Winter on a Small Farm

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm we're a small livestock farm just 45 acres and we focus on putting our animals on grass whenever the grass is growing but it's winter now and we can't put the animals on grass because the grass isn't growing so in this video i wanted to take you around and show you how we take care of our animals in the winter first the cattle we have about 35 head of dexter cattle which are a small and thrifty breed in the wintertime the cattle are confined to this winter pasture and the reason for that is because we have a long mud season here in central new york mud season happens really often on from october through april and mud season is when the top layer of the ground thaws but the layers underneath don't thaw so water gets trapped in the upper portion of the soil and you wind up with mud for that reason we can find our cattle to the winter pasture in the summer because if we put them out on the fields which surround this winter pasture they'd ruin them they would wreck them because of the long mud season and there are lots of logistical problems to putting cattle out on fields year-round here in central new york the first being that the fields get trashed the second being that we can have a couple feet of snow on the fields for a good part of the winter it's not practical to run temporary fences to move them around to keep them from trashing the field it's not practical for us to bring hay out into the fields and feed them hay out into the fields because a lot of the time the fields are impassable with the tractor so we put them in the winter pasture here and yes the winter pasture gets muddy it's frozen right now but the cattle don't mind it they have a place out here to get fresh air to exercise a little bit when it's sunny out they come in and bask in the sun let's meet some of the cows this is prudence prudence is 10 right prudence she's a great mom and a great cow and standing next to her is one of our bulls titus we have great bulls because they were raised on a dexter dairy and what happened is whenever their moms came into the parlor to milk the calves would come in with them the calves got handled twice a day every day and the result is really tame bulls i know people are nervous about being around bulls but after working with these guys for about five years i'm not nervous i always keep my eye on them but i've never had a problem with them and this is what our fields look like in the winter there isn't any snow on them right now but the ground is frozen and the grass is dormant we couldn't put temporary fences in the ground if we wanted to it's frozen solid so the winter pasture is really the way to go for us hi ladies we keep all the colors of dexter's dexter's are usually black that's the predominant color but they also come in red and dunn colors we've got some of each on this farm this is our second bull orton who we've also had roughly five years and he's just as friendly as titus not hand shy at all these are the kind of bulls i want to have on the farm no wild ones and i think some of that temperament transmits to the bulls offspring as well we've never had a problem with misbehaved animals this is hux one of orton's sons he's smart and he's curious that's a great trait that seems to run throughout our dexter's we feed our cattle mineral year-round this is a free-choice feeder we keep loose mineral and three compartments in it's got salt and kelp and then a macro mineral mix calcium phosphorus the things that the cattle need in bigger quantities than trace minerals the cattle are free to come out here whenever they want in the winter time and then there's a door into the barn and i'll show you how we feed them our cattle and our winter pigs as well are kept in a three-sided pole barn the open side of the pole barn faces east we get very little wet weather in the winter time here out of the east so it's a good shelter from the wind the cattle occupy two bays in this barn and each bay is 16 feet by 36 feet and each bay has gates on the end of it so i can open up the gates and drive in the front end loader to clean out the manure pack we feed our cattle inside the barn we have these feeder panels with diagonals that are about 10 inches apart to keep them from coming through we place large round bales outside one on this side and then one on the other side and the cows can come in and eat whenever they want i am a big believer in feeding hay inside versus outside we found that they waste less hay feeding it this way through feeder panels versus feeding it out of a round bale ring plus this keeps the hay out of the weather it keeps it dry it keeps it from getting rotted if it does get pulled out and onto the floor we just fork it back in toward the cows if we were feeding hay out in the winter pasture that i showed you we'd wind up with a large percentage of it pulled out of the bale rings trampled on the ground and lost as far as nutritional value now of course a side effect of feeding hay in a barn is you wind up with a betting pack keeping winter betting packs like this have their pros and cons the biggest pro is that the manure and the hay start to decompose and actually provide some heat to the cattle when they lay down at night some of them will lay down in here and sleep at night some sleep out in the pasture cattle are really good in the cold in fact i think heat bothers them a lot more than cold so they just do just fine in this cold weather the main con to the bedding pack is i gotta come in here with the loader about every six weeks and clean all this out and pile it which i'll show you a little bit later but it becomes good fertilizer for the farm this bedding pack is built up to a couple feet deep now and i'm going to be coming here and cleaning it out next time we get a thaw in the winter time we water our cattle out of several of these stock tanks which are i think 110 gallons even though it's below freezing for most of the winter here the cattle drain down the stock tanks fast enough where we don't have a big problem with ice accumulation we don't run any tank heaters in these tanks sometimes ice will build up on the outside but it's really not a big deal and if there's a thin layer of ice on the top the cows will punch through it to drink if they do freeze up on the top we come through twice a day when we do chores and just knock the ice to break it up so that the cattle can drink we have a separate area in the winter time for our heifers that are going to be going to slaughter next year these are our sort of call heifers as we pick the best genetics to keep for our herd and they have this small yard here they have their own stock tank and then they have an indoor area in the barn here so our call heifers have this indoor area in the barn where they also have access to eat hay indoors and they also have their own bedding pack which is about in need to be cleaned out i'm also a big believer in storing hay inside even though we make round bales and round bales can be stored outside you have a certain percentage of spoilage when they're stored outside so we we're lucky to have a big enough barn where we can store our hay inside along with a lot of old tractors that i collect that covers our cattle operation and they'll be in these winter yards until april when we'll turn them out on the pasture and when we turn them out we do a modified form of mob grazing which means that we move them to a new pasture paddock every day using temporary fences now let's move on to the pigs we keep our own breeding pigs and we grow two batches of piglets each year to bring directly to the market we keep two thousand a bore in this breeding barn and the reason that they're kept separate from the other pigs and separate from each other is because we want to control when they breed we don't like having piglets when it's too cold out so we time our piglets in six month increments piglets are born in april and in october this is our older sao red who is a great mom she's had i think four litters now and in a couple weeks we'll be turning our boar in with her to be bred and over here we've got brownie brownie is our young sauce she hasn't been bred yet we got her last march to replace missy who you might have seen in earlier videos we wound up butchering this fall because missy was not a good mom brownie is a friendly pig and we hope that she's gonna have nice litters but we won't know until it actually happens this is our poor little john and i i think he's ready to get to work breeding he's been laying around a little too much as you can see we keep our brood pigs in concrete floored pens and i've gotten a lot of questions about that these pens are each about 12 foot by 12 foot and people will say well why don't you bed them with straw hay wood chips what have you and we've been through all those options to begin with these pens were all dirt floored and we piled hay in and it was a giant mess you see the big problem with keeping pigs in pens like this is water no matter how you give them water it winds up on the floor we tried using nipple drinkers they played with the nipple drinkers till the pens were flooded now we feed them fixed amounts in these small rubber dishes over here so that they can't dump as much on the floor we try to put in as much as they'll drink at each time that we feed them we've tried bedding concrete with straw and with hay and with wood chips but the bedding becomes soiled really quickly with the water that they dump we found that the most effective solution to keep our brood pigs dry in the winter was to just leave it concrete the slabs have a broom finish so they don't slip and slide on them and they usually because pigs are pretty decent housekeepers if you let them keep an area of it dry and tend to poop in one area and we come in here about every week or so and we clean all this out and over here in the last bay of our three-sided pole barn we have the pigs that we're growing out to send to slaughter in the spring we keep them in this one bay which is 16 feet wide by 36 feet long and it gives them plenty of room they don't soil it too too quick we take the waste hay that the cows won't eat and we pull it over into here to give them bedding they love to run around it's a game they play with me we use a continuous feeder which keeps them from wasting feed and keeps their feet dry we use a nipple drinker here so they always have access to clean water and the big thing we've found with keeping pigs in the winter is to give them lots of bedding so that they stay dry now we tried keeping pigs out on pasture for the winter but and it didn't work out very well the snow piles up the pigs can't root anyway so there's really nothing they're getting out of the ground in the winter and it's cold and pigs aren't as resilient in the cold as cattle are so we choose to keep our winter batch in the pen and then we have two tree filled lots you can see one over there and there's one way over there that we rotate the pigs in in the winter so when we grow our summer batch of pigs they do grow outside in a tree-filled lot and they can forage curious little guys when they get done running around and playing their game they usually come up to see me our pigs are a mixture of breeds our bore is a purebred old spot our sows are a mixture of berkshire and durock and the meat from this hybrid we found is really delicious you guys aren't so shy when i settle down are you now on to the laying hens our lang hens spend the winter in this winter house this is a high tunnel which is 11 feet wide by 32 foot long and then there's a separate laying house which we call the top house up through that doorway the chickens spend their winters in here and we bed this profusely with wood shavings we pile on probably 10 bags of wood shavings every week and the chickens have horizontal roots here this the nice thing about having a high tunnel is we get a lot of solar heat in the winter this will really warm up on days that have some sun now aside from the winter house that the hens are in right now we also have two outdoor runs that are attached to it and the chickens are free to come out here anytime during the day we open and close the doors morning and evening to protect the hens i think that the laying hands are our two youngest children's favorite pets they adopt a dozen of them every year and take care of them and raise them up to be hand friendly they're great to have on the farm chickens are a lot more interesting than most people would think who haven't kept them before this is our second outdoor run for the laying hens again with a door into the laying house we keep a mixture of layer hand breeds that we've developed over the years it's just favorites for their sturdiness on pasture and their egg production buff warpingtons you'll see quite a few here barred rocks we keep ericana's because customers like the colored eggs we keep white leghorns which lay just a standard white egg and we keep rhode island reds those are our five principal breeds so that's our winter arrangement for the laying hens now in the summertime they occupy these egg mobiles which are mobile roosting houses for the laying hens we move these all around these fields once a week and we use temporary fencing you can see the last place there where they were and ate the grass the chickens pick up bugs and they eat the grass and the quality of their eggs improves greatly they're out here on this pasture just like the cattle really between april and october we also grow a lot of broiler chickens or meat chickens during the summer again starting in april and we house them in these pasture boxes these are joel saladin style boxes for anybody that's familiar with joel saladin we pull these across the field and we move them once a day bringing the broilers to new grass and fertilizing the pasture at the same time we also grow one batch of pastured turkeys every year time for thanksgiving and this is the ark that they stay in we move the ark around the pasture just like the eggmobiles we have a temporary fence around it and the turkeys can go up in this and roost at night when we first started raising pastured poultry meat chickens and turkeys and eggs i couldn't believe the difference yes you pay a premium for them but it's hard to go back to supermarket chicken or turkey once you've tried ours as our farm operation grew we went from using bagged grain to bulk grain you see these gravity wagons we have three of them this one's pig feed that one is layer chicken feed we have a third one on the pasture for broiler chicken feed when we're growing those we save about 25 percent the cost of feed by buying in bulk we just move these around to where we need to feed the poultry in the summer poultry can't live off of foraging on pasture alone they need the extra calories that grain provides and pigs do too when i use the loader to remove the bedding pack from the barn and all the pig manure and the chicken manure and everything that comes off of the farm gets piled in these piles and they cut it composts in here and what i do is i turn this pile at least once a year i let it sit for a year to compost down so it looks more like soil than manure and hay and then i spread it on the fields a year later this system of composting that i use traps more of the nitrogen and other things that are great for growing grass into the soil that comes out of the compost if i were spreading this manure raw in the fields i'd be losing more of that especially nitrogen out to the air beneficial bacteria in the compost pile help lock those nutrients in given that we're a small livestock farm the only way i know to make a living for a family and this is all we do for a living is to sell directly to the consumer so we have a whole bunch of freezers in our garage and refrigerators too from which we stock up and sell meat directly to the consumer at several local farmers markets and we sell from direct from the farm as well we don't sell online we've never done that and it looks like it would be a big time investment for us and fortunately we live in an area of the country where people are aware of the importance of local food and have never had a problem selling all that we grow we've attended as many as three farmers markets a week in the past now we attend one a week and seem to do all right when you combine it with sales straight from the farm in the winter time markets get a little bit shorter they're still once a week so we keep selling right through the winter in our climate and with the type of farming we do which focuses on grass growth and grass intake by the animals summers and winters are really different and we have also to deal with the fact that we're in the northeast with that long mud season that i was talking about and so we have to uh house our animals differently in the winter than we would say if we were down south with more warm days and little or no mud season one of the things i appreciate and thankful for about living on our farm is that seasonality that things get quieter in the winter in the summertime quite often we're working 12 or 16 hour days because there's a lot more animals here to take care of with the broiler chickens and the turkeys and moving the cattle around but in the winter things are quieter so we regenerate in the winter and my wife likes to read she she really gets into reading books in the wintertime we like sitting by the fire once in a while during the day maybe watching a little bit of tv and i enjoy working in my shop and restoring old tractors which is what a lot of this channel is about these days but that seasonality means that life on a farm is always changing it's in harmony with nature and i think there's no better way of feeling connected to the outdoor world than taking care of animals through the seasons i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you'll stick around with me for more of our videos on our farm and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 106,744

Rating: 4.975296 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, pigs, chickens, small farm, winter on a small farm, farming in winter, pasture farm in winter, farm life in winter, take care of farm animals in winter, farm tour, small farm tour

Id: SAq995fzyFg

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021