Starting a small farm...

[Diy mechanic mike]

You know now that you mention it we have some of the barred rock chickens and they have been the most tame and do alot of digging out of our flock. We started out with 10 barred rock, 10 rhode island reds, and 10 cali whites, and i have to say the cali whites are the nasty ones and they always fly out of the fenced in area we have for them which is a 1/4 acre. And i just hated coming home and seeing them out in the front yard, in the driveway, on the porch etc. And there was one rhode island red that got conned into the madness but the barred rocks always stayed in and did what we intended for them. We have had them 4 years now and were at about 15ish left, dogs got a couple, one got it by a coon or opossum, and the rest just this last year started dropping. We stopped selling/ using their eggs at year 3 cuz we started to find a few rotten ones and weird yokes and shells so figured they were aging out but all the rotten eggs and weird ones definatly helped us go fully plant based haha (that smell will haunt you) lol but good luck to all of you cracking eggs for breakfast, i hope you dont have to experience it.
But back to the animal excavation project, why do you say pigs are for your neighbors property and to rent goats? I was only talking 2-3 pigs and maybe 10 goats. Obviously they would outlive our farming area project and would need other areas to work on which we have 27 total acres to have them frolic the rest of their heartbeats out as long as they dont cost us a fortune to keep fed. The whole slate we got is wooded, some thicker then others and a creek/erosion ditch at the lowest point, so i think the 3pigs and 10 goats could be a great natural army for the property we got. Im mostly just concerned about the cost of feeding them and their care cuz im not trying to use and abuse them here, just mostly make them earn their worth you know and save me a dime/alot of teadious time doing the inital brush clearing cuz thats the worst part in my opinion. But if they like it and do a great job at it then we might even grow them a special watermelon patch just for them cuz i hear pigs love melons and hard workers love getting bonuses. And thanks for the input its definatly great to hear other ppls experiences with possible ventures we plan to take.

Thanks mike

 

[CentaurG2]

Eggs have a respectable shelf life. If you were finding “rotten” eggs, you were picking up some really old eggs or cracked eggs.

https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/how-to-store-fresh-eggs-zmaz77ndzgoe

You should candle your eggs before eating or selling. A high-power LED flashlight works fine for this and you should be easily able to determine if an egg has a problem. We usually candle as we pick up our eggs. Any “bad” eggs can be cook and fed back to your flock.

Goats, if you have never dealt with them, do little other than try to get out of whatever area you try to keep them in. Following escape, they usually go to the exact area you don’t want them. Meat is next to useless as is the cheese. (acquired taste fur shure, but yuck!). Why keep them around? Rent them and get rid of them. Pigs is too close to humans for my comfort. Outfalls from the animals can be dangerous, particularly around an organic garden. Leave pigs to the piggeries.

 

[066blaster]

when I was a kid our neighbors had giunne hens , about 40 or 50 running loose. we would find the eggs and throw them at each other. we learned very fast to hold our breath and run if it popped and was green when it hit the ground. Not to many other smells that have such an affect on your senses. and the smell is nothing like what most people consider rotten egg smell.

 

[Diy mechanic mike]

I get the eggs have a long shelf life but our 3year old chickens were laying these eggs and were bad. We never did here about the flashlight trick you mentioned, but sounds legit. They werent left behind for longer then a day cuz we collected mid morning and after 4pm everyday and when we forgot, the dogs collection pile got bigger. We gave the dogs the odd shaped ones that werent bad but bad ones(cracked) just when to compost pile. And we even had a few eggs that were laid without a hard shell it was like jelly but not leaking it was very strange looking. But thats when we were like yeah this has to be because they are old cuz nothing changed in their life becides giving up more yard to them to frolic and grub out on lol. We mostly let them graze in our planting usable compost pile, wood chip pile, yard, and supplemented with the scratch grain mix and layer pellets from store on rainy days and in winter or when they would really beg for it haha.

But you really dont see pigs or goats being a good/cheap tool to go from thick wooded unbrushed land to like forest service ground with big trees and minimal undergrowth(in my opinion the perfect maintainable wooded land)? I have seen alot of videos on youtube with ppl using pigs for clearing, specifically a guy using alot of pigs to basicaly bulldoze a hillside that had large forest growth on it and logged it and like months down the road it was ready to drag stumps to a pile and disc the ground and plant. It might have been a year later but still a pretty fast way to go from forest to pasture or w.e and a very cheap and natural way to do it. He claimed the pigs if unringed would dig the stumps out of the ground enough to pull out with a tractor with ease. Now i dont remember the time frame but if i remember right it was like within a year of logging the area he was able to drag uprooted stumps outta the way for the new feild to be worked and planted. Now i understand he had a fleet of pigs and they made one hell of a mess haha but the fact that the pigs made it happen is great. The mess part is why im saying 3 pigs is all we would want to handle our labor needs. I have seen what 3 pigs can do in a 20x10 pin and it gets nasty fast. But i think 3 pigs fenced in an area as large as 6 acres would be fine, to much ground to stomp to tear one specific area up unless its near a water hole where they would drink.
But can you have pigs and goats fenced in together? Like would they get along or would i be running a gladiator style fight arena? I wouldnt even worry about the chickens cuz they dont cost much to replace if they got stomped, but they are pretty good at being chickens(running and hiding).

Thanks mike

 

[muddstopper]

Putting pigs in the same lot as a goat isnt a good ideal. A pig will eat anything, including goats and especially chickens. My suggestion was meant to use goats to deforest the underbrush and then use pigs to destump what the goats didnt eat. Personally, if I had no intention of eating the pigs, chickens or goats, I wouldnt raise them. If I did raise them then it would be with the expressed purpose to sell. A pig will bring a dollar a lb on the hoove. Goats, depending on breed, will bring anywhere from $25 to $100 per head. Boer Goats are considered meat goats and are usually sold by the lb. Boer goats are also the hardest goats to raise so be prepared to loose a few.

Chicken eggs are easy to sell, but free range chickens tend to hide their nest. This usually means when you find one, there are usually several eggs in the nest and most of them will be old. A chicken will lay about every 26hrs, not quite one egg a day. A chicken is also hatched with every embryo it will ever lay. Its most productive period is about 50weeks after it first starts laying. Chicken farmers replace their flocks every year since they are only interested in mass production. Old chickes go into Cambell soup. If your going to sell eggs, the Black Australops have proven to produce the most eggs, but they are dumb as rocks. Most pruebreds wont even set their own eggs. Lots of folks raise certain breeds because they like green and blue and even chocolate colored eggs. Some breeds lay very large eggs. The most Money I ever made on selling eggs was when selling pure breeds. I have gotten as much as $45 doz, which included shipping, for certain breeds. I have shipped eggs all over the US. I used chicken tractors to keep my birds in. I kept the tractors in my pasture and would move them every couple of days. This way the birds had plenty of grass to pick and it kept the poop spread out so that flys and smells didnt become a problem. About as close to free range as you can get without letting them run free. Tractors also keep predators from becomeing a problem.

 

[CentaurG2]

We have a black australorp. She was a drive-by, as in someone drove by and tossed her out the window. She fit right in with the rest of the flock, although she is stupid tame. I am told there is a chicken breed called the death layer that produces eggs till the day it dies but they are ridiculously expensive.

https://greenfirefarms.com/deathlayer.html


If you are going to free range, go with chickens that have some predator savvy. Ancona and the Appenzeller are both reported to be great free range.

https://www.mypetchicken.com/catalog/Baby-Chicks/Ancona-p724.aspx

https://www.mypetchicken.com/catalog/Baby-Chicks/Appenzeller-Spitzhauben-p580.aspx

 

[Diy mechanic mike]

Gotchya, yeah i didnt know if they could be together or not but i guess the chickens will have to learn the hard way cuz they are harder to teach where not to go since they can sorta fly over barriers lol. But yeah from everything ive read and videos ive watched seems that goats dont eat everything you want them to but pigs devour everything down to roots which is great for going from woods to pasture. So im thinking if i let goats and chickens in said area for a monthish then move them to next area to start, and let pigs go into area the goats were already at to finish up the work, then once move time comes again and pigs are outta the first spot i could maybe seed the area after a couple months of recovery from the disturbance. And if we get the whole 4-6 acres hot wire fenced in and separate it into 12 half acre lots, we could move them once a month for a whole year. Then start back over next year if we still have serious weed issues or we could just start them on some other areas on our property. But im guessing the clearing project of the 6 acres would take 2 years of rotation along with here and there chainsawing, so we might even have the pigs and goats excavating the area for 3 years so we have a year of them working on the weeds while there is sunshine available because right now we got alot of timber trees in that area so once its cleared of under brush in the first or second year we could start logging and have them work another year once its logged. And continue to work on seeding it with cover crops and removing the stumps from logged trees.

But any info on best inexpensive ways to feed/ care for 3-5pigs and 10 goats when using them for this purpose. I get during summer they wont need much supplemental feed but winter time they will.

Thanks mike

 

[muddstopper]

I think if i was going to free range and not eat the eggs or meat, I would go with some sort of Game chicken. They raise multiple broods each year and pretty much take care of themselfs. My grandfather used to raise fighting chickens. Way back when it wasnt illegal to import chickens, he brought in some sort of jungle fowl and cross bred with his games. For a while he was unbeatable at the chicken fights and used to go all over the county to enter his birds in big derby's. He kept experimenting with breeding until he finally messed his fighters up. Couldnt win a derby after that. With chicken fighting being illegal just about everywhere now, I doubt there is very much breeding for fighters taking place anymore.

 

[Diy mechanic mike]

I have talked to some ppl in my area that just got a dozen of the death layers eggs to hatch and they were very pricey for just the eggs that might not even hatch, so sounds risky to me but i guess once you got them you got a dozen a day for a long time, which caring for just a dozen chickens would be ok. But you know now that you say black astralorpe i think thats what our black ones are lol we just call them "white(skinnys), black (fatties), and the reds". But either way the black ones are definitely the most tame and do the most digging around, and are the biggest out of the types we have.

 

[Diy mechanic mike]

Lol i dont wanna be watching my back down at the farm cuz we got vicious chickens around. I get they could hold their own out there but man if i get attacked im pulling out the 22 and having target practice haha. But what are some good game breds that can take care of them selves cuz that is really what we want, self efficiency. And yeah the whole bird fighting thing being illegal is crazy cuz we still fight humans and heck its even on t.v. talk about "inhumane"..... but i guess there was alot of cruel training tactics with birds where humans we can actually tell them what to do and they listen, even scarier in my opinion then chickens haha.

 

[CentaurG2]

Gotchya, yeah i didnt know if they could be together or not but i guess the chickens will have to learn the hard way cuz they are harder to teach where not to go since they can sorta fly over barriers lol. But yeah from everything ive read and videos ive watched seems that goats dont eat everything you want them to but pigs devour everything down to roots which is great for going from woods to pasture. So im thinking if i let goats and chickens in said area for a monthish then move them to next area to start, and let pigs go into area the goats were already at to finish up the work, then once move time comes again and pigs are outta the first spot i could maybe seed the area after a couple months of recovery from the disturbance. And if we get the whole 4-6 acres hot wire fenced in and separate it into 12 half acre lots, we could move them once a month for a whole year. Then start back over next year if we still have serious weed issues or we could just start them on some other areas on our property. But im guessing the clearing project of the 6 acres would take 2 years of rotation along with here and there chainsawing, so we might even have the pigs and goats excavating the area for 3 years so we have a year of them working on the weeds while there is sunshine available because right now we got alot of timber trees in that area so once its cleared of under brush in the first or second year we could start logging and have them work another year once its logged. And continue to work on seeding it with cover crops and removing the stumps from logged trees.

But any info on best inexpensive ways to feed/ care for 3-5pigs and 10 goats when using them for this purpose. I get during summer they wont need much supplemental feed but winter time they will.

Thanks mike

If you want to give it a try, the basic for either beast is food, water and shelter. Winter would be the same but depending on the severity of your winter and how many animals you want to over-winter, the water and shelter could become a big factor. Around here, cheap winter feed for goats are round bails of first or second crop hay. You can also go with squares but rounds are usually far more cost effective but are a lot more difficult to handle and store. You could also overwinter goats on pelleted feed or use a combo of hay and pelleted feed. Water here requires frost free hydrants and tubs with floating heaters so an electrical source near the tub is also required. If you get a lot of snow, it is unlikely the animals will stray from the shelter. Acquiring bedding and a method to remove contaminated bedding throughout the winter months should be considered. There are a lot of choices for bedding material but sawdust is usually used here as it is cheap. The only other thing I know about goats is that intact males positively stink. Stick with does or weathers.

I am no authority on pig farming. I know pigs can be pastured with supplemental grain. Here is an article that is similar to what I think you are trying to do.

http://smithmeadows.com/farm/how-to-raise-pigs-on-pasture/

Most folks that I know who raise pigs do not over winter them. You might find someone in your area that raises pigs and talk to them about best farming methods for them.

 

[CentaurG2]

I think if i was going to free range and not eat the eggs or meat, I would go with some sort of Game chicken. They raise multiple broods each year and pretty much take care of themselfs. My grandfather used to raise fighting chickens. Way back when it wasnt illegal to import chickens, he brought in some sort of jungle fowl and cross bred with his games. For a while he was unbeatable at the chicken fights and used to go all over the county to enter his birds in big derby's. He kept experimenting with breeding until he finally messed his fighters up. Couldnt win a derby after that. With chicken fighting being illegal just about everywhere now, I doubt there is very much breeding for fighters taking place anymore.

It was probably a Malay chicken. I would like to add a couple to my flock but they are not cold weather hardy breed so they are a no go around here.


https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/malay

 

[Diy mechanic mike]

Gotchya so water and shelter are biggest winter concerns.... we have a few ppl down near our farm that do bail hay that we could source from cost effectively and in the future once we get our pastures planted we will probably try to work some sort of deal out with them to bale it for us and leave us half or so since we dont have means to bale it at this point in time. Any input on deals like that would be great if anyone has worked out sonething like this before?.?... but the bedding issue shoukdnt be a problem we have saw mills near that load out sawdust for cheap as well or if wood chips could work we would have that all day our selves for free and the used material could be piled for a year for future use on fruit trees or berrie bushes as mulch. But im guessing our front end loader would finally get a full time job around the place rather then just being a front end weight lol. But the winter watering issue could be an issue to figure out, as we do not currently have a power source out there but we do have great access to the grid as it runs right threw the middle of our property spliting it in half so options are endless on points to source power from and if all hell hits the fan and we let it grow back up which we wont but previous owners did this exactly, But every 5 years the power company hires out a company to clear with bucket trucks and forestry mulchers the right of way so they helped us out this year alot on stuff we were planning to do in futre but only have to maintain it now and we got a load of chips dumped for us as well so free access to bedding/mulching materials if woodchips are ok for bedding that is. But thanks for the info and links to check out more info on our future projects. Forums are like the greatest things ever, i feel sorry for all the oldtimers who had to just figure it out the hard way but i respect all of them because someone had to do it and i really appreciate that their info is more readily available for ppl willing to seek it out. And the internet has made that very easy for the motivated mind.

Thanks mike

 

[Ferny]

First of all congratulations! I have a friend who 3 years ago decided to buy this farm for sale in Spain in La Mancha province and he has been growing grapes as that area is popular for it as I understand. Now his business is going pretty good as he sells grapes to local bodegas (vineyards) the only issue he has is when he needs to gather the crop. He highers Moroccans mostly and they do all the work for him.

 

[esshup]

For clearing brush and stuff on a larger scale I'd find a place that rents a tracked bobcat with an enclosed cab, with what they call a Fecon head. Think of a large open brush dhipper that will chew up trees/brush, etc and leave mulch behind. You can probably do an acre or two in a day, depending on the size of the trees there.

Going organic is a chore for a larger scale like you are describing. Look into how many years it takes before you can be certified organic. Then look into the actual sales of the produce you want to sell vs. the amount you will NOT sell because of the imperfections.

Goats can clear brush too, but you have to fence the area in and what will THAT cost? They won't eat much woody brush or small saplings either.

Ever see organic honey? Think about that for a minute or two. Read up on how far bees will travel from their hive. Unless you control a huge amount of land, and have the hives in the exact center, how do you keep the bees from gathering nectar and pollen from non-organic certified plants??

I think being certified organic is a good thing, but if you are planning on running a business and getting your income from that, I don't know if it will be a sustainable long term.

Locally last year we had a crop duster spray the wrong farm. The one that he sprayed was certified organic, not any more.........................

 

[Woodchuck71]

Everyone has a dream.But goats are usually found in my nightmares!
Unless you put in a no-climb wire fence,8'tall(at least),with nothing, I mean NOTHING,within their jumping ability, you're fighting a loosing battle.
Once they get out,they find the best paint job on any vehicle and decide they need to put their signature on it!
That's my experience with them anyways.
Nope,not the 40 year old tractor,20 year old dump truck but the 2 week old pickup.
Pigs will usually stay in IF trained young to electric wire.May hit it a couple times,but that's usually all it takes.
Keep first strand about 8"or so off the ground,second strand about 20".
But,IMHO,you need a solid wire perimeter fence also.
Southern Illinois,wintering shouldn't be a huge problem if you choose to.
Guineas are awesome, but never hadluck them laying their eggs in the coops.
Ours free range,with chickens.They roost in coop together,but don't lay their eggs inside.
So we usually find nest with as many as 20+eggs in them.They(eggs) go to the pigs!
Never lost a chicken or Guinea to hogs,but list several to Hawks.They go inside their coop every night with automatic door,don't have to worry about coons and possums.
Pigs keep snakes away also.Feeding your pigs will get expensive.In your situation I'd buy early spring,let them do their business with supplemental feed,then sell when them at around 250/280 pounds.
No wintering and someone always buys pigs.

 

[Huskybill]

Don’t forget the wild life. I have fruit trees for the bear and deer. This year in planting pasture grass and white clover. I only have two acres but plenty of wild life going from the bottom land up to the water shed behind me.

Onetime we had 100 tomato plants we canned. One pound of fried chopmeat, a jar of tomato sauce, one pound of macaroni, some cheese and homemade garlic bread we / kids ate good.