Benedict Bosco

Richard Rios wrote:I also don’t want to go through a huge process to clean it for that machine. Am I able to skip the cleaning process and shred it? And if I shred it, will I be able to apply it straight to the soil, or do I need to make it into pellets?

I've looked into the pelleting a bit, both into having it done (there are a few people near-ish to me that do it) and buying the equipment myself (not cheap). As far as your questions - the only cleaning you need to do is to make sure it's free of rocks and sticks (likely debris from shearing), and large manure tags. Beyond that, it just goes straight through the shredder. The people who are shredding sell it both as shreds (for mulch) and pellets (for mixing into soil in lieu of peat moss), so how processed you need it really depends on how you want to apply it.

I've not had great success with applying the raw fleeces as mulch - it works for a bit, but once the weeds break through weeding is a bear, because it roots into the wool, which is still bound to itself, so pulling stuff up is pulling an entire mat. I want to try the shredded option and see if that works better.

If your fence doesn’t hold water it won’t hold goats…so the saying goes. You will need good fences. Half an acre of grass and forbs should be enough for a couple goats in a temperate climate, but you’ll need to set up housing for them and probably store hay for the winter. Just be aware that milking animals need a good food supply or they will languish or dry up.

As to the forest, it all depends on management. Look up silvopasture. Steve Gabriel has a good book on the subject, but I don’t think he was fond of goats.

No opinion on the eternal value of goats. However, I will point out that there are also dairy sheep that might work well for small scale dairy. (East Friesian for example, or some lines of Icelandics)

If you keep an eye on the Eau Claire Craigslist, there’s a guy in Fall Creek that usually has some for sale. I got some from him a couple years ago.

We keep a quart mason jar of starter around with ~300g of starter at 100% hydration. That's enough to feed whatever it is we're making (usually ~200g starter in any given recipe). We feed twice a day (100g flour + 100g water) when it's out. If we're not going to be baking for a few days we put it in the fridge, making sure to take it out and feed it once or twice before baking. We've found enough things to make with it (waffles especially, as well as pizza crust, cakes and pancakes and english muffins) that we don't usually have to compost much of it. It is definitely happier out and being fed; extended stays in the fridge (weeks) really slow it down, but unless it's getting nasty it will usually recover after a few feedings.

We keep a small jar of dried flakes from the bread mixing bowl in the freezer to help jump-start a new starter if something happens to ours; once in a while it's left too long, and we've had the starter jar get broken at least once...

Were you able to get him back?

Dave Lucey wrote:I also remove any rumen-protected PUFAs from supplements since I learned, the hard way, that it causes gender skew in the lambs.  (I got 70% rams for years due to that.  Honestly, I removed them entirely since then.)

Can you elaborate on this? What kind of supplements? What are PUFAs?

Disclaimer: I've only ever worked with a small flock of sheep on their own, and haven't worked with cows yet, so take what I say with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

I'd talk to the neighbor. I suspect your success will be very limited on open pasture, unless you or someone you know has a really good working dog; you will probably have to work with the neighbor to retrieve the ram while the cattle are confined to a smaller corral, either for working or transport. Running the cattle through a chute and pulling the ram out when he comes by seems like the most likely possibility to me.

Another possibility would be treats - does the ram respond to a bucket of alfalfa pellets or something? You could try to lure him to a treat bucket and grab him, but I suspect the cows will be just as interested in whatever it is, and make life difficult.

Good luck!

From what I've read here, I suspect you'd probably be good. Rotation will be a huge benefit in any case, and I think that you are right in looking at smaller animals for a smaller acreage. If you wanted, you could call your county extension office and ask what the typical carrying capacity of pastures in your area is. That number is usually given in animal units per acre, where "animal unit" is a 1,000lb cow. You can do the math up or down based on the projected weights of whatever animals you're looking at. Wikipedia indicates that Dexter cows are usually around 700lbs, so that would be 0.7AU.

The biggest thing is to be observant, both of the animals, and your pasture. I'm not sure who started it (Allen Nation, I think), but there are those in the regenerative livestock world who consider themselves grass farmers before anything else. Keep the grass growing and happy, and the rest will fall into place. I've been reading The Stockman Grass Farmer (a monthly magazine on the subject) for a couple years now, and there's a lot of good stuff there about pasture and animal management. They also have a free podcast, for those so inclined.

The grazing and rest periods are going to vary through the year, as weather, seasons, and animals change, so you have to develop an eye for when it's time to move, and when it's time to come back. It's both an art and a science. There's also an art form to multi-species grazing - working with cows and sheep and chickens and turkeys and pigs and ducks (or some permutation thereof), which can be beneficial, but you probably want to ease into that one at a time, so you make sure you're meeting the needs of each species as you go. I'm not sure that you could stack all that deeply on a small holding - it probably doesn't scale as if you're accounting for each animal individually, but you're still have to account some carrying capacity for each new animal, and if you overstock you'll end up wreaking ecological havoc and end up with a barren moonscape that will take a lot of time and rest to recover from.

As you practice and learn, you'll figure out just what your land is capable of, and with good management it will get better as the years go by.

We briefly considered a tankless water heater in our last house, but the installer (who did both) encouraged us to go with a tank. His argument was that the tankless ones need more (annual) maintenance, and missing it voids the warranty. You also need to make sure your water is soft, or a tankless heater will scale up and die much more quickly than a tank heater. I learned later that the water in that area was hard on heaters in general.

I've always had tank water heaters (both growing up and as an adult) and we've never had issues with bacteria; this is the first time I've ever heard that could be a concern. I don't know what they were set at, but they weren't super hot.

Looks like you've gotten some excellent feedback here, especially from r ranson.

Death is inevitable on the farm, most especially when you are keeping animals. There will be times when an animal has to be put down, even if you aren't planning on it, whether due to illness or injury or ill temper. We need to be able to identify those times, and either be ready to do the deed ourselves, or have someone who can do it for us. Keeping a suffering or dangerous animal alive simply because we don't have the heart to kill it is doing it no kindness.

It is harder for the small-scale shepherd to make culling decisions than it is for someone with a larger flock, because we get attached to individual animals, and because a "cull" decision on a particular animal might be 10 or 20 or even 50% of our flock - which is no small cost. Greg Judy (a regenerative rancher from Missouri) talks about his zero-tolerance policy for fence jumping - that's a one way ticket to the freezer (or the sale barn) on his farm. One bad sheep can teach that behavior to others, and pretty soon you end up with half the flock over the fence and down the road eating the neighbor's flower garden. The result of that policy, though, is that he very rarely has a sheep escape, even grazing a flock with a single hot wire fence. The same goes for parasites - cull the weak and breed the strong, eventually you will get a flock that is parasite-resistant without the need for pharmaceutical support.

So, all of that to say - do your best to correct your ram's behavior, but don't be afraid to get rid of him (one way or another) if you can't. Maybe someone else can improve his behavior, maybe someone will enjoy a nice roast, but you don't need yourself or your visitors getting hurt because the ram attacked them. If he _is_ aggressive, you don't really want his lambs, anyway, as there's a good possibility that will get passed down. Rams are generally pretty easy to come by (as a matter of supply and demand), so consider life too short to deal with aggressive rams and find one that's not.