Morning Chores FARM TOUR! | Meet All My Animals!

I have 800,101 animals on the farm and I've got to take care of them before I go to work. But 800,000 of them are bees, and we're going to focus on the 101 right now. Let's go. Good morning, little chickies. You don't belong out here. Let's get you back in. Okay, here we go, here we go. How do you pick up a chicken? You put your hands around its wings like this, and then you gently toss it back. Okey dokey, artichokies, let's do this. Ma'am, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. We are in the process of trying a new little thing here with rotational grazing and a mobile coop. But as it turns out, the coop that I built is a pad heavy to move the way that I needed it to on our very hilly pasture. So right now we're making do with what we've got to get where we need to go, which is keeping these chickens alive. These expandable hoses are an absolute life changer. They're super light, and also you can get them really big and carry them all over the place. But you have to have enough water pressure to make them work. So certain areas of the farm we have to use regular hoses like peasants. But because these chickens have food that's a little powdery, we want to get it kind of wet. Then we also want to fill up their automatic feeder, which is a little counterintuitive. It's just that I haven't hooked up the automatic part of the automatic waterer here. Excuse me, ma'ams. If you have any kind of birds, get yourself a chicken fountain. These things are the absolute best. They keep down on flies and make it so that your chickens always have clean water instead of, you know, pond scum out of a little dish that has feces and whatnot in it. This is what happens when you have a furniture builder who tries to build a cheap, easy-to-build, lightweight chicken coop. The projects always become bigger than they're supposed to. This electric netting from Premier One is electrified. It keeps, for the most part, keeps the chickens in, but far more importantly keeps predators out, which is also why we have livestock guardian dogs. But, you know, there's a lot of things that could happen on a farm. We need... Oh, good morning to you, Bella. Good morning, ladies. These are our ducks and geese. They're also supposed to be mobile and automated, but they aren't quite yet. So, again, making do. Ducks and geese are notoriously smelly and tend to attract a lot of flies and things. So we have flypaper up. Every time they put their little heads down, it'll disturb the flies, and they'll fly up. So that's why we have one right above the water, and then we have one right above the feeder as well. But flies congregate on poop and decaying organic matter, and our best way to combat that is to keep it buried in something that's going to absorb that. So from the same concept as our composting, we use carbon or wood chips to mitigate smells. So I have these piles of wood chips ready to just add to the poop layers every day as I'm doing my chores to keep the smells down and keep the flies down. Also, please note that we're using a trash can lid as a duck feeder at the moment. Have you noticed how expensive things have gotten? The troughs that I usually use to make their automatic feeders are, like, $25. They used to be $4. So until then, we make do with what we've got until we get where we need to go. Morning, ladies. Making lots of honey, I hope. Hi, piggies. Hello. I'll be right back. Don't you worry. Oh, the chicken fence fell over. So this is our egg-laying flock. They are in my no-chicken chores, completely automated chicken coop that is a one-quarter scale replica of that barn over there and is at this exact moment We're desperately in need of a paint job, but we're not going to look too closely. We'll hop in here, feed the chickens. Hey, ladies. This is a big thing that's important for this coop because it's usually a lot further away from the hoses, etc. But because we're having a huge problem with hawks and stuff taking our chickens, we brought them in closer to the bigger animals for a little while to help them just, well, help me stop losing chickens for a hot second. Again, because the feed that we feed these guys is powdered, we want it to get a little bit wet, and then there's an automatic waterer inside the coop that gives them plenty to drink. Chickens lay the majority of their eggs during the first 2 1⁄2 to 3 years of their life, so you'll see some teenager chickens along with the older birds, too. That's because we want to be constantly proliferating the efficiency of our egg layers. All right, girls. Have a great day. Notice my little 55-gallon drums standing on toothpicks are never far away from the food. This little pipe is a pretty cool thing. This is the epitome of making use of what you got to get where you need to go, because we just dug a well that turned out to be an artesian well, and I was going to have to pay $40,000 to create this special pump. We didn't have it, so I was like, what if we routed it to some automatic waterers for the cows that just basically gravity feed, and then we route the rest of it back over here to the pond, and so that's what's going on right now. And please enjoy my very luscious pond. Isn't it glorious? I have my weed whacker here right along the way and in the way because I had to clear all the grass along the electrical line. A cool hack I learned from my friend Billy at Permapastures Farms was basically daisy-chaining my fences with clips, and so this line runs around the whole perimeter of this fence, and then if I need to attach a new electric line, I literally just can put a clip and attach to this line here, which is really cool, I think. All right. Here we have our very sweet new dairy cow, Butter, but I am accepting Better Name suggestions in the comments section below. She's down here right now because she needs to stay in quarantine while we wait for test results just to make sure that she's healthy and ready to be with the rest of the cow herd. Lucy, stop yelling. We will bring you your breakfast post-haste. All right. This little clip is here actually because Lucy, that fat little lard over there, she kept pushing the door open with her little snap to break in. Then I also had to add that thing because Jeffrey, our male goat, kept pushing the door open from this side to help himself to some little afternoon delight with his lady. So this stops that, and this stops Lucy. We'll go in here and get some pig food. So again, the feed is powdery, so we have a little water in here. Also, my bananas got a little bit riper than desirable. One scoop of food per piggy. Check out my sweet knife, custom-made for me by Alabama Blade Company. I love this thing. We're disrespecting it a little bit right now. I'm using it to open feed sacks, but again, using what we've got. So the pigs will also be out on pasture more of the time than not, but because I'm currently training them to electric fencing, I'm also giving them chaff hay in with their feed so that they're getting some green forage fermented feed. It's good for their gut. While we're here, we'll just toss some in for the goats as well. All right. Goaties. This is Aretha Franklin, Brenda Lee, Jolene, Baby, and this stinky little stinkpot is Jeffrey, who has this beautiful beard to collect his hormone-rich pee-pee, which then putrefies in the sun and becomes an absolutely awful musk to attract the ladies. It's breeding season. These are Nigerian dwarf goats, and they are specifically for milking, dairy production, and Brenda is the only one we're milking right now. This is Johnny, love of my life, and this is June, who is also here. Johnny doesn't like most people, but he's my very best boy. These are Colorado mountain dogs. They are livestock guardians, and right now you can see they're blowing their coat, so they're losing like three dogs' worth of fur per day. So we have to brush them like twice a day right now while they're losing their winter coat. We definitely don't want to shave them because their coat is actually what keeps them cool in the summertime, and they can't regulate their body temperature without it. All right, Lucy, we hear you, girl. We hear you. So goats are escape artists, and this gate right here is the only goat-proof slash convenient gate I can open with one hand that I've ever seen, and it's important that it goes both ways because depending on whether you're coming in or out of the gate with the goats, you want to be able to also karate kick as you enter to make sure that no one escapes. Are you kidding me right now? Oh, it's just a kitty, okay. Everyone knows the feed is kept in here. So I was trying to stagger my breeding this year, but Jeffrey, that little stink pot in there, broke into the barn and bred everyone all at once, and at first I couldn't figure out how he was getting in, but then I realized he was pushing on this back part of the door here, coming back through in here. Then he jumped up on this sawdust, hopped onto the jointer, jumped over to the table saw, jumped onto that fence, and then jumped in and had himself a grand old time. So that is why we'll be having 16 babies at once instead of my preference of three babies at once because last year we learned our lesson that 16 babies at once is not actually 16 times better than one baby, but here we are. Lucy gets special diet food because she's on a diet, and the other piggies get growth food because they're trying to grow. All right, Lucy. Hello, howdy, we see you, buddy. We see you. All right, you may have a few bites of that while I do this. As you can see, Lucy's been having some semi-persistent skin issues, but her afternoon food gets oil in it to help with her skin, and, you know, she's just a treater, this pig. Little jerk spilled the food. I said you could have a few bites of chapé off the top. All right, piggies, here we come. So we got the pigs, obviously because the hope of bacon is delicious, but more importantly, this pond desperately needs to get fixed, and I have a good buddy who does permaculture design and uses pigs to repair leaky ponds with bentonite clay, and basically all their little rooting around causes the bottom of the pond to reseal. So my dream is someday to be able to stock that thing with fish and other cool stuff. Okay, little buddies. Right here we've got a perfect example of the daisy chaining to the electric fence that I was telling you about, where basically this little clip attaches this whole line of electric fence to that bottom line. All right, we hear you. And so when I unclip it, now this is not hot anymore, and I can come in and out of the pig pen, and we're working on our manners right now because, well, here we are playing kinky-toe roulette, which will be a lot more dangerous when these things weigh 300, 400 pounds. But basically, hey, buddies, here we go. Back up. Ah, ah, ah. We're not going to be doing that. Ah! Okay, here we go, buddies. Here we go. Okay. All right, well, that's not great. Come on, dummies. All right, you enjoy that banana, you little turd. Excuse you. Excuse you. Ma'am, sir, do you mind? Here we've got Kevin Bacon, Patsy Swine, and Piggy Lee. That's my toe, sir. And we bring our sweet expanding hose over to add some moisture to their slop. All right, that's very rude. This is the $9.99 in 2020 that has kept on giving. This little pond has been sat in many a time by Lucy, the alpacas, and now is enjoyed by these little mud muffins. Still somehow holds water, unlike the $25 feed dishes that have inflated inexplicably over the last several years. All right, Paul, Ringo, are you ready for your breakfast? These little llama pups just got their annual summer haircut. And this is Ringo, our resident aggressor on the farm. He has an extreme case of little man syndrome, and he thinks that everyone is out to get him all the time, so he's constantly being a real jerk. Then, of course, we have sweet Paul behind him. George is somewhere over there, and I think they're ready for their breakfast. Paul, come on, guys. Come on, come on, come on. Ringo, Paul, Georgie, come on. This is Briggs, the bunny. And we need to just check to make sure he has food. He's very cute, but a little camera shy. And then we check his water. And later this afternoon, because it's going to be really hot, we're going to put out an ice pack for him to lay on because just living in the devil's armpit in the middle of summer is a little challenging when it comes to livestock. Here we have three bowls in each, a little scoop of fortified pellets. They also have a special vitamin-rich pre-choice mineral they can lick on anytime. And I mix up their pellets with chaff hay for their gut health, extra calories, et cetera, but also so that they don't choke on the pellets because they're idiots, for lack of a better explanation. And Adam has just broken the cardinal rule. If you open a gate, you shut it, because otherwise these little jerks come in and help themselves. All right, young man, let's go. Back up. Back up. Good boy. Absolutely no detours to the pig food, you little jerk. Come on, let's go. Here you are, young man. You may have that, okay? There you go. Come on, buddies. Ringo, Paul, Georgie, come on. Take your time. Hey, buddies, come on. Come on. Tina, eat your food. The most fun part about this is I get to stand here and wait for everyone to eat their breakfast because pretty soon the donkeys are going to finish their breakfast, and then they're going to steal the alpaca's breakfast. And this is not a chore that I have to do every day all the time because usually the donkeys get locked in the pen with Lucy while she's having her breakfast, and then the alpacas can take their time having their breakfast. But because we have Butter quarantined in Howdy and Bella and Lucy's pen, this is what our life is like. Standing guard. Where are you, little muffin? Georgie! Oh, there he is. Georgie, what are you doing, titty goose? Come here. Come on, buddy. Let's go get your breakfast. There he goes. Look at that. What a ridiculous creature. What is most interesting to me about those little creatures is that they made it through evolution somehow because they are constantly trying to invent new ways to die. They have just had their summer haircuts, which, by the way, serve no functional purpose. Well, they have to get their fiber sheared every year, but I make them look like llama pops because I think it's funny, and that's the only reason. But here they are. Each of them has their own bowl, and yet somehow they still insist on fighting over eating out of the same bowl. Which is also why we're standing over here because while alpacas generally don't spit at humans, they do often spit at each other, and if you're in the crossfire, you're going to smell like the most vile fluid that has ever been known to man for weeks to come. Actually, I would almost say that the alpaca bile or spit is almost as bad as if young Jeffrey touches your pant leg while he's walking past. Our last two items of business down here are giving Butter her morning ration of chaff hay, filling up her water, etc. Then we need to milk Brenda the goat, and then we'll head up to the cow pasture and check on the rest of the cow herd. You're fine, buddy. Here. Here's a tad more for you. What are you doing, Butter, you silly little goober? Let's just not with that, ma'am. Savvy, here. Are you thirsty? Here, we'll get you some water, buddy. Let's fix your little water situation that you just so kindly decimated. Lucy, this is 1,000% off limits for you, girl. You and your dumb little mud puddling. Lucy, don't be a jerk. I always say that I have three pigs and also a Lucy because Lucy is nothing like my very sweet, wonderful little piggies. She's a total jerk. She's like such a boss. She's always trying to be a little part. So all these chores right now are extremely exaggerated because we have so many extra things that we're doing right now when, in reality, my daily chores, while not filming, take about 20 to 30 minutes. And for anything that I have to do multiple days in a row, I try to create a system to do it as efficiently as possible. But because we're kind of making do with so many different animals right now, we don't have the best systems, which makes everything take longer, which compounds over time, which is definitely the argument for building better systems. Anytime you have to fill and carry a bucket, that's 15 minutes that then compounded over a year's worth of time is 36 hours. And it may seem like a really inconvenient thing at the moment to put in a new hose pipe or reorganize the way that you're storing your feed or whatever else, but when you think about the fact that all of these things compound over time with every day that you have to repeat and do them over again, it makes a whole lot more sense then to spend at least one day a week trying to mitigate some farm problem that is constantly repeating. So this actually right now is a bit of a twofer because not only are we feeding her her daily ration, we're also training her to a stanchion. This is my alpaca palace normally. Again, this is where we usually feed the alpacas. But I tossed this together really quick so we could train little Miss Butter while she's down here to using a stanchion so that later on when we're ready to milk her every day, she'll already be used to it. Lucy, you are such a jerk. She has plenty to say about it too. One other thing, because it is fly season, I've been trying to keep the cow patties as cleaned up as possible because then there's just that many fewer flies hanging around. Okay, to milk our Brenda. All right, Miss Brenda. Are you ready, girl? Brenda! All right. All right, one thing too, during fly season, flies really like light, and so we try to keep all the lights off all day unless we're absolutely using them. So I'm going to sneak by you here and get some goat food. So this little bin system is really handy, and usually when I haven't just gone to the feed place and have feed strewn about literally everywhere in the barn, this thing works really great to keep mice out of the food and also to keep things well labeled so if anyone else ever has to take care of any of the animals, they know which food is for which animal. There's also a 45-page instruction sheet that they can refer to for further instructions. But yeah, this is just we keep all of our feed in these bins. Medical supplies are up here, and I wish in retrospect that I would have put this on wheels of some sort so I could have moved it around, but the thing is I'm small and I can fit into concealed spaces, so this is a fine pathway, is it not? All right, while she gets started eating, I'm going to wash my hands and get the milking stuff. Welcome to my office slash workshop slash egg collection situation slash fly mitigation slash mouse mitigation slash music studio. Oh yes, and this is my bathroom slash kitchen where we'll just quickly pop in to wash our little handsies. With raw milk, cleanliness is next to godliness. It starts with a clean barn and then clean everything else as you're going along. Excuse me, ma'am, you do not need to be eating pig food. Look at her, so naughty. She knows just what to do, though. She is pretty well behaved, so she doesn't actually need to have her head closed in the little head gate here, but it's there just in case we need it. And also, I built this very fancy pallet milking stanchion. There's a video on my channel you can check out, but then I realized that it would be easier for me if they were standing a little taller, so I just added this piece of wood to the stool to bring them to the proper height because shock of all shocks, miniature goats are short, but I can 10 out of 10 relate. So this is the last thing that we have to do down here. We'll head up and check on the rest of the cows in the upper pasture in just a couple minutes. So I got my first dairy goat eight years ago, and I've been milking some sort of animal pretty much every single day since then. It's been a very slippery slope, and I've learned so much. If you're interested in learning anything dairy, how to make cheese, how to take care of your dairy goats, what it's like having a milk cow, making your own yogurt, butter, etc., etc., you can find blog posts and all kinds of other homesteading resources at annofalltrades.com. Squarespace has been a fantastic resource for someone who is not super tech-savvy like me to be able to chronicle my entire journey from total city slicker to living full-time on a farm over the last 12 years. Squarespace allows me to easily drag and drop anything that I want to share with the world into a beautiful artist-designed template that then lets me share it with the world. I'm also able to host an online store where people can buy merchandise, the online classes and courses that I teach, and all kinds of other things, too. If you are interested in starting a website of your own, head on over to squarespace.com, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash annofalltrades for a 10% discount. All right, our last step here. We need to put the milk through a filter. Production's a little low right now because we are in the middle of an insane heat wave, and I feel so bad for the animals, but we're doing everything that we can to keep them cool. Normally, the goats and the dogs would go up to the top pasture to graze for the day, but because it's so hot, we want to make sure that they've got shade, so we've got fans on in the barn for them, and they're basically just going to hang out and hopefully try to stay cool through this heat wave for the next couple days. Put a date on this, put it in the fridge, and then head up and check on the big cows up in the top pasture. The cows. All right. We need to just get eyes on the cows really quick because it's so hot. I just don't like not seeing them, so while we wait for the troughs to fill, we'll go over. Hi, buddies. Hi, sweet Ella. Okay, so this is Ella, and she has this really cool sticker on her back. This is what I like to call a breed right strip. I have her in with our steer, Duke, right now to let us know when she is in heat. This is basically a scratch-and-stiff sticker that turns pink when it's been rubbed on, and we have been waiting for her to go into heat so that she can be bred for the first time, which should be today, so we're going to, right after we're done here, call the AI tech to have him come over and do a little turkey baster action. It's not really a turkey baster, but, you know, this is a family channel. So this is little Duke. He's our steer that basically has been raised as Ella's brother because her mom, Reba Milkentire, adopted him as a little baby calf, which saved me the trouble of having to bottle feed him, which was delightful. Back behind us is Reba Milkentire, the cow that started it all, the absolute love of my life. Reba is pregnant with her fourth calf right now, which I'm so excited about. She was my very first cow and has taught me so much about consistency and patience and showing up even when it's hard, haven't you, because she's waiting for me at the gate every single morning, waiting to get milked all through the pandemic when I was so lonely and couldn't be around the people that I loved. You know? She filled a pretty big gap in my life. Then over here we have Maybe and Maybelline. They are our Dexter cows, so all the dairy cows are Jersey cows. And then our Beef Mamas are a Dexter-Jersey cross, which is what we like out of these, is the best beef that exists in my personal, professional opinion. Okay, everybody, stay nice and cool today. Stay in the shade. Alright, so you may notice that there's this fence right here. We are not doing our rotational grazing like we normally do. All the cow chores are doubled and all of my automated systems for the cows are currently not in use because I've had to separate our herd. We've put Duke and Ella and then these other three cows and Butter all separate while we are waiting for disease testing results. This is potentially a very devastating situation for our farm, and to that end I think it's so important to learn about disease testing if you're going to have livestock. We've made an entire video about that. You can check it out. It is linked right here. I really hope you'll take the time to watch that video. I'll see you there. Cheers!