On my Osage County farm, new life fuels cycles and establishes seasonal rhythms. With early spring, new life arrives as green grass and poultry. Once the grass is plentiful new life appears as lambs begin to drop and then the calves. This morning we experienced an especially compelling treat –Valentine, our female donkey surprised us with a spindly, wet, awkward bundle of joy. I don't know why Valentine chose the dusty corral as for birthing...

That's not where dinner's located!

Wet and wobbly.

Nothing like starting out the day with a good breakfast.

Only two dinner plates for three mouths.

I didn’t care much for winter before we moved to the farm, but now I love it. When we lived in town, I didn’t dress for the cold, since most of the time I was just hopping from car to house to office. Here, if you go out you’re going outside for a while, so I dress for it. I’m not cold, I’m warm, and that makes me comfortable, so I can appreciate how lovely the woods and fields look under the snow. Another thing I love with the low sun angles is that you can see the lay of the land. Especially at dawn and sunset, the shadows on the snow show exactly where the low spots are in the fields and exactly how they drain.

Chores are pretty light around here in the winter. The cattle come up for water and grain each day so I can count noses and make sure everyone is healthy without having to go further than the barnyard. Once a week I trek out to the outwintering area to flip hay feeders onto new round bales. I like to do this before the previous bales are quite gone, so the cattle have a warm dry spot to lay in what’s left of the old hay.

The bales were placed out in the field in rows last fall, about 30 feet apart in each direction. I put an electric fence around them. One side of the fence is attached with handles, so it’s easy to move it back as the cows finish the bales in a row and are ready to start a new one.

The chickens don’t like cold and snow, and won’t go outside. Our coop is built into one corner of the barn, so I let them run in the barn during the day. It’s messy, but I hate to keep them shut up all winter and would rather do some extra cleaning than have unhappy chickens. On sunny days they sit in a row at the open front door of the barn, soaking up the rays.

The donkeys are feeling sorry for themselves. They’d like to be out with the cows stuffing themselves with hay all day long, but that makes them incredibly fat. So they have their own pen in the barn with an open door so they can come and go as they please. They’re usually out, but are always there waiting for me at feeding time. Donkeys don’t like diets!

Ann Larkin Hansen is the author of The Organic Farming Manual, available here. 

 

We’ve got goat troubles … and it’s the chickens’ fault. Maybe it’s a bit unfair to blame the chickens but if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be here trying to figure out what to do with an ornery, head-butting pygmy goat named Oscar. So in my angst-ridden state I’m holding them responsible. Okay, partially responsible.

It all started back last October when we finally got around to cleaning years of previous owners’ junk out of the barn. We had a great set-up – a few goat pens, a large horse stall and two areas to keep poultry – but no livestock.

So like many new country folk, we decided to get us some chickens. Because it was fall already, it was too late to place a chick order so I went online to look for some laying hens.

Not long afterwards, I found a lady willing to sell us 10 mature barred rocks, Rhode Island reds and black rock hens.

We brought them home and within days we were collecting tasty, rich and gorgeous eggs from our girls.

(Editor Hank Will and fellow blogger Paul Gardener have both recently written about raising your own chickens here and here. If you’re still thinking about it, I suggest you get off the fence and contact your local hatchery!)

About a week later, the lady who sold us the chickens emailed me to ask I’d be interested in buying a six-month-old male pygmy goat. Although Billy was still intact (as in, a fully capable male goat) she said he was very friendly and not at all aggressive.

I admit it – I’ve always loved goats, especially the little ones. Yes, my only exposure to them before moving to the farm was in petting zoos (there’s my disclaimer, right there), but I’ve always loved their personality. But that’s not a good enough reason to buy one, I reasoned, as we are not ourselves a petting zoo. So I decided to do some research.

I discovered that although pygmy goats are only 16 to 23 inches tall at the withers and does weigh approximately 55 pounds, pygmies can produce as much as four pounds of milk a day (equal to half a gallon) or 600 to 700 pounds a year, quite enough for a homesteading family of four.

Since one of the reasons we moved to the farm was to become more self-reliant, raising goats seemed like a good way to ensure a steady supply of goat milk and cheese. While purebred dairy goats such as Nubians and Saanens produce a much greater quantity of milk (averaging 1600 pounds annually), they are larger, require more space and more feed. Plus, registered proven producers (milkers) would be significantly more expensive.

Because we had absolutely no experience raising goats, we decided to try the economy version first.

But the question remained, should we buy Billy? I know there’s a lot more to selecting an animal for breeding than upbringing – pedigree and conformation are key but again, we’re just getting started here. The sticking point was, did we really want a buck?

While intact male goats start out as lovely little creatures, they quickly mature into bucks with somewhat objectionable habits, smell being the least of them. I mean, once you learn that a buck likes to spray his own beard and forelegs with urine, you may think twice about owning one. I know I did.

Finally, we decided to go ahead with it. We’d buy Billy now and get a doe in the spring and we’d go through one breeding cycle and see how things went.

We weren’t able to get Billy right away so in the meantime, I found another pygmy goat for sale: this one a three-year-old wether, or a castrated male.

I thought that it would be a good idea to get a wether as a companion for Billy. Goats are herd creatures and don’t do great on their own and once Billy matured, he’d be off limits to our future girls.

So on a cold, sunny day in November, my daughter and I brought home Oscar.

I liked Oscar immediately. He was inquisitive and friendly and took to following me around the barnyard like a puppy. While it was endearing at the time, that was probably a sign of things to come. I hadn’t bought livestock – I’d brought home a pet and a pet isn’t what I bargained for.

A few days after arriving at the farm, we tried introducing Oscar to the donkeys (they came after the chickens.)

Already we’d heard the coyotes circling the farm and we wanted to have predator protection in place before adding anyone else to the barnyard. Let’s just say it didn’t go well.

Cinder, the older and more sensible of the two, didn’t much mind Oscar. Lee, the younger and more insecure donkey, laid into Oscar like a fury, sending him cart-wheeling across the barnyard. It was unexpected and truly dreadful. We put the donkeys in the back paddock and tended to Oscar’s bruised ego.

Worried about what we were getting into, we were relieved when the chicken lady decided to keep Billy. That was fine with us because breeding was farthest from our mind at that moment.

But then a few weeks later, along came Lucy and Sam.

We purchased Lucy, another three-year-old pygmy goat, and her two-month-old baby that we named Sam, from a less than scrupulous owner. The idea was that Oscar would now have a companion (he was starting to show signs of stress and anxiety that we assumed was because he was an only goat), and we could keep Sam intact and have our own buck.

While we hoped the addition of Lucy and Sam would reduce Oscar’s growing agitation, it seemed only to heighten it. Although we kept them in adjoining pens for the first few weeks (we’d now moved everyone into the barn, out of the harsh winter weather) he became even more aggressive, not less.

Then the aggression turned on us. All my sources say that wethers were supposed to be docile and friendly but whenever we went into Oscar’s pen to collect his water bowl, he’d growl, head-butt and even once tried to down me. It left me with a nasty bruise and a growing worry that something was wrong. But what should we do about it?

The vet told us to take him to the sales barn. My dad offered to eat him. I even tried to sell him privately. But none of these options seemed to assuage my guilt that we’d failed. If only we’d done something more or differently, if only we weren’t so inexperienced, he wouldn’t have turned on us. (Looking back, he did seem pretty high-strung and codependent for a goat, right from the very beginning.)

So here I am today, learning my first lesson in animal husbandry – what to do with an animal you no longer want. I’m finding it a hard decision to make (now’s probably a good time to disclose that I’m a vegetarian – I’m something of an oddity around here), but it’s the first of many if we decide to continue raising goats or any animal.

If 50 percent of goats born are male, our options are: castrate every one of them and open a petting zoo (not an option), sell them privately (which may be harder to do with animals that are neither registered nor proven), butcher them or sell them to a sale barn (where someone else in turn will probably butcher them.)

It’s not like I didn’t know we’d have to dispose of excess animals even before we got into this goat business. I’m all about paying your own way around here and if you’re not contributing then you’re taking away from making this farm sustainable. I’ve even said it myself that once our chickens are done laying, they’re headed for the soup pot.

It’s just there’s this disconnect: the self-reliant side of me that knows full well that livestock are not pets (repeat after me: livestock are not pets) and that I can’t keep every single one of them; and the other side of me that has a soft-spot for four-legged creatures.

Maybe it’s time to get out of goats, but the barn would sure be empty without them. We’d miss out on our own milk and cheese too. Seems like a pretty high price to pay for my squeamishness.

So if anyone has any perspective or advice to share with this greenhorn, I’d love to hear it. Should I stick to growing vegetables or does culling animals, even the cute furry ones, get easier?

Read more about our early adventures in homesteading at Rowangarth Farm.

After having a couple of donkeys around for a few months, I have to admit that they are great companions. In fact, they are almost as fun to be around as the dogs … and it is because donkeys like people. 

 

I was cool with the whole donkey addition because we planned to bring sheep to the farm in 2008, and I wasn’t too keen on the idea of leaving them to fend off the coyotes on their own. Well, we got the donkeys, but not the sheep. Actually, we have a ram, but he still lives at my friend Bryan’s farm. I just didn’t get our fence upgrade completed in time … in fact it still isn’t completed. Oh, did I mention that it was Bryan that convinced me that donkeys would be fun? He was right.

Our male (jack) donkey, Jack is said to be at least 7 years old (the previous owners weren’t for sure). Our female, Valentine, is not quite a year. After keeping them separated for months, we finally turned them both in with the cattle and after a bit of chasing around, they have become fast companions. In fact they pretty much ignore the cattle and have formed their own little mini-herd.

Now, whenever we walk the pastures, Jack and Valentine come running. They heel better than any of our dogs and are tall enough that we don’t have to bend over to chuck them under the chin. Of course, the donkeys are really more interested in the all-natural, hormone-free range cubes or  in my coat pocket than they are in being  my companion, but I will take their affection, and gladly rub them here and there, either way.

Some folks won’t have an intact jack donkey around their place, but so far, Jack hasn’t been any hassle at all. We used to keep anywhere from 15 to 25 Angus bulls around (breeding stock was part of our business), so handling large rambunctious boys is nothing new. And Jack is far from rambunctious.

In time, we will rely on Jack and Valentine to keep the flock safe. In the meantime, they are great companions, and that is just fine with us.
 

November 25^th and there’s still at least two months of good pasture left … assuming continuous hard freezes or deep snow don’t shut it down. We put up about a quarter mile of temporary electric cross fence last weekend to give the cattle and donkeys a fresh break.

The east and west boundary fences on this farm are pretty well shot. The old barbed wire hasn’t had any but the most rudimentary maintenance for what appears to be the last decade. The north and south boundary fences, on the other hand, are in good shape. So far, we have reinforced the western boundary with a couple of strands of 14-gauge low-tensile electric wire that pulses around 8,000 volts with the makeshift grounding system we cobbled together. I just wrapped the ground lead from the charger around an old copper water pipe that goes somewhere beneath the barn … this is far from the right way. That fencer will likely send closer to 10,000 volts through the wire once I get a proper ground field put together.

At the moment, the cattle are far enough from the eastern boundary that we use a single strand of 14-guage wire stretched between the north boundary fence and one of the permanent cross fences, which is still in fair condition. We charge that single wire with a Premier IntelliShock 20B battery-powered charger. This little box sends a consistent 9,000 pulsed volts through the wire … which is plenty to keep the animals from testing it.

Those who believe that cattle don’t experience joy have never opened up a fresh break of grass to the herd. This is one of the special treats for those of us who choose to manage how the animals graze the pastures. The animals know when it is coming, they appear to anticipate it, and they burst through the gate, literally kicking up their heels, as they take mouthfuls of lush growth from all corners. Eventually they get down to business, put their heads down and don’t come up for air for more than an hour. There is nothing like the sight and sounds of contented cattle doing what they were designed to do … harvest grass.

Photos courtesy of Kate Will.

Now that it is dark when I get home after work, I try to do all my animal bonding and light-requiring chores in the pre-dawn glow before heading off to town. The Highlands are on their third small pasture paddock, and they still have a couple of days of good grass left before I open up the next break. These animals are pretty serious foragers and have cleaned up the brush in the pine grove very nicely. They also have made efficient use of a small creek for drinking, even though I keep a stock tank filled with fresh clean water in the corral.

 

I really enjoy working with cattle on foot using a combination of the Bud Williams approach and a bit of common sense. In keeping with that low-stress approach, I like to be able to call the cattle into the corral … rather than whooping it up and driving them in. It worked with our Angus herd, so I figured it would work with the Highlands. In this case, I call once or twice (hey bos) and rattle some 100-percent-natural, 20-percent-protein cattle cake in a small plastic bucket. The stuff smells like molasses … I have been tempted to taste it myself.

This morning, even though I was out of town last weekend and part of last week, the cattle heard me feeding the Mulefoot pigs, headed to the corral and were waiting quietly for a couple of cake cubes apiece and a chuck on the chin. When the ritual was completed, they turned one by one and headed back out to the pasture. What fun. Jack the donkey, who lives with the cattle, lingered to get his treat. His rank is pretty well in the basement of that little herd. Valentine, who lives in the adjacent paddock, waited to get her cube until Jack was finished. She also got her ears rubbed.

I can’t really think of a better way to open up each day than with a glorious sunrise and some quality time with the animals whose lives so enrich ours. I cannot wait for the winter solstice to arrive … I am already anticipating longer days and more daylight on the beginning and end of the work day. I like the seasons well enough, but I thrive on daylight.

Highland cattle photo by Kate Will.