Babies on the Homestead (Kune Kune Problems!)

We're actually in the middle of winter here at Riverbend in North Idaho. This is actually kind of a wet winter but nonetheless we're in the middle of winter and for us that means all the animals come in close together. They're out of the pasture, they're out of the woods, and they're all cloistered up here because we get about five to six months of snow where there's no grazing. That makes chores a bit easier because feeding everybody is real close but we also have a management issue right because we have a lot of accumulating manure and so our job this time of year is not just feeding the animals and observing them but it's managing the manure as well. So there's a system of feeding and adding carbon to the different areas in the barn that help create this deep bedding system that keeps it clean, keeps it not too wet, and also is building fertility because we'll take this out later and spread it out in the pasture or in the garden and makes a really nice system. This is also coming on spring and we usually start having some birds. February usually starts with the lambs. We've even had a few piglets this year and you can probably see somewhere out here we've got our first little calf and we'll have some calves coming in probably over the next six to eight weeks or so. It's an exciting time. Spring's not here yet but it's starting to feel like it's in the air because we've got little babies. We've been raising a lot of animals for a long time, breeding cows, breeding sheep, you know, raising chickens, doing meat chickens, and we've always raised pigs but we've always bought feeders in the spring, late winter, fattened them up, butchered them in the fall. Well a few years ago we decided we wanted to start breeding our own pigs, did a lot of research actually for quite a few years and settled on the Coonie Coonies because we wanted a non-rooting grazing pig that was very resilient, a good homestead pig that doesn't need a lot of inputs. And the Coonies have been great on that but learning to breed the pigs has been a real challenge. Coonies don't need much and so they get fat really easily which is great because that's why we wanted them. We wanted a lard pig, a fat pig that produces a lot of lard besides meat. Challenges is they get too fat and they don't breed. So it's been a struggle for us for the last 18 months to get a sow bred and some babies and we finally had our first babies with this unproven sow. It's been exciting but it's also been pretty tough as can be common with new animals sometimes and particularly pigs. Mamas take a little bit of time to learn. She had a small litter and lost a couple right off the bat and she's had to learn to be a mama and in fact we were down to two and we lost one this morning and so we're down to one. So it's been hard. It's been one of the harder struggles we've had as far as working with animals. We've always been very selective in the animals we buy. We're very careful about how we take care of them. We've had over the last you know nearly 20 years a real really good success rate with birds. Just with health issues in general in our management it's gone very well and this has been tough. This has been really hard to get into this cycle and now to where we finally you know get some baby piglets and we lose all of them but one. Snuggle them in. Oh I know it's terrible. It's just terrible. You gotta make it okay. You're our first riverbend piggy. It's hard but it's also life on the homestead. It's part of learning. It's part of the journey. We're not giving up. Hopefully we'll get this last one through so we have a little bit of fruit for our labors here and you know we'll keep on going and hopefully her second time around she will have learned a little bit and we'll be a little bit better mother. And with raising animals and with babies comes what are we going to do with these animals right? First and foremost we're looking for provision for ourselves but sometimes your flock or your herd grows and so right now we've got one calf on the ground. It's a little bull calf and I guarantee we'll be keeping him. We'll be castrating him and he will be beef in two to three years. We're just getting started with the cows though and we've got about four or five more calvings to come and that's pressing us for resources for land. That's more than we can handle on the land this year and if I can't find some grazing land some additional grazing land off the property then we're probably going to have to cull our I hesitate to call it a herd but our little herd here and reduce our numbers and that can be hard as well because a lot of we've been working hard to get just the animals we want but we may have to reduce them so that's a challenge doing that yet while thinking about obtaining beef for ourselves for the next few years because we need to keep you know animals lined up for the harvest and it's kind of the same with sheep. Sheep have been an interesting journey as well. We switched over breeds a couple years ago. They're doing pretty good. We've had three little lambs this year. Those are all feeder lambs for us so we've had two males. We'll castrate them and these three will be specifically for the table so we'll raise them up till the fall harvest them put them into the freezer and they'll be part of our sustenance for the next year. That won't grow our lamb flock at all. It's kind of good right where it is. We used to have Gotland ewes and Icelandic rams and they were great low maintenance and it gave us lamb meat and it gave us a really good wool that Carolyn liked however they were very slow growing and the yield was very low for the amount of feed that we were giving them and so I wanted to switch over. We did some research and we went with these Cotswolds which are from England over near Wales. They've got a good wool similar to what we were looking for. We bought a small little flock. They've been great. They're growing out larger and they're giving us better sized lambs in the fall for butcher and the wool is pretty good. Definitely have had some challenges a little bit with breeding success and hardiness. They're just not as hardy. They get wound up in our fences more so we're still deciding what to do with that. They're serving their purpose as a meat breed. You know again you try things you want to find what fits your location your specific needs. For us we're trying to do a little dual purpose and sometimes that's a journey to find you know the right animals. With winter comes a lot of thought and a lot of daydreaming about spring and what's to come and I always enjoy getting out to pasture and we're slowly refining our rotation and our pasturing methods for our property. I've been enjoying working with my son Connor who's really involved in that. He's really enjoying it. He thinks he wants to do it long term and it's just going to be a really really neat year to get he and I working together more and just deepening our systems. I like to tweak things. I'm always looking to refine to make it better and it's fun to get to work with him to do that so I'm really just looking forward to new iteration of pasture. We've got some new systems in the barn where we're generating more fertility in here and we've now got some equipment that we can better spread that fertility out in the pasture which is going to help it grow and we're working on clearing some other areas on our land to extend our capacity our grazing capacity and that's a multi-year project but I'm really looking forward to doing that but getting to do it with my son. It's really really cool having the next generation really excited about what we're doing.