More Goat Kids, Pig Tilling, Egg Laying Picking Up & Silvopasture Creation

It’s been a pretty lovely and straightforward week on the farm with more goat births, the chickens picking up their egg production and the pigs rooting and cattle bale grazing through the woods, both helping our silvopasture creation goals.

Four more kids joined the herd this week! There was a set of twin bucklings for a second-timer, Bergie (full name Bergamot of the citrus line!)

And Anise and another second timer each had single bucklings. The latter (second photo) doesn’t have a name yet. I have just been calling her Dottie’s loud mouth doe in my head because she screamed so much during her first labor last January and then her little mini-me doeling was a very loud kid, screaming straight from birth as well! ;-)

The November kids are technically read to be weaned, although their moms always let them nurse much beyond three months! So likely within the next week or so, I will get some information up about weaned kids for sale. We have some beautiful bucklings that would make great herd sires and tons of beautiful doelings, since we skewed much more towards does in the November kidding group. Of course, I want to keep all the doelings, but we have no need to have a herd that big!

The breeder set moved out of the field where our house is this week, but to a tree line near the tiny house and the goat herd. They really rooted up the cogon grass patches we wanted them to attack and now as it’s warming up they need more shade. And they can continue to spread out hay in the woods to help along our silvopasture goals.

The feeder group of pigs are still in their large woody section we moved them to last week (after the cattle had bale grazed through it). It’s about 2 acres or so, in an L shape and yesterday when I went to check on them, I was slightly alarmed when I counted only nine of the 16 pigs near the feeder or the waterer, the most common areas they hang out.

I walked all the way to the back of the paddock where there were other hay bales (and lots of blackberry canes poking me!) and found a group making wallows in the cool mud in the back. They seemed very happy!

The chickens are picking up their laying! Mid February seems to be the sweet spot for number of daylight hours for the hens to start picking up. We did, in fact, hit a whole 11 hours of daylight this week, so that’s something. For perspective, indoor henhouses usually have hens on about 14-16 hours of light every day to keep them laying their maximum number of eggs per day.

But as I’ve mentioned before, hens are like human women in that they are born with the number of eggs they are going to have for their whole lives.

We keep our hens for at least two laying cycles, so their molting break triggered by decreasing daylight in the fall does mean that they will lay a more consistent amount of eggs in their second cycle than they would have if they were kept under 14-16 hours of light in a typical indoor commercial operation for the first cycle. Most commercial hen houses cull their birds after one cycle.

That said, we still do not have enough eggs to meet demand. We’re doing our best to balance our loyal wholesale and retail customers and supplement from other farms if and when we can. But we are on the upswing and that is something to be excited about. We also are getting another flock of pullets in April that will start laying in May!

The green up in the pastures has been really noticeable with the warm weather. So the hens are all parked in their respective fields right now and we put down a lot of hay for them, but it’s looking like they will be able to get back on the move again very soon, depending on how much rain we get on Wednesday and Saturday this week!

The cattle moved from the acre paddock to bale graze through a woods section that the feeder pigs left last week. Essentially they swapped with the pigs.

Grant did a bunch of chainsaw work in the fall, felling small trees and shrubs and vines all tangled together for the goats to eat, so it’s exciting to see the pigs and the cattle each doing their part to improve the soil and clear it out a little to make a thriving silvopasture system in our woods.