Farm

Spring?

Steve HardinLeave a comment
 
Everything is changing so fast. One minute it is freezing cold, the next it’s warm and rainy then it’s snowy. Mother Nature cannot decide which side of the fence to stay on. 
I found a dead lamb in the barn a couple of days ago. Mouse found it buried in the straw, neither AnnMarie or I ever saw it alive. It was the only lamb we had die out of 50 babies. Not too shabby. 
I am ever grateful we bought an extra 20 ton of hay. We are almost halfway through it. This winter has been long and brutal. Something killed one of our cats in the yard last week. All of our dogs were inside with us. We think it is a raccoon. Unfortunately, we will now have to get a bunch of kittens this spring. We will get an entire litter and create a kennel out of metal wire and raise them in the horse area of the barn for a few weeks. Once they are settled into the barn we will feed them every day and see if they take over. Our goal is to get them attached to the barn. When they get old enough we will get them all fixed. We are not real keen on having more kittens. We are down to three cats now. So we will get 5-7 kittens. 
The cows and sheep in the barn lot are eating the large hay bales very fast. Tonight I managed to push a bale behind the lamb shed and almost into the lean to. I then cut all the strings and jammed it into the building. There is a feeder panel across the front that will let the cows eat but no one can play in the hay and waste it.  I am hoping this forces the sheep to eat some of the barley hay we have been feeding them. I would like to get it all used up this winter. 
Donna called yesterday to let me know that the lower cows needed feed also. One of the new babies had slipped between the smooth wire and was on the road. Someone stopped and put the calf back in the schoolhouse pasture. I will probably have to line the fence with sheep fencing. Those cows actually let me get the bale in place and the feeder around it before rushing in to eat. 

I counted laying hens today. I have 22 hens and am collecting almost 14-15 eggs a day. We have a pile of eggs on top of the fridge. Both annmarie and I need to find another customer. 
 
 
 

Back creek started up

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Yesterday the back creek started running. It is purely fed from mountain snow runoff.  The weather was warm but we had a couple of days of rain and I don’t think the ground can absorb any more water currently. So our creek is now running. The screwy part of this is today we are now under three inches of snow with a predicated total of ten inches coming tonight. Winter is truly unwilling to let her hand off the snow switch.  
It has been busy around here the last week. We had another calf for a total of two in the last ten days. In the next two weeks we will need to run our bull band into the shoots so we can tag and band. 

Our sheep have had two more lambs. We have a few who are obviously off cycle. I have four lambs to tag and band now. That will need to happen in a couple of weeks also. 

Thank goodness we bought extra hay. We will have fed about 40% more than normal this winter. I am super excited about not having to scramble for hay. 
Another great thing has just occurred. We had our tractor place RDO haul in the old 1950’s International gas powered tractor to revive it. It had not been started in over 8 years. They put in a new battery, new starter, spark plugs, distributed cap, oil filter, fuel filter, hydraulic fluid filter, partially rebuilt carburetor, changed oil, cleaned out fuel tank and lines, new ignition switch, added headlights (it had none), pumped up the tires and it is a mean running machine!!!  We only had to pay $2435 to revive it!!  It should be able to lift the big 1300 lb hay bales. I just have to drop off a check from Donna for the tractor and we will be able to load and unload hay ourselves!!  This is great news. As soon as we get it back to the farm I am going to see if it can handle a large bale. 
The chickens are going to town and I am now getting almost a dozen eggs a day. We are going to need a couple more customers. 
 

Rock wall 2017

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I will live!  Those are profound words for 2017. Theoretically, I do realize that pneumonia is bad but never having had it I had no personal reference. It is horrible. Once I got to the point I could breathe I figured it would be almost over. I was wrong, this crap is going to take a while to get over. I am getting sick of taking it easy.
 On Friday I attempted to burn weeds. It was too wet. I got nowhere. I did spread out the last of the large 1.5 inch gravel. The mistress did all the work, I just had to direct her. I even did all the chores on Friday. I was feeling pretty good so on Saturday I decided to ramp it up and do more.
 Actually, I was scheduled to work but they called me and put me on call so I jumped on the mistress and we drove around to the back hillside. When the weather hovers at freezing it limits what I can do outside but it was 38 F so the ground was thawed out and workable. When there is nothing else to do and the weather is perfect I like to work on the rock wall. If the weather is too nice then I can fence or burn weeds or do something else. The rock wall requires the weather to be just good enough to not do anything else. So “perfect” for the rock wall means not good enough for anything else. 
The last time I took the mistress, my John Deere tractor, to do rock wall work we almost went off the wall and into the dry creek bed. It was sloppy muddy just like yesterday. I decided to flatten out a space on the hillside of the gate so I could maneuver easier. I had forgotten that I would actually have to place big rocks in the bucket and work on building the wall higher. So every 10-15 minutes I would have go get off the tractor and move rocks and keep stacking them onto the wall. My real goal was to get some dirt behind the rock wall so it didn’t fall down. I also managed to flatten out the approach so the mistress didn’t feel the need to drop us off the wall. I didn’t slip toward a certain ER visit once. Which is good because I don’t have my Lifeflight membership decals attached to the mistress yet. She needs a good hosing down and paint touch up first. I spent three hours outside and finally quit as the temperature dropped into the freezing zone. 
I need quite a bit more dirt to level off the ground. My goal is to put in 40 hours of work on the wall every year. I will get there eventually. 
 
I was exhausted!  I could not believe how tired I was after three hours of intermittent labor.  I went inside took my second shower of the day and promptly laid down on the couch. I have a few more weeks of recovery it appears. I slept for 13 hours last night and have just laid around all day today. 
 
One of our cows just had a calf on Monday. I have still not seen the baby yet but several other people have. I am not sure what gender it is. Annmarie said it’s all brown but it is not a keeper. It’s from one of our bull’s daughters so we will be selling it for food.  I would like another one so we could sell them this summer as a pair for someone else to raise up. It just makes it easier to not have to keep the bull away. 
 

 

Bachelor bemoaning

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Annmarie has been gone all week in Berkeley going to school so I have been alone. Some men would like us to think that being a bachelor is a wondrous thing, but there is a reason that married men statistically live longer. 
I usually get up at 0430 and head to work or a couple of days a week the gym. I did still get up at 0430 but by the time I finished all the chores I only made it to work before 0700 twice. Also, I cook too much food. I had planned four dinners. I cooked one and there are still leftovers in the fridge. I did eat more fruit than normal and had a vegetable with each meal. 
Annmarie had a stupid lamb get its head stuck under a feeder a couple weeks ago. I went out one evening and there is a black and white lamb with its head stuck under the feeder. It looked if he would turn his head sideways he could just pull it out. No go. I tried turning his body 90 degrees in the hopes his head would follow. No go. I raised up the feeder and backed away he finally figured it out on his own. 
Once I got back from work there is another hour of outside chores. Normally this is not such a big deal but we had single digit temperatures and my fingers kept going numb.  Did I mention it just kept snowing?  
On the third day I tried to take a shower and there was no hot water. This is odd as we have a brand new tankless propane water heater. I looked at our free standing stove and it was off. I got dressed and went out and took a picture of the tank gauge, zero!  No propane. When I left there were four small electric heaters blowing on water pipes and it was 60F inside.  I had placed a call at 0600 to the emergency fill message phone. At 1000, I talked to a nice lady on the phone and said I was out of propane and it was 5F outside. She assured me they would be on it. I came home that evening and there was no propane. It was 58F inside but I wasn’t feeling good so I tossed a couple more blankets on the bed and was asleep by 2030. 
I woke up to a noticeable chill in the air while feeling worse than I had when I went to bed. It was 43F inside!!  I dressed quickly and left the house quicker. I did move one heater from the downstairs hallway to the breeze porch. I didn’t want my tropical plants to freeze. I called again at 0830. I was nice but more insistent about propane. We have a 500 gallon tank that gets filled 80% (all tanks have to have expansion room). That is still 400 gallons at $1.55 gallon my cost. I came home and dropped off bird food at my mother in laws and she tells me she had to stop the propane guy from leaving. He had not filled our tank!  He had never been here before and did not know we built them a gate in the fence and a bridge so it was a straight pull of the hose down a hill to get to our tank. He thought we needed to move our cars and his hose was too short. Thankfully he did fill it. I had to reset all the furnaces so they would start back up. 
It was a normal temperature in the house the next morning. I felt worse. 
I was supposed to go pickup Annmarie in tricities at 1840 on Saturday . I felt so bad I let Sarah drive her mom’s car to tricities. I slept on the couch last night. I get a serious “man cold mentality” when I get ill. It makes Annmarie crazy. I told her last night her voice felt like spikes being driven into my head. Not one of my finer spousal moments. I went to the walk in clinic today. I have pneumonia. It’s Sunday and my pharmacy was closed so I get to have drugs tomorrow. Yeah. I am going to be doing a lot of sleeping and coughing. 
 
 
The dial is on zero. 
 

2016 chicken financials first nine months

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These are the financials for the first nine months of 2016. They should all be going up as the weather was beautiful and the chickens can free range this entire summer period.   On average I had 24.6 laying hens (0.3 decrease, I am down to 23 hens) giving me 8.2 eggs/day(decrease 0.2 eggs/day) for a productivity rate of 33% (1% increase). I am going to blame some of this lousy productivity rate on piss poor egg collection.  I would go days without collecting eggs and the chickens would step on them and break them.  I also had 2 or 3 hens laying out in the barn and I missed collecting most of those eggs just because I could not find them! I am feeding on average 155.6# chicken feed/month(decrease 2.7 #/month) for a grand total of 1400# this year already (450# increase).  My monthly feed bill is $36.86/month (decrease $0.78/month).  My feed costs are $1.94/doz (decrease of $0.03/doz)with my total cost of production at $2.16/doz (decrease of $0.14/doz).  My chickens are consuming 0.63 lbs food/egg produced (decrease 0.01lbs/egg), spring is here and gone with chickens free ranging for all they are worth and their owner doing a lousy job of egg collecting.  Did I mention that the child used to have to go get eggs most of the time also? It is costing me $0.15/egg (no change) in feed.  I have collected 1491 eggs to date (increase in 744 eggs).  My total feed costs are $331.73 (increase of $105.92) and my extra expenses are $0.  I currently am profiting $142.97 (increase of $106.08) for the year!  After much discussion it was deemed that I should endeavor to collect eggs on a daily basis.  I will work on this.