The Year of the Farm - A Recap of 2012


Our most popular Facebook photo, little Joplin!

2012 was an incredible year for us. One blog post can't do the whole thing justice, but I'll take a stab at a quick summary.

Clearly, the biggest event was MOVING TO THE FARM! Leaving NYC in a 26 ft. Penske truck seems like it happened years ago. Hard to imagine it was only 10 months ago.

We packed up all our stuff and the day before we left we got our first animal. Sophie! One of our farmer friends gave her to us and she has since turned into a wonderful livestock guardian dog.

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Elusive Blue


Blue

Not everything goes as planned on the farm. Before moving to Tennessee we put in over a year’s worth of research and planning to make the start-up as “smooth” as possible. Since then lots of stuff has gone according to plan, but just as much has not. Things not going according to plan is what we spend most of our time figuring out, fixing, and trying not to do again.

With the dogs we’ve been very lucky. Our three girls, Sophie, Sheba and Izzy, all stay within the perimeter fence, they love the animals, they love us and they hate anything that tries to get inside the fence. So far they've been fantastic and we haven't had any predator problems. However, because of our property's layout and the amount of land we’re managing it will make sense for us to have more guard dogs as we expand. We’ll be running goats in different paddocks. Bucks will be separate from Does. Kids will be separate. Cows and pigs are all run separately. In addition, the land is split between three (or four, depending on how you look at it) distinct parcels. It’s too much to ask of three dogs and we don’t want to set them up for failure.

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Wild Turkey Egg Snack


Sophie, the culprit

We milk the goats twice per day. Once around 7am and once around 7pm. They like consistency and if you can get the milkings twelve hours apart that tends to work best. Typically, when we go out to get the goats Sophie and Sheba will greet us at some point along the way. They hear the gate rattle and if they're not busy doing something else they'll come up and walk with us.

On the weekends I'll usually join Sweetbreads since I don't always get to join during the week. On Sunday morning it was business as usual. Sophie and Sheba joined in for the walks. However, on the evening walk Sophie and Sheba were lagging behind. I didn't know why. It made me worry. Were they sick? Were they dehydrated? Did they have lyme disease? So many thoughts run through our heads these days at even the faintest sign of something abnormal. Being observant is critical. 

 

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