It was a heckuva 24 hours. It started with this girl going into labor. It seemed like birth was imminent yesterday around 2 pm, so I set in to watch. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to have that privilege, so I waited, camera in hand. But nothing ever came. There was no amniotic sack and no feet, so I figured it was all just stage 1 "preparatory labor." I'm not prepared to tell you the whole story tonight, but suffice to say, things finally came to a head around 11 pm. While waiting with 93 while she labored, it got dark, and I turned the big spotlight on the paddock. The elk were a bit disturbed by this and were chatting loudly amongst themselves and then coming by the fence looking very curious about what was going on with that poor yak cow. And then I noticed 604 was walking laps around the pasture. And then they became more purposeful and I could see she was panting and I knew! She was in labor too! Sadly, shortly before midnight, I realized the yak cow had an abnormal presentation when she finally let me get close enough to palpate the amniotic sack. And then I simultaneously realized the calf was already dead. It was a strange deal, the calf already being dead because the presentation wasn't difficult to correct when I helped her deliver her stillborn calf. It's hard to deal with the death of what you expected to be a joyful occasion but then to not understand exactly why it happened makes it more so. I think I probably made it to sleep around 2 am and then my boy woke me up at his customary 6:30 wake up time, but I was awake! I wanted to go check on my girls. How was 93? Had 604 had her calf yet? 93 seemed pretty good and 604 was still walking the fence. Around 9 am, I saw that 604 had stopped pacing, so I went to see how things were going, and I could see feet sticking out, which was such a relief! Then I decided it was time to see if I could catch a peek of 601's calf. It had been over two days since I had seen it and I like proof of life occasionally! That's when 601 and I began to play the hot/cold game. She was in one pasture up against the fence and so I closed the neighboring pasture off so I could get closer. As I moved, I could get a feel for whether I was getting closer (hotter) or farther (colder) from her calf by how she reacted. When she acted like she wanted to charge at me, I knew I was getting close! It soon became apparent that the calf was in the pasture I was in while mama was stuck in the other pasture, so I took a little extra time trying to find that calf, watching mama's reaction the whole time. There were a few times it was clear I was close, but can you believe - I never did see that little thing. I finally gave up and went up to the house. I was in the back yard when I suddenly saw her calf headed across the pasture toward his/her mama. I must have practically tripped on it!! They're such good hiders! Around 11:30, my neighbor came by to pick up the calf's body to bury it for me. While we were chatting during the exchange, I looked over and - low and behold - 604 had just had her calf!! Talk about the juxtaposition of life and death. 604 and her baby are doing great. I can't believe we have TWO elk calves... at the same time! And I'm confident we have at least one more coming. 93 is still struggling a bit trying to pass the afterbirth, but the vet doesn't seem too concerned. I wish that little yak bull had made it; I hope that the other yak cow has a successful birth soon... I'd sure love to enjoy a little yak calf running around in addition to the elk calves. But that's the nature of it all. Farming. Life. The whole bit. The Lord gives and the Lord taketh away, but it's all blessed and beautiful.
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That Little Girl. She's not even a year old, but boy is she getting big! She was born last July 8, so here she is only 10 months old, and I'm having a hard time telling which one she is on first glance. I always have to look twice now. I thought we might play a little game. I'm going to post a picture and you try to figure out which one is Little Girl. Make your decision and then scroll down for the answer. Keep track of your score - inquiring minds would like to know how you did!! ;-) We'll start with an easy(er) one. Which one do you think?? There she is! Let's try this one: Do you see her? There she is! Here. Try this one where they're easier to get a look at. That's 604 in the front. I think we may at least get another baby out of her this year. She's been looking a bit more rotund lately. But which one is her girl? What do you think about this one? Maybe this one isn't so hard? They're all so scruffy looking right now while they're shedding! But which one is Little Girl? All right. How's your score so far? One more left. I saved the hardest for last. I asked my husband which was Little Girl and he picked every other elk in the picture before he picked Little Girl!! Got your answer? No peeking!!! And the answer is... Well, how'd you do? All I know is that as far as growing elk, I must be doing something right. Now if I can just get the conception thing worked out, we might be able to get somewhere with this elk farming thing!! Let me know how you did in the comments! I'd love to know I'm not the only one having a hard time picking her out of a crowd.
So this is what I woke up to this morning. May 9th. I guess it could be worse. Growers all over were struggling with freezing temperatures and damaged crops, but we just hovered around 34 F. But still! We've been alternating between amazing spring weather and a winter reprise for the last two months. Honestly, the plants don't know what to do! I have things that I was going to move forward on a month ago that I didn't get around to. Turns out my procrastination was kind of my salvation. I love it when that happens. Take these pepper and tomato starts. I was initially going to start them in mid March. I didn't get around to it until mid-April. At the rate this spring is going, they'll be just right when it's time to put them out. The fruit trees have been trying to bloom for weeks now. Sadly, I don't think I'm going to set any apricots this year - they were way too early - but the peaches have been trying their darndest to hang in there, so I'm holding out hope! I've still got good blossoms on the peaches, the cherry trees, and one of the pears, and the apples are just starting to put out their buds this week. I'll tell you what's really looking amazing. The red raspberries. When I moved in, they filled half the flower beds around the house, but they were so packed in together, they weren't producing very well. Over the last two years, I've been moving them into two rows in my perennial garden, and they are looking great. The first row, now in their second spring in their new location, are already developing flower buds! I can't wait to see how many berries I get this summer! And look at my strawberries! The ones I planted last year are leafed out and already blooming. The new batch I planted less than two weeks ago are also leafing out already and looking great. I planted day-neutral strawberries, so I'm hoping to get berries all summer long. Hopefully, I'll get enough berries to make many, many jars of spread to stock my shop with as it's been flying off the shelves lately! It's been a busy month for me in the kitchen preparing Mother's Day boxes and other goodies for the shop. I've never had such a batch of orders to ship out before! It was a thrill for the Mother's Day gift boxes to sell out, but it sure kept me busy. I'm looking toward offering Teacher Appreciation boxes and Father's Day boxes, but in the meantime, I'm ready to go play in the dirt a bit. I always tell people that I love living somewhere that has four distinct seasons. I love how just about the time you get tired of the one type of weather, you start moving into something new. When people ask me what my favorite season is, I usually cop out and say I like them all equally, but I realize now that really isn't true. I love all the seasons, but there is something extra special about spring. I absolutely love watching the plants day by day as they wake up and prepare to bless us with beauty and bounty. Happy Spring!!
That Little Girl. I tell you, she has some super special hair! Every time I go out to visit with the girls lately, it seems I end up belly laughing at Little Girl's hair. None of the others have hair like hers. Maybe it's an elk calf thing (obviously, since she's my only one so far, I don't have any other data points with which to compare!). Maybe she's just extra special. Little Girl has always been fairly fuzzy, but even just a few months ago, in December, it was reasonably normal. And then things began to change. I think this picture above, which I took in mid-January was the first time I got a little chuckle at her hair. I also love the coloring on her ears here. So striking. She's such a character. Even in the rain here, though, her hair wanted to stand up a bit. Every time I went out, it got more wild! I'd been trying for some time to catch her "do" from the right angle and with the right light to really show you how crazy it is, but - of course - the time I finally catch those two things right, I didn't get the photo to focus! But this! This is how crazy her hair has been. By the way, I'll bet you didn't know that Little Girl does a great llama impression. ;-) Again, not in focus, but crazy hair! As February turned into March and March dragged on (and on), it seemed like Little Girl's hair was getting longer and longer. In fact, it confused me so much that I kept catching myself thinking that we were heading into winter because apparently that's the only explanation my brain could come up with for this crazy hair growth! It doesn't always look quite so wild. I love this picture I got recently of little Girl. She's still really fuzzy, but she doesn't look silly at all. In fact, it may be my favorite picture of her ever. I love watching you grow, Little Girl... hair and all!
Now that I have two totally different types of livestock, I find myself noticing some interesting differences between them. I mean, obviously... they're different. Yak have horns and elk have antlers, for instance. They may both grow out of their head, but one is regrown yearly and one is a permanent fixture. But one of the reasons I got the yak was because they are, in some important ways, very similar to the elk. I like that they are an ecologically sound meat choice in that they both convert feed to meat in a much more efficient manner than beef or other traditional livestock. In general, elk and yak use about one third the feed of beef to produce one pound of meat. That's pretty incredible when you think about it! Scientists claim that matriarchy is fairly rare in the animal kingdom, describing less than a dozen species that practice it. Elk are one of those species. Except for during the rut, when the bull doesn't really lead so much as terrorize the cows into submission to keep them away from rivals, the head cow leads the herd in their day to day decisions. This last rut, Big Guy was very protective of his harem, keeping them deep in the woods out of sight. In fact, for a few weeks, he was so protective, he wouldn't even let them come and get grain from me, despite their clearly wanting to. The rest of the year, however, the herd is clearly led by a cow. Initially, it was 604, but last summer, as she approached calving time, after a number of very impressive boxing matches, 601 took over the lead position and has held it ever since. In my day to day observations of them, her leadership is fairly clearly seen in where they go and who does what when. I spent most of my formative years working cattle out west on fairly large ranches. In those outfits, the bulls are kept separate most of the year, and - honestly - they just seem to be interested in doing their job and then resting (it's hard work, I guess! Ha!). I suppose because most of the year it's just a bunch of female cows hanging out, it didn't seem weird at all to move onto an elk farm where the predominant social structure is one of matriarchy. So I was a bit surprised by just how patriarchal the yak are. The big bull is clearly in charge... of everything and his herd dutifully follows his every move. The video below is a perfect example of how they follow him around, strung in a line, head to tail. Growing up, I loved watching Nature on PBS and other wildlife shows. One of the things I love about my little farm is that it almost feels like my own episode of Nature every time I go out to check on my critters. Sometimes I'll go out to feed and my husband will call me and ask me why it's taken me two hours to do a twenty minute job. Oops! They're just so fascinating to watch - I never get tired of being out there with them!
This past summer, I enjoyed watching a pair of white tail fawns visiting our farm regularly and growing. They were a rambunctious pair and always fun to watch. Here is a picture from last August when they still had their spots. Though their family group had a regular loop going through our yard, sometimes I would go weeks or more without seeing them; then they would come around again and I'd get to see them frequently for a bit before they'd go farther afield for a while. A couple of weeks ago, they started coming through again regularly. On that warm day when the elk were feeling frisky, the twins were in my yard playing too. I got a little bit of a video of them playing in my orchard. Sadly, when I went out to feed the elk this morning on the back side of the farm, I came across one of those twins dead near the side of the road. Except for some blood in the snow from his nose and mouth, he might have been sleeping. It was a little buck and he was just starting to sprout his first set of antlers! He was in the alleyway between two of the pastures, and I cannot tell you how damning it felt to be dragging this little body out to the road past Piggy and the girls, who were intently watching me. I went to ask the neighbor's hired men if they wanted to salvage the meat, and upon driving back to the body, I was greeted by the saddest sight. It is probably hard to see here, but if you look in the middle of the road a little ways back, there is the twin to this poor dead buck. It was in the field watching and came running, following me, as I approached its fallen twin. As we lifted the little body into the back of the pickup to salvage the meat, the remaining twin ran off. Saddest thing I've seen in a while. I'm really going to miss watching them play.
You know what that is? That's homegrown winter feed that the stock have decided they love. It's grass clipping silage (aka haylage) that I ensiled (fermented into usable, storable feed) in garbage bags last April. I only put up three bags as an experiment this year, but now that I've spoken with my vet and let the critters try it, next year, I'm going whole hog! So what prompted this experiment, you might ask? This, my friends, is my front yard. And it's only a small portion of the yard that I mow each week, all growing season long. It takes me between 3 and 4 hours to mow with a very fast ZTR mower and, if the grass has grown so much that week that I have to bag it so it doesn't leave clumps everywhere, I will add between one and two cubic yards of grass clippings to my compost pile. Although the clippings don't go to waste, per se, as they either are composted in place or in my compost pile, as a stockman, it galls me. What a bunch of wasted feed! Every time I mow, all I can think is, "Dangnabit, someone could be eating this!" So I started doing research, and, low and behold, I found a very promising answer! The only experience I had with silage prior to this endeavor was smelling it as I drove by silage pits, but I came across a few articles that described being able to preserve grass on a small scale by putting it up in air tight bags. Interestingly, most of the research on this is as a method to help African farmers to withstand drought and seasonal fluctuations in forage availability. There are also a few outfits in the US trying to develop large scale methods of ensiling grass clippings as a way to reduce landscape waste, but I'm not sure how you account for spray residue in that kind of operation, where the clippings are coming a bunch of different residential lawns. Obviously, if I'm going to feed it to my animals, I want to be sure I'm not feeding them a bunch of herbicides and pesticides! The concept was so simple, I figured I had nothing to lose. One day in April while mowing, instead of dumping all the clippings in my compost pile, I simply dumped some of them into garbage bags, squished all the air out of them, and tied them up. I then put the bags in the back of my lawn shed and forgot about them... well, that's not completely true. Every time I went into the shed, I was reminded of them because I could smell them! But it wasn't really a bad smell, it was just really fermenty. About mid-summer, I opened one of the bags to take a peek and was thrilled to find perfectly fermented grass. I closed the bag up tightly again and then let them sit until last month. They held perfectly and looked just the same last month as they did in July. Amazing! After speaking with my vet to be sure I didn't need to have the forage tested before feeding it, I let the critters have a go. They were initially a bit unsure about it, but within a day, they were convinced that it was good eats! The yak love it. The elk love it. And next winter when I have laying hens, I'm sure they'll love it and I'll be able to enjoy dark, rich yolked eggs all winter long! I am so excited! I'm almost even excited to start mowing again. Almost.
Three years ago, who would have guessed that today I'd be farming elk? I'm not really sure I even knew people farmed elk, to be honest. I'd hunted and eaten them out west. But raise them? Who does that? In the two and a half years since I became an elk farmer, I have been completely converted. They are amazing creatures. Handsome. Curious. Flighty. Self sufficient. Photogenic. I'm not sure I could ever go back to regular old livestock! Before I married my husband and embarked on a fifteen year journey of suburban living all across America as a military wife, I spent my formative years working cattle and horse ranches out west. The deal when we got married was that I'd follow him around until he retired, but when he did, I got to have a farm. But I expected to be raising cattle! Or maybe horses or pigs or something. You know... something normal. Something commonplace. Never did I expect to be raising such unusual stock as elk and now yak. Previously when I was farming/ranching, the question of what I did for a living did not consistently blossom into a lengthy and involved conversation as it does now. People want to know. Elk? You raise elk? What are they like? How does that work? They are so curious and I have come to be so fond of raising these critters, that it is a pleasure to take the time to answer. Watching Little Girl grow has absolutely been the highlight of my time on the farm so far. What an amazing privilege I have to be the steward of her life... to make sure that she can experience what it is to be an elk in a way that is fulfilling to her. Can I replicate the exact kind of life she would experience in the wild? Of course not. Although I might argue that her life with me here is in many ways better than what she would experience out there. In my care she will never know hunger. It is unlikely she will ever have to fend off predators trying to take her or her calf. And when her time is done, she will have a clean, quick end. Nature doesn't often provide that. I didn't intend this post to end up about death, but when you raise animals for food, inevitably, that's where you end up. Raising meat animals is a huge responsibility and I take that responsibility very seriously. Fortunately, harvesting is a teeny, tiny part of being a farmer. Most of the time, I get to enjoy caring for these amazing animals and doing everything in my power to make sure that their lives are as fulfilling and comfortable as possible. And I may take a picture or two of them. Or maybe five or a thousand. What an amazing job I have.
Where did the summer go? Seemed like it would never get going and then... poof! Now it's almost gone. So, so many things have been going on. I've been posting on facebook regularly (and Instagram somewhat regularly), but I've held back on posting a lot of my photos because I didn't want to commandeer everyone's feed! But, boy, has there been a lot to share. Obviously, the biggest news is that we had our first baby! Little Girl joined us in early July and has been growing like a weed. Besides that exciting event, I've been calling this my summer of experimentation. Growing our elk herd has been a little more challenging that we expected. New Hampshire is not fully in compliance with USDA guidelines for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) management and so we cannot import elk from anywhere outside of the state... and there just aren't that many elk farmers in New Hampshire! So, I've had to get creative with figuring out how we're going to make this little farm profitable. I've never gardened in the Northeast, so I had to experiment with how that went, and in some cases, there was just a little bit of serendipity. We have a few new products available in our etsy store. We have our delicious and unique artisanal golden delicate maple syrup made exclusively from sugar maple trees on our farm. Our newest item, which came about pretty much by accident but has now become a best seller is our edible flower confetti! So beautiful and I've had so much fun developing the product and its packaging. I'm very excited with how things are progressing and I think the easiest thing for me to do will be to put a gallery of all that's been going on lately and I'll comment on each one so you know what you're looking at. We're getting there... a little at a time. Starting a business sure keeps you busy! I always feel like I am so far behind. My to do list is starting to resemble Santa's list in length. There's probably enough on there to keep me busy every single day for the next two years, but at least I'm never bored. After being on the farm for about 18 months now, the plan is starting to come together for what I've envisioned for this place. After following my husband around from state to state for his job for over 15 years, living mostly in suburbia, it is really great to be on some land again. I've spent every day since we first looked at this place thinking about what I want to make of it. My plan is finally starting to firm up in my mind, and I can't wait to bring it fruition. Since we've moved in, we've done a lot of maintenance/upgrades to the place, but we've also planted our orchard. Eighteen trees of all kinds just waiting to blossom and be fruitful. It will be a few years before they are really producing, but just the idea of it makes me swoon. Apples, peaches, cherries, plums, pears, nectarines, and apricots! Oh my! And now spring is coming again! The crocuses are popping up and the buds are starting to swell. The maple taps are slowing down and I'll be pulling the taps soon. I look forward to my first real garden space in almost ten years (!?!). To say I am excited to begin this season is an understatement. How far I will get with expanding our menagerie this year is yet to be seen, but my hope is to get our hen house set up and rolling for chicks this fall. I am leaning toward raising rabbit and guinea fowl for meat, so I hope to at least move forward on that as well. You can follow the progress here and on Facebook/Instagram. I am always looking for a better way to do everything, so there's a lot of experimentation and research that goes on around here. I'll try and keep you posted with the goings on and, if you have questions, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for stopping by and I can't wait to get this thing rolling! |
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