meat

First lambs of the year

2012-02-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

Had an early arrival today; a pair of twin lambs. We've got a good space for them, they're bedded down and comfortable. Nothing quite as cute as a lamb. I thnk I'm immune to it, and then spring comes and I fall again.

Normally I aim to lamb in march or april; these two arrived because love conquers all.

Southern farmers feeding tomatoes to hogs

2012-01-30T21:12:00.000-08:00

This article in the New York Times talks about the revival of southern cooking, featuring several farms that raise heritage hogs -- like the Berkshires pictured wolfing down tomatoes.

Southern states have always favored pork as a staple, and the resurgent interest in lard and heritage breeds is getting wide, popular support.

Wait a second. Tomatoes are a vegetable (or a fruit?). And isn't that what the Snohomish Department of Health is giving me grief about?

As they say in the south, sure 'nuff.

"where are all the customers yachts?" - farm blogs

2012-01-29T21:38:00.000-08:00

One thing that I'd like you to notice, if you haven't already, is that this blog has no advertisements on it.   No sponsors, no hotlinks, no revenue. I'm not doing this for the money. I'm not against the idea of making money, but I started this blog for non-monetary reasons, and I write what I believe here, and I do so because I'd like other folks to have a clear view of what farming is like, at least for me.

What gets my goat, and it gets gotten from time to time, is when I see someone talking about something that I sincerely believe is harmful, or if they're talking about some sort of fantasy but offering it as if it's reality. I think that this is the worst thing you can do to someone who's thinking about farming -- basically by selling them false story, you're sabotaging their future efforts.

So if you propose a method of raising animals and it's actually harmful to the animals, or just plain impossible, or if you talk at length about something you've never done, and claim to be able to help others do what you haven't done... well, you get your own blog entry.

The title of this post refers to a book that was first published in 1940; a customer, visiting New York city at the time sees a harbor full of the stock broker and dealers yachts, and asks that question: "Where are all the customers yachts?"

The take home lesson is that anyone who is promoting a particular action or scheme may not have a dog in that fight.    It's a lot easier to tell someone else to do than it is to do it.

In fact, I think if someone comes to you and asks you to be your financial planner, it's fair for you to ask to see their portfolio. I've had probably 20 people pitch me on why they should manage my money (or start a retirement account, or pick a mutual fund or...) and I have never had one show me their own portfolio results.   It's funny, because they were proposing that I tell them the same information about my own personal finances as I was asking from them.  Honest is as honest does.

If you propose to teach me about something as crucial as starting my farm, financing my farm, organizing my farm, or anything else related to my farm, I want you to have actually done it on YOUR farm. I get a lot of people who comment about this or that on my blog, or who call in a complaint to whatever government agency that they think will care (and a surprising number of them have), and every now and then someone comes to the farm gate with a question or comment, and I deal with all of them in as civil a manner as they approach me. More so than most, I'll actually talk about what I do, how I do it, and when I do it. I work hard to be patient with people.

But where my patience is tried, where I find myself nearing the edge of my endurance, are folks who believe that they know better than me about how to do what I want to do on my farm. The most formal of those folks are the regulatory agencies; every one of them that I deal with believes that it's their mission to tell me what to do, and in fact, there is no negotiation or discussion of any sort. ("Mr. King, we do not think you are taking this seriously!") You will do what we want, or we'll put you out of business or fine you $10,000.00 a day.

The second source of irritation are people who believe that by virtue of having a pile of money, or a spreadsheet, can tell other people how to start their farm, or be in farming in general.

But they leave out the big pile of money part. Farming is a lot easier if you have a mattress or two of cash.

They'll teach classes about how to finance your farm, having purchased theirs with cash made somewhere else. Or they'll speculate about how to make a profit, having never made a profit.   Or they'll promote themselves as expert farmers when they found that the job they created they needed to flee as it was destroying their life.

Teach me how to run a sales or marketing firm and earn a few million bucks, and I'll take that class. Your credentials are good there. You've actually done that. Or any other venture you had some success in.

But I think that folks who want to teach others how to make a profit should probably do that themselves, first.

farm-dreams.com has been speculating, both in their podcast and in a blog entry. Now mind you I think that they're all good folks, and hardworking -- but so far, I don't see any evidence that any of them have actually made what I consider a sustainable farm -- one that makes a profit, provides a decent wage for employees if there are any, and is a desirable job -- one that the farmer wants to do.

Full disclosure, folks. If you are going to talk about profitable farming, why don't you start with your own credentials. Tell us about the reality of the operation, what you do, what works, what doesn't.   If you're going to talk about balance sheets, how about you show me yours?

And if you started your farm with a million bucks and a house on the golf course, why not talk about that, too?    I find the disney version of the story lacks the details that really make it useful.

Update: Prior to writing this, I did ask "dusty bottoms" this question:

"With respect to the podcast, are comments that disagree with topics that are discussed appropriate? Or the conclusions made?

While Tim and Liz do have a point of view, it's not the only one. A wider discussion is more fitting for a website that is aimed to help farmers.    If this is a broadcast-only medium, It'd be nice to know that up front. "

And I got this reply:

Dusty Bottoms replied to their discussion "Farm Dreams Podcast Comments/Questions" on Farm Dreams
------------
Yes, of course comments that respectfully disagree with any view on a blog or podcast are appropriate. That's how we learn and grow.
Thanks for participating.

And then they banned me from their website 20 minutes later.  So much for open discussion.

Natures harmony, by any other name

2012-01-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

Tim and Liz are back in the farm blog and podcast business, this time under the name farm-dreams.com

As usual, dissent - even questions - are not allowed. My question about why they were operating under a pseudonym was deleted 7 minutes later, and a followup question to "marsha":

"Marsha mail@farm-dreams.com via bounce.secureserver.net 3:44 PM (10 minutes ago)
to Bruce

Marsha has sent you a message on Farm Dreams
Subject: Message from Form Administrator, Farm-Dreams.com
------------
Hi Bruce,
Welcome to Farm-Dreams.com! We're thrilled to have you as part of our community!
A comment posted by your account was removed from the forum. As forum administrator I strive to keep all topics and comments focused on the threads and on the aim of farm-dreams.com, which is to encourage, inspire and help others to learn skills that relate to farming, preparedness and homesteading. While I felt that your comment was not constructive and not on topic, I hope you continue to utilize farm-dreams.com and find it useful.
------------ "

went unanswered. Well, welcome back, Tim and Liz. Hope this works out better for you than your farming venture did.

My experience with Tim and Liz is that while they claim to have reviews of their products online, no negative review, comment or anything other than glowing praise is ever published. Try it out for yourself; rate their podcast on itunes as anything other than 5 stars (out of 5).

What on earth do they feed dairy cattle?

2012-01-27T08:55:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I try hard to do is to use food that would otherwise be wasted to produce my pork. Most pig farms do that; it makes sense both from an economic and from an ecological point of view.

Walter Jefferies just scored tons of dairy products in his operation, which, honestly, I'm jealous of. I'd love to have a house of cheese, myself! I guess I'll content myself with a mountain of pineapples

Yes, I really feed tons of pineapples to my pigs

But that's not the topic of the day. I was reading the local paper, and I ran across an article about a local dairy farm that constructed an "anerobic digester" to produce power from the cow manure.

Here's the quote from the photo gallery associated with that story:

"The Werkhoven Dairy in Monroe, Wash. has 1,000 milking cows that produce milk for Darigold everyday. Recycling several products like beer and wine into the food for the cows is just one way the dairy has become a model of environmental sustainability"

Now wait just a second. If you recycle food products back into animal feed, and feed it to animals, you're a "model of environmental sustainability"?!?!

Let's review here:

Feeding beer, wine, whey, and other stuff to dairy cows is a model of environmental sustainability.

But feeding fruits and vegetables to pigs is "improper handling of solid waste"

Actual photo of fruits and veges we feed to the pigs, deemed "solid waste"

I think that the main difference between our operatoins is that the dairy farm receieved more than $1,000,000 (one million dollars) in grants and subsidies, and me, well, I'm not subsidized at all.

That must be it. If you get a million dollars, THEN you become a "model of environmental sustainability".

I'll be waiting for my check.

Farmhand update

2012-01-27T08:30:00.000-08:00

New haircut is an improvement, Isaac!

I was in small claims court with Isaac Dozier earlier this week for our initial appearance. I've written about the issue I had with Isaac, and then about serving him with papers from the lawsuit. In addition to taking my equipment, Isaac also made complaints about me to the Washington department of labor and industries, the health department and so on. Guess that's what I deserve for hiring him, eh?

So I'm sitting there in small claims court, and they're calling the names of the people on the docket, and much to my surprise, I'm not the only person there to sue Isaac that day.

When I served Isaac I wrote "...does this stuff happen to Isaac every day?", and I didnt' realize that it apparently does.

We sat down with a mediator, and basically I asked him to return my equipment and tools and I'd call it a day. I don't hate the guy; I just want my stuff back. He agreed. The Labor and Industries complaint was the next topic, and after thinking about it, I said, ok, Isaac, I don't want to chase you around or deal with you any more. I'll give you $100.00 if you drop that, and any other complaints you have.

I did that not because I wanted to give him $100.00, but because it costs me time and money to deal with labor and industries, and with my equipment and tools returned, I really didn't want to have to chase this guy around any more.

He took the $100.00, and that resolved our basic issues.

He asked me to remove the blog entries. "It's just your opinion!" and I said "Isaac, when you do this sort of stuff there are consequences. "

6 months later Isaac appears to be unemployed.

Oh yea: The other person there to sue Isaac was a woman who was owed about $2,000.00. This is the second time she's been in court with him. Apparently they signed a lease together, and while he was working for me he wasn't paying his rent. Or utilities. Or anything. She sued, got a judgement, and a payment plan. Isaac apparently didn't make his payments, and she was back in court to get a judgement for the remaining amount.

The judge listened to her testimony, looked at the original judgement, asked Isaac for his side, and then gave the woman everything she was asking for; judgement against Isaac.

Take home lesson for me: New employees get a background check and a credit check, no exceptions. If they're not paying their bills or they have a record, I'm going to pass.

Good luck, Isaac. Good riddance.

So you want to be a farmer...

2012-01-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

It's on the rainy, cold, freezing days that your determination to continue to farm gets tested. We don't get much snow as a rule in western Washington, but we've gotten a foot or so. The picture above is my large hoop house that I built back in 2009.

During heavy snows, I inspect the greenhouse to make sure that it's shedding snow as it should. Everything looks ok on the outside. The snow shoulders will actually insulate the greenhouse a little bit, making it a little warmer for the animals inside.

I'm standing just inside the end of the greenhouse, looking down to the far end. There's about 75 grower pigs in here; the largest are just reaching 200lbs, the smallest are about 40lbs. They're curious about me, grunting softly and coming up to nibble on my boots or push on my knee.

Normally I'd be using automatic waterers, but I have to consider that they'll get frozen during cold weather, so I switch them out for sheep troughs. The pigs push at them, and if they get close to empty they will flip them over, but if you keep them full there's really no issue.

As I walk down the greenhouse I'm keeping an eye on the roof to make sure that the snow isn't piling up. Snow can weigh a great deal, and if I find an area where it's not shedding I'll get a brace and raise the plastic in that area.

This is from the other end of the hoophouse, looking back at the entrance. You can see the big feeder there in the distance. At this end it's noticeably warmer; I'd guess 30 degrees. This end is sealed, and between the pigs body warmth and the composting floor it's pretty comfortable. Chilly, but nothing like outside.

The snow continues to fall. It's really pretty at this time of year.

"Certified Naturally Grown" - what does it really mean?

2012-01-09T00:24:00.000-08:00

Last month I wrote an entry on the USDA Organic certification program. In writing that, I ran across another organization that also certifies farms, Certified Naturally Grown, or CNG for short.

Here's the first paragraph from the wikipedia entry on CNG

"Certified Naturally Grown is a non-profit alternate farm assurance certification program created for small-scale organic farmers, and striving to strengthen the organic movement by preserving high organic standards and removing financial barriers that tend to exclude smaller farms that are selling locally and directly to their customers. "

That sounds pretty good; the basic idea is that it's too hard to keep up with the requirements of the USDA Organic certification program, so they get farmers to inspect other farmers, and is easier for the smaller farmer to deal with.

What does it really mean?

I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty details of what the certification process is, or what their requirements are. You can see those on their website if your'e curious.

As with the USA organic program, I think that it's a reasonable expectation that anyone claiming to be certified actually follow the rules and practices, and, actually, that they be really certified.   I asked the following questions via email to info@naturallygrown.org, their contact address.

What do you do in the following cases:
1) A farm that claims to be Certified Naturally Grown that's never been certified by you
2) A farm that may have been CNG at some point, but is no longer, and still claims to be
3) Farms that are CNG certified, but no longer appear to be abiding by the certification agreement

I received the following response from Alice Varon, Executive Director of CNG

"...In situations 1 and 2, we ask them to discontinue using our name and logo. In situation 3, it depends on the particulars, such as whether it's a willful violation or a misunderstanding, how serious the breach, and whether they will change their practices."

I did a bit of searching, and found a farm that was claiming to be Certified Naturally grown. I went to that farms website and found several references to being certified, along with a picture of their certification certificate.   To keep this on point, I'm not going to mention the name of the farm, but it's a pretty big name on the internet.

I then went to CNGs website and looked up that farm. No listing as certified by farm name, or even in the same state. I was a bit confused by this, and wrote Ms. Varon asking for clarification:

Me: "I've looked at cng.com at length and cannot find a profile for , which apparently has been certified in the past. Can you verify that is no longer CNG certified?

Ms. Varon: "That is correct, they are no longer certified"

I provided Ms. Varon a link to the certification certificate, the farms name, and other information on 12-23-2011. As of today, about two weeks later, the claims remain on their website, and as far as the consumer can tell they're still Certified Naturally grown.

Ok. So they were certified at some point in the past. Maybe their certification lapsed recently. I asked Ms Varon about that directly. Three times. I finally got this answer:

Ms. Varon: "...Regarding , we don't provide information about farms that are not currently certified with our program."

Here's the biggest problem I have with this:

1) No apparent action taken when they are put on notice that a farm is violating their policy.

2) No way for the consumer to know why a farms certification was removed. Was it bad practices? Bad husbandry?   I'd like to know why a farm is no longer certified. Voluntary? Who knows?

3) And finally, because of this organizations reliance on farmers inspecting other farmers, I'm a little skeptical that their standards are being uniformly applied across all of their certified farms.

Summary:

Third party certification programs have standards are are, basically, random. I think of them as little trade groups; special interest groups, not much different than the big agriculture farm lobby. They're out to sell you a story, same as any other brand in advertising.

There's basically no history behind CNG with respect to a farm. If you want to see what a particular farms records are, you're out of luck.   Contrast that to government based certification -- open government laws mean that if you really want to, you can look at just about any document that they have on file about a particular farm. Not so with these guys. They won't even tell me the dates of certification, reason for it being pulled, or anything about a farms records. Have they lost their certification many times? No one knows. Strike that. CNG knows, but they won't tell.

They take no apparent action when put on notice that a farm is violating their policies. That is inexcusable.

Farmer-to-farmer inspections are a little suspect, in my opinion. Remember that CNG is about creating a brand. The last thing that most brands want is any sort of controversy about their brand, or standards. In my opinion, if I'm inspecting the guy down the road, and he is inspecting me, well, there's a lot of reasons that I can think of that I might overlook a practice or lapse.    I can't even tell who did the inspection of any particular farm. Anonymity is the enemy of public trust.

I'd give CNG a solid D rating as a certification organization, based on these issues.   Sounds good on paper, but the implementation sucks.

The learning curve

2012-01-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

There are areas of my farm that you really don't want to drive a tractor at this time of year. We're about halfway through the wet season, and the ground has had three months of rain to soak up. One of the farmhands decided that he'd drive down the fenceline, using the tractor to retrieve a calf dome that he wanted to use to house some chickens.

What he didn't know is that down that fenceline is an old drainage ditch that's overgrown. He thought that the new tractor was OK with puddles; but it wasn't a puddle. It was deep.

When I got the call last night I was downtown, working my day job, and headed in to see what I had to do to get the tractor out. Sometimes by stacking stuff under the front loader you can generate enough lift to get the front tires out of the mud, throw a couple of hay bales in under them, and then back up -- as you back off the hay bales under the front tires it helps you get grip with the rear, and you "paddle" with the front loader, and the combination will get you out. But not this time. As we lifted the front of the tractor it slid farther down the mud and deeper into the drainage ditch, and tilted pretty alarmingly. After a couple of hours of this, I shut it down for the night -- too dangerous to work after dark on this. Propping the front loader on a pile of hay bales, I went home.

I never sleep well when I've got equipment in the mud, and so I got up early in the morning, headed down to the farm, and worked off my energy doing some chores.

After looking at it in the morning, I had the culprit attach a chain to the draw bar on the back of the stuck tractor. This involved basically shoveling freezing muck out of the way, and then reaching your entire arm into freezing water up to the shoulder to scoop handfuls of freezing muck out of the way, and then to run the chain through the attachment. One way you learn not to do this is to have to fix what you've done. I'm pretty sure that the message got through.

Once the chain was in, I brought the other big tractor over, and the proceeded to paddle with the front loader and use the tires in very low gear, and pull with the other tractor. The combination of all of that managed to pull the stuck tractor out.

It was entirely covered with mud, pretty much up to the bottom of the cab. Pressure washing time, inspect to see what sort of damage was done, and back to work.

This is the main reason that I'm inclined to keep two big tractors around. They can pull each other out of the soup.

Final concrete

2012-01-05T02:03:00.000-08:00

I know, you're probably bored by now, but I'm glad to have gotten the hard (and most expensive) part of the new barn complete. The slab is down, level and turned out pretty nicely.

30' wide by 80' long.

It's strong enough to walk on now, but I'll wait two or three weeks for it to cure before putting any weight on it. At this point we can use it to bend the hoops that will form the roof. I've already got the ecology blocks on site. With the hoops bent and brackets fabricated it'll take a day or so to stack the walls and roof it. Really looking forward to having it done.

Todays progress on barn

2012-01-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

The holidays have complicated the barn construction; gravel pits are closed, concrete suppliers won't deliver, people want days off. That's one thing that I do miss about working an office job; Friday used to be the day before I got a couple of days off. Now the only reason I noticed it's Friday is that the bank is open later, and Saturday and Sundays are when the bank isn't open.

The slab is turning out pretty nicely. What we've poured is 18' x 80'; we still have the last 12' section to pour, and then some additional flatwork around it; since I'm doing the work, I might as well put concrete around the faucets and around the water shutoff valve and so on, basically make everything neat and tidy

...and harder for the hired hands to run over or snap off or otherwise break. We've had a rash of stuff get broken.

The slab is pretty flat; the water you see in the distance is 1/16' of an inch deep at the deepest point (I measured it to see if I needed to do some rework there -- that's fine) and we've managed to get it down between downpours. No freezing weather on the forecast; lows in the 40s for the next few days, so by the time it gets around to freezing again the concrete should be fine.

I had a comment about animals and tracks. I've got a few geese that are mostly pasture ornaments (well, not mostly. They are pasture ornaments) and they've been the worst offenders. You can see some goose tracks across the slab.

Glad that this part is getting close to finished. One more pour and the hard part will be done. The rest of it will go up pretty quickly -- as in 1-day quickly.

first part of floor complete

2011-12-29T17:17:00.000-08:00

Completed about 1/3rd of the barn floor today; decided to do a small pour to allow everyone to get used to the process. Sean and Carlos haven't done a slab of this size before, and pouring concrete is a complicated dance.

The first step isn't shown, where we screed the concrete -- get it to a rough level. To do that efficiently, you need three guys. One on either end of the board that is moved along the top of the forms, and a third guy with a shovel to move concrete in to fill in any dips or gaps that show up.

Once the concrete is screed, you float it with a bull float to get the basic surface started. In these photos both of those steps have been completed.

We're cutting expansion joints in every 8' along the slab, so it basically breaks the concrete into 8'x10' tiles. As it swells and shrinks due to heat or cold, the expansion joints allow space for it, and prevent cracks. Actually, it'll probably crack at the expansion joints. It's more correct to say it's going to crack, and the expansion joints direct that crack to a particular place.

Once the joints have been cut in, we bull float it again to cover them up. The joint is still there; it's just covered with a thin layer. We do that so that if the slab doesn't crack it provides a smooth, crack-free surface to make cleaning easier in the future.

We're building the floor absolutely flat, and it turned out really nicely, but...

it started to rain pretty hard. So we had to...

Edge the slab, which provides a rounded corner on the edges, both looks nice and prevents chipping, and then...

cover the finished sections with plastic. We'll pour the center portion tomorrow, and the final 1/3rd we'll probably pour on Wednesday. Everything is closed on Monday.

Good day today. Got a lot accomplished.

Todays task: Final prep for barn floor

2011-12-28T21:50:00.000-08:00

Spent today doing the final tasks in preparation for pouring concrete tomorrow. Here Red tests the level.

The plastic does two things; one, it prevents the concrete from drying too quickly, resulting in a stronger floor, and two it prevents the movement of liquids either up or down.

The mesh is to provide reinforcement of the concrete when it's being pulled apart. Steel works well under tension, concrete works well under compression, and when you combine the two you get a much stronger, more durable slab. The mesh will prevent cracks from spreading, too.

The total floor size is 80' x 30' -- we'll pour 8' x 80' of it tomorrow, which is about what a concrete truck will hold. That'll give the crew a chance to learn their jobs and practice a little. My brother Bryan and I have poured large slabs before, but none of the other people who will be working have, and there's technique that you have to learn and timing.

Friday we'll pour the rest of the slab - 22' x 80', and it will be a long day.

Ethanol subsidy ends!

2011-12-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

The 30-year old subsidy on corn ethanol has been cut from the latest budget, saving taxpayers around $6 billion a year. The total cost of the program is estimated at $45 billion dollars since 1980.

I'm really glad to hear that. Food should be for eating, not for fuel.

You'll find the orginal story here.

A quote

2011-12-27T13:41:00.000-08:00

"Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country."

William Jennings Bryan, 1860-1925.

I think about this every time I wonder why we're so intent on flooding or destroying farmland in Western Washington.

USDA organic: What does it really mean?

2011-12-26T22:17:00.000-08:00

I'm very interested in where my food comes from, and I'm very interested in how it gets produced. In fact, I'm so interested that I started farming mostly as a reaction to the anonymity of the food that most of the US consumers eat.
But I'm pretty extreme -- not everyone starts their own farms to eat better. Most people who are concerned about animal welfare use the words on the packaged food to inform them about their food, and that's a good thing. Informed choice driving your purchases is how you can make a direct change to our food industry.

One of the most widespread types of certification is that offered by the USDA, specifically the USDA Organic Certification process.

   I'm not going to go into the details of how you get certified, or talk to you about what the standards are, or whether they're worthwhile, or even if it's been co-opted by industry. Those are all valid topics but I'm going to focus on one thing here:

Whatever the standards are, I think it's very important that people actually follow them.

If you promise me that you're certified organic I, and every other customer of yours, have every reason to expect you to follow the guidelines and maintain the standards.

Doubts about the USDA Organic certification

The primary problem that I've had with the USDA Organic label is that they have had several instances where food producers have not followed the standards of production, the USDA has been put on notice that they have not, and it has taken YEARS in some cases for any action to be taken.

Let me repeat: Known violations, claims that the products are organic, no consequence to the producers.

Typically food that is labeled organic is sold at a higher price than food that is not, so there's actually an economic advantage to be had by labeling food that is produced non-organically as organic. This has shown up at farmers markets, for instance, where vendors have been buying conventionally produced produce and selling it as local, organic produce, and pocketing the difference.

This was the case with an Oregon man, Harold Chase, who made more than $450,000 selling corn that he claimed was organic, which turned out to be conventionally raised corn. This corn was used to produce "organic" animal feed and products.   That $450,000 he made was the markup that organic corn is given over conventional corn -- it's pure profit.   When you can make that kind of money in a relatively low-profit business like farming, you'll see more of this. The economic incentive is just too big.

Our food system is made up of a whole chain of people, and when any link on that chain is compromised it makes the efforts of everyone else worthless.

Lets imagine that everything along the whole chain went right. The food was produced organically, it was correctly harvested, it was shipped and stored correctly, and it arrived into the back of your local supermarket in perfect shape.

It can get messed up right before you buy it. Here's an example of organic produce being mixed with conventional, in violation of the USDA Organics rules. Yes, it might seem that stacking organic and non-organic vegetables next to one another is no big deal, but again

If you claim organic certification, I expect you to follow the rules

My single largest complaint about the USDA Organics program is that the enforcement of the rules and the investigation of the violations isn't effective enough to give me any confidence that the standards are being upheld at any point in the supply chain.

Here's what you can do to help

The easiest place to start is going to be at farmers markets. I'd like you to take the time to ask the vendors about their farms and their practices -- specifically, if they're certified USDA organic.    If you notice a vendor that seems a little vague about their product practices, talk to the manager at the market about your concerns, and take the time to report your concerns to the USDA.

Yes, you may report people who are indeed organic, but it's also true that this sort of report is often the ONLY way that the violators are caught.   Error on the side of caution. Expect that they follow the rules.

Report suspected USDA Organic violations

A little farming

2011-12-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

Well, between the government agencies, employee issues and lawsuits, I get to do a little farming.

This is the view from the end of the large greenhouse, doing its offseason job of providing livestock shelter. I'm doing a deep-litter type approach here -- there's about a foot of fresh wood chips under the pigs. There's one large feeder in with the pigs, and two outside the pen that we'll rotate in as its consumed.

(To see the greenhouse in the main use, click here. )

I run a panel across the greenhouse, and woven-wire fencing along the edges to keep the pigs off the plastic, and to keep any pigs that get out of the electric fence in the greenhouse.

These little guys are small enough that they can slip under the electric fence setup we have, but I don't worry about them too much. They mostly snooze and hang around the extra feeders, and eventually will usually go back in with the main herd, but they're well-contained by the greenhouse and no bother to me, so I let them be.

Here's the view from the middle of the greenhouse back towards the feeders. There's 75 or so pigs in this pen. I've set it up this way so that there's an alley for the tractor all the way along one side; makes it easier to bring in new chips or supplies as needed. Once the pigs have been on this side of the greenhouse for a while, I'll move the alley to the other size.

At this time of year we have to deal with the automatic waterers freezing, and we do that by switching to smaller bowls of water. I don't use a trough here because of the varying sizes of pigs; the smaller ones have a hard time dealing with the height of the trough, but everyone can drink out of the bowls. They'll turn the bowls over and wet the wood chips, and this is where I'll need to add more chips, I note.

the space is big enough that the pigs can spread out and have some alone time, or cuddle up. When they sleep like this I know that the bedding is warm enough that they don't feel the need to cuddle up; the wood chips compost and provide heat for the pigs, and the warmer and nicer the bedding, the less feed they consume to put on weight. Plus I like to see lazy, contented pigs snoozing and grumbling and basically having a nice winter day together.

Followup on my missing fence charger & tools

2011-12-23T22:07:00.000-08:00

I've written before about my irritation at having some of my equipment and tools taken by an ex employee, and I thought that I'd post an update to the situation.

We achieved personal service on Isaac Dozier tonight for a small court claim for the value of the tools and equipment, plus court costs and fees. Our first court date is set for January 23rd. I was present at the serving to identify Isaac for the process server. We found him having dinner with his friends at The Conway Pub. Which does have very good pan friend oysters, by the way.

He seemed pretty surprised to see me and the process server, but that's OK. Merry Christmas, Isaac.

I've asked him to return my equipment and tools via voicemail, email, US-Mail and in an in-person visit, where I saw my equipment in use by him. At this point it's a matter of principle. See you in court, Isaac.

His friends weren't sure what was going on at first, but when they read the sign i was holding they got the idea. They started to laugh. Does this stuff happen to Isaac often? He spent the next 45 minutes explaining to his friends why he was being sued. Kinda put a damper on his get-together, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. He left the state for a month and a half, and this was his get-together with his friends to tell them about his trip; there were about 20 of them there. Glad to provide more stuff to talk about.

About the only thing he said was..."Brruuuce?". Yep, Isaac. You got served.

Health Department: Public disclosure results

2011-12-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

One thing about most regulatory actions is that it's handy to see what information they have on you. In Washington and many other states, the government has a duty to disclose public records.

I've written a short entry about public disclosure, which basically describes what I've done here, and why I did it, and gives you links so that you can do it if you wish. I think that public disclosure is a very valuable tool. Sunshine is good.

The file contained about 100 pages. You'll find some of the pictures here, with commentary, and you'll find the working notes here, again with commentary.

Summary:

Enforcement folks really take a dim view of anyone questioning their authority or conclusions. They commonly respond to anything they perceive as resistance by trying to make the matter bigger. In this case Kathy Pierson of the Snohomish Health Department called every single agency she could in the hope that she would be able to get them interested in enforcing something else, and spent weeks on this effort.

I fully believe that fruit and vegetables fed to pigs are not regulated by the health district, any more than an apple fed to a horse. They disagree. And they're doing their level best to make sure that I change my mind to agree with them.

What happens when an official is mad at you

2011-12-21T23:59:00.003-08:00

In general, enforcement agents DO NOT like it when you don't agree with their interpretation of the law. Anything but complete compliance to whatever it is that they deem important is considered to be resistance, and resistance is to be stamped out at any cost.

So in the document above, Kathy contacts every single other agency she can think of that might have some interest in enforcing anything.

She calls the washington state Veterinarian, who confirms to her that they did an on-site inspection of my operation, found that I was feeding fruit and vegetables and found no violation and that in their opinion I'm not feeding garbage as defined by federal law. (garbage must be cooked, fruit/veges do not need to be cooked)

She calls the Snohomish County Planning and Development services enforcement officer for my area, who apparently can't think of anything he can charge me with or enforce.

She calls the Snohomish county animal control, who says that while animals occasionally get loose there's no issues of neglect or cruelty, and that they've been observing me for 3 years.

This has to be a little frustrating for Kathy at this point. She'd like to find SOMEONE to do more enforcement of me. So she comes out on 7-21-2011 to find that I'm... still feeding my pigs fruits and vegetables. This annoys her to no end, I think. She notes that the goats like the produce, too.

So she calls the snohomish county water quality hotline and reports me to them, talks to three people doing so. Unfortunately I'm more than 500 feet from the water, so that doesn't pan out.

So kathy calls the surface water management department, apparently hoping that I'm violating something there. No dice.

I'm guessing at this point she's wracking her brain. What other agency can she call?

She has done her level best to involve every other agency she can possibly involve. Unfortunately, they either don't have a dog in this fight, or they've already decided that I'm fully compliant OR they've regulated me to the maximum extent possible.

The ecogeek reference at the top of the page is for this article, which talks about the difficulties companies are having finding local producers of meat. You'll find the article here.

Kathy, if you want to know why local meat producers are scarce, look in the mirror.

Current status: They'll postpone any action for 6 months in contemplation of a farm plan.

The original complaint correspondence

2011-12-21T23:59:00.002-08:00

The document below is the reason that the health department gave for the redaction

Kathy Pierson contacted every agency that should could think of that might have an interest. One of the agencies, the Snohomish County Animal control refers her to my blog. Glad to see they're readers!

The complainant sends more pictures.

And then creates a photobucket page with the pictures on it. Coincidentally, all of those pictures showed up on Isaac Doziers facebook page. Wonder how that happened?

They're having trouble communicating. But it's nice to know that he's trying hard to be helpful.

It's funny. Here's Kathy telling the fellow how to get a copy of the file. NO problem - here ya go!

Dealing with regulators: Public Disclosure requests

2011-12-21T23:59:00.001-08:00

Click on the picture for a bigger version

In Washington State we have a pretty comprehensive public disclosure law that allows you to ask for and recieve public documents. A complaint about your farm (or my farm!) is a public document, but so are the files, documents,pictures, emails and other materials that have been collected.

You can get these materials at any time. In this case I asked for, and recieved, these materials during the the health departments active investigation. They do reserve the right to redact (edit) some of the materials, but they typically tell you why the did so.

In this case they removed the email address of the person who made the complaint, but left the contents of the complaints themselves. My guess is that the person who complained called in, and then followed up that phone call with email.

If you have been afflicted with a zoning, health department, Department of ecology or other agency request and would like to see what they're looking at, I reccomend a public disclosure request. At a minimum cost (in this case, I think I paid $15, copying costs) it provides you with information that you may find useful.

Each agency usually has a public disclosure officer whos job it is to process these requests. Each agency will vary a little in how they want you to submit your request (use our form, send it via email, write a letter, that sort of thing), but it's easy, and cheap, and I've found that having this sort of disclosure allows me to make better decisions about how I choose to proceed.

You can also use public disclosure to look at government conduct towards other landowners. For instance -- if your neighbor is allowed to do something that you are being prohibited from, how did they do that? A public records request for their permit, complaint resolution or other documents will give you a roadmap for how it might be done.

With that said, if you're going to go into a gunfight, you need a gun. I have found that my results are better when represented by an attorney. I'll start the research myself, so that i have a basic understanding of the issue, and if it looks like it might be serious, I will tend to hire an attorney. You get more respect at the table, unfortunately. Just being a citizen or landowner doesn't really matter to these guys.

Washington state public record act - the law

The complete scoop on obtaining public records from the Washington State Attorney General

Pictures from the file

2011-12-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

The fellow in front of the blue tractor is Isaac Dozier.

This file contained a number of pictures, two of which I've posted above. So far no surprises there; yep, we feed fruits and vegetables to pigs. Yep, we dump the material, and then distribute it via tractor to various groups of pigs around the farm.

Yep, the uneaten portion is mixed with more wood chips and windrowed, eventually composting. We get a few tons a day, on average, so on any given day you'll find some fruit or vegetables in each stage: Just delivered, fed to pigs, post-pig, composted. One thing that the pictures do is to give you an idea of what they're looking at. The hand-written notes also help.

This is an interesting picture. The county road, to the left side, is impervious. When it rains the water runs off it. When the county did the road they didn't raise it above the area around it, nor did they install a ditch to contain the runoff from the road. So when the health department comes over and takes this picture, road runoff is assumed to have come from my property.

My experience has been that if you ask one of these enforcement people about what they're after, they're often very coy about it. It's a double-secret violation -- why, if they told you, you might correct the violation. I can't say what they're thinking, but I've been left with that impression repeatedly.

Here the health department is looking at google maps, but notice that they're looking at a line that is 200' from the front of the property. The statute that they cited me with says that I have to be 200' from any water, so I think they're doing the math and found out that I'm more than 500' from any water. They have been very rigorous in their examination of my farm. I'm curious if they consider grazing animals a violation. I'll have to ask them. No stone left unturned.

Farm pricing - what's fair for a pig in 2011?

2011-12-20T03:01:00.000-08:00

I was watching one of those reality shows; the one I was watching was a fellow who goes into failing restaurants, looks at their operations and rehabs them for $10,000.

He's a pretty rude fellow overall, but it maintains my interest because honesty is interesting.   The places he's working with are typically a few months from bankruptcy, and given the glide path will probably go out of business anyways, so they at least have a better shot. (At the end they'll do a little followup on what happened to the particular place, about half fail anyways)

So he's needling a woman about her handling of the restaurant, and ends up asking her a question that I thought was interesting.

"How do you price your food?" he asks. She replies she doesn't really know. "Well, with most places they take the cost of the food, and then triple it, and that's the cost of the finished dish.   So in the case of these crab cakes, your food cost is $6.80. So a retail price for that dish is $20.40". Oh, ok, she says. "but you are charging them $18 for that dish, so you're losing $2 per dish. How long can you do that?"

As I watched this unfold, I realized it had a strong echo in how I see a lot of the small farms around here price. They sell their production at a price that I cannot understand.

So here's a little writeup on pork costs, using the ratio they described.

Feed is $440 a ton right now -- darned high. It takes 800lbs or so of feed to bring a pig from wean to market weight. That's $176. The weaner pig itself sells for about $80 around here. Adding the two together ($176+$80), you get $256.

Then multiple by three gives you $768.   If we were a restaurant, we'd need to charge $768 for the pig, and we'd expect the customer to pay 10 to 15% more than that to the guy who handled the order- their tip.    Wow. What Would I have to do to get the customer to tip my farmhands?

Well, you're probably thinking that the restaurant has to pay rent, and has labor costs, and has to buy dishes, and advertise and... wait a second. My farm has rent, labor costs, tools and materials.

Lets see what I'm charging for pigs these days:

$2.25/lb hanging weight, or roughly $450 for a full-sized pig. Add to that the kill fee for the farm kill, at $55, and the likely cut and wrap costs (200lbs at $0.65/lb, $130) and you end up with a consumer cost of... $635, and we are STILL under the standard markup for your average restaurant.

Farming is a business, and like any other, the basic way it works is to sell things for more than it costs you to produce. Examining your business by the standards in other businesses is good. And this exercise leaves me feeling like we're undercharging.

Lest you think that restaurants are particularly high priced; most items at retail are marked up 50% over their cost to the retailer.

Slab talk: Finished gravel

2011-12-15T16:00:00.000-08:00

About done with the slab base. The picture below shows the progression. On the left at the edge is the 2" rock, and then there's a layer of 5/8" minus rock in the center, forming a 2" raised area, to reduce the amount of concrete needed for this slab.

and here's the finished surface. I took this picture after dark because it's a lot easier to check the level after dark -- you can see the laser level better. This surface is plus or minus .25", so we're good. A couple of simple forms, and we're ready to pour.

Oh - THATS where the piglets are!

2011-12-14T16:00:00.000-08:00

I'm working on the chores, and about lunch time I stop and go to close up the gate so I can go run some errands and eat lunch. A sow and her piglets had been hanging out close to me while I worked, and as a matter of habit I looked for her, and counted her piglets, and came up 3 short.

Our fences are good at keeping full sized pigs in, but piglets are a different matter. They can fit through pretty small holes, but I don't worry about them too much because they mostly stick close to their mother and they don't cause any problems. Kinda fun to watch them run around. But where are the 3 missing piglets?

So I'm looking everywhere, and I see something odd on top of the pile of wood chips. I can't quite make out... it's a piglet! Ok. (so click on the first picture, and you can see the piglets ears sticking up just a little to the right of center, at the top of the pile.

And I get closer, and sure enough, there's a piglet, snoozing on top of this 15' pile of wood chips. In fact, all three missing piglets are napping up there.

They're taking advantage of the heat coming off the pile; quite a bit of heat, as a matter of fact. They're napping in the warm updraft.

So I stop, and think about it, and then go about my errands and lunch. Enjoy your warm nap, piglets.

90 gallons of soy milk

2011-12-13T16:00:00.000-08:00

One of the readers here called and asked if I'd like 90 gallons of soy milk. Sure, I'm always up for good quality food for the pigs; what's wrong with it? Getting close to expiration date is fine. We'll be right over.

Of course there's a small catch. It's packaged in cases, about a quart per container, 12 containers per case. But we've developed a system for this.

First, slice the top of the case off. Yes, it says no cut on it, but we're experts. Professionals. We can do this stuff. Then cut a slit into the top of each row of boxes. Make that 4 slits.

Ignore the cap. We'll leave it attached. We hate plastic caps, and if it's attached to the rest of the box it won't go into some animal somewhere. Ok. Open the flaps and...

Pour the whole case into a handy container. Here we use the 30 gallon garbage cans; that's our single-serving size, pig style.

It really makes a nice foam when it's poured like this. Smells good, too. Yummy vanilla flavor.

lets see. There are 240 calories per box, 12 boxes per case... that's roughly 3,000 calories per case. We have a hundred cases.... yep, Score! Thank you!

Lovely foam. Let's see what they put into this stuff.

Pure, natural, organic. Nothing but the best for the piggies.

I should have taken pictures of the pigs drinking this. I did, but my camera malfunctioned. But thank you, and it was appreciated. Every pig got a 2,000 calorie soy milk boost today.

A roundup of pig prices and market notes

2011-12-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

Pig prices are seasonal; winter piglets are cheaper than summer. I look at prices every now and then to see what the market is.

Market in December, 2011:
Northwestern Washington (Bellingham area), $75-85 (two producers)
Central Washington (Tacoma-Everett), $80-100 (five producers)
Olympic Pennisula and coast (Sequim, montesano) $75-100 (three producers)
Eastern Washington (Wenatchee, Yakima) $40-110 (nine producers)
Eastern Washington (Spokane) $65-100 (four producers)
Southern Washington (Vancouver, portland OR) $60-$75 (four producers)
Southern Washington (tri-cities) $75-$100

Notes:
Prices this year are generally higher than they've been in the past years. As with most years, there are some producers that don't want to raise a pig in the winter, and they're selling the pigs cheap; happens every year. I sell a lot of finished pigs in the spring because there's not much local supply.

My price for my weaners is $80; this isn't the lowest price, nor is it the highest. For breeding stock I'll charge a significant premium; what folks are buying is the hand-selection and special care of the pigs.

Some of the ads talk about show pigs, fair pigs, ffa pigs or 4h pigs. Most of those ads are from folks who are looking to sell pigs in a few months. Those ads are also listing the highest prices.

Right now is about the lowest weaner pig prices of the year. The highest prices are usually March-May, and my guess this year is that we'll see $125 to $150 a pig average price this season. There's not as much production locally, mostly because of feed prices. Most pig farmers that I know of reduced their herds to a bare minimum when the feed prices spiked, and feed prices haven't gone done.

For those of you raising pigs, remember that people eat pork all year, and Easter hams are popular. Stay the course, watch your costs, and charge an appropriate amount to make a fair profit.

For my own operation I'm selling a steady stream of finished pigs and a few piglets, but the majority of my production is being finished for sale in early 2012.

Solstice pups: Airedales

2011-12-12T16:00:00.000-08:00

Kat has had a nice litter of pups that will be weaned just in time for Solstice.

She's a little camera shy, but soon warms up. Cup in the picture for reference.

There are 10 pups, 6 boys and 4 girls. eyes are open and they're eating food. A whole pile of puppies.

Soon to be under a tree near you!

Natures harmony farm stops podcasting

2011-12-11T23:51:00.001-08:00

A few years ago I ran into a blog that I liked quite a bit; natures harmony seemed like just the sort of thing that I liked to read. Animal-centered, with a plain style and dealing with some of the topics that I'm interested in reading. Animals for food, with a homesteading sort of bent.

Some of their content was particularly good. Their turkey slaughter video is one of the best that I'd seen to date, and I liked that they seemed to be interested in experimenting with their farm. It's interesting to me to see people try new things, and to succeed, and fail.

Every now and then Tim would wander over to my blog, and he'd comment on his blog about something I was doing, and I'd do the same; we have no connection and are farms are thousands of miles apart, but it was interesting to see his viewpoint -- which could be pretty extreme at times. It was annoying that Tim would start a controversial subject, and then ban everyone who disagreed with him, and it happened to me, too. I forget what I got banned about... I think he posted a topic asking whether chicken tractors were inhumane, and I responded that fences on cow pastures must be, too. That got me banned.

Over the last year or two they've chosen to go in a direction that hasn't been very interesting to me; they've been busy shrinking their farming business; reducing their production of pigs to personal use levels, and chickens, and giving away their equipment.

I had to laugh when they were talking about spending more time with each other and Tim chose the hardest type of farming, in my opinion -- dairy. It's a relentless, 365 day a year job that allows no vacations, no sick time and is not really a social activity. Maybe the cheese tastings will make up for it. Dunno.

At this point I'm not really sure what they're selling. Their webpage has items that I know are no longer for sale.

One thing that I'll give them credit for is calling an end to things. A lot of blogs and podcasts just stop recording; Tim and Liz have made a formal end to each of their endeavors; the blog, the podcast, and I suspect at some point they'll call an end to their farm, but I enjoyed them while they were here.

Natures harmony blog
Natures harmony podcast

Thank you, Tim and Liz.

slab talk: Gravel layers and "thickened" slabs

2011-12-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Working on the slab, here's the progression for today. Below you'll find a picture of the recycled concrete base layer. Pretty big chunks. We'll use that to bring the base to a few inches of the desired gravel level.

You can really only get as close to the level desired as the size of the rock. so if you're using 2-4, it's pretty hard to get closer than 4". So the next layer is 2" clear, which is much smaller and more uniform. Using that I can get within 2" of the desired level. (yes, you can do a lot of work to get it smoothed down and really pound it into the ground, but that's a lot of labor. )

Here's the same area, now with layer of 2" rock on it. It's within an inch of the desired grade. I'm working hard on getting the grade right because concrete is very expensive -- about $80/yard, delivered. Crushed stone is $13/yard. An extra 1 inch of depth would cost me $640 -- for every inch!
The next step will be to put an even smaller crushed rock in the center of the slab, raising the center of the gravel 2" or so.

What the picture above shows you is two slabs. For this particular project, I don't need the entire slab to be 6" thick; I need the edges of the slab to be strong, strong enough that they can support 10,000lbs of ecology blocks, and I need the edges not to crack under the weight of the tractor, that weighs 12,000lbs. But the center of the slab won't need to be that strong -- 4" of reinforced concrete with a well-compacted base should be just fine.

So my first step is to level the entire site with the gravel, and then I'll add 2" of height in the center of the slab, and by doing so reduce the total amount of concrete that I need by close to 9 yards -- a whole concrete truck. Doing the math it reduces my cost about $650, net.

You can do this sort of thing if your grade is very good. When I'm done I'll be within 1/4" tolerance on my grade. If I wasn't sure about my grade, I'd go thicker just on general principle.

Too many people grade with concrete. Sure, it works, but it's a terribly expensive way to fill a hole. Gravel is pretty easy to work with, and much cheaper.

Just a note: For each size of gravel laid I'm carefully spreading it, measuring it with the laser level, and then running the compactor on it. So every inch of this gravel will have had at least 3 compactor runs over it before I'm done.

Farmers note: Going to garden this year?

2011-12-11T02:44:00.001-08:00

The seed companies have been seeing increasing demand for all sorts of seeds. If you're going to grow something this year, even popular varieties of staple crops do run out. So now is the time to go pore through the seed catalogs and figure out what will be growing in your ground next year.

Now is the time.

The Russian way of scraping a pig

2011-12-10T19:00:00.001-08:00

I can't really say if this is THE Russian way, but it's the way that the three Russians wanted to do it when they bought a pig today.

What we usually do when scraping a pig this size is to boil 30 gallons of water, and then use a bucket to ladle the water onto the pig, scraping the hair off as we go. These guys didn't want to use the water method, asking if they could use the propane torch we use to heat the water.

"ok, you go to youtube, and you search 'ukrainian pig scraping', and you see what to do". Wait a second -- I thought you said you were from Russia -- so you're Ukrainian? "No, no, he is from Ukraine, I am from Belarus, former soviet union". Ok. So you're Belarusian? "No, when you are 16 they ask you what you are, and he and I speak Russian, so we said we were Russian, but I could have said Ukrainian or whatever". Ok. So where you're from is whatever you said when you were 16? "yes, in the past, now is countries. "

They'd burn the hair off, and then the skin would blacken, and they'd keep going until it was pretty black, and then lay a wet towel over it, and scrape off all of the singed area.

After they'd scraped it, they blackened the whole pig again and scraped it again. The end result was a pig that was kind of yellow colored and hair-free. The hot water method results in a white pig.

With the skin charred, a hot towel was applied and then the char was scrubbed off.

We gave them the standard cake spatulas we use.

"Can we use that?" pointing to my hay barn. No, you can't use that, this is where we process the pigs. "no, the, how you say it... the grass, in the barn" the hay? the bales of hay? "yes! yes! we light fire with hay, and it burns, and I like the taste of the meat when it is that way" So you burn off the hair with burning hay? "yes, you break the bundle and put it on the pig" using hands he makes a pyramid, showing the hay stacked on the pig. "high, like this!, and then burn it, and it is tradition!"

Sure, if you want to do that, I'll sell you a bale for $6. "Ok! maybe next time! "

Took about 2 hours for them to get the pig into the shape that they were happy with, about the same amount of time for a boiled-water scald.

Kinda fun to learn about the customs and traditions. These guys had watched as children as their parents processed pigs, and missed it. This was their re-connection to their roots.

(note: We put the pig on pallets to allow the water to drain as it was scrubbed, and to keep the concrete from cracking from the heat of the torch. )

Ok, you wanted concrete, concrete you're gonna get

2011-12-08T20:07:00.001-08:00

It's funny, I've been reading in the local papers about a "sustainable" starbucks franchise that's being constructed from shipping containers. Sustainable is a funny term; and its pretty meaningless at this point. I mention that because one of the materials that I like to use underneath concrete is recycled crushed concrete, which you'll see in the picture above. I use it in place of large rock. To get it to act right though you have to top it with a smaller crushed rock -- the crushed concrete is pretty rounded, and won't lock together. A topping of 2" clear crushed rock will filter into the cracks around each chunk of the concrete, and make a very nice surface for your slab.

Dirt is cheaper than rock, rock is cheaper than concrete. The first step is to remove all of the loose dirt, and then replace with rock. I use the rock to bring the entire area to the same level. With these concrete chunks my goal is to get it within 2" of level. I'll get closer later in the process.

The harley rake (on the back of the tractor above) is a power rake -- it has a spinning element in it, and it really does a nice job of making the rock bed smooth and level.

I'll run the harley rake across it, and then do another pass lengthwise to remove any windrow remaining.

After that we go over it using a laser level (not shown) and a surveyor stick (I don't know what it's called; its a telescoping stick with measurements on it). We'll work down the surface, add an inch or two of gravel here, take it away there. The slab is going to be 80' x 30'. At this point the surface is +- 1" of level. We'll add the grade we want the finished concrete to be when we do the forming.

So here's what the health department complaint has cost me:
$560 for gravel of various sizes
$93 for a plate compactor
$250 labor (so far)
$3,100 in legal fees.

I'm doing the slab because I am *really* tired of having to rebed my entire pig herd every other day. This slab will be both a concrete feeding area per the health department complaint, and a shelter big enough to fit my entire herd into, and managed as a deep litter system.

I'll post some pictures of the smaller gravel application, forming and pour when we do it. I'm actually looking forward to having the concrete -- despite the fact that I'm annoyed at the health department, I do like the idea of having more of the food go into the hogs and less into the mud.

I'm still not decided what I'll do about the health department complaint. I'm mulling my options.

If you buy an apple and feed it to a pig, is that solid waste?

2011-11-30T00:39:00.001-08:00

In August the Snohomish county Health Department (SCHD) received a complaint about my farm.
For background, I wrote about the original complaint here, and then a followup here, and then wrote about a farm visit here. Farm visit: I took the health department representative, two conservation district reps and my attorney, and we walked all over the farm and looked at anything they wanted to look at.

This is the view of my side of the table. Katherine is on the left, and Mike, her supervisor, is on the right, and we're talking about the complaint. Not shown is my attorney, who is sitting immediately to my right.

Solid waste on display in a supermarket

I think when I started my farm I had visions of growing things, and working with animals, and was a bit worried about flood season, and that it would be hard work. The hardest part of farming for me is the constant regulatory activity. Joel Salatin wrote a book entitled "Everything I want to do is illegal" and I have to say that I really, really agree with him. There is nothing that I can do that isn't regulated by someone.

Ok, So we're sitting at this table, and we're talking about what I feed my pigs. The health department doesn't like me feeding my pigs fruits and vegetables. They'd rather I switch to a commercial feed; mike, the fellow on the right, made that suggestion.   If I fed a commercial feed, the health department would be just fine with me.   No violation, no enforcement, done.
Ok.   You're skeptical. I'm a little surprised too. So I ask a question. If I took a 50lb bag of pig feed, and poured it on the ground, would the health department object to that? No, says both Katherine and Mike. that'd be fine. Ok. If I took a ton (2,000lbs) of pig feed, and poured it on the ground, and the pigs ate it, would that be a problem? Again, no. Unanimous.

So I asked: "If I went to safeway, and I purchased an apple, and I took that apple and fed it to my pigs by throwing it on the ground, would you object to that?" No, they would not. " Ok, what if I got a 10lb sack of apples and dumped the apples on the ground. Would that be a violation of any law? " Yes.

One of these is not solid waste. Or is it?

What law would I be violating? "You would be improperly handling solid waste", says Katherine. Ok. I don't understand. When I purchase the apple from safeway, is that apple solid waste? No. Ok. I transport that apple in my car to my farm, and I feed the apple to the pig. Is that solid waste?

We have crossed the solid waste line. Or maybe not. No one knows.

"Mr. King, we'd like you to comply with the law. This discussion is getting us nowhere. We will not discuss this matter further."

Commercial pig feed is made out of mostly corn and soybean meal. It's processed vegetables. I can feed as much of that as I like, where ever I like, and it's all ok. I can throw processed vegetables on the ground. Is the health department paid by Cargill?

But apples are solid waste. Well, somehow they become solid waste. Somehow. But they can't tell me when, where or how they do.

Actual picture of the fruit I fed my pigs an hour after the meeting. I am thankful that there are only 2 apples in this picture.

Oh dear. There are three apples.

UPDATE: It's not just Washington State. Here's a story from Missouri about a fellow who was not allowed to feed vegetables raised on his own farm to his pigs. His blog entry about the situation.

I sure wish it would freeze

2011-11-28T23:37:00.001-08:00

We're out of the growing season now; any greenery that we have on the farm is what we'll have until next spring. This is the time of year that we start breaking out the hay, and putting the animals into sacrifice areas or barns for the winter; to prevent the sod from being cut up by hooves.

When it freezes life on the farm actually gets easier for me. Yes, there's the chore of breaking the ice off the trough and getting water to various animals, but it makes the ground solid and the tractor doesn't sink in or make ruts. We are very close to the sea, so we get a marine climate. A hard freeze is usually a day or two, and then back to the refrigerator zone -- about 40 degrees f, the temperature you keep your refrigerator at.

When it's a hard freeze it means the animals bedding stays dry, in better shape. I think that they sleep better; the piglets stack themselves and squeal and grumble a little. If they're chilled they cuddle up to mom; who is 400lbs of sleeping piglet love.

The main pig herd sleeps together, touching sometimes, but out in the open. Given the choice between a shelter and the open sky, when its cold, the pigs sleep under the stars. Even if it's snowing, which surprises me. You can see the frozen ground in the upper left hand corner of this picture. It's cold, but this is what the pigs prefer.

We also get a fair number of sea birds and migratory birds that use our fields for sleeping. These swimming birds can't really roost, and I think that they come in and sleep on the fields because it's relatively safe from predators. These seagulls have chosen a field that is entirely surrounded by field fence, and they're a good 100' from anything that could hide a coyote. About the only thing that could get them are eagles. These might be migrating, but I don't think so. I think they're just resident gulls that are taking a break from their usual haunts. Wish that they'd eat some starlings.

The story of the turkey buying club (part 2)

2011-11-27T00:31:00.001-08:00

This is my first experience with raising the broad breasted turkeys -- I've been raising the heritage turkeys for the past few years -- and they're a bit like the cornish-cross meat birds. You have to watch to make sure that they don't overeat, and they're generally not as oriented as the heritage breeds.

We feed the turkeys a higher-protein feed, usually called a "game bird starter" or "turkey starter", from a local mill, and in July we were about done with that.

So far so good: We're in July, birds are due end of November; only 4 more months.

We had a predator issue in August, four turkeys committed suicide in September -- and now I'm getting worried about having enough turkeys to fill the order. I started watching them carefully.

Feed prices spiked in the summer; what we used to pay $300 a ton for was now $450 a ton. The problem with contract growing is that this risk is pretty much on my end; I didn't think to negotiate an escalator on feed prices, which I'll do next time.

We're into October now, and things are looking good for the delivery. But I'm noticing that the broad breasted, as they get larger, are starting to sit on the ground most of the day. This is wearing the feathers off their breasts, which doesn't look good, but doesn't harm the birds, but it's different than the heritage breeds.

Finally we get to November; and I staff a turkey processing line, and get the equipment in order, and schedule it. Unfortunately the pickup date for the buying club is the same as for my other customers, which complicates things for delivery. Hmmm... have to work out the calendar together next time.

We started processing this batch of turkeys and found that the tub plucker we used wasn't doing a very good job of removing the feathers, and it ripped the skin on a couple of birds -- which is not what you want. You want to deliver a perfect bird, so we had to pluck these birds by hand. Every one.

Hand plucking a turkey takes about 3 times as long, and the problem with the broad-breasted birds is that where they'd worn off the feathers on their breasts we had to, one by one, individually pluck out each feather with tweezers.

Oh yea. One of my guys called in and said his car was dead, couldn't make it.

Three days of tediously detailed hand-plucking and processing turkeys.

Oh. And during this time we're getting 4 inches of rain. And we're outside during most of this. And it's truly miserable. I mean really bad. Sean and Dan get full credit for showing up for work; heck, I own the farm and I didn't want to get out of bed.

So we get a call, and I explain that I'm running late, and I actually am about 2 hours late for the pickup, but to make things better I dispatch a truck of turkeys to the buying clubs other pickup point (30 miles southeast) and drive the turkeys myself to the main pickup point.

So I'm soaking wet. I've been up to my elbows in turkey blood and guts and feathers. This little turkey flock has been more work than any other turkeys I've ever done, and they're mad that I'm late. I apologize, and they ask me if I can do anything to make it better.

And I look at the woman, and I think about it, and I realize that I'm not going to make a dime off this whole 7 month experiment; between the extra labor costs for plucking, the slower gain, higher feed costs and so on... and I say "yea, I can take $5 per turkey off".

Here's my take-home lesson:

* $3 a pound for a delivered turkey is too little. I should have charged $3 a pound for the turkey and then another $100 for delivery for each location. Or maybe just say $4/lb. At $4/lb I would have had another $600 margin to play with, which would have covered my feed and unexpected labor costs.
* 8 months of work isn't really appreciated if you're a couple of hours late. Next time I'll slaughter earlier and keep the birds chilled. No missing deadlines. Being on time is important.
* Heritage birds are easier in all respects for my farm and staff to deal with. And the margins are better.

The story of the turkey buying club (part 1)

2011-11-23T21:15:00.001-08:00

I got a call this march or april from a lady in Seattle who wanted to arrange a basket of local products from local producers, and was interested in whether I could supply the turkeys.

I get this sort of call all the time; lots of people are interested in local food, and the idea of a group purchase seems to make sense. Often times you'll get a better price, but the downside is that you have to agree to buy large quantities.

So I talked with her for a while, and she said she was after 30 turkeys; I told her that we usually don't take orders for turkeys before October 1st, but if she was willing to put down the $20 deposit per bird that I'd order extra poults and raise them for her project.

Now that's where most of the people vanish; hundreds of dollars tends to make it real, and I was surprised when I got the $600 a few days later. Guess I'm raising her turkeys.

I called her back and we talked a bit more about the turkeys; did she want heritage ($6/lb) or broad breasted ($3/lb), and she wasn't sure. So I asked what weight people wanted. In my area, for a young bird, the heritage turkeys top out at about 16lbs, and the average is probably closer to 12.

This is particularly true when we have cold, wet springs. And speaking of that, 2011 was the coldest, wettest springs ever recorded in Western Washington. The long term forcast for 2012 is the same, so I'm expecting more of the same this coming year.

So she thought about it, and said 16-20lb, and that the broad breasted was what she wanted to go to keep the costs down, and I noted that, and then upped my order of turkey poults to cover that.

Now lets talk a little about turkey poults from the hatchery. We've had batches that have arrived with no problems, and we've had batches that have had 75% mortality. I'm talking about dead in the box on arrival, or within 24 hours of arrival. It's been my experience that we will get a bad batch from hatcheries randomly, which is a bit of a problem for me. I'm aiming to produce a fixed number of birds, and I really don't want to over-order.

So what I do now, for the broad broad breasted, is I buy them from a local feed store at their asking price. I did the math, and even marked up by the feedstore, it's cheaper on average for me to buy them than it is to deal with the random mortality. The feedstores in my area must think I'm an animal hoarder; I'll walk in, find a bin of likely looking poults, and buy them all. A short trip in the cab of the truck, and they're warm and safe in the brooder, and the turkey slog begins.

I call it the turkey slog because it's a marathon, and it starts on the day the turkey poults arrive. As I put each into the brooder I dip their beak into the water, and then watch to make sure that they're walking around, and then move the next poult. After they're all in the brooder, I'll tap at the feed container, which sounds like pecking to the little poults, and they'll all gather around my finger and then peck at the feeder. Some of them miss, and accidentally get their beaks into the feed, and you can see the little turkey wheels turning in their heads. Once a couple have figured out how to eat, they teach the rest.

If the batch of turkeys is particularly slow, I'll put a chicken chick in with them, as a learning aid for the little turkeys. Chickens don't have to be taught to eat or drink, and the turkeys will do better by imitating the little chicken.

I want to put the turkeys on pasture as soon as I can, and the weather this last spring just did not cooperate at all. Not one bit. Cold. rain. Rain. Cold. Little turkeys do ok with cold once they're feathered out but they cannot get wet; you can lose your entire flock in a rainy night. It's a myth that turkeys look up and open their mouths in rain and drown. it's not a myth that a wet turkey will probably not make it.

So I struggled with the turkeys in April and May and June. June, when it should be warm and sunny, wasn't. Better housing for the turkeys, more bedding, bringing turkeys indoors when they weren't doing well, this little contract flock took a lot of individual attention. More so than my usual heritage birds. A lot more.

Next: A summer of discontent

"young farmers", subsidies and enabling

2011-11-13T00:53:00.001-08:00

The new york times has an article today about the difficulties of young farmers; particularly the difficulty they have in getting land to farm.

It's not just young farmers. Land, which is what farms are made out of, is expensive to people of all ages.   I'd much rather they said "new farmers" and not focus on the "young" part.

I think that struck me about the article is the feeling that someone should, by virtue of a desire to farm, be helped to farm. Now while I'm generally for people getting into farming, I also get the echo of the housing bubble we just went through.   The desire to own a big house isn't reason enough to loan you the money.

I feel that you also have to have the experience and commitment to farm. The article points out that apprenticeships are valuable to young farmers, and that's great, but it comes in many forms.   One way that it works is that you go out and make a living doing something else while you save up the money to start your farm. A fellow I know worked as an electrical engineer to put himself through medical school. Took him 10 years, but he came out a new resident with ZERO student loans.

Oh yea. He had to earn a degree as an electrical engineer first.   I'll let you imagine how he paid for that. Amazingly talented guy.

Most of the farm blogs that I read are written by people who made enough with off-farm jobs to be able to afford to farm -- because, as the old joke goes, to make a small fortune farming, you start with a large fortune. I feel like you have to be able to afford to farm; and that's something that the "people should be able to farm if they want to with a lot of help" crowd hates.

Most American farmers farm as their second job. The "town" job provides the health insurance and a steady income, and covers the bills when the farm doesn't, and makes the mortgage payments.

In their example they cite a couple who grossed $60,000 by their third season. By small business standards, that's below tiny. And they do that on 49 acres that were subsidized by two conservation groups.

What I find most wrong about that is that the conservation groups are, in effect, enabling this couple to lead a life that, based on that gross, is probably below the poverty level. I certainly don't want to have to compete against them.

How about we work with the couple to come up with a plan to make market rate land pay a living wage? Because when we can do that, we won't have to pay people via subsidies to farm. It'll be a way of life and living, like any other occupation choice.

You'll find the new york times article here.

The downside of hiring farm help: Isaac Dozier

2011-11-12T17:23:00.001-08:00

I hired Isaac earlier this year to work on my farm. He did well in the interview, and seemed like a nice enough fellow at the time.

Now I've had lots of experience with hiring and firing folks, and when folks call me for a reference, what I can say legally is a bit constrained. It's a my-word-against-their-word sort of deal, and I don't really want to get into a pissing match with someone, so I don't say much.

Isaacs last day was in July sometime, and as usual I got the paperwork from the state about his application for unemployment benefits, which I thought was a bit odd as he'd only worked for me for a month or two, but whatever. I filled it out accurately and sent it in. There are good reasons to make sure that you're paying people above the table. I use a payroll company to figure the deductions and so on for just this sort of situation.

Somewhere around then I was looking for an electric fence charger, a big 200 mile beast that costs around $600. I had hung it on a peg and I couldn't find it, and a brand-new weedburner, too. Come to find out that both items were last seen with Isaac, and that had been a few days before his last day. So I emailed Isaac and asked him for it back. No response. I then called him and asked him for it back. No response to voicemail. I wrote a letter (US MAIL) and sent that to him, with no response.

Finally I drove out to his house - he lives with his mother, and there was my charger. Hanging on the fence, right next to the house.   Fine. I walked up to the door, and knocked, and when he came to the door I said I'd come for my charger and could he go get my weedburner?  I walked over to the fence and unhooked it.    Well, it didn't go over very well with his family. His mother is screaming at me: "You touched me! I have witnesses! You touched me! His brother Paul is doing the chest bump with me (which is kinda funny as the top of pauls head is nipple high on me, and I had a hard time not laughing at that) and Isaac just stood in the background "I'm calling the police". Please do, Isaac.   I told his mother that this was my fence charger and that I wanted it back. Paul ripped the charger from my hands, and I thought about it, and then got in my car and drove to the end of their driveway. I called the Skagit county sheriff, and talked to the officer who'd been assigned, and asked what he thought i should do.

"Well, " says the officer, "I asked them why you were there. They said they didn't know, and something about equipment" and I explained about the charger and then said "well, I'd be happy to have my charger back and call it a day" and the sheriff said "yea, I told them that it'd be simpler just to return it".

Ok Sheriff. What should I do? Can I file a theft report with you? "No, you have to do it in the jurisdiction where the theft occurred. How much is the charger worth? " $600. "Oh wow. That's a felony case, then. Why don't they return it? "   I don't know, officer. In my opinion they appear to be an entire family of nitwits. The sheriff laughed.

So I wrote a US MAIL letter and mailed it, requesting that they return my charger in the next 7 days or I'd be forced to file a felony theft report, as I had no other option. I waited 2 weeks for a reply. Nothing.

I then got a wage complaint from L&I, where it was claimed that I'd shorted him on his pay. I checked his paychecks, and the hours worked, and then again, and I'd paid him for all of the time he'd worked. I sent the state the copy of the paychecks Isaac had cashed.

So a couple of days ago I got several comments on my blog.

Is this the "Humane Pig Farm" Bruce speaks so highly of? http://s1208.photobucket.com/albums/cc380/tomthebomb5/

And I looked at those photos that are a mix of photos that I've used in my blog and some other photos. The timing of the photos is right... yea. It was when Isaac was working. And the photos aren't what I'd consider cute farm photos.   From the data on the photos I figure it it was Isaac who took them, and the stuff that he's taking pictures of he's supposed to be taking care of.

But that's not really enough, so I go over to facebook and look at Isaacs facebook page.

I then look at where the pictures came from, via the IP#. It's from the mobile carrier that Isaac uses. Pictures that were taken on a day he was scheduled to work during his shift, from his phone, and posted on his facebook page.

So I write Isaac an email. Hey, if you want to say something to me, or to the folks on my blog, why not just write it? I promise not to edit or censor anything you say. Say whatever you'd like, and I'll publish it. No response, as usual. So I send a message to his girlfriend asking that she get ahold of him and let him know I'm interested in whatever he has to say. No response there, either.

Isaac, farming is a pretty small community. Most everyone knows everyone else. I was out on the tractor one day when I got a call.

"Hey, is this Bruce?"

Yes, who's this? This is xxxx from the yyyy dairy. You run a pig farm down there, right? "

Yep, I do. Whats up?

"Did you have a kid named Isaac work for you? "

Why. Yes. I. Did.

"Can I ask you about his work".

gosh, I'd love to, but I can only say his hire date, and last day. But if you asked me, I could tell you whether we'd rehire him.

"Ok then. Would you rehire him? "

NO.

"Is there anything else that I should know about him that you can tell me?"

You near a computer? "yes". Ok, his facebook profile name is idozier4509, I'd look at the entry on his wall on May 20th.

"bong?"

yea, that's what it says. I'd ask him what he means by that.

"Horse tranquilizers? He's kidding, right?"

I can't say what this guy is thinking, honestly. You'd have to ask him.

"I think I have what I need. Thanks for your time, Bruce. "

No problem.

Isaac, I'd really like my fence charger and weed burner back.

Hoophouse - bending conduit, attempt 1

2011-11-11T20:26:00.001-08:00

I've been working on the hoophouse, and specifically on bending hoops to the right diameter. I want a continuous, smooth curve from one side to the other. So I took a smaller, thinner pipe, 40' of it, and bent it into a smooth hoop, shown above. I then used a pencil to trace the curve onto a piece of plywood, and found that in an 8' run, it was 8" from the top of the curve to the edge of the plywood.

What I'm going to do is cut multiple curves out of that plywood or any scrap wood I've got around. Anchor one end of the pipe, and then bend it to that curve.

I borrowed a friends hydraulic tube bender to this bend. It's a $400 tool, but if you want to make gates or hoophouses or anything else that requires corners, you'll probably want one of these. In this case this is the bend from the base of the tube straight down to the ground. You do this so that you can put up your hoophouse by driving larger pipes in, and then just slipping this pipe into it.

The pipe shown here is galvanized fence top rail. I don't know if it'll work with the heavier rigid conduit, but i'll be trying that tomorrow. I think that it will -- because of leverage.

Bending a 2' length of pipe is very difficult. Bending a 20' length of pipe is much easier; the moment arm is so much longer.

Progress on the farm

2011-11-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

I've got to give a hand to Dan and Sean. With their help, Andrea and I have made real progress towards getting rid of the clutter around the farm. Let's take a look at some before-and-after pictures.

March 2011

Ugh. Lets see. Two trailers (big white one to rear, small white one on right rear) silo, and random stuff in no particular order.

November 2011; silo moved, and trailers parked. An untidy pile of buckets on the right, small trailer disposed of (My brother Bryan had me store it for him, but I finally got him to get rid of it). The trailers provide work areas for stuff we do. We use them like big work tables. the double decker stock trailer in the rear of this picture doubles as a dog kennel -- it's 8' wide x 30' long, and so it's got more room than most dog kennels, and it's easy to clean.

A major cleanup project was the front pasture. My property was junkyard about 50 years ago, and there's still quite a bit of metal in the ground. Every year something else surfaces, so I decided that I'd get serious about cleaning up the front paddock.

These big springs must have been really popular in the 40s. this is about the 15th one I pulled out that day.

Differentials haven't changed much. Maybe this one is to a model T. Don't really know, off to recycling it went.

After plowing, raking, tilling, raking and then rolling, it's flat, level and pretty darn clean.

The final step was to plant it, and I'm gratified to see the new grass coming up.

It should be beautiful pasture next summer.

2011-11-09T18:51:00.000-08:00

Question from Email:

"Hi Bruce, I have 4 pigs; 3 sows and a boar, and we just had our first litter. Unfortunately, none of the 11 pigs that were born survived. We have them in a shelter on pasture, and I'm wondering what your experience has been with giving birth on pasture?

Thanks, Mike"

Sorry to hear that you lost a litter, but don't blame yourself too much. If you have and keep animals you'll lose some despite your best intentions. I've written quite a bit about my experiences with losing pigs. Do a search for farrowing (upper left hand corner of the blog window) and you'll see at least 50 entries about this. I've thought about this a lot, and I've had a lot of experience with it on my operations.

Fair warning: We are talking about piglet mortality here -- so there will be pictures of dead piglets in this entry.

Farrowing in a shelter

This is a sow that farrowed in an 8x16' shelter that I constructed from plywood and heavy timber. The bedding is dry and warm, and relatively level. There's plenty of room for the sow and the piglets. But she's managed to lay on most of her litter overnight.

There's still a live one back against the plywood behind her, and she's protective of it -- but she's pressing it against the plywood too. This shelter might be improved with "pig rails" - boards that are nailed to keep the sow away from the walls by 8" or so so she can't press the piglets against the wall, but the three that are dead (center of the picture, above) got squished in the center of the shelter -- probably under her as she rolled over.

Farrowing in a calf dome

Before I build that shelter, I tried portable calf domes. They weigh about 100lbs, they're 7' across, and about 5' high. Bedded with hay or wood chips, they provide excellent shelter.

But the problem I've had over and over again is no matter how well I bed them or try to stake them down or block them down, the sows love to move them around. A sow is in a different world from a piglet -- she's hot on all but the coolest days, insulated by a thick layer of fat. So she pushes the dome around until she can find some mud and then typically lays down in it. It's a disaster when she has her pigs into the cold mud.

It's heartbreaking.

So what we've switch to is farrowing crates. The sow is confined for a week or so while her piglets get big enough and agile enough to dodge her. Once we're sure that everyone is doing ok they go to a transition pen -- a fenced pen with a calf dome in it.

Here's a sow in a transition pen. After this we wean the piglets and them usually put them in a sale pen until they're sold. For those that we're going to be finishing we wean them, put them in separate housing for a couple of weeks to make sure that they're weaned, and then out with the rest of the herd they go. If we let the piglets continue to suckle on mom past 6 weeks they take her out of condition -- takes quite a few calories to feed 10 growing pigs.

We've been gradually increasing the number of farrowing crates to be able to handle the groups of sows farrowing. Having a sow in a crate is actually more work for me than having them in a pen or with the herd. I'm not doing this because it's easier, I'm doing it to save the pigs lives. I've picked up too many buckets of dead piglets. I'm done with that.

Retiring the herd boar

2011-11-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

Saying hello at the fenceline

Nose to tail, about 8'. Probably 800lbs.

Socializing with th pink boar at the fence line.

All good things must come to an end. My main herd boar past his prime in the last couple of years, and while I'm fond of him, it's time to go. He's sired more than a thousand nice pigs, and his genetics are well-represented in my herd.

I never did name him. He was always just "The Boar", and I've always been careful around him, but he's given me no reason for concern during his time here.

For the last 6 months or so he's been pretty sedentary; preferring to sit in any mud he can find, and while he'll occasionally mate, he's not as into it as he was when he was a few years old.

At this point he's one of five boars we keep, so we'll be well-covered as far as boars go, but what I'll probably do next is get a good berkshire boar to replace him, to increase the percentage of berkshire in our herd.

I do appreciate this animal, and hate to see him go, but it's time, and past time.

Thank you, Boar.

Hoophouses are generalists

2011-11-09T18:05:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that I'm interested in hoophouses as a basic farm building is that they're darned useful. If you need a roof over your head, or to store stuff, or to grow things, or to shelter animals, they're pretty nice. In the picture above we've got an earlier batch of replacement gilts in the small hoophouse. My only problem with this particular hoophouse is that we have to rebed it by hand. You can see that it gets a bit wet around the water dishes, and in this case the pigs have chosen to dung against the back wall, so that's a bit sloppy, too.

Later, some laying hens that are molting. We bring in 2x4s to provide roosting for these girls. Without feathers it gets kinda chilly. They appreciate the shelter.

That top picture was a while ago; here's the same pig, about 3 times the size and about ready to become a mom.

and her buddies. They all got a great head start by having better shelter when they were younger. That's one of the reasons I'm working on another hoophouse. Better winter housing.

Replacement gilts / marking pigs / breeding / handling

2011-11-08T01:39:00.000-08:00

We sorted through 800 piglets to find the 15 that will be our replacement gilts; and when I say sorted, I mean we got down and counted nipples and inspected every inch of those 800 piglets.

This little group of pigs has been getting very special treatment. A gilt is a virgin pig; when she has a litter, she is then considered a sow. We actually sorted out and selected 17, but 2 of those didn't make the cut this time, and so we're ear tagging 15 of them. Andrea is carefully leaning over to tag the left ear. We tag the left ear as a standard. If the tag falls out there's a hole in the left ear, and we check that before we take pigs to market as a fail-safe. We raise the breeders with the other pigs and separate at market time.

We tag the pigs so that we can track their progress, health and litter characteristics. If you're going to be breeding, you want to be able to identify each animal, and since we've got 5 people who work with these pigs, we need to be able to say "hey, #57 looks like she's about due; can you look at her?"

We use the hog panels you see in these pictures pretty much everywhere. They're the duct tape of hog operations. In this case the pen itself is formed with hog panels, and then we've brought a spare one in to form a temporary pen inside the larger pen, so that we don't have to chase the pigs around while we're tagging them.

When you have 200 to 400 pigs around at any given time, it's hard to remember the details of each ones history. Records are important.

Marking pigs can take many forms; ear notching is pretty common. In the bigger hog farms, tattoos are used. We don't tag the majority of the animals; just the breeders, and we don't retain very many. 15 out of 800 is about 1.8%, which is in keeping the the philosophy that you only breed the very best.

It's pretty common on pig farms, especially on those that are raising heritage breeds, to believe that anything that comes out of a sow is breeding material. If you're going to be serious about saving a breed, I think you should be serious about improving it, too. And you do that by learning to evaluate a pig at various ages, and by tracking your results.

Your desired results can vary. For me, I want calm, good mothers who work well on pasture and wean a large percentage of their litters. A couple of these pigs were chosen because they were particularly friendly; temperament is important to me, too.

These guys are F1 yorkshire/hampshire cross piglets. that means that two purebred animals were used to produce them. I've found that they make good mothers, and I'll be crossing them with a purebred berkshire boar to produce my market piglets.

Building a hoophouse from scratch: Initial design

2011-11-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at temporary buildings to house my pigs during the rainy season, and a hoophouse seems to be the best candidate.

For my purposes, a building that can be used for multiple purposes is ideal. In the fall and winter, housing livestock. In the spring and summer, growing things. As a bonus, the deep-litter system that I'm going to try will produce (in theory) good compost, which, helpfully, will be placed right where it's going to be used -- in the greenhouse. Sounds good, right?

I'm going to go a little more expensive in my design by having the greenhouse itself rest on ecology blocks. I'm going to do that so that I use my tractor to move materials into and out of the greenhouse. The easier I can make the maintenance the better it is -- and the more likely that it will get done.

So the project breaks down into three parts:

1) Initial design.   How big will it be, what materials will I use, and what will it cost? How much of each material will I need, and where do I get them from?

2) Fabrication.   Taking the pipes that form the framework, how do I bend and form them so that they form the hoops that I need.   Addition of additional pipes and bracing to make the structure stronger. Placement of the ecology blocks and anchoring the structure to them. Covering the whole thing in plastic. Securing the plastic.

3) Pig prep: Additions to the building that make it likely to survive curious pigs and amenities to make it easier on the farmer -- food and water handling, access doors, and so on.

Initial design
On my farm I have never said "gosh, this building is too large". Ever. With that said, the cost of building a bigger building, or the biggest you can afford, is often well worth it. If nothing else you'll have extra space -- and that's often pretty handy for things you didn't know about. Extra space in your greenhouse means you can store your soils and amendments there, for instance.

Choosing a hoop size
With hoophouses the limiting factor is the size of the plastic cover available, and basic math. Here's an example of a supplier of greenhouse plastic in my area, and from that I can see that I can get plastic sheets in sizes up to 100'x48', and no bigger. Here's a table of greenhouse sizes and the maximum hoop size for each one:

Plastic cover width/Max hoop size
48'/30'
40'/25'
36'/23'
32'/20'
20'/13'
16'/10'

Other covering choices considered:
You can get larger covers; they're called hay tarps, and you can order them in any size. there are also fabric barns that get their fabric from somewhere; I chose to do a transparent plastic covering because I want to use it as a greenhouse, too. If I were doing a permanent pig barn, I'd seriously consider figuring out who makes the coverings for fabric barn resellers and getting a light colored fabric cover made.

I'm assuming that the plastic covers the entire arch, from end to end, as well. You could shorten it a bit with a pony wall.

The shape of the hoop is strongest if it's a smooth, even arch all the way across. These calculations assume that the shape of the hoop is half of a perfect circle.    Here's how I calculated it:

Width of desired hoop / 2 * 3.1415

Note: You might need ladders or scaffolding
This also means that if I have a 30' wide barn, the top of the hoop in the center will be 15' tall. Assembly will require some way to get up there to do the work of putting it together. More on that later. With a traditional use as a greenhouse it would be very difficult to use that extra height. If I were designing to only grow plants and had smaller equipment, I'd consider a shorter greenhouse.

Will it work with the tractor?
With a circle, as you get closer to the edge you'll loose ceiling height, which for me is important to note. I want to get pretty close to the edge of the building with my tractor. The ceiling will be 10' tall 5' in from the base of the hoop. which means that if I put the hoops on 2' ecology blocks, I should be able to get within 2 feet of the wall, which is close enough for me.

(How did I figure that out? The old fashioned way. I drew a circle on graph paper using a pencil and a piece of string.   Each square on the graph paper represented 5', and after I drew it I could look to see where the pencil line and graph paper line intersected. You can print graph paper online. )

How much material do I need?
I cheated a little. The picture at the top of this entry is a commercial greenhouse that I bought used, so I've got it as a reference point for building this one; it helps that I've already put one of these together and pretty much know what's involved, and that the design has proven durable enough for my climate.

I'm going to use a 4' hoop spacing, and I'm going to NOT use the truss system that the other greenhouse used. I'm going to try using a heavier, larger pipe to eliminate the need for trusses for tractor clearance purposes.

So here's the math:

Length of complete hoop house / hoop spacing = number of hoops
Width of each hoop / 2 * 3.1415 = length of each hoop
length of each hoop / pipe length = number of feet of pipe you'll need.

For this project: 80' long / 4' spacing = 20 hoops
30' wide hoops / 2 * 3.1415 = 47.1 feet per hoop (round up)
48 / 10' pipe length = 5 sticks of pipe per hoop (round up)

100 10' long pipes will form the hoops

You'll also want purlins -- pipes that run the length of the structure, usually one on either side, and one along the top. The design I'm looking at (see picture at top) has 5 of them. Two on each side, one along the top. I'm going to copy that directly.

80' x 5 = 400' of purlin, or 40 10' lengths.
Purlins can be smaller than the hoop pipe. I'm going to be using 1.5" or larger pipes for the hoops, but the purlins will be smaller: 1 3/8" pipe, or 1" pipe. The purpose of the purlin is the keep the hoops in position to stiffen the structure.

One thing that the greenhouse design doesn't have is diagonal bracing at either end. I'm going to add diagonal braces to strengthen the ends of this structure, one on each corner. I want the braces to be attached to 4 hoops, so I'm going to make them about 20' long, each.

80' of purlin-sized pipe for diagonal bracing.

Prices and sources; next entry.

The new tractor!

2011-11-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

Just bought a (new to me) tractor, a Kubota M125x. It's a 2008, and has 300 hours showing; to me that's a brand-new tractor. As part of the proof the paint hasn't been worn off the front loader...

It's pretty close in size to the Kubota 9580 we've been using as our farm tractor, but the 9580 is in the shop getting a new clutch installed, and I ran across this one local. After a bit of haggling we settled on a price that neither of us were thrilled about (I thought it was too much, they thought it was to little) and sealed the deal by adding 3 finished pigs to it. So for some cash and 3 pigs, the tractor is mine. It's pretty hard to price tractors. Even the same year and model will have asking prices that vary by 25%.

The front loader is rated to lift 4,000lbs, and there's a forklift that quick-attaches on to the loader so that you can handle pallets easily -- which I'm looking forward to. The bucket in these pictures is 8' wide and 30" high, which doesn't seem like much...

until you get the scale of it by looking at the picture above. That's Dan standing in the bucket, loading some 33 gallon garbage cans of chips. A heaping load in the front loader seems to be about a cubic yard, or maybe a yard and a half, which means moving the chips around just got a lot faster.

For areas where we want to rebed, but cannot get the tractor in, we'll fill garbage cans with chips as chore buckets, and then move the chips in the can to where they're needed. In this case the chicken coop needed some new chips. Toss the cans into the bucket, drive the tractor to the chip pile, fill the cans, load them on the front loader and return to the chicken coop.

The rear tires are filled with calcium, and that provides extra weight to counterbalance the front loader. So far I'm pretty happy with the tractor.

Unfortunately for me, a million small birds decided to roost on it last night, and I'm going to have to pressure wash it off. I really need a garage.

Free vegetable seeds

2011-11-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is the winter squash season, and if you're interested in what grows well in your area, go to your local farmers market and take a look.

I love these acorn squash, and the variety that's grown around here is abundant. These two squash were $1 each, about $0.25/lb. Roasted with some brown sugar and butter, in a hearty soup; mashed or grilled. They're a favorite. And my pigs like them, too. They'll root around and pick these squash out over their other favorite -- apples.

Each squash comes with a money-saving tip inside. The seeds. Each squash provides enough seeds for all of the squash that I'd like next growing season.

Slice open the squash, scoop the seeds out, and spread on a paper towel. Dry overnight, store in a cool, dry place. And next spring you'll be all set to plant -- with fresh seeds.

Some of the varieties of vegetables are hybrids, so your results may vary a bit, but the price is right, and if you're buying local, you know that this variety is suited to your climate.

And the same applies to all of the other winter squash. Eat your favorite, and then grow it!

The 1%, OWS and ...npr?

2011-11-04T01:41:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I've noticed when I listen to NPR is their almost slavish reporting of the down jones number. Every day they faithfully recite the change, as if it means anything at all to most people. The stock market is largely irrelevant in my life; up, down, sideways, who cares?

I do nothing different on a day when it's up 1% than I do when it's down 5%. I don't care what the number is, but they report on it as if there's a vital need for me to know it. Somehow knowing this number will improve my life...

Some days they don't even give you the total, assuming smugly that of course you know the total if it's up 178 points.

Meaningless waste of time. And they've devoted hundreds or thousands of hours on it.

Maybe if you're watching the DJI and it does change your mood you'd be happier if you just... didn't.

If you'd like to help NPR, and specifically, "all things considered" change this, write them a note and ask that they read my comment on the air.

You can write that note here. Feel free to provide them a link to this posting. In fact, I'd appreciate it.

Deep litter pig housing, part 2

2011-11-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the pig shelter. The parameters I'm after:

1) No exotic parts. Everything comes from a local hardware store.
2) Cheap, but durable enough to survive pigs and time.
3) Easy to repair -- stuff gets broken.
4) Allows equipment to drive through

I think version 1 of the pig shelter will be a variation on a hoop house. Metal tubing bent into arches with a tarp or fabric roof, and eventually I'll anchor it to ecology blocks.

I've looked at a variety of metal tubing sources; most small hoop houses are made of toprail pipe -- this is the pipe that is used as the top of a chain link fence. It comes in 10' lengths, and is swaged on one end, so that you can fit the pipes together by sliding one into the other. Here's a picture of the big greenhouse that I put up a few years ago

This is a commercial greenhouse that I bought used, and then assembled on my property. What the manufacturer did was have every other hoop in this design have a truss. You can see them in the picture. A truss makes the arch much stiffer and stronger. I mention this because this hoophouse has been through three snowy winters here, and 15 snowy winters in eastern washington. So this is one version of a hoop that will survive the local weather conditions.

Another way to strengthen the hoop is to use either a bigger diameter pipe, or a thicker walled pipe, or both. Toprail is 1 3/8" in diameter, and the walls are 17 gauge. Electrical conduit comes in three different strengths - electrical metal tubing (EMT), Intermediate Metallic conduit (IMC) and Galvanized rigid conduit (GRC). I'm looking at IMC or GRC as potential material for the hoops.

As far as cost goes, toprail is about $1/foot, and GRC is about $2/foot, retail price.

Why would I go with a bigger pipe? See that truss? the tractor has to fit underneath it. If the truss wasn't there I'd be able to use a shorter sidewall and still be able to get the tractor inside.

Here's the tractor inside this greenhouse after completion. After working with it for a few years now, I've found that the 30' wide greenhouse is a nice size.   The weather here is cold and damp most of the year, and I've found the greenhouse to be really nice to work inside. It's light, and usually 20 degrees warmer than the outside. The plastic seems to be pretty durable, too; 4 year rated plastic is still going strong after 6 years on my first greenhouse.

The more I think of it, the more I think that i'll go for a 30' wide pig barn.

As far as coverings go, the greenhouse has a big drawback in the late spring through early fall: It gets too hot for pigs. On a partly sunny day it can hit 100 degrees, and on a sunny day it tops out at 135 degrees.   pigs don't do well at that sort of temperature.   But plants seem to do fine... and that brings me to the 4 season plan: Fall and winter, pig shelter. Spring and summer: Greenhouse.

Now for the ecology blocks.   I don't know if my tractors front loader can lift an ecology block. Ideally I'd be using materials that I could move around without having to have additional material. The blocks themselves are pretty cheap - $15 - and a row of blocks on either side allows for easier cleaning with the tractor. Just lower the front loader and scrape it out. Two ecology blocks stacked means that the pigs can't reach the plastic or tubing, which is a good thing.

Grapes, piglets

2011-11-02T21:52:00.001-07:00

Processed 50lbs of concord grapes, finished it today. This was the easiest juicing that I've ever done; when we were buying the grapes the farmers learned that we had been doing it with a colander and offered to give us their processor - for free!

This is the beast. It's got 3 parts and a lid. the bottom holds the water. above that is a pot that holds the grape juice as it is produced, with a small spigot (you'll see it at the bottom in the picture above, with a plastic tube attached to it to direct the juice).

At the top of this is the colander that holds the grapes; it holds about 10lbs at a time, and produces 5.5 quarts for each batch. At the end of the process you get lovely, concentrated grape juice and the skins and seeds, below.

A cake of grape skins. We give this to the pigs at the farm. They think it's yummy.

These two little guys are at the house; the closer one is the runt of a litter that we didn't think would make it, so Andrea has been carefully nursing it back to health, and the other is a little pig that, well, doesn't seem to have anything wrong with it physically, but seems a little off mentally. Just not piglet-like, but little pigs do so much better with a buddy, so they both get to lay on their heating pad, underneath the heat lamp. I don't see how they sleep like that; they have to be roasting. Both are doing well.

Andrea is not impressed. But I checked her tongue to see if she'd been eating grapes. She passed.

Deep litter pig house: Another cold, wet winter forecast

2011-10-31T23:39:00.000-07:00

Last winter and spring was really rough on the animals, and the farmers, too.   We had huge amounts of rain and mud to deal with, and it was a constant struggle to keep the animals bedding dry. I'd like to do a better job of it this year, mostly for the animals, but for the farmer (me!) too.

The basic design that I'm going to use is influenced by this study of pig housing in finland. They have to deal with a lot colder climate than in Washington State, but I think it'll work well here.

Summary of the study:
Housing for pigs is filled with a layer of litter -- usually sawdust or wood chips, but it could be straw or any other carbon-rich material like corn stalks.

Adequate space must be supplied for each pig, so that there's enough litter to absorb the manure and urine and any uneaten food.   This study suggest 1.5 square meters per pig, which works out to 16 square feet per pig.

  The bedding area is assumed to be inside a building -- you can't have rain or outside moisture hitting the bedding. In fact, as the bedding composts, moisture will evaporate from it.

The composing of the bedding is helped by turning it once a week or so mechanically. This is in addition to the normal rooting behavior of the pigs.

The litter has to be pretty deep for this to work. They suggest starting with a 50cm (19") deep litter and adding more if it becomes wet.

The study also mentions that the time spent on the pigs is much less if you can drive through the building with your equipment instead of having to turn around.

So here's what I'm thinking:

1) Each housing area has to be tall enough and wide enough that my big tractor can drive through it when it's full of litter.   I want to minimize the amount of hand-work required to clean and rebed these pens.

2) It has to be as cheap as possible and constructed of materials that are either indestructible (ecology blocks, for instance) or easily locally replaced. Think a trip to the local hardware store vs special order territory.   Ideally I'd like the cost of housing to be on the order of $60 per unit (1,000lbs) of pig or less.

3) It has to provide good housing for all ages of pigs.

4) It has to be easily cleaned, particularly the area we feed the pigs in, given that what we feed the pigs is pretty messy at times.

5) Automatic waterers with a trough for backup during freezing weather.

I'll post my design later this week. Hope to get the first couple constructed pretty quickly.

Concord grapes

2011-10-30T00:45:00.000-07:00

Absolutely love concord grapes. Brought 100lbs back from eastern washington (was there to pick up a trailer, which I'll write about later).

Juice, jelly, and fresh. Concord grapes are super special. And at $0.50/lb, a bargain!

I'll write up the processing as we do it. Right now I'm kinda bushed. lots of driving today.

Environmental regulations: It's bad when...

2011-10-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

The border patrol has decided that the a whole bunch of laws (that the rest of us have to comply with) make their life too difficult.

The laws that they'd like to ignore are the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act and 32 other federal laws, including various wetland regulations.

They'd like to be able to ignore all of those laws within 100 miles of the border.

If the goverment can't even respect its own set of laws, why is it a reasonable expecation that the rest of us do so?

My favorite comment on this post:

"The same government that put those environmental laws in place now finds them too inconvenient to allow them to do what they think is necessary.

Of course everyone else already knew the environmental regulations were too burdensome, but they were stuck following them, wasting piles of money going through review after environmental review before being able to do even small things.

The government doesn't want to follow its own rules. They just make an exception for one agency to ignore some other agency, and they go about their business without a care in the world.

I say that if these environmental regulations aren't necessary for the Border Patrol, they should be scrapped. If they are necessary, then the Border Patrol must follow them. More realisitcally, recognize the pain points of existing environmetnal law and amend it, not just for the Border Patrol, for everyone. But none of this insider favoritism crap.

October 25, 2011 at 11:20 PM
Sandy C. "

Here, here!
You'll find the story that inspired this post here.

Not my favorite farm chore

2011-10-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

Sean learning how to clear a drain

This is a Super Vee drain cleaner, also referred to as a snake. When I built my small barn I put in floor drains, which work most of the time, but get clogged. This little beauty allows us to clear the drain, but I have got to say that it's not my favorite thing to do.

Its basically a drill with a special fitting on the front that contains a flexible metal hose with a special tip. You put it down the drain, 4" at a time, and spin it, and it clears whatevers down there. Most of what gets into the drain is a fine sediment, mostly dirt. I rented this thing from the local hardware store a few times, and then finally decided to buy one. They work great.

Next time I put in floor drains for a barn, however, I'm going to do something other than a 2" line. Maybe a full-on 3" or 4" line would work better.

Fine tuning the pasture

2011-10-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

Rain is the final test of how flat i got the pasture; and it's pretty darned flat. A few puddles here or there, none deeper than 2". So I spent part of today connecting the dots to make sure that the water drained.

To do this I've got a middle buster plow that's designed to go down a row of potatoes and turn them over for harvesting - but it works well for temporary ditches. I only have to go down an inch or two, but it's no trouble to do a deeper trench.

We seeded the majority of it by hand today; took 3 people about 90 minutes to spread 350lb of grass seed. I'll go over it with a roller to tamp the grass seed down, and then that's it until next spring.
Whew. Glad to get that done and over with.

Part of the fun

2011-10-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

On a nice fall day it's pretty fun to watch a sow take her piglets out for a stroll. She's pretty protective of them -- she knows me, and I know her, but they are her piglets, after all. So a little close scrutiny from mom and she decides that I'm the same fellow she's known all her life, not some suspicious stranger, and relaxes a little.

She's a 14 nipple sow, picked when she was a piglet for that reason, and everything seems in order. The most engorged nipples are being used by the pig, the ones that aren't so engorged are not. Pigs will pick one nipple and pretty much stick with that nipple as their private one. They're not adverse to raiding some other nipple if they're given the chance.

She wanders around, snuffling at grass and shrubs, a mouthful of grass here or there, until the piglets squeal her down. They're pretty demanding. "lay down! lay down! "

And she lays down, and they all line up, and it's dinnertime. She's closing her eyes and grunting contently while they nurse. Pretty soon, around dusk, she'll go back to her shelter and all of the little pigs will follow her in a line.

These piglets are 3 days old.

Foreclosure purchase update

2011-10-23T00:16:00.000-07:00

I purchased a property at a foreclosure auction in December of 2010. I wrote about the initial purchase here, and another entry about it where I talked about my being puzzled by the banks handling of the matter here.

And when I got a call from the bank asking if they could buy it back, I wrote about that here.

I never did hear back from the bank regarding repurchasing the house, but I did get a notice posted on the door about a month later -- they were starting foreclosure proceedings against it.

So I called the attorney and had him take care of it, and that was about it until Friday.

The auction scene. Imagine 4 other groups like this.

This building is two townhouses that share a wall. The other half of the townhouse got auctioned off on Friday, and I was the 2nd bidder on it. I bid it to $102k, and then stopped; the winning (and only other bidder) got it for $104k. Turns out that its a Canadian investment firm, buying houses down here.

The courthouse steps foreclosure auction is a little hectic. All of the trustees handle multiple accounts, and all of the auctions are simultaneous -- so I had a bit of a scramble to figure out which guy was handling my auction, allow him to verify that I had funds (certified checks or cash only, please) and wait until my property came up.

I'd guess that more than half of the properties had zero bidders and reverted to the mortgage holder, but the other half had bidders. At this auction there were 5 active bidders and I'm going to guess that they spent something on the order of $3 million at this particular auction.   I can't say what they were bidding on -- I didn't do the research on the various other properties being auctioned. Some properties had multiple bidders, some only 1.

These Canadians purchased this townhouse sight-unseen. They had never been inside it. Now I'd been inside because I was there when the bank crew secured it, but when I met them later in the day they were expecting much worse than they found.   "We've seen some bad ones. All the appliances are here, walls and floors in good shape, no damage!" said one of the guys.

So I pitched them on the idea of buying my unit so that they'd own both halves of the building.

The winners write history.

2011-10-18T02:27:00.000-07:00

I wrote a post last week about Rebecca Thistlewaite and the big bad meat company. Apparently she's had second thoughts about publishing it. You'll find a google cache of her original post here.

This is actually a problem when you look at blog archives. Most blogging software allows the author to go back and retroactively change what they wrote, and there's no easy way for the public to know that.

This is different than posting an update; I've had the experience of having someone completely rewrite what they wrote and then claim that it's the original.

As always, measure your blog by your own experience, and take any blog and any claim on the blog, with a grain of salt. Not everything written is accurate or true, and some folks won't stand behind what they've written, even if they appear to invite discussion.

Tractor travails

2011-10-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

I've been having problems with my big orange tractor for the last 2 or 3 weeks. It would work fine for a random period of time, and then stop. Since there are multiple people using the tractor, and it seemed to be out of fuel each time this happened, I chalked it up to operator error -- the guy driving the tractor not watching the fuel gauge.

The problem with that is that a diesel engine out of fuel is not as simple as a gas engine is when you go to restart it. So I trained all of the people on the farm to restart a fuel-out situation, but we kept having problems.

So I'm working on this problem, and I fill the fuel tank to the brim. I get the service manual, and I"m working through the steps to restart the engine, and I end up doing this 6 times, because the book says that if the engine does not start to repeat the steps. Each time I can get 10-15 minutes of work out of it before the engine dies.

This is really frustrating. The maintenance manual has the fuel priming sequence starting from the fuel filter forward, and so I started replacing the fuel filters, figuring that maybe the fuel had something in it causing this problem or blockage. Same behavior. 10 minutes and then it dies.

So I read the maintenance manual, and they talk about a fuel solenoid that is only open when powered, so I figure out a way to get a voltmeter in there, and it is powered, and the power doesn't flicker, so that's not the problem.

So after 8 days of this, I'm staring at the tractor, and finally start looking at the diesel fuel tank in suspicion. I disconnect the fuel line from the tank, and see if I can suck some diesel out. I cannot. So I try blowing into the tank; and it will accept air -- and suddenly the fuel starts to flow out the tube.

That's very weird. Ok, I'm going with it. maybe it's the tanks. So a jury-rigged 5 gallon diesel jug and a bit of copper tubing, and... no more problems. No problems for days. As long as I don't run off the tractor tanks it all works. Weird.

So off come the diesel tanks. Maybe it's algae, or... I don't know what. The picture below is what was found in the tanks.

It's a latex glove. it's been in there a while. So this darned thing was floating around in the tank, and would get caught in the fuel intake hose now and then. So blowing into the tank just got it off the tub, and allowed fuel to flow. When it was covering the tube, the engine would die.

We don't use these gloves at our farm at all, and the once-white glove is pretty discolored. I'm guessing that this is a factory-original glove that floated around in the tank. Mystery solved, problem solved.

My smaller tractor has had some flexing going on in the front end, and it caused the fan belt to wear a hole in the radiator tub. After fixing the rear bracket I was using the little guy to spread lime and noticed that the front loader was doing odd things. It was moving when it shouldn't. Closer inspection showed the frame of the tractor had broken. A quick look on the other side showed a similar break. Calling the tractor dealer got me a quote on the price for this part: $1300 and a week or 10 days for the part to get here. And labor costs and a few days to take it out and put it back in, for a total of maybe $1800 at shop rates.

For $1800 I don't think I'm going to replacing this part. I'll have it taken out and welded and then put the thing back together; I think I can get that done in a few days, and hopefully for less than $400.

The break on the small tractor isn't new; there's rust on the edges. What I think was happening is that over time the bolts that were holding things together snapped off, and as they did the fit got looser and looser.

I use the tractors a lot on the farm; having one out is a headache, but having both out is a big deal.

I'm hoping that the small tractor comes back in time to take the load from the big tractor, which needs to have a new clutch put in.

Messing with the pasture: inputs

2011-10-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

This is about the last time of year I can work my ground before the serious rains and mud set in, so I was out spreading lime on the pasture. The lime I'm using is in the picture above, it's been pelleted for easier application. This lime is pretty expensive; about $0.16/pound (for comparison purposes that'd make a 50lb bag about $8) and the recommended application was pretty thick. So I purchased it in 1 ton totes.

We use the big tractor (out of the picture, but you can see the chain holding the bag up that's attached to the loader) and then fill the spreader on the back of the little blue tractor, which does a pretty good job of cruising around and spreading the material. You have to keep this stuff pretty dry; any wet and it'll cake up and prevent the spreading. Spreading 1 ton takes about 20 minutes; driving it back and forth, using the tire tracts as your row markers. I ended up with 4 passes to get all 6 tones of this spread.

It sounds like a lot, but a ton over an acre is roughly what pepper looks like on an egg. I'm sweetening the soil here to help different types of grass thrive. This pasture will be the pastured-poultry area next year, and I'd like the grass to be as healthy as possible.

Tomorrow I'll spread the seed. We're applying the seed at 110lbs/acre.

Fixing the tractor

2011-10-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

I do a lot of my own work on my equipment, for economic reasons. Shop rates for tractor repairs are in the $100/hour range around here, and I'd rather pay myself that wage. When I buy a tractor, I make a point of buying the service manual for it as well. The service manuals are usually pretty comprehensive, and contain a step-by-step description of how to do things, and a troubleshooting guide.

Even if I don't do the work, the troubleshooting guide allows me to narrow it down on my own time, and if it's something that I dont' want to fix, well, I can hire it done.

Today's repair is the top link of the 3 point hitch. This is the new holland tc33d, and it's a 30hp tractor with a small backhoe that mounts to the rear. this happened at some point, but I didn't see the damage until I took the backhoe off. On closer inspection, this isn't the factory part. Maybe softer steel than factory specs?

It's an easy fix; 4 bolts... wait a second. Two of these are studs, two are bolts. And there's a 4 washers... hate that.

A lot of time when people do repair on equipment, they kinda use whatever is laying around. Which is fine when you're doing a chicken coop, but if you're dealing with load items like this, it's worth doing it correctly. I check the new holland service manual for bolt torques and the whether it specifies a particular grade for the stud, and I'm off to Champion Bolts in Everett.

So a quick trip to the bolt store comes up with the appropriate length and grade of stud, and a little fiddling, and it's back to factory spec.

Champion bolts in Everett has been a real resource for me, as both of my tractors are metric, and the local hardware stores, even the big box ones, have a limited selection, and it fits with my trying to steer as much of my business local as I can. Sure, I can get the bolts on the internet if I wait a day or two, but I'd much rather have the local bolt store.

My struggles with buying local

2011-10-15T00:12:00.000-07:00

For the supplies that I use on my farm I try my best to buy local. I do pay a little more than I would otherwise, but that money both boosts the local economy, and it also is a good sales tool. Having a relationship with a feed store means that when I want to put up an advertisement for my weaner pigs they're all for it, and my name comes to mind.

What I prefer to do is to patronize the most-local retailer, recognizing that there are local branches of chain stores that are almost as good... well, not really. I'd really like local ownership if I can help it.

So I do a lot of business with a local feedmill. They're kind of old-school; they don't even have a web page, and I'm ok with their facilities, which are old, and feedmillish. Think big groups of galvanized tanks sitting next to railroad tracks. You know, feedmillish.

I've been selling a larger number of weaner pigs every year, and I've been doing my best to steer this business to this local mill -- pointing out that they can buy their feed at $600 a ton in 50lb bags, or $400 a tone in a bulk bag -- and so it's been a win-win. People keep their costs down, local business does some more business, everyones happy.

So for pig food I'm pretty happy most of the time, but recently, in the last 6 months, I've changed my buying from them, reducing my feed order from 6 tons a month to around 1.25 ton a month -- a small enough amount that they won't deliver it, so I have to pick it up. This is because most of what my pigs are eating is produce -- I only use the feed for sows that are farrowing and for the occasional pig that we're treating. Like one of my boars that got a foot infection a few weeks ago.

These guys keep shooting themselves in the foot with my order. I order 6,000lbs of food, and ask them to put it into 4 sacks of 1500lbs each. (I have room for 4 sacks). They can't do it. I never did figure out why they couldn't, but after being on the phone with them for an hour I got 3 sacks of 1000lbs and 1.5 ton of 50lb sacks. grrrr. Ok, so I can put the three sacks on pallets and stack the bags on top of them, but that also means I've got to load and unload the bags by hand, not by tractor. They did sell me at bulk price, which I thought was nice.

Ok, so today I call up and I ask if they have a 1,500lb sack that I can buy. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, sometimes it's a 1,000lb... so I get the news. They are out of feed.

Out. Of. Feed.

There's a whole list of reasons why they're out, but the point is that they're out. I can't get feed from them. Well, I can, in 50lb sacks. So I drive over there, and they've sold ALL of the 50lb sacks of feed they have to some other pig person -- matter of fact, it's to a guy I sold 10 weaners to earlier this year. "we're sorry! We'll be back in operation next week..."

So I call the multinational conglomerate that operates a mill a little north. Would they have some feed I can buy? Sure do. When do you want to pick it up? Matter of fact, can we have a crack at your feed order? I'd love to make you a deal on feed. And Jennifer, the saleswoman, is a knockout.
Yea, that shouldn't matter, but I'm just giving you my experiential view of this process. Super easy. Ready today, on my schedule. Go get what I want. Yep.

And $100 more a ton. And that money goes to a company that has a history of doing bad things to producers. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

I really do try to buy local. It is such a struggle though.

Land, land, land. Buying land. Farms are made of land.

2011-10-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

It's approaching flood season for me, and for my farm, surrounded by a dike, and on an island, this is the time of year when my workload increases.

Well... maybe not the workload. Lets say the working time. I have to be on call on an hour or so notice for the next 3-4 months, while the flood season is in progress. We've had a lot of rain this last year, and the weathermen are predicting another wet year.    I could REALLY use 5-10 acres off the flood plain to put my stock in the event of a flood.

This is a particular problem for me -- pig farms are not popular as your neighbor.

I've been wanting to add some more land to my operation, and I usually look for land in foreclosure auctions. I'm interested in land for the bottom dollar; farming is a game of pennies, and land is a big expense.

My north property is an example of that. I purchased it at a foreclosure auction, fenced it, and I send the cattle up there to graze every year, between march and October.   Here's how the math works out:

Purchased the calves for an average of $300 each. Put out to good pasture and provided with minerals, they put on weight pretty well. At the end of this they're worth about $1,000, so I've made about $650 gain per cow, or $4550.00. After transport costs to auction and other misc stuff - like the corral construction expenses and fencing expense, I'll net about $3k.   I could make a little more by USDA slaughter and selling cuts, or I can take them directly to a packer and sell them wholesale. This quoted net profit is the wholesale price.

So at $3k, that pays for about 10% of the purchase price of the land. Put another way, land purchased at the right price will pay for itself in 11 years with a few cows on it, and cows are pretty easy if you have good fencing.

The problem a few years ago is that land was going for astronomical amounts. 1 acre of nice pasture for $100,000, for instance, as a building lot.   No way to make any agricultural profit with that sort of math.

So I'm back to my usual habits looking for land, and I did the research for this Decembers foreclosure auction.

What I do is this: First, I check the list, and for each property I look up the county records; last sale, size of parcel, taxes due, etc. Then I check with the local planning department to see if there are other things -- violations of building codes, complaints, fines and so on. And finally I look at the satellite views of the property, and if everything checks out, I'll drive out to look at it.

After all of that checking, if it still looks good, THEN I'll go to the real estate sites to figure out what similar parcels are selling for.   I do that because I want to buy either at or below the minimum retail price I can find for a comparable parcel.   My rule of thumb is to always buy the cheapest house (land) on the block. My experience is that if you do that, it's very difficult to get into trouble.

I've narrowed my original list of 220 properties down to something like 10, and I start working up the comparable parcels, and as I look at real estate for sale sites, I notice something that I haven't seen in many years.   I'm seeing properties that have been on the market for 2, 3, 4 years.

The last time I saw that sort of thing was in 1987, when I purchased my first house. I wrote 30 lowball offers to people selling houses before one guy agreed. I paid $500 to the previous owner to move out, and assumed a $40,000 mortgage from the guy. He really, really wanted to move.    I sold that same house in 2002 for $400k.

I think it's time to write some low offers to these multiyear listings. Not short sales; it's difficult in this area to get financing on raw land, so most of these parcels are owned outright.

I wonder how many offers I'll have to write this time.

What a confinement pig farm looks like

2011-10-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

When I talk about pastured operations I think it's useful to look at what the industry looks like. This is the other side of the market -- and in fact, this is how most of the pork consumed in this country is raised.   Having the pigs kept near where the food is produced also keeps the costs at a minimum.

This particular video was produced by industry -- in this case pfizer -- and is great because it shows the interior of a particular hog unit. As far as hog units go, this is a good one.

You'll find the referenced video here.

Overview: Most pigs are raised in buildings, and each building is usually for a particular stage in a pigs life. As they grow they're moved from building to building in batches.

00:39 You can see an outside shot of a hog barn. The four silos on the side are for the feed, which is a mix of corn and soybeans and various other supplements, carefully formulated to produce the greatest amount of lean growth possible.

00:44 You're looking at the interior of a farrowing barn. Each sow is in a crate that prevents the crushing of the piglets and by doing so decreases mortality. There's an automatic feed and water system. this is where pigs are born and kept with their mothers for the first 2-3 weeks of their life.

00:56 this is an outside shot of two other hog buildings.   These are all over Iowa and Minnesota. there are thousands of these.

1:56 This is an early wean room. After the pigs are separated from their mothers they're put on a high-protein food for a few weeks and given additional heat (notice the lamps hanging from the ceiling). This high-protein feed is relatively expensive.

02:40 is a hog finishing unit. these hogs are raised on a slatted floor with some sort of manure pickup system underneath -- usually concrete troughs that are sluiced with water. What this video doesn't show you is the smell of this house. It's usually very intense.

There is no bedding in this sort of environment. The pigs stand on a slatted floor their entire lives.   If the ventilators go off in this sort of system the hogs can die from the ammonia emitted by the waste underneath the slatted floors.

Pastured pigs: SARE grant

2011-10-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Sabra reminds me from time to time that the government does a lot of stuff that is valuable and useful, and one of those things that they do that I find particularly good is the SARE grant program.

Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) is a program where farmers can get money to help them experiment with different practices to figure out what works the best for them, and for others. The grant is given with the condition that the results are shared with the public, and there has been quite a bit of work done with these grants that most small farmers find interesting.

You'll find more information on the SARE program here.

The video that I'm going to talk about today is the product of one of those sare grants,
you'll find that video here. You'll find the farms website here.

Summary:
Pigs are kept on grass or on fields planted with barley and peas, and the feed they're given is carefully measured out to see how effective the pasture mix is. These pigs are on what I'd consider good pasture, and are what I would visualize when someone says "pastured pork"

00:10 : what pigs eat on a field in this farmers experience.

00:38: Why pasture -- less feed costs

00:56: As with most pasture operations, this one is also feeding a prepared feed. I'm guessing that this is a corn-soybean mix.

01:00 They use cows to move their feed around. No tractors.

01:20: We want to use the pigs to till the soil so that we could plant things that pigs eat.

01:28: Note that the pen that the pigs are kept in is bare dirt with rocks. They feed the pigs by pouring the feed on the ground.

01:30 Pigs on pasture, rooting up the grass. this is pretty typical pig damage. Left to their own devices they will turn over all of the sod.

01:40 The experiment: Take some pigs, divide them randomly, put half on grass and half on stuff they planted for the pigs to eat. Weigh the pigs every week, and weigh the food that they gave the pigs.

02:10 Notice that the pigs are in greenery up to their shoulders, and they're eating it. This is what I'd consider pastured pork.

03:26 The pigs are getting 6.4lbs of feed per day plus what they can forage

03:53 Again the feed is poured on the ground

Joel Salatin and his pigs: Pastured?

2011-10-10T03:11:00.000-07:00

Joel and pigs "on pasture" (courtesy of Jessica Reeder)

Pastured pork is a popular topic these days; and there are a lot of people who are saying a lot of things about raising pork on pasture.  Over the next few days I'm going to talk about some of the videos that are out there from various farmers.

The first video I'm going to talk about is from Joel Salatin, who is a very famous farmer over in Virginia. He's outspoken and has spent years talking about agriculture.   You can see the polyface farms website here.

Executive summary: Joels pigs are fed a pretty standard corn-and-soybean feed mix that Joel purchases off the farm.   Joel also purchase the pigs themselves off his farm. His involvement in pigs is to raise raise them from wean to finish. While they do have access to green stuff at some point during their lives, they spend a big part of their lives in small pens on dirt. Even when they are on "pasture" they are provided free-choice feed at all times. The amount of feed value the pigs get on pasture is not clear. Joel does not use the word "pastured" on his website, preferring "pigerator pork".

The first video is Polyface: Piggies

00:00 These are 40-50 pound pigs, with a few 60-70lb pigs in there as well.

00:05: Notice the large grain feeder in the left corner of the pen, and the floor of the pen. This pen is providing no nutrition for the pigs at all; all of their food is coming in the form of some sort of feed put in the feeder.

00:06: The intern mentions that they'll be put out to pasture "when they get bigger" -- not clear when that is.

Looking at the panels, this pen is 20x16, and there are approximately 30 pigs in that space. Each pig is given approximately 10 square feet of space.

01:38 you can see a second pig pen, with another large feeder, again on dirt.   That pen is smaller; 10x20 or so, and the stocking rate is similar.

Now this guy is famous for his pastured poultry and as a proponent of pastured livestock. He talks a lot about it, but these pigs in this video aren't what I'd consider pastured.

Summary: Pigs are in pens, 10 square feet or so per pen, and fed some sort of prepared feed. Joel has talked about the feed in other areas, it's a standard corn-and-soybean based feed that he purchases from off his farm.

You can get a feel for his "pastured poultry" and another view of his pigs in this video:

00:00 The chicken houses are greenhouse frames with plastic. From his clothes I'm going to assume that this is during cold weather. In warmer weather those hoophouses can get hot enough to kill chickens.

02:54: this is basically what industry calls a "cage free" or "barn raised" chicken egg operation. It's actually pretty similar to how most industry chickens are raised -- here's a picture of what a "factory farm" operation looks like.   The factory birds are meat birds, but the basic layout is the same. Feeders and waterers, birds have some floor area they move around on. In the factory farm they're using solid buildings, so it's dark, or maybe it's night.

03:29: You can see a pen of pigs in there. I'm going to guess that the stocking rate is again about 10 square feet of space per pig, there's a big grain feeder. In fact, the more I look at Joel Salatins pig operations, the less pasturing I see.

Here's a video of his pigs "on pasture"
00:06: I count 17 pigs laying along the fenceline next to the feeder. I'd guess these pigs are 150lbs average.

00:10: Note that the ground is bare dirt under the pigs and around the feeder.

00:13: They explain that the pig paddock is 2 acres split into 8 sections, for a 1/4 acre per paddock.

00:27:  "they are in here just as long as it takes them to eat that feeder" -- they're not managing the forage, they're filling the feeder. This is contrary to what most people who pasture animals do -- watch the forage available and move the pigs when the forage is exhausted.

A quarter acre is 10,890 square feet, and assuming 17 pigs, that's about 640 square feet per pig. .

summary: The pigs are given a chance to root and forage, but the vast majority of what puts weight on these hogs is in the feeders. It's the standard corn and soybean feed mix Joel has mentioned in the past.

You can see a video of his "eggmobiles" here. This is apparently in the summer. But the take home lesson is that for some portion of the year, even the animals that he's famous for pasturing -- chickens -- are kept in fixed locations under cover.

Farms & Animal rights activists

2011-10-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

In my area I seem to have a larger-than-normal number of fairly militant animal rights proponents. For me, that means that I get contacted by the snohomish county animal control about once a month about some darned thing.

They actually get a lot more calls than that, but resolve them by coming to the farm gate and looking at whatever the complaint is.   Here's some of the most recent complaints:
pigs don't have water (I have installed two types of automatic waterers. Here's one, and here's the other)
Sheep are standing in the rain.
Pigs are standing in the rain.
Pigs are in mud
Dogs are unlicensed (my three farm dogs, that is)
Dogs are in the stock trailer
Sheep can't reach the water (water is popular, see above)

I don't fault snohomish county animal control at all - they're required by law to respond to every complaint,and they do actually check out whatever it is. When they can't see what they need to from my fenceline I will take them over and let them look at whatever it is, but this takes time out of the day. They're nice enough about it, but it's annoying.

In addition I get a variety of notes left on the farm gate. Most of the folks are looking to buy something, but I get the occasional angry note from someone about something.

I'm not the only one. Michelle, over at the collie farm blog, has had various issues with people about her livestock guardian dogs. Here's one example, and another, and another.

This has reached a new height in this area. A local woman had her dog stolen from her fenced yard a few days ago, and the police have made an arrest in the case.   surprise, surprise: A dog rescue group is apparently involved.

What's been surprising about this latest case is that people are saying things in the comments of various articles that dog kennels are inhumane and electric fences are inhumane, which should come as a surprise to anyone who raises animals on pasture.   I had no idea.

Rebecca and the big bad meat company

2011-10-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

[Disclosure: I don't think that Rebecca Thistlewaite over at honestmeat.com likes me one little bit. In fact, I'm pretty sure she hates me. But I sure do love her.  ]

I read Rebeccas blog from time to time because she talks about stuff that I'm interested in. She has a completely different point of view from mine on many subjects.

So I'm reading her most recent entry, about a new farm operation that is starting in northern California, by the name of belcampo meats.

So the basic facts about Belcampo:

They're claiming to have purchased 10,000 acres of farmland
They're showing up in farmers markets and gatherings
They claim to be building their own processing plant (which they also say will be available to other farmers to process their product)
And they plan on doing a variety of products, beef, pork, chicken, lamb.

Rebbecca goes on a rant about the evils of rich people, and how the sky will fall if... well, go read it for yourself. But here's my take:

One of the biggest barriers to entry for a farmer is finding the land to farm on. you've got to have land to farm, and there's no way around that. And land, particularly land near population centers, is going to cost a lot.

So this company purchased 10,000 acres, and looks to be getting into business producing food.   Someone sold them those acres, presumably at market prices. That's a nice exit strategy for folks who own land - I'm sure they were happy to sell.

But the point is that belcampo now has to come up with a business model and plan to make money after paying retail prices for land, and here's how that helps small farmers:

If they can make a profit after paying retail for the land, so can any other entity -- corporation, family or individual.    If they can do that using good practices, even better.

I think that the "multigenerational farms" that rebecca quoted are one of the things that make farming particularly hard to enter. If they're using land that they own outright it's a HUGE competitive advantage over someone who has a mortgage.   And often that translates into production that is actually below the true cost. And those lower prices in turn mean that folks with mortgages have an even harder time.

Rebeccas own experience on leased land shows that land ownership is one of the key elements that makes a farm stable. Don't know why she's pitching a fit about someone who's going the other way -- buying the land first.

UPDATE:   Rebecca is claiming that farmers are losing "thousands of dollars of sales" to belcampo -- but they're apparently not. See the comments in this thread.

The spring chickens

2011-10-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

New Hampshire rooster

I spent part of today ordering the chickens that we'll be selling next spring as started laying hens. We try to raise a small quantity -- 500 or so -- laying hens each year, and a similar quantity of roosters.

Part of my farming is to do my best to guess what consumption will be next year, and to buy and raise an appropriate number of animals to meet that demand. I have to think about how many I can carry, what the feed costs are likely to be, where I'll house them (because in the winter, baby chicks are especially hard to care for) and basically work through the logistics.

For retail purposes I have to make some guesses as to what people will be interested in buying. The market here for laying hens is driven by the city folks -- many of the cities around my farm allow people to keep small numbers of chickens in their yards, and people tend to like a colorful, varied flock. So when they come to the farm to pick out their chicken, it's nice to have a variety of colors to choose from.

Why raise chickens in the winter?

Raising chicks in the fall and winter is harder than it is in the spring and summer. But the retail customers around here don't think too far ahead -- which is good for me. In March and April, when the chicks arrive in the feed stores, these chickens will be at point of lay. So my basic pitch to the backyard chicken folks, is yes, you buy chicks now, and in 4 to 5 months you'll get your first egg... or you can buy one of these hens, and start enjoying the eggs right away. People will pay for convenience, and this is pretty darn easy. So the reason is to have the birds ready to go during the high season for chicken sales.

My favorite breed of hens:

My favorite chickens aren't the barred rock. Barred rock are my 2nd favorite. They have long been a favorite of the American barnyard, and for good reason. Properly cared for, a barred rock hen will produce more than 200 eggs for at least 2 years, and then provide a meaty carcass for the table afterwards. The roosters are larger, and eaten young (3lbs live weight) provide excellent table fare. They lay a large brown egg.

Barred rock rooster

My favorites are actually the White leghorn chicken. This is the breed that produces the quantities of white eggs you see in the stores, and they really do quite well on pasture. They are active, intelligent, flighty birds. I like them because I like an animal that approaches life with gusto, and these birds do that. They are also the smartest chicken in your flock. If there is some trouble that chickens can get into , you can be sure that the white leghorns will be right there. Leghorns lay more eggs than any other breed of chicken, hands down. That's why industry has focused on them.

The one drawback to leghorns is that their carcass is very small framed, and there's not much meat on them.

I round out my hen order with some buff orpingtons. They're very calm, and very pretty, and people seem to like them. They also work well as dual-purpose bird.

Hen order:

150 barred rock hen chicks

150 buff orpington hen chicks

50 white leghorn chicks

The meat birds

I have a special market in this area, and I was sure glad to find it. I'm able to sell live chickens at the farm gate for $20 each. No processing, not slaughtering, and in fact, not any trouble at all. The people who buy these are usually recent immigrants, and they're after the taste and texture of a bird that's been running around and doing chicken things.

To match this demand we raise a few hundred roosters. We generally let the chickens roam around, and they do a very good job of sucking up any spillage from feeders or fruits or vegetables that get dropped as we move it around, and people start buying them at 3lbs live weight, which we'll hit around march, and all through the summer.

Yummy!

As far as roosters go, I prefer to have the roosters be a different breed than the laying hens, and this year we'll be raising rhode island red roosters. We've raised quantities of Black Australorps in the past, and they're perfectly satisfactory as a table bird, but we're going to over-winter some black austarlorp hens this year to collect and hatch their eggs. Having the roosters be a different color than the hens means that when we're looking for a rooster they're easy to spot.

Rooster order:
400 rhode island red rooster chicks
40 cornish cross straight-run (my personal 1 year chicken supply)

Cornish Cross
Most of the people who are doing pastured birds commercially, and most of the chickens that you see in the grocery store are a breed of chicken commonly referred to as cornish cross. I've written about their growth pattern, and measured by conversion of grain into chicken, they cannot be beat. They are hands-down the fastest growing chicken you can buy.

I do raise a small number of cornish cross chickens, but for my own personal consumption. The folks that we sell our chickens to will not buy a white chicken from us. I just like the efficiency, but as with every other meat in my freezer, I prefer to have an active part in its production.

And our feed situation is pretty novel. More than half what the chickens eat is the produce that we also feed to the pigs, or forage that they turn up themselves, including grass and bugs and everything else that a chicken finds tasty. (Chickens are not vegetarians by choice). Given that, I don't have to worry about the cost of feed during the longer grow-out of a heritage rooster, and the hatcheries sell heritage roosters at about half or less the cost of the meat birds -- which means that my outlay of cash to purchase them is smaller than if I purchased cornish cross birds.

Supplementing this chicken order is our own production of eggs and chicks. We'll hatch 100 or so chicks a month of each breed, starting in November, to provide continuing supply of maturing chickens throughout the rest of the year. We stop hatching eggs in June -- the market for chickens starts to dwindle in October -- I like to sell out of all of the adult birds that we're not going to over-winter by the 2nd week in october.

Creating a swale

2011-09-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've been working with my power rake to do some contouring of the land and using it to form a swale. The power rakes sure are nice for some stuff, but they're expensive. I got mine at auction a couple of years ago for a few thousand dollars -- specifically for rehabbing pastures, like this one.

This is at the north end of the pasture. I've contoured the entire pasture to drain in this direction; its about 400' long, and the drop from one end to the other is about 4', so the overall slope is a pretty gentle 1%, which for most purposes is flat.

It's a little hard to see, but what I've been doing with the harley rake is using it to move the dirt and mound it up a little on the left side of this picture.

At this point I've probably moved 18" of dirt, which is hard to see, but the goal is to have a raised area on the left side that will be planted and permanently maintained as a green filter, and form a swale in the center.

The post and pipe in the foreground is an improvement that I put in since I was going to be working this ground anyways. Might as well do all of the digging and dirt prep at once. Having a frost-proof faucet allows me to avoid carrying water for pastured birds -- which is one of the uses of this particular bit of ground.

While I'm doing this I'm also removing rocks and debris and leaving a pretty nice seed bed. It'll be pretty smooth when its done for the most part.

A couple of passes later and I'm getting pretty close to my goal.

And that's about it. The area I've designated as a swale is 200' long and about 30' wide, with the deepest area being about 24" -- that is, the dirt mounded on the left side is 24" taller than the lowest point. I'm providing that much water capacity to be able to handle the runoff from a major storm, or several storms, and to filter the water that's generated through the soil.

It's not all altruism. The manure and runoff from the fields contains nutrients and fertilizer that I don't want to lose, and I certainly don't want the soil to be lost to erosion if there's ever bare dirt. A swale allows that dirt to settle out and kept on the property.

The soil test says that I need 3 tons of lime per acre to bring the acidity to pasture or some row crops, and I'll be applying that tomorrow, along with the grass seed. By next May or June I should have a very nice, perfectly level pasture with good stormwater handling built in.

Farm inspection by health department

2011-09-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Last month the health department of Snohomish County sent me a notice of violation, and in subsequent talks we scheduled an on-farm inspection by the health department and by representatives of the Snohomish County Conservation District.

So today was the farm visit and inspection. I show a lot of people my operation, and today wasn't any different than any other as far as normal workload. The health department, in the person of Katheryn

The health department representative was pretty formal in her hardhat.

The conservation district a little less formal. Everyone watched as we went through the whole process of feeding the pigs, from trailer to trough (or ground).

Todays load was very carrot-heavy. Pigs aren't big fans of carrots but they do eat them eventually.

I'll be working with the conservation district to see what their proposed farm plan is. We'll see what they have to say. I'll write it up as it happens.

Petting a brush

2011-09-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

If you've ever shopped for a brush you know that some of them are made with natural bristles. Let me introduce you to their source.

The texture as you run your hand down is pretty rough; it feels a lot like a hairbrush. The bristles are probably 3-4" long, and are spaced pretty widely. More guard hairs than warm fur coat.

The pig in this pictures was completely unfazed by this. I'm Eating! she says. Don't bug me.

Lets talk piglet selection: Your boar

2011-09-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

I get asked about boar piglets maybe 10 times a year. And the issue that most folks have is that they want a boar to be gentle and nice, and to know them well. Many people who are starting with pigs aren't equipped or capable of loading and transporting a full-sized boar, and so for all of these reasons, I suggest that they start with a boar weaner pig and raise it themselves. Grow your own boar.

If you want to do that, you'll have to choose a pig at about this age. Many farmers castrate the male pigs very young, and while I understand their reasoning, I feel that a an older weaner will show you more of what you need to know about its potential than one that is only a week or two old. So talk to your farmer about holding off castration, or find someone that castrates later so that you can assess the pig at a little older age.

The first thing to note about any pig that you're looking at is its overall state. Is the skin clear, and free of lesions, wounds or scabs? Is there any sign of any injury or lameness, and is the animal alert and bright-eyed?

Standing still is one look, but you want to see the animal moving, too. Does it move easily and quickly? Do both eyes work? does it veer towards one side or the other? Is the head kept level?

You'll also want to check the feet of the piglet. This little guy will grow to be 800lbs, and it'll happen pretty quickly -- less than a year from today. So if there's any issues with his feet, they won't really have a good chance to get better. Any foot defect -- cracked hoof, abscess, anything -- is a reason not to take this boy.

Look at the rear of the piglet, too. Here it looks like he's got a case of runny stools. For this particular pig it's because he's transitioning from mothers milk to solid food, but for most weaners you want to see a solid poo. If it's not solid they're not fully weaned, and you may have to supplement their food to get them to make the weight you want. A half-pint of yogurt will often clear up runny stool. Live culture yogurt.

You want a good, wide stance for front and rear legs. Indicates good muscle development. You want symmetry -- the more symmetric the animal the better. Compare right and left front shoulder, and right and left hams.
And finally, look at the father for total size and conformation clues as well. In my case I prefer a boar with very big front shoulders and medium sized hams.

What I've said here is not the only way to assess an animal, but it's what I've found to be a good set of attributes to help make the decision. For me there's a second decision point, at about 8 months old, just before it starts to breed. I'll sometimes cull at that point, mostly based on temperament. I'm very conscious that these animals get huge, and I will not tolerate a mean animal in the herd.

Reworking a pasture

2011-09-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

This year has been very late, in terms of weather and working season. Working season is the time of year when I do yearly tasks, and the yearly task that I've got now is to cultivate a pasture that will be next years pastured poultry and pig area. The first thing to do is to remove all of the metal that's surfaced in the last few months. Todays harvest is a big spring and a car differential. Or maybe it's a truck differential. No matter.

Once I've got the auto parts out of the way, I can work on the next parts. I've found that its a good idea to have a faucet within 200' of anyplace I'm going to keep animals - hauling water is a major chore, and fresh, clean water is one of the simplest ways to maintain your animals health. So below you'll find a picture of my waterline rough-in.

In this case I dug a ditch about 450' long, about 5' deep. That's a little deeper than normal, but I want to make sure I'm not going to hit this waterline at some point in the future, if I'm plowing or cultivating. The other issue is that the pigs, if they get ambitious, can easily get 3' deep in their wallows. I run a 1" water line down the bottom, and at the end I put an 8' 6x6 post. It doesn't look like it's 8' long, but it is. For the water line posts I use pressure treated lumber.
Later I'll come back, dig down a couple of feet, install a frost-free hydrant (fancy term for one of these) and then secure the hydrant to the post with plumbers tape. I'll use the tractor to pull or push the post to the required depth. I like the posts to be 3-4' above the ground so that I can see the post over medium-tall grass.

After refilling the trench I work over the surface so that it's smooth and relatively firmly packed. I use a box blade mostly. I want it smooth so that the chicken tractors will not have gaps under the edges that will allow birds to escape, and because it's always nicer to have a smooth pasture than one that has lumps or furrows. I'll use the harley power rake to put the final finish on it.

I will also put in a couple of swales -- Since we get a lot of rain, I'm going to put in shallow depressions in the otherwise-smooth ground, to direct the water to the places I want it to go. I'm using my knowledge of the various soil types to direct the water to more-permiable soil types, in the hopes that I won't have as many puddles in the winter as I usually do.

The reed canary grass that is the predominate grass in this area is a root-based grass. that is, with the cultivation and so on I expect it to bounce back pretty quick. I'll plant some oats and a tall fescue based pastured mix in it, along with some clover added in for nitrogen fixing. the goal is to have a grass mixture that will over a variety of diet components to the animals next spring and summer.

This little boar will be one of the beneficiaries of the grass next year. He's 7 weeks old, and has been watching with interest as I move dirt around wit the tractor. He'd like to move the dirt around, too. Soon, little boy. Soon.

Natures Harmony farm: how & why you farm

2011-09-18T22:47:00.000-07:00

One of the farms that I watch with interest is Tim and Liz Young, over in Elberton, Georgia. They used to write a blog, but decided that they didn't want to do that, but do talk about their farming experience in a podcast.

It's been interesting to watch their farm evolve because, well, I think that they're pretty darned radical when it comes to their views of animals and husbandry. They've killed thousands of chickens and hundreds of turkeys and various other animals as they try to get their operation to work in the way that they think it should work, and that's been kinda amazing to me.   In farmcast #34 they mention the poultry deaths. There's also been issues with sheep and cows and so on.

It's amazing because that's something I run across quite a bit in the farming blog community. There's a reason that farmers do what they do, and to go into an occupation and assume that some idea you have is just as valuable/useful/credible as the existing practices is a bit silly, actually. What I've found interesting is that they've been pretty open about their struggles, and actually, their operation is getting closer and closer to industry practices every day.   At this point I think that they're reducing their farm down to a level where it's not an economically viable unit; they talk about a total production of 36 pigs a year, and eliminating all but homestead quantities of sheep, turkeys, chickens and rabbits. I don't know what the numbers look like for their cheese business, but I have to say that dairy is one of the hardest types of farming, and I'll be interested to see what they make of it.

So Tim and Liz are now reccomending that when you buy animals it'd be pretty good practice to give them the care that they got from the previous owners. Yep, I'd agree. That's pretty sound advice.

So I'm listening to #34, and they're talking about apprentices and employees, and customers, and how they started farming to spend more time in nature, and that actually struck a chord with my experience.

Around here the primary push for agriculture is about being an agri-tourism business.   The county government promotes farm tours, and hay rides, and all of the stuff that people associate with farms. Corn mazes. Petting zoos.

That's not really my vision of my farming experience. Mine is more about producing food that people like, value and that tastes good. That the animals at my farm have a good time, are well treated at all stages of their life. That my personal contributions are things that I enjoy doing, and that I find someone who enjoys doing (or will do it for pay) what I don't want to do. And if I have someone doing work for me, I'll pay them a fair wage, and above-the-table -- with all the appropriate taxes and so on, because while I hate taxes like the rest of us, it's part of the deal that we pay them to support all of the stuff that our government does. Sometimes does to me.    No interns, or apprentices or whatever folks call free labor these days.

So Tim and Liz talk about getting rid of customers, and stock, and downsizing their farm to the point where I'm not at all sure that I could make it pencil out as a business, all on the basis that having people work for them takes time and effort.

And I had to laugh a bit, and shake my head, and think to myself, "yep, Tim and Liz. Welcome to small business administration"

You'll find the natures harmony blog here.

The volunteer garden

2011-09-17T02:32:00.000-07:00

This year I haven't planted a formal garden, and I was regretting it a bit, when I noticed that I had a garden already.

Most everywhere I've fed pigs produce has some sort of vegetable growing in it. Here's a patch of tomatillos having a riotous good time.

Tomatoes have made a huge showing. I probably have 500 tomato plants of various sizes.

Mixed in with the tomatoes are various volunteer squashes. Some of them have squash growing. given the time of year, it's unlikely I'll get any mature squash, but I've got to say, this is the easiest garden ever.

Lots of green tomatoes. Most of them are the plum tomatoes, some are beefsteak. Tomatoes are probably the most common.

There's also some smaller squash vines. I think they're cantaloupe or cucumber. They have that look to them.

The plants are really growing well on the edge of the pig paddocks, which is a good sign. The mix of wood chips, composted veges and pig manure is producing good quality soil.

Corn Syrup is evil

2011-09-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

I have one major vice -- I like soda pop. In particular, I like coca-cola.

In my personal consumption, I've switched from the corn-syrup sweetened version to the sugar-sweetened version, and after doing that I've noticed that I've lost weight. Same consumption, "same" product.

So then I read a report from princeton university that points that that rats fed the same number of calories in the form of corn syrup gain more weight than sugar-fed rats. And the industry is trying to change the name of the product (High Fructose corn syrup) to something shorter (Corn Syrup)...

Our american culture has consumed a lot of sugar for the last 100 years, and we haven't had the obesity problems that we now have. It's only in the last 20-30 years that our weight has ballooned. And my opinion is that corn syrup is the major cause of that gain. It's inescapable if you each any sort of processed food.

Mind you, I have nothing against eating corn direct. I like corn.

"will work for food"

2011-09-14T19:28:00.000-07:00

The pasture that the pigs are in used to be a junkyard in the 60s, and as a result, there's quite a bit of metal debris still remaining. All of the stuff that will biodegrade in 50 years has done so. That means that the vinyl seats and a lot of the sheet metal is just gone. What remains are the larger, more substantial pieces of steel, like this wheel, engine blocks, axles and, of all things, chrome trim.

The chrome trim is just as bright and shiny as it ever was, and it's pretty common to see a pig running around with a few feet of it. They think it's cool. But what I find really interesting is how much the pigs seek out the iron and steel.

The pig in the picture is my main herd boar at this point. He's 700lbs of pretty good natured boy. He was walking along while I watched him, and then stopped, snuffled at the ground a couple of times and then dug this wheel out of the ground in 30 seconds. No part of the wheel was visible before he started digging -- I think he smelled it. Flipping it around a few times, he decided he'd seen enough and wandered off to do boar things. (which mainly involves finding another pig and moving them for the heck of it. "my wallow now, I'm the boar!" )

I'll periodically walk the fields and pick up the metal that the pigs have unearthed, and when I move the pigs to another area, I'll bring out the tractor and dig anything I can't get out by hand. Over time I'm cleaning up the land.

In the last 3 years I've removed 18 tons of steel from 12 acres.

Farm infrastructure

2011-09-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

I've been working on my materials handling facilities. I'm starting to handle serious quantities of wood chips, and I'm having to get a little more formal about where I store them so that I get more use out of them. So I had 36 ecology blocks (why are they called that?) delivered to my driveway. Actually they came 12 at a time on a semi truck. I rented a backhoe to unload and move them, as they weigh more than even my big tractor can lift. These blocks are 6'x2'x2', and weigh between 4 and 6 thousand pounds each. I really don't know what they weigh; they are very heavy.

You can see the pile of wood chips in both of the above pictures -- actually, that's about half the pile. We had to move a bunch of chips to make a place for the block wall. The blocks will allow us to stack the wood chips higher and scoop them up more efficiently. What was happening was that the mountain of wood chips was slowly creeping into my equipment parking area.

You can see the basic tools I'm using in this picture. Notice the baling twine at lower right. I use that so that I have a reference to make a straight line for a neat wall. The blocks all interlock, so a half-block is required to get a smooth end to the wall. The key to this is to make sure that the bottom block is level and plumb. After that one it's just a matter of carefully stacking the blocks.

With a block wall that's more than 2 blocks high, I like to brace them so that when I push on them they don't fall over. So that I'll do is do a couple of blocks every 20' or so to prevent the wall from getting out of plumb even if I smack it with equipment on the other side.

Tomorrow I'll write up my pig barn idea using ecology blocks.

These blocks are $15 each, and it cost about $7 a block to have them delivered. The backhoe rents for $260 a day, or $1k/week. Takes about a day to build a 60'x6' block wall, with careful placement of the initial course of blocks.

Fall is coming

2011-09-08T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'm well into my fall preparation, with a few items left to do. The hay barn is full, stuffed to the rafters.
I'll be installing a feeder panel and a shed for the cows -- this year I'm going to do what Matron of Husbandry does with her cows in the winter. It saves wear and tear on the land. I'll even adopt a couple of her ideas (which I'll duly credit as I write about implementing them.

On my list:

Rotate the pigs to a new pasture area
Finish the planted buffer and fencing
Repair the fence at the county road
Make final chicken culling choices

So much to do.

Delicious

2011-09-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

This is what my pigs were eating today.

I can sort-of tell the season by what is around. Blueberries to me were always late summer, and so were peaches. Strawberries are July. Lemons?

It looks like a lovely fruit salad. I had some food on a plane that looked like this.

Tons and tons of this food. The peaches are luscious. They slice neatly when I scoop them up with the bucket of the tractor. The strawberries kind of mush up though, when you move them.

This is what I feed my pigs. 40 pallets of it today. about 8 tons.

Pink with Orange highlights

2011-09-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

We normally use livestock crayons for this sort of thing, but we couldn't find any, and we needed to keep track of who we'd vaccinated, and who we had not.

Most of the pigs we produce we don't treat in any way; they're here for 6-8 months, and honestly, we haven't had a problem in the last 6 years, but the sows (and the replacement gilts) we do vaccinate against the pork diseases that are common in this area.

When you're working with a bunch of basically identical pigs, it's hard to keep track of who you've vaccinated, and who you haven't. We use a syringe gun; you fill it with enough vaccine for 30 piglets and just grab them and mark them as they go. With this batch we're giving two different vaccines that cover different diseases. So we mark each pig as we go through them, and then mark them a second time as we complete the batch.

No one likes shots; there's a lot of scampering around and squealing as Andrea and I work through the piglets. A hog panel in a corner of their pen helps with this, bunching them up. Reach down, grab the rear leg, flip the pig on its side, inject, mark, repeat.

These pigs are the best of the best -- perfect in all respects. They'll be the new breeders next year, and if things go right they'll be around for a long time - 4 to 6 years.

They aren't named yet. We wait until they get pregnant to name them. There's always a few that don't get pregnant, and they get slaughtered in due course - nothing wrong with the meat, just not working out for breeding. I wonder sometimes why they don't, and the vaccinations are one way to eliminate variables, but from a empirical view, it doesn't matter why they don't get pregnant; it just matters that they didn't, and by making this sort of choice, I'm steering my herd towards better overall fertility.

Getting closer to my food

2011-09-02T00:04:00.000-07:00

When you read about the life of a farmer no one mentions laying on your back in cold mud as a sow does her best to tear your jeans off.   I lay flat on my back just outside my hay barn, where the sow had thrown me.

No mention of the bark and hay working its way into my waistband as i crab-scuttled backwards, watching the open mouth of the sow pass my knees as I frantically backpedal.

No, the reading I'd done before i started my farm was all about the satisfaction of getting closer to your food. I thought about this as my food (in this case, a sow) got closer to me.   The mud was firmly packed into the back of my jeans when she decided that I was far enough from her piglets to back off. I debated sitting there, but then decided that I wanted more distance... and a bucket of water to get the dirt out of my, ah, pants.

It reminded me a bit about a joke I'd heard a few days before.

"A pirate ship appears on the horizon. The captain says "Men, bring me my red shirt!" The first mate fetches the shirt and the captain successfully leads an attack on the pirates that sinks their ship.

One of the sailors asked the captain "Why do you wear a red shirt in battle?" The captain responded "because if I am wounded, you will not see blood and will continue to fight as if nothing is amiss." The crew was astounded at the bravery of the captain.

Later, twenty pirate ships appeared on the horizon. The men looked to the captain, waiting for the request that brought everyone so much strength. The captain looked at the horizon and said, "Men, bring me my brown pants!"

This was definitely a brown-pants episode.

In the accounts I've read, there's nothing but a contented sow, joyfully suckling her pigs and grunting in deep satisfaction.

I stood up carefully, trying to figure out whether I'd gotten hurt by something, and found no damage but my pride. I watched the sow as I stood up, not sure if I'd provoke her into another charge by doing so, but she was content to watch me, and as I took a couple of steps backwards, turned and nosed her pigs.

I'd been trying to move her out of the pen in the hay barn, where we'd put her a few days before, to give her piglets a roof over their heads. Piglets have very tender skin, and sunburn very easily. It's plenty warm enough in august, but the sun can be hard on the little guys.

This particular sow, normally calm and placid, was very protective of her pigs, and when I stepped into the pen I thought a little gentle persuasion would be sufficient.

Notice of Violation followup

2011-08-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Snohomish county health department has agreed that the regulation as written seems to have several problems; while it describes ways to feed garbage to pigs, that seems to conflict with their requirement to have the material be stored in "rodent proof containers". You can have one or the other, but not both.

"garbage" isn't defined in this statute, but it is in federal law. Garbage contains meat or slaughter offal -- this is solely vegetables and fruits. I don't think that this material is properly regulated by the health department as it's not garbage as defined, but they believe it is.

They agree that it may not fight into the "public or common nuisance" as described by WAC 246-203-010.

So what do I do?

Well... the health department has asked me to work with the Snohomish county conservation district to either develope a protocol or a farm plan to allow the feeding of fruits and vegetables to pigs or other livestock.

Yep. So one agency refers me to another agency, and now I get to work with both of them.

My biggest gripe is that these guys seem to think that i have all the time in the the world (not to mention willingness to pay legal fees and costs) to work with them.

Each of these agencies has the belief that their demands are reasonable. "Were only asking for 10%, after all!" but the cumulative effect of dealing with all of these guys and their agendas is a tax that I am really hating having to pay.

I'll keep you apprised as always.

Notice of Violation

2011-08-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

Another government department has taken official notice of my farm. I got a "notice of violation" for "improper handling of solid waste" from the Snohomish County Health Department.

What waste are they speaking of?

Yep, you guessed it. The produce that I feed to my pigs.   They've decided that I'm in violation of the public nuisance provisions of the Washington Administrative Code (WAC), specifically WAC 246-203-180

I've had plenty of agencies bug me about my farm, so I'm getting kinda blase about the whole thing. "What would you like me to do to address your concerns" is a pretty good starting point.

"We want you to put the solid waste in rodent proof containers and to have it removed every week at the minimum. "

ah. If it's rodent proof the pigs can't eat it, either. Kinda defeats the purpose of the feed. Would you rather it be be fed to animals, or go directly into the landfill?

So I retained an attorney for this matter. I did ask how they came to come to my farm. "We received a complaint".    One complaint, I asked? "yes, one. "

One complaint. That qualifies as a public nuisance? Here's the definition of a public nuisance:   WAC 246-203-010:

"For the purpose of these regulations, a public or common nuisance shall be considered as that which is set up, maintained or continued so as to be injurious to the health, or an obstruction to the use of property by interfering with the repose, health, safety or life of any considerable number of persons."

One complaint. 55,000 cars drive by my farm every day, and one complaint in 6 years.    Someone I just don't get "...interfering with the repose, health, safety or life of any considerable number of persons."

Cost of raising your own pig, 2012 edition

2011-08-18T16:00:00.000-07:00

I update this every year to keep everyone current on the costs of raising your own pig. You'll find last years version here.

Question from email: "I'm interested in raising my own pig to eat. What will it cost me?"

For pigs, the cost of raising is pig is the cost of the newly weaned pig + the cost of the feed to bring the pig to market weight + the cost of the pen to keep it + the cost of the labor. I'm going to ignore the cost of your pen and land, and talk about just the money you'll need to spend to feed the pig to market weight.

In western Washington, where I farm, a weaner pig will cost you $100. This is up $15 from last year, and it's a reflection of low supply and high demand. Some folks are paying $125 in the spring for a weaner.

It will take between 600 and 800lbs of feed to get that pig to market weight at $400/ton (July 2011 price). Using the higher weight, that's $160 in feed, giving you a hard-cost (piglet + feed) of $260. This is up substantially since 2010, when feed was $290/ton.

Having someone come to your farm and kill the pig will cost $55, and for that price they will shoot the pig, skin it, gut it and split it down the backbone. For an additional $0.55/lb they'll cut it into your pork chops and roasts and so on. Butcher costs haven't changed since 2010.

Adding it all up, you'll pay $260 for the pig and feed, $55 for the kill, and $110 for the cut-and-wrap, for a total of $425. This will yield approximately 150lbs of meat, for a cost per lb of $2.83, up $0.40/lb from last years number, with the majority of that increase due to higher feed and piglet costs.

Question about holstein bull calves & my notes about feeding them for beef quality

2011-08-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

Question from email:

"Hey Bruce was just reading your blog and had a couple of questions for you, I hope you don't mind the email.

There's an organic dairy nearby that sells their Holstein calves, and I'm thinking about getting a couple, one to raise as a milk cow and one to raise for meat. Was thinking I would use the bull to breed the heifer @ 14-15 months and then butcher him, rinse and repeat each year. "

That's pretty much the standard dairy cow dance; the cow needs to give birth periodically to continue to produce milk. What you're proposing is pretty standard. What you're missing is my experience with dairy bulls: Hands down, dairy bulls are the meanest bulls i have ever encountered, as a group, and a bottle-fed bull would be even worse than a dam raised bull. Bottle feds have no fear of you, and they get really big.

"How long are you raising your Holsteins before butchering? Could you estimate how many pounds of hay it takes to get them to market weight? What weight do you butcher at? We bought a 1/2 steer this year, 1200lbs on the hoof, our half was 600lbs, 325lb hanging weight, and we got back 188lbs of meat including packaging. For a family of 7, that doesn't last long. Anyway, I have no idea what market weight for a cow is, and I've no idea what breed steer we bought, but I'm sure it was a meat breed."

I prefer to eat an older cow; and the holsteins benefit from additional growth time. The reason that holsteins sell at a discount is that at the same age the percentage yield of a holstein carcass vs a beef carcass is lower. I've found that holstein beef is very tasty -- with some notes, below.

(I don't know if these are the first cows you've raised for beef, so if you can't answer some of these, I understand.) If I did my plan, and didn't castrate him, is there any issue with beef from an intact male? I know there is supposedly boar taint, but I've not heard if cows have something similar. I can of course, make a bull calf a steer, but part of the appeal is to be able to breed him to the cow to keep her in milk LOL."

No issues on the beef from bulls tasting different, but behavior of an bull vs a steer is pretty dramatic. I'd talk to your local dairyman about their bulls and experience.

I purchased 4 bull calves, bottle feed and castrated them, and eventually ate this one because it was annoying my girlfriend by being too aggressive, and then ate this one because it got hit by a truck on the road in front of my farm.

Notes on quality:
Unfortunately for me, both of the cows that I ended up eating were just coming off a diet of mostly hay. The one that got hit by a truck was still on hay because of our cold, wet spring and lack of grass, and the other one just had to go, so we ate it.

Both steers were SUPER LEAN, which sounds like a good thing, but actually wasn't. It was very dry, and not very enjoyable.

The next one I slaughter will be this fall; probably in December, and I'll be feeding it some grain prior to the slaughter. A quantity sufficient to add some fat to the cow and for a duration sufficient to get some marbling going. I've eat lean, grass-fed Holstein, and while I appreciated it, and it's tasty, isn't just not my thing.

So my recipe for a tasty cow:
Bottle feed and wean to grass at 3-4 months.
Grass and hay for the first 2 years, some minerals, salt lick, occasional treat (spent brewers grain, for instance).
And for the final 4-6 months, 10lbs of feed per day as well as all the grass it can eat, with slaughter timed for the end of the growing season.

Farm hands & Interns

2011-08-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

Say hello to Dan and Sean. They're both doing a great job on the farm, and I thought it was time to give them credit. Whether they're up to their knees in mud or their elbows in blood, I've appreciated their work and effort, and they deserve the credit for a job well done. Thank you both.

With respect to labor and "interns"...

There are a lot of farms that offer "internships" -- basically free labor with some sort of arrangement for housing and possibly food -- with the theory that what you'll be learning is your primary pay.

I think that it's an interesting idea -- but I personally don't think that it's fair, or even appropriate.

This might piss some folks off -- but if your farm isn't producing enough income to pay at least the minimum wage (or more, if you can) is that really something you want to hold up as an example of what a farm should be?

The most sustainable farms are those that make a profit and continue to exist, and if you're really going to take someone and teach them, take the time and care to teach them something that works. And to me, if you can't afford labor, it's not working.

So the next time you see someone offering an "internship" -- think about it. It's just not sustainable to have a model that depends on free labor.

Final haying

2011-08-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

We've finished the primary haying for the year; picked and stacked 21 tons of hay. That's up from the 14 tons we put away last year. We're carrying a few more animals, but mostly the price was good and what we don't feed can be used as bedding, even next year. Here's a stack of 300 bales. We ended up with 700 bales, about 60lbs each. Maybe a few more than that. Enough to fill 2/3rds of the hay barn.

I put up more bales this year because I'm able to sell them for $5-6/each in the winter. Horse folks seem to forget that their horses eat all year long, and as a result there's always a demand for relatively cheap hay, and local grass hay at $5 a bale is just the ticket. Stacked in my barn, including labor costs and allowance for breakage and spoilage, they cost me $2.38/bale. So if I sell half it pays for the other half. I'm betting on horse people doing what they always do. Been a safe bet so far.

My hay guy has had problems with his baler this year; so we had more breakage than usual. Here's an example of a bale that isn't correctly baled. So I talked to him, and the bales we didn't take we cut the strings on, and he re-raked and re baled it, so he get some use of out of it.

Here's my new hay hauler. It's a 2000 ford F450, an ex-utility truck. I think that this one was the power companies. It has 60,000 miles on it and cost $8,000 at the auction. Works pretty well, put it to work the day after I bought it. Comes with a hydraulic crane on the back and the bed is all-aluminum, so it won't rust and doesn't weigh much -- more payload. We stack that trailer 6 high before we're done.

And there was a whole lot of work to be done!

A farmers view of stock market crashes

2011-08-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

In 1987 I was working for Microsoft, and had been for a year or so, and the stock market crashed while I was there. I was relatively young; I think I was 23 at the time, and as part of the hire process I'd been given a block of stock.

What was funny about that time was that someone had written an application which would sit on your computer and constantly track the stock price, and it was later expanded so that you could put in the number of shares you owned, and your option price, and it'd calculate your net worth hundreds of times a day. So that folks would watch the stock price and be very pleased when it went up a quarter or a dime, and you'd hear people hoot when the stock price went up.

But that changed on Black Monday. The stock market lost 22% of its market value in a SINGLE DAY. To put that into perspective, that's like the DJIA losing 2,640 points today. So the loss of 500 points day before yesterday is a pretty small echo of that single day.

But the effect on my co-workers who had this little application telling them their net worth (and in the minds of many, their value to society - it was that important to them!) was profound. They set up televisions in the cafeterias and in the conference rooms and on black monday, not much work was done. Lots of pale faces. Lots of worried people.

While everyone I know was worrying about the 4% drop, I spent the day bucking hay, and scalding and scraping a pig, and generally enjoying myself. I'd heard the news the market was dropping, and I really didn't care.

I don't care about the market because I fundamentally don't trust it. There's been too many insider trading scandals. Too many billions made by investment banks or hedge fund operators; by scandalous mortgage practices and by speculators. All of this moving money around and not much doing.

I invest in stuff that I understand. I understand land and real estate. I understand businesses -- some businesses, anyways -- and I understand people. So I work with that. What the market does is not really a part of my daily life, and I've intentionally distanced myself from it.

Because I learned, during that day in 1987, that if I pin my hopes to some random number that it can ruin my whole day, and I only work with things that I understand, and I'm much happier as a result.