Beef & Goat Harvest, Family Visit, Weaning Piglets and the End of Pumpkin Season

Mid December was a bit of a whirlwind with bringing in a load of cattle and goats to harvest, moving around pigs and keeping up with the massive amount of pumpkins at the shop to bring back to the farm, but we were rewarded by staying here for Christmas and New Year’s and hosting family in our farmhouse!

The biggest news of the past few weeks on the farm is that we finally harvested more of our grass-finished beef at long last. We brought in a load of goats to the processor on the same trip, too.

It is always a very bittersweet and sobering experience harvesting livestock, especially the goats that I've been intimately involved with since they were born. 

But I'm really proud of the finished weights and overall condition of both the cattle and the goats. We've come a long way in in knowledge and experience in the last nine years.

And our drill stem pipe corral comes in very handy for low stress loading the cattle. We want to put up a higher fence in our acre paddock that leads into the corral because we did have one cow jump the fence when we tried to load her this spring and again this time!

We brought the beef and goat to Cutting Edge Meat Co., the processor that we normally use just for pork. It’s a little further away than Kased Brothers and they do a few things a bit differently, but for this size load and wanting to try out some goat sausage, it was a better fit for what we needed this time.

So the label will be different than the green labels you might be used to for our beef and pork and we won’t be able to do Caveman ground beef this time. But we’ll have a trial of two different goat sausages and I hope to order some other spice blends for next time, too!

We expect to be able to pick up all the beef and goat meat by the end of this week or beginning of next week.

My family (parents, sister, brother in law and niece) all came to stay with us for Christmas, which was pretty much a dream come true to be able to host and cook and just luxuriate in the house we worked so hard to build.

And because we typically travel to Wisconsin for Christmas and lived in a tiny house for many years, I had never even put up a tree in my own house.

We had such warm weather for these Wisconsinites, so our farm walks and visits to the goats were kind of hot and so humid. But it was certainly a nice change of pace for them than frigid winter weather.

When my family was last here in late March, a few of these goats were brand new newborns, so it was fun for them to see them grown up!

We finally moved the sows to their own section of woods to wean their monster piglets. The sows were SO ready to be done nursing that they lined up at the door of the farrowing barn stall when they heard the tractor and barreled into the trailer as soon as Grant opened the door!

Now they’re romping through a section of pine, taking long naps undisturbed by piglets nursing and eating some of the last pumpkins of the season. Grant thinned out some more branches in their section before moving them in and Spots created her own canopy bed/nest with some of them, it’s really cute!

And the new breeder group with three young gilts and our boar is continuing to work another corner of woods on the opposite side of the farm. Thursday, January 8th will mark six weeks since we moved them in, so they should all be bred and we’ll separate the females from the boar and move another set of three gilts in with him. Ideally the first round of piglets will be born in late March and early April and then the next group will be born in May.

Meanwhile the finisher group of pigs are absolutely living their best lives. We moved them from the end of the farm to some sections near the barns and the entrance, so we get to pass by them more frequently than making dedicated trips out to check on them and fill feed.

In the warm temperatures we’ve been having, when they’re full and content, they pass out for naps all spread out, but near each other (versus in a cuddle pile). There’s something about it that at quick glance looks like they’re all dead if you didn’t know any better!

But although it makes me double take, you gotta love seeing them so comfortable.

And the “piglets” who really aren’t piglets at all any more, but “weaners,” are still in the farrowing barn paddock for a few more weeks until we move them to their first grid on pasture. After weaning, we like for them to stay in their familiar environment at first while they wonder where their moms are for a few days.

A few of them have perfected the collapse INTO the feed bowl strategy and eat while laying in it and therefore take up more space to block other pigs from eating of that bowl.

They’ll transition to a bigger feeder in their new paddock in a couple of weeks, as well.

Besides the big deluge the week after Thanksgiving, we’ve had a drier December and January thus far than we often do, and that’s welcomed, especially for the chickens! When the forage grows slower in the cooler months, the rain doesn’t absorb as quickly and easily and it makes their paddocks muckier much faster.

That’s why we typically put out tons of mulch and hay and park the flocks for a few weeks each winter. We haven’t had to do that yet, but Grant is setting up the biggest flock with a bunch of hay today to get ready for some potentially heavy rains this coming weekend.

And the pullet flock in the hoophouse is continuing to crank up their laying. Their eggs are almost to the size where we can start incubating them and Grant would like to get two full incubator hatches out of them before moving them out to pasture (where they’re more susceptible to predation, despite all the other measures we have in place).

The timing should work nicely for forage growth by them to make it worthwhile. Currently, there’s pumpkins, kitchen scraps, and beetles and worms galore in their thick deep litter bedding.

After bringing the six cows and steers into the butcher, we have the smallest herd we’ve had in two years. And they’re making their usual pasture rotations, with a bale of hay in each grid to supplement what’s growing right now.

Hopefully by the time we’re ready to buy more cattle in the spring, prices will have stabilized even more than they have so far. If not, we’re likely going to continue buying beef from Little Creek Hay & Cattle when our beef sells out and focus on the goat herd for our primary ruminant this year.

The goats have still been loving pumpkin season and are all set up and cozy in their hoophouse paddock. After the big rainstorm in early December — which prompted us to move them there even though they’re not expected to start kidding until mid February — it’s hardly rained at all, go figure!

But when there’s not much forage, they can be more difficult to manage. They just get bored and restless, even with plenty of quality hay, pumpkins and alfalfa and don’t respect the fence in the rotational paddocks as much as they do when the forage keeps them occupied. So even if they’re well fed, they’re ducking under the three strand internal fence to greet us on the road every time we pass by.

Hence, it makes more sense to have them locked down at the moment. Depending on the weather and brush and sapling growth over the next few weeks, we may do some rotations nearby the hoophouse before locking them down for kidding again in February.

And finally, we managed to get the pumpkin bin at the shop entirely emptied out last week! I snapped the picture of Grant early Tuesday when we were unloading the van before I loaded it up with eggs for deliveries.

We have a stockpile that will amount to a few more days of feeding pumpkins to the goat herd, pullets and a few of the pig groups, but we're about at the end of pumpkin season now after a very busy December keeping up with your post-Thanksgiving donations.

If you happen to still have pumpkins, don’t worry, there’s not a deadline and you can certainly still bring them. It just feels momentous to mark the end of the massive pile that always accumulates in early December.

Thank you again for helping us provide a great treat to the livestock and keep all these pumpkins out of the landfill!