The Birds in the Buttermilk

Chickens can be really entertaining! I cleaned out my fridge the other day and found some buttermilk that was outdated. (Does it go bad considering all it is is sour milk? That's a topic for another post though!)
I poured it into small yoghurt containers and gave it to my backyard laying hen flock. My flock eats whatever doesn't get composted and seeing as my compost bins are in their pen, sometimes they eat the compost too!
Oh their delight at the buttermilk! They didn't just daintily dip the tips of their beaks, oh no! They dipped their whole beak in! And then shook off the thick goo so all the hens looked they had come through an explosion in a paint factory!

Messy chickens

Chickens enjoying some hay outside their coop to scratch in and keep their toes warm :)

The Truth about Ranching

Hollywood sometimes - well ok, most of the time ;) adds onto reality to make it seem glamorous. In Hollywood movies, ranchers live in gorgeous log houses. They have a few hired hands, and a maid or older relative in charge of the domestic end of things.
Let me tell you about the reality if ranching.

We don't live in log homes. At least not the ranchers around here.
My house is a 1929 model. Most ranchers and farmers here live in houses from 1920-1960.

We drive trucks. Mostly, they are older. Some work trucks around this area are from the 1980's, the newer ones maybe 4-5 years old. Mine is a 1998. My truck is my most useful tool. It hauls fenceposts and fencing tools when I am fencing. It hauls pails of grain, bags of mineral, blocks of salt, me and my dogs, tools, animal medicine, you name it. I can hook my trailer to it to haul livestock. It is dirty. :)

We work every day. 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Some days it might only be an hour or 2, like when we are planning a trip to the city. Then its just the bare neccesities checking animals, checking water, feeding dogs, etc. Some days, it might be 20 hours - like in Spring when its calving/lambing season and there is a Spring blizzard.

We work outside. A lot. In all kinds of weather. It's raining? Get out the raincoats! -30? better add another layer! +30? throw on some mosquito repellent.

We live in isolated areas. No running to the stores quick or grabbing a take-out quick. My closest grocery store is 38km away. The closest big city with big box stores is 100km.  You better have a shopping list when you go!

We don't get sick days. Today Larry and I are both fighting a cold, but we had to get the last deworming of the sheep and goats done before the bucks and rams are put in with the does and ewes on Saturday. So we sucked it up and toughed it out.

There are no paid holidays, no guarantees of profit. It's like working the entire year and at the end of the year, rolling a dice to see what kind of salary you can expect - if any!. Maybe you need to pay your employer for you coming to work every day!  OK, so we have control over some outcome of the dice through planning and managing our animals - making sure they are in optimum health with all that they need for optimum production. But things don't always go as planned.

We don't have control over commodity pricing, unless we do direct marketing, in which case its another skill to learn. But an outbreak of disease in the country can knock money off our animals, even if they are not the ones getting sick. A drought means higher feed prices, and inevitably a lower price for our animals as the market gets flooded with producers selling out.

It is an expensive business to get into - kinda like royalty, you are either born into it or marry into it!

We deal with death and illness. You have 3 kids that might get sick, I have over 200. They can and do get sick. We check every day, and treat as neccesary. Even so, sometimes our best efforts are not enough and the animal dies. Yes, it bothers me. Even after many, many times. I always feel like next time, I will do better. Next time, I will save it. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But I always keep trying my best.

Some days are glorious! Even if it is a day of hard work like branding day or vaccination day or building fence. There is a great sense of accomplishment with seeing a job well done.

Some days - not so glorious. We get tired and irritable. Some days we fight the elements and lose. We recently had quite a fair bit of ice rain which is turning winter chores into a hassle. When putting out round bales of hay as feed, we cut the strings off that hold the bale of hay together. Normally this is a quick task, but with the ice rain, the strings are stuck on one side of the bale. It takes 2x as long to unwrap a bale. And some days it is cold and miserable out when you have to cut strings.

strings pulled off

Strings stuck in ice

Or a winter water source will break down. Here in Canada on the Prairies,  you have a few options for winter water: one is if there is enough snow cover, the animals can be trained to eat snow. It is not very efficient, but sometimes the animals might choose to eat snow instead of walking to water.
The second option is if you have a dugout, to chop a hole in the ice every day for the animals to drink. In the middle of  winter, the ice is thick enough that cattle can walk on the dugout without falling through the ice. But in the spring, the ice might be getting thin and they can fall through so making the hole close to the edge as possible is ideal.
The third option is a watering station. These differ in size and price. Most require a power source for a heating element to keep the water thawed.
Some solar models use insulated troughs or a motion sensor system, but those can be quite pricey to install. Whichever system you have, it might require maintenance. The heating element might fail and the bowl freeze up. Dealing with frozen waterers at -20 is not really a lot of fun as it involves getting wet, taking your gloves off.... you get the idea.

Working livestock in rural locations where help is not often available, means working with your spouse or significant other. Imagine going to work with your spouse. Throw in some unpredictable animals, and you will soon find it a recipe for domestic disaster :) There might be some yelling and hard feelings. Deal with it. We need each other.

Kids are often working on the ranch (if you have them). Lots of kids choose to leave the farm because they see how hard their parents work, they feel resentful at having to help on the farm when their city friends don't have to do a thing, and get weekends off. So a lot of kids end up leaving for a 9-5 job because you make more money and you have free time. If you are not passionate about the lifestyle, you will not make it.

After lots of snow, it finally compacted enough that I can walk on top of the drifts without sinking in. Here is my track along with Remus's as we went to check the watering station one morning.

Remus enjoying his Livestock Guardian Dog deluxe pet bed. :) A piece of hay dropped by the tractor makes a comfortable nest. The horses, sheep and goats grazing on a rolled out bale in the background.

Fall work

There seems to be more work left at the end of my day. I would like to have more day left at the end of my work! Be that as it may, this Fall has been a busy time. After building the fence for the new pasture for the goats and sheep, I set about planning a shelter for them as there is no natural shelter in that pasture.
I have seen buildings made out of shipping pallets and I had experimented with a small shelter for my bucks and rams, so I decided to build a shipping pallet shelter. For a few months now I have been collecting same size pallets at the co-op where I work. Finally I had 18 matched pallets and I went to work.

I also needed roof joists - so I decided to reclaim some lumber from a fallen down cattle shelter in my corral. The rafters of the cattle shelter would provide lumber long enough to make roof joists. So I went to work dismantling the rafters - which was quite hard

The rafters of the old cattle shelter

a small pile of lumber from a few rafters

I bolted the pallets together. Here are some goats enjoying the wind break on Tuesday evening before the wind storm

The shelter blocked, leveled, and with 2 joists up. 

I still need to finish the front beam, and put up the rest of the joists and then strap them and put old salvaged tin on for a roof. All in all it cost me about $37 in bolts, joist hangers, nails and screws. The shelter is 11x29 feet. It was fairly hard work as the pallets are heavy. I would load 5 in my truck, drive up to the pasture gate, drop them off and drag them into position, then go back for 5 more. The recycled joists had to be carried up the hill. It was a good workout! And fun to build. I hope to finish it this Fall but at least for now the sheep can use it as a windbreak

Storm clouds brewing. 

The goats on the east side of the shelter Tuesday night. The wind was picking up.

Remus the guard dog on the hill. He is 6 months old now. 

My next Fall project is to finish winterizing my well. The well is the winter water source for my animals. The water table is quite high where the well is, so the water is about 5 ft from the surface... which is not good. 8 feet would guarantee it doesn't freeze but at 5 feet last year there was significant ice in the well - and it wasnt a particularly cold winter. So I am building an insulated box with a tight fitting insulated lid to go over the well casing and hopefully provide enough protection to avoid my pump freezing up. More on that in the next post! 

Blown off course

Wednesday was one of THOSE days.
The wind started Tuesday night, gusting to 70 km/hour at times. Wednesday morning started out with having to put out hay for the sheep and goats, as they had finally grazed down the grass in their new paddock. I was quite impressed that they grazed it for a month but still wish I had more grass to avoid feeding hay.... anyways. The lambs were easy to move into the corral, roll out a bale in their pasture and put them back. We move them when we roll out hay because they will run up and swarm around the tractor - which makes it really hard to try put down a 1000lbs bale without squashing an animal, and then roll it out without driving over eager little critters that cannot wait for their breakfast. Then we moved the ewes and goats into the next pasture and rolled out 2 bales for them. The wind took the swathes of hay and blew it around, some of it ending up right against my fence, on top of the electric offset wire. That would need cleaning up later.
 Then I had to set up an alleyway to move the ewes and goats back to where we had rolled out their hay. Moving them was hard, uphill and with a 70 km/hour head wind.... The ewes went through the gate and to the hay, the goats on the other hand, ducked out under the temporary fence alleyway at the last possible minute and headed for the yard. Convincing them to come out of the bale stacks and trees... took me to phone a friend with a trained dog because my 2 dogs weren't impressing the goats one bit. So we put the goats in with the lambs as that pasture has access to shelter, and the goats are such babies when it comes to wind, rain, snow... anything but perfect sunny weather!

Finally having everything sorted, I stopped my truck to pick up a pail blowing away in the wind.... forgetting to park the nose of my truck into the wind. So my door just about got ripped off, and now I have to listen to an annoying wind whistle when I drive as the door frame got bent.... oh the joys of the windy prairie!

The afternoon things didn't go smooth either. We were preparing for a custom cattle take-out in the North pasture. I helped Larry set up portable fencing as alleyways much in the same way I do for my sheep and goats. Larry's pasture is cross-fenced with single strand electric wire. Once trained to electric fence, cattle consider it a serious barrier. We do not have gates, instead the wire is loose enough that we can slip a 'lifter' - a 8 ft tall plastic pipe - under the wire anywhere we want, and just let the cattle go under the wire. Which works great once they get trained to recognize the black pipe as a 'safe' place to come through the fence. As it happened though, this particular group of cows had not been through the lifter much this summer and we had trouble convincing them to go. Its amazing how a cow will stop right at the line of fence posts,  even though the wire is up high where they cannot see or touch it... yet they refuse to cross that line. Add a strong head wind that the cattle didn't really want to move into and well... it took us  5 hours to move under 3 fence lines - about one mile. By that time it was too dark to push them the rest of the way, so we left them for the night. Walking in a strong wind like that is very tiring!

Thursday morning the wind had gone down a notch to 45 km/h so we took the horses out at first light to get the cattle into the corrals for sorting and load out. That went pretty smooth but loading the trucks took up all of the morning. Thursday afternoon we had to move portable panels for corrals from the North pasture down to Larry's home farm, to set up for Friday morning take-out of custom cattle. It was a long day too. Friday morning we rode out on a lovely calm morning to round up some more cows for shipment. Larry had enough help once the truckers showed up that I left after lunch to go into Moose Jaw to go watch the reining Futurity and support my coach and team mates that were competing. It was a nice break and I hope to be showing there next year.

A busy Summer

Wow I'm not sure where summer went!

It was a busy one. We were fortunate to have some help from the HelpX website - Paul and Charlene, Nic, Sarah, Cecilia, Fred and Fabien.
These folks helped out with looking after the chickens and turkeys, collecting eggs, fencing, gardening, yardwork, housework.... Thank you each and every one. I hope you enjoyed your visit to Canada!

So what have we been doing?
Larry had 3 different groups of cows to manage - checking water, moving fences for rotational grazing, moving cattle....

I had a fence to build, animals to pick up at community pasture, the sheep and goats that stayed home needed checking and managing, my garden needed work, I helped Larry move cows, and then tried to keep the Balance of things and plan fun stuff in between - so I took my horse Macy to 2 horse shows, took my dog Spice to sheep camp, went fishing, went to Cypress Hills, went riding 1x a week with my coach...

So here are some random photos from the summer
You might remember this photo from my Grazing Rotations blog - this was what the grass looked like after an intensive graze on June 4:

 This is the same hill, on July 6:  

Me and Macy moving cows

Jewel eating apples - there's an advantage to having a long neck! :)

Remus, new guardian of the flock. Sitting behind the electric fence.

Fishing with friends

 Nic enjoying some time off 

The chickens enjoying a dust bath under the trees

The new chicken pasture. 

  

chickens moved

turkeys foraging 

 Whats left of a plant: only the top leaves the turkeys cant reach! 

Here's a video clip of the turkeys grazing Turkeys Grazing

My veggie garden with chicken coop in background

 Another picture of a thistle that the chickens and turkeys stripped

Shamrock trail ride

Nic with a fish

At sheep camp: thanks to Chelsey A Hinckley for these gorgeous photos

Take-out day at the Elbow community pasture: I was at the crowding tub, this is the alley leading away from the tub to the sort gate

The view on the other side of the crowding tub! It was a hot and dusty day! 

Animals sorted into producer pens

 Remember what the layers looked like when we got them? 

Before and after

 Nice moose spotted on the way back from Elbow pasture

Sunset over Lake Diefenbaker

Fall is in the air....

Land of the living Skies :) 

Chickens part 2: Broilers

The chicken you buy at the store, is the Cornish x or Cornish Giant. Cornish have been selected and bred for fast weight gain. So fast, that it can cripple them. they grow and their legs cannot take it. They are shipped from the hatchery into a barn as day old chicks, and there they remain until they are harvested at 8 weeks. No sunlight, no grass, no fresh air.

Our chickens are raised in open air brooders for the first few weeks. Baby chicks need heat, so they are in brooders with heat lamps. As soon as they start to feather out, and depending on the weather - we move them out at 3-4 weeks.

Here are pictures of 4 week old broilers, their first evening out on grass:

They get to scratch in the dirt, catch bugs, eat grass - things that chickens are meant to do. 

Chickens part 1: layers

I haven't posted an update about our pasture poultry yet!
In part 1, I will talk about our laying hens.

Interested in adding some laying hens to our operation, I started doing some research and decided to order a red sussex cross type layer this Spring. These birds won't be ready to lay eggs until September, so in the meantime, Larry saw an ad for retired battery hens.
These poor gals weren't old, like a year and a bit. They were used to being jammed in a cage most of their life, 4 or 5 of them in a tiny little cage with wire sides, bottoms and tops. Artificial light regulates their daytime so maximize production. They never see daylight or feel grass under their feet, or have enough room to stretch their wings.

We brought them home in April and set them in a temporary old wooden bin so they could acclimatize before turning them out on grass. Their nails were long, their combs pale. They LOVED the bit of sunlight that came in through the wire mesh doors, and the shavings we put down for them to scratch in, and that there was room to run around and stretch their wings! Quite a few died the first week, they didn't know what to make of their freedom and piled into corners at night.
Enjoying some sunlight:

What they looked like straight from the cages - and believe me, those are 2 of the better looking ones...!

An egg comparison with my own layers, and the Leghorns before they started eating grass:

Pastured egg on left, 'cage' egg on right:

Chicken manure is exellent fertilizer - this was taken in early Spring: 

Can you tell the strip where the portable coop was? The green strip in the middle of the photo 

Finally it warmed up enough that we could put the hens outside. This was their first day out:

I am happy to report that they adjusted well, enjoy eating grass and chasing bugs and taking dust baths. Their combs look redder, their toenails have worn down from running around, their legs are darker color, and so are their eggs! 

Remember, everytime you  buy something, you vote - with your money. You are saying, I endorse this product by paying for it. Don't pay for battery hen eggs. Buy free run or better yet, pastured eggs from a farmer that you know and trust.