here a goat, there a goat

Meet our newest additions, our meat goats.

These ladies and gents are one of the easiest keepers on the farm, maybe even simpler than our little bovine herd. With the exception of the occasional hoof trim and a lovely little incident with goat lice among the last group we brought in ( all I’m going to say is thank the heavens that we quarantine all newcomers and that the louse are species specific. YUCK!) they pretty much take care of themselves.

We have two breeds in this herd, Boars and Kikos. Some are full bred, others are some cross of the two. The Kikos tend to be a hardy breed and more apt to eat just about anything. The boars seem to convert feed to muscle more efficiently so they should theoretically make the most optimal cross. With two huge ponds, a maple grove, lines and lines of pine trees and brush that is hellbent on devouring our fence line, not to mention the acres and acres of grass that would need to be mowed by one of us, we were in desperate need of a little help. This summer has been hijacked by a massive project which aims to re-grade a ditch that runs the length of our property and has required weeks of Kevin’s attention, as well as a weekend of help from his dad and a good bit of help from a neighbor,  to cut down about 50 trees and clear it out before the heavy machinery can be brought in to complete the job. Needless to say, between this and all the other daily chores and winter preparations, we were in desperate need of some help.

Our main goal when bringing in goats was to have some sort of livestock that would cleanup and clear out the north part of our property, taking that demand off of us this summer. And, like everything else, it needed to meet our criteria of providing some sort of income and a possible food source for us. Meat goats seem to be the answer, mostly because I do not have the time or energy to milk an entire dairy goat herd right now which was our other option. We decided to bring in two breeds in the hope of encouraging hardiness within our bloodlines, especially since we plan on only producing grass-fed meat and have no intentions of showing them.

This will probably be one of the last additions to the farm for a while now, excepting births next spring, which will be limited to the goats and probably only a few sheep. With everything that has been going on this past year I missed our small window to get the cows bred in order to time the births in early spring and will now most likely have to wait until next July to schedule a visit from the AI specialist. At this point, we have only sold three of this year’s lambs and will only be butchering two of last year’s wethers for meat, leaving us at a herd total of 27, two more than the high-end of what I had hoped to go into winter with. Unless we sell a whole bunch in the next two months, only a few girls will be headed for a date with Zeke and Fergus this November.

Now it’s up to Nelson, our Kiko buck, to get down to business this fall and expand our herd. Hang in there buddy, November will be here in no time!

freer ranging chickens

I am fairly certain, over the seemingly short time of this blog’s existence, that it has become quite apparent that I am a recovering Type A personality. I fight the need to have everything “just so” on a daily basis. I tended to spend hours mapping out any given action, as well as all its possible outcomes. Up until becoming the mother of two (because really, let’s be honest, now it’s just about surviving the day) I was notorious for being over prepared. “Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad” you say? Well here’s an example, our wedding had an itinerary, which was broken down by the hour for the entire day, so everyone knew where they were suppose to be and when. Kevin also had a list of all the luggage and other bits he was supposed to deliver to the hotel we would be staying in the night of the wedding. To answer the questions I know you are dying to ask, yes, Kevin’s family still makes fun of me for it and yes, Kevin still forgot a piece of our luggage which we had to drive back and retrieve before leaving for our honeymoon.

Anyway, I am sure you are wondering what this all has to do with our chickens. Well, you see, when we initially ordered the laying hens Type A me ran through all the scenarios. They mostly consisted of buying 40 hens, them not imprinting on the coop and never coming home the first night and in my mind every coyote, fox and weasel in the area would be stopping by daily for a snack. We bought movable electronet poultry fence, Kevin built a huge chicken coop, which sits two feet off the ground and on wheels with car jacks attached to each corner to aid in stability when parked, allowing us to move it to new grass within our fenced in pastures when needed. We religiously tucked them all in at night, which at the beginning often meant catching one or two with Kevin’s bird catchin’ net, or what most normal people would call a pool skimmer. Nothing could dig into the coop, most likely nothing was going to traverse two layers of electric fencing to have chicken for dinner, however, we also felt like we were constantly moving a gigantic, and what turned out to be cumbersome, chicken tractor and chasing chickens indoors every night.

Fast forward to this spring and we had a few dozen chickens who had entered winter laying over two dozen eggs a day and were now limping along with only a few eggs daily, even though the daylight hours were increasing (hum, maybe I should refrain from writing posts like this one and unwittingly dooming us.) They had plenty of food and water, a freshly cleaned out and re-bedded house. No one looked sick, there was no predator pressure and our two roosters were doing an excellent job of gathering everyone up at dusk and tucking them into bed for us. There was no reason for them not to be laying dozens of eggs a day and they all looked a little extra ruffled and seemed to be scuffling with each other a little bit more than usual. One day while preparing dinner and looking out our kitchen window, which has a view of our front pastures, I witnessed our one and only Brahma hen running frantically from one end of their fenced in area to the other, worm dangling from her beak and about 25 other chickens chasing after her. What followed was a scuffle, the Brahma frantically swallowing her snack, some random pecking and kicking and a bunch of chickens retreating to either under or into the coop.

I got to wondering if they were just acting up and fighting with each other because they didn’t have enough space to wander in. They seemed to be acting like siblings who had been stuck inside for too long with too much energy and no way to release it and, in turn, decided to take it out on one another. The worm incident seemed to be that classic fight of “I want what she has and even though there are 20 other toys, I mean worms, on the ground no other than her’s will do!” So despite my concern, and control issues, we decided to take down their fence, trust that the boys would get everyone in at night and let them range as free as it gets.

Almost immediately egg production steadily started to increase, everyone started to look sleeker and shinier and fighting reverted back to minor squabbles only once in a while. As of today, no one has ventured out of the pasture that the coop happens to be parked in, everyone marches into bed at dusk and we even witnessed our Speckled Sussex rooster, Brewster, calling everyone in when a particularly bad storm was blowing in.* Now we can roll the chicken tractor into a larger pasture and not have to move it within the week. Best of all, we no longer have to tangle with the electronet fencing every few days.

I am shocked at how happy and content they all seem to be now and even though they have the whole world opened up to them they seem satisfied with taking just a little bit more space then they previously had and have shown no need to wander too far from home. Ah Ha! Another unlikely lesson in parenting learned thanks to farm life, I’ll be sure to file that one away for later. All of this did get me thinking, if my well-loved chickens were unhappy with just a quarter acre of space versus the full acre (and no fences) they have now, what do those poor chickens, who are crammed into hot huts with no windows, not to mention zero access to fresh grass to graze upon, feel like? Well, I suppose there in lies the truth of it all, this is the reason we make the sacrifices we do, to live this back to the land life of ours…we were simply in search of a happy egg.

* This is what happens when the kids are in charge of naming and the oldest is going through a “everything I say must rhyme” stage. Also, our Americauna rooster is named Wooster. Just wait until you find out what they named the new calf.