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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The $500 Hoop House for Hay Storage

We're remodeling an old red barn that was used for milking cows in the 1970's and 80's. It's been abandoned since then and was infested with termites, brown recluse spiders, and who knows what else (actually, I know everything else that was in there, but the list is way too long).

The old milking barn was our hay and lumber storage. We recently decided to transform the barn into a small creamery/classroom space/milking parlor. Over the next few months I'm working with Sweetbreads' step-father to fix up the old building. Good thing he knows what he's doing...

With all that going on we needed somewhere to put all of our hay. We couldn't afford to put up a nice, big hay barn, so we sought out an economical solution. What we found was a $500 hoop house. All of our materials were bought new (except for some screws and a few 2x4's). If you have access to free PVC or plastic covering you could build this thing for next to nothing. 

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Pig Pen Expansion


Pig Maze?

While we're on the topic of letting wild animals loose, I might as well write about what the pigs have been up to. They aren't yet roaming in electrically fenced areas like the bucks (and the rest of our animals), but they're getting there. 

A few days ago I expanded their pallet pen for a second time. This time I wanted to create a chute so I could easily sort them and also give them a little more space. During the rennovation I realized it was a great time to test their willingness to plow through the electric fence.

For a little background on the pallet pens you can check out my prior posts: Pallet Pen for the Piggies and Revised Pig Pallet Pen. If you haven't read about The Great Ossabaw Escape, you should start with the Ossabaw? More Like Lostabaw post.

During this particular pen expansion I left the interior electric fence in the same place and I removed one pallet from the wall. The removed pallet will serve as the "chute" and also as the fence testing area. Right now there's a whole separate area of pasture that the pigs can see, but only the electric wire stands in their way.

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