Our blog is back!
December 9, 2007
One thousand apologies to everyone. Server problems combined with slack blogging on my part resulted in a long dry spell.
A dry summer (again!) was followed by the most glorious fall that we a have had in many years. The rains started at the very end of July and continued well into September. Our pastures were spectacular! And the cows responded!
We bit the bullet this year and installed a pod irrigation system. Believe me, we didn’t want to do it from several perspectives. Although grass irrigation is considered near zero loss from a ground water perspective (a small amount is lost to evaporation), the cost of digging a high capacity well and buying the pods, the time spent moving the pods (every 8 hours) and the monthly electric bill from running a motor 24 hours is not insignificant. That said, we believe the increased grass growth gained from our own highly mineralized soils will be worth the money and effort. It sure better be.
From the poultry side, we had serious problems with owls beheading our pastured meat birds. We probably lost 50 plus of the chickens and 15 turkeys. We know it was owl because they love the head and internal organs, and will leave the rest of the carcass. It is really discouranging to find a beheaded, gutted chicken almost every night. Soon after we moved the turkeys out to pasture, we found 10 (yes, 10!!!), beheaded turkeys. Wow. We tried several tactics, but the most effective was to simply go out every night at dusk and push the birds into their huts and wrap the huts in poultry netting. What a pain! Frankly, I’m not sure what we are going to do next year. We obviously have a healthy, well fed owl in the neighborhood now, so we have to assume he/she will be at it again next year. Oh well, we have 6 months to think about it.
Egg production is down, as usual for this time of year. I anticipate a nice increase in production as the days get longer in early January. Please keep in mind that we do NOT use articicial light to stimulate our chickens to continue to lay (thus the down time). We believe this rest period is essential for the health of the chicken, and will result in a better production period once they start up again.
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