Rib-Eye's in the Freezer Now

Rib-Eye graduated to the freezer early in October. He only yeilded 340 pounds of meat, which was split with a buddy. I learned a lot with Rib-Eye. Primarily that short horn cattle are not my favorite breed of cattle. We learned that buying a single head of cattle and introducing him to a closed herd can go poorly.

Rib-Eye was never accepted by the herd. He was bullied by all of the other cattle, even the younger and smaller calves. He was a bit forlorn to be honest. This led to him jumping the electric fence from time to time, and eventually just walking through all the electric paddocks. He didn't get as much to eat as the rest of the cattle, and I have to believe this played a role in his lack of finish weight. Hopefully he tastes good. :-) I'll let you know.

Tractor Upgrade

The best $36 I've spent in a while on these LED Headlights from Amazon. After my buddy Gabe hooked them up I knew they'd be bright, but I had no idea how bright they'd actually be. It allows me to actually work confidently at night now. If you have an old tractor, and working at night sounds better than roasting in the midday sun, drop less than $40 and upgrade your ride!

Thanks for reading!

Thoughts on Propane Tractors

So, I had the question posed tonight about my thoughts on Liquid Propane tractors from a "doomsday prepper" standpoint. For the record, I'm not much for the whole doomsday prepper movement. Self-reliance I'm all about, but trying to prepare for ever worst case scenario will leave you alienated, overwhelmed, and broke. I'm firmly in the modern survivalist camp that Jack Spirko has done much to define this way: doing things help you thrive if times get tough, or even if they don't. 

But I digress. For LP to make sense you already need to have one or more large LP tanks (500+ gallons) on your farm. You also have to be willing to not have all the horse power that you would get from the same model tractor in either gas or diesel. On the plus side LP is the cleanest burning fuel out there, and your engine will most likely last longer than the same gas or diesel model. 

Gas made the most sense to me, as I keep at least 60 gallons of gas on hand. My tractor doesn't see real frequent use, so gas makes more sense than diesel based on ease of starting after sitting for long stretches. LP is also easy starting due to how clean it is. Parts availability would be the next thing I'd think about for any tractor. Does the local NAPA carry all your parts or are you limited to 1-3 online retailers. 

In the event of mass disruptions of fuel to most of America, we'll have bigger things to worry about than how long you can get your tractor to run for. :-) As a wise man once said, after 3 days without food the thin veneer of civilization starts to peel off pretty quick.

Heating the House; Two is One - One is None

Providence protects children and idiots. I know because I've been both. -Mark Twain-

My wife enjoys being warm in the winter. Make that Africa hot, she's happiest when the house is above 75 and pushing 80. She's easy on the thermostat during the summer, so the least I can do is make her happy during our brief winter here in Texas.

The selection of pellet stoves in Texas is not what you have up North, to say the least. So after much research I found a model that worked for us from Tractor Supply, it was delivered to the front door back in September and sat collecting dust waiting for a free weekend to be installed.

As luck would have it FreezePocalypse 2016 found the daytime high on the Snow Compound at 77 followed by a nighttime high of 24. 53 degree drop in a matter of hours. The house came with a heater in the master bath and a very small propane fireplace that is great for knocking the chill off of 45 degree nights, but can't keep up when it's in the teens or 20's outside.

As with most of my projects this one was motivated by sheer panic. To quote Twain again, "If it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done." Fueled by the impending Freezemageddon, I started measuring once and cutting twice. Through sheer luck of the height of the pallet and floor protector, the hole for the 3 inch pipe ended up in the only section of the wall that it could have gone through, again it's better to be lucky than good.

It's going to be in the teens tonight, and the pellet stove, while rated to heat 2200 square feet is doing a fair job of keeping the house relatively toasty. There's no way the propane stove would have the main living area at 76 degrees.

The project was pretty straight forward, order the insulated pipe, high temperature silicone, and for the first time in my life I had every tool needed in my possession and didn't have to go into town. I finally feel like an adult.

Growing Soil With Every Bale of Hay

One of the unexpected benefits I saw last year from feeding hay was that after each bale was more or less eaten by the cattle the remnants of hay left behind ending up being a great spot of pasture this year. As growing soil is a big part of our mission it's a big plus. In the photo above you can see where I drug another bale of hay through the bale from last week, and the soil that's already forming under it. To the right you can see a big green patch of green to the top right, that's where a bale was placed last year. 

Now each bale is placed in an area that isn't growing grass very well, or more simply, on my really crappy areas. It's astounding to watch in the spring as the remnants of that hay end up being a big green patch of pasture. Is it cost effective to add bales of hay simply as a soil amendment? No, but
there's no reason not to place the hay in areas where I'd like to see the soil improved.

I figure somewhere in the next decade I could really improve the worst areas quite a bit with nothing more than being cognizant of where I drop off my winter hay. Not a bad deal.

https://www.instagram.com/snow.farms.tx/

Wildflowers on the Homestead

If you're read this blog, and I know at least 3 of you personally, you've probably seen more pictures of wildflowers than any sane person would post... Why? We're growing soil here, and to do that successfully we need bees to pollinate everything. That means that we let the wildflowers grow everywhere we find them. 

It was 84 degrees on the 16th of November here on the homestead, so the flowers are still blooming and the bees are still hungry. All the wild sunflowers are still covered in bees and butterflies, as are the basil plants, and peppers that are still producing heavily the week before Thanksgiving. 

I hope we've done our part to feed the bees, and trust they've put enough honey away to have a comfortable winter here in Texas.

Putting Your Free Range Chickens to Work

Cow Patty

So the basis of Permaculture is minimizing inputs, and maximizing outputs, while improving the earth, and giving a reasonable . Joel Salatin routinely says that his egg laying tractors and broiler chicken tractors following his cattle grazing are there to spread cattle manure, add chicken manure, and lightly turn the soil, the eggs and meat are just a bonus.

Chickens at Work on a Patty

It's just been the last couple of weeks that the Ideal 236 layers have really started to go to work on the cow patties, but it's been a revelation. The cow patties within a couple hundred feet of the barn have all been reduced to the photo below.

Fertilizer and Soil Amendments 

It seems that each day the range of the layers increases a bit. We're doing our best to minimize predator pressure, and though I'm sure we'll lose some to hawks and feral dogs, I think that we've finally got things figured out to be sustainable moving forward. Right now the 27 chickens we hve on site are being fed roughly 3 pounds a feed per week, in a mix of cracked grain/corn at night to encourage them all to come to the coop daily, and a bit of the feed that I had left over from the FrankenChickens.

All in all I'm really excited about the layers coming online in early February for the eggs, but I'm also trying to find a couple of broody bantams to raise replacement chickens moving forward. The tractored chickens next spring will continue to help spread the manure and improve the soil on the homestead.

Why Are You Going With Oreos?

I had one of my former players, who grew up in a ranching family and community ask me this question. I went back through my posts and found I really hadn't put forward a detailed answer. So here it is.

First, much like my friends labeled Deplorables, Libertarians, Constitutionalists, libertarians, anarchists, survivalists, homesteaders, hippies, and everyone else who tries to limit the amount of money that Uncle Sugar picks their pocket for, they serve as a tax hedge here in Texas. You need 4 horses or 4 head of cattle as a minimum to qualify for, and keep, an Ag Exemption on our place. This limits our tax bill and increases money kept in our pocket, which allows that capital to go to work in other places.

Our piece of land is black clay, which to start with is a poor growing medium. Irrigation is too cost prohibitive to make sense here, so we were also looking for drought tolerant cattle that could survive on poor range/pasture/hay. The place had also been over grazed a bit with horses so there wasn't much growing on it for the cattle to "make a living" off of to begin with.

The Galloways are generally thought to be only second to the Texas Longhorn in their ability to not only survive on poor pasture land, but gain weight and thrive on poor range. That proved really true with my two heifers that I purchased at 4 and 6 months old respectively. They received no supplemental feed other than a salt block and a bucket of grain to follow as we take them from paddock to paddock. Those heifers are now cows and are thick and meaty. I trust the three young steers will follow that pattern.

This is a very part time job for me until I retire, but I'm trying to build something that is scalable for after my retirement. The Belted Galloways have to make a profit for the farm with little time or capital input. The Belties are easy on fences, other than my bull who has figured out that he can walk through barb wire strands alone, but won't get close to hotwire. They are easy to manage in paddock shifts, so that's a big plus for us. Land carrying capacity here is around 1 animal unit per acre (I'm at in North Texas) the Oreos are somewhere between .5 and .75 animal units, so the hope is to carry a few more total head than I could with conventional cattle that spreads my risk.

If I carry full size cattle I could probably get away with a bull and 3 cow calf pairs. If I sell at 2 years, we'd be carrying 10 animal units +/-. If I lose a calf, I lose 33% of my potential profit. If, with the smaller Belties I carry a bull, 5 cows, still selling at 2 years I'm carrying 8 - 12 animal units. If I lose a Beltie calf, I've only lost 20% of my profit potential.

Risk management on the homestead is different than on a working ranch and I'm the first to admit that. Just weight-wise 3 two year old large framed cattle, grass fed and finished should have a dressed weight of around 1200 pounds each for around 3,600 pounds total. Where 5 two year old Belties should dress at about 675 pounds each that's only 3,375 pounds, but losing one of each puts the full size net beef at 2,400 pounds where losing one Beltie still nets 2,700 pounds of beef. It's less meat overall, that's true, but it also allows me to put aside an area to graze, not overgrazing during drought years, and focus on our primary mission of growing soil.

Belties are half to three quarters the size of conventional cattle and I'm not nearly as nervous working them by myself as I would be with full size cattle. They're easy birthers, great mothers, and each cow will birth up to 18 calves in a lifetime. They have a compact productive frame, meaning they have a carcass yield of meat usually over 62% for steers, and that equates to cash in the pocket for us.

The last thing is as the slow food movement grows more folks are looking for grass fed, grass finished beef. I live within an hour of more than 7 million people, I only need to find a dozen or so folks that I can sell premium products to, who are also willing to pay a fair price to the producer. Part of the process is in educating our customers that grass fed and finished beef takes longer and thus simply costs more. Providing recipes on how to cook ever cut they pick up from the butcher, and giving them a bit of the experience of the farm.

Finally, I saw commodity farming growing up, it's a tough way to make a living. I'm willing to cater to folks from a marketing and customer service standpoint to make our homestead work.  There is real market demand for this type of beef is real and growing.

Winter Forage for Cattle

Today's project was overseeding the 8 acres of non-paddocked pasture. Last year I put down 450 pounds of winter wheat with a yard push mower. I've done a lot of stupid stuff in my life, but that exercise has to rank near the top. My little walking app on my phone said I walked 14 miles that day, it felt like more...

This year has been so dry that I had to wait until the second week of November to put out annual rye grass seed. I bought 200 pounds this year, along with a 50 pound sack of winter wheat that I overlooked last year, and spread it behind a 4 wheeler, it was night and day how much faster and easier that is.

I'll update pictures in a few weeks to show progress. Our hope is to supplement the hay we bought for the cattle, along with building the soil. Looking at this as a building project between now and 2020 finally gives me a reason to look forward to the next presidential election.

My Wife Says I'm a Pessimist...

I am always planning for the worst case scenario. Be it the drive home from work, shopping at Wal-Mart, or expecting apocalyptic pestilence on the Snow Compound. This weekend found us having to pull a calf out of Rosy, the youngest heifer, and that took up most of Sunday afternoon.

While we were focused on that Tito, the smaller of the two Belted Galloways, managed to let her calf escape through the electric paddock. We realized around 6:00 PM that Smore, her calf wasn't doing too well. It was time to move the cattle back onto the main pasture anyway, so I started moving the Belties first, thinking that we could get Tito (so named for her Jerry Curled resemblance to Tito Jackson) and Smore into a pen together.

Tito wasn't having it. Regardless of what we did she wasn't going in the barn. At 6;35 Smore was limp and non-responsive so we made the decision to pull her into the house due to what looked like dehydration. I jetted into town beating Tractor Supply's closing time by a couple of minutes, picked up some colostrum, a dog bottle due to how small Beltie calves are, and a Mister Pibb because it was already a stressful day and having Dr. Pepper was too much to ask!

Andrea went to work getting fluid into the little girl. Strawful by strawful Andrea was getting water into the little calf. I got back and we did the same thing with the colostrum. She wouldn't swallow much, she was cold, and pretty much limp. We put her on the dog bed and wrapped her in a towel and blanket. I fed Smore every hour until she woke me up at 1:30 with a pile of pee and poo and her doing her best ice skater impression on the tile. She wouldn't go back to sleep, so I figured I'd take her out to the barn and see if I could entice her mom into a stall.

No dice on the stall. I begged, I pleaded, I put a bucketful of sweet feed inside the barn to trap her, but she was having none of it. Exasperated, and with Smore starting to fade, I pulled her out of the stall and placed her down by the feed. Momma went nuts, as did the neighbors dogs, and wouldn't stop mooing. Smore perked up, and Momma stood still long enough to let her nurse for a few minutes, before realizing she may not really like this mothering thing after all. They dance with one another for another 15 minutes, Smore trying to nurse, Momma moving every few minutes.

Then Momma just headed to the back 40 with Smore following behind. I left it to Providence to look after the calf. I told Andrea when she woke up that the calf probably wasn't going to make it (about the 10th time I'd predicted death for Smore or Meatloaf, she just hugged me, kissed me, and told me to stop being such a pessimist. I went out after sunrise this morning to find Smore chilling in the back of the pasture and Momma grazing contentedly not too far away.

Only time will tell if Smore is going to make it, but if she lives through the week, the odds increase dramatically.

Giving Thanks for Great Neighbors

It's said that good fences make good neighbors. I think it takes a lot more than that. You have to engage, share, be friendly, give space, and treat them the way you want to be treated. I'm by no means perfect, but I've been really blessed with awesome neighbors everywhere I've lived, and Texas has not been an exception

Today we had the last heifer give birth. She, like all teenage mothers, was not ready to be a mom yet. The downside to running a bull with your herd is that nature is in control  of when your heifers get pregnant. Sophia and I were out this morning looking at the dun full blood Beltie that was born overnight when we realized that Rosy, the young Dexter heifer (+/- 19 months old at the time of this writing) was about to give birth.

I always get nervous with first time Mommas. You don't know how they're going to handle the birthing process, and in this case she's still growing and not yet to size. My worst fears were realized as only one foot appeared while the calve's head was more or less out and things had come to a standstill after 2 hours it was time to act. The presentation of the head and one leg out is called, simply enough, "Leg Back" though I didn't know it at the time.

I knew we had to get Rosy tied up and help pull the calf out. My neighbors saw the circus going on out in the paddock and Andrea, Sophia, and I were trying to get Rosy restrained. Comedy ensued, as Rosy bolted through the electric fence into their previous paddock. I had left the gate open back into the pasture this morning anticipating moving the cows back later this week, and Rosy saw that open gate and thought she was making her escape.

My neighbor Joe was in the field, along with his wife, George made his way over, Andrea, Sophia, and even Emma made their way into the field to herd Rosy into the barn. We got her into a stall and here's where my neighbors went above and beyond. We got Rosy into a rope and tied her off on a stall bar. Joe, George, and myself took turns trying to find that leg and get the poor little calf out, to no avail, we just couldn't find it. After about 5 minutes I sent the girls out of the barn, because we'd decided that we had to pull the calf out.

As I'm writing this I don't know if the calf is going to live, and to be honest it'll break my heart if it dies. That said, there's simply no way Andrea and I could have pulled that calf out, my neighbors and I are all over 200 pounds and it took everything we had to get that calf out. I don't think we hurt Rosy, but only time will tell.

Calf Number 3 in 2016

With first time birthing heifers, you never know what you're going to get, but so far both Belties have had their calves without incident, and both at night strangely enough. We think that this calf is a heifer, and if so the girls have decided on "Smore" as her name. She's Dun colored and really is a good looking calf.

Today she did give us some excitement as she kept escaping the paddock and chilling just out of reach of Momma. She doesn't seem to mind us at all, unlike her half brother from the other Beltie who is skiddish as all get out. Hopefully we can get the electric fence grounded well enough in the dry conditions we're facing to help discourage her from roaming about.

She will be the foundation of our homegrown breeding stock moving forward, provided her genetics look right. The cuteness factor at the Snow Compound has gone up considerably this week!

Calf Number 2

Calf number 1, AKA Sir Loin, showed up on a Monday morning two weeks ago with little warning and zero work from us. Calf number 2, AKA Meatloaf, was much the same way, Arial's udder was super full on Friday night, and Andrea told me she was going to calve the next day. As is frequently the case, she was right.

Meatloaf presented both legs, and then his head about 2:00 PM on Saturday, Andrea and Sophia left to go work the school Fall-fest, and by 2:30 Meatloaf was on the ground. By 3:00 he was walking and nursing. If only they could all be this easy! His belt is almost identical to his father's along with this curly coat. With the late summer we're having, I'm not sure he's going to need that thick of a coat.

Arial is a tremendous mother cow. She's attentive, protective, and nurturing of her calves. She produces a ton of milk, and if I had a squeeze chute, I'd be very tempted to buy a bottle calf and see if I could get her to adopt him. Everything they say about Dexter's being great mothers has been proven true by this cow.

Belted Galloways Versus Their Full Size Brethren

So Andrea and the girls wanted to go the State Fair of Texas this year, and I was lucky enough to get some free tickets at work. To be honest, I'd rather pour hot sauce in my eyes than willingly go to Dallas, much less go to Dallas and wander through huge crowds. Love makes men do stupid things.

After spending the last two years with the Dexters and Belties it was wild walking through the beef cattle exhibits and seeing the yearling steers double the size of our full size cattle. I'm an honest 6 feet tall, barefoot, and after getting used to towering over our cattle it was odd to be looking at the backs of cattle at eye level. It definitely made me more sure that the smaller cattle are right for our little homestead.

I can't imagine, after 2 years of working by myself with the cattle, of working with full size cattle now. If a Beltie steps on your foot, you're hurting, but if a 2000 pound cow steps on you, I can't imagine the damage it will do. The females are easy on fences, the bull on the other hand is not. I can't recommend enough the Belted Galloways for your homestead.

So You Want Independence?

"The greatest act of rebellion in America today is growing a garden."  I can't remember who said it, or where I first heard it, but the further I get away from the first time I read it, the more it rings true.

If you just looked at the meager 45 or so posts I have up, you'd never know that I spend the last 8 years getting ready for this homestead. I failed spectacularly more times than I can count, but each one was on a small scale, and each time I walked away a little smarter.

Google Fu is your friend. Learn how to use a search engine effectively. If you're writing articles to help folks learn how to label them to be able to help the biggest number of people possible.

I started my journey after watching my 401k get halved in value. I, wrongly I might add, listened to "experts" who told me to leave my money put and "invest for the long haul". It was a valuable learning experience. I knew, in my bones, that something wasn't right in 2007, and by the spring of 2009 I was planting my first garden. Something I'd denigrated a previous girlfriend for wanting to do only a few years prior.

I had some moderate success that first year, thanks more to wonderful Idaho soil, and free irrigation water. I was hooked, and the more I grew the more I shared, the more I gave away the softer my heart became. That little garden fixed my soul as much as coaching wonderful girls at The College of Idaho.

From the garden I moved to fruit trees in 2010, then onto raspberries, strawberries, goose berries, currants, and a failed attempt at arctic kiwis. By the time the first fruit harvest really came on two years later, I had moved into a few chickens and ducks in the back yard, breaking several city ordinances at the time. My neighbors were kind and my closest neighbor said she liked to hear the ducks as it reminded her of home.

I learned about predators, and that if your wife, who's more or less blind without her contacts/glasses drops a skunk with one shot from a pellet gun in the middle of a dark night with no light, you'll never hear the end if you ever miss another shot. :-) Andrea is a fierce protector of her children, myself, and the animals in her charge.

If you dream of a homestead, you have to communicate not only the whys, but also the HOW it's going to work. Be gentle, be realistic, be honest, start with the piece of land you have now. and start showing that you really can produce things that feed your family that are of higher quality than what you could ever afford at Whole Foods.

Why Homestead?

I've been at this homesteading, self-reliance, modern survivalist thing now that I see a more people making a conscious decision to do the same.

As I've said before, this self-reliance thing is hard. It's early mornings, late nights, praying for rain, and praying for rain to stop. It's the heartbreak of losing animals, crops, and time invested in both, balanced by the joy of a newborn calf, frying up an egg still warm from recently being laid, and the juice of a tree ripened peach running down your chin.

For my friends that realize, somethings not right, many of them say they can just feel it. It's not that they know the total amount of American debt, or even what a derivative is, but they know somethings coming. I remember the feeling of going down more and more rabbit holes, realizing how precarious our situation was in 2008, but here I am 8 years later as testament to you that anyone can do this. Here's my attempt to help you on your way.

1. Breathe. It's going to be OK. Empires fall, Markets fail. As King Solomon said 3,000 years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.

2. Debt. It's a soul crushing burden. Here's the Dave Ramsey plan in a nutshell. Make a budget. Cut up your credit cards. Sell everything you have of value, Pay off the smallest to the largest of your remaining debt each month. Pay cash, on payday put it into envelopes for rent, gas, etc (or debit cards as cash is harder and harder to use). Get a second job. You aren't owed feeling good, spoiling yourself, pampering, etc. until you're doing it with your money and not the bank's at 24% interest.

3. Skills. Once these two things are handled I see so many men rush into the firearms world and blow a ton of money there.
   a. Learn to grow a garden, there are so many great resources out there to help you. Ask me if you want!
   b. Plant fruit trees, there's not better ROI on the planet than a healthy productive fruit tree. Think about it $25 investment, some vermiculture compost, and for the next 3 to 50 years you'll get hundreds of percent return in fresh fruit.
   c. Learn how to change your own oil. For less than $25 and 30 minutes of my time I keep full synthetic oil and a high mileage filter in my vehicles every 5000 miles. Your car will last longer, run better, and you'll get to know your vehicle.
    d. Preserving food. Learn how to can and dehydrate and your garden and fruit trees will start to save you money.
     e. Learn how to cook. It's a skill, find recipes you like and make them once a week until you understand them. After you're out of debt by a KitchenAid mixer and large high quality food processor. You can feed a family a high quality inexpensive meal and the more products that you produce the more self reliant you're becoming.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. Do all you can do today, sit down on the couch exhausted, love on your family, go to bed and do it again tomorrow. You'll feel like you're swimming in concrete for a while, but eventually you'll look back and realize how far you've come.

So You Want to Be a Successful Homesteader? Marry Well.

I have mentioned my beautiful, smart, kind, amazing wife from time to time in this blog. What I haven't put into words what she means to me and the success of our little homestead.

Folks, if you're serious about self reliance, getting out of debt, raising children who turn into kind adults, it all starts with who you marry. I got so lucky. She is 100% in to what we're doing.

How did we get here? To marital bliss involving long family talks about the best way to manage intestinal parasites in a cattle herd? Communication. (And a sense of humor about how much I talk about intestinal parasites.) When she gets repeatedly shocked by an electric fence and still speaks to you the next day, you know you've found a keeper.

From the day we started dating, I had fixed in my mind what I wanted. A small homestead, with permaculture intertwined into the Joel Salatin method of raising Beef, Chicken, and Pork. I asked her her thoughts, bought books that I read and then offered up to her. I'm not perfect, while she's very close, but after buying the little farm I've worked hard to DO what I say and not make any of the homestead a burden on her.

When I'm out of town she picks up the slack on feeding and watering the animals. When I'm in town, I'm out feeding before I head to work, and feed again as soon as I get home. It works for us. I have never been so happy as I am right now.

We've seen the first of our animals graduate to the freezer. That 137 pounds of meat may not seem like a lot to most folks, but in it's own small way, it's proof of concept that yes we can feed ourselves in a financially viable way. With a half a hog going into the freezer soon, it should add to that feeling. By this time next year we should have another half a hog in the freezer another 20+/- chickens, a half of beef, and another couple of our own born and bred cattle halfway to maturity as well.

Who knows what the future holds, but there's no one I'd rather be sharing it with.

Everybody Roots for the Underdog

I think every farmer has a runt they secretly root for. I've been around farming long enough to know that most runts won't make it. Nature is cruel and honest at the same time. Survival of the fittest usually involves being bigger, stronger, and faster than the others in their group.

I write this because one of the little 236 hens is about half the size of the rest of her brood, but man is she fearless and plucky. (She's in the top left of the picture.) She fearlessly scoots in and around the hogs picking up loose hog pellets and table scraps. She negotiates the older Rhode Island Red hens with ease and is smart enough to give the rooster a wide berth.

Who knows if she'll make it to laying, but I'm rooting for her, and I'd be lying if I didn't own up to throwing her extra scratch grains from time to time.

Thoughts on Hogs

Bacon and Chorizo enjoying pancakes.

I love bacon, but besides that, raising hogs has been one of the more straight forward endeavors here on the homestead. They've been healthy, thrived in the heat, rain, and even managed to turn up hard black clay soil for me. They don't attack live chickens, but have turned the snake victims and Cornish Cross chickens that succumb to growing too fast into sausage and pork chops. If that ain't magic I don't know what is .

It has been awesome having 0 food waste go out in the trash, and the lack of guilt over throwing food away or not seeing some left overs in the back of the fridge is pretty sweet as well. Interestingly enough the hogs don't find every morsel and crumb that we throw to them, but the little 236 layers come through their pen a couple times a day and make sure nothing is going to waste.

The Red Wattle Duroc cross is showing typical hybrid vigor and is probably 30 pounds heavier than his litter mate that arrived on the farm on the same day. Both have been castrated, but the bigger one is using his bulk to bully the other out of the food trough. I've bought another trough and think this will take care of that problem.

I'll do the pigs again in a heartbeat, whereas I'm really questioning doing more Cornish Cross as they seem so un-chickenlike. My next step is to find a place to dumpster dive or a ongoing source of cheap higher quality food than the hog pellets, supplemented by table scraps, that this pair have had. Cheaper food would make the hogs a very viable income stream for the homestead since pork is so popular here in Texas.

A Texas Welcome to the Wife

Towards the end of May I was finally able to move my wife down to Texas. I wanted so much to impress her with a thriving, squared away homestead. Complete with a clutter free home and a swept out barn. Alas, reality once again kicked me in the twig and berries.

That said, after two hard days driving across the Rockies dragging a trailer and an elderly pug dog (not in Christmas Vacation style, mind you) it was really, really good to be home. The house still looked like a gypsy safe house, and the barn was worse. We settled in for the night happy to finally be in the same place together.

Around dawn the next morning Katniss started barking. Katniss only had two reasons she ever barked, the postman was dropping off something from Amazon at the door, or there were other dogs on the property. Eliminating FedEx making a pre-dawn drop off, I grabbed a rifle and headed out the door. The sound of squawking hens and barking dogs filled my ears, and I was sprinting out to the barn.

The four feral dogs, a bigger problem than you’d think, came tearing out of the barn. I missed both shots I took, made the rifle safe and went back to sprinting after the dogs. In the heat of the chase, and low light of the morning I forgot about the electric fence I’d started the week prior. So there I am, clad in boxer shorts, muck boots, and a rifle slung over me running full speed when I went ass over elbows in to knee high, chigger infested grass.

Two chickens had been more or less eaten and already dead. While another two were chewed up, both of whom would later succumb to their injuries. It was a tough day on the homestead. The two surviving Production Reds have thrived since, and started laying shortly afterwards, blessing us with around a dozen eggs a week since.

For those of you who wonder why the chickens aren't penned it comes back to two reasons one, the economics of how much less feed free range chickens require from me, and two how much healthier free range is for the chickens, minus of course the occasional feral dog attacks. :-)