Fun Farm Tours, Pork Harvest, Growing Piglets, New Pasture Pens & Bale Grazing Cattle & Goats on Freeze-Zapped Pastures

There’s certainly been a lot going on at the farm this month! Besides some great tours, the piglets and their moms are continuing to do well, we brought in some gorgeous pigs to harvest and the freeze zapped the pastures, so we’re bale grazing the cattle and goats and getting ready to process more beef at long last.

And we’re feeding out lots of pumpkins you’ve donated, building new pasture pens for all of our young chickens we hatched this summer and fall and aiming to get our laying flocks situated for a winter break in pasture rotations and seed cool season annuals for winter and early spring grazing.

We had a lovely time at our recent tours, feeding pumpkins to the goat herd, moving the cattle to new paddocks, checking out our mobile chicken coops and our new pasture pens for growing out our pullets and roosters hatched on the farm and of course watching the sows and piglets romp around the barn yard!

We just scheduled the December tour for Saturday, December 13th. You can book tickets here and read more about tour details and specifics here.

We have a couple conferences and events in January, so we may or may not be able to squeeze one in that month, but the goats should start kidding in the first half of February, so we’ll aim to have a couple tours each month in February, March and April when the kids are at their cutest and most bouncy!

For the December tour, we will likely have brought all of but three of our cattle in to be harvested by then! And our pig herd will be down to just a few mature pigs, plus gilts we’re keeping as future momma sows, the three sows, the boar and the piglets born in October.

All three litters and their moms are romping around the yard now! We keep them in their private suites for one to three weeks or so, depending on the age difference with other litters.

A week is the minimum to really make sure teat order is established and everyone is eating well. Once we let the two sows and their litters out who farrowed at the exact same time, the piglets immediately tried to nurse on the opposite mom, but once the sows actually laid down to nurse, things settled down into the usual order and everyone is nursing well and gaining weight as they should.

Even though the sows have been together their whole lives, they always have some drama to re-establish their dynamics once they see each other for the first time after farrowing. Waiting until the piglets are a few weeks old mean they’re used to mom’s queues and know to get our of the way while the sows have “words” with each other.

By now, with the older litters passing the six week mark and the younger litter passing the three week mark, it’s the most fun time to have piglets as most of the initial stress is over.

Because each sow had smaller litters this time and aren’t at as much risk of losing weight and conditioning, we will wean when the younger litter is at least 6.5-7 weeks old. The sows are READY by then and the piglets are mostly eating feed.

In commercial hog barns, piglets are weaned at three weeks old, just when they start to eat feed. The extra three to six weeks we give them helps their growth and overall health a lot! Not to mention it follows the more natural instincts of both the sows and the piglets.

Meanwhile, we just took a group of nine pigs to “graduation” in mid November. I am so proud of how beautiful and filled out these pigs were, but I won’t lie, it is always bittersweet when we get to harvest time.

We’re really proud to raise nutrient-dense, humanely treated and regeneratively managed pork for you, but I think it’s important to never lose the sobering concept that something dies for us to eat. The sting of it has never gone away for me in nine years of raising pigs for pork and I don’t think it should.

I am scheduled to pick up that pork from our butcher tomorrow (Tuesday, Nov. 24), so expect sausages and cuts that have been out for a bit to be back in the online storefront by Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning.

We also selected eight potential gilts (the term for a female pig before she has her first litter, after that she becomes a sow) to keep back as future mommas. We plan to just breed six, but will make the final call about who exactly we’re breeding when we get ready to move them in with the boar in the next week or so.

Gilts are mature and can get pregnant at just five months old and gestation is just under four months. Depending on weight, it’s best to breed between 7-9 months old and aim for gilts having their first litter around their first birthday.

It would seem to be common sense to wait to breed them, that an older and more mature pig would make a better first time mother, but there is a window you’re trying to hit for optimum health of the gilt and the piglets and the longevity of the gilt’s breeding career. If you breed too late, too much fat around her ovaries can cause lower fertility and farrowing problems.

Most of our cattle are on their final circuit of rotations around the farm before we bring them in for slaughter in December. We’ll keep our big momma cow who we bred for a spring calf, her calf from last August and another calf from last May, both of whom still need time to grow.

Hopefully by the spring, cattle prices will have dropped or stabilized a little so that we can bring in more steers to finish on spring, summer and fall grass!

For now, we’re thankful for curly dock and clover and a few other plants that are thriving after the abrupt and brief freeze two weeks ago zapped all that was left of the warm season perennials. Since it warmed up so much since, it’s especially frustrating to already be supplementing the ruminants with hay and alfalfa, but so it goes.

We’re also getting ready to mow down the dead plants that are left standing as mulch and seed winter annuals like rye, oats and wheat, but since it’s been so dry and we don’t till or have a no-till drill, it’s been a little pointless to put seed out on top of dry ground with little chance of it germinating. That’s just expensive bird food!

It looks like there’s some rain in the 10 day forecast, so hopefully we’ll be able to get it out soon!

The goats had a brief period after we combined the herds back together of grazing in their usual pattern — having access to a whole 6-8 acre field during the day and corralled at night to a quarter acre in electric net fencing for extra protection from predators.

But even before the freeze, the pastures were getting a little sparse of goat food, or at least good food in the plant stage of growth that the goats like to eat it.

When they’re full and satisfied, the herd respects the three strand high-tensile internal fence that goes around each field.

When they’re not, they’re more than happy to duck through it to come see us every time we pass by and eat the more appealing shrubs and saplings and vines in the hedge rows.

And that’s not really sustainable to have them following us around all day, willy nilly!

So they’re now bale grazing in smaller paddocks with their net fence, which they do respect.

Bale grazing means shifting the paddocks on a regular basis like if they were grazing, but moving a hay bale with them each time. This still allows the manure load to be spread out and to still break the hatch cycle of intestinal parasites and it spreads out any wasted hay. That hay waste can then serve as more mulch and organic matter for decomposers to break down and continue building soil.

Pumpkin season always comes at a good time when the pastures are less abundant. The goats are the main recipients of all of your pumpkin donations, along with the sows and piglets.

Before the freeze, I hacked down most of my personal garden, including all my roselle hibiscus plants. I fed some to the sows and piglets and a bunch more to the pullets in the deep litter hoophouse. They seemed to love it and while they couldn’t eat the thick stalks, they ate every speck of green and red left on the stalks!

And they just started to lay their first tiny pullet eggs last week.

These are birds we brought in as hatching eggs from a friend’s farm in May. They have been breeding laying hens that are larger frame birds who lay well but are good foragers, are calm, respect the electric fence and are smart with aerial predation. After a few frustrating flocks of birds from hatchery chicks, we invested in these hatching eggs to start breeding our own flocks.

So, to recoup our investment, we are keeping the birds protected in the hoophouse until their eggs size up and we can fill up the incubator twice.

In the meantime as they start to have enough eggs for us to sell their small and medium eggs before that, we are experimenting with feeding fodder, pumpkins and other kitchen scraps while they aren’t on pasture.

The irony is that because the freeze and the drought zapped a lot of growth in the pastures, the hoophouse birds have arguably more beetles and earthworms in their thick mulch bedding than the flocks on pasture even do!

Although we don’t raise broiler (meat) chickens at our farm anymore, we decided the most cost efficient and best way to house all of our growing young chickens we hatched this summer was in Salatin-style pasture pens.

We opted for a white heat-deflecting tarp rather than metal on the sheltered half of it, and the usual specs for everything else.

We currently have three built, with plans for six total. We have a small flock of future laying ducks in one and then young roosters in another and young pullets in another.

Unlike the large mobile coops on wheels, these get moved every day and the enclosed structure means the small birds are safe from aerial predation. We also put electric net fence around the outside of the pens for an extra layer of protection from raccoons, foxes and other predators.

Because of the freeze, we’re getting close to adding tons of mulch and coffee grounds and hay bales to a quarter acre grid and parking the laying hens and their coops for a few weeks of late fall/winter.

Even though we haven’t cycled into a wet pattern yet (the main reason we usually add so much mulch to their winter paddock, to keep them out of wet mud), the pastures are so dry that the chickens start to exhaust the forage pretty quickly and turn it into a dusty mess with all of their scratching and pecking. This time of year, it can be better to let the fields completely rest and concentrate the chicken manure, along with plenty of carbon in the form of mulch and hay, in one spot.

This will also allow us to seed and let the rye, oats and wheat get some good growth to feed the cattle and goats before we follow the chickens behind them (the hens often eat it down to the roots and destroy it, whereas the cattle and the goats don’t bite that low and if we move them off of it quickly enough, it will grow back).

And with our small Barred Rock breeding flock, we switched out the two roosters for three roosters from our June hatch (the birds from our friend’s farm) and added some young pullets from the group that hatched towards the end of July. They’re just 17 weeks old, so probably won’t be laying for another two months or so, but can learn all the ropes from their mothers in the meantime!