Revised Pig Pallet Pen

New and improved pig pallet pen

A few weeks ago I wrote about the temporary pallet pens that we built for the pigs to train them to the electric fence. My expectation at the time was to release the pigs into larger paddocks within a few weeks. To my dismay, that hasn’t happened. I wrote a bit about the frustration with the pigs in a couple posts during my weekly column on Farm Dreams. You can find them here and here.

The short of it is that the pigs remained very small and tightly wound. I wasn’t making a lot of progress with getting them to calm down and/or respect the electric fence. Sure, the electric fence was inside the pens and it would zap them if they touched it, but I noticed they were touching it a lot. At first I thought they might not be respecting it the way it was intended. I figured I’d give it a couple weeks and see if they learned better.

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Goat Buck Pad


My lovely wife putting on the finishing touches

Male animals on the farm are a difficult proposition. They’re harder to manage, they’re stronger and they generally only have one thing on their mind. Yet you need them to make milk. If you don’t have babies you don’t have milk. So we needed some bucks to help us breed our ladies this fall for milk in the spring.

Enter Gozer and George. One is a Nubian (such as Bridget) and one is an Alpine (such as Mayday and Sabine, Queen of the Truck Roof). Both have excellent blood lines for milk production, which is a critical quality for our bucks. They are responsible for 50% of the genetics in our herd. Each doe has less of an impact than the bucks. Yet neither buck has produced kids, so we can’t be sure that their progeny will be up to par. But that’s the risk you take with bucks. No one wants to sell you their best buck, you almost always have to go with an unproven youngin’ from good blood lines.

 

 

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Transitioning to Farm Life - Social Isolation


After nearly five months I finally got the first batch of homebrew going. Here it is being dry-hopped

We got this request on Twitter about a week ago:

I would love to see a post about how you're adjusting to the long hours, hard work, and general transition to farm life. Also relative social isolation after leaving the city.

Succinctly answering the request is nearly impossible, but I’ll give it a shot. We get this type of question  a lot, so clearly it’s on people’s minds. It’s hard to write for both of us because we’re in different shoes, so I’ll write from my standpoint.

Over the past 4 months we went from living in a 700 sq ft apartment with no animals (or experience raising animals) to managing 85 acres with 2 cows, 4 pigs, 11 dairy goats (potentially going to 13 soon), 5 livestock guardian dogs, and close to 30 chickens and guineas. Only time will tell if we find success, but thus far it’s been quite a transition, involving a lot of long hours, hard work and isolation, as our reader suggests. We're not yet "full-time farmers" (as they're reverently referred around here), but it's a first step and maybe in a few years that will be the case.

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