Bonnie Johnson

Ticks they suck, literally.  When I lived in north Central Arkansas, we could stand on our porch and have the wind blow the seed ticks onto us without leaving the house.   Had a dog get loose overnight and when we found him in the morning, we stopped counting after pulling over 200 ticks off of him.  In Ohio and people claim ticks are bad, I just say, well you have never been to Arkansas or Southern Missouri.  

Keep the brush down, mow.  
While people suggest Guinea Fowl, my experience with them has been less than  stellar.  Plain ole chickens work well.  

Here is what worked best for me in Arkansas.  Sprayed my shoes and socks with in insecticide. These days, I use Cedarcide. Works against the ticks and the mosquitoes and even keeps the flies away.  If it is warm out, wear shorts. You can feel the ticks going up your legs easier and pick them off. This works with chiggers too. I could feel the chiggers hit and spread out when walking through the vegetation then I could wash them off. If you wear sandals it is even better. Ticks and chiggers can burrow through your socks and you won't feel them until later.  I don't wear long sleeves either, I can feel the buggers walking up my arm and pull them off before they attach.  When you get in the house, you take your clothes off and you do a tick check if you are alone, use a mirror, if you have a partner, then check each other.  

I tried the tuck the pants in the boots and all it did was encourage the darn things to crawl up my pants and burrow in through the waist area. I would rather pull a tick off of my legs than off my butt or worse.  

Cedarcide also has granules that you can use on your yard and around your house. I have not tried them.

If I had a lot of problems with deer ticks, I would use tick tubes around my house and farm. You can make your own using toilet paper rolls and some cotton. You treat the cotton with an insecticide and mice find the toilet rolls with the cotton and use it for nesting material.  The mice get the insecticide on them and the ticks on the mice get killed. Mice are a vector for the ticks that carry lyme disease. You could use an organic type insecticide in the tick tubes.  
Anyhow, goodluck and I hope you stay disease free.

I tried the hoop style covered in plastic. it worked for one year, then the plastic got ripped up. The plastic was the sheet plastic you buy in a roll at Lowe's or Home Depot.  I then bought plastic from the greenhouse mega store that was supposed to last for 5 years.  Some of it is still being used for covering plants over 5 years later, but the hoop house just didn't work well for me.  So on one of those good years when I sold a lot of goats, I used some of the extra money to build a green house that was framed in pressure treated lumber.  We covered the exterior with the polycarbonate stuff that is single layer that you buy in sheets at lowe's or home depot.  It has the wavy corrugated thing going on.  Well, after one year, it got brittle and you could break pieces off with your fingers or if a board leaned against it too hard, it wold crack and break. I was so freaking mad.  Spent about $1200 just to cover the green house it is a 10 foot by 10 foot and we even covered the roof with it.  

At our local livestock auction people bring in other stuff to sell that sometimes there are piles of windows.  I bought two piles of window for $6 dollars each.  I removed all the brittle polycarbonate on the walls and replaced it with windows.  I put a metal roof on the green house and insulated the roof.  It works pretty good and I wish I had just bought the used windows in the first place and saved myself all the hassle.  The windows don't hold in the heat as much as the polycarbonate stuff did, but they do okay and I don't have to worry as much about things getting too hot. I only use the greenhouse in the late winter early spring to start plants.  I save a couple hundred a year just starting my own tomato, pepper, broccoli and cauliflower plants.  

So I would suggest if you want to use the windows to cover a greenhouse, look for local auctions that sell all kinds of stuff. We have several in our area, look on craigslist and perhaps facebook.  

I do have a piece of the stuff that looks like corrugated cardboard polycarbonate and I use it for a window on my chicken coop.  If I could afford to cover a greenhouse with it I would because it is tough, it has lasted for over 10 years and is still going strong and it is still flexible and not breaking.   But I cant afford this stuff right now.  

Just my experience with different materials , hope it helps

Brian E Schreiber wrote:No, I did NOT know, until speaking with a cattle farmer yesterday, that fermented grass(hay in his case) was used. . . He explained how in the winter here in Minnesota he feeds 2 to 1 ratio of dry / "wet" bales to his cows.  The wet round bales were wrapped in plastic so they did not dry over the winter months.
My concern, mold, you address by hand picking it out.  Somehow that does not seem very time / cost effective for a big operation so I figure you only are keeping a couple cows vs this guy's 150.  Also, your hand bagging, double bagging . . . just too . . . MUCH!

I run 35 head or so of adult goats. We have been kidding since the end of November so we have added another 30 kids with more to come. We have 3 pigs, 3 horses, a steer, chickens, and rabbits. I will probably bring in two or three calves here pretty soon.  Round bales of hay first cut are anywhere from 45 to 75 dollars right now.  I go through about 45 round bales each winter. If I can cut that down by feeding my own small scale silage, it will help our small farm make a little money or a little more money.  Last year I also raised over 700 roosters which I sold live. The roosters like getting extra grass clippings even when I have them in chicken tractors. It also cuts down on how much feed they eat.  I figure a good grass clover silage probably is coming in at 15 to 18 percent protein.

Technically bales that are wrapped are called haylage.  Silage is chopped up forage with sometimes chopped up green corn stalks (they have corn that is specifically planted for making silage) and sometimes they add some grain to the mix. Then they ensile it in either the stand up silage towers (they don't use those much anymore) or they pack it down into bunker silage that they drive tractors over to pack it down and sometimes they tarp those and they now have tube silage where they use a chopper to force the silage into the tube and pack it so their isn't much air in there.  

For my test bags, the disc of mold on the one bag ( the fresh mown in the afternoon grass) was small, in once piece and I could grab it and it came out and stayed in one piece.  I had a good 45 pounds or so for silage left for a few minutes or work. So that was no trouble at all to remove and that is the silage I am going to make this spring from fresh mown lawn with no drying done to it.  The bagging is simple.  I am sorry if I didn't describe it good enough. I put a plastic bag over the end of the lawn bagger from the lawn mower. I dump the bagger bag over and hold onto the plastic bag and let the bagger contents dump into the plastic garbage bag.  Then I push the air out and fasten it shut. It wasn't that hard the first time and it was easier the second time.  If I can get enough barrels to hold the silage I will move to using barrels but the barrels have to be air tight and have clamp on lids and I would need a lot of them.  So until I have enough extra barrels, plastic bags it is.  

You can actually make small scale silage with your lawn clippings. i did test bags of silage last fall and they turned out great after fermenting in the plastic bag for 6 or 8 weeks, they goats loved it. The lawn mower silage smelled great to me too.  Our lawn is fertilized by a chicken tractor and it has a lot of clover in it also some plantain, and a few other edible weeds and of course grass.  This spring, I am going to make a lot of silage with my lawn mower. I mowed late in the day on a dry day.  I double bagged the silage in plastic  garbage bags and you can reuse the bags if they don't get holes in them. You can also use five gallon plastic buckets with a tight fitting lid or barrels.   I will be cutting down on the amount of hay I need to feed to my goats, steers and horses.  I think my chickens will like the silage in the winter and I have read that you can feed it to rabbits which I might experiment with too.

I dumped the clippings out of the bagger directly into a plastic garbage bag and double bagged it. Then I pressed as much air as possible out of the bags by kneeling on them. I tied the top shut on the inner bag as tightly as possible. And then I tied the outer bag.  There was a small disc of mold right under the the bag closure that came out in one piece.  It was about 8 to 10 inches in diameter and about 1.5 inches thick.  I tossed that to compost. The rest of the silage was great. The test bag where I used partially dried clippings had a lot more mold about three inches thick all over the top of the bag and down the sides. I didn't feed that as it wasn't as nice smelling.

If you didn't know fermented feed (silage) is often fed to cattle. So a little fermentation of the grass clippings won't hurt the cow.  I used to feed fresh grass clippings to my horse when I was a kid. My horse loved it and she never had  problem with it.

I feed fresh mown grass clippings to my rabbits, goats and pigs. They eat it fast enough that it doesn't ferment.

I used to use our horses to mow the lawn and weed eat with the goats.  However I had to stop doing that when I put in fruit trees and berry vines/bushes.  The goats destroy them. Also the horses were knocking over the trash can with the rabbit pellets even with the lid bungeed down so they could eat it. Yard is fenced in over an ace.  I do still run a small chicken tractor in the yard, a 5 foot by 10 foot long.  I also have the goats and chickens fenced out of my garden!

About four or five years ago, my husband bought me a battery powered Stanley xd self propelled lawnmower and wheel barrow also battery powered.  I love them both, but it was taking for ever to mow the lawn. So two years ago, we use the tax refund that mostly generated by our ranch/farm to purchase a Green Works riding lawn mower with bagger that is battery powered. I can now get the lawn mowed in about 45 minutes instead of several days. I use the lawn clippings to mulch the garden, feed the rabbits, goats, and pigs and sometimes chickens.  Last summer i used the bagger to make some test bags of small scale silage. The test silage was a great success and I am planning on making a lot more silage this spring, summer and fall.  

We run about 35 head of goats on rotational 7 rotational grazing pastures. I follow the goats with a steer or two and my 3 remaining horses.  I raised about 700 roosters in chicken tractors in one rotational grazing pasture. Used the Green Works battery powered riding lawnmower to pull a cart with feed and water out to the chicken tractors and I used it to move the chicken tractors.  I can mow really tall grass with the Green Works riding lawnmower. I was surprised that it would go through grass a foot tall.  Can't use the bagger when you are doing that though.  I had to mow the pasture in front of the chicken tractors so I could move them. I would mow several days worth in front of the chicken tractors so the bugs and stuff would come back before I moved the chicken tractor.  I will be mowing part of the pasture to make extra silage too.  I also use the battery powered mower with cart to haul the roosters up to the house in cages so customers can buy them. I sell live birds. I don't sell processed birds.

I also used the Green Works battery powered riding mower to mow along some fence line so I would not have to do as my with my battery powered weed eaters. it worked better than expected so I am going to do more of that this year.

The small scale silage is hopefully going to help cut down the amount of hay I purchase.  I plan on feeding it to goats, horses, rabbits and pigs, and maybe chickens.  I just empty the bagger into a barrel or plastic bag and get the air out and seal it up.  I try to mow when it is dry in the afternoon and that seems to be the right water content.  I am able to reuse the plastic bags as long as they don't have holes in them. I hate plastic, but I don't have enough barrels for storage yet.  

I use a brush cutter blade on my battery powered weed eater to clear fence line so my high tensile electric fence will stay charged enough to keep goats in. I can take down 3/4 inch diameter saplings and rose bushes with the battery powered weed eater with the brush cutter blade.   I have also switched to using electric battery powered chainsaws for those times when i have trees come down on the fence.  

I still use the Stanley XD pushmower and wheelbarrow.  They both still work great. I use the battery powered wheel barrow more and I don't want to ever go back to having a push a wheel barrow or pull a cart by hand.

I am not sure how any backwash would get back into the tubing and flow upward against gravity to go to another cage.  When a rabbit pushes on the nipple the valve opens and water flows out. When the rabbit stops pushing, then the nipple closes.  The water flow would push out anything trying to go back up in the nipple and into the tubing.  

I had way more crap building up in the water bottles and they are very hard to get clean.  I do not have the flip top. Also I have had to replace the water bottles along with the ball valve nipple that goes on the water bottle. The plastic bottle part becomes brittle then cracks.  The water bottle nipple freezes and cracks easily on the plastic that screws onto the bottle. I can't use the bottle or the automatic system in the winter.  

I have not had a problem with disease transmitting through water.  I only bring in a new rabbit every couple of years to help avoid heavy inbreeding. I don't go to rabbit shows, and I don't have my rabbits where they can get in contact with wild rabbits.  Although I did have a doe successfully raise two out of four wild bunnies that were orphaned.  

I understand that it can tell you a lot about how an animal is doing by monitoring the water.  When I first installed the automatic watering system, I would go to each cage and check to make sure that the water was flowing. Now I can tell from looking in the 5 gallon bucket if the rabbits have been drinking enough water.  Also if the bucket is empty, I know to look for a leak or a bad nipple or a disconnected tube/hose from my dogs hitting the tubing. I have so many other animals to take care of horses, steer, pigs, goats, chickens, and dogs that it is a relief for me not to be constantly checking and refilling water bottles three times a day in the summer.  

I am glad your system works for you.  

when I was a kid, over 50  years ago, we scraped or poured out the bacon grease into a can. The can was kept by the stove so you could use the bacon grease to put oil in a pan so things wouldn't stick.  It was the never ending can of bacon grease.  I don't think my Mom had heard of Olive oil at that point in time.  It was either lard, crisco or corn oil or the ubiquitous can of bacon grease.  

Fast forward to today.  I don't cook bacon often enough to have bacon grease sitting around. If I did, and I had room in the frig, I would probably put it in there especially in the summer. However, I do render lard from our home raised pigs.  I cut up the pig fat and put in in the slow cooker with about a quarter cup of water and I let the slow cooker melt the fat. I then strain the liquid hot lard through a bakers sieve, what you use to sift flower over a funnel into quart jars. Then I put a new canning lid on it and it seals down on its own. This stuff keeps for at least six months in my basement at about 60 to 65 degrees.  So I suspect that you could easily store bacon fat the same way in either pint jars or quart jars.  

I made my own home cured bacon and hams from our own pig last year. It was easy and worked great. The bacon is awesome, but I just don't eat bacon that much and neither does my husband.  I don't keep a can of bacon grease sitting around because it would probably go rancid especially in the summer. I do cook bacon in a pan then saute up veggies and what not in the fat when making certain soups.  

You can also render chicken fat and duck fat and beef fat.  I have some duck fat in the door of my frig in a pint canning jar.  I raised and butchered the ducks so wanted to keep some of the fat. The duck fat does taste good for frying/ sauteing.  

good luck

Goats are very wasteful of hay. If it drops on the ground, they won't eat it.  This seems horrible to us, but for goats it means survival.  Since goats are browsers, they aren't meant to eat things low to the ground the reason for this is that the parasite larvae that infest goats usually climb up to about 3 to 6 inches above the ground on grass and other vegetation.  If goats are grazing/browsing that low then they are ingesting massive amounts of parasites which can and will kill them.  

A two inch by four inch mesh usually is fine.  However, adding tray under it to catch the hay usually leads to goats putting their feet on the tray so they can reach higher up and reach the choices tidbits. After all the harder it is to reach the better it tastes for goats.  Often young goats will get all four feet up there and end up pooping and peeing in the tray and things just get nasty.   I really can't understand why anyone who has ever own goats wants a tray to catch hay under the feeder and they usually put a tray under there that doesn't have drainage so you get a horrible moldy nasty mess in that tray.  

If you have other animals like pigs or cows, or horses, you can pick up the hay under the feeder and give it to them.  I have done that before.  Most parasites from goats will not infect the pigs, cows, or horses.  In fact, I use this to my advantage in rotational grazing and graze my horses and cows behind my goats so they ingest the low climbing goat parasites and the goats don't get infested then.

you can use the hay under the feeder for goat bedding.  Then when the goats pee and poo on it, make it into a compost pile and use it later on our garden beds, flower beds, or any other place you would normally use compost.

I don't buy bedding for my goats, I just use the hay they drop and wont eat. If it is nice hay, sometimes I take it to my horses, but if it is first cut, I use the dropped hay in their shelters for deep litter bedding all winter.  I even take the outer layers of the round bales off the hay and lay it in the goat shelters so they have plenty of bedding. The goats love it, they will pick through it and eat a bit then they lay down on it and wont' touch it.

and if anyone can't tell, it is a rainy wet day in my area or I wouldn't have any time to post on permies.  

goodluck with your goats!

You are also damaging the foxes ability to live as they are supposed to.  Giving them free easy to kill food does not teach young foxes how to survive as well. you are building a false economy for the foxes.  The local foxes near your farm can get plenty of easy to catch chicken.  They will be able to raise large litters of kits but they won't be training those kits how to survive hunting mice and other small wild critters the way they would normally do in the wild. They will be teaching their kits how to hunt and kill dumb worn out chickens that don't know they should even run from a fox.  The kits won't have any real hunting skills so when the go out on their own, they will have no choice but to hunt chicken whether they hunt your chickens or someone else's chickens won't matter.  The young adult kits may starve because they didn't get the hunting skills they would normally have gotten if their parents had taught them to hunt mice or voles or rabbits.  The kits might end up getting trapped or shot because they were going for someone else's chickens.  

Yep having to fence them in sucks, yes, it costs money.  I had to stop raising specialty breeds due to the foxes and raccoons around my area the last couple years.  It really sucks when the foxes and raccoons are killing chickens that are worth 25 to 40 bucks each.   I only let my personal egg laying chickens free range in my winter goat pasture. I always have my dairy goats in there the meat goats go out on rotational grazing in May.  The goats seem to keep the foxes and raccoons from coming in during daylight hours and if I lock up the chickens before it gets too dark, I rarely lose one these days.  I did have to trap, shoot and kill a large number of foxes and raccoons the previous two years. I had them coming in during broad daylight right into my fenced in chicken yards.  My terriers got a couple too.  This year, my traps have been empty and there have not been any daytime raids.  

I keep meat chickens in chicken tractors with fold down wings which stops predators so far.  We have had bear sightings near my farm so I don't know what I will do if I have bear problems the bears are protected by law in our area.  

I do not like having to shoot the foxes.  I think they are beautiful.  But they need to be out there hunting the stuff they should naturally be hunting.  I gave up on raccoons they are just trash pandas to me these days they cause so much trouble that I can't even call them cute anymore.  Which sucks because i used to think they were cute.  Those days are gone.  

I have been using it for years.  I let it compost like any other manure, horse, cow , chicken, and then put  it on my garden.  Works fine.  I sometimes also put it on the garden in a thick mat of six inches or more in the fall and let it sit on my raised beds over the winter.   My garden is all raised beds.   The only manure i use fresh is rabbit.