The Impossible Farm - Putting Animals to Work

hello and welcome back to the impossible farm last week you watched us set up a multi-purpose straw bale composting project which is doing fine it has heated up just as expected this week we're going to move over to another area of our property we're going to be doing a whole make over for an area that we call Arcadia which begins with saying goodbye to some beloved friends in our first three years out here we live in a yurt while we built our house the house was built from trees right here on the property and we learned a lot about sawing lumber we learned a lot about gardening and mostly we just got here and got to know our little piece of property so now that we've been here a while we want to grow food before we moved off-grid to the woods our gardening experience was in suburban Lots or urban Lots a nice square or rectangular raised beds with an even amount of sunlight nice and flat irrigate from a hose coming from the side of the house those skills don't translate directly to three acres of extremely varied terrain you can move ten feet here and you're in a different place as far as what the soil conditions are and how much Sun there is we're trying to learn to paint the artists with lights and water and that's up there it's totally magic it's magic in a really intimidating way because we don't necessarily have our our perceptions tuned to be able to see what's going on with light and water but it's also magic in a really beautiful way because sometimes you get it to work and then you don't have a system that requires you to babysit at every single minute you have a system that thrives just like nature thrives that's what we're going for that's our dream here that's our impossible farm we have spent the last month or so on our homestead making a plan for how to make the various pieces and an elements on our homestead fit together and one element that really doesn't fit with anything else right now is our goats when we were out here for just a couple of years we thought we'd get goats to go to cool goats do a lot of things we had brush to Clare we are looking forward to milking goats and we just didn't have a great way to manage them out in the thick forest that we have we didn't make it work has been good company good adorable faces for a long time and we have red tulip tulip has been bred and we did milk her although we dried her off before we went on vacation this year so we have experienced the ways in which goats can be helpful or productive but we haven't had them integrated in any useful way with other things here on the homestead we liked having goats but the way that we used them and the way that we were really prepared to use them were really mostly as pets they weren't a terribly productive animal for us and that's our failing and not theirs they're just goats I once did their chores in haste and one time when I was going down the hill I like jump jump jumped on me and and I grabbed her and we started racing down the hill who's pretty fun to pick I'd go we tumbled babe before I ran away to the woods to live a quiet life I used to be a theatre director and playwright and in that field we had an expression called killing your darlings which meant that if there's something wrong with your production if there's something wrong with your play probably the thing that you should look at is your favorite part very likely that part with a really snappy dialogue is actually a scene that's really not needed to move the play forward or that one bit that makes you just laugh and laugh and laugh isn't something that anybody gets but you we're having that experience in a way with our beautiful goat barn and the goats themselves they've been very special to me we got goats and built that barn at a time when I didn't feel like homesteading was working for me it's a symbol for me of staying put it's the first time Nick ever used concrete in any form a permanent thing to set the piers for that little mini house which was his practice for our house that we live in now it's very special to me that was your handprint do you remember all of those are wonderful true human things but none of them are farming so these ladies are gonna go and we hope to add them back at some point we sold them all to the same person they're all in the same place um so they're okay the goats are okay and we are mostly okay making sometimes the harder choices in order to really make our homestead make over the most effective that it can be and move forward into a really bright future for ourselves buying hay for animals that are in an enclosed sacrifice area is an addictive input it's not useless because they do transform it into manure which we are then able to use to enhance the fertility of the property but it isn't going to go away unless we can find a way to feed our animals off of the property [Music] I'm gonna miss them you will let's go to Arcadia I'm oh they're all the Americana's one of the americanus has been laying there don't break them girls that's why we can spot so it's not a terrible day my wife and kids they lost some pets but they were largely just pets they weren't doing the work that they're capable of we treated them well but we were just feeding them from the store and they weren't living up to their full potential so they're moving on someplace where they will be used and we are moving on to other plans the best part about this is we've got a little bit of money out of those goats and with that money we bought an electric fence what is the electric fence do for us it gives us options rather than having an established place with fencing that's hard to put up just specifically for animals we can now put animals kind of anywhere on our property and have them do the work that they're capable of doing first thing we're doing is putting a bunch of chickens inside of electric fence and they're going to till and work and poop on the ground where we are going to be planting food next so we'll move them there they'll do work there we will move them down the mountain a little bit they'll do some more work there we could move them all the way back over to the other side of the property for clearing or whatever an animal is capable of whether it be goats or pigs or chickens and have them work land for us before we move into it with Gardens so this gives us ultimate flexibility as far as weary animals are going to go step 1 mark out the location of t-posts and fence step 2 use the brush cutter to remove all brush and grass from right under those lines step 3 drive the t-posts step 4 set up the fence and then the Energizer I just places for support the attached to these fiber tuff rods if I had it to do again I would probably not go with the t-post insulators and I would probably just get more fiber tough rods and tie it to the fence posts with paracord the fiber tough rods are not conductive at this point we realized that there were some tree branches hanging too close to the fence that might be in contact with it and so Nick cut those out and I helped him carry them out of the pen then we headed over to get our meat birds who have been living in a tiny tractor it's a perfectly serviceable little tractor but very small for 25 Birds and just as a precaution we cut their primary wing feathers so that they can no longer fly it does not harm the bird in any way and they don't like flying anyway then we move them into their new home what do you think gentlemen such a bad place we're gonna go snack [Applause] so to power the fence we're just using one of our deep-cycle 12-volt batteries hooked up to the Energizer like I said it's a one Joule and you guys are negative side goes over to a grounding rod that's about a four foot rod jammed in the ground and then the hot side goes right to the fence I just gave it a dry place for the battery to be and mounted the Energizer's I just put another tote over that so that it's relatively covered from the weather that battery's gonna last really quite a long time there's very little draw on this even with it grounding out I expect that battery to last at least a month which is really not bad and we just haul it up and swap it out with another battery that's in the yurt that's charging off of solar so there is a bit of a learning curve for the animals anyway for knowing what the electric fence is it works best if you start them off really young and then they know what the what the fence means if they have everything they need inside of that zone they're really probably not going to challenge the fence the only time that we've really had a problem with the birds trying to get out was when they were brand new to it or when they didn't have what they needed inside so as long as you're taking good care of the birds and isn't really the issue so hopefully next year we'll have animals not only on this terrace but on the one above here and two or three below here and with food in between and and it seems like we're well on our way we're not trying to show you a perfect electric fence setup today the part of our journey that we're trying to carry you along on today is the part where you have to take things apart to make room for better things so we're taking down the goat yard fence in order to make way for other things to happen for one I need to cut down a couple of trees to bring in light to provide some lumber to build our shop and I don't want to smash that fence it's a thing of value and while we're not using it right now I don't want to throw it in the trash so we're bundling it up we're gonna keep it nice so we have a solid plan on exactly what we're going to do inside of that area that the goats have some nicely cleared and fertilized for us as much as it stinks to undo work that you've already done it's in an effort to do it right when we do reintroduce animals so we're taking some things apart but we're making the right move right now we don't want to be held back by our own limitations we want to be brave enough to say we did what we knew how to do but now we know how to do something even better one thing I will say for that no goat ever escaped through it lots of our friends and neighbors have had goat escapees but we never ever had a goat get through next fence he did a great job very secure we've done so much work over the last four years we have learned how to milk a goat we've learned how to string a fence we've learned how to be reasonably good gardeners we've learned so much about the different pieces of a homestead but we'd still don't have all those pieces working together we still don't have a cake so in in some ways we're kind of taking the pieces apart again so that we can put them back together in a way that will really work and and what I'm talking about in particular is having a land that will sustain the animals rather than just kind of dropping the animals on it you can go and get goats the same way you can get an outfit from the story you can have goats but are we are we having a system that supports those goats do we have are we using the Sun and water in a way that raises those goats or are we just having goats for fun not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that but our goal is to have a sustainable homestead where our goats are fed by the by the land so here on our farm which is not impossible animals will definitely have a place and with the electric fence and moving forward they're gonna have a whole lot of places we love them there are a key part of the operation just got us to do it right [Music] well thanks so much for hanging out with us for episode 2 of the impossible farm we appreciate you last week you watched us set up a multi-purpose straw bale composting project which is doing fine it has ended up just as expected come and check on us again if you like we're going to be collecting some seeds we're going to be featuring our girls Sadie and Stella and their gardens and then we're going to be taking down some trees to provide more sunlight to our growing areas so come and check on us now and then we appreciate you and until then thanks for watching I'm Nix ouch thanks for watching so the electric fence is a great new addition let me introduce you our electric fence testers it's this little device right here and it lets you know if your fence is hot or not were you nervous there's a chicken laying eggs under there are you perturb by the interruption here madam [Music] thanks to up in hazelnut say mean our goat [Music]

Channel: Fouch Family Off Grid

Views: 99,528

Rating: 4.9302979 out of 5

Keywords: the impossible farm, animals on the homestead, livestock, homestead family, goats, Nubian goats, Alpine goats, preparing soil, electric fence, pulling t-posts, how to pull out a t-post, driving t-posts

Id: UA88ajju718

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2017