What To Do When You Feel Overwhelmed - Small Farm Sunday

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm sunday edition where we talk about issues affecting small farms and today i'm going to talk about what to do when you feel overloaded but first i got a few things to show you thing number one youtube sent me this silver play button for passing a hundred thousand subscribers and i got it this week i thought what better place to hang it than in the barn where all the action happens anyway thing number two we gotta check on redner piglets i know you all have missed them howdy red howdy little ones how you doing mom always trying to get a drink they never leave you alone mom do they no brad won't let me get a shot she keeps getting in the way red all right reds piglets are three weeks old now and hillary and i castrated the males last week there were i think seven males and four females they're still 11 still 11 healthy piglet so they'll stay in here for i don't know two or three weeks and then we'll put them out to the pasture hey mom you guys are terrible you're after me all the time stop eating me and when we put the piglets out at six weeks old or so mom won't be sad to see him go she'll be happy to get a good night's sleep now then on to the subject at hand which is what to do when you feel overloaded on your farm and the reason for this subject is i feel overloaded putting hay in always overloads me i had to drop almost everything for five days to get this hay in and it's not only the stress of doing the work itself making the hay but it's things that are surrounding that looking at the weather forecast every two hours watching it change this time of year and realizing i had a day or two less than i initially thought i had thinking about it constantly will it get dry will thunderstorms come this afternoon i said it again somebody could make a lot of money if they made a medicine called haymaker's friend that was a combination of motrin and xanax because that's the way it is sore muscles and nervous mind when i finished bailing the hay i was exhausted and to boot i had a mountain of things that had piled up i had to fix fence in some places we have two steers to bring in to go to the butcher i had to clean out the pen in the upper barn we had a batch of meat chicks that needed to go out on pasture hill and i had to castrate the piglets and to top it all off we had a new mom we had our first calf last week who was kicking her calf off when the calf tried to nurse so we had to deal with that situation and process the calf castrate tag and de-horn it and i was facing all this stuff and i just felt like a gasket was gonna blow but luckily hillary and i both came from professions where managing a large amount of tasks and getting through that stress was taught to us in school and in practice so hillary was a nurse and she learned how to triage patients where you treat the worst ones first and let the other ones sit for a while and i was an architect and i managed these huge projects that could take years with thousands of tasks which would overwhelm you if you thought you had to do them all at once so this is the way i deal with an overload i use my phone and all i do is i sit down i don't start running around like a chicken with his head cut off to do whatever i can i make a list of all the things that need to be done and then i triage them or in the language from my previous profession i put them on a critical path kind of schedule where i look at all the tasks and i say okay which one needs to be done first and which ones can wait and after looking at my list of tests i realize the things that require the most immediate attention have to do with animal care so we had left the cows open field grazing on a five acre field so that we didn't have to move them every day while i was doing hay the first thing we did was set up our temporary fencing in a new field and start strip grazing our herd and the second thing was to fix some broken fence because of course we didn't want the animals getting out so once you make a list the priorities start to show themselves and after that we could get on with castrating the piglets and the most difficult task which our cow coco one of the red ones back there had a calf while i was hanging and we had to go find the calf and castrate tag and de-horn it and in addition watching the calf coco was having issues so after we did the processing the calves always go and lay in the tall grass most of the day in their early days and they sleep and it's hard to find them to begin with but mom and calf's schedule didn't sink up so the calf was coming out in the middle of the day instead of at dawn and evening the way that the cavs usually come out and coco wasn't interested in nursing her calf then so we had to bring the calf out at the right times to get it to sync with coco's schedule and eventually the two came to an understanding as far as nursing schedule so that took some time and a lot of messing around on our part and a lot of worry about will mom accept calf i think one of the things that's important when you go through these kinds of periods on the farm is to remember to be deliberate about what you're doing so when faced with all these tasks you need to go through them one at a time and finish that task before you go on to the next now certainly if you're in rush rush rush mode you may be able to do things a little bit halfway and then move on to next thing just to kind of temporarily get it stabilized using the allegory of hillary's patient at work stabilize the patient move on to the next but the way i like to go after things for the most part is to take that task finish it so that's off my mind and then move on to the next task i think one of the stressful things about having a farm is remember i'm talking about all these tasks that had to be done they're in addition to all the routine tasks on the farm doing the chores every morning and afternoon our regular processing of meat chickens all those things that just come normally you have to cram that extra work in between them so we took care of the most pressing things first which had to do with the well-being of the livestock and you'll find with any list that you make that there's a whole bunch of things on the list that kind of dropped to the bottom they have a more flexible schedule so for me it was things like getting the hay into the barn putting the hang equipment away mowing the lawn which i hadn't done in about three weeks we mow the lawn sometimes here about four times a year and that's it always falls to the bottom of the list and ever since we started to farm a bunch of household things that a lot of people think are important really aren't very important on my list number one is mowing lawn but there are other things like cleaning out the gutters on the house cleaning the inside of the house i mean we do what we have to do but that's about it keeping a garden we used to keep a big garden we don't have any time for that now so things that used to be a priority really aren't a priority anymore when you're taking care of livestock and i'll tell you what having a partner in your farm operation makes a world of difference so those days that i was doing hey hillary was covering for me she was taking care of the afternoon chores while i was out in the field and in the evening she was somebody to talk to to say geez i'm stressed out about this you know and having somebody just to talk to makes a world of difference i i can't emphasize that enough having family involved with your farm and being part of it really helps you out when you're under stress developing systems on your farm helps to alleviate stress as well so as i always say when you start a farm it's important to start small and establish those systems like your feeding schedule for different animals or when you're going to move different animals to new pasture so those things you've got kind of down and you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about them that removes stress because it's just an ordinary part of your day then and you can spend more of your time focusing on the things you haven't run into before instead of those basic systems for caring for your animals in fact when we started our farm in the first years when we were growing small amounts of animals we thought geez i don't know how we can ever grow this anymore we just don't have the time but gradually as you get used to taking care of those animals you find that it's easier to take on more of a workload because you refine and make things more efficient in terms of their care so taking all those tips into account did that remove my stress no it didn't remove my stress but it made my stress manageable and gave me a path through it you know it's funny people think of a small farm as some kind of bucolic life my gosh this time of year i work 16 hours a day seven days a week and i do not take any days off it is not a bucolic life you got to run pretty fast just to make a living for your family off of a small farm i think this busyness is one of the reasons that small farms come and go so often i've seen many come and go since we first started eight years ago and underestimating the workload and underestimating the skills needed to get through overloads and stressful times or one of the things that people don't think about enough when they start a small farm lastly for this video i want to take care of a few housekeeping issues mainly regarding communication i don't have any time to answer emails anymore i answer very few of the emails that i get and i feel bad about that i get long emails from people with lots of questions and i just don't have the time to do it between farm youtube channel and family there's no time left to spare for me i don't answer phone calls i haven't answered phone calls in a long time and the best way to get a hold of me like this flies trying to get a hold of me is to put a comment down below no i don't answer all the comments but i try to answer some of them especially right after the video comes out so that's it really easy right it's never easy trust me i hope this video was informative i'll see you later this week with more daily farm life videos i hope you have a great day and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 16,835

Rating: 4.9751039 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, feel overwhelmed, overwhelmed by farm work, small farm sunday, managing farm tasks, feeling overwhelmed, prioritizing tasks

Id: n_aQZTJy2Tc

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021