A New Year and a Year in Review

Wow time flies.... I was just thinking I really should update this blog more often.  In the year of 2018 we got two Babydoll Southdown sheep. We got them as bottle ewe lambs and after they grew up a bit they did a great job on mowing the South Pasture down.

Right now they are off the pasture and into their winter area. But they still like to hang outside in the snow. Ah... the magical thermal insulating properties of wool.

Sheep shearing time will be around the end of March or 1st half of April. 

In addition we raised and processed 14 turkeys in 2018. 7 Broad Breasted Bronze(BBB) and 7 Bourbon Red(BR)turkeys. Those Bourbon Red turkeys sure now how to fly and we spent a good part of last October and November herding them back in the pen.  

The turkeys were moved to different areas of the unfinished vacant ground that will be turned into the North Pasture during 2019. 

I had 300ft of electric netting to enclose them. We processed them the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The overall avg weight of the BBB was a respectable 24lbs and the BR were around an avg of 10lbs. 

We also raised to pigs for meat in 2018.  They were a Mangalitsa X Kunekune.  We got 2 very healthy gilt pigs at 8 weeks old in April and had them butchered on the November 1st. Live weight was around 300lbs for each and a hanging weights were 197lbs and 199lbs. Final pork pork products were around 135lbs for one and 140lbs for the other. 

In addition they gave a lot of fat to render. They were moved around in some paddocks throughout the first 4 months and then the last 3 months moved to a big pen. The last 6 weeks they were finished on at least 5 gallons of apples a day in addition to a free choice grain mixture. Which yielded some great tasting pork.

Our pig experience was by far the best that we have had with out farm animals. They were incredibly smart and great easy going animals.  I think it is the Kunekune side that was coming out.  We loved that we had very minimal food waste in the fact that all extra cooked food that we don't eat gets fed to them.... and they love it. In fact that lead to us getting some more pigs right before Christmas of last year. I will have to create a separate post for those pigs.

Anyways, I will attempt to keep this blog up to date more often at least one post a month.