Lush Summer Forage for Cattle & Goats, Breeding Pigs, Hatching Chicks & More!

The cattle and the goats both rotated through our house field in the last two weeks, which is always fun to watch them from the windows! Plus we’re breeding sows for fall piglets, the new flock is starting to lay more eggs and we hatched our biggest flock of chicks yet in our new incubator!

After about a month apart, the goats are all back together again! (Except the two herd sire bucks, of course).

We had held the does and their newborn kids born in May once we started moving the main herd in their usual grazing rotations again, but now even the very youngest kid is old enough to follow the herd and not get lost sleeping in tall grass!

So to ensure that the kids followed all the way (about a quarter mile or a little more), Cade and Grant just rounded them up into our hog trailer and drove them to the main herd.

But just because the kids are ready to be with the big herd, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been an adjustment though. They went from a herd with 13 does and 18 kids to the main herd of 90+ goats (I’d have to do a sorting of all my kidding records and who we’ve sold for an exact count!).

While the little kids are past the very sleepy phase where they pass out for long stretches of the day and are now happy to follow the herd around and nibble on plants, they definitely make their frustration known by screaming loudly when they lose sight of their moms temporarily and don’t seem to want to traipse all they way across the field again because the herd is constantly moving like a school of fish back and forth!

For grazing the cattle, we divide each of our 11 major fields into three or four wedges with a central water point. This is easier since the cattle can be trained to a single strand of electric poly wire and they won’t jump over or duck under unless they’re super hungry or startled or stressed.

Since we don’t have enough net fence to use for these field divisions, we typically set up a smaller corral at night with the net fence for extra predator protection and let the goats have an entire field during the day and move them from field to field every 5-7 days or so.

This spring, we played around with training the goats to two-strand electric poly fence and they behaved pretty well.

So we gave that a go in our house field and strung a second poly line along the rebar posts. It worked… for about three hours. And then gradually one goat would pop out to eat stuff on the other side of the fence, we’d shoe her back in and someone else would do it. When our friends arrived for a visit, they entire herd came barging through to meet them!

It’s partially because with how wet it’s been and how much vegetation there is, the voltage on the perimeter and internal field-dividing fences is lower than we’d like it to be and that is what powers the temporary fences.

So we abandoned that plan for now, put net fence around our house so they could come on the porch (and basically come inside with us, which they totally would try to do) and let them have the whole field after all!

We’d like to eventually get a separate charger to make the two-strand fence a much high voltage to properly train them on it, but for now, last season’s method of giving them an entire field works fine!

The cattle are still looking wonderful on summer forage and we will be processing some steers in the next few weeks. Unfortunately with cattle prices where they are — continued record highs — we don’t have plans to buy in more steers to finish right now.

We are just going to have to rely on the goats as our grazers and browsers until the cattle market stabilizes and buy grass-finished beef from other local farms for our market when we run out of ours.

Last week, the cattle were rotating through the house field, so we spent a lot of time watching them out the windows like we are this week with the goats! It’s a whole different thing to watch them through windows where they can’t necessarily see us — observing how they behave when we’re not there.

We moved the boar and the three sows together for an extended date last week! That means we expect more litters of piglets in October, as early as the fourth. But based on observing the sows in heat two weeks prior, we expect their actual due dates to be more like October 11th or so.

And the piglets are doing well and growing like crazy! After a few other ideas, we decided to move them near the goat hoop house, so they’ll go over there this week now that the doe and young kid herd is out of there.

There is so much waste hay and goat manure packed in there that they can root through and turn into compost.

It’s too hot this time of year and that bedding would put off its own significant heat if we fenced them IN the hoophouse and we want the compost to amend the soil in the nearby tree line anyway.

So Grant will do some bobcat work mucking out the hoop barn first and putting the material nearby and then fence a large area with hog panels so the piglets can root through it but still have wallows and bare dirt to cool down.

Slowly but surely more and more hens in the youngest flock are starting to lay. The most we’ve collected from them is 5 dozen per day so far, but once all of them are laying, it should be closer to 33 dozen or so! So we still have a ways to go!

The other two flocks are doing fine and predation has definitely decreased with all our recent additional defenses and deterrents. Perhaps spring baby season (for coyotes, foxes and raccoons) is tapering off, too.

Finally, we had our biggest hatch yet in our new incubator! This is one of our solutions to increased predation we’ve seen this year and not having to rely on hatcheries and the post office to get replacement chicks throughout the year.

Of course, hatching your own does mean we’ll have plenty of roosters, but we were able to sell them all in our trial batches and hope we can continue to rely on those outlets with larger hatches.

These eggs came from a breeding flock from one of our mentor farms, so they’re chicks from hens that have done well on pasture for generations (and a bit smarter with aerial predation — they only start hatching and selling hatching eggs from older birds to help ensure this).

We also hatched some Barred Rocks from our small breeding flock and plan to keep some roosters from that hatch to cross with hens from our mentor farm. It’s a long game on making our egg production more sustainable and it’s been exciting to work on.