Our Farm Has Too Much Rain!

it's been raining a lot in my opinion too much whoops well come on try it again what are you doing in here you should know better than that get out this is marty come on i don't have anything to poke him out with hill come in come on oh i knew this camera was good for something what a mess oh little calves hey guys this sacrificial yard that we feed in the summer with is not built for this kind of weather the water comes off the roof of the barn it's quite a bit of water and rain and if we get rains over successive days it turns muddy but that's i guess why it's a sacrificial area look at all the water rain's good right well it is to an extent just like dry weather some dry weather is good too much dry weather is not good too much rain is not good as well it hurts the crops it hurts the grass our grass growth is slowing down so we want everything in moderation but mother nature seems to rarely give it to us that way our pasture growth is stunting because of the rain we're not seeing nearly the comeback that we normally would for second cutting or pastures it has rained every day for the last seven days and i'm not talking about sprinkles i'm talking about half inch to an inch there's an inch forecasted for today a half inch for tonight and the forecast just goes on and on rain rain rain rain but i do have some good news for you these turkey poults came last week i love raising turkeys they are personable birds this guy's quite upset that i'm holding them they sure are fragile though in their first weeks it took us a while to figure out how to get them to live through mainly the first two weeks secret number one is to hold their feedback for a couple hours after they come from the hatchery and just feed them water i don't know why but it increased our survival rate a lot tip number two is to feed the much higher protein content feed than you would feed to say a young layer chick or a young broiler chick we boost our feet up to 24 to 28 protein for the first five weeks for these guys tip number three is to always feed them vitamins and electrolytes in their water and we get a ship from the hatchery with the chicks and we keep them on it for about the first week be free little one combining all those things we haven't lost a single pulse since they arrived which is really good for turkeys they'll be in the brooder house here for five weeks and then they'll go out on pasture and they'll grow out there for another eight weeks 12 weeks depending on size ready in time for thanksgiving what do we do on rainy days well there's certain things we have to do we have to do the chores twice a day and we did them this morning in the rain but other than that i try to find things to do that aren't in the rain so we're gonna do one of those now hi john these guys have been outside rooting and they made a mess of their pen so i'm gonna clean that up right john but first we got to move you [Music] out all right big bud red's waiting in the mud out there she can stay out there while i clean when they go out and root outside like this they wind up tracking a lot of money and i keep telling them to wipe their feet but they're not listening to me hey rod ritt came in to see me okay check things out all right we'll move john back in nope one goes to one pen one goes the other don't do that red come on come on there you go this is john's hubba hubba sound this is probably why red was out in the yard when i came in because john is relentless and he actually brought her yesterday so i don't think he's gonna have any luck today john the board is getting up there he's got to be six years old but he's always done a great job for us and he's fairly docile for a board he's showing his age though i don't know she seems to be standing for him so maybe she's still in heat but how are brownies piglets you ask well they're doing great how are you doing mom still seven seven healthy piglets you little ones curious little guys i like that about them you come check me out i got mom on one side and piglets on the other they're not going to like it so much a little later in the week though because hillary and i got to castrate the males that's always a fun job not remember this yard that i cleared along the fence line last week well they came out and they cleared the rest for me pigs do a good job at clearing out weeds let's go out to our fields and i'll show you what kind of damage that the rain is causing so remember we pulled the cows off of pasture because we temporarily ran out of pasture because our herd is a bit large for our land but you can see what cows do to land when they traverse it repeatedly right mud mud oh these guys decided they would ignore the fence i don't know if you can see it on the camera but look at the color of this field see the green and then see where it's a lighter green down there that's the wettest part of the field where you get some more of that yellowing and if you look closely at this grass see how light it is it's not that deep green color that you would normally have that's a symptom of too much water a whole multitude of things happen when soils are too wet from too much rain that affect plant life and i'm not a soil chemist but here's the way i understand it the first thing is you lose available nitrogen to the plants which is one of the principal things that make plants look green and healthy and without it they start to yellow the reason you lose nitrogen is really two ways nitrogen in the soil in the form of nitrates can wash along with the water and when you have a lot of water coming into the soil it pushes those nitrates deeper into the soil and can move down deeper than the root zone so it's not available to the plants the other thing that happens is something called denitrification where the nitrites at the nitrates actually turn into nitrites which is a gaseous form and then it escapes the soil entirely so what you end up with is a nitrogen deficiency in the soil that affects grass growth and this applies to other crops as well in a previous video i mentioned my neighbor's soybean fields are starting to yellow up a little bit for the same reason there are ways to minimize this and we practice them if you're practicing organic methods instead of applying liquid or granular fertilizer that nitrogen in organic form is locked up in the soil better and less likely to go as nitrates deeper down when it rains too much but still some of it does and the other thing that happens which is why i'm glad we've left this whiny batch in the yard instead of out on pasture is compaction or soil pugging so when the soil gets waterlogged it's more susceptible to when hooves trot on it pugging or coming down in compaction and you can get a lot more compaction on the soil when it's wet and we all know what compaction does it inhibits future water flow it inhibits soil life and it inhibits plant growth so having them off pasture now not completely a bad thing you guys broke the wire here that is not cool i gotta fix that actually the gate handle's off i wonder how that happened well that's an easy fix you're a bunch of miscreants so for now the cattle stay off the pastures and we're feeding hay speaking of cleaning pens we've been cleaning out the winter chicken house hillary started and plugged away at it for a couple days and then i helped her yesterday and maybe today we can finish it that's benjamin the turkey over here he's living in here because the pulitzer in the other side he was a turkey that the mayor of ithaca pardoned at thanksgiving about i don't know four or five years ago and he's lived here ever since stop this is inevitably the point in the video where somebody will comment or multiple people will comment oh how nice it is that hillary's out you out helping you or why are you making hillary do that work hillary and i are equal partners in the farm when uh pete started doing this few years ago i was uh interested and wanted to do it so pete grew up here on the farm and i grew up in suburbia downstate new york so my experience wasn't really i didn't have any so the learning curve was a little bet and still is to today but we divide up our responsibilities and that seems to help the day go smoother i take care of the poultry and pete takes care of the cows and the pigs and we help each other out but you know that's our primary responsibilities for the day and then you know what you can plan on do you drive tractor yes and you know tell the women out there you can do this women have been farming for a very long time and now that it's on youtube all of a sudden it's maybe a new thing but uh women have been doing this for a long long time and you can do it too yeah i especially became clear to me we have two daughters age 15 and 18 and the idea of women being stuck in traditional gender roles something that chafes at me i think having daughters really brings it home i want them to be whoever they want to be in the videos the videos are from my perspective so you see what i do for a day and sometimes hillary is with me working and when she's not she's off doing her own work on the farm um she doesn't just come out and help me once in a while uh she has her own thing sometimes we have to team up and do them together it's good to have your own work and then work that you do together um yeah yeah because we're home all the time [Music] chicken manure mixed with pine shavings make some awful good compost to put on the fields next year i think hill and my feeling about kids working on the farm is they're not indentured servants right if we were raising kids if we were raising kids in the 60s or the 70s when i grew up you know that was more of a thing we made a conscious decision not to do that the kids do help on the farm oh yeah and they get allowance to do that yeah but they they get paid they get paid by the job they help with chores they mow the lawn they help with butchering and i made a decision i don't know a while after i started the youtube channel probably last winter to not feature them in the videos because as you can imagine i get some comments that are really not cool so we don't feature them but they're helping us out oh no i knew that was gonna happen they don't make anything like they used to the shovels only lasted 15 years i'm not opposed to children working for sure on the farm i think hard work builds good character and i also know that making somebody do something that they don't necessarily want to do is one of the best ways to drive them away from it and make them hate it i would like one of our kids to continue the farm someday but i have little control of that and i think that forcing them to work on the farm is not a good way to go about ensuring that in fact just the opposite i couldn't wait to get out of this place when i was out of high school and it took me till i was 40 years old to realize what i was missing i hope the same for them i was missing all this manure you know i knew it was missing that's enough shoveling chicken manure for one day we just pick away at it a little at a time my beautiful compost pile like money in the bank those little monsters are out on safari right now there's some of them often i'll walk out here and i won't see any pigs i'll just hear grunting over there over there and that's where i know they are my family has good dynamic between hillary and me between hillary me and the kids we have figured out a way to live on this place in harmony for the most part as much as a family would i'm not out to tell you how your family or kids should be raised but i have plenty of people telling me what i should do all the time on youtube and i realize that that's one of the problems we have is we spend too much time telling other people what to do instead of taking care of our own business and to add to that getting it mad when people don't do what we want them to do a little live and let live would help us a lot that's my video for today i hope you have a great day and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 144,522

Rating: 4.9652877 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, day on the farm, slow farming, piglets, homestead pigs, pastured pigs, pigs, too much rain, turkey poults, rainy day, cleaning pens, children on farm, pigs breeding

Id: fBjtE0FvxNo

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021