Year-end farm review.

2017 was a bittersweet year on our farm.

At the beginning of the year, we started building the barn and looked into ways to breed our pigs.

We got the pigs bread and that was both happy and sad as most of my readers know, our one pig yum yum turned out to be a very bad mother and although I did everything humanly possible we lost all but one, of her 10 piglets.

Bean is the one piglet remaining from yum yum's litter and we fought hard for her to be as well as she is.

Primrose had a beautiful litter of 11 babies. We lost one in the first two days but everyone else thrived.

We had the vet come out to do our very first health check and ear tags for all the piglets, this was mayhem and took us two hours to catch the little buggers.

Once that was done they all went to their new homes, all but two.

Peper and Pericilia are still with us despite losing their mother to hardware diseases.

Priscilla is still in a trial period as to whether or not she will be bread.

I am unsure whether she has the loving personality her mother had. 

Primrose, you are missed!

We butchered our first steer this year and I was thrilled at how well he turned out. 

One of my customers said it was the best beef he had ever eaten and since he is a foodie, I take this as a huge compliment.

Thank you, Duffer.

Daisy had her baby early this year and due to some trouble with her utter health and an accident, little Bit is destined for the freezer earlier than expected. 

He will not grow properly or be able to get around well do to an ACL injury.

Daisy is, however, doing well and expecting another baby in March, our first Charolais babies on our farm, we are excited to see how its coloring turned out because Charolais are all white.

We finished our barn in a little over a year with the two of us working on it.

It has been beyond words amazing to have everyone inside.

Daisy epically loves it.

We had a good year for all our crops.

Sugaring was an average year.

Haying was a little tricky because we had so much rain but we got it all done.

We raised and butchered 12 meat birds Successfully and are considering going bigger this coming year and perhaps introducing meat ducks and turkeys into the mix of birds we rase.

Our 12 new laying hens are still doing well and someone just laid her first egg yesterday.

Our farm dog Jack went through a troubling bought of Lyme disease this year but I am happy to report he is just now fully coming out of it and doing great again.

2017 taught me a lot about farming, that showed us you never stop learning. I have lived and worked on a farm since I was around 2 years old and I learned more this year than any other I can remember.

 Never stop learning, never think you know it all, life will show you that you don't!

Happy new year, I am looking forward to another year of farming, and I wish for good things to come for all of us.

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

The barn window last night.

Yesterday I woke up with a cold and the thermometer saying 10 below zero.

Today the thermometer says 16 below zero, and I'm feeling worse.

This is tough weather on the animals especially if they do not have shelter. 

Luckily with our new barn, this is not an issue for us.

Cows are pretty tough Critters and the colder it gets the thicker there fur gets, which can be darn right adorable when they get very fuzzy. They can handle the cold pretty well as long as they have the opportunity to stay dry and get out of the wind. 

They also need to be fed very well to keep their body temperature up. 

Pigs, however, do not handle this cold as well at all, even though they do have hairs on their skin they are not furry. They have a much harder time keeping their body heat in and who can blame them would you like to go outside naked? 

The birds are vulnerable to this type of weather, the chickens especially. 

The Ducks are better suited,  they have a thick layer of fat and very thick waterproof feathers so they actually very much enjoy the snow and like to play in it.

 They can have problems with their beaks freezing shut if you're not careful about how you feed them because Ducks prefer to eat their food wet, it is healthier for them and safer because that is how they are naturally made to eat.

Chickens have a harder time keeping themselves warm and are susceptible to becoming very wet and chilled. Our hens are in the barn and the coop with heat lamps and this helps them, they do perfectly fine in this weather if they have that opportunity to warm up. 

 Below 20 degrees I tend to keep my animals inside, not for long periods of time if I can help it because they get stir-crazy for more than a few days at a time and the barn will get very messy.

This causes another problem for farmers in this type of weather because it's harder to clean out their stalls.

A lot of times their manure freezes and there isn't a heck of a lot you can do about it. Sometimes you can chip it off the cement floor and remove it, but sometimes you just have to give them a whole heap of new bedding and bury it so that they're not laying on it.

As I have said before I like the cold but this kind of cold can be dangerous and unpleasant, and it is worse because I have a cold right now. 

Farmers tend to not work outside when it is this cold if they can help it because as I just said it is truly dangerous to be exposed to this kind of cold for too long. 

I have deep sympathy for all the wild animals when it becomes like this. 

This is good timing for me because it's so cold I can't work outside anyways so it's nice to be cozy and held up in the house while I'm sick.

Hopefully, this will blow over in a few days because regardless of whether a farmer is sick or not, the Animals still need to be fed and kept clean and warm.

so I will be pulling on my boots and charging out to the barn twice a day the entire time I'm sick regardless. 

This is just how we do it, it's built into our life.

I'm not saying that I don't give my body time to rest and recuperate from being ill, but I still need to do, what I need to do, for my animals and that is just the fact of a Farmer's Life. 

Stay warm everyone and please remember to dress properly, it is very important!

Winter wonderland.

I love winter.  

I love how the woods are blanked in frosted crystal and how peaceful and quiet it is.

I love how when you wake up in middle of the night and its snowing the world is completely still and silent.

I love how the snow can make even the most mundane things look pretty.

I don't even mind the cold, it feels healthy and refreshing to me.

That's a good thing considering how often I'm outside in it.

The one thing I don't understand about winter is the way people dress. 

It's astonishing to me to go downtown on a 20° day and see folks in sneakers or ballet flats, wearing sweaters as coats and leggings that don't meet their sox. 

I am not being judgmental of peoples fashion here, I'm concerned for a real reason. 

When we go out to work we are out there for hours on end, we must dress properly!

I know what you are thinking. We live where we work, can't we just go in and get warm? Not necessarily.

We farm 150 acres, we drive four-wheelers to get to where we are working, sometimes tractors as well. 

What happens if we are in the back 40 and what we are driving breaks down or gets stuck? We walk! Do you know how long it takes to get frostbite if its 0° with a wind chill? About 30 minutes. 

How long would it take for us to walk home from that back side of our farm? 

About an hour on foot. That's not considering hypothermia or getting deadly chilled either. 

Most of the time we would not just leave the broken down or stuck wheels. We would walk back to get something else to drive and head back out to fix out the first problem.

So how does one survive this cold?

Easy, you dress correctly. 

Layers are a farmer's best friend.

I wear anywhere between 8 and 10 layers, this includes real warm sox, leggings under my jeans. A tank top then a long sleeve shirt a sweater, a flees jacket a down vest, then my Carhartt coat.

Always a hat and sometimes a buff and a scarf too. 

I see the young people dressed barely warm enough for 40° and I worry about there safety. It's crazy to go out in anything other than a winter cost and boots if its anywhere around 30°. 

What if the car breaks down? What if any number of emergencies happen. They will not handle it well. 

My grandfather always taught me to be prepared, Be ready for anything, the Weather can change without notice. 

You can come across an accident that you weren't expecting, a storm can come blow up that wasn't predicted, there's an endless number of unpredictable and unexpected things can happen. 

we've come across 

car accidents before and we had to help the people in the vehicle before the EMTs arrived. Life is unpredictable.

You just don't know, you must prepare yourself to be safe and take care of yourself. 

All young women go through a phase where they don't want to put a coat over there carefully thought about an outfit, I get it, I was 16 once too but my grandfather taught me a very important lesson.

 One day when I was getting ready to go out (I believe we were possibly going to cut down a Christmas tree on the mountain) I had worn platform sneakers, wide leg jeans and just a vest over my long sleeve shirt.

My grandfather protested the outfit. 

My family was not terribly argumentative, but we were disagreeing with the fact that what I was wearing was perfectly fine.

He did not think it was. "You are going to freeze." He informed me.

 I insisted that I would be completely fine and he gave up telling me that: "I would understand why he was so worried by the end of the day."

He let me leave the house like that and I'm very glad he did, I would never have learned the lesson otherwise.

By halfway, through the day I was freezing! 

I had not known that he had hidden an extra coat and blanket in the car so that I could warm up. 

He asked me on the way home if I understood now why he wanted me to dress better? 

I did, And from that day on I dressed properly for the weather.
My grandfather always wanted me to be prepared, he told me to never buy a pair of heels or shoes that I did not think I could run in because you just never know!

My grandfather was a smart man and he wanted me to take care of myself and be prepared for anything.

 Now that I'm grown I feel I can, I thank him for that.

My Grandmother had a different approach, "we paid for you to have that warm coat, your darn well-going wear it!" my grandparents were on a fixed income and I understood, even then, that everything they gave me was hard earned. I respected the effort, therefore, the item as well. 

 I understand a lot of peoples income has a lot to do with what they purchase, however this, in my opinion, is not an excuse. 

There are second-hand stores, there are donation places, there's help for low-income families, there are tag sales all throughout the season. 

My husband and I are not wealthy, yet we own several pairs of very warm good coats that we bought second-hand for very little, sometimes nothing.

So, please! Please! Learn to dress properly for the weather that you live in.

 I do not want to come across any of my readers Frozen on the sidewalk someday please heed my warning because if anybody knows about surviving out in the weather it's a farmer.

It's a dusty job, But...

Making grain.
Not surprisingly grain is a very important thing on every Farm.
We grow and make our own, this starts off in the spring when we plant our oats.

We plant and harvest about 20 acres of oats, from this we get two crops, the oat seeds, and the oat straw.
This is shared between us, and our customers.
Oat straw makes wonderful garden mulch and bedding for animals.

We clean and dry the oats in our grain handling equipment, and then it gets stored in Grain silos, not as big a silos you are used to seeing, but still can hold 300 bushels.

(A bushel of oats is equal to about 32 lbs.)

We are very lucky to possess a very old and unique piece of farming equipment, it is called a palletizing mill.
This pelletizing mill is what we use to make grain for the animals.
The mill gets Feed from a hopper above it where the grain is stored, this makes it very easy to make the gain, all you need is to hook up the tractor to the PTO shaft, that runs the mill.

I realize this may be a little hard for some of you who are unfamiliar with these terms and equipment to understand, that is why I am adding photos with small explanations of each thing further down in this blog.

Making grain is a loud and Dusty job, that is why I am completely in love with my Bluetooth noise-blocking headphones so that I can still hear my phone if my husband needs to call me because he has a flat tire. 
(It happens pretty often)
 It also blocks out at least some of the noise of the mill that is running.
Right now I am making two kinds of grain, I am mixing some supplements for our pullet chickens. 
(Remember pullets are teenagers.)

Because they are young they need the exact right balance of minerals and nutrients until they are fully grown, so I'm mixing this into their grain which is separate from everyone else's.
It's very high in iron and would not necessarily be good for other animals.
 (especially sheep, If we had any.)

I'm also making grain for the cows and the pigs this is simply oats mixed with some leftover Rye that we have and some black beans, which is good protein and fiber, very good for the cows and the pigs especially in the winter time.
(All of our grains are grown organically and are non-GMO.)

The PTO shaft on the tractor is a star lock, that you hook the shaft too, this shaft spins the entire thing which turns on the other end of the mill.
This causes the wheels to turn when the grain falls into the hopper of the mill it gets crushed by the wheels. 

Gravity and the weight of the Turning Wheels,
Then pushes it through the holes in the plate, that is in the mill, the plate sizes can be changed to have different sizes and types of grain.
Then the grain falling out underneath the plate get pushed out the spout into my waiting container or bag.

Because of the force and friction of the wheel the grain comes out hot, this is not because we are heating it on purpose this is just a natural side effect of using this type of mill.

A PTO shaft on a tractor is very dangerous and must be kept away from as much as possible.
 I worry about the dogs and I'm sure to keep them away from it.
It is extremely powerful and if you catch a piece of loose clothing or some hair, it will wrap it up sort of like a blender would if you caught something similar in the blades. Except it is a lot stronger and can actually remove a limb.
This is why it is very important to be careful around the Grain mill.

So there you have it, 700 lb of grain made for my critters will last a little under a month. The cow gets a scoop twice a day, along with hay and grazing ability weather permitting.
The pigs get a 5-gallon bucket of grain mixed with water, warm in the winter. And whatever other kitchen scraps we have around, twice a day as well.
 The chickens get their grain Hopper filled once a day and currently the meat birds are going through about 25 lb a day they are close to butchered time and I will be relieved when that finally happens because they're pretty much eating us out of house and home.

Whole Oats before grinding.

Oat grain pelites after grinding, with added vitamins.