Farm and Soap Updates — farming

Vermont has been in the news lately and not for a great reason. Our county has seen worse flooding than during hurricane Irene and many towns and farms have been hard hit. We are fortunate enough to be a hillside farm, so while we have seen minor washouts and truly impressive volumes of moving water, our animals, plants and home are safe. Here's what is normally a small creek on the farm. Even though we've escaped the worst of the flooding, we are dealing with saturated soil in our pastures, which means making mud pits is a real danger. It can...

Anyone who's ever had chickens has seen the origins of the term "pecking order" first hand. Pecking and flapping at each other is pretty normal behavior for chickens, both hens and roosters, but in its extremes it can lead to severe injury and cannibalism. So let's talk about how to avoid this and also what to do if you have a severely "hen-pecked" chicken. Breed Choice At least some level of chicken aggression is tied to genetics. Breeds described as "nervous, restless and active" tend to have more aggressive tendencies, while "docile, calm, easily handled" birds are less likely to...

The downside of farming in Vermont, especially farming that is focused on rotational grazing, is that 4-6 months of the year we have snow on the ground! Since I installed permanent fencing several years ago, I've been enjoying the ability to "graze" the cows on hay for a good part of the winter season. Here's how my system works. After grazing wraps up sometime in October, the cows head back to cow shed area to eat hay bales in the "sacrifice pasture". That means that this small area will get churned up, over grazed and muddy but all the other pastures...

Skip to: Chicken Digestion Goose Digestion Further Reading Cow Digestion As people learn about the benefits of grass-fed beef they often wonder if the same principle can be applied to other farm animals, which then leads to the question: Do your chickens eat grain or are they also grass-fed? To fully answer that question (and if you don't want full and detailed explanations, you should probably stop reading my blog posts!) we have to first understand a bit about animal digestion. The cow is a ruminant. This means that it has a system of stomachs (four in this case) which...

Around the beginning of March I got one of the first signs of spring on the farm (the real first sign was back in February when last summer's young female calves went into heat for the first time and started bellowing and making well, cow-eyes, at the bull from over the fence) which is a rising tide of eggs! I do provide supplemental light for my hens in the winter but with the bitter cold we often experience in Vermont, they expend a decent amount of energy in the winter staying warm, so production drops. I could provide them with...