Management

When you raise animals without confinement there are many more variables that we contend with.  Weather, stress, light, and other environmental changes all change the way animals perform.  Sharon moved the chickens to the egg mobile on pasture, and while the eggs are again at their finest, the changes have caused the chickens to change their production and their activities.  They're breaking more eggs in the box and laying less.  Sharon is investigating, and losing sleep over, ways to mitigate these changes and hopes to make some changes to the next boxes soon.  I've move the cattle out to areas of the farm that haven't been grazed in probably 10 years and at the same time I'm experimenting with stock density.  I can experiment now in early spring because the pasture grasses will actually get ahead of my ability to have the cattle graze it, but once summer temps move in, the pasture growth will slow and overgrazing any area can cause that area to stop producing for the year or more.  I've put 10 pregnant cows into an area about 1/20th of an acre.  One day I had them on the 1/20th for 24 hours.  Then I tried the same size area for about 14 hours.  The idea is to maximize the the cattle's grass intake and optimize the grass utilization without sacrificing the grasses ability regrow.  A grass plant that has been severely bitten will take longer to regrow - like cutting your grass if you cut it too short it will "stunt" the lawn - the same type of thing happens with grazed pasture.  But with grazed pasture the cattle create and are impacted by many variables.  Cattle don't like to graze grass that has been soiled by cattle, so once the ground has is fouled with cattle manure and urine they slow down their grazing.  That's good for the grass but bad for cattle performance.  My next experiment will be to cut their area in half yet again and move them to see how long it takes for them to slow their grazing due to fouling.  I have been considering purchasing a GPS that will allow me to calculate area and to calculate grazing areas better ultimately allowing me to setup a grazing plan once I'm back in the pasture.

Started the day off by making someone's morning less that ideal.  I dropped a rack of large rounds off at the sale barn this morning for this morning's sale.  Unfortunately I pulled the hay rack into a very soft part of their parking area.  The guy that owns the sale barn wasn't too happy with me.  I'm guessing that he won't work to hard to sell my straw today...  Oh well, time to go move the cows.  It's beautiful with the cows.  I could hang out down by the wetlands with them all day but I guess I've got other things that need to get done.

Asparagus

I cultivated the asparagus yesterday and today.  It is a joy to cultivate the asparagus.  Not only because the asparagus is doing so well, but also because it mixes manual processes with tractor work.  Because we planted the asparagus in a disked alfalfa field, the alfalfa bounced back shortly after disking and is still active which hides the asparagus.  We flag two rows of asparagus before running the cultivator.  Flagging gives plenty of time to enjoy the sites, sounds, smells and warm feeling of spring coming into bloom.  Then its into the tractor to cultivate out the weeds and alfalfa for a couple of passes before pulling the flags and flagging the next two rows.  Since we don't use herbicides it is a yearly battle for domination.  Weeds and alfalfa grow along with the asparagus, and we push back against the weeds and alfalfa.  It's never about winning or losing, its simply a matter of making sure that the asparagus has enough room to grow without being overwhelmed by alfalfa and weeds so that we can get a harvest.  This year is the second year for the asparagus and we'll let it grow for one more year before we harvest it.  We're excited about next years asparagus!

Yesterday was the day to finally move the animals to their pasture homes. 
First the chickens - Sharon manages all of the operations that involve chickens, so if I sound like these are processes I have come up with I am only describing processes that she's developed. Friday night the kids caught the chickens in their deep bedding barn and moved them out into the "egg mobile".  The reason that it's best to do it at night is two fold.  First is that at night, like most birds, they perch/roost for safety and it's easy to catch them when they roost.  Second is that the birds will get into their new home and figure out their pecking order and roost order at night and in the morning while they move to their new pasture home.  Usually the first week or two after the chickens are put on pasture they have to be manually put back into the egg mobile at sunset until they learn that it's better to roost in the safety of the egg mobile rather than on the running gear and wheels of the egg mobile where they would be easy pickings for the local predators.  But last night Sharon came back from checking on the chickens and announced that they all went into the egg mobile by themselves.  That is huge!  I've never liked wrangling chickens in the dark and vowed this year I wouldn't be a chicken wrangler.  It looks like this year no one will have to be nighttime chicken wranglers. 

Next came the cattle - The bull and steers were separated from the cows, and the cows were let out onto the pasture.  We'll be grazing them outside of the fenced in pasture area using single strand of electric twine.  When we were carrying water across the pasture for the chickens the cows thought that we were carrying something they wanted, so they started to follow our pickup.  Not wanting to miss an opportunity to lure cattle rather than push cattle, we led them across the pasture and down some ally ways that we built to get them outside of the pasture.  They were kicking up their heals and running at full cow speed to keep up with our pickup.  It's a joy to watch the cows run and hop around like calves.  They moved right down where we wanted them and have started their work turning sunlight into calves and milk, and clearing the cool season grasses so that wildlife will have the prairie grasses in the fall.
That left the chicks which were moved to the deep bedding barn and the goats to the pasture.  It made for some long days but we enjoyed each others company and enjoyed the beautiful spring weather on the farm.

Maybe I started a little early this year based on the amount of moisture in the ground, but since we've been getting rain every week I figured I'd wait until it was dry "enough" and give it a try.  It was a little slick, but I've got my vegetable beds plowed into the alfalfa field.  I've walked around the farm the over the past few days to see how things are coming up.  The new alfalfa looks good but something is living in the middle of the field digging some huge holes and leaving very impressive dirt hills.  I'm sure that when we're cutting hay it will be a shock every time we drive up over one of these mounds hidden in the alfalfa stand.  The holes look like they've been made by a ground hog (wood chuck), but they are kind of unusual around here.  Not that we haven't seen them on the farm, but I think we've seen one on our farm in a decade.  I looked over the pasture yesterday.  It looks like I have a good stand of alfalfa coming up in the brome from the frost seeding.  I'm not an expert on small alfalfa so I pulled some up and took it along with some white clover up to the house for closer study.  Small alfalfa looks like sorrel and really I can't tell the difference.  So as a last test I tasted it.  It wasn't sour like sorrel so I'm assuming it's alfalfa.  I guess I'll know better in a few weeks when it has had time to get more mature.  I also walked along the field break that runs the west side of the pasture.  There are two rows of shrub/trees and a row of evergreen cedar trees.  What a mess.  I'm down to one row of shrub/trees and a about a half row of cedars.  If I was intending to grow thistles it would be a huge success.  I guess I'll disk out the first row of what used to be tree/shrub and in between the other trees and put down oats in an effort to smother out the thistle.  Then I'll put in a row new of trees next spring and go for another more permanent grass between all of the trees.  I'm also short on blue spruce trees as part of the "living snow fence" that runs down the lane.  I'd have to say that when I had the idea of running native fruit and nut bearing trees and evergreens a half mile from the north end of the farm to the south end of the farm I never imagined that I'd have such a struggle with keeping them going and keeping the weeds in check.  Hind sight being what it is and knowing what I know now I should have known that when I had to smother out the alfalfa around the trees it would have created a break in the soil which created the opportunity for other plants to jump in.  Any future trees should be incorporated into a more complex environment that can live in sync with the trees.

Winter and Fences

Last week Sharon and I walked around the pasture in the evening just enjoying the absence of snow and seeing what wildlife we might encounter.  It was cool but not cold, and we got to enjoy watching two pairs of geese land on one of our wetlands.  One pair literally landed by going right over our heads close enough to hear their breath as they flapped their wings.  It was awesome.  But let me digress.  Earlier in the week I was walking the paddock up by the house and noticed that a couple of the steel T-posts had been pulled down by the snow and ice.  They were under a tree which I guess meant that the snow and ice falling from the tree little by little shoved the barbed wire down with such force that it pulled the T-posts down about twelve inches into the ground.  Back to the pasture walk.  As we walked around the pasture I checked the fence for deer strikes.  The pasture fence is all high-tensile with SunGUARD fiberglass line posts.  We've had deer strike the fence before and it pulls the high-tensile wire out of position.  No breaks because the posts and wire flex but they can spread the wires wide enough that a cow might try to walk through.  So as we walked the pasture I kept checking to make sure the wire was in place.  When we got to the back of the pasture I noticed that the top wire was kind of loose but still in the correct position and the lower wires were tight.  Then I noticed a wire out of place so I walked over to check it out.  Sure enough the stainless steel clip that one of the wires attaches to was bent.  We thought deer strike, but then we noticed something strange.  About half a dozen or more posts were only about waist high!  Like the T-posts the fiberglass posts were pulled down about a foot into the ground.  These posts aren't under any trees and run pretty much even with the rest of the posts on that part of the pasture.  That's the first time since we've been out here that I've ever seen this.  I assume that the snow was so deep and hard that it put enough pressure on the fence wires and posts to push them down until the wire kept them from going any deeper.  If you've ever driven fence posts with a post pounder you know what an amazing force it must be to push these posts into the ground that far.  And into frozen ground at that!  Now I have to try pulling out the fiberglass posts without breaking them.  More learning to be done.

Early Sprouts?

I'm not sure why, but this year our plants have germinated a few days earlier than last year.  The first to pop-up were the cucumbers, but then the roma tomatoes were just a couple of days behind.  That's 2 1/2 days for the cucumbers and 4 days for the romas.  Sharon thinks that it's because I've kept the corn stove cranked up and the temps have been in the high 70's - 80 F in the area we're germinating the plants.  She may be right.  Last year when we started the plants it was cold outside and we had temps near freezing during the day.  This year it's been in the 50's and the nights have now barely dipped to freezing.  The next change will be hardening the plants.  This year the basement is much warmer than usual, which I assume means that the plants will not slow down as much which made for really hardy plants last year.  I figure that I can keep the temps down by opening windows if needed but with temps outside so warm it might be warmer outside than down in the basement.  I guess I get to learn new things every time we run into something that is different.  I guess this is why old farmers can say they've been farming for 50 years and can only remember a couple of "normal" years...