Just One Good Day on the Farm

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm well in honor of labor day i am smoking some pork belly and also in honor of labor day i thought i'd take this video and talk about the pros and cons and the ethical issues surrounding abortion i'm just kidding i tried to get you going we're going to have a light work day today and i'm going to show you some interesting stuff and it'll be fun it's labor day let's take a little time off what i'm smoking here is pork belly from our old sal missy that we butchered last year five-year-old sal really good flavor but she needs to be smoked a long time and i use a snake around my weber grill and i really load it up with hickory it gradually burns all day long i never have to mess with it and i like a lot of smoke and pork belly so that's why i use a lot of hickory so we'll put the lid on her and smoke her at about 225 all day long we do have one major piece of work today and that's to load up a steer and bring him to the butcher so i'm going to hook up the trailer the camera and backing up is not easy this is a two-year-old steer and he's going to the butcher today so we're going to load them out of this little pen and into the trailer all right buddy no we're not going that way [Music] all right buddy come on i'll turn your head around some are hard and some are easy trailers all hooked up and ready to go you know the ones that are easy to load are usually hard to unload we'll see all right i'll climb in here with ya watch out buddy okay let's go they don't like that fan i'm sure you can hear it they never heard anything like that before we don't have any fans like that do we larry our butcher went in and shut the fan off so we'll see if she comes out now or he i should say or i should say let's go buddy man off you go come in come in there we go there we go thanks larry we got the trailer all put away and it's on to the next job and that job is herding turkeys there must be a joke in there someplace are you guys ready for new grass hear that bark that they're making well compare that to the sound they make when they get on new grass you'll hear we move the turkeys to fresh grass once a week and to do that we build a new enclosure and we drop one side of it here and then we just drop this fence herd them into the new spot pull their ark into the new spot and they're all set to go all right guys these are just like people at the office hanging around the water cooler you turkeys get back to work all right now we heard him in turkeys turkeys over ego we always have to go back and get the stragglers all right guys come on you you were hanging around the water cooler come on go join your mates [Music] hear how their call changed it changed from barking to [Music] the pit pop is i found something now we just got to bring their home through now we just put up the side of the fence that we moved him through we hook up this jumper to the main electric fence here from the electro net fence and we're done turkeys are happy on new grass you know that reminds me of an old old joke that my fourth cousin twice removed once told me and that is what's the difference between a skydiver and a golfer give up a golfer goes whack dog and a skydiver goes darn whack oh boy it's just another day on the farm well i think it's time to wrap up the pork belly yup two pigs in a blanket or two pigs in space blankets we'll let them rest there for a while let's go out and see the cattle howdy cows howdy cows what are you yelling at me about here comes titus titus has to be scratched when i come out to the pasture it's like i have to pay tribute to him as the boss right titus hey little one this is our newest calf and he is a cutie right little guy you're a cutie obviously the cows are back on pasture at least titus's group is and right now they're on about two acres which we've just let them loose on and they'll be here for about five days i want to show you what this stuff looks like that they're on because we've really got some great pasture growth this fall they've prompted it down as cows do but we've got a lot of clover and alfalfa and grasses it's really nice thick stuff that they're on growing good grass is something you can be proud of but since new york legalized marijuana when i tell people i grow grass for a living it takes on a whole new meaning this is just the start of good pasture that we have to graze them through the fall let me show you some of the other stuff i have two acres up there five acres here which we amazingly took hay off of just two or three weeks ago it's looking really good five acres there and five acres down there we're going to be grazing later in the year this year than we have in quite a while this is the field that i just took hay off of two or three weeks ago and look at this alfalfa popping up lots of clover coming in look at this stuff beautiful look at all that alfalfa it's going to be in great shape and about geez the cows aren't going to be on this for about a month or so so there's going to be lots of grass here by then coming down to these two fields here and over there this grass is an optimal grazing state and the cows are going to be moving on to this field next this just amazing stuff to graze cattle on it's right where you want it to be the alfalfa has just started to bloom lots of clover and grass is coming up nice tender forage the cows are going to be gaining weight all fall that's for sure and i probably won't be putting them on hay till i would say the end of october beginning of november at the earliest we only have about 20 of our 35 head of cattle out here because remember the herds divided for breeding so we've got orton's group in the barn and then we've got heifers in the heifer yard now that are going to get cold next year titus is going over to trash talk ordon [Music] oh titus came in to pine after the heifers here across the no man's land the dmz he just gets so mad that he can't get to these ladies while i'm out here i'll take you over to the barn and tell you about our hay situation for the winter earlier this summer i think it was for one of the sunday videos that i do i did some hay calculations and grazing calculations for our dexter cattle and found that we really have too many had for our land we're grazing and making hay off in combination 30 acres total and we have about 35 head of cattle including yearlings and calves and 30 acres of grazing just won't cut it as well as making hay off of that same land this year i've made about i haven't added up exactly but i'm guessing i made about 90 5x5 round bales and it's not going to be enough for the winner so early in the spring i made arrangements with a local custom haymaker who makes hay for a lot of the big dairies around here to get a hundred four by five round bales and he's going to deliver them just soon as he gets a chance he's still obviously in the midst of his hay season but i've been in communication with him and indeed i do have a hundred bales coming hopefully it'll be this week or next but i can't tell for sure when he's going to free up to do that subsequent to figuring out the actual carrying capacity our la of our land which is actually about seven brood cows plus their trios yearling and calf that go with each brood cow for a total of around 21 had to i think probably up to 26 or 28 had maximum we can provide our own hay we've decided to downsize our herd because we can't provide all of our own hay and i know it's something that is not necessary we could graze more land and buy more hay but i'm really not into that for our cattle i like having the control of growing good quality hay and pasture and feeding our cattle exclusively what we grow and i do think at times about the same for our poultry that it sure would be nice to have control over our total food supply for our animals i don't know if we're going to get there with poultry one of the heifers came in but certainly we can get there for the cattle and have a self-sufficient herd so we've made butcher dates over the rest of this year in 2021 as well to complete the downsizing of our herd it's time to unwrap the pork now that i have it unwrapped i'm going to cook it at a higher temperature to put more of a crust on the outside of it for a couple hours smoke and then it'll be ready it's time for afternoon chores and time to feed the pigs they've been whining a lot i think they're hungry are you guys hungry don't touch the fence so these little guys are scrappy they hold their own feeding time until i scare them you need a water refill well it's time for dinner time to pull off pork belly oh and of course we have to do the chef's official taste test it's not as falling a party as i would like but sometimes that's not completely a bad thing let's give it a try it's good one of the perks of having a garage full of freezers full of meat delicious before i go inside and eat my delicious dinner with my family i wanted to acknowledge something that i thought was kind of cool in this video you may have noticed that three of the four college shirts that i wore are not from the us james cook university from australia the australian national university anu both set by folks that watch a channel from australia and then university of new brunswick from canada it's really cool to get shirts from halfway around the world those sorts of things still blow me away i've gotten a couple hundred college t-shirts just a rough guess since i uh said that you know it'd be a cool thing to do and it's connected with a lot of viewers i think i see lots of comments like hey i love that university i have enough at this point so i don't need any more i have a lifetime supply of shirts i sure do appreciate everybody that sent them it it meant the world to me i hope you had a great labor day i know you'll see this a day late i hope you have a great week and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 109,126

Rating: 4.9631052 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, day on the farm, slow farming, busy day, farm day, pigs, dexter cattle, turkeys, pastured poultry, dexter calf, loading cattle

Id: JNGGZaF9ZPg

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021