Our BULL finally meets the COWS! PLUS a NEW Animal on the homestead.

hey everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead well we have a jam-pack day full of animal projects today uh we're really excited to bring you guys along we've got some updates for you on how some of the animals are doing we're also going to do some work with the cattle here in a little bit Watson is going to have a very good day today let me just put it that way Watson is our bull if you're not familiar and he's going to get to go in with all of the cows today we also have some new animals on the homestead you didn't know it but when Kevin was gone to Kansas City with his dad for surgery we had new animals arrive on the homestead so we get to share that with you today too and we're going to hopefully create some new animals today as well because we're going to get some eggs loaded in the incubator so we've got a lot to accomplish we got about 2 and 1/2 Ines of rain overnight last night or yesterday afternoon to overnight so it's it's quite wet out this morning so we had to wait just a little while to get out here to do chores but you can hear that the Ducks and the geese are excited to get out here so let's start chores here in wattville so the first thing we're going to do is let the geese out it's been a while since you guys have seen the goslings uh this spring our geese we have American buff geese they hatched out four of their own goslins this is the first time we've ever had gosline's hatch here on the homestead they laid a lot of eggs but only four of them well six of of them ended up hatching two died within the first day but these four that are left are doing great uh these will ultimately be food for us uh but they are going to live here all summer into maybe the like late fall when we will process them uh later on you guys the last time you saw these I think they were still pretty darn small so I think you're going to be amazed how big these golins are getting good morning [Laughter] can you guys believe how big they are soon we are going to put leg bands on the Gosling so that we can tell them apart because if they get much bigger and get their regular all of their regular feathers in we may not know which are our four breeders and which are the goslins this variety of geese there's no difference between males and females when we ordered them from the Hatchery we got them sexed so we know that we have three females and a male but there's no way for us to determine that later on so we are going to to Mark the four Gosling so that in the fall we can still tell them apart before I refill the goose water I'm going to let the Ducks out because they are being super loud good morning ducks [Laughter] if only we all woke up every morning with as much excitement as the ducks that would be great all right let's give them their food and then we'll let the silkies out as well I'm coming with your breakfast oh your feed is all full of water all right there we go okay let's let up the silkies and the Polish crusted chickens now this past Valentine's Day Kevin bought me some Polish crusted chicks because I just think that they're so cute uh we raised them separately and from the silkies and then recently we kind of joined those two flocks and they all live in here overnight there have been no scuffles or anything and so it's really been kind of a a great transition for the two breeds to live together so let's let them out they're doing so well good morning silkies good morning polish they're all running over to the duck feed I'm going to feed them here maybe they'll come back no the Ducks are on their way over here to steal their food here they're all doing so well and so beautiful I just still cannot get over these like puff balls of feathers on top of the Polish crusted heads the hens are the ones that have like a round tuft of feathers on their head and the roosters are the ones that are kind of a little more scraggly but they're all beautiful overall they're getting along really well now they're all together eating they do all get along really well and the Polish crested are very curious about us when we're out here uh they'll kind of come and see what we're up to if we have something to give them to eat uh when we're in here they'll kind of follow us around so they've been a really interesting personality for us to learn about with this you know just a different type of chicken the silky chickens they're not skittish at all but they just really don't care about us they just kind of go about their business they don't run away when we come around um the Ducks they just kind of do their own thing and have a good time all day long well Sarah told you guys that we have something new that you haven't seen yet I don't know if you can see that chicken tractor over there well there's not chickens in it but there is something in it that needs to be taken care of this morning so let's head over that way all right let's take a look inside and see what the new animal is you probably already guessed it even from a distance but we've decided this year that we're going to raise some turkeys again it's been several years since we've raised turkeys we're only doing four of them because we're also going to have the four goslins to put in the freezer and then we'll have our chickens to put in the freezer and pigs and beef and everything else so we're only doing four turkeys uh we actually split in order of the turkey pts with our friends rich and Shelly from air to ground Farms so they have four of them we have four of them and it worked out well to split in order that way looks like these guys have everything they need for this morning their food is still full uh stayed nice and dry even in this tractor so that's good they are loving we just moved them out here onto grass two or three days ago and they are absolutely loving being out here instead of in our Brer Barn these guys are about 3 weeks old uh they're starting to get you know they're real feathers already now this is the broad breasted white so they're a very fast growing turkey they're not one they're not a Heritage turkey that we could keep around forever they are kind of like the Cornish cross equivalent of a turkey so they will grow very fast they'll get very very big but then they will be ready for the freezer they're not something that you would want to keep on your homestead to you know have a as a sustainable source so these guys will be ready before Thanksgiving and we'll be able to have a homegrown turkey for Thanksgiving again this year all right like I said it looks like they have everything that they need so we don't really need to do anything for them this morning let's head over and let the breast chickens out okay we're going to let out American breast chickens here their food pan is completely filled with water in their food now this is our laying flock the American breast chickens are actually a really true dual purpose uh breed of chickens uh for meat and for eggs we've been keeping these guys around mostly for eggs but also so that we can collect their eggs their fertile eggs and hatch them so that we can raise their chicks for meat and actually uh today we're going to be setting about 53 of their eggs into our incubator so that we can raise that flock up for a meat uh for a year so we're going to let these guys out you can see how beautiful they are I think we have nine or nine or 10 hens and one rooster right now we have two Broody hens but they're a beautiful bird nice and heavy birds so this fall we will have a nice amount of chickens to go into the freezer well now that we're done with all of the bird chores Uh Kevin and I are actually going to just quickly milk bab and we're going to bring her calf up here into this kind of barn lock Barn lot here keep them in here that way when we move cows around the two of them are secure in here we don't have to worry about them mixing with the beef herd um and then we'll bring you guys along when we introduce Watson to his herd of beautiful ladies [Music] [Music] well now that milking is done and Ralphie is reunited with babe for the day the next thing we're going to do is we're going to let Watson in with our herd of cows or the other way around yeah right now they're separated into two different paddocks and they're separated by our driveway you can see here we don't care whether the cows come over to the side where Watson's at or vice versa we just need them reunited at everybody on one side or the other I think that what's going to happen is that our herd of cows is going to be so excited to move somewhere that they're probably going to all cross the driveway um into the dairy pasture area which is fine that could actually be it could stand to be eaten down for a few days uh but whatever happens happens as long as it's safe and everybody ends up on one side or the other it's fine no Watson is this is the first time he'll be with a herd of cows like this he is a registered Herford bull that we purchased earlier this spring um so far this year we've had two calves born but those aren't Watson's calves those are calvs out of our uh old bull Tech you guys probably remember him we had him for several years but because we saved back so many of Tex's daughters this year we replaced him with a new bull Tex went to a great new home where he's now got a whole new herd of cows to take care of and Watson now will hopefully be our bull here on the homestead for many many years to come now we have six cows right and eight heers that he'll be breeding this season right so last year we sold off a bunch of our older cows some of them were having a hard time cing some of them had some behavior issues we didn't want to deal with anymore so we sold off a bunch of the older cows and we kept back a bunch of heers which are females that have never had calves before so Watson is supposed to be a very good bull um there's all these numbers you can look at when you buy a bowl that will kind of determine if he'll make really big calves or really small calves Watson is supposed to be more on the smaller calf side which means he will be very good for breeding with firsttime moms and that's really one of the reasons we bought him yes so technically uh Watson is what's called a heer bowl he'll be perfect for heers because the cows will be smaller and easier to deliver but his numbers suggest that even though his cows will be small at Birth they will grow very quickly right so he'll be good for the cows too uh but he'll really be good for these heers all right let's head down the driveway we're going to get things kind of set up um when we do this we just kind of make kind of a temporary shoot across the driveway we use the UTV we use an old gate it's we just kind of things together hge Podge but it works really let's go down the driveway and get set up so you can see we have a gate over on this side of the driveway we also have a gate over on this side of the driveway these two gates will open and create a barrier right over here on this side this is where we use the UTV and then we have this old broken gate that I just keep leaned up here all the time I'll just prop that against the UTV the cows never once they see it there they don't even try to knock it over [Music] well Watson today's your lucky day you're not going to know what to do with yourself actually I bet you will all right all right you girls want to go in with Watson guess that great gate sagged a little bit all right girls come on let's [Music] go oo Watson's excited [Music] go on [Music] girls well I guess he's going with them [Music] go on [Music] go on [Music] all right well that went smoothly everybody is excited especially Watson let's go ahead and get this locked back up so they stay where they're supposed to stay so this is the side over here where normally our dairy cows are we've moved them up to what we call our barn lot which is just a smaller Paddock they'll be fine up there for several days because we have plenty of grass up there for them and it'll be good to have the big herd over here because they'll Eat This Grass down quite a bit more than just the dairy cows will this is really a little too much land for just babe and Ralphie so it'll be good to have the other cows here so they graze it down a little bit before we put them back out here all right we're going to get everything locked back up and we'll just see how Watson settles in with the girls all of our outside chores are done so we're back in the house and it's time to put some hatching eggs into the incubator these are the American breast chicken eggs and these will be our meat for the next year once these chickens grow up we're putting them in the incubator now it's June 1st which means that by the time they incubate and then we raise them for about 16 weeks we should be able to process these chickens right around the end of October which in our climate here is perfect because the weather is starting to cool down by that point and it works out really well so I've got the incubator here uh we have what's called an Briny Ovation ex incubator uh it holds 56 chicken eggs at a time so let's open this up the one thing that I like about these incubators versus like the older styrofoam ones like we used to have is that this one has a humidity pump which means you can just have a jar of water here and it actually will pull the water in and make the humidity inside of the incubator Perfect all of the time so on our incubator here the eggs will go pointy and down and today we are going to be loading in in 52 chicken eggs we've collected these over about the last 6 or seven days there have been some that we've had to toss because we've gotten so much rain that if they were too dirty we didn't keep them but I think all of these are clean enough to go into the incubator now this incubator also has an automatic egg Turner so you can actually set how often you want the eggs to turn but uh normally we do it every 2 hours so the the motor in there will actually tilt the eggs one way and then 2 hours later it'll tilt it back the other way and it'll do that 24 hours a day so I'm going to go ahead and get these all loaded and then we'll move on to actually setting it up get the temperature and everything set and then it's just a matter of waiting really about 18 days on day 18 we'll take them out of the egg turner and then around day 21 is when the eggs will actually hatch all right they are all loaded as we were loading them Sarah actually said why don't we run out and see if there's four more eggs today so we did and there were exactly four more eggs out there so now we have a full incubator full 56 eggs we're going to go ahead and put the cover on and we're going to get this plugged in and this one has a digital display and I'm pretty sure I already have it all set to exactly what we need nope I do have to adjust the humidity so um I know the temperature is already set to 99.5 which is what we want humidity is still set at 70% from the goose eggs that we had in there we're going to set this down to 40% until it's time for lock down the rest of this is all okay and there we go you guys these eggs will now be in here for 18 days with the Turner on after 18 days we'll take them and we'll lay them on their sides in the bottom of the Inc inor and just a few days after that we'll start getting chicks well you guys thank you so much for spending part of the day with us today we hope you enjoyed seeing all of the animals it's always a balance here on our channel to try to show you guys animal videos and gardening videos and cooking videos and everything else and we we don't want to overdo one but we always want to show you guys what's going on on all different parts of the homestead hey you guys if you enjoying videos like this make sure that you hit that subscribe button and remember the best way to help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 49,119

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: VInziAsEWPQ

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024