Happy I'm Not Doing That Anymore!

time for the morning commute to the office morning chickens ah wow eat that new grass they don't know what to make of the camera oh we make our morning commute out to the field but meanwhile i see people zipping by on cars making their morning commute to wherever they're working and i think to myself i'm glad i'm not doing that anymore oh wow the bulls didn't eat all their hay from yesterday that's a never happen but i opened the door to the pasture yesterday and they're out there munching grass now morning little pigs why are you scared of me oh it rained again last night poured oh well hey turkeys hillary hasn't fluffed their bedding yet for the morning that easy there you go these guys are two weeks old now he's not happy some of them are strutting and gobbling now two weeks old unbelievable there's a couple strutting wow it's time for breakfast and the sun's starting to peek out i hope that hangs around today's a day of bits and pieces i'm not sure what the weather's going to do it might rain and hillary's got to go to market this afternoon so it's little jobs today and the first job is to move some feed around [Applause] when our wagons get filled they come out here to the pasture and this is for the broilers and we have a broiler cart that we use to put the feed in and the cart follows the uh broilers around the pasture try to do this without getting it all over we have very little problem with spoilage in these gravity wagons and i think the key is that these are heavy vinyl tarps if we were using canvas tarps you'd have more of a problem with condensation or even seepage through the old style canvas tarps but these are truly waterproof we do get a little bit of spoilage around the seams of these old gravity wagons and it's not a big deal it'll clump right around where the water's seeping and we just picked that out the feed doesn't get moldy or anything like that it stays nice and you can smell it it smells good the gravity wagons work out just fine there's probably a more efficient way to do this but it works for us and we're using what we have yeah for the efficiency owls out there which is a whole genre of comments yes there's probably a more efficient way to do it but works fine for us and it's really not a big deal in the overall labor on the farm and then to feed the broilers because we have them on a diet they get a prescribed amount of feed each day we have hash marks on the bucket that are the different weights of feed so we know feed them each day remember the layers we have a different wagon they have different feed and i just used some garbage cans because that keeps the feed dry and i'll use a couple buckets to carry their allotment over to wherever they are it's not usually very far the layers were all here at the fence they know we're up to something with their food that's it for that job and the next job is to clean out the pig's pens all right brownie time for pen cleaning little ones so time for the piglets to freak out still seven piglets and they're filling out really nice hillary and i haven't gotten around to castrating the males yet i guess we're gonna do that tomorrow what are you doing brownie hey what are you doing you want a scratch don't you pigs love a scratch in the middle of the back i think it's because they have the toughest time itching there all right red and john you guys want to go on a walkabout there we go these guys just keep dragging in mud from their outdoor run i keep having to clean it out that can you go down there feeding the floor in there there you go i put a little feed in the corner to get john to come back in he's a guy who looks after his stomach first and foremost he's going to stay in here with red for another heat cycle he bred her last week but we like to leave him in for one more just to make sure that she's bred all right pigs i'll see you later now it's time for my favorite job of the day you guys have something to tell me uh-huh uh-huh i'm listening yeah uh-huh what a motley crew you are i feel like something's breathing down my neck is somebody following me we have the back fence set up now so this is the third day on this pasture back fence there we move the front fence and then move the back fence over and extend the aisle way i'll show you ah um [Music] ah now we move the back fence [Music] we set the new corner between the aisle and the back fence and now we draw the back fence over to its new location then we jumper the back fence aisle to side reels and add one post on the aisle fence it keeps continuing itself outward and then jumper the aisle fence to the main fence and we're done we do this every day that they're on pasture and this paddock is about 80 feet wide by 300 feet long it takes us about 15 minutes without the walk up and down here and the walk up and down here is for exercise and this is what gets left behind in yesterday's paddock and these good things as well i got some comments earlier in the year why are you leaving so much behind and another comment you should do zero greys where you just mow and chop it all and bring it up to the cows well that kind of runs against what our farms about first of all we like to bring the animals to the food rather than vice versa because it requires less fuel and it's in the cow's nature to graze so we wouldn't take that away from the second thing is this trample that you see is not waste it becomes part of the soil at least a percentage of it does it insulates the soil during dry weather it helps develop good bacteria and soil life because it's an insulating layer that's on top of the soil that's gradually breaking down and becoming part of the soil it's one of the ways that we keep our pastures growing strong growing strong that is this paddock from yesterday is pretty much exactly what i like to see in terms of percentage graze versus trample i've got a nice mat remaining on the bottom of it the other thing that happens is that this pasture will recover more quickly with it like this if you mow it and then take it up to the cows you'll stall the grass growth because that grass when it's you know this tall or this tall it takes a week or two to really start its growth cycle again you don't want to cut it too short so moving them off of this has a lot of merits and one of the greatest merits to what we do in my opinion is this this experience of the cattle grazing on the pasture listening to the munch the grass this is natural it's not mechanized it's not industrial it's the animal interfacing with nature the way that it was meant to it's the relationship that counts another thing about grazing the way we do is it's completely flexible this is a five acre fenced field 300 feet side to side so when we come down it with strips we can adjust the strip width with temporary fencing based on the grazing conditions so now we're running 80 feet wide we could run however wide that we want depending on how tall the grass is it's my favorite part of every day moving the cattle i love it even in the pouring rain well maybe not in the foreign rain i have to pack for market now hillary's going this afternoon but while i'm packing the stuff i thought i could tell you all a little story and it does have a point at the end trust me when i first got out of college in 1991 there were no architecture jobs to be had when i entered college in 1986 architecture was booming but architecture is boom and bust based on the building cycle which seems to go up and down every five to seven years i was living in syracuse because that's where i had gone to school so i set my resume around all the firms in town and there were about 50 at the time and i got absolutely no responses so i put in a listing with one of those temporary employment agencies and a couple days later i got a call from a man in liverpool that owned a landscaping company and he said i've got summer work for you i said great and i went to work for them mowing lawns on commercial properties now when winter came and there was no lawn mowing to be done i drove a sweeper truck and swept parking lots at night so i'd make a big circuit around the syracuse metropolitan area sweeping parking lots with a rig mounted on a truck and also when it snowed outside i would drive a pickup truck or a loader to clear out the parking lots and that was my job for two years over time i got discouraged after two years in working this job i thought i am significantly underemployed i went to college to a professional school which is supposed to lead directly to a job but the economy had killed that well by this time the economy had started to come around so i sent out another round of resumes and this time i got a response ashley mcgraw architects in syracuse was hiring and they gave me a call and said why don't you come in on friday and we'll interview you so i got my portfolio together i went in and the interview went pretty well and that afternoon they called me back and said we'd like you to start on monday and i said great well that happened to be the weekend of the blizzard of 93 and syracuse got 50 some inches of snow in three days starting that friday afternoon and i worked all night and day all weekend plowing snow for the landscape company i was working for and monday morning i went into work at my new architecture firm without having had very much sleep at all i guess that's the benefit of youth and i worked there for 20 years and you all know how that story ended here i am on the family farm the point of the story is that it's good to experience a diversity of things when i was in high school i had jobs digging holes trimming trees planting trees taking care of nursery plants food service i did just about everything and when i got out of college i had the flexibility to move into something that wasn't my career in fact it was the exact opposite probably but when i grew unhappy in my career i had a range of experiences to draw from as well as growing up on this farm to say well these are the things that i like and i think i want to point my life in this direction so if you're unsure of where to go in your life it's good to draw back on your prior experiences and start to pull those things out that you enjoyed and then you can build up what you think the direction may be that you should be headed in and honestly i wish the system worked differently because when i was in high school it was expected if you were a successful student that you went to high school to college to your permanent career well at 18 years old i think very few people have any idea how they want to spend the rest of their life it's funny the places life leads us to i hope you have a great day this is the end of my video and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 148,568

Rating: 4.970922 out of 5

Keywords: farm, farming, hobby farm, hobby farm guys, hobby farming for profit, homestead, how farms work, just a few acres farm, life on a farm, dexter cattle, dad jokes, day on the farm, slow farming, grazing cattle, busy day, farm day, pastured pigs, calves, temporary fences, pasture, happy, Happy I'm Not Doing That Anymore, strip grazing cattle, new pasture

Id: Yk7xr4E-qgA

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021