We Have Our Turkeys!

Finally, we have our heritage breed turkeys! We have been looking for quite some time for a breeding pair of turkeys and I hooked up with Judy Fitzsimmons. She has quite a few heritage breeds of livestock and had a pair of Broadbreasted Bronze Turkeys. The added bonus was the fact that the hen is broody! We are very excited to have this pair of birds and hopefully, we will have some chicks this spring. We haven't seen any breeding activity yet, but it is still early. I do plan to build them a separate coop along with adjacent yards. We will try to produce a small amount of turkeys for friends and family and see where it goes from there.

These birds are very interesting to watch. They are quite close to their wild cousins in the way that they behave and are exactly the opposite of their reputation of being "stupid". They are extremely aware and have a complex behaviour of displays and verbal communication. The Tom is funny because with every loud and sudden noise, you get an immediate return "gobble" from the pen. Also, he is still quite possessive over his hen and whenever someone approaches the pen, he fans out his tail feathers and puffs out his body. They also have a whole bunch of different clucks, purrs and squacks that mean different things.

what....

Prudence was enjoying a nice mid-afternoon snack yesterday when I snapped a photo of her. It is funny how the picture turned out because it looks as though we caught her with a mouth full of food and she is saying "what are you lookin at?".

The sun is finally moving higher and higher in the sky. Actually, it has been doing that since December 21st, but now you can actually feel the difference in the amount of heat it gives off. The days are longer too! This is the time of year where the anticipation of spring is just starting to appear in my mind. The animals are spending more time outside of their shelters and soaking up as much sun as they possibly can. The slowly melting snow is revealing little morsels of food that were covered early in the winter and the pigs spend a good portion of their day out rooting up the snow in the pasture now. It is good to see them enjoying the outdoors once more.

A Full Load

I made a couple trips to Vince's place over the weekend. He had a fairly large pile of small, square alfalfa bales that a helper didn't tarp very well. Some rain and melted snow got through the improperly fastened tarps and rotted the sisel twine holding the bales together. Some of the bales were ruined, but more importantly, a good portion of the bales had broken apart. Vince took as many bales as he could that had held together and sold them to folks who had to travel some distance to pick up the hay. The rest of the broken ones, he gave to me. We decided to just stuff as much hay as we could into the horse trailer. It has worked well so far and we are almost complete cleaning up the pile...one, maybe two more loads to go. It is great hay too. Very rich with Alfalfa leaves and quite green. The sheep, cows and pigs are loving it.

Horse Trailer Full...

Unloading the loose, broken bales of alfalfa hay.

Haulin Feed

This past weekend I hauled a little over 6000 pounds of Rye screenings and flax from my friend Vince's farm about 3/4 of an hour away near the town of Thorsby. With all the snow we have had, it was quite an expedition. We had to tow the forklift from the shop to the storage building. Then we had a bunch of logistics to get to the different pallets of feed that we needed to access. All told, it took me about 3 hours to bring home the feed. This latest batch of feed will last me well into Spring for the pigs and laying hens. The cows and sheep don't get grain at all in their diet so we just need to keep enough hay for them to last until the grass greens-up in late April/early May. I will need to haul some more hay next weekend. Vince has a big pile of really nice hay but the strings were bad and most of the bales broke apart. I will take the horse trailer and stuff it full of as much hay as I can. I'll take some pictures of that next weekend. All in all, things around the farm are still very static...daily chores are about all that we are up to right now.

The New Loading Ramp

This is the loading ramp I was talking about earlier. It only took me 2 hours to build and is fairly simple. I made it about 36" high which should cover most farm trucks. I had to build it so we could load the large sow into the stock rack in the back of a customer's truck who had come to pick up a 60 pound Large Black Boar. Loading the little boar was easy, we just threw a big sack over him and put it over my shoulder to carry to the truck bed. Getting the sow up the chute was not as easy but it worked finally. I was happy to see the ramp easily handle the weight of both me and the 250 pound sow!

Our new sow

A couple weekends ago, I needed to get some more pigs for the meat market. There is an older fellow north of Edmonton that had some piglets and at the same time wanted to give me the two sows! I took both of them and then passed along one of the sows to some folks who had just bought our little Large Black Boar. I kept this little red sow. It looks as though she has some Tamworth blood and/or Duroc. She is a beautiful sow and will cross well with Bubbles, our Pure Bred Large Black boar. I have been calling her Big Red Pig and my son thought of the name "Burp" because of the initials BRP. Clever! So, Burp it is. She still has 4 little ones sucking, but they will soon be weaned.

Sheep at the feeder

Here is one of the latest carpentry projects that I have completed. At first I built the crib for the hay to set in. Quickly though, the sheep started using it as a bed! I then had to install the dividers of 1x4 at roughly 12" apart. This keep everything except their head from entering the feeder. At the one end I have installed two plastic troughs. One is for the salt and the other is for the mineral. This way I can simply pull the feeder to wherever the sheep are without moving all their mineral troughs too. In the future, when we have more sheep, I will copy this design and use several.

New Carpentry

I have to say that my carpentry skills are improving. A few years ago, building something like a loading ramp or a simple feeder would have been fairly easy but it would certainly not look very good! These past few weeks I have had the challenge of building two projects for the farm. First, I needed a hay feeder for the sheep. I needed to build something that would keep them out of the feeder, yet be large enough to throw a good supply of hay into. The second project was just this past weekend when it was determined that I needed a loading chute to get a large sow into the back of a customer's pickup. My wife even made the comment that the chute looks professional! I will post both projects separately tomorrow after I get some photos.

A Recent Trip

This is a little footage from my recent trip to S. Alberta to pick up the sheep. I love southern Alberta, especially at sunrise and sunset. The scenery is just amazing to be in a place so flat with such a big sky. Throw in some distant mountain ridges...awesome.

Little Boar For Sale

Here is the little boar from my last litter. He is a really good example of a young Large Black Pig. His conformation is excellent and he has really good length. I am happy with how he has turned out but I cannot keep him because he is related to my little herd. I brought in a new boar from Ontario last year so this little guy can go to a new home and spread some Large Black genetic material. The breed is actually good as a cross with Yorkshires and other commercial white breeds. The white breed is dominant so most of the piglets will look like their mom....white with little ears.

SOLD!!! This little guy was sold and his new owners Lindsay and Brenda came all the way from near the U.S. border to pick him up. We had a great visit over the weekend and loaded both him and a mixed breed sow without too many difficulties. I am glad I got the chance to meet Brenda and Lindsay, they are going to give this boar a great home and I am looking forward to hearing about his progress.

Butchering Cows

We have had two Hereford cows on our farm since early Summer. They belong to friends of ours that were short of pasture and we had an excess. Besides, it was alright for our cow Henny to have a little herd with her and her calf. Alas, the time came for us to process these two cows and downsize the "herd" considerably. Instead of simply trailering the cows to a processors where they would be scared and stressed, we hired a mobile processor to come to our farm and take care of the business without transporting them at all. It really is the best way to process meat for your own use. Stress is a common problem with transporting animals and decreasing the quality of meat. All of this is besides the point that perhaps the traditional method of processing meat is not the most humane procedure. I'm not sure about that, but what I am sure of is how easy it was for us to accomplish the task on our farm. We hired a fellow to come to the farm and he quickly dispatched the animals and bled them. The hard part was over in a matter of less than 2 minutes. After that, the cows quickly started looking like the meat that we know and appreciate. He skinned, gutted and split the carcasses using our old Allis Chalmers tractor with the front end loader to hold them above the ground. We loaded the quarters into the truck where they were carefully wrapped and from there, he took them to the meatcutters' shop where they are now hanging. For our troubles, our friends have given us a quarter of beef. We will intruct the cutter on how we want our meat cut and wrapped and fairly soon we will have some nice organic pastured beef in our freezer!

New Sheep!

Over the holidays I made a trip down to Lethbridge Alberta to pick up our newly purchased flock of Clun Forest Sheep. I bought three ewes and a ram. This picture shows the group of young rams that I had to choose from. We have been researching sheep for several months now and have been thinking about them for the farm for a lot longer than that. For several reasons we decided to track down and purchase the Clun Forest breed of sheep over all the others. We have talked to many people, read many books and publications and made a list of the priorities that we had, or the goals for our flock. Since we are a diversified farm and we have little experience with sheep, we wanted a breed that had tremendous mothering instincts and the ability to lamb without assistance. Nothing would turn us off of sheep quicker than spending the spring pulling lambs and dealing with orphans and dead lambs and ewes. I cannot overemphasize that different breeds have different characteristics. We want sheep that do well on a grass-based diet...not grain. We want sheep that are hardy and resistant to disease and parasites and most importantly, we want sheep that can produce a good crop of lambs with little help from the shepherd. Clun Forest fit the bill in all these categories and we are excited for the future of our herd. They are a multi-purpose breed that make good gains on pasture for the meat market and also produce a fine wool that is in demand by spinners. We plan to direct-market our meat products in the same way that we sell our pork. The lambs will be processed by a licenced facility and the wrapped & frozen meat will then be delivered directly to the customer. There appears to be a good demand for farm fresh lamb and of course, our lamb will be produced organically with a grass based diet to make it even more desirable by customers.

Large Black Pig

This is Prudence...one of my sows. She is quite large as you can see. I haven't had any luck with her this year as far as piglets go. I had a old lame boar up until several months ago and his replacement has been too young to breed such a large sow up until recently. I hope that she is bred now and I suspect that she is due to farrow in the next month or so. In this video, she has just been placed into her new pen with the farrowing hut relocated and cleaned out. She was quite content to sleep, uninterupted, in her new house soon after I left her alone. She will stay in this pen until after she has farrowed and weaned her pigs.

Winter Yard Scene

Gathering Winter Fuel

One of the best feelings in the world is having enough wood stored to last you a significant amount of time for your heating needs. I had promised myself that I would spend the summer months gathering wood while it was warm and there was no snow to contend with. Of course, I didn't get that done and ended up starting the winter with almost no wood to speak of. This past weekend though, I did spend a few hours cleaning the woodlot immediately in front of our house. I managed to collect enough wood to last a week or two. We use the wood in our stove downstairs. It is a large stove that keeps up with our heating needs for the most part. When it is really cold though, the furnace will still kick in overnight as the fire dies. I really want to get organized enough for next year to start collecting wood in the spring and then do small amounts of work throughout the summer to get enough wood cut and split to last the entire winter. I figure we will need somewhere around 4 full cords.

Christmas Tree

Every year we venture out into the bush on our property to find the family Christmas tree. It is alway fun to trudge through the deep snow in the willow brush yelling to each other "here's a good one!" Of course, everyone is yelling the same thing at the same time! Eventually though we find THE one and start the drag home. This year, we had pre-scouted the tree in the fall and walked right up to it.

All Crop Combining

This is Bob D. harvesting beans near Ridgville, Indiana. Pretty cool to see these old combines working.

Cold Cows

The cows don't venture far from their feeding area anymore. With the cold temps, they pretty much huddle around waiting for the next feeding. I am giving them quite a bit more hay than usual and they seem to be keeping good weight on. The insulation they carry is amazing. They always have a thick layer of frost and snow on their backs, a strong indication of just how efficient they are at staying warm.

Brrrrrrrr...

It is definitely winter around here. The weather is unusually cold for this time of year. While November almost always acts like winter, the temperatures are usually just under freezing for a daytime high. Right now though, and for the past week, the daily high temps. have been below minus 20! There have already been a few nights with close to minus 30 temps. At these temperatures, the equipment is impossible to start without being plugged in and the animals need extra feed. On top of these cold nights, the snow has been falling relentlessly. We have more than a foot out in our pastures now. Still though, the animals cope well. There is no shivering or apparent distress. They eat more and sleep more and that is about it. When the pigs come out of their barn for supper, they soon develop frosty beards of ice from the steaming porridge. This is Bubbles, he is growing fast into a big ole pig. He still has the funny personality that he always did, although his growing size makes him more and more docile.

The piglets are doing fine too. They are still living in the hut that they were farrowed in. Mom is gone from the pen now, so they greet me every day with excited squeals knowing that I am the food animal. Inside their hut is an infrared heater that hangs from the ceiling. They make themselves a nest of straw near the light and happily sleep. The only way you know that they are there is when you see the straw heave up and down with their breathing. The girl's name is Pumpkin Pie and the little boar is nameless. We will keep him for awhile to see how he turns out and then he will be sold as a breeding boar.

Duals on an Allis?

I am thinking of adding dual wheels to my Allis Chalmers WD45. It looks pretty cool, but actually serves a purpose too! In our area, we have some hills along with some sandy loam soil. This makes traction a problem at times when working hard at something like plowing or chisel plowing. By simply adding two more rear wheels, you can add to the weight of the rear end and add more gripping power to the ground. The fact that it looks so cool is just a benefit! This is a picture that a fellow Allis man sent me. Leon's Allis CA looks like it is ready for business. In my mind, having grown up around International Tractors like the 1086, all tractors should have duals!

Allis in the snow...

I am almost finished with the Allis for this year. I have the loader back working and the shifter has been fixed. Although, I noticed that I still cannot get it into 4th gear! This will have to be remedied before spring work starts. For now, the loader will be a great help around the farm. Moving snow and loading and unloading acquired equipment from the trailer is something that had to be man-handled until now. I still need to re-work our truck mounted snow plow to be able to attach it to the front end loader. We used the plow on our Ford Expedition, but Cindy traded that in on a Honda a couple years ago. Good timing with the current price of gas! Anyways, we always held on to the plow just in case. A set of mounting brackets for my Ford diesel is more than $200. I can easily save most of that money by fabricating a way to mount it on the loader and use it with the tractor.

Loading Facility

I am almost finished with our new loading facility. This series of pens and a chute will make the process of loading livestock for transport much easier than it has ever been. Instead of chasing animals and trying to force them into a trailer where they quite clearly do not want to be, we can simply guide them into the "V" shaped corrals that leads to two sorting pens. The second pen has another "V" guide that takes the animal to the chute. I still have to install the various gates, but I used the system this weekend to load our Highlands/Galloway cross cow "Henny". She is off now to visit her boyfriend for awhile. The pens are just the right size for our farm. Any bigger, and I feel that I would need help to get the animals sorted and loaded. Henny is quite wild and I had her loaded in about a minute and a half! Excellent! I am a little proud of the design and the ease of use although it is nothing new and plans on-line showed me how to design the catch pens and gave me dimensions for the chute. The next thing to do besides installing hardware and gates is to design and build a slide-in chute within the chute that will make the chute usable for our smaller animals like the pigs and sheep. With a chute that is cattle-sized, the sheep and pigs will easily be able to spin around and make life difficult for us.

Another View of the All-Crop/Roto-Baler

Just thought I would publish more photos of both pieces.

From this view, you can see how complete the baler is. The belts are far less than perfect and will need replacement. Belts on the combine seem fine, but who knows when it actually starts working. Bearings will need TLC. The back of the combine shows how perfect this machine is. There is next to zero rust. Paint is still ok too. Will need canvass (which seem to be rolled up inside!). It is also missing the cutting bar and teeth. That shouldn't be too bad to replace. Otherwise, I have my fingers crossed that there is very little to do.

Border Collies of the North...

We have always owned Collies, but at one point we had the best Labrador in the world. He passed away several years ago and I still miss him greatly. He was a tremendous duck dog. My wife acquired a couple sled dog harnesses from somewhere and she always used the dogs to mush to the mailbox about a mile away. She always got weird looks with her full-size dogsled and team of Border Collie and Lab! The Border Collie was always smart and she quickly figured out that if she just kept the rope tight, she could appear to be pulling but it was always obvious that Brant was maintaining all forward momentum! He would sure pull. Now our old collie is 13 and her only duty is to try not to get herself killed around the equipment. She is deaf as a post and I now have to be very aware of where she is when I am moving equipment or vehicles around the yard. Our new Collie "Tag" is almost 2 now and Cindy decided to try him out in the harness yesterday. It was amazing how quickly he learned to pull. Obviously, he can't pull any amount of weight, but it is still fun for Mrs. Schneider to go to the mail.