Good morning guys!
It’s been almost a year since my last farm journal and I apologize. This last year has been both the hardest and most rewarding. We moved into the garage, started living off water collection, finished the house and moved into it, bought sheep, halter trained a wild horse, bough pigs, created hay fields out of locust fields, wrote a book, built a pond… and found out that we were pregnant!
But now that things have calmed down a bit (ha!), I’m going to try and do better about giving you weekly updates about how things are going and what we’re up to on the farm.
Last week it rained… all. week. long. Which meant that I felt more like we were farming mud than anything else! It also meant that we couldn’t get a lot accomplished on the farm other than the normal morning chores. Benjamin is up to his neck in a remodel house, so the farm chores have fallen to me. Which I’m totally down with! I just wish I wasn’t 8 months pregnant. Haha.
Our Morning Farm Routine
Now that I’m so far along in the pregnancy, sleep is a difficult thing to come by sometimes. I’m always so sore from the day’s work that I can never seem to find a comfortable position. Add to that the 2-3 bathroom breaks throughout the night and my normal 5am wake-up time is just too early for me these days.
6am – I’ll get up and head to the guest room/office to work. This time usually involves my scripture studies, journaling, editing my new book, researching farm questions, etc. Anything that requires quiet I try to get done during this time.
8am – Lydia and Lillian will get up and Benjamin will head to work. If they wake up before 8am, he’s a sweetheart and handles them till 8am so I can finish up whatever I’m doing. Love that guy!
8:30am – Breakfast! Now that our chickens are laying like nobody’s business, this usually includes eggs. Egg burritos, eggs and biscuits, deviled eggs, fried eggs, boiled eggs. You get the idea. This still leaves us with over ten dozen eggs in the extra fridge that we’re rotating through. So any extras that we get each day will go to the pigs to help them get their protein needs.
9am – Clean-up time! I love the concept of waking up to a clean house. And for many years I worked so hard to make that happen. But I was fighting against nature and always lost. We’re tired in the evenings. The last thing we want to do is pick up. So now, Lydia is in charge of picking up the living room after breakfast while I clean up the kitchen/my room. Then we’ll work together to get the girl’s bedroom picked up. This isn’t vacuuming or anything, it’s just picking up everything that’s out of place.
10am – Lydia and Lillian play outside on the front porch while I bottle feed the week-old Jersey calf. Then I’ll take food and water to the pigs that are tilling up my blackberry rows for me. Then hike back to the chickens and let them out for the day while collecting eggs and giving them some corn. I’ll top of the chick’s food and water in the brooder while I’m there (soon they’ll be joining the large chickens in the coop. Yay!). Next, it’s into the sheep pasture to check on them and water the guardian dogs in training. Last but not least I’ll take some oats mixed with sunflower seeds out to the goats/horse. One of our goats was losing some hair this spring, so we started this mixture up to help her zinc levels. Her hair is growing back beautifully and everyone else is really looking sleek and healthy!
And there you have it! Sometimes I feel bad that our “morning” routine stretches to almost 11am. After all, we live on a farm. We’re supposed to be rising with the sun and getting farm chores done before 8am, right? Well, not on this farm. Not this year anyway. If there’s one thing Waltz Ave is teaching me, it’s that my expectations are usually waaaaaay off course from reality. And that’s okay.
Current Farm Projects
I’ve got to be honest, I was so excited for this weekend that I couldn’t sleep and ended up getting out of bed around 5am this morning. What, you ask, can tempt a pregnant women out of bed with the sun? Pigs! We’re driving an hour and a half to pick up a starter herd of Idaho Pasture Pigs this afternoon.
Yesterday we drove an hour to Tractor Supply and purchased an ungodly amount of cattle panel and T-posts (trust me, you don’t want to know how much it costs to fence in an acre now vs 30 days ago. It’s depressing). We got about half the acre fenced once we arrived back at the farm and took a break till this morning. We’ve got a bunch of guys from church coming to help us Saturday morning, so today we’re just going to fence off a corner of the future 1 acre pasture so we can house the new pigs there for the night.
Saturday we will finish out their new pasture with cattle panel and two hot lines running along the base to keep them from pushing the panels out and messing up Benjamin’s perfectly straight fence line. 😂 We’ll then put pig nipples on an IBC tote with one nipple going into the boar’s pen and the rest available to the sows. Don’t worry, I’ll do a blog post with pictures of the pasture set up once we’re done!
We will also be moving our barn (AKA converted carport) to a new pasture so we can move the sheep over to the 10acre pasture. They need more space, and we need to pick up our pregnant cow from the farm she’s been staying at. The sheep need the barn more than the cow, hence the need to move the barn. And since we only have two pastures right now, the ram and ram lambs will be living with the cow in the 4acre pasture, while the horse and goats will be living with the ewes in the 10acre pasture.
Needless to say, Saturday will be very busy!
Pig Math
Like I said, we’re getting a herd (is that the right word?) of pigs today. So what’s the math behind it? Why am I so excited?
Purchase Price: $2,500
This includes 1 registered boar, 1 registered pregnant sow due by June 13th, 1 unbred registerable sow, 1 lactating registerable sow with four piglets, two pig huts, 30 cattle panel, 60 T-Posts.
Immediate Income:
The four unregistered piglets will sell for $75/ea = $300
The registered sow will have 8-12 piglets. So let’s say 10 that we’ll sell for an average of $200/ea = $2,000
Total income over the next three months = $2,300
Long Term Annual Income:
We already have 2 registered sows and will register the two that we’re purchasing which aren’t registered yet. So that’s five registered sows.
Let’s say each sow has on average 10 piglets. 5 sows x 10 piglets x 2 times a year = 100 piglets
Now let’s say only 60% of those are breed worthy and we sell them for $300/ea. That’s 100 x 60% x $300 = $18,000
Then let’s say the other 40% we sell as feeder pigs at $100/ea. That’s 100 x 40% x $100 = $4,000
Total Annual Pig Income = $22,000
That does not calculate for feed costs, which we’re hoping to get down to a very small amount by rotational grazing and feeding from the farm (milk, eggs, fallen fruit, kitchen scraps, etc).
So even if we cut that annual income in half to account for food, vet costs, etc. that still leaves us with $11,000 profit each year. Which will cover our mortgage on the farm and our property taxes. One step closer to a financially sustainable farm! You see why I couldn’t sleep this morning? This pig stuff is exciting!