Farm Update May 2024

The Eclipse Left us Behind!

Despite dressing in long flowing white apparel and dancing around the pasture with flowers in our hair, the great eclipse on April 8^th didn’t take the Jones tribe up into black inkiness of space. Honestly I was more than a little relieved because my month was already packed. I would have missed the opportunity to make some new connections within the community, and we would never have had the opportunity to show off our homestead to a group of like-minded families, both of which are better than the ether of space.

Some photos taken by our visitors

The families that came out are part of a home schooling group and it was honestly one of the best experiences we have had with having people out to visit the land. We started by showing the milking setup and letting the families all have a chance to pet the cow and check out the milking apparatus. I would like to express how that went, but I was caught up talking to a couple of the husbands/dads about the pasture and the work that we are doing on it when Kayla grabbed my attention and informed me we were moving on. We proceeded to go down into the pasture, where I had the opportunity to explain our chickens and the benefits to moving them daily. We did lose a couple of kids to the velociraptors in the tall grass, and one child needed her dad to wade through the green ocean and fetch her; altogether not unexpected for the wilds of the pasture.

Afterwords we returned to the top of the hill, which is where we continued talking about our composting setup with the BSFL and processed chicken parts, and finished by showing off the greenhouse and the plants we are growing out. It was a really great experience with people who are doing the same things where they are at with what they have. It was a great reminder that I live on a piece of generational land and the value of having that option as my girls grow older is beyond any value that currency can ascribe to the soil.

“This Peasant Knows That History Repeats”

The weekend prior to the home school visit we were able to process 47 Cornish Cross with our Poultry Pals at Barefoot Farmstead. This is our third year processing poultry and we do get a little better at it every time, but man, the first time after 6 months of not doing it I always feel a little rusty. As they are spending their last few living minutes in front of me I could almost see the chickens thinking as they are suspended in their restraining cones “Do his hands always shake that much? Why is he all pale and sweaty looking?”

After running through the motions a couple of times it does become much easier to manage the birds and get a feel for the best way with the least pain.

The kids from both families were a lot more involved this time around in everything from bringing me live birds, helping scald and pluck some of the birds, to processing certain parts of the birds with the other adults. On processing days when I am more aware of my hourglass of life it is so much easier to be appreciative for my family and the time we spend together, and the memories that develop during the processing are precious to me. Where else am I going to acquire a memory of a little girl laughing at me because a dying chicken pooped explosively on my shoulder? Where else will you see birds being held one last time and gently carried by truly caring children that understand that the sacrifice of the animal, if not the deeper implication that life is precious and short? No where.

I am glad that they enjoy doing it, because we have another 50 birds coming up June 1^st, followed by 150 more birds spread out throughout June and July. This is the part where things can become a little dicey with so many unsold birds, but never let it be said that I don’t have a very unrealistic expectation for how easy it will be to sell them! We have had one sign out at a friends house, and all the feathers were plucked without any kind of correspondence from anyone to date. I also have flyers that I need to put up in different locations in Stanislaus County, and between the signs, the flyers, posting on social platforms, and maybe a little bit of word of mouth from some of the readers will net us the difference in selling the remaining chickens off. If anyone has businesses they frequent in Modesto and surrounding cities with a community board, I would love to hear about them so I can put up flyers.

I did end up hanging some around Modesto and Oakdale!

With all of the birds we have right now we are running slim on housing for the little nuggies, which is a problem I don’t mind having because it allows me to build stuff! Every tractor that I have built to move birds around in have suffered from several of the same downfalls: tall grass, too expensive, and/or too heavy. The popular designs online with the wheels are typically designed so a human can go in and move around inside the coop, or they are built really low to the ground to remove the weigh aspect, but dragging them through the grass is still a pain. Both being able to enter the coop is important, as well as not having a rolling fortress like the one I am using now.  Across the board they are all what I consider expensive to construct also, usually in the $450 range.

The newest design is one of my own and not built around what anyone else has done, and I lovingly call it the Caterpillar. Several of the features that were important to me during the design and build were ease of access, ease of movement, and ease of peaz…I am a big proponent of the Eaziness of Peaziness. The Caterpillar is designed to be flipped onto its roof if needed, but it is more often pulled on sleds of 4” pipe that extend the length of the body and will allow for direct chicken feed to be poured through the hardware cloth. I have an automatic door on the way that will fit onto one end, and I am going to be utilizing a solar powered pond pump to keep clean water circulating through their water pipe.

I used a lot of recycled material to build it this time around, but looking online at material costs I think I could rebuild it for around $250-300, and at that price point I expect this particular one to last me five or more years of use.

Lastly, back in February when Bella the cow took a decade off my life by developing milk fever and refusing to rise, we had Azores Veterinarian Practice come out and assist by injecting calcium into her via IV and a pair of the biggest pills I have ever seen in my life. Fast forward to April where Cozy, our most recent adult addition to the herd, has had a bout with hoof rot. As a family who is very hesitant about over-medicating and common practices that tend to be more learned behavior than best alternative, I knew that the time had come for Cozy where she needed more attention than what we were able to do on a dermal level…especially after I missed a hoof to the face by a couple of inches trying to “doctor it”.

Hahaha, all aboard the fun train!!

Swollen foot and spread toes are both classic signs of Hoof Rot.

Azores was fantastic. We ended up getting blood samples for all the cows, two confirmed pregnancies (girl squeal), and a dose of antibiotics for Cozy along with pour-on Benadryl that we were told would make us feel really good if we touched it while handling her, but it would destroy our kidneys. Tempting I know!

They checked the overall health of the cows from listening to lungs and checking weight, and I made a semi-inappropriate joke about how cows get pinkeye when they were asking if we had noticed anything. Both of them laughed! Honestly, I’m still riding that “Make a professional laugh about something in their profession” wave from last month! As a dad it is like a gold star from the joke committee.

We also had all the cows checked for Johnes disease, and everyone one came back negatively. If you don’t know what Johnes is then you are right in the same dinghy as I was less than a week ago, but thankfully we have the internet! I will go into much greater detail about the disease in my next post, but suffice to say it is a disease that is detrimental to herd health and is something that I can’t help but wonder if society had never gone to concentrated groups of animals (CAFOs) would we even have the disease right now?

Tune in next time!