Purpose Driven Homestead

Well... life continues on the farm without my amazing wife and kids while they are on vacation with family. After a surprise calf birth, I have been supplementing with some colostrum. Since its a new cow, neither of them (cow or calf) knew what to do, so I had to step in. Since the cow would only let the calf nurse for a few seconds before stepping away and only when I was holding her by her halter, I made two bottles of colostrum yesterday. The first one the calf drank 90% of it. The second she didnt want. Thats a sign that even though ive not seen it, the calf is nursing somehow... otherwise she'd be hungry. I made this bottle 🍼 this morning and once again she didnt seem hungry. Making a warm bottle for a calf requires a dramatically bigger pot of water than for a baby... lol. Since I work a non-farm day job all day, I can't observe the cows all day. I have to make inferences based on other data. Here, the calf is mobile and not hungry... thats a good sign even if I dont physically observe her nursing.

Well.. I shared earlier this week that I volunteered to hold down the fort for a week while my family went on a well deserved vacation to see my mother-in-law in Florida. Of course we had to have at least one surprise while they were gone. One of our dairy heifers decided to go into labor early and I had to quickly pull a calf. Now she's officially a first time cow. I video called my wife and the kids named her Peaches. You never know what you're going to get into on a farm from day to day. This cow wasnt due for another few weeks, but she wanted to throw me a curveball while I was by myself. Lol.

On our farm, I walk... a lot. The regenerative agriculture methods that we use, don't leverage tractors nearly as much as standard farming. I work a day job from 8-5 and do most of my farming work in the morning before work or in the afternoon after I get off work. I move chicken tractors by hand and I move our beef cattle by hand. My wife uses our UTV to milk our dairy cows and set up feed for the chickens and pigs. So even though I don't get a lot of steps in from my "day job", I routinely get in 15K - 20K steps just walking around the farm doing chores. I wanted a faster way to zip around the farm without having to fork out big $$$$ for another UTV or ATV. This E-Bike was the perfect solution for us. https://youtu.be/a65E0orSQcU

Well... after 3 years of constant work on the farm, my wife and kids have taken a well deserved vacation trip to visit her family in Florida for an "end of summer break" before fall starts. I'm excited for them and was happy to watch the farm and take care of all the chores for a week. They all work so hard, and I love that they can take a quick breather. My family lives closer, but seeing my wife's family involves either a long drive or a flight. With 4 kids... flights are unaffordable, so driving is the way. Candidly, the most challenging part was taking over the milking duties from my wife, but yesterday went pretty good. Dairy cows (in smaller non-automated farms) get to know their human caretakers and are creatures of habit. They don't care for change much. Here is one of our girls in milk and she is munching on her ration of Non-GMO feed while I milk her. I think I'm going to do a vlog type of video showing what goes into a day in the life of running a farm by yourself. It would be a great primer.

I haven't posted for a while now because there's been so much going on. Should be able to get back into the posting routine soon, assuming everything settles down some. In the meantime, I think this may be the final garden haul for the season. Maybe a few items here and there, but mostly done.

With meat birds season starting to slow down a little, its time to start cleaning out brooders we used all spring and summer. We are small scale so we use big troughs for our brooders. Once the chicks are out on pasture I always dump the leftover wood shavings that were used as bedding, manure, and leftover feed bits out to the laying hens. They pick through the remnants and spread it for me and the manure and wood chips then help add nutrients to the pasture as they decompose. Just one more way we add back in our regenerative farm.

The foam I sprayed the other day cured completely so I was able to cut the bottom side of the rafters off to make it clean and flat for installing drywall next. I used a serrated insulation knife and it cut like butter through the foam.

Finally finished spray foaming the ceiling of the milk shed yesterday. I had run out of foam with only that small portion in the first picture still left to go on this gambrel roof line. So I took the day off and finished up getting the spray foam done so I can start drywall soon. If you missed how I did it, check out the video below to see the setup.👇👇 https://youtu.be/qLYuDK8FjR0

What a difference a couple months make. While the last few weeks have been dry, we had a really rainy July. That first picture was of my father's pond on June 12th. The second picture was from yesterday. Scale is hard to infer from the picture but the water was down about 14 feet from the rim of the pond. Now its only about 6 feet from the top. The pond is graded so that it slopes away and no runoff goes into it when it rains, so about 7 of the 8 foot increase is due to ground water intrusion as the rain seeps into the surrounding land. One of the many reasons we can't have basements around here. We have some more potential rain coming in over the next few days, which is good because the top 6 inches of the ground is starting to dry out now and we could use a few slow soaking rains again.

You guys may remember the mobile shelter that I built a couple years ago. I built it on 4x4" sled runners so it could move with the cattle daily. You can see the video here of how I built it. 👇 https://youtu.be/tabPf5kooY4 Well its still working great, but we have a lot more cows now that want to share it than we did originally when I built it. 😆We've had another round of severe heat come through (pretty normal for August) so they are packing in under it and on the shaded side as the day progresses. Its so awesome to see a shelter that I just kind of thought up has survived being pulled from paddock to paddock for several years now and worked well for us.

As the USDA says over and over... clearly highly regulated commercial/industrial food is dramatically safer than knowing your local farmer and buying directly from someone you can trust. Chickens at those factories providing your eggs... instead of allowing their chickens to graze and scratch in an open pasture, those factory egg chickens live their entire lives in a space the size of a 8"x12" piece of notebook paper. How is anyone surprised by this level of incompetence. Buy local. Buy safe. Pay your farmer or pay your pharmacist. https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/fda-upgrades-egg-recall-highest-risk-level-salmonella-sickens-dozens-across-several-states

Pay your Farmer... or Pay your pharmacist. Next time you're eating that soy milk in your latte, eating soybean oil in food, or anything else that that has it. Remember that these weeds dying amongst the soybeans, aren't dying of natural causes. These are "round-up ready" GMO soybeans. They have been genetically modified to tolerate application after application of glyphosate without dying. That goes into all that food you eat. I took this picture on a bike ride right down the road the from where we live. Yet we wonder why cancer rates are through the roof in rural areas and digestive system cancers (especially colon) have dramatically increased over the beast few years even more so for young adults under 40. You are what you and your food eats.... Look for local farmers thats don't use this stuff.

Ever wonder what goes into running a small regenerative farm that feeds your local community while still working a day job? That means leaving to go get feed at 5:30 after work yesterday and making a 4 hour round trip (getting home at 10pm) because its the only local non-GMO feed provider. It then means getting up before going to work today to get the feed unloaded and put up before some potential rain moves in. Smaller pickup this time with only 4,000 lbs. It makes for a long day from 5am to midnight working two jobs, but we love serving our community. If you want to see the full picture of what that entails, check out the video below of a typical feed run for us.👇 https://youtu.be/vKXX0L77_MA

Ever wonder what goes into running a small regenerative farm that feeds your local community while still working a day job? That means leaving to go get feed at 5:30 after work yesterday and making a 4 hour round trip (getting home at 10pm) because its the only local non-GMO feed provider. It then means getting up before going to work today to get the feed unloaded and put up before some potential rain moves in. Smaller pickup this time with only 4,000 lbs. It makes for a long day from 5am to midnight working two jobs, but we love serving our community. If you want to see the full picture of what that entails, check out the video below of a typical feed run for us.

Moved the cattle to a new paddock yesterday (like every day) and it just amazes me at how much the regenerative approach changes things. The first picture is from a video I made a couple years ago on how to connect hard fencing. Look at the ground and the grass in the back ground. Thats the same pasture (just viewed from outside the fence vs inside) as the second picture. No fertilizer. No herbicides. Just regenerative agriculture practices with animals on it for only 2 years. Wow!

People don't realize what goes into raw milk production. For example... we break down ever single piece of equipment and sanitize it every day to keep milk safe. You think commercial dairies do that? https://youtube.com/shorts/xJAp3D3_UW4?feature=share

What a difference a year makes. The last two years have been droughts. We started feeding hay in June both prior summers all the way until spring. Hundreds of bales just for our little herd. This year... we have actual rain! The spring was dry and then starting at the end of July... the rains started. We received more rain this summer than in the prior two... combined... times 3. Lol. The pastures exploded and all of the regenerative work we've been doing paid off! The land held on to more water (less runoff), it soaked in dramatically quicker, and it was available for the grass for longer due to the improved organics in the soil. We haven't fed one bale of hay yet this summer and if things continue... we wont feed until winter. We're talking about thousands of dollars saved compared to prior years and better fresh forage! Praise God!

Dog days of summer have returned and the chickens benefit from some watermelon from the fridge. It's a nice way to cool down the chickens. You can see the before and after... lol

When you think you're eating healthy avocado 🥑 oil... and they are really replacing it with soybean oil... https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils

Finally bought a cream separator for our jersey milk. Still need to work with it and make tweaks but it works pretty well. One day it may allow us to make sales of butter, cream, etc.