09 Apr 2003
Going Operational

Well, an interesting day, to say the least. I'm finally back into it: we have 10 cows, four calves, two bulls, a goat, a llama (Dalai - no kidding!) a miniture donkey and 20 sheep roaming our pastures. Quite a zoo ... farming again!

They're not ours - a neighbor, Kevin, approached us with an offer to rent the pastures for his herds. As our viewpoints are quite similar (MIG - Managed Intensive Grazing for livestock, minimal use of herbicides/pesticides, as close to the way Nature intended us to farm as we can get) this partnership in grazing lands may blossom into something more. But even if it doesn't, I'll bill more than $1000 as farm income this year, which makes us a "real" farm according to the USDA. Who said the family farm is dying? We're coming back!

We're already talking about coop marketing meat, wool and other products. We're looking into buying for ourselves a few head (<10) of Scottish Highland Cattle and Icelandic Sheep - the latter probably unregistered for the time being, as we'll be selling for meat and fiber and not breeding stock.

I'm sure that Kris will get some good pictures - we set electric fence all day around the permimeter of our property and didn't have much of a chance to do anything else. We've got some serious fence work on the east side of our pasture, but everything else is in pretty fair shape, actually.

The cattle, even the bulls, are pretty docile, and that's a good thing. Hammer (our horse) was sure skittish when we were setting up, but once he was introduced to Mouse, the mini donkey, he was OK. In fact he was enarmored of Mouse, but the donkey wanted as little as possible to do with Hammer! Poor guy - just we he figured we finally got him a buddy he faced rejection.

But now, having traisped around the fields all day, I'm heading to bed. Setting fence is a lot more strenous than coding, that's for sure.

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