Monday, February 7, 2022

Our Pork Experience - Leveling Up


Back in 2017, one of our first homesteading adventures was buying four piglets, aka bacon seeds, to raise our own pork.  We decided on pigs as they don't require a lot of space to grow out, and are ready for slaughter in six months.  So, it's a relatively quick turnaround time for meat in your freezer.  We also had an old cow pole barn we were able to easily convert a portion into a covered run, and with a few hog panels made a nice attached outdoor area for them too, giving them plenty of space.

As newbies we ordered a ton of feed, in bags from a feed store, thinking we were getting a good price and keeping our costs down.  Little did we know there were other options in the area where we could have purchased a 1-ton tote of grower feed for half the price we paid for our bagged feed.  That was one of our first mistakes, the 2nd mistake was the place we chose to process our pigs.  We asked around and got good references for a slaughter/processing business, but little did we know the great references for the place apparently created a bit more demand for their services than they could handle.  We delivered our pigs to the slaughter house and quickly learned after slaughter our pigs got set aside because one of their bigger clients had a priority order.  Poor communication with our cut orders, lots of mistakes, and bacon missing from one of our customer's orders really had us bummed.  They found the bacon in the freezer, but their smoker schedule was booked so our customer didn't get their bacon for another month.  The entire experience had us questioning our decision to raise our own pork and motivated us to look for another processor to take care of our beef.

Thankfully we discovered a mobile slaughter operation for our steer, Farmer's Helper, and they've been doing such excellent work for us that it gave us new motivation to try raising pigs again.  This time we purchased just three bacon seeds, Berkshire-Yorkshire crosses, and built a small hog hut and setup a pig run in the area we've been trying to get a garden established.  We're hoping the pig manure is going to give us the fertilizer component our garden area needs, a mutual benefit from raising pigs.  Unfortunately, COVID had an impact on the meat processing industry which had our small mobile slaughter operation booked out farther than our six month finishing period, so we had to settle on nine months before we process.  We were worried about the cost vs benefit of growing the pigs out three more months, but it all worked out.  Our pigs finished out nicely and the processing job Farmer's Helper did for us was awesome.  The pork is fantastic!

We're getting three or four more piglets this spring and our next adventure is slaughtering and processing our own pig!  We'll continue to use Farmer's Helper for our customer's processing, but we're gearing up for the big DIY pork!

  





Monday, April 6, 2020

Early Spring Honey Harvest

Last fall we had one new hive of bees we started in the Spring that produced like gangbusters!  We harvested nearly 36 lbs of honey in the fall and we left a frame partially full of honey for them to over-winter with, but unfortunately the hive didn't survive.  It's our second hive loss in two years, and as new bee keepers it's been disappointing and somewhat discouraging for sure.  

Our first hive did well its first year, and over-wintered successfully.  However, in the Spring the hive decided they needed a new queen and she apparently didn't like our setup so she swarmed with the colony.  We didn't actually realize this until after the fact because we weren't watching the hive well enough to see that they were producing a new queen.  We might have been able to prevent the swarming had we watched more closely.

Our second hive didn't survive Winter because I left too many frames on the hive and they couldn't stay warm.  We should have winterized the hive better and removed another frame or two to consolidate the hive.  Frustrating to say the least, and a costly learning experience.  We haven't given up though.

Another thing we learned from this last experience is that it's a good idea to have some honey harvest for the Spring rather than sell or use it all in the Fall.  We'll see if we can work that into our normal harvesting practice.

This past weekend, we harvested about 25 lbs of honey from the frames that were left behind.  We'll clean and prep the foundations and frames for two new packages of bees for hives we're starting back up this Spring.  Fingers crossed we improve our bee keeping skills to maintain some hives for a least a few years successfully for a change. 


Friday, April 3, 2020

Fresh Beef

We've harvested our second steer on the farm on April 1st (522 lbs hanging weight), we're working on getting into a cycle of harvesting two steers a year, one approximately every six months.  We're selling half of the steer, which helps us cover our processing costs, and utilizing the other half for ourselves and extended family.  This time our cut order included a prime rib roast and ~5 lbs of jerky slices to make ourselves.

We use Farmer's Helper out of Harrisburg, Oregon for mobile slaughter and processing.  They're simply the best to work with in our opinion; they're reliable, honest, work quickly, and do an excellent job with the cut-n-wrap.  Mobile slaughter allows the steer to be dispatched without stress of being hauled in a trailer somewhere, and we can be there when it goes down. 

How do we finish our beef?  Well, we don't grain finish since we prefer leaner beef and a healthier meat product.  In our opinion grass fed is simply better for the steer and our diet.  We get our hay locally from a nearby farmer, so the grass fields they harvest are nearby to our own pastures where our beef graze on spring grass.  We know what's in the bales and how the hay was grown.

We also harvest at 18 months regardless of steer size, it's about the quality of the meat rather than quantity.  We're not in the production beef cattle ranching business, we're simply homesteaders producing our own meat the best we can.

Our next steer harvest will be in December on the 2nd, and we'll have a half beef to sell.  It sells by hanging weight per pound, plus processing fees (kill fee and sort fee, cut-n-wrap we include in our price per lb).  As an example, a 1/4 beef from steer of 506 lbs hanging weight would cost $443.70 (126.5 lbs x $3.30/lb + $16.25 kill fee + $10 sort fee).  The actual amount of meat from the 1/4 will be around 100 lbs (less the trimmings).  Let us know if you're interested in a 1/2 or 1/4, if available.



Monday, December 30, 2019

Why Our Own Beef And Do We Make Money?

Anyone that spends any time around us gets to hear about our cows on a regular basis.  We endearingly talk about them all the time, providing almost daily reports of what they're doing and the latest pasture gossip from previous day's activities.  Sometimes it's a simple morning feed report, or sharing a story of getting mauled by an overly affectionate cow that wanted a good scratching and took it upon herself to initiate by rubbing her neck on a leg.  Sometimes it's as mundane as explaining why there's hay on our clothes.  Yes, the cows get fed before coming to work and I hope that's just a little mud on my shoe.  Most everyone we socialize with knows our cows by name, and I'm sure they're thankful we only have five rather than a herd of 100 to hear about.

I'm also certain our discussions spark some curiosity and we occasionally get asked why we raise our own beef and do we make any money from it.  The money question is fairly easy to answer, no we really don't make any money off our beef because we don't have the land resources to produce our own hay and to have a herd big enough to generate profit.  Sure, we'd like to make a little money to help support the farm but we're lucky if we break even with all of the associated expenses of buying and caring for the cows we do have.  At best it helps offset the cost of our beef we consume.

Why we raise our own beef is the bigger question, because there are a lot of reasons.  Knowing how the meat we're consuming was cared for and what it was fed are the primary factors.  We literally know the beef that hits our table, and have the utmost respect for where it came from.  In this modern day as consumers we're so removed from our grocery store food supply that we have no idea where the meat and produce is actually coming from.  It may have a label with country origin, but that tells so little of the story of that food you really have no idea what you're eating.   Also, since we've moved to our small little homestead we have enough space to raise a few cows and that experience is an opportunity that most don't have.  Raising cows has truly brought joy to our lives.

Some of the biggest challenges we have on the homestead is trying not to do too much and strategically planning all the farming activities we're undertaking.  Cattle raising can be a lot more complicated than simply beef or dairy, there are far more options than you might think of.  To name a few, there are: calving operations, registered breed operations, feeder lots, show cattle, rodeo cattle, dairy cattle, micro cattle, mini cattle of various breeds, and probably things we haven't heard of.  Our original goal was simple, to have a few standard sized cows to produce calves for beef and raise them to processing age.  We'd sell any heifers that dropped to buy feeder steer.  We didn't want more than 6 head of cattle in the pastures at any given time to keep the impacts of grazing and winter damage low, and overall pasture health to a reasonable level.  We've already made a few mistakes with our first cow selections, the Jersey-Belted cross was probably not the best idea since we're not likely to start our own milk harvesting.  We also bought a cute little Hereford calf that's promising to be on the small to mini frame size, so we're now considering focusing on mini cattle.  Plans can change on the farm, you've got to be ready to roll with the flow.

So overall the answer to "Why are we raising beef?" is simple, we're loving it!







Thursday, December 19, 2019

Winter Calving & Do We Have A Mini!


We're getting down to the last couple of weeks of gestation for our Limousin cow, Becky.  She was artificially inseminated (AI) March 31st from an Angus bull named Thunder.  She has a due date of Jan 8th, 2020 but could drop a calf as early as Christmas.  We'll likely name the calf Thunder Struck, it'll be a Lim-Flex (Limousin-Angus cross).  This will be our first calving on the farm and we're hoping for a smooth, non-complicated delivery.  We'll manage either way but ideally Becky can manage this, she's looking large and in charge as you can see from the pic below taken a few days ago.  Our Jersey-Belted X just barely in pic on the left is due at the end of February.  Unfortunately she failed to take on two AI attempts and we finally got lucky (or she got lucky) when our neighbor had his Angus bull in an adjacent pasture and allowed us to have her bred to his bull.  So in a couple of months our herd will have grown by at least a couple of calves.


As we've been watching our cows and herd grow we've noticed our cow Belle doesn't seem to be getting any bigger.  She's about a year old already and about as big as a six month old calf, in fact our six month old Angus steer just pasted her in height.  You can see how tiny she is in the pic above, and honestly we're hoping she stays that small and also hope she's a viable heifer so that we can breed her to a Mini Hereford and start our own Mini Hereford operation.  We'll have a better idea in a few months if she's going to get much bigger, and be patient because it takes a bit of time to build a herd.  Here's to hoping we have a Mini!


Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Too Busy to Blog, But Still Doing Stuff

I suppose if my writing were good and attracted readers, and if I had amazing things to write about that peaked interest, I might be a good blogger.  But alas I'm a bad blogger, either too busy to commit the time and effort for posts or lacking the whit to conjure up tantalizing or important topics enticing followers.  I never intended my blog to be the real attraction, it's merely a web space to share info on our homesteading and farming adventures.  Besides, we're not a 'commercial' operation, we're just doing stuff.

Since last winter's fence work and the progress on our round pen in the spring, we've done a few things. Maybe more than a few things, like: storing hay for winter, building a goat pen, acquiring a few goats, breeding a horse, processing honey, hatching quail, building a quail grow-out hutch, losing  a dog and a horse, canning peaches, started a batch of peach mead, growing the cow herd with a new heifer and a new steer, and now we're getting into the apple processing season.  We did a bit of riding the horses, routine maintenance, and a little fishing in-between. Most of what we do is seen in real-time on facebook with posts to our individual pages or our farm page, so posts here or sort of redundant some of our farm fans.

This year we opted to buy more hay in the spring to get us through the winter feeding for our horses and cows.  We'll likely need to get more hay, but ~400 bales should be a good start.

Putting hay up in barn

Cleaning up after stacking


We also picked up a few dwarf Nigerian goats to start a small herd of milkers so we can make goat cheese and soaps from goat milk.  We had to build a goat pen to accommodate our new farm family members.
Bunk feeder

New goat pasture

Fenley, Maple, and Granger

Double trouble, our does

Homemade gate latch



It seems we're always adding new animals to the farm, so why not a new horse.  Last year we tried breeding our maiden mare, but she just didn't take.  The stud owner gave us another shot this spring so we opted to have our paint spend a few weeks in their pasture to ensure she naturally cycled into heat; and well, that seemed to work.  Thankfully the stud owner was patient with us and our mare took finally!  Her foal is due end of April, beginning of May 2020.

Placental attachment to uterus ~40 days

Anya, our prego paint mare
Last year we started a hive, but didn't get any honey.  We're new to bee keeping so we expected a slow start.  We also believe that was partly due to the crazy yellow jacket season we had and the impact they had on our hive robbing it.  In fact, for awhile we feared they killed off the hive to the point it wouldn't last over winter.  This spring we added another hive and had high hopes for the old hive because it was very active, but it turned out they made a new queen and the hive swarmed.  Hard lesson for new bee keepers.  They left behind a lot of honey though, so we harvested that and it turned out our new hive of Italian bees were super producers and we were also able to harvest from our new hive too!

Filtering raw honey from extractor

Our new labels

Over 3 gallons of honey harvested

A grey fox came to help clean off the frames


Since having a lot of animals is something we planned on doing on our farm, I decided to hatch some quail.  They're small and don't take much space to manage so I thought it would be an easy endeavor.  I bought 3 dozen fertile eggs and ended up with 20 quail chicks hatching, so it was a fairly successful hatch.  I chose cutornix jumbo brown quail as they're the fastest growing and largest quail suited for meat and egg production.  I had to build a grow-out hutch as well and we're hoping to have farm fresh quail in the near future.  I'm collecting what I hope are fertile eggs already in hopes of hatching another batch soon.
Eggs ready to begin hatching

Quail chicks in the hutch

Grow-out hutch near completion

Quail fully grown at 8 weeks
Our first quail egg!

Along with all the positive things we've been doing, we've had to deal with some rough patches.  In the late spring we lost one of our dear family members, our little chihuahua Autumn.  She got out of the yard and crossed the road and was hit by a car trying to get home.  It was heart breaking and a loss we still haven't gotten over with.  She was a special part of our family and taken too soon.  We also recently lost one of our horses, Cody.  He unexpectedly passed from colic/twisted gut and wasn't an easy thing to deal with both emotionally and physically.  Cody was only with us a year and he had just started to really bond, so it's been difficult.  

Autumn, pure love
Cody boy
Keeping busy helps distract from focusing on the sad days, and thankfully we have lots of good memories which helps us cherish the time we had with our loved animal family members.  We have plenty to do and preserving food is one of those things that keeps us busy.  On the weekend Cody passed we had picked up a few cases of peaches so we had lots of canning to do. We got so caught up in canning them we forgot to set some aside to make a batch of peach jam, but that didn't stop us from starting a batch of mead.  With all the honey we harvested I set aside enough to make a six gallon batch of honey wine, and why not add some of those peaches for some flavor.  Peach flavored honey wine!

~40 quarts and 12 pints of canned peaches

Peach honey wine fixins

Measuring potential alcohol, 12.7%


We've also been busy with working on growing our cow herd.  Earlier this spring we added a Hereford heifer calf and more recently new an Angus steer.  We now have five cows in the pasture with two pregnant heifers.  Our limo heifer, Becky, is due mid January and our jersey-belted cross heifer is due end of February.  We're hoping for a couple of bull calves but will be happy with healthy calves.  We're planning on running 6-7 cows on the pasture on a regular basis.

Cow Belle, our new herd heifer

D2, our latest Angus steer


That brings us to apple processing season.  Recently I finished making a few new apple pallet totes so we can harvest our apples and move them around more efficiently.  This past week has been raining so we've only gotten one tote filled so far almost finishing harvesting one tree.  A few more trees and couple more totes to go, then lots of cutting, crushing, and pressing for cider!  We'll set aside a few cases of quality apples to make apple sauce, dried apples, apple pie filling, and apple butter.  Lots of work in the next couple weeks in front of us.  That should have us caught up on our doings for now.  Keep checking back and maybe I'll start posting more frequently!

Shaking apples from top of tree

Loaded trees

Moving pallet of apples around

Just a pallet of apples on the porch


Friday, May 31, 2019

80' Round-pen on $500 Budget

5-wire 80' Round-pen












We finally finished building our round-pen, or should I say it's finished for now.  Eventually, we may add some lumber rails, but for now we're satisfied with the 5-wire setup.  I'm not going to go into details with step-by-steps, or how-to build details for the round pen because there are already a ton of great how-to videos and pages that provide those details, I'm just sharing a few pics here of what we did and our materials list to give you another reference for your own design.

It's fairly simple, figure out how much space you have and how big you want your round-pen.  The bigger the better so you have room to work your horses.  For our space we settled on an 80' round-pen and found the center, measured out a 45' piece of rope to help with spacing the posts tacking it to the center of circle, then measured the posts with about a 10' spacing.  We started with an 8' gate opening so we could drive a tractor through to work the ground for good footing, so we set those posts first.   We set the posts in late winter while the ground was still wet and soft.  I used a chainsaw and trimmed points on the end of each post and we drove them into the ground like nails using the bucket on the tractor as our hammer.  It took us less than 3 hours to drive all 25 posts.

Once the posts were set, we hung the gate and that's about as far as we went for a couple months.  Afterwards I tilled the ground within and did a bit more leveling to even out a few small low spots.  We didn't want to hang the wire until the ground was hard and posts were set firm.  We came back and tampered around posts and ensured they were straight up.  I couldn't find the plastic coated wire locally, had to order from Tractor Supply Co and it took about a week to get here.  All other supplies we bought from Wilco Farm Store when they were on sale.

It took me about an hour and a half to measure the staple spacing and hammer in all the staples, then drill and tap the eye-screws.  I did that while we were waiting on the wire to arrive.  Once we got the wire it took 3-4 of us less than two hours to sting the wire, trim and tie-off the ends, and apply some tension.  We did take a break to play with a gopher snake that visited while we were working.  That's pretty much it for the pen itself.  And that's what a $500 round-pen looks like.

Line strainers bolted to eye-screws














We'll want to put down a layer of gravel and then river sand over the top for footing.  It will likely take a couple loads of 3/4 minus, which we'll till into the top layer of soil to provide foundation and drainage, then a couple truck loads of river sand or one truckload of 1/4 minus and a truckload of river sand.  It all depends on how well the 3/4 minus tilled finishes.  The small crushed rock provides better traction over the river sand but too much is harder on the horses feet.  The footing is going to cost another $600 before we're finished I think, but we'd still have that cost even if we'd spent $1,800 for steel panels.



Materials List

25 qty 4-6" x 8' treated post - $7.99 ea. ($200)
8 lbs 1.5" barbed staples - $16.99
6 rail 8' utility gate - $79
Polytuf 12.5 ga. coated high tensile wire 1,350' - $179
5 qty Line strainer - $3.49 ea  ($17.50)
10 qty Eye-screw - $1.29 ea ($13)
5 qty 1/4" x 1' stainless bolts ($0.80)

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