HARVEST SEASON IS HERE: Dexter cattle, pastured pigs, chickens & turkeys

hi i'm pete and welcome to just few acres farm well it's fall it's the height of fall here it's a beautiful day and fall is the season for butchering fall was always a season for butchering especially back before we had refrigeration and it followed natural cycles because animals like lambs and pigs and chickens would be born in the spring when the weather was warming they would grow through the warm months remember in the old day a meat chicken took at least six months to grow they would grow during the warm months and then you would butcher in the fall the other great reason for butchering in the fall is the outside temperature is agreeable for it you could hang carcasses outside to cool in 30 to 40 degree weather you could age beef heck when i was a kid we used to hang beef in the barn to age it after we butchered here on the farm so it just makes sense it feels like part of the natural rhythm so we're doing a whole lot of butchering now it's a real push for hillary and i and i'm going to take you around the farm in this video and show you all the animals that are headed to freezer camp first the pigs i've got 12 pigs here that are going to the butcher in mid-november so it's coming up pretty soon and uh with pigs i am always glad to see them go pigs are a pain in general but they're especially a pain when they get big because when i come in to feed them i've got my bucket of feed they'll rush me now they don't run away anymore and they've almost bent my knee backward a couple times so i will be very happy to see these guys go when it's time for them to go i'll just back the trailer up to the fence line about a week before i'm going to load them to the butcher start feeding them out of the trailer and on butchery day when they all go in to eat i'll just close the door behind them and away we'll go glad to see them gone pigs are my least favorite animal to grow but i sure do like pork and this is next summer's pork that just came this week special delivery red had 15 piglets two of them were born dead she's lost one since then so she's got 12 left and red's a good mom she is careful where she puts her feet and she takes care of her piglets on the other hand misty also had piglets and as you can see there's only two here missy only had seven piglets she stepped on five of them and so she's got two left missy's a terrible mom so i've got plans for her this fall as soon as we wean her piglets off i am going to butcher missy here on the farm um it'll be a big job she probably weighs i don't know she'll dress it four to five hundred pounds and we've had bigger pigs believe it or not but she'll provide a couple years worth of meat since we're butchering them here on the farm we won't be able to sell the meat so we'll save it all to eat ourselves that's going to be a big project i'll probably make a series of videos about it the reason we're butchering missy here on the farm is because i can't get her into the butcher the butcher won't take pigs that big he says his chute isn't wide enough and his killing apparatus isn't the right size when it comes to pigs that big and i can't get a date with him anyway he's booked into the middle of 2021 right now so we'll do her here i you saw that those piglets are on bare concrete and folks have asked about that a few times in the past the reason that we keep our brood pigs on bare concrete is because it's easier to keep clean i can go in there every couple days and take a few shovelfuls of poop out if i put in straw or wood chips or something like that it winds up being a wet mess and in addition the piglets get lost and that they'll bury themselves in it mom won't see them and step and she'll step on them so we keep the floors bare to keep them cleaner and to keep the piglets safer we've also found through our own experience that it's a lot better for us to feral pigs inside rather than out on pasture and that's because of the temperature we farrow pigs now october and sometimes in november and then we'll have another batch that comes in april it can be awfully cold rainy wet snowy here both those times of year and it's hard to keep piglets warm enough when they're first born when you've got the variables of weather no matter how much shelter you give them outside it's a lot better to keep them inside we can warm up the concrete floor with heat lamps and we can keep them dry and dryness is really the key to keeping them warm misty and red's piglets will grow out in here over the winter this is where we grew piglets last year it's the end bay of our pole barn i need to clean it out and get it all set up i had so much better luck last winter growing pigs in here than out on pasture and in the wintertime here there's nothing for pigs to forage for anyway the ground's frozen most time nothing's growing growing them in here keeps them out of the wind keeps them dry they gain a lot better than they would out on pasture and then spring pigs will go back out on pasture in a different lot than this year next year hillary and i spent the morning and mostly afternoon butchering turkeys today and we started out with 106 we have 26 left we do them in four rounds and it's awful work because turkeys are so heavy and you have to lift them up multiple times in the butchering process at the end of the day your back's pretty sore so we're waiting for these guys to grow out a little bit more we start butchering uh well we started last week and we'll go through about two weeks and as they gradually get bigger we butcher them to meet our customers different size requirements they go into the freezers and then the customers can pick them up when they would like around the thanksgiving or christmas holidays on the days that we're not butchering turkeys we're butchering broiler chickens we've got one two three boxes left out of the six that we've been running all summer so we're halfway there whenever a box empties now it stays empty you can see them trailing back in the field we'll collect them all up in the fall i'll be happy to be done butchering poultry it gets old this time of year it is nice to fill up the freezers though to think about all that we'll have to sell in the winter time to keep us busy and keep money coming in fortunately we don't have to butcher any stew hens this year we have about 400 layer hens out here now you see there's two houses we combine the pullets that got hatched out this spring with the older langhans usually we would butcher a batch of two-year-old langhans keep our flock young and productive but we're always short on eggs and this year we're going to try holding the layers for another year so next year we'll have some three-year-olds laying her between two and three-year-olds and see if we can up our egg production a little bit as we're moving toward keeping a 400 hen flock permanently so at least it's a relief that we don't have to go through like we usually do and butcher these guys we moved them into their winter house late october usually but i'm not sure the winter house is going to be done this year as you recall we tore it all apart to put in a concrete floor i've been waiting for the concrete truck to come for almost a month now and once we get the concrete poured we can put the plastic in the metal on it and move these guys inside but it's gonna be a little bit later than usual this year and i left the most important thing for last this is sammy remember sammy the bottle fed steer now he's over two years old he was hand raised and he's always been friendly but he's going to the butcher in a couple weeks and i have to tell you hey i really have mixed feelings about that because this is hawks hux [Laughter] anyway sammy's gotten really headstrong as i've said in previous videos and he has a tendency to kick up his heels he'll run toward you turn at the last second whoops sorry sammy and kick up his heels coco stop it and it's dangerous i've been bent over opening up a hay bale and almost gotten hit in the head by his heel so i also feel that it's better for sammy to stay on the farm and sort of end his days the way he was meant to because it's the less stress for him you are pushy today you know i've had more than a few people contact me and say they'd like to buy sammy to keep his pet well number one he's really not that great pet anymore number two i have a hard time selling cattle to anybody because i don't know how they're going to be cared for i know how they're cared for here these these are like part of the family and to send them someplace else where they might not be taken care of as well to some stranger i'm just not comfortable with that so sammy's sticking to the plan here and we'll be having sammy burgers in about a month that's my update busy busy busy and it's getting to be late afternoon now and i better hurry back up to the house so i can get a nap in before dinner time thanks for joining me and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 120,489

Rating: 4.9407096 out of 5

Keywords: small livestock farm, small farm life, farming, farm, homestead, just a few acres farm, Dexter cattle, harvest season, freezer camp, turkey harvest, pastured pigs, newborn piglets, pastured chickens, pastured poultry, farm tour, just a few acres farm pasture, harvest season 2020, hobby farm guys, hobby farm, hobby farming for profit, small scale livestock farming

Id: y-pVXcH4kZY

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020