Pasture Raised Everything

[Music] michelle joe we're out at your farm little way farm in silas city thanks so much for having me out today yeah um tell us a little about your farm and what you guys do here sure yeah we're a small family farm we're a family of five my wife and i our three boys under five years of age we also have a religious community here on the farm where we offer hospitality to uh poor folks formerly homeless men that live with us and there's three of those guys and we started just a few years ago in the city of durham living together offering meals to folks having a roof over our heads and as i finished up graduate school and started having children i stayed at home and quit my job and began to think about what do we do during the day when we're home with family and guys with time on our hands and it kind of led naturally back to the land and thinking about growing our own food so for the first couple years out on the land we grew food for ourselves and once you kind of start growing for yourselves it's not that much harder to kind of raise the production up a little bit and now we're feeding about 40 families every every two weeks through our deliveries offering all pastures meat and eggs okay so you guys started off in durham essentially and you guys were vegetable farmers at the beginning well so we leased a house that was on a vegetable farm and um as part of our lease we were helping volunteer on the vegetable farm and that was our first experience we're both city people i grew up in los angeles joe grew up in tallahassee um so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing when we moved to this farm i mean so it was a really good it was a really good experience for us to learn what we wanted to do um vegetable farming is so difficult and i think we learned a lot about how to grow our own food and then we also started to think more broadly about how we wanted to care for the land um and raising animals in a sustainable and regenerative way was something that we and the guys who live with us were really interested in doing um so after two years on that property we then found this place and i bought this and these are our children um and then uh when we moved here one of the reasons we moved here is because it had the infrastructure for us to raise animals so we moved here and we started very small with just a few chickens and cows that was mainly raised for our own production plus our dairy cow and then we've expanded from there okay and can you talk a little bit about the work you've been doing with um the homeless men and and sort of how that fits into the holistic plan here yeah so part of the hold back to the land idea of the catholic worker movement um it's the answer to industrialism and capitalism run rampant and that having a foothold on the land is the answer to some of society's kind of biggest problems is that once you become detached from the land you have a hard time sustaining your life so what we're trying to do is give folks a toe hold back into growing their own food having a place they can call their own having a place that's quiet that's theirs and then we just try to love each other the way that we try um that we would want to receive it okay and so you house a few of those gentlemen here and they help you out on the farm yep okay yeah they pretty much they run the entire layer operation with our with our layer hands and then they kind of help us with uh just the maintenance and the upkeep of keeping up with the with the 50 we're on 50 acres here okay cool so what are the different uh operations we have going on here yeah so our very first operation was it was a dairy cow and we bought a dairy cow with her first calf and we've been milking her for going on this is her fourth calf this year so this is four years of us up milking her quickly after that we did our first set of broiler chickens we started out with 50 chickens four years ago and now we're doing 2 000 birds a year we also have a flock of layer hens we're raising turkeys for thanksgiving and then in this year with the pandemic and the supply the supply chain for the pork industry breaking down we rescued about 20 pigs from that supply chain and are raised in you know white industrial pigs out in the forest out here cool so pretty much everything pastured meat yep okay yeah and our omnivores our pigs and our chickens we're all used we're using a non-gmo uh locally raised 100 traceable grain that's grown and milled here in north carolina by jeff bender that's been on a lot of your other videos yep and i use the i use his feet as well and jeff's an awesome person so uh let's uh go check out all the stuff you got going on i know we're gonna go do all the chores this morning great all right you guys want your buckets so joe the kids help out with the chores every day they do they're a big help with the buckets uh they can get milk out of the cow they can't really hit the bucket yet with the milk but they're try to include them in as much as they want to and are able to come along for it yeah this is mama cakes she's our dairy cow she's half jersey half angus she's a smaller framed cow she probably only weighs about 900 pounds but as a smaller framed cow it's great for us because she'll throw a smaller animal which is just when you're practicing regenerative agriculture big heavy cows tear up the land especially in the muddy season so she's great for us but half jersey half angus so she throws a good bit of milk but then she also raised a really good beef offspring as well for the ones that end up going into the freezer okay how much milk do you get per day this fourth calf we're getting about pretty consistently two and a half gallons a day share milking so share milking is uh the calf and she had twin calves this year they get mama for 12 hours a day and they milk her out and then we pull the calves off overnight and then 12 hours later we get all that milk that's stored up okay and that's just one uh the routine of that and the chores you're only having to milk once a day instead have to go back out and milk at night and then also it just mimics the natural relationship between calf and mom so the calf's getting everything they need we're not having to bottle feed they're milking mom out preventing mystitis and all that kind of stuff so it just really helps to keep that natural relationship as well as feed us all right but mama is the workhorse of this farm um dairy cows are pretty amazing for what they're able to do she provides milk to the eight of us that live here she provides milk to her calves she's growing a calf inside of her right now she's feeding a calf on the ground she's feeding a calf inside her she's feeding us and then during the day she's out spreading her manure and urine all over the farm fertilizing the place so she is really she does it all that's amazing all right so you're gonna get rid of milk right now getting ready to milk her we use a little iodine spray this is basically like wound treatment stuff but it helps just prevent infection or anything um in a normal operation if you didn't have the calf on or you do this at the end but the calf's gonna come in and lick all this on so we just do a little bit of a treatment before we before we milk and then we'll rinse this off we just use warm water we don't have warm water out on the farm so we just bring a warm bucket from the house and use a rag and just get her cleaned off and part of this is if she's slept in manure the night before you're getting the manure off getting her really clean but it also stimulates let down for the milk the letdown is controlled by a hormone so uh we're just trying to simulate what the calf would be doing with its mouth or its nose to let mama know that it's time to give her milk up now that we got her all clean we'll just spray a few squirts out of each teat and this just makes sure if there's any bacteria right there in the plug at the bottom that's not going in the bucket i've never milked a cow before it's not just i'm not just squeezing it in just one motion what you have to do is take the teeth and trap the milk so it's like a two-part motion you're you're doing a pinch to trap the milk in there and then you're rolling your fingers down to express that that milk and when you get really good at it um you learn how to do it with your non-dominant hand and it just moves moves a lot quicker so joe i know you got to do this every day but is this like something you enjoy doing every day or does it seem like a chore at this point yeah this is one of my one of my favorite things to do um but it does come with a responsibility it's a i mean more so than any other animals when you're rotating on pasture you can you know if you're out there later than normal that's not a big deal but the build schedule stays pretty tight and it's a commitment every day of the year one of our one of my favorite stories it's not my wife's favorite story is uh when our third child was born she had gone into labor while i was out milking and i didn't take my phone or anybody to communicate went out and milked and i came back she was on the front porch in the middle of a contraction yelling at me wondering where the hell i'd gone and i just responded well the cow had to be milked and that's how labor started that day all right joe talk about what's going on here you got a cap in here with you yeah so uh part of part of um share milking um as opposed to like just pulling the calf off the cow and the cow never sees her calf over the cow would get used to that way of milking but because we're share milk and she knows that her calf's coming so she can withhold her milk and and not have a really good let down so the experiment i've tried the last couple calvings is i'll milk her out as best i can without the calf and then when i get all that i can get i'll bring the calf back in and give the calf a teeth and she'll almost get a whole nother let down and will pretty much double the milk that i had gotten before i brought the captain so this part really makes coming out here worth it to me that from start to finish this is about a 25 minute chore and to get two and a half three gallons of milk for 25 minutes worth of work part of our uh the permanent infrastructure that just helps with raising a dairy cow is we have several we have four permanent paddocks set up so we're constantly on a rotating mama and her calves through with some permanent fencing um because she spends 12 hours a day with her calves and then she spends 12 hours a day there at night by herself building up the milk supply for what we milk in the morning so having that permanent fencing in place just makes that daily daily chore go a little easier all right so these three are just on their own they're not with the rest of the herd right okay yeah we've you know our kind of dream is to figure out how to how to milk out in the field but having the bar and having water here having permanent paddocks to separate them um when you see the beef cows later today we just haven't figured a way to like do it all together makes sense she is once she dries off so before she has her next half she has to get dried off for a few months before and once when she's doing that we're not milking she is with them with the rest of the herd every day and his feet this this speed we just gave her we do some beet pulp shreds with molasses in the summertime and we soak it with water and it just helps on a day when it's going to get above 90 degrees that some of her feed is soaked and just trying to increase that water intake all right joe so we're inside your brooder here and very impressive setup tell me a little bit about it and then we'll go check out what's inside thanks yeah this year we uh scaled up to 2000 birds a year last year we did 600 and we did 600 birds over the course of the year they were in smaller batches of 100 around a hundred uh and we were brewing those chicks primarily with heat lamps and and using the waters like the gallon size waters and that would give water everywhere so to do 2 000 birds in a year we're doing batches of 400 and really just to make chores possible is to try to automate as much as you can and part of that automation includes making sure that things are clean and that the brooder stays dry so when we take you inside we can show you some of the changes we made all right so there you have two brooders each one's for about 200. yep yeah we're doing 200 we could probably do do a little more um and they're kind of mirror images of each other they're 12 by 12 004 stalls and what we did this year is we hung uh these gillis gamebird drinkers they're eight feet long and they're nipple drinkers that don't leak so we don't get any all look at all the shavings and how dry everything is the bedding stays really dry which is good for the health of the bird and then there's way more drinking space if you think of those gallon or quart drinkers how many birds can fit around that versus how many birds can fit on an 8-foot nipple drinker this way birds are getting as much water as they need the neat thing that we did with this the way we plumbed this in is we plumbed it up through the halo and up in the haylock we have a 50 gallon drum on a float valve that always stays full and the purpose of that 50 gallon reservoir of water is if the power ever goes out which would shut down our well if we get a freeze hurricane season you get sporadic storms through here so if we ever have a problem with water we've got 50 gallons up in the hay loft that's gravity feeding all of our drinkers and we've got a 50 gallon head start to kind of address that problem this year we also switched to propane heaters and it's just at their first week of life these birds eat 95 degrees so to do 95 degrees on heat lamps is very it's a lot of electricity to run those lamps and to do that many birds so we've been really happy with the with the propane heaters they're on a thermostat so they get up to temp and they shut off really no attention from us in this process and also if there's power outage or storm or something there it's a little bit more fail-safe yeah okay and then talk about the light in here too sure and then this barn also doesn't get a whole lot of light the only windows or path for light is the barn doors but we try to keep those closed to keep the temperature in here here good so what we did there was exterior doors here for the horses to run in and out of and we just used greenhouse panels and put those up to get as much sunlight in here as possible the sunlight is really good for birds at all stages of their growth but particularly when they're young the sunlight stimulates their pituitary gland which allows them to grow these birds were hatched on monday and they came to the farm on wednesday today's saturday in seven weeks they'll be harvest ready awesome they look great this is a nice setup i think a lot of people don't put enough attention to the brooder you can lose a lot of chickens this way it's really i think if you're trying to do a lot of birds it just makes the whole process just so much easier right yeah between the drinkers and the propane if you wanted to do 50 birds in here or scale up to hundreds it's ready to go another interesting thing is the rounded off corners i don't know if you've picked any of that up but birds have a tendency to clump together when they're young and if you do 90 degree corners you're going to get birds that get suffocated or trampled in that 90 degree bend because they can't get out but with the rounded corner if they cluster in there they just push each other out and they come around the circle so that's a really cheap way to to save the same birds that can otherwise get trampled well joe really well thought out i'm sure you guys are enjoying this setup and you know put a lot of birds through your system in a year all right michelle so this is uh your chores every day yes okay so usually when joe is melting this is what i do um sometimes by myself sometimes with the kids but there's three general things that i'm well there's more than three the three basic things i do is i fill up feed i check the water height so sometimes i need to adjust that right now they're so little but once they start growing really quickly i usually have to adjust the water every day and then i'm either putting new shavings down or if the shavings look dry and not covered in manure i'm just raking them this also one of the advantages of this of being able to stand up in the breeder is i can actually take the time to scan and look for individual chips you might need attention so especially when they're little it gives me an opportunity to see ones that are a little weak and kind of nurse them give them some water give them some food and try to give them that attention so i really enjoy doing this so i'm doing this every morning until they go out in the field so they're in here about three weeks and then we move them out and one of the amazing things is the sounds completely change that they make so they're in here they're kind of exploratory they're happy right now but as they get bigger and it starts to get a little more cramped once we move them out into the field the chirping noises they make are completely different the contentedness they have of just being on the pasture so yeah so we're just we don't always have chicks in the brooder and sticks on the field at the same time but this is usually we're doing this about every four or five weeks we have new batches coming in right now all right so we're about to go move the cows and talk about what you got in your hand there's a really cool tool sure this is a remote that goes with our fence charger we just got a new charger from stay fixed last year and it came with this remote and not only will it test the voltage of the fence uh so our fence right now is reading nine and a half kilovolts uh you just hit the off button and it talks to the charger up in the barn which is 2000 feet away and it turns it off and now you can step through the wires uh bring your kids through uh you have basically an instant gate you're not having to walk to a gate or try to find an h brace and jump over this that is so cool what a cool tool especially if you're out far away from the disconnect or because you guys got a lot of long lines here yeah yeah our fence goes all the way around the wood so we can be out in the woods uh pulling stuff off or fixing a short you know we're minimizing how how we build our fence so we're not getting as many grounds but you still get them someplace and this allows you to to fix it right there on the spot without having to go back and unplug the whole fence very cool let's move the cows let's do it this is our beef herd and what we're trying to do with our beef cows is mimic natural systems and if you think of our country thousands of years ago with the the wild buffalo and how they would graze their herd animals so they all stuck together to protect themselves from predators and they would graze an area pretty hard because the impact of all those animals and then when their forage was gone they'd move on to a new spot meanwhile all those spots they'd visited in the past had rest from that herd until they eventually made their way back through so now hundreds thousands of years later we've built roads we've built fences we've done all this stuff to kind of prevent animals from following that natural system and we're trying to recreate that with our beef herd we have 19 head in here right now and we move them twice a day they're ready to be moved we're about an hour behind schedule from where we normally are but what this does is builds rest into our system so our cows are given a half days worth of forage a day's worth of forage meanwhile the entire rest of our farm is resting and growing back forage for them to graze again and we're right now hitting about a 30 day rest period we'd like to stretch that out to 45 to 60. demand is high this year with the pandemic and we're trying to you know make it as tight as possible but right now we're about 30 days rest which allows the grass to grow back to get fertilized by their manure and their urine and it also that by concentrating their paddock size every day you're getting the hoof impact you're stimulating uh the seed bank which is already here we don't seed anything out here the only thing that's all we're doing is managing the system in a way for the natural process to kind of take effect very cool so logistically here you have a perimeter fence and then you have these portable lines that run across yeah what we've done we have a all our perimeter fences our six strand high tensile electric and that's behind you and then down here in the creek we just put a riparian buffer in and do a single strand of semi-permanent electric that keeps them out of the creek and then each day we use real temporary fences on reels to create their their daily padding so a couple of things that we're looking for every day when we're moving moving our cows is making sure that they're getting enough forage to be putting on gain these are all most of these are beef steers and for a beef steer to go from calf to finish weight they need to be gaining like one to two pounds a day so they're eating a lot of grass and one of the things we check for when we pull the line up is on their left side you can see this triangle and right in front of their hip and if that is sunken in they haven't really gotten enough to eat so that's part of the assessment we're making every day when we're coming out here you see this one here 207 he looks pretty good but there's some others that have um if it's just smooth they're looking really good they got enough to eat if it's indented a little bit they could have taken a little more and then we're factoring that in the next day with well maybe we need to give them a bigger space or a smaller space to making sure they get enough all right so you're taking this moment while you're moving them to check them out make sure they're they're doing well right okay so [Music] so [Music] okay [Music] just moved them into the new area and i just hooked the fence back up and part of the reason we keep a back fence in naturally they would just stay where there's forage and they wouldn't go back to where they graze you can see the difference right under the fence line on what was hit yesterday and what's available for them today but the back fence does help with them re-grazing the regrowth after three to four days if the weather is good this grass is going to start growing back and we want to really save that 30 45 days before they come back again and not have that you're really trying to get the cows to only take one bite off the plant and if they're coming back for a second bite it's setting back your regrowth i don't think that takes a lot of effort too i mean the line was already there right okay so then you're gonna take the line that's behind us here and move yeah and then we'll take yesterday's back fence down we'll move the minerals over that's the only only thing that we give our beef steers is we provide good clean water out of the well and we can show you that water system here in a little bit and then we provide a mineral with salt and high magnesium as well as sea kelp which has iodine in it which pretty much knocks out all infections above the shoulder so pink eye we have no issues with pink eye in our herd and i think that's attributable to always having free choice kelp available for them cool and i know you put a lot of effort into the infrastructure here obviously the fencing is really nicely set up but let's go look at the water system all right so i know that one of the difficult things is just water management because cows drink a ton of water so talk about how you have this setup it's pretty cool yes our first year not hauling water last summer we used the big 300 gallon ibc tote and hauled that around our farm and last fall we invested in running inch and a quarter black pipe and irrigating the whole farm for the cows so this is what they're drinking out of every day this is a 30 gallon tub we like to keep it small because it's easier to move if you're moving it like we are every two days you don't want to be dumping 100 gallons of water out so this is a 30 gallon then because it's smaller they're cycling water through it faster so in the summertime to keep that temperature down in their drinking water the smaller tub works better we use a job megaflow valve that comes in from the underside and as the float comes up it shuts the water off it's the best valve that we've found and then we run it off 100 foot hose to our water connector and we can show you that okay and that water line runs around the perimeter so this uh past winter we trenched in about 2 700 feet of water line around the farm used an inch and a quarter black roll pipe we got a lot of water demand up at our barn for when we process chickens so we did inch and a quarter throughout the whole farm around our cow pastures every 100 feet we installed a placen quick connect valve and we put them in these little meter boxes to protect them from the elements on the outside and these things are great so every 100 feet we're using a 100 foot hose that gives us complete flexibility on being able to water our cows throughout our entire farm so we can water on the side you're standing on on the fence once we start bringing this area up into productivity then we have water on this side and the way these work there's just a male end and a female end the male end goes in and clips on and you've got full pressurized water uh throughout your whole farm it's really slick that's unbelievable uh huge time saver okay was that a big investment in terms of like costs yeah materials was uh was was quite a bit to do 2700 feet if you got smaller area you want to do it's not so bad and we rented a a trencher for the weekend from a heavy equipment supply and trenched a lot did all the labor ourselves with some friends and then bought the equipment at the local plumbing supply store cool it's one of those things you put the time up front and then you save so much time forever right but these plastin valves they're the ticket all right so very cool infrastructure here you guys are moving them often i feel like this is like the ultimate setup here but let's talk about breeds here maybe you can explain a little bit about like what you guys are running and what you're trying to do with your with your herd sure as new farmers we're we're new to this so we didn't have a herd we didn't inherit and heard from anybody we're also kind of cash limited so how to grow a herd with limited resources and one of the things we try to try to follow is that you invest in your animals before you invest in in metal things so before thinking about buying a tractor or a baler or that kind of stuff invest in your animals because the animals are the things that are going to make your farm profitable so what we're doing you've met our dairy cow when we were milking this morning we get her bread every year and now she's old enough she became a grandmother this year and we're slowly breeding breeding her back to grow our herd and and the breed we've chosen is the south pole breed came out of alabama it's a four-way composite breed but all most of the brown animals here are south poles and you if you can get a look at them they're slick hide so they're way more heat tolerant they're brown so they're not attracting the sun as much they're able to go out today's pretty pretty cloudy day but on a really sunny day the black hide animals they're staying into the trees while the south poles are out grazing and what that's doing they're putting weight on or if they're mamas they're keeping their body condition up so that they're able to breed back and raise a calf these animals were the south pole were also bred to finish on grass and because that's the only thing we're feeding is grass we really want an animal that thrives on grass and a lot of the other more commercial industrial breeds are bred to be finished out on grain products and they're just not going to stand up on grass anymore even though that's the way their rumens were designed designed to work okay so that seems like a perfect breed for your context here but you can't just go and buy a whole bunch of them right and because they're so efficient on grass and doing so well and some of the big names in regenerative agriculture are using south poles many south pole females are worth more on the hoof than they are in the freezer as meat so the demand for these animals is really strong right now so what we're doing is renting a bull is our second year renting a south pole bull and we're slowly you know over the generations will work towards a south pole herd so the darker hiding animals that you see out here these are balancer breeds they're a hybrid between angus and gelfie it's a kind of hybrid cross you get the hybrid vigor between the gelfie and the angus and there's their steers so to meet our beef demand for our customers as we grow our own herd up we're able to buy these steers from from our friends on other farms and bring them here and grow them out on grass and then the brown heightened animals are what we're using to to grow our own herd this is our pasture broiler operation we're doing raisin this year batches of 400 and we've got nine chicken tractors that we use to do that we're using eight by eights and they're two feet high we went with the eight by eight you'll see lots of different sizes out there or even ones you can stand up and walk in we went with the 8x8 just for ease of movement and on uneven terrain they kind of level out a little better my wife and i do all do all the moving of these tractors so having an 8x8 just makes a little lighter and also our kids are really young the oldest is five and as soon as he's ready to pick one up we want him to be ready so it's compared to like a 10 by 12 that you may be able to get 60 75 chickens in we're doing 40 to 45 and an 8x8 okay so i think a lot of people are familiar with this style of chicken tractor what what are some of the differences here with your situation your setup sure we've just done a few modifications we've uh we put a vent on the on the solid side just i mean it gets up to 90 95 degrees and that kind of helps keep the whole tractor cool and keep some air movement through we've showed you our our water system so we have pressurized water here on a hose and that makes filling up these five gallon buckets they fill up like a snap with a pressurized water line and then we've also we bring our feed out here doing nine tractors at a time and we've got six foot feeders in each each tractor those can hold quite a bit of feed so you really don't want to be hauling your 50-pound feed bags around all the time that that really wears on you so what we did is we took an ibc tote and cut the top off made a solid roof for it so it stays dry we can get a thousand pounds of feed in that tote and then our boys are up there and they'll fill the five gallon buckets up and then we fill them up into the feeders so it really helps these chores again thinking of how to make this a sustainable daily chore there's nine of these my wife and i and our kids uh when we're not being videoed we can knock this out in like 25 minutes okay and another difference is that with the smaller tractor is that you guys don't have like a dolly or any wheels right right yeah we just pick it up and move it and the birds they know where the grasshoppers and the green grass are they're most the time moving along with us you got a couple stragglers or maybe someone with a bum leg but yeah wheels is just something else that can break and go wrong all right joe so as you put the feed in that last tractor there you got turkeys in here yeah this is our thanksgiving turkeys and we did an experiment this year typically we've raised our turkeys completely separate from our chicken operation and what we did this year primarily trying to think about how to simplify chores every day we thought and other people have done this but you hear on both sides of the issue but we uh raised them with our broiler chicks so they hatched at the same time arrived at the farm on the same time we mixed them together up in the brooder we didn't even turkeys typically need a higher protein feed we'll see how this works out at harvest time but we just did the broiler starter which is a 22 percent uh now we're on the 18 percent grower after about three or four weeks and raising them right alongside our boiler chicks our boiler chicks this batch will get harvested next week and then we'll also move the turkeys out of here into something a little bigger i'm a little you know don't want to stunt their growth in something this small but it was a way to get them started and consolidate our chores so next week we'll move them into a bigger shelter and do the electronic fencing and give them a lot more space okay and how long do they take to grow they're 16 weeks okay so these will be ready for thanksgiving yep they'll be ready just a week two weeks before thanksgiving so you guys are doing a lot of pastured chickens and so you're processing all on farm and this is a very impressive setup just show us a little bit what's going on here yeah so we start out here outside we have two sets of kilcones so we can have 12 chickens in the cones at a time and the reason we do this is so that you always have six chickens who are you know bleeding out six chickens that are ready to go and so when you're doing 400 chickens in a day that really helps keep the process running really smoothly after they come out of the kilcones they're going into the scalder here they'll run through the scalder and this is um obviously getting them warm getting them ready for their feathers to be plucked this is the right here so they'll go in here we can fit about six birds at a time here so they'll go through the plucker then we have this table set up here so someone will be taking care of the feet and the heads after the plucker they'll put the birds in here and then we have our whole inside um set up so that we're doing all the eviscerating and packaging and everything inside all right very cool and you guys process under like a pop-up tent sort of like yeah homesteading style essentially yeah so we did that um at first when we started we were just processing for ourselves we were only doing like 50 birds a year um that's obviously scaled up quite a bit so we're doing 400 at the time so we're doing it about once a month right now so we're doing 2 000 birds this year um so we really needed something that was going to be really functional and because we'd spent so much time going through the process when joe sat down to design it he really knew like where things needed to go and how it needed to flow so the whole system works really well all right cool i want to do another video at some point about more of the details here but can we go look inside a little bit yeah all right so the birds come in behind you yeah so they come in here um so their feet are taken off their heads are taken off and they're put on this table this table right here is the eventually evisceration prep table so this is where we're doing the work to get the birds ready to eviscerate and eviscerating is taking out um the innards of the bird basically this table right here is the evisceration table so this is where we're taking gizzards out we're taking livers out all of those organs we save the organs we bag them up so that's all happening here then we have this sink here so birds that are ready to be rinsed and chilled go in this side this is here where i'm doing quality control so i'm checking in making sure that everything's been taken out that needs to in this and then this is our pre-chill tub so it's really important to try to get the chickens as cold as possible before you packaging them and putting in the freezer so we do that here we use this scale to help us um just get an estimate on weight so we can figure out which birds we're going to do as parts and which birds we're going to package as whole and then there are two tubs here that we put in and we sort the birds based on whether they're going to be whole birds or park birds and all this plumbing was put in so we have water everywhere so we can fill the tubs up here with water we have water over this over the table so that people can clean up as they're going um and then obviously water over the sink cool yeah it's super impressive i mean we got concrete poured here um all the water lines everywhere are just amazing it seems like they're pretty much right in the spot you need them all right cool and then what about over here yeah so then if we move over here so once the chickens have chilled um then i'm bringing them over here and i'm doing pretty much all the packaging so this is our hanging wrap we put the chickens on here so we're getting the water out bag over here um and then we have a vacuum sealer here so vacuum sealing the chickens and then we have a scale here that will lay them and print out the labels for us and then this table here helps me organize them so i can get them organized before they go in the freezers super cool this is super professional easy to clean stainless everything and you guys doing 400 birds in a day does that take you most of a day it takes us about i would say about seven eight hours now okay yeah but this is always here it's always set up and how's the cleanup is it pretty quick yeah i think yeah i mean so especially we have a good crew especially when people are used to you know doing what we do um the cleanup goes pretty well but yeah we're getting to the point now where we're really efficient before lunch and so it's just a little bit of work after lunch and then clean up that's awesome i i know you guys and joe you know putting a lot of thought into systems infrastructure with all the water lines and the brooder and the processing you guys are set up for success here it's it's awesome to see thank you all right so you guys are doing poorest pigs here uh but we gotta talk with them it's a little noisy so let's feed them first we'll talk about them okay i know you guys doing a lot of pasture animals but this is what we call these forest rays horserace pigs okay that's pretty much like the equivalent though the equivalent uh i think doing anything outdoors is okay how these animals were plus naturally they were originally forest animals right okay talk a little bit about what you're doing here and sort of the history with these pigs in particular sure yeah i think first we're using these as a land management tool um as we're kind of land locked and thinking about how does the farm grow how do we make the farm healthier and more productive we're using the pigs to help clear the understory out here in the woods and we're thinning behind them and seeding cover crop behind them and then rotating the cows in behind them this is our first year with pigs and with the pandemic this year piglets were really hard to come by for more of a a breed that's bred to be an outdoor forager those piglets were pretty much not on the market because they're in such high demand so we got these pigs from a grower out in eastern north carolina they're white piglets they're chester white's duroc crosses and when the pandemic hit the only place you could be with thousands of people were these processing facilities for me out mostly in the midwest of our country and once those places started experiencing cases of coronavirus they shut down then you had all these pig farmers that were breeding or growing pigs out who couldn't send them to the slaughter facilities and then even farther down the chain you had breeders who were trying to who were breeding piglets and then had nowhere to send their piglets because the system got so backlogged so this particular grower out in eastern north carolina had 4 000 piglets that he was going to euthanize if local farms in the area didn't come to the rescue we were able to take 20 of those as our first time doing this and we're raising them outdoors these pigs had never they were four weeks old when we got them they're typically weaned at eight weeks old for a forest raised pig so they're weaned really early in the industrial system a lot of antibiotics hold up their immune system so we did have some losses initially but these pigs are getting to experience sunshine and fresh air which they would never have gotten in an indoor system which is the meat that's bought in the grocery store is all done indoors okay so using portable electric fencing and you're using them to clear out the underbrush um and so what are you guys feeding them so we use a non-gmo feed the same thing we use for our chickens and our turkeys it's a you know got a specific ration for swine that we're using all from north carolina grown and milled here 100 traceable okay and um are you guys you guys are fermenting some of that food too yeah and what we do the one thing we've learned from folks who have done pigs before is uh they're really easy animals to keep probably one of the easier ones to keep except for loading day so if you haven't trained them to get on a trailer a pig that weighs 250 300 pounds that's 12 inches off the ground there's no way i'm going to move that pig so part of the the reason for soaking some feed and fermenting feed in a five gallon bucket is that when they see that bucket they follow and come to it so it's all kind of training for loading day to make that go smoothly but then also because we have a dairy cow and we have some excess milk products we're able to use any skim milk that's left over or buttermilk that's left over from our yogurt making and when we pull heavy cream out we're able to put that skim milk and soak it in the feed and we're putting that dairy protein through the pigs and growing bacon with it that's awesome we take a look at that process yeah all right so we're gonna put some of the dry feed in these five gallon buckets and get it soaked and we'll let this soak overnight about 24 hours and this will be part of tomorrow's breakfast for the pigs and the kids get involved and the kids get involved they run the hose and fill it up and they got their own little particularities on how they do it do you like doing this do you like help making this yeah yeah yeah they get really bossy about this william in particular has his own method of doing it all right so you are also running a pastured layer operation talk a little about this and how it fits into the farm sure yeah they're about 130 layers in this flock and we're rotating them through our pastures twice a week and we try to follow behind the cows by a couple days give the what that does it allows the fly larva to get started and the cow manure and the chickens are coming behind not only spreading that manure when they're scratching through it but they're eating the fly larva it keeps the fly pressure down on our cows also cows and chickens are dead-end hosts for each other's parasites so what can grow on a chick a parasite that grows on thrives on a chicken won't thrive on a cow so they're dead end hosts and keep the parasite load down for both animals by having different species out here grazing together that way our eggs are one of our most popular items we're always sold out of eggs if people don't get in early on their orders eggs sell out got nice deep yellow yolks because of the sunshine and the green material that they're able to collect out here on pasture yeah so michelle and yourself and the boys take care of most of the chores but this one the uh the guys that live with you take care of this right yeah and uh one of our residents larry we got two larry's here but one of the larry's is kind of like the captain of the layer the layer flock and it's his responsibility um he collects the eggs and washes dirty eggs and makes sure that they're they're getting their feed we don't have any automatic water out here we're doing the five gallon maybe those are seven gallon waters and that's his area of responsibility and then the way i help out is just hook the tractor up twice a week and move the move the coupe for him and then larry gets the other two residents together and they're taking the fence down and responsible for moving the chickens twice a week and that's uh something they're into doing right yeah yeah and uh you know we we go through the eight of us are eating at least a dozen sometimes in a dozen and a half eggs every morning for breakfast do you guys have enough hens for that yeah that's why we're always sold out is because we're eating them okay okay you gotta get more chickens yeah and uh this this is part of the uh over winter pro these birds won't make it over winter and we'll get a new flock started in time for the spring um next year that's part of what we're doing as a community here together on the farm you got to see all our chores this morning on a typical monday through friday morning we're out on the farm doing our chores and then we're gathering for breakfast every morning when chores are done so the eight of us our family and the guys get together for breakfast monday through friday and then we also have uh evening dinners where we eat together three nights a week putting something together from the farm together and sharing those meals together all right so where are you guys selling your products and how can people find them if they're local sure we are on a every other week delivery schedule into durham chapel hill pittsboro and asheboro okay and we meet typically in a big parking lot a church or a non-profit organization and people can place orders online and meet us at that parking lot okay so i'll leave links down below for any social media and your website is that website's probably the best place to place orders and that sort of thing yeah okay very cool guys this place is unbelievable you guys are doing amazing things not just for the community but for the land and for the animals that you take care of and a growing family and uh just a beautiful property thanks so much for having me out today and uh hopefully we'll be back soon for checking us out

Channel: Josh Sattin

Views: 80,230

Rating: 4.920434 out of 5

Keywords: farming, farming for profit, farming business, micro farming, urban farming, urban micro farming, urban farmer, regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, sustainable farming, sustainable agriculture, no till farming, no till garden, no-till gardening, no-till farming, organic farming, organic vegetable gardening, market gardening, market gardening for profit, suburban farming, suburban farmer, permaculture, homestead, homesteading, garden, gardening

Id: aIU0xj7X3r8

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020