The thining of the herd....Part 1

Back around the holidays between money being tight and the weather being so cold I was stuck inside...I found myself researching different ways to lower our feed bill.  With 2 horses and at that time 15 goats and 4 pigs and a half a dozen older chickens and another dozen meat rabbits of varying ages we had a pretty hefty feed bill.  Not to mention the fact that I had brought home some chicken starter crumbles a few months before as I HAD (had being the key word) some replacement laying hens which were about a month old still in the brooder....after serving them that bag of feed they literally half dropped dead in an hour and the other half wilted and wasted away over the course of a week...the dealer claimed up and down it wasn't them...I doubt it though...

I made a resolution well before the New Year arrived that I would do 2 things.  One - I would find a better way of feeding my animals, something healthier and sustainable for us.  Two - I needed to thin things out a bit.  It was just too time consuming to be caring for a yard full of critters AND try to make this place better than it already was...feeding and watering and such sucks up a LOT of time! That was time I could be spending improving things around here...so I began to thin the herd...
 
First I went through the easy stuff - small animals.  The rabbits were either getting up there in age or young fryer sized and to be honest we already had (and still have) quite a bit of rabbit meat in the freezer.  I sold some of the younger ones, stock that would be suitable for breeding as just that, and then I culled the rest for freezer camp.  I knew I had several does due to kid, projects a plenty to tackle, and I wouldn't have the time for rabbits for a while.  It was tough to do, as I enjoyed them and all of the fresh meat they brought to our table raised in a healthy fashion...but with the rabbits out the feed bill dropped a bit...

Then  came the pigs...we had a freezer full of pork products, and these were just pot belly pigs....not like I was loosing whole hams here.  So I sold all except one.  He was retained to do my garden tilling in the spring.  The others got the boot.  That wasn't so hard to do, except by the time the family that bought them found the house is was well after dark and took a little creativity in parking to shine headlight just so as to be able to find them...but that was another way to massively lower the bills...

Next came the chickens...and that was much harder than either the rabbits or the pigs!  Some of these birds were my original chickens and some were not.  I had a strange emotional attachment to poultry that I didn't have with the pigs or rabbits...but still, the job had to be done.  The younger group was sold to a friend and the older birds were quietly culled.  In all seriousness now, the older birds weren't hardly laying any longer and had not been for some time - the egg factory had dried up so to speak.  The younger ones were okay layers...but they had been given to me by another lady who was just hatching and raising backyard type birds.  They were nothing fancy and not overly productive anyways. I had already decided months prior that for my flock I wanted productive, strong layers.  I will admit, I miss my fresh eggs.  But it's been a nice break not having to mess with poultry these last few months and when I jump back in I will hopefully have everything set up just right and perfectly for them versus the half baked deal we were working with after our move....

So now I was down to just one pig, the horses and the goats...I debated for a while letting my mare go.  I love her, but to be honest the horses have become the red headed step children of the farm.  There was a time pre-goat where the horses were bathed once a week, ridden at least 3 times a week, and in general they were overly spoiled.  Now they are lucky to be ridden once a week, bathed 3 times a year, and they a get a fraction of the attention that the goats receive. I decided against it though - Smokey is my love and even if I don't give her the attention I used to she is still a one person type of horse and very attached to me and me alone.  And let's not even go their with Rocket.  First of all he is older and when I took him on it was decided this would be his permanent forever family - he had been through enough changing of hands in his life.  Not to mention that he is my husbands horse and I really do think Mr Homesteader would have a fit if I got rid of HIS horse...That left the goats...a story we shall save for tomorrow or the next day, but needless to say we dropped down to 10 goats as well....

So, anyways, back to the point being that I had time on my hands now that there were less critters to deal with, research to do, and a problem to solve.  I was tired of feeding overly processed mostly gmo corn based molasses filled pelleted feeds to everything with the added factor of the mysteriously dropping dead baby chicks...yeah, I'm still bitter about that (but that's another blog post entirely). Anyways...Dr. Google solved it for me in the form of FODDER!!!

Stay tuned...the saga continues tomorrow....