Pasture Raised and Grass Fed on Stony Brook Farm

Like the 2009 task and events log, I pretty much blew off the 2009 welfare concerns log. I wish I could say that I didn’t add anything for so long because I didn’t think there were any concerns. The reality is that I just blew it off. As of January 1, 2010, there are no concerns to note.

Ongoing — Pig — Isolation. Earlier this summer a circovirus infection called Post-Weaning Multi-Systemic Wasting Syndrome killed three feeder pigs very soon after I got them on the farm. A fourth pig seemed sick, so I brought him in and put him in the sick pen with the last remaining sick pig. As it turned out, he was just wormy and a shot of ivermectin made him fit. Unfortunately, pigs can be circovirus carries without becoming ill, so since he spent a couple of weeks with the sick pig, I couldn’t risk putting him back out with the herd, so he has been raised in a box stall in the barn by himself. Such isolation is a serious welfare concern.

December 26 — Feeder Lambs — Equipment Injury. One of the sheep feeders fell over on a lamb. She was trapped beneath it for quite some time. I freed her and brought her inside to care for her. She had injured her leg, but it wasn’t broken.

January 5 — Feeder Lambs — Stress. My friend came over today and helped me weigh the feeder lambs. Because walk-in scales are so expensive, I have a hanging scale. To use a hanging scale, you catch the lamb, wrap a sling under its belly, lift the lamb up, and hang it on the scale. That part of it is stressful as it is. However, I really wanted to know where things stand with the feeder lambs, so I wanted to weigh them all. There are only fifteen in one group, so that wasn’t a big deal. There are forty-five in the other group. We got through twenty three of them before I decided to call it quits due to the stress I felt like it was causing the lambs. I don’t have a chute, so we just had the lambs locked in a pen in the barn. We would walk into the group and grab a lamb and drag it/walk it over to the scale. After about an hour of the stress of being approached and snatched up, I noticed a couple were cowering a bit, so that was that. We opened the barn door and out they went. We fed them a lot of hay, but kept the grain back just in case the stress had upset their digestive systems. Though important, getting all of those weights wasn’t worth stressing the lambs out like that. Besides, we got half of them done, so I have a pretty good sense of what everybody weighs now.

January 8, 2010 — Feeder Lambs — Handling Stress. I was not set up well to sort out a group for slaughter from the second batch of feeder lambs, and I overworked them.

January 20, 2010 — Lambs — Ethics and Stress. Out of the 140 feeder lambs that I have raised this year, four of them never thrived. One of them never fully recovered from a bout of meningeal worm, one of them had some sort of congenital issue having to do with his cud (he always had brown gunk on his lips), and two just unthrifty. So, after thinking about it for quite a while, I compromised my principles and dropped them off at the sale barn. Their fate, slaughter, is certain. What is not certain is how they would have been handled from the time I dropped them off to the time they are slaughtered, and that for me is a serious compromise of my principles. I need to find an acceptable alternative for the future. I think with a little work I could find some raw dog food people to sell them too cheaply. That way I could drop them off directly at the slaughterhouse.

May 2, 2010 — Sheep — Handling. Yesterday we weaned the lambs by removing the ewes from their paddock, and in order to do so we confined the lambs to their creep area, two “walls” of which are made up of cattle panels. I did not anticipate the degree to which the lambs would try to get to their ewes as they saw the ewes passing by them. Apparently, one of the horned lambs got one of his horns caught in a corner of the cattle panel and stripped off the hard cover, leaving a bloody painful mess. Peter and I separated him and cleaned the wound with water and diluted iodine and put him back in with the rest of the lambs.

May 2, 2o10 — Pigs — Heat. I was not prepared for the heat, so the pigs didn’t have adequate wallows. We quickly hand dug a couple of them, but they were too small and they didn’t hold enough water for the number of pigs we have in the paddocks. The pigs in the large group of small pigs were climbing all over each other trying to get to the water to stay cool.