New Egg Layers, Hatching Chicks, Fat Piglets, New Homes for Goats, Farm Tours & Spring Mowing
It’s been an absolute spring bustle around the farm lately with new chicks hatching and teenage hens arriving as our next laying flock, piglets growing, ever more goat kids being born and a round of spring mowing aiming for better warm season forage growth.
The chickens have been a big focus recently as we try to get back up to our usual egg production numbers, start hatching some of our own replacement chicks and double down on protection from predators.
Two weeks ago, we got in a new flock of pullets (pullet is the word for juvenile hens). They came from Charley’s Chicks in Florida, an operation that specializes in raising ready-to-lay hens for backyard operations, as well as larger operations like ours. We connected with them through the American Pastured Poultry Producers Association and we’ve been really impressed by the calm temperament of the birds.
The pullets are now 18 weeks old, so they should start laying their first small eggs in another week or so.
We also separated out a small flock of Barred Rock hens and roosters as a breeding flock. Barred Rocks are one of the few heritage breeds we have these days as we mostly have higher production first generation hybrid hens.
These birds are also known as sex links because the breeding results in female and male chicks to be easily differentiated from right when they hatch (by feather color, plumage patterns, stripes, dots, etc.). These birds have the hybrid vigor of a first generation cross and lay more eggs, but their offspring will not necessarily breed true in the second generation.
We also have received two orders of hatching eggs from one of our mentor farms who has been breeding chicks from hens that do well on pasture for years. The first group hatched out a few weeks ago with a great hatch rate and the chicks are doing wonderfully, having no stress from being shipped as day-old chicks. The next group is set to hatch this week!
(The last picture in this gallery is a bonus honeybee feasting on the pollen in volunteer pumpkin plant!).
All three litters of piglets are out and about as we let the younger litter and mom join the yard area a week and a half ago or so, when the piglets were two weeks old.
There were some adjustments for the sows to get used to each other and communal nursing, but they have seemed to work out the kinks for now. Mainly piglets stick to a teat order, but some opportunistic piglets do try to nurse from their aunts as well as their moms and this can result in some smaller and weaker piglets not growing as fast.
While this set up is working out fairly well, next time I am hoping we can fan out three separate yard areas from each stall and keep the litters separate until weaning.
Meanwhile, our boar who sired all these litters is continuing to live his best bachelor life in a big woods paddock at the far end of our property, clearing out some undergrowth for us!
Kidding season literally never stops this year. While it’s fun to constantly have new kids bouncing around and I am determined to make sure we only keep the bucks in for a short period this fall to limit next year’s kidding to a tighter window!
This beautiful yearling, Sophia, had two tiny bucklings last week, just in time for the last April Farm Tour. She was born last January and I find it so interesting that her mother has only had her and another single this year and Sophia upstaged her with twins on her first kidding.
We also sold several doelings born in November in the last week — five to someone in Magnolia, Miss. and another two to someone in Columbia, Miss.
We still have 7-8 doelings from the November group available (maybe of them are “available” but I really want to keep them for myself! ;-)
And then soon I will be putting together information about the spring doelings that will be available later this month and in June and July once they can be weaned.
It is tough to say goodbye to them, but I am also really proud of this group especially and the results of our management and breeding practices over the last eight years.
We great tour last Saturday to cap off our April Farm Tours! I made sure to make clear that attendees shouldn’t expect to hold baby goats because they’re not always cooperative or easy to catch and we don’t want to stress them or their mothers out.
But then somehow, every group did get to hold newborns that were so fresh and sleepy that they complied! The irony. But always better to underpromise and overdeliver in my opinion.
We also were able to host our friend Damian Faul, who runs Rose Wagon Ranch and sells our pork at the Hammond Farmer’s Market. Hanging out with other farmers fills my cup so much!
The cattle are still feasting on lush forage and look absolutely slick and fat and beautiful. We are a few weeks away from processing some more and then our herd will get even smaller for now!
We don’t have a cow-calf operation, although do sometimes buy in cull cows that happen to have a calf. And one of them is such a good mom and held her condition so well, we decided to keep her and are sending her over to our neighbor’s place for a date with his bull this week.
Meanwhile, for the first time, Grant decided to do a round of mowing this spring, following where the cattle have most recently grazed so that by the time they circle back around on the next rotation there will be plenty of regrowth.
The purpose of clipping right now is to knock down all the rye and other cool season plants that have gone to seed and are very stemmy and lignified and have the potential to crowd out warm season plants from really taking off.
Laying down the clippings is great for mulching, essentially, and giving more organic matter to the microbes and decomposers to build soil. And of course letting more light in helps have a better stand of warm season grasses and forage.
As we continue to improve the soil, the forage and our ability to feed more ruminants improves, too. But with cattle prices still sky high, we are holding on buying more for the moment. In other words, we have increased our stocking density by improving our soil and mob grazing cattle in a higher density would accomplish the same thing, but it doesn’t make sense financially to buy more cattle at peak pricing right now.
Of course, the downside to clipping can be the impact on wildlife. This is why regenerative grazing can go hand in hand with wildlife habitat restoration and protection. Herds of ruminants are not going to disturb ground nesting birds and rabbits and other wildlife in the way a mower can.
But Grant got to thinking about the timing and knows that red wing black birds and quail and other ground nesting birds haven’t fully started nesting yet. The goal is to clip now before they commit to a nesting sight and force them into the safer habitat or our hedge rows where we don’t mow.
Lots of litters of rabbits have already grown up and we see them bouncing around, so there’s less risk of destroying a litter of young kits that haven’t started to run around yet.
We have clipped in the fall before seeding cool season annuals like rye grass, but this is the first we’ve done a major spring clipping and we look forward to seeing the results.