We CHANGED our minds.

[Music] good morning everybody welcome back to the homestead well it is a nice cool morning today and today we're going to try letting the baby ducklings out for the very first time to explore the entire property until now when they were real little we had them in a tractor so that they would you know just be confined to that little area then we moved them to one of our animal pens that's probably 50 feet by 25 feet or so a decent size pen and they've been in there for a couple weeks now and today's the day we're gonna try to let them out to free-range and see if they will integrate with our other ducks I tried to let them out yesterday but because they're still used to being in their pen even though the gate was open all day they stayed in their pen they never once came out so I even tried to chase them out at one point and as soon as I walked away they went right back in so I'm gonna try something a little bit different today I'm going to move their food and their water close to the gate in hopes that they will get a little bit brave and start to explore outside of the gate so let's get going and I'll feed it give them food in water and then we'll let them out and see what they do I think I'll leave their water just inside the gate but we'll put their food just outside the gate and we'll see what that does I need to get their food it's in the quail room let's go check on the quail while we're in there it looks like the quail are doing fine like these guys the little guys here need some water it's automatic beater that I made for the quail is working out so great for the for the grow-out pen and then these feeders that I used in the breeders they work really well too I just need to fill them more often I just had another hatch of quail chicks in the house I think I've got about 20 of them in the house that are about a week old so soon these guys over here in this pan some of these I'm going to be saving to replace some of my breeders to some of my breeders would we go into the freezer and then we'll be replacing them with some of these young ones so it's exciting I really am enjoying raising the quail I think they're real fun animal to have on the home study even though we have a lot of space I do enjoy raising these smaller animals they are also though good if you just have a small backyard they don't make much noise they're not really messy and you can process them without anybody really knowing it so they'd be great if you just have a real small homestead anyway we're in here for duck food let's take some duck food over to the Ducks that's out a little bit because it's starting to sprinkle just a little bit I don't want to run off the run for a minute either alright let's let them out and see what they do my guess is they're still gonna go that way back into the pan we'll see if they find this stuff [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] well now that they've come out this far I'm actually going to try moving their water further out than their food ducts are actually more motivated by water than they are by food so I think if I move their water outside of the pen quite a bit they'll go to eat and then they'll come up to get some water and then hopefully they'll realize that they have freedom days these Ducks don't care much at all about this food they'll take a little bit of nibble and then they take off to find water and then to go foraging for bugs they'd much rather eat bugs in this food but we'll keep it here they'll nibble on it throughout the day along with the wild Cardinals come and feed it their dish let's head back to the woods I want to show you guys the piglets and the progress that I'm making with them getting them tamed up we haven't even had them a week yet and they're already getting pretty tame so let's head back to the woods I've got some things back there I don't know if you guys can tell that it's starting to rain it's supposed to rain on and off all day so we're just gonna have to work through the rain if it stays like this it's not bad at all and it's actually great for the gardens and once we get back to the woods under the trees it probably won't seem like it's raining at all so let's go yesterday our friend de Lin came over and brought us some of the cabbage out of her garden just the outside leaves and some of the heads that had too many bug bites on she brought them over so that we could feed them to the pigs and so what I've been doing is is taking them in and then feeding them by hand they're actually getting pretty tame if you remember a week ago when we got them they wouldn't let me anywhere near them yesterday a cup these two right here actually let me pet them a little bit so I'm hoping we can build on that today I'm gonna go in and see if they'll let me paddle me now there's still a little scared if you make really fast movements but I think if I just sit in there on my block here they'll they'll come up and let me feed them like that cabbage this is definite progress that they're letting me scratch them and touch them a week ago they would have never let me do this that little one back there is still the most standoffish but she's getting pretty friendly too well I'm definitely happy with the progress that they're making I think probably another week or maybe two and they'll be ready to be left out of this pen and have this entire area they are going to have a blast with all of this good stuff to eat back here pigs are actually much better foragers than a lot of people give them credit for you know I think it's sad in these big industrial Pig firms they raise them on concrete or like on these graded floors so the camp route around and they can't do all the things that pigs like to do and really this type of setting and kind of a you know lightly wooded area is just exactly perfect for them that that's what they want that's where they would live if they had a choice so I'm excited I love having the pigs well ten minutes ago it was thunderstorm and there was lightning and wind and storms and now there's barely a cloud in the sky this has been the craziest start to a summer that we've had since we've lived here in the Ozark yeah this whole day has been like that it's been like these 10-minute storms that blow over that are like terrible storms and they're gone in ten minutes it's like set up the camera run out of the rain and set up the camera run out of the rain right but now we're back and I don't see any clouds for as far as I can see now so I think we've got a while until more rain is coming so we wanted to talk to you guys today about a decision that we've made for the area that we're preparing for getting a dairy cow yeah we changed their mind we did change our mind but we didn't change our mind about getting a cow we still want a cow we still plan on getting a cow we just changed their mind about what type of fencing we're going to be using around that area this has ended up being a really big project right this project has been much bigger than we anticipated which is why it's taking us a little bit longer because you know on top of everything else we have going on with our greenhouse and all of our plant starts and getting the gardens farmers market right and all of that stuff finding the time to do this project has turned out to be a hard a big challenge yes so the original plan was to do two separate paddocks that were split down the middle all with field fencing because we'd really like to provide a larger area for our goats to be able to live and forage in a more natural environment than you know this pen area and then also have the cow in there as well with them kind of sharing right and so two separate paddocks so we could rotate them from one to the other and if we ever needed to keep them separate for any reason or or whatever and we felt that field fencing was the best option because of the goats smaller holes for them to get through and all that kind of thing but there have been some significant challenges with that that plan right because of where the area is it will be hard to roll out that much field fencing to get it back there I know we could do it and I can even buy an implement for my tractor that would allow us to roll it out with the tractor but that is pretty pricey and I'm not sure something that I would use very often so I'm not sure it's worth that investment the other thing is you know t-posts are pretty expensive I started pricing how many t-posts we would need to do that area and it would be around 150 t-posts to do that area and that would be putting them every eight feet which is what I think we would need if we were doing field fencing in that area so that I mean 150 dollars times I think they're about three dollars and fifty cents apiece right now you know it would have been around you know $400 or $500 just in the tipo yeah and the field fencing was expensive right the field fencing so we were looking at over $1,000 well over $1,000 for all of the fencing that we would need to do that area not to mention that that area is very rocky and the thought of putting in 150 t-post by hand wasn't all that appealing to me either I'll admit to you guys since I had my hernia surgery last winter that there's some things that are more difficult for me now and that motion of putting in t-posts is one of them especially in really rocky ground like that so if I can get away with putting it laughs that's what I want to do so we've been trying to figure out a better way an easier way a leave less expensive way but still a safe and secure way right absolutely so we've we've changed our minds on what we're going to do in that area right as you know for our pigs we use electric wire and we have great success with it we've tried electric netting for our goats in the past because we still want to be able to keep the cow and the goats together if possible so so in the past we've tried the electric netting for our goats and really it didn't work very well at all so we feel there are two reasons why the electric netic didn't work well for our goats the first reason is we didn't ever really train them we just put up the electric netting put them out there and our goats like to climb up on fencing to say hello and you try to get petted and those kinds of things and and they would do that on the electric netting and it just wasn't working also we just didn't feel like the electric netting for those bigger animals packs a big enough punch to get their attention and for them to not to go into it or try to get out and that kind of thing right so we started to do more research about alternative ways to how to fence in goats with electric fence and really what we've decided to do is to do seven six or seven strands of electric wire throughout that entire area six inches apart well the first few will be six inches apart and then all the way up to the top which will be about 48 inches up now the cow won't be an issue I'm almost positive that the cow won't be an issue cows from my understanding even though I don't have any first-hand experience are fairly easy defense they will respect defense pretty easily in fact all of our neighbors around here have cows and all they use is three or four strands of barbed wire they don't even use the electric fence they just use barbed wire and the cows respect it a lot so I don't think cows will be an issue the goats are going to be the issue so we are going to be testing the waters a little bit before we jump into this for the goats out in the woods and we're gonna start that off with training them within their existing pen area which is where we're at right now we're going to be installing three wires today to start training them in this area and then we'll do some testing in the pasture behind us here to get them used to it and so they're a little bit closer to the house you know we're outside in this area all day almost every day and so if one of them figures out they'll probably come running to us or coming to the milking room that we have that's where we keep our feed so I think it'll be easier for us to see if they can get out right but initially like sarah said we're gonna put three strands of electric wire inside of their pen area here because just like we do with the pigs what that will teach them is if they get shocked by the wire they have to go backwards not forwards that's the main concern with electric wire is that if the animal gets shocked is that they will go forward through the fence instead of backing up to get away from the fence so by putting it on the inside of her muff a physical barrier you teach them that they need to back up because it's impossible to go forward right so we've convinced the goats to go in one of our kidding pens actually so all six of the girls are secured in a nice safe area so we actually have a little bit of mowing to do in here and then we'll get started installing that training wire so we're gonna get busy and we're going to get this hooked up and we'll see how they react to it when we're all done despite what people say goats are not great lawn mowers they actually don't really like to eat that much grass they would prefer to eat things like blackberry bushes and brambles and weeds and that type of thing but actual grass they're not that fond of that's why we actually think it'll be great to have the goats and the cow to gather because they kind of eat opposite things so that's why I need to mow their pen before we can put this fence up just notice that the baby ducks just came out of their house out of that pen area I hope I don't scare them too much but I want to show you guys there are there by the other duck they want to be friends with the other ducks but the other ducks keep running away all right so we figured out what spacing we want for our training fence so we put these about every 7 inches or so because we have an existing fence we kind of have to work around that just for this purpose but it's about every 7 inches ending at about 30 inches tall so what we're using our 5 inch t-post insulators so what that means is that these will stick out from the existing fence five inches which means you know the goats could get up to there and then hopefully they won't try to get through but if they do they'll hit this fence so that is how we will be teaching them to stay back these are just clip on the existing T posts but these are also what we would be using out in the pasture except shorter ones we won't need these five inch ones out in the past year so we're going to head and get these put on we're not doing we're not going to do all of these T posts in here with these we really only need them about every 20 feet so we're only going to do a couple on each side and hopefully that will be good enough to start training these goats alright so the way that again that these work is that they just clip on the T post you basically pull this part out we're going to start these right here and this part will just go on now because again there is an existing fence here makes it a little bit harder see if we can get it on here yeah it still clipped on it just clip the wire along with it which is fine for the purposes that we're doing now so that's all they do and then on the back side there's just another little clip that goes around the back of the T post and those are really strong those will hold on really tight so we'll be able to pull the fence while you're pretty tight with these on so we'll just go up every like I said about seven inches until we have four of them on and we'll do that all the way around the pen and then we'll start putting on the wire [Music] this day is a big break [Music] well it's still raining in just a little bit it got crazy there for a couple minutes there is pale and I mean it was just coming down in buckets and now the sun is shining again we're gonna have to go take a look at the garden quick before we work on this project more because I'm not sure what kind of damage that hail could have just done to our tomatoes and everything out so we need to go look at that and then we'll get back to work on this project well so far so good the beans look okay the okra looks okay let's go take a look at the peppers and the tomatoes well nothing's knocked down so that's good no everything's good everything's okay everything's okay when it started hailing in there I could hear it on the metal roof of the barn and then I saw it coming down my heart my heart just sunk but it didn't last long and the little you know pieces of hail were only about the size of a pea and so it looks it looks it looks fine Oh turn around and look at the steam coming off of the garden and you can see just over here in the sky that's all blue sky and then just right over here that's the storm that just went right over us and dumped a bunch of rain and two short cycles of some hail and now it's gone and it's warm and sunny again there was even a small rainbow gosh this is this is like the weirdest day ever this team is crazy it's like foggy out now oh gosh let's go finish all right well I've got all of the t-post insulators on we're gonna again gonna do four strands for this test fence or practice fence Sara actually had to leave because she just had to remind her off on her phone that it was time to go pick up her monthly as your standard order and so she needed to leave so I'm gonna keep working on this while she's gone home hoping that by the time she gets back I'll have this up and running and be able to test it out with the goats so I'm gonna get busy putting the electric wire on I'm just going to be using a standard galvanized wire electric fence wire I'm actually going to use try to recycle some that I took down when we reconfigured the pig area so that I don't have to waste a brand-new stuff on a practice fence like this so I'm gonna get busy putting that on and then we'll get ready to hook up the Energizer or the fencer and we'll see if we can get this working [Music] all right so I've got all four strands of wire up all the way around the pan I know you probably can't see it because it's so thin but the next thing that I'm going to do now is take this red marking tape and I'm going to tie this on every strand of the wire at different intervals around the pen now I'm doing this for two different reasons the first reason is because I know that the goats are curious about things and when they come out back into their pen area they're going to want to investigate what this is and when they do they'll most likely touch the fence with their nose and get a shock now I'm not doing this just to be mean because I want to see them get shocked I don't want to see them get hurt in any way in fact the fence won't hurt them it will give them enough of a shock to startle them and it may hurt a little bit but it's not enough to cause any type of injury to them but the real reason that I'm doing this isn't just so that they can come up and sniff it it's because in their minds what they will start to realize is that this red tape is where the fence is and it'll become a psychologic barrier to stay away from the red tape so when we move them out to the pasture I'll do the same thing I'll put this on the fence they'll know that this is where they need to stay away from and they'll stay away from it so that's why I'm really doing it I'm going to tie this all the way around in different spots and then we'll get ready to hook up the energizer alright all of the red flags are on I think that those will be perfect I think those will help create that psychologic barrier for the goats that they'll know to stay away from those so now we need to get busy setting up our solar energizer for this the first thing we need to do is put in a grounding rod and then we can actually wire it up [Music] alright let's test it out all right looks like for kilovolts or 4,000 volts on each wire which should be plenty to train these goats I'm real happy with that all right I'm gonna get all of my tools cleaned up and then we'll just get ready to let the goats out and test out the fence well Sarah is back from the errands that she had to run so now we're gonna let the goats out I wanted her here to be able to see their reaction so I held off a little bit which actually worked out great because it rained again so now we're gonna finally let the goats out before it gets dark and see if they will explore this fence a little bit um the baby got it Rory got it once well we're gonna see how this goes we're really hoping that we can make this work that these goats will figure out how this electric fencing work so we can use that back in the woods so we can move them out there and they'll have a really great time out there the rain we've had another rain shower and now it's gonna come back again I think Franklin again right now while we had to move outside of the pen because the goats just won't leave the camera alone so we saw three of the goats get shocked by the fence and they did exactly what they should have done which was back up and move away and then they didn't come back to the fence so hopefully that's a good sign I think we'll give them probably a couple weeks with this fence inside of their pen then we'll try to set up a small paddock out in our current pasture and see if they respect that and then we'll start working on putting fence up in the bigger area but we need to make sure it's gonna work first and then it's going to be safe for the goats you guys I hope you enjoyed spending some of our day with us today on and off actually most of the day we really appreciate it if you're enjoying our videos please make sure to subscribe if you haven't already share our channel with people you know who would like it and until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 254,917

Keywords: homesteaders, homesteading, living traditions homestead, missouri, ozark's, self-sufficient, unjobbing, runner ducks, free range runner ducks, raising pigs, raising pigs for meat, raising pigs in the woods, family milk cow, nigerian dwarf goats, electric fence for goats, electric fence for nigerian dwarf goats, living traditions homestead pigs, living traditions homestead goats, we changed our minds, lifestyle vlogs, homesteaders on youtube, homesteaders life, homesteading family

Id: 5NoLgWVOro0

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019