The only Farming thread on CHUD

I don't know if this is the first Chud thread about farms or farm life but it certainly doesn't happen often. I want to start by putting up a bit of a disclaimer. Farming is hard and I've only had my own farm for about 15 months. Even though I grew up in the country and I've been around this my entire life, I'm no expert. Hell, I'm still not sure what I'm doing sometimes. This thread is meant to be interesting and I'm hoping anyone else with related stories will throw them in. Also, animals get hurt and sometimes die. It makes me want to cry but I've been raised to think that isn't a manly thing to do so I typically don't. I've wanted to though. I warned ya.

My wife, Monica, and I own just under 8 acres. Most of it is fenced off pasture meant for livestock. There is a half acre pond with a swampy, boggy mess just north of the it. This is it during some flooding last spring. The pond is in the exact middle of the frame. The rest is overflow from Sycamore creek, which is about 400 yards from where the picture was taken.

This is the house with the barn behind it. The picture before was taken from that porch, facing right, toward the tree.

Our nearest neighbor is 200 yards away and after that the closest is a quarter of a mile.

This is our first farm animal, Der Duckerson. He is a male, Pekin. Your basic white duck.

He thought he was a dog and refused to spend any time in the pond. He would come greet us whenever we came home and he would bite your legs if you wore shorts. He had a partner that didn't make it past being a duckling. Duckerson made it through our first winter on the farm but disappeared this spring. I found a ring of feathers that must have been where he was attacked but never found him. It was probably Coyotes.

I hate super long posts so I'm going to take a break for now but I'll put more up if anyone is interested. I have already put a picture of my mini-donkeys in another thread but I'll talk about them more later. Please, add any farming experiences if you have them though. I realize this whole thing might seem stupid but I've been around here for quite a few years with very little to say and I thought some people might find it interesting. Blame The Rain Dog if you must, he told me to do it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SeanCE 

Okay, I'll go first. Which, if any, movie farming cliches have you run into while at the farm? 

I hadn't really thought much about movie farming cliches. Animal crap used for slapstick isn't too far from true. I've seen people hilariously fall into it in all sorts of ways. I don't typically stand around with a piece of straw in my mouth, hammering on my fence. Like I said though, I'm new to this so that could be me doing it wrong. I have definitely comically chased animals around because they had escaped from the pasture.

Well, right now we have 2 mini-donkeys, a goat, 2 dogs, 5 cats and my twin daughters so it isn't totally up to speed. This spring we are going to get more though. Cows, pigs, more ducks, maybe chickens and some more goats. Sheep are at a good price right now so I might get a few of them. Probably less love than a zoo because the animals aren't there for looking at. They keep me from having to mow the pasture and, aside from what I have at the moment, will be for our own meat and for selling.

If a duck catches a finger or toe, it hurts but otherwise it's just kind of annoying. Geese, on the other hand, are a good bit stronger and that is why I don't have any.

My wife went to bed so I'm going to relay the story of my goats and how one came to be known as King Willie. The first animals we bought for the farm were a pair of goats that we named Willie and Waylon.

We knew 2 goats weren't enough to make much of a dent in the pasture growth but we wanted to get something and we didn't have a lot of money. A couple of weeks searching Craigslist, which is awesome for small time farmers, yielded results. A family not far away was selling some cheap young goats, $50 or $60 each. They weren't weaned yet so we couldn't take them but we bought them and started getting the barn ready. Couple weeks later, we go pick them up and bring them home. The girls love them and want to spend every moment with them.

Now, we had two dogs that my wife and I had bought years ago, a Blue-tick Coonhound and a Black Lab. Great dogs but they had never been around livestock before. We kept them in a big chain link kennel when we weren't home. You can see one of the panels in the above pic. After dinner at my parents one day, we are greeted at our vehicles by both dogs. I'm worried but not freaked out because they hadn't paid much attention to any of the animals before. I tell my wife to take the girls inside and I go to check on the goats. They aren't in their pen. The dog kennel has a hole torn through two layers of chain link where the dogs had separated it from the frame to get out. Now I'm worried but I hear a goat bleat. I go through the barn looking for it and I find Willie, laying on the ground, with some blood around his rear end. Christ, I don't know if he is severely hurt or what so I'm trying to stay calm and lock the dogs up to keep them away from him. Waylon is not right around there but after a quick search of the barn I find him. It looks like he was chased right into the side of our camper and either broke his neck or had a heart attack. Either way, he was dead. I'm pretty much ready to end the dogs myself but it's not something I could do, so I call my dad and tell him to bring his rifle. We get Willie up while we are waiting for dad to get there and he has a decent sized wound on his hind leg right next to his anus. It's the only actual wound on either animal. He seems to be in shock and just kind of wanders so my wife holds him and takes care of him.

It's weird that the dogs did this because they hadn't attacked any animals before. My dad gets there and helps us clean up Willie. He asks what I want to do with the dogs. I didn't kill them then but we got rid of them within about 2 weeks. They weren't raised to be farm dogs and even though it is possible that something else attacked the goats and the dogs got out to fight it off, it just ain't likely. They never showed any aggression that I saw though. Willie wasn't afraid of them and we actually found him laying next to the kennel. We had to give them away because we just couldn't risk it.

This brings us to why he is now called King Willie. Well, after the attack his wound got infected pretty bad. We were cleaning it every day but it wasn't a big wound and we didn't think much of it. It turns out there is a body cavity between all a goat's organs and it's leg. He wasn't walking or doing anything so we took him to the vet. I'm not kidding when I say the cavity filled with maggots. The vet had to cut it open and scoop them all out. He cleaned it real good and gave us 2 different sprays to put on, and in, the goat as well as shots of penicillin we had to give him every day for two weeks. It was rough but Willie healed and he ended up being the only animal we had for a couple months. One lonely goat, wandering the pasture and escaping every other day to come hang out on the porch. Basically, Willie became our dog. He stays in the pasture now that he has the donkeys and he leads them around all day long. Willie is the king of the farm, the only male besides me, and all the animals, even the new dogs, follow his lead. This is me and him just yesterday.

My wife raised pigs for 4-H and my grandpa used to be a pig farmer so I'm very familiar with how smart they are. They have tons of personality and are the easiest farm animal to get really attached to. I forgot to mention in my goat post that we had to tell my daughters that Waylon ran away and even now, several months later, they will ask if I know where Waylon ran away too. I get the feeling it is going to be hard to explain to them why we have some of these animals.

It is certainly not easy and I hate that part of it but it just feels like this simple and honest way of living that I really like. Part of it is family though. My dad is a farmer, his dad was and his dad's dad was. My great uncle is a farmer and a school teacher. It just something the men in my family do.

We actually did get new dogs just a couple months ago. Puppies, both girls, a border collie, June-Bug, is my farm dog and for my wife we have Lucy, a lab-retriever mix that is the inside dog. Both are getting extensive time with the animals. June is the sweetest dog I've ever had and has damn fine instincts for a collie. She already knows how to herd the animals. She brings them up to fence when we get home every day and just a couple of days ago herded Willie back into the pasture after an escape. It's hard not to have dogs. Out here they offer good protection because June patrols outside and Lucy will wake us up inside if anything off happens. Granted, we don't have much issue with crime but every once in a while a house will be broken into.

Thanks Kate. I think next up will be either a cow or a pig. My neighbor has a few cows with not quite enough room for them all so I offered to let him use some of my pasture. Hopefully, I can get a cow out of the deal. If I can do that, I can get a pig for cheap and next fall have all the steak, ground beef, pork chops, sausage, ham, and bacon I can eat. It will be glorious. Add that to my plans for canning a big chunk of my garden this summer and all I will have to buy from a store is beer, coffee, milk, and Doritos. Heck, I could get a dairy goat or cow to provide the milk even. Milking is a lot of work though. I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet.

Thanks Bucho. RD, I missed your question about predators but they aren't too much of a problem because the biggest ones are wild dogs and coyotes, maybe the occasional hawk. No wolves or bears or anything really scary. Raccoons will kill some smaller animals, ducks and such, but the real duck threat on the farm comes from snapping turtles. I'll throw a couple pictures up later but I'm talking about 20 to 30 pound turtles. My best friend's dad came and trapped some after we saw a big one trying to nest in the middle of our yard. We had a good dozen ducks in late spring and the last one just disappeared a week or so ago. Navidson, I didn't know guineas were good for killing ticks but I'll definitely consider getting some now. My wife hates, hates, hates ticks. I'm the one who has to check the girls and pull them off the dogs when they get them. It's too bad about the suicidal rooster. Some creatures just can't handle being turned away from their own kind.

I'm not sure I should even ask, but, Kate, why don't you drink milk? I don't care for it and only use a bit in my coffee but it sounds like you have other reasons.

Well, they start by being this big.

Next, they hang out in the pond, just under the surface. Waiting. Watching. Holding on until an unsuspecting duck floats on by. Then, it's chomp time.

I actually don't know. I've never seen a carcass anywhere. Just ducks disappearing on the pond.

It's winter so their long coats have started to come in.

When we bought them last spring they were at a horse rescue over two hours from our house. I don't have a livestock trailer so we had to rig up a pen in the bed of my F-150 with some wooden racks. We were driving about 35 mph the entire way back because they were on the verge of freaking out. There is a McDonald we stopped at on the way but I couldn't go through the drive thru because the racks were too tall. It was hilarious though.

I woke up this morning to find one of my cats had died. It was my daughter's favorite so I'll have to deal with that when I get home. Eventually she is going to start thinking it is odd how animals run away from our farm so much. They are barn cats so it isn't like a pet dying but I still hate to see it happen.

I would love to have 100 acres but I need to have a much more lucrative career for that. We were insanely lucky to get this place. My parents live just up the road from us and the people that owned the house told my mom that they were getting ready to sell because they were almost done building their new house. We put our old house up for sale (this was 2010 so selling a house wasn't easy) and nothing happened all summer. Our neighbors, the former owners, were taking longer than they expected to get their new home done so they still hadn't put it up for sale yet. We were worried so we switched realtors and within a week someone had put an offer on our old house. It was exactly what we asked for, which was just enough to completely pay it off, and we jumped at it. The new owners wanted to move in ASAP so we had to be out by the middle of September and nothing was moving at all on the new house. My wife and I sat down with the owners of the farm and told them that we wanted the house and would pay basically what they asked as long as it was reasonable but we were going to be out of a home soon and we needed things to get moving. They agreed but at the same time the mortgage company started giving us trouble and said we wouldn't be able to close on the farm until the early November. The owners actually let us move in more than a month before we closed. They had just finished their new house. It was a hell of a nice thing for them to do. A lot of it was probably that they knew my parents and my wife's dad but it was still crazy of them to do that for us.

Good news, everyone. Tomorrow morning I will be picking up the newest additions to our farm. We are getting a pair of 2 week old Jersey calves. Both male and they will be our first real meat intended animals. Apparently, Jersey cattle aren't the absolute greatest meat cows, like an Angus, but they are very docile so with miniature donkeys and three year old kids, they seem like a good fit. It will take about 2ish years for them to grow to slaughter size. For only $150, plus whatever feed costs, it should work out well. We will have to bottle feed them for a couple more weeks though. I'll post some pictures of them soon.

I'm sure the girls will be upset but, and this might seem crass, that's life. It's going to happen a lot. I'm sure I'll even be a little upset when that day comes. On the other hand, animals are cheaper than a big tractor to mow my pasture and they have the added benefit of being food. I can sell what we don't use to friends and family and maybe even make a tiny bit of money to help buy the next animals. I'll make sure their pain is well documented though.

Here it is, in all it's glory. My very first tractor. It might not look like much but it's exactly what I need to mow and plow snow and manage a farm. Cost me $3,400. It's a mid-60's International 444. I don't know nearly enough about tractors to make a decision about getting it by myself but my dad said there is a good chance it's the only tractor I'll ever really need on my little farm. Just had it delivered a couple days ago. So awesome. I don't know if you will ever see a man as happy about going slow as he is on his new tractor.