I was turned onto the Freedom Ranger, Le Poulet chickens.  They are a heritage breed of chicken bred in France as a meat bird.  They dress out nicely, they are incredibly delicious.  True, they take 16 weeks to grow out, but they have the will to live, and they are known for their foraging skills.

One day, when I was sitting next to my son waiting for him to fall asleep (as I am doing right now), I started planning for the farm.  The pigs are currently pastured on the section of pasture that is going to the the garden this year.  They have done a good job tearing it up and eating out the roots.  The soil is much richer than it was when I put them on that ground just 4 months ago.  I thought what a fantastic compliment it would be to raise a batch of meat chickens on that ground after the pig butcher but before it was time to start planting the garden, brilliant, right?  Well kind of.  By a stroke of luck, everything was starting to work out just fine.  The chickens managed to hatch out and be delivered the right week and we were off to a good start.  They were brooding nicely and eating up the Organic feed by the bagful.

One morning I went out to find a pile of dead chicks.  It looked like a massacre.   All told, there were 17 in the pile.  I was horrified, and I took precautions to stop it from happening again (I assumed it was a predator).  The next morning, nope, another 18 dead.  WHAT?  I quickly thought the feed was contaminated and I grabbed the tags from the last few bags and headed off to the extension service to get some help.  Then I saw it, the feed I had gotten the week before had been switched out.  Rather than giving me the Organic chick starter, I was given Organic Layer ration.  It has a very high amount of calcium, and, surprise, it kills chicks.  Well 39 dead chicks later, I had my solution.  Voila!  I took the feed away, replaced it with the correct feed, and the chicks are off growing again and not piling up in dead heaps.

What lesson did I learn?  Well, farming never turns out like you plan.  Yeah, I think it’s a lesson I’m going to have to learn over and over again.  I assume that with some more experience I will have less and less losses, but in one mistake, one little oversight, I lost a huge percentage of my chick population and all of my potential profits.  I’m not complaining, and I will carry on, but it just goes to show that you can never be too detailed in the way you manage your livestock.

Until then, I’m going to be grateful for my well fertilized garden space and the chicken meat that will soon be filling my personal freezer to bursting.