Thoughtful Food 
  • Pastured Pork
  • Pasture Fed Beef
  • Our Values
  • About Us
  • Farm Blog

The 2015 Plan

8/14/2014

4 Comments

 
The summer is starting to wind down, and our plan for 2015 is starting to come together. First, some old business.
Picture
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
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
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!
Picture
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.
Picture
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...
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
Picture
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.
4 Comments
George
8/14/2014 10:57:11 pm

I'm curious as to what you paid for those calves, and what age they are? They look a lil thin right now. do you have hay set aside for the winter? What forages are they getting besides clover... and reed canary? Reed canary can only be grazed a couple times a year or it does back quickly.

Sorry to hear you lost some piglets, and that sow isn't coming along well. These things happen.

The garlic sounds promising, although I don't know if the certified organic mark up is worth it, especially pushing $20/lb for seed garlic. Do you have enough straw or something to mulch it in? Weed control especially rhizomes can be an issue growing into the garlic bulb etc. Make sure you've got a clean plot of land to put them in, heavily composted as well really does well. We plant a 150'x50' or so a year (though not last year, as we moved) and end up with an awful lot !! We also dry on wires, tied up 2 bundles on each end of twine, and toss over the wire, works out great. then come by and cut the bulbs off when everything is cured well.

Reply
Jeff
8/15/2014 05:53:24 am

Good questions. I paid $450 each for the calves, in a partial trade for the weaners, which helped my cash flow at the time. Bulls and steers were selling for about $180 /cwt at the closest auction in June, so I figure I got a decent deal, considering the two bulls were delivered to my door for no additional charge. I also know the farmers I bought them from, and they're less than a mile from me, so they hopefully had some immunity to any locally prevalent diseases.

I have about 120 bales in the barn right now, but a lot of that will go to the pigs. My plan is to pick up a couple round bales after I get my cash influx from the pig sales in a few more weeks.

The current forage in the 4 acres that I own is probably 65% clover (three types), 8% reed canary, 5% horsetail, 10% perennial ryegrass, and the rest misc. In the spring, there is a lot of velvetgrass. The other pasture that I'm renting needs a lot of work, but it's cheap and it will help supplement this year. I'll be doing a bit of seeding after I run the pigs through one more time.

The goal is to sell garlic at $20/lb myself, and I need to make sure I buy certified organic to get there. I have lots of carbon for mulching--all that pig bedding--which is mostly low quality local hay I get for about $2/bale, can get reusued for mulch. I also use low quality hay to absorb the rabbit manure below the cages. I have the perfect size manure spreader to mulch the bulbs in the fall. I'll be rotating the garlic on a 4-8 year rotation, and each year I will put some effort into working up that 1/2 acre with compost and lime.

Reply
George
8/15/2014 08:43:37 pm

Yea you're gonna want more hay... :)

Sounds like a good plan for the garlic. I'd be slightly cautious w/ the hay due to mold and how much water it will retain compared to straw, you might see some soft necks on the garlic due to all that.

Manure spreader works great most of the time for mulching, you'll probably still have some hand work to do as it does clump up when thrown out sometimes. Is yours ground or pto driven?

Reply
bruce king link
8/15/2014 09:57:41 pm

Foot problems with sows do happen, and it's a shame that she's not showing improvement.

the pig market for me is still pretty crazy; we're are selling every pig we wean, usually before they're weaned. I've been surprised by the sustained sales. I'm sure you'll sell every pig you produce if next year is anything like this one.

we run boars together and find that mixing them at different sizes is best. They sort out who's boss and get along after that; the worst is when you have two evenly matched boars and the issue is not clear. That's when you see injuries.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.