Winter Is Here

So, just like that, winter is here, and, surprise, surpise, I was more or less prepared. All of the animals but one of the breeding flocks of sheep are super well protected from the wind and snow. That one breeding group could use another shelter, which I plan to drag into their paddock today. Everyone has one more cycle to get bred, and then the rams go into a nice big stall in the barn for the winter and the ewes, including the ewe lambs not being bred will be reunited in their one acre winter pasture/feedlot (depending on how much snow there is and for whole long [the pasture is stockpiled]) with enough run in space for all of them. Anyone not bred in two cycles will be slaughtered for mutton in the spring. I have a marginally profitable market for mutton, and I don’t want to have a three month long lambing season, so I will be selecting (and managing) for a flock that, ideally, all lambs within a month to six weeks (I know of farms that lamb out completely in twenty days, but they really know what they are doing).

I feel better about this last group of pigs than I have in three winters of raising pigs. There are twenty of them and they have a draft-free, deep bedded, 1,000 square foot barn to hang out in and a similarly sized barnyard to eat and mill about it in. If it gets super cold, because of the low stocking density in the barn, I can move their feeder and waterer inside, and the pigs will only need to go outside if they want the exercise.

Little by little I am doing it better. Hopefully one year soon I will be doing it right.

 

Composting “Mortalities”

“Mortalities” are the “industry” euphemism for dead animals. To compost “mortalities” is to compost animals that have died on the farm. So far, 2009 has been a big year for dead animals on this farm and I hope I don’t have another year like it for a long time. In late winter, my favorite goat Izzy died due to a management mistake, then the ewe The Old Girl died of OPP (I think), then two feeder pigs died from a vicious bacterial infection. All four animals went into a compost windrow, although, in retrospect, I probably should have burned the pigs to ensure that I killed the bacteria.

For the past couple of months I have been putting off turning the compost windrows because I was worried about what I would find. I finally did it yesterday. As I came down the windrow, the first animal I encountered was Izzy, who has been in the windrow the longest. When I put her in, however, it was cold and the windrow was not cooking well. Left of Izzy were bits of bone and fur and a strong unpleasant odor that unfortunately continuously blew into my face because I was facing into the breeze. To increase the rate of composting, I mixed a couple bucket fulls of nearly finished compost in with what remained of Izzy’s body and then covered it back up.

About twenty feet further down the line I found The Old Girl. Her body has been in the pile since May 17. There was nothing left of her but a mat of wool and a hunk of malodorous pink slime. When I had originally placed The Old Girl’s body in the windrow, I had surrounded her with a couple buckets full of nearly finished compost, which I believe explains the difference in the rate of composting between her body and that of Izzy. I mixed in some more nearly finished compost.

A bit further down the line I came across the first feeder pig, which has been in the windrow since about the first of June. Bits of bone and that malodorous pink slime. The next feeder pig was in about the same condition.

I didn’t have my compost thermometer with me, but the compost in the area around the pigs was really cooking. When I opened the windrow up quite a bit of steam billowed out.

Basically what I discovered yesterday is that in two to three months — in a static pile — a 150 pound animal will be nearly completely composted. What I have read about composting larger animals like cows and horses is that it takes three to four months is a windrow that is cooking well.

Composting is by far the best option for getting rid of animal carcasses, as long as it is done correctly. If it is not done correctly, it is a foul putrid mess. More and more agricultural experts are counseling large animal farmers to compost bodies rather than bury them, burn them, or drop them out on the back forty for the buzzards. Composting binds up and then makes available the nutrients contained in the animal tissues, and a pile that is cooking well enough will kill off most pathogens. Basically you end up with a more or less inert soil amendment.

 

Walk-In Freezer

Last year my friends down at the vegetable farm got a bigger walk-in freezer and I agreed to buy the old one. I was supposed to take it last fall, which turned into last winter, which turned into this spring, which turned into…well, I haven’t taken it yet, but, finally, the site is ready, and before my friend’s patience was entirely exhausted.

The previous owners of the property torn out a section of the back wall of the barn and put in a dog kennel with runs that extend beyond the barn. They poured concrete to serve as the floor of the runs, and the concrete pad is perfect for the freezer (and for the grain bin). A friend of mine who is an equipment operator is going to move the freezer from the vegetable farm up the hill to my place. Once he gets it here, he’ll have to hold the freezer just above the ground and ease it slowly under the overhang in the barn that was created when the back wall was torn out.

On Sunday, my brother Peter and I started working on tearing down a section of the kennel to open it up enough to get the freezer in. As I expected, it actually didn’t take all that long. Altogether, it probably only took five or six hours, and since we were demolishing something, it was fun. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my boyish enjoyment of smashing things with a sledgehammer or cutting them into pieces with a sawz-all.

For the past few years, I have been using two freezers that I keep down in the basement. One is a new chest freezer that I bought and the other is an old upright that I got for free from my neighbors. Between the two freezers, I currently have just under forty square feet of freezer space. The walk-in freezer is roughly 350 square feet, or nearly ten times what I currently have. I could probably get by with another forty square feet of space, but adding forty square feet — assuming new freezers — would cost the same as purchasing the walk-in. Of course, the walk-in will cost substantially more to run each month than would the chest freezers. However, when I agreed to purchase the walk-in my hope was that I would grow out of even two additional chest freezers, and even faster than I expected, I have. I will still only need about half of the space, so what I plan to do to keep the operating cost of the freezer down is to run up to the cheese factory and get a tankful of whey and get a whole bunch of five gallon buckets and freeze the whey in the five gallon buckets. The thermal mass of 250 gallons of frozen whey will help keep the freezer cold. I will pull a bucket or two out each day to defrost and feed to the pigs.

One other thing I am looking forward to about the walk-in freezer is that it isn’t in the basement! Right now I have to lug coolers packed with 100 pounds of meat up and down those stairs every Saturday when I go to the farmers market. I also need to carry all of the full meat boxes down there whenever I pick up at the slaughterhouse. I haven’t wrecked my back doing any of that yet, but I have come close. I will be able to back the truck up to within about ten feet of the walk-in.