Polling

Polling is the act of removing horns and the ability to grow horns from an animal while it is very young. This is generally done in three ways;

1)Polling bands (very small rubber bands) are placed on the nub of the horn and inhibit horn growth, this method is not very successful as the animal will often rub the band off.

2) An electric polling wand has a heating element (similar to a car cigarette lighter) that burns the incipient horn out of the animals skull and the resulting scar tissue keeps the horns from growing back.

3) A caustic chemical solution is used to burn the horns out similar to a polling wand.

As you can guess the animal in question does not enjoy any of these methods, imagine what having a section of your skull burned off would feel like. But the main reason most people poll their animals is that in order to "show" your animals in competition, they must be polled. The secondary reason is that people think that horns make the animal more dangerous.

Rosie and I do not poll our animals, frankly I can not see any legitimate reason to poll an animal on our homestead. We have one goat who's prior owners tried to poll her with a caustic chemical and failed, as they would not be able to she show her due to this failure she was sold to us at a discount. Little Lucy AKA Unigoat is our little pure bred toggenburg female and she is the only goat on our homestead that was polled. Due to the failed polling Lucy has one stunted but straight horn and one small horn cap, about 1" long. From time to time Lucy manages to snap off this horn cap leaving an open bleeding wound on her skull that has a direct line into her sinus cavity. Recently Lucy once again snapped off this cap and bled all over the place, so far we have been lucky and she has not gotten the open wound infected but we try and keep a close eye on her while she has that injury. A failed polling will haunt an animal for the rest of its life, causing reoccurring injury and associated pain.

So why am I talking about this? Well we have a fundamental belief on our homestead that our animals should be able to live in an environment as close to the one they evolved into as we are able to provide. Our chickens run around cage free, our pigs live on pasture and our goats and sheep don't get their skulls burned open at birth. Call us crazy, but we believe that animals are pretty smart and if you let them live like they are meant to live they will be healthy. Goats use their horns for two reasons;

1) Defense
2) Temperature regulation

Goats use the vascular structure of their horns to keep their temp from fluctuating in the weather and without their horns you need to be watchful of weather extremes that could make your goats sick. Goats (and their ancestors) have been developing horns for millions (sic) of years, there is probably a pretty good reason they needed to keep that evolutionary trait. Granted that not all ruminants have horns there are some naturally polled animals and while I am not a specialist in the anatomy of herbivores I would be willing to guess that naturally polled animals have other forms of temperature regulation not found in horn-growing breeds.

Some people claim that goats with horns are too dangerous and polling is meant to keep people safe. To that I would say "What are you doing to your goats that makes them want to gore you to death?" I move among our 500-700 lbs pigs with no fear, I push apart our rams and male goats with out getting hurt, I feed our roosters and ganders by hand, this is not magic. If you raise your animals to be friendly by treating them well and showing them respect and affection then you will not need to worry about them trampling you, biting you or goring you to death on a daily basis. Really, it works, try it.

The moral of all this?

If you animals are born with a trait normal to that breed there is probably a reason and you should let them be normal. To do otherwise is cruel and flies in the face of millions of years of experience and no matter how good you are I am guessing you don't have millions of years of experience.

Daily chores

As our farm year progresses our daily chores increase and change. With the kidding of our goats we now have milking duties after the morning and evening feedings. This also adds the making of butter, cheese, and yogurt. We have some kefir grains (I know Guy they are not grains but yeast.) so we'll have a home stock of kefir soon. We also slaughtered Oreo so lard making and sausage stuffing is also added to the mix. As soon as I get the plans for the smoke shed we'll start smoking bacon and the insanely huge ham we got off Oreo.
On the plus side this all adds nicely with our egg retrieval and veggie harvesting. Slowly but surely we inch our way to a more self sufficient home.

Slaughter party - Oreo

Until this weekend we had only slaughtered animals who had turned into jerks, but Oreo was a fabulous pig who had completed his mission. The day started off with getting the pig drunk on a mixture of really cheap vodka and sweet grains, being that Oreo was in the neighborhood of 500lbs to 700lbs this took about a gallon of vodka. After he sucked down his liquor ration we gave everything a few moments to set in. Due to the size of Oreo we chose to use a 410 slug rather than our usual 22 caliber. The initial shot had perfect placement and was nearly point blank, unfortunately it was not a fatal shot and Jed had to reload (single shot shotgun) and fire a second shot. This follow up shot dropped him and then Jed used a large knife that he forged in his shop to slit the throat, cutting the carotid arteries and finishing the job. Neither Jed or I was happy about having to use a second shot, we don't want to have any animals suffer on our farm but at times these things happen. On the plus side Jed was able to place the second shot threw the same hole as the first shot (on a moving target from a distance, not an easy shot) limiting further damage to the carcass. Then with 5 people pulling we where able to drag the carcass onto a working platform to begin dressing the carcass. With the weight and length of Oreo there was no possibility of hanging the carcass to dress it out, we had neither the strength of material or height of tower required to hang a 700lb 9ft long pig. Dressing on the ground was not easy and given the choice we would rather hang a pig to dress them. Really it was not fun. We attempted once more to scald the pig, buy turning up our hot water heater and running a hose from the washer hot line to a hose. The temp of the water was fine and mostly did its job but we tried to use a pressure washer to do the scraping and this did not work well at all. While the pressure washer did take off the outer layer of skin it did not remove the hair so scraping was required in any case. Also our hot water tank did not have the capacity to scald an entire 700lb pig so we ran out of hot water before we could finish, over all a scalding failure. As we knew that dressing that much pork would be a huge undertaking we elected to skin the carcass and go from there. With the amazing help of our work staff; Holly, Guy, Sharron, Sam, Brigid, Melody, Crystal and Rosie's Mom we where able to part out and package the meat in around 6 hours after 4 hours of slaughter and dressing. All in all it was around a 16 hour day for Rosie and I. But we where able to power threw it in no small part by the AMAZING Birria the Rosie's mom made for every one in our work party, really if you did not make it you really missed a great meal.

I don't know the total weight of meat we got from Oreo we don't have a scale in the house that goes that high and frankly there was not time to weigh it all but we did weigh a few pieces and the lay out was as follows:

Hams : 60 lbs each
Pork Belly (bacon) : 65 lbs
Forelegs (estimate) : 40 lbs each

and an untold amount of stew meat, roasts and ribs. In the end we ran out of space in our chest freezer and our house freezer and had to send our work force home with a nice selection of cuts (they deserved it after all the work they put in!) and then I was able to lean on the door of the freezer to get it to close. In all it was an amazing day and the help of our work force was in the finest traditions of community, we literally could not have done it with out them.

Some lessons we learned:

700 lbs is way too big for a pig slaughter weight, 200 lbs would be better.

We need a meat/bone saw

Your first shot may not drop your animal be ready for follow up shot (we where, Jed always keeps a second round in his pocket for just that reason).

We need better preparation for scalding; more hot water and a better scraping method.

Make sure your vacuum sealer works before you are ready to package (thank you Sam for running to the store for us).

Just like with Macaroon, slaughtering in the rain is a real pain.

Have more buckets on hand.

Over all the day was a success and above that it was fun for all involved, our night ended with laughter and jokes and meat for every one. Thank you to all who could make it and to any who could not, we will be doing more of this in the future so while you may have missed out this fall next fall there will be more pigs to slaughter and more help needed. Oh and sorry about the changes in tense in this post both of us helped to write it. We will see about posting images from the slaughter party in the near future.

Succinct nature of our posts

As you might guess, having an infant around sometimes means we have to change tasks quickly. One day our posts might actually make sense again.... and speaking of changing tasks... The overlord Ivan calls.

Front garden update

We found some borer holes on part of the almond out front so we'll have to trim heavily and apply something to make the borers shove off.
My front beds are under attack by chickens and cats. My first winter bed is growing well. I've managed to transplant the garlic to the back beds and the peas seem to be coming up nicely. Now if I can only convince the cats that flinging mice into my veggie beds is not a good idea then that would help. As more of the front beds are cleared more of the chickens find their way u front to scratch thoughtlessly through my just planted beds. I have not noticed any seedlings in one of the beds so I think they ate and/or killed them. I'll just have to plant that bed over again.
Next on my list - finish picking tomatoes and summer veggies, clear beds, plant winter crops, cut old berry stems and burn them, finish throwing away the star thistle and endless weeding. Yaaay for home grown veggies and food.

New baby goats and the last of Macaroon

Well the birthing is done and now Little Bugger and Unigoat both have a single male offspring. Unigoat's birthing was easy and required no intervention from us. Little Bugger had a small amount of difficulty, her kid's head was trying to come out at the same time as his feet and he got stuck. In the wild this may have resulted in death for the kid as well as the dam but here on the homestead I just pulled his feet a little and he was freed up enough to slide right out. It has been a couple of days and every one seems to be doing well. Out temps have dropped below freezing a few nights and I was a little worried about the ability of the kids to survive that low of a temp so soon after birth but every one was up and playing this morning so all is well.

Also we have used up the last of the Macaroon meat (to make room for the next pig) and while Macaroon was not much in life she was a pretty good lard pig. Modern pig breeds are intended to produce large amounts of meat with very small amounts of fat owing to our current culture of lower fat cooking and the cheap cost of corn oil. In the past certain pigs breeds where used as "larders", pigs grown for lard production. Macaroon was certinly a larder and we are still cooking with the lard we rendered on that slaughter day and we still have a shopping bag full of fat that still needs to be rendered down into lard. Our next pig will certainly have some fat on him but nowhere near the ratio that Macaroon was carrying.

Milking my goats

With the babies born the goats are now giving milk. If I have helpwith the milking I'm able to get about a quart fro each goat per milking. Of course art of this goes to my morning pajarete (mexican hot chocolate - scrape mexican hot chocolate into a cup with tequilla or rum and then milk into the cup to get a hot frothy chocolate) although i use plain unsweetened chocolate instead and hold the alcohol. In any case we are still able to have enough left over to make cheese and other dairy products. We'll see how we do once we wean the goats and start harvesting all the milk the produce.

Ivan is 5 months old today

Can you believe it?? He's changed so much and I'm grateful that he needs to go walk with us outside at least twice a day. That makes it so much easier. I cannot trully imagine my life without him.

Giving thanks

There are many things to be grateful for this year. Yes, I'm giving thanks before Thankgiving. Thank you to all our friends, know that you are always welcome in our hearts and home. Thank you to our families for their support while expand our own. For our jobs,crops, animals, and all the miscellaneous things that make our lives special. But especially to my husband Jed, thank you love for making this life so wonderful. I look forward to writing many more stories about farmer Jed. =)

I won - Unigoat kidded first