Cheese.. cheese... cheese...

I spend a lot of time handing milk in various forms. I work with it all the way from beginning to end, udder to end product (i.e. cheese, butter). This is good and bad... Good because I control the quality of it bad because it limits my processing time. It's hard to get anything else done when your life is consumed by an abundance of milk.

I currently make cheese in a 6 gallon pot. Not nearly big enough for the volume of milk we're getting daily. I have a 25 gallon steam kettle to be turned into a cheese vat but that is a little bit away yet with some details to be worked out. But I need it now is the problem because I get 8-10 gallons of milk a day. That would put me making cheese every other day. Right now I'm desperately trying to keep up and failing miserably. All I would ever do is milk cows and make cheese (oh and wash all the equipment) if I actually could keep up. The end of the week is fairly nice though, as a good deal goes out the door for fluid milk sales.

So my goal today is to get three batches of cheese made today. So far I have Basil Queso Fresco in the press. It has a short press time of only 6 hours and next up is getting cow milk Manchego going. I'll finish off with a 4 gallon batch of mozzarella.

As a note, I've found mozzarella to be a good cheese for my older milk, generally 2 weeks old. I've done it with fresh milk as well but I try to save that for the pressed cheeses. Another good cheese for old milk is Queso Blanco so long the milk isn't sour. Funny things happen if the milk is sour.

I'm Pretty Excited!

I now have a new-to-me computer! A cute little Dell Latitude D400 that has Linux installed on it thanks to my most wonderful DH and friend CM (who found it in the garbage). The battery is shot but I'm okay there. I just leave it plugged in and never take anything for granted on the saving aspect of using it. It's still got a few bugs but hey!! At least I'm not radiating my hands with my cellphone. So now I can put together better blog posts, hopefully, much more easily.

In regard to the power system, it's still a work in progress. I've been bogged down with cheese making, as a cow just calved a couple weeks ago. I'm trying to keep up on the milk supply and get cheese aging for the purpose of selling and some eating. We primarily eat the flops. Like some Gouda I just made that blew... blah. I believe I have a cow with gas producing bacteria naturally abundant in her milk. Her cream bubbles when it sours.. It's all quite fascinating in the cheese making world all the crazy possibilities that can come out of a pot using the same ingredients every time. I'm hoping to do a little more blogging regarding cheesemaking and my experiences in the future.

Chicken Processing and Meat Bird Breeds

One of the best presents we've ever received is a Whiz-Bang Plucker built by my DH's wonderful mechanical engineer father. It has been fantastic! He made a few improvements to the design and fixed complaints that were discussed in the plans turning out a trouble free home built plucker! You can see it in the foreground of the picture below.

It's been interesting processing (in my mind it's butchering but processing is a more PC term I suppose) this year. We hadn't done much in the meat bird realm since moving here due to the difficulty of brooding off-grid.
Now, with a propane heat lamp, we have the usual brooding issues.

So our goal now is to start hatching our own meat birds. The Rainbows from S&H Poultry supposedly breed true.. we'll see, but whatever the case we've been pretty pleased with the birds we get from them. We started buying our meatbird chicks from them and continue to do so along with a couple other places.

My favorite meat breeds, in order:
Rainbows
Red Rangers
Freedom Rangers

Though I have a dislike for Freedom Rangers as they are the most apt to cannibalism if they get a little bit of stress. The Ranger roosters can be pretty mean. And thus far the Rainbows have had more breast blisters but in all breeds the blisters tend to only be on the roosters. Carcass wise, the Rangers seem to be a good all around bird and the Rainbows favor a higher weight for a better carcass. They all get to the size of small turkeys when full grown. Carcass weight being 8-10# for the roosters and 7-8# for the hens. When full size they have gorgeous fat deposits and a lot of it! I am most fond of the Rainbows because they are just plain pretty. They have no standardization of feather color. I sell feathers in a small amount and the variety of colors is rather helpful for diversity.

We're looking at trying S&G's Heritage White's this fall for a final batch for the year. They have a shorter grow time, which isn't normally ideal for us but they should be done before our winter really hits in January and February.

So why slow growers?  Because they have better flavor and health! I don't have the issues I would otherwise raising Cornish X. Nor are they as dirty. I've talked with many producers who dislike how lazy and dirty Cornish X are so I'm not making crazy claims! If you disagree please comment! Help me find some redeeming qualities in the Cornish X!

This and That...

To start off, the solar panel has brought a nice change when it comes to the power situation. We have more continuous power and continuous refrigeration. I didn't realize how much I missed continuous refrigeration ... but we still have work to do on the system. We built our generator as well. Pretty basic especially after blowing through three in the last four months. It's been super annoying. I haven't been able to use my washing machine the last couple months so laundry is way waaay behind! That's only one of the problems. But the power shed is coming together and it's pretty awesome.

Canning has been pretty non-existant this year. The garden is a veritable failure due to a number of factors. Even now, after having the baby, I can't seem to get out there to do any work. Now with ragweed in full tilt my allergies keep me out.

Always lots of things going on and never enough time to do them...

Solar...

It is dry. Not as dry as last summer but dry all the same.

I had my baby girl the end of June so now I'm in the healing stages. Though I'm pretty healed up already, I always push myself a little too hard.

Now onto solar... we bit the bullet and bought a 1 kW solar panel. We had to buy a solar charge controller as well. No home panel manufacturing this time, no time available for it. I've too many other building projects pending. But we spent a day hacking it together so it could be used while getting it's permanent location ready. So for the first time in nearly 4 years I have continuous power and refrigeration. The refrigerator is a big deal due to our dairy production and is what accelerated the purchase after the 3 generator deaths in a 3 month period.

Finally, my boys and I had a building project... making a solar oven. We used a styrofoam cooler as our box and lined it with aluminum foil. It works to heat water and can reheat food but not super good for actual cooking. It needs a little help yet.

How the months go by..

It's been some time since I posted last. A lot has happened but I don't think I could relay even half of it.

First, my pregnancy continues. Not much time left before our new arrival gets here!

We purchased some Tunis ram lambs... well they were banded when I picked them up. I didn't like donut banders before but now I can detest them with a passion. The lambs scrotum just barely fit. So here's my best guess. Banded + scrotum falls off prematurely + raw wound gets infected + rotten flesh + maggots set in eating away everything including live tissue + fly strike sets in + septic infection = death. Lost 3 of 6 lambs before getting it somewhat under control.

To start I went out and cleaned the wound with tea tree and lavender essential oils and scraped the maggots out which required tea tree oil application so they wouldn't just crawl back in again. The tea tree oil kills the little buggers. The lavender oil was applied at the end to promote healing among other things. I've been using a 1% tea tree/water solution (20 drops tea tree to 100mL water) to spray on the fly strike. Tea tree oil is apparently a natural insecticide. Then I also started limit feeding Fertrell's Rumicult 40 Gold. *gasp* It has copper in it! Don't care! Fescue pasture = copper deficiency. They've reduced how much they eat on their own now, but I still limit how much they get. So the results of this treatment still equated to two dead lambs. ACK! What finally turned it around was the homeopathic remedy Lachesis 30x. The maggot infestation in the raw wounds reduced after 24 hrs. The Lachesis is used for treatment of gangrene in traumatic wounds as well as septic infection. After 48 hrs, the maggots in the wound nearly nonexistent and healing had started. Still continued to put tea tree and lavender oils on the wounds to help as well. The two lambs in worse condition were showing severe weakness in the back legs so I dosed them with Conium 30c. Only took once, as they were showing improvement in a few hours. I'm down to battling fly strike on two of them and just putting the essential oils on the wounds. The third I caught early enough that he didn't progress to fly strike buy real improvement didn't show until homeopathic treatment started.

We don't do antibiotics. And vets do antibiotics.

I almost won a battle with Coliform mastitis in a ewe with similar treatments but I didn't protect myself properly and got pretty sick for a few days. She regressed and died. She was healing up but discovered it was her water source that was contaminated so she couldn't win. If her water hadn't been contaminated then I believe I had gotten her far enough she would've healed up but I'm conjecturing. Homeopathic treatment doesn't work if you don't remedy the outside cause.

So that's my wonderful gross story for the day.. we'll see how the fly strike goes now.

'Tis the Season

We have had 3 cows calve in the last couple of weeks. This has brought us up to 5 milkers as we're still milking the two we milked through the winter. This means cheese making is picking up with the excess milk production. Yay!  Cheese!

The grass has finally taken off growing and suddenly it's trying to get away from us. We may even be able to make some hay for ourselves. There are two pastures, 20 acres worth, that could, possibly be hayed.

The garden is falling behind due to the sheer volume of things to do and I'm getting closer and closer to my own due date of July 4th. But I'm trying to make progress. If anything, we'll have lots of potatoes and onions. I'm trying to get green beans planted and have made some progress in that regard.

Otherwise, we have 300ish meat birds growing and goslings hatching.  A friend of ours is incubating 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs for us. So MAYBE we'll have duck and goose to sell this year as well. I have 5 goslings and two broody hens are sitting on 16 eggs between them. Another dozen are being incubated for us. Just a ton going on.

My kerosene incubator is on the back burner for now but still will happen just maybe next year so we can start hatching our own meat bird chicks.

The pictures below are of our calf feeding/training bucket. It's a Kiwi system (meaning it hails from New Zealand, geniuses when it comes to 100% grassfed dairy). The nipples are halfway up the bucket and hoses go down into the milk.Technically, this bucket is meant for two calves. But I've been feeding three. Works fine. I add milk until gone then pour a gallon of water in toward the end. This cleans the system out to a small degree. It gets washed every once in awhile and a lid is left on when not in use. All in all, I like this waaay better than bottles.

Goslings and Incubation

Goslings are the messiest, most ungangly little things... We have White Chinese. We like them for their appetite. Yes, we want geese for weeding, though we have yet to use them as such. At this point we're just trying to figure out how best to propagate them, as odd as that sounds.

These one were incubated and hatched by a friend of ours. There were 7 (out of 14) but two died for no real apparent reason. One he thinks got on it's back and died, the other, he has no clue. He's been raising waterfowl for some time and knows what he's doing but as he says, he's still learning. He's also the only one who's been able to hatch our waterfowl successfully. I don't have an incubator built yet to even try. I've been too busy with everything else. So we sent 12 more goose eggs and 60 Silver Appleyard duck eggs to him when we picked up these goslings. Hopefully they go well and we get ducklings and more goslings.

I do know we both use dry incubation methods. What does that mean? It means, you keep the incubator humidity down around 50% rather than the regularly recommended 80%. The eggs NEED to evaporate liquid out of them or the baby inside will drown in it's own fluids. By the time they're ready to hatch they should've lost around 40% of their liquid. Now at hatching time you do want higher humidity so shells don't stick, something like 70%.

But I digress...

P.S. I made some adjustments to their watering and feed. They are staying much drier and cleaner. The big adjustment was putting a small cake pan under their waterer. Ducks and geese are horribly sloppy with their water when cleaning their beaks...

Raising Rabbits and Other Tales...

Sooo.. in the short amount of time we've been raising and breeding rabbits, it's certainly been interesting.

The most interesting is the doe that started methodically killing And eating her kits.. herbivores, right? Many would say environmental stresses others a protein deficiency. Curious, is what I call it. So why?  No idea. Once read a study about cows eating rabbits. Turns out it was a selenium deficient area and rabbit bones accumulate selenium. My father said they'd leave dead cows out in the pasture because the cows chew on the bones. Say, what?  Yup they roll them around and around in their mouths and would find bones in the water tank from time to time. Why?  Calcium and phosphorus was his reply. Go figure. Granted.. can't do that now..
It's always strange watching a cow eat her placenta and afterbirth. They chew and chew.. blah! Would I take it away? Nope. Part of nature. It helps guarantee no hemorrhage as a major dose of oxytocin causes the uterus to clamp down. I'm more worried if she doesn't eat it.

Now I've got myself thinking .. another favorite of mine is that geese are "true" vegetarians. Which is why, after a rain storm, I watch them eating worms with the best of them. We were both a little surprised on that one...

Muscovy ducks are excellent catchers of frogs and chickens are very good thieves of those frogs. My pond froze pretty thoroughly one winter and the ducks fiercely attacked the trapped minnows and ate handsomely for a good week.

It's just strange what you can observe and learn. Especially in a natural environment ...

The Weather... it mocks me.

Last year by this time I had potato plants in bloom! And even if I was on time for planting it was getting late. This year... ah, this year has been the opposite! I have potatoes barely peaking out of the ground and those that were got frost damage. I'm having a terrible time getting things to germinate in the garden and out. Been too cold for carrots too!

Crafty

I must be into my 3rd trimester of pregnancy ..  my fingers are itching to do some knitting. The problem is I have all kinds of other things to accomplish that are a bit more important, like getting ready for chicks and planting the garden. Below is a picture of my patching our "new" grinder mixer.  The exit auger is rusted out but that's just one thing to be done out of many..

Straaaawwww...

I don't know about other regions, but where I am in SE KS mulch of some kind is extremely helpful! Though many view straw as problematic due to grain left behind, it is one of my favorite mulches. Though I much prefer red clover as a way of amending the soil. Mulch is important here because of how hot and dry it gets in the summer! The last two summers have been plain atrocious with the drought and mulch helped but it didn't seem to matter through the worst of it. 

I'm actually looking at investing in shade cloth due to the intensity of the sun combine with shear day length. It was best described in the book "Gardening in the Heartland" as here we get too much sun. Who'd have thought! All the gardening recommendations say put your garden in full sun! Not necessarily wise here and I'm certainly finding that out first hand. Makes a person wish their garden was portable ... Whatever the case, I find myself trying to get a load of straw in. I don't bother with small square bales, they are WAY overpriced. You can get around 15 small square bales from one big round. I can get a big round for $30. Otherwise I'm looking at $3/small square bale. That's $45/big round. Granted $3 is a good price, more common is $4 each ($60).

Big protest people tend to have: I don't have a tractor. You don't need a tractor. I've been handling big rounds of straw without a tractor for years.  The most you really need is a pickup and some muscle or ingenuity on getting it out of the pickup box. In is no problem, the farmer will load it for you. But if you really like the convenience of small squares then you'll be willing to pay for them.

As a quick note, it is excellent to layer a legume (i.e. alfalfa or red clover)  and then straw. The legume hay breaks down faster and is an excellent nitrogen source then the straw does it's usual thing and adds carbon into the soil. Just make sure you ask about any sprays applied to the crops!! Herbicides can wreck your garden! Fungicides aren't so good either.  Your best bet is to find certified organic otherwise question the farmer extensively.

Sweet Potato Slip Production

Sand Hill Preservation Center

It costs quite a bit of money to buy enough sweet potato slips to grow a useful volume of potatoes. So don't buy the slips, unless you're after a different variety, get your own started! It's easy as can be!

I buy organic sweet potatoes and put them in a container with water, bottom down. Bottom being the end that wasn't directly attached to the plant. Slips will start growing and when it is time I cut the slips and plant them. All you need is a "node" planted in the dirt and it'll grow.  I had the above ground tops die back but it still grow because the node and stem survived. I cut my slips but there are different trains of thought on that.

Another method is to plant the whole potato in damp sand. The slips will grow up and you cut them off. This can be done on a field scale.

So why not just plant the potatoes like a regular potato? Because each slip is a new plant that needs to be separated to it's own individual hill.

The link at the top is for a preservation center in Iowa. He is managing an awesome amount of varieties of sweet potatoes. If you want a crazy, unique variety check him out he's got hundreds!

Notable Quotes

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant. ~Author Unknown

Rabbit Nestboxes

I built four nestboxes like this so cage floor space wouldn't be taken over by a nestbox. I have one box that's your standard one that is set inside the cage.

You actually line the mesh floor with cardboard. The purpose of the mesh is pee drainage.  And then you put straw in on top of the cardboard for bedding.

The harder aspect is having successful kindling... so far we're 1 for 3. Yuck.

Pasture Improvement

I come from Montana. Up there hay rings don't seem to be used much. I could be wrong but I really didn't ever see any. What I would see are hay bunks in a feedlot or the bale rolled out on the pasture.

PROBLEMS WITH HAYRINGS

First, a hayring gives you a ten foot radius circle of concentrated manure, pee and hay wastage. A very concentrated circle. This is relatively okay so long you move the ring each time you put in a new bale.. which brings me to the next problem. Most only seem to move the rings seasonally and sometimes never. Don't be lazy! Make that in place fertilization count! Cost is the third problem. They cost money to buy. Some times prohibitively so. If not heavily built, they will get busted up and bent and you'll have to eventually replace it. More money. Finally, they can be problematic for horned livestock. Which I have and have fairly long horns to boot.

PROBLEMS WITH ROLLING OUT BALES

While this spreads the manure over a much larger area, it really only works well with a herd size that can eat that much in a day. But even then, there tends to be excess hay wastage.

MODIFIED BALE ROLL OUT

So this is what we do. The bale is rolled out over the area we want to fertilize, this is generally progressive and after several bales can cover a large area, and a "break" wire (electrified) cuts the cattle off what we don't want them to waste. They will eat the hay from underneath the wire but in general we'll give a foot or two hay strip.

This method still has problems. If it snows heavy your unused hay gets covered up. If it's not too bad you can dig the edge out a little and the cows usually take it from there. Sometimes the cows get out and make a mess of the future hay. This irritates me the most.

CONCLUSIONS

Though all these methods have their problems, if managed well you can put carbon and manure down nicely in a manner that improves your pastures. The picture below is of the modified bale roll out. We have a hay ring with our beef herd as they like to break the fence a little too much. So we move the ring every time we feed them hay.

Blogger App Issues

While the apparently is nice and all it has some whopper issues.. I have to highlight text to link but I can't get it to highlight the just the text I want then scroll up to select link. The text manipulation has to be thought of ahead of time for the same reason. Inline pictures are a no go, all go to the end. And finally it won't let me use HTML tags to do the manipulations myself. Google you've got some work to do! My software engineer husband is less than impressed and so am I.

Tapping Trees for Syrup

I live in Kansas ... the last thing I ever thought I'd be doing is tapping trees to make syrup! Notice! I did NOT say MAPLE syrup. Nope, I'm tapping Black Walnuts of all the crazy things. I have lots of walnut trees, granted a lot of the big ones were sold for lumber right before we bought the place. Upwards of $8000-10000 worth of large trees taken. I can understand though... the guy was trying to pay doctor bills.

There are some maples down here and people do tap them but you just don't get the sap flows like you do up north. Kind of comes in fits and spurts. But I happily have some friends who've been doing a little sugaring the last few years so I at least had someone to ask basic questions. The taps I made are based on what he did. Super cheap! I use a 6" length of 1/2" PEX. I added the screw to hang a bucket from, he stuck a 1 gallon milk jug over it with just an X cut in it to slip over the tap end. The jug is oriented upside down so you just unscrew or pop the cap to empty it. I don't have milk jugs in abundance ..  I don't buy milk. I did have a bunch of ice cream buckets I was given recently and also discovered grocery store bakeries are a source for free to cheap buckets 2 gallon and up. So I used what I had. I even had the PEX and screws amazingly enough. But mathwise, PEX is about $0.25 per foot so 2 taps plus a couple screws and a little tape (seals the tap in the hole better; use duct tape or first aid tape) you're looking at probably $0.20 per tap.

I used a carpenter awl to drill the holes with an appropriately sized bit. Takes a little muscle but you drill approximately a 2" deep hole, clean the debris out, use a hammer to tap the tap in and hang your container on it. Violá! You're collecting sap!

Now, there is a minimum tree diameter you can tap. Tap nothing less than a 10" diameter (31" circumference at chest height). Bigger trees can handle more taps. At a 20" diameter (64" circumference) a tree can handle two taps; at 25"+ (79"+), three.

Something I learned, because I don't have a book, is to tap the anything but the north side of the tree; south and east being the best.
After collecting enough sap, 50-60 gallons will produce approximately 1 gallon of syrup, you boil and boil and boil in a flat pan with no more than a sustained 2" of liquid in the pan. Do this outside over a fire or propane camp stove (the stove, however, is not economical for the amount you need to burn). Why outside? Too much humidity in the house even burning a wood stove. Learned that one too. There's more information on the web about the boiling aspect than the tapping so I'm not going to get detailed about it here.

So far I've made around 1 gallon of syrup. My first attempt at the sugaring aspect ... I nearly had sugar! Too far! The flavor is dark and nutty but nice and sweet. Very different than maple syrup.

Where did I get the idea to tap walnuts? Plants for a Future at http://pfaf.org/user/Search_Use.aspx?glossary=Sap. (Sorry, the blogger app has issues.. otherwise I'd link it.)

365 Days of Photos: Day 14

A Very Useful Garden Addition ...

The idea of rabbits may not cross peoples minds as an extension to their garden. But the shear volume of manure just a dozen rabbits produce is absolutely insane! While I would love to pasture them, the logistics to do so is rather difficult. Meanwhile, I'll just have to settle for the caging system.

Whatever the case, rabbit manure has the ability to be directly applied to the garden. No composting required. Recommended? Probably a good idea all the same. The same goes for sheep and goat manure actually ...

Back in January we cleaned a pickup load of manure/alfalfa out of our rabbitry. It had collected in a pile off to the side from clean outs from under the cages. Now we've cleaned out more and have at least another third of a pickup load. It's pretty awesome! Otherwise, we have compost from the milking stanchion area that consists of hay/straw, cow manure and wood chips. I've got quite a bit of that to spread around as well.

So fertility wise, my garden looks promising this year.

365 Days of Photos: Day 13

Planting Onions

This year I was on top of things with planting my onions ... maybe a little too on top of it. As soon as plants and bulbs came in to our local feed store in mid-February, I bought what I needed and started planting my Vandalia onion plants. With two more varieties to plant, a winter storm, probably the worst of the 2012-13 season, blew in. This was a long winded storm lasting about 2 weeks. During which we received 6-8 inches of sleet/snow and fairly cold weather.

I had mulched the onion plants but the cold had taken some of the tops off. I'm not confident about my accessment of the Vandalia onion plants survival but the bulbs didn't seem to freeze and there is a small amount of green remaining at the base of the leaves. Time will tell.

365 Days of Photos: Day 12

365 Days of Photos: Day 11

Insourcing Feed

This post about growing your own feed got my brain cranking... And while I made comments on the post itself I have some things I'd like to address.

As Bruce's post said, a lot of small farmers would like to grow their own livestock feed be it hay or grains. It's not a bad desire, it's just an 'is it feasible?' desire.

We've been trying to accomplish this ourselves for years. We raise pigs and have dairy cows. These two farming enterprises require high inputs. Pigs have high quantity and dairy cows are high quality. Buying in feed for either sucks the pocket dry if you're not careful.

Techniques We've Done Historically

How do you do it? Welllll, that's the million dollar question. Equipment is expensive. Especially harvesting equipment and that is also proprietary. So we don't harvest it we let the animals do the work. We haven't been able to get a consistent year round rotation but we're hoping to change that this year since we now have a tractor and have acquired small scale tilling and planting implements. But before our pigs were our implements. After they were through an area we'd broadcast something. Generally we used turnips, oats, amaramth, wheat or milo and have had varying results. The optimum timing was to broadcast right after the pigs left. For some seeds, it was helpful if it was something being fed to the hogs. So it would be tossed in long lines on the ground. The pigs would eat, trample and turn it in. This is a little more uneven but it works fairly consistently. All the same our attempts usually resulted in some kind of increased diversity of pasture.

While all that is fine and good, it doesn't really extend your green season or reduce the need to buy in feed.

Our Future Path

Our goal this spring is to create higher density forage that will actually provide feed replacement. This means tilling and planting acres worth of area with balanced diversity. A field of green tops are great for ruminants but only act as a feed supplement NOT a feed replacement in hogs. In that regard, it's significantly easier to improve fodder for ruminants than repace feed for hogs.

We had an intriguing occurrence once early on with a hog. We stuck him in my 60x60 ft garden area. I was experimenting with a Fukuoka system of garden which was failing because I used ladino clover rather than white dutch. So I had a garden area with poorly growing sweet potatoes some other poor doing vegetables and a rather thick stand of clover. He went off feed. Didn't act or look sick but he didn't want the grain. I was weight taping him regularly. The first week he gained 40-50 lbs. This took him to finish weight with no grain. We were pretty astounded!

So how do we recreate this on a field scale? Unfortunately, the first step is understanding the nutritional requirements for the animals. All livestock have needed requirements to achieve their growth rate potential. For example, hogs main growth limitation is protein, in particular, lysine. A traditional high lysine hog feed is barley. In China, amaranth was commonly used. Amaranth is another good lysine rich feed.

This is companion planting on a much larger scale with slightly different reasoning as to why. So for a summer planting and fall harvest you could plant amaranth, cowpeas (we're avoiding soy here as well)  and turnips. For midsummer harvest, you'd be looking at barley, oats and winter peas. Spring harvest is a little more on the greener side so supplemental grain would be likely needed. For spring harvest: kale, turnips and oats.

Winter is the hardest. A note for leaving standing grain, such as corn, in the field over winter to be harvested this way: mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are a bad bad deal. If in excess they will cause gain issues, fertility issues and psudeo-pregnacies. Take these very seriously when dealing with hogs we learned the hard way. Ruminants seem to be able to deal with them better but it's still not a good thing for them. They mainly occur when grain is left dry in the field for too long of period. So those corn fields that sit there forever are at high risk for mycotoxins. This really goes for any grain crop. Getting wet when ready to be harvested creates problems with molds and fungus. So for winter, a good plan would be a green annual like July/August planted winter wheat, May planted field pumpkins (left in the field they'll keep) and July/August winter radishes (i.e. diakons). Both diakons and wheat will broadcast but your best bet would be row cropping. So plant pumpkin rows far enough apart to till and plant between them. Such is the fun of figuring out feed replacement ..

<b>Final Musings</b>

Hopefully this helps plant the seed of how to possibly insource most all your livestock feed. I know I mainly only addressed hogs but ruminants are a little easier to work out. I will make this wise recommendation, keep some hay and grain around. A bad winter storm can leave self harvest crops inaccessible. Drought can cause crop failure and leave some crops poisonous (look into prussic acid and the related crops). So always have something so you're not scrambling later.

Hallelujah! A blogger app for my phone!

I have been watching for a blogger app to make posting easier.. and finally it's available!  I think it was actually available awhile ago but I'm so busy I haven't checked for awhile.  So hopefully this will make it easier..  it'll certainly make adding pictures easier.

100 egg Kerosene Incubator/Hatcher Design Pains

I mentioned in a previous post that one of my projects in planning us a Kerosene Heated Egg Incubator/Hatcher. You can buy one from Lehman's. That's $400 I certainly don't have. They are more readily available overseas (i.e. Africa and India). And you can occasionally find an old used one a farmer is selling. So I've been looking for information about how to build one... that's been as difficult as if not more so than finding one for sale. As a digression, I'd rather like to build a solar one which DO EXIST.. in AFRICA! The problem is the information veritably nonexistent. So back to the topic on hand, a kerosene incubator is a more likely candidate at this time.

Informationwise, I've found two designs:

• A Kerosene Fired 180 egg cabinet incubator. Done by a gentleman in Haiti. (.pdf file)
• The Peace Corps Poultry Training Manual from 1981. (scroll to the end)

I like the simplicity of the Peace Corps design but their lack of dimensions and instruction makes it a little difficult. You have to do a little guesstimating. I prefer the thermostat wafer set up in the cabinet incubator. Whatever the case, I have a very good start on my detailed design. Lots of notes and a possible design on a manual egg turner ran on the horizontal plane similar to what you'd find in a HovaBator or such.

With just an egg tray, where I'd have to hand turn the eggs individually, it would fit around 100 chicken eggs, 80-100 duck eggs (depends on breed) or 40-50 goose eggs. Then, of course, a bazillion quail eggs... I've added a hatching cage to the design as well. This was a must after my first incubator design flaw (that's another story) of NOT having one.

It's my desire to keep y'all posted in its progress but you know how that can go...

February 2013

It's very frustrating when you start a post, get interrupted, then never finish. That's the state of my last unfinished post and those before it.

We've been rather busy to say the least. The days are getting longer and it was getting "springy" then this winter storm rolled through. We currently have 6" of heavy, wet snow on top of nice gooey mud. I think we're done with snow for a little bit, however, cold weather is settling in for now. How long is a big unknown as the weather forecast really can't even tell me for sure.

Current Projects:
-hot bed for starting garden transplants

Projects in Development:
-Greenhouse
-kerosene heated egg incubator