The 2015 Plan

The summer is starting to wind down, and our plan for 2015 is starting to come together. First, some old business.

The sow with the foot problems is not likely to get any better. She hasn't shown any improvement in about 3 weeks now. She still won't put any weight on one of her feet, and gets around on her front "knees" (actually her wrists). I'm thinking she may have a fracture of the growth plate. She seems to be comfortable, for the most part, but I do feel like it's a borderline decision as whether it's humane to keep her for much longer. The plan is to have her slaughtered in two weeks when the the rest of the grower pigs are slaughtered, unless she makes a miraculous recovery. I don't know if there is anything I could have done to prevent this

The rest of the pig herd is looking healthy. The nine pigs born in June go off to their new home next week. As mentioned above, 9 of the 11 older pigs will be slaughtered in two weeks. Since we're going to lose the sow, we're going to keep back the two best gilts from this litter. We're planning on adding another unrelated heritage gilt next spring to bring us up to 4 litter producing pigs in 2015 and at least 5 in 2016. We may keep another gilt from our own litters next year, depending on how sales look.

If you followed some of the previous blogs, you may remember that I was worried about a litter that was born on pasture when we were having massive, unseasonable rain. Unfortunately, only one of the 7 piglets survived (I have a plan for the future if this situation comes up again), but the boar that did survive looks really good. I certainly don't advocate letting animals die to select for the best animals, but if a selection event occurs out of my control, I will take advantage of it. Since I want to select for hardy, healthy animals, I plan on keeping this boar to supplement/replace our current boar. I'm also curious to see how two boars do together, if one is introduced as a piglet.

We added two five month old bull calves a few weeks ago, and have been having them co-graze with the pigs. We are going to castrate them tomorrow, and I know I'm going to wish I had a head gate. It's going to be an interesting experience. I would have much rather castrated younger bulls when they're easier to handle, but I got a good deal on these guys. We're going to keep a half or quarter for ourselves and slaughter them in the fall of next year. We already have a few informal deposits, so if you're interested, let me know as soon as possible.

I'm finding I need to rotate the cattle and the pigs about every 5 days to a new acre paddock to avoid overgrazing. I'm glad I have that second 5 acres leased!

We've been waffling back on forth on what do with the rabbits. We've started to get a bit of interest from restaurants, but it's definitely too late this year to try and scale up. The other thing that I've been mulling over as I've thought about this for the last few months is that I don't want out barn to become a nasty, smelly rabbitry. I think it would be very difficult to have 80 cages of rabbits in a fairly small area and not have it be disgusting. To that end, I'm thinking again about pastured rabbit, but this time trying to emulate Daniel Salatin's pastured rabbit set-up. The basic idea is to raise the does and bucks in cages, let the rabbits kindle in cages, and then remove the kits at weaning. From there, the kits go into a pasture pen with a slatted floor. The benefit isn't so much that the kits get to eat pasture (although they will get some), but rather that their manure is distributed easily and not allowed to build up in a single location. I'm not completely sold, but since i already have three pens, I can fairly easily modify them to this new system. We just had our "test litter" born a few days again, and I'll keep you posted.

In the midst of all this planning, I've been furiously working on repainting the house. Scraping is done, and now it's on to sanding, washing, and then finally painting. Once that is finished...

I'll move on to the last major project of the year: building a loafing area for both the pigs and the cattle. It's difficult to see in the above picture, but the are to the right with all the tall reed canary grass is a small paddock fenced with woven wire that the boar has been living in for most of the year. I want to expand this area to be able to separate it into two paddocks, add a gate so I can get the tractor in there to add wood chips/other bedding, and add a roof that will start at the barn and slant down at least 10 feet away. Luckily, I already have most of the materials to make this, it's just a matter of getting the other projects done first. I want to make the roofed area as big as I can afford, as you can never have too much real estate under cover.

One of the big decisions we made was to go forward with the garlic idea. We harvested about 10 pounds of garlic from our small test patch this year, and we ordered another 40 pounds of organic garlic that will be delivered in September (note that those 40 lbs of garlic cost us over $700). The plan is to primarily produce certified organic seed garlic that is well suited for the unique conditions West of the Cascades (mild, wet winters). I played around with some drying apparati in the barn, and I think I settled on hanging the garlic on wires that can be raised up into the loft using pulleys. The key for the future is to maximize our use of all that unused real estate in the upper parts of the barn. Hopefully we'll be able to turn 50 pounds (5 different varieties at 10 pounds each) of garlic into 200 pounds in 2015. From there, we will probably have enough capacity to start selling seed garlic in 2016.

The last major thing to do to prepare for the winter is to build some farrowing pens in the barn. I can get three pens in the space above, and I have room for at least 6 more in the barn. Once we get to 8-9 sows, it will be time to start thinking about some infrastructure investments like a hoophouse on ecology blocks.

So, in summary, the main enterprise in 2015 will continue to be pigs. We will hopefully have four litters in February, and another four litters in July. If we can get our litter sizes up, using all the knowledge we've learned over the last few years, we'll be on course to have a decently profitable pig operation in 2015--perhaps $3-$5 thousand. We'll also have two steers that will bring in some cash, and we'll have a bit of garlic that will be too small to keep as seed. Throw in a bit of honey, and we should actually make money in 2015. Fingers crossed. There are no guarantees in farming.