Pigs eating a pumpkin

This is from two years ago when I saved some pumpkins. At 6:45 they get a good zap from the electric fence.

Corn

A load of Manure

 I have a flat area on my property that is about a 1/10th of an acre that I have always envisioned as a corn field to raise corn to help supplement feed. Last year I tried but failed miserably. I planted it too late and didn't add any nutrients to the soil. Did I mention it failed miserably?

Piles of Poop

So last spring I brought in 8 yards of cow manure from my local landscape supply. The trailer can handle 4 yards, so it took two loads. The landscape supply is not two far away so it was much more economical to do it this way than to have them deliver in one big load.

I unloaded it with the Yanmar's loader, dropped it off in these piles, spread it out with the front blade on the Farmall Cub, and then tilled it in with the 4' rototiller I have for my Yanmar. A great day of hobby farming!

Baby Corn

That was in April. In mid-May we had a warm spell and I planted the corn with my earthway seeder.

When the plants were having just germinated I ran my 1970's horse rototiller down the rows. I did that one more time while the plants were small. and left them for quite a while. When they were hip high I side dressed with Urea (40-0-0) at the rate of 1 pound per 100 feet of row. I tilled it in with the cultivator attachment I have for my Stihl Kombi-System and irrigated.

I used the kombi-system because it is much more narrow. I have read that at certain heights you have to be careful of how close you cultivate to the roots as not to cut the ones near the top that keep the corn from lodging (falling over). I recently bought a cultivator for the Farmall Cub that I found on craigslist that I look forward to experimenting with next year.
I only irrigated two or three times. Several neighbors were quite concerned with how little I was watering.

The corn is an old open pollinated variety called Nothstine Dent that is supposed to be well suited to our short growing season, drought tolerant and is know for its use as feed and corn meal. I plan on saving seed.

Weeds in corn

Well... We did get weeds but they are only in the rows. From this angle they look out of control. When you look down the row, it doesn't look so bad.

Weeds like my hair in 1992

But when you pull the weeds back you see that they are a mop top and it is bare soil beneath them. I wonder if the mulching qualities it brings out-weighs the nutrients the weeds steel from the corn? The plan is to feed this is as ear corn to the pigs and use the stalks as bedding. My son and I fed them several ears yesterday and they really went after them. It will be interesting when it is all said and done to see how much this helps the feed bill. Of course there is the cost of growing it... 8 yards of manure, 1.5 pounds of corn seed, fossil fuels, Urea...Experience of growing it, priceless.

Evolution of the Hoop House / Deep Litter Bedding

Well these first couple of posts are turning into postmortems on my first couple of cycles of raising feeder pigs in the winter. The initial idea was pigs in the winter, they poop and then garden in the summer. Though working well in theory, in practice it was a muddy mess and the pen took too long to dry in the spring to get in there with the tiller. A big problem with our already short growing season.

Pigs in Mud

They did have a place to get out of the mud, but it was still kind of cold with no good place to bed down really well. Shivering away the calories (future post on feed efficiency) was not good. The neighbors complained to the health department (another future entry topic that has a happy ending). I needed a better way.

I first learned of the concept of deep litter bedding when reading a book on raising chickens. A few google searches lead to this article, this blog entry, and this blog entry. So I decided I would try to make my own variation on the hoop house. I used cattle panels, t-posts, a tarp, ratchet straps, lots of zip ties. I can give more detailed instructions in a later post, if people want them. At that time I also built a deck on skids to put the feeder and water barrels on.

Hoop house skeleton

Using small pieces of hog panel and electric fence I combined this with my old hog house I had built on skids and got to this:

Inside view from feeder with straw

I put rebar in the ground and ran a hot wire along the inner perimeter so the pigs would leave the hoop house alone and it has been working great, so far.

The idea is that the pigs will eliminate waste on to the straw. The straw will soak it up, bond the carbon and nitrogen thus minimizing smell and providing warmth from the composting action. All I have to do is keep adding straw to wet spots and the bedding pack will build up. Toward the end of the pigs time hear I do plan on letting them out in the garden space to do some tilling and gleaning but not let them turn it into a moonscape like previous years.

Just south of us is a farming community that has some small wheat farms and I was able to load up on 50 pound bales of straw for $2.50 a bale. I got 60 bales, I should be set. Craigslist once again!

Kids and Straw

So I'm set to go, right? Well right away a problem showed itself. The pigs were choosing to defecate in the old pig house that has a wood floor and not on the straw! It stunk! I shoveled poop two days in a row to put it on the straw. This was not the plan!

So I went to work to barricade them out of the pig house until they were trained to do their business on the straw. Scrap wood pile to the rescue.

It's ugly, but it has worked! The pigs are doing all their business on the straw now. Now to keep an eye on the moisture level and add straw as necessary.

One other little problem that has come up is that the straw keeps building up around the edges and hitting electric fence. Not a huge problem but I have go in everyday and kick it away from the electric fence wire.

So hopefully with this setup I will keep the pigs dryer and warmer, minimize mud, and have some great compost in the end. I will keep you updated.

Trip to the "big" city, part two: Feed mill and history lesson

Part two of our trip to the big city was going to the feed mill. I get a little jealous of reading other blogs and people having more than one feed mill to choose from. In our area there are many feed mills but they are all owned by chicken farms. They are not available to mix pig feed for little guys who may be interested in some bulk purchases. That being said; the one independent feed mill is good to work with, but the customers would benefit if they had some competition.

When I first started finishing pigs I found a guy who owned a grinder-mixer relatively close to my house. The price was very good and I would call him up and go pick up a 1000 pound super sack of feed whenever I needed one. I think he was supplying several small time hobby farmers like myself and it worked out great!

Scoop the super sack into front end loader

Dump into home made bulk feeder

Store remainders in derelict chest freezer

When year two of pigs came around "Jim the pig feed guy" wasn't grinding grain anymore because the state found out and said he needed to get a permit and keep batch samples. The permit wasn't expensive, but he just didn't want to deal with it so he stopped.

This suddenly made raising 10 - 12 pigs, selling them and trying to make a little bit of money a lot more difficult!

Options: 1. Buy from local feed store (really expensive)
               2. Buy from feedmill (cheaper, but lots of time and gas)
               3. Get a grain bin and have it delivered by feedmill (same price as pickup, but need a 3 ton minimum.)

So in raising pigs round two we were able to go with option 3 due to the beauty of craigslist. Found this for $500.

Grain bin on trailer ready to go its new home.

Brought it home, made some footings with rebar, sonotube, and concrete to get to the point of raising it.

Push with loader, pull back with yellow strap

and the feed mill sent the truck to auger in 3 tons of pig feed.

Filling with auger

 It was a little more involved than that with some paperwork form the feed mill and learning about sonotubes and footings to figuring out how to raise it. It all worked though! It paid for itself in time and money saved.

For round two this worked great. I raised 12 pigs, got two loads of feed. 1000 pounds of feed went to each pig (very inefficient, I know. Many plans in round three to deal with that issue. future blog post)

With this great grain bin why am I going to pick up feed at the feedmill? I am trying to get my feed efficiency to the point of being able to raise each pig on 800 pounds of feed. The books say I should be able to do that. Once again, future blog post on what changes I plan on making. I am raising 10 pigs. That adds up to needing 8000 pounds of feed. Problem: 3 ton minimum from the feed mill. I don't want to buy all 8000 pounds at once Feed shouldn't sit around for 5 months, fresh is better.

My plan is to feed them 16% hog feed that I get from the feedmill in sacks for the first 2000 pounds and then, when they are bigger and eating faster, fill the grain bin with 6000 pounds of 14% to finish them.

We picked up 400 pounds today. 400 pounds fills the bulk feeder. No sales tax as feed for animals that are to be sold is tax exempt. It was $105.20. My local feed store would have charged me $139.04, sales tax included. They do not want to mess with tax exempt status paperwork. The savings was worth the gas right there and when you add in the pop cans...

My "local", independent feed mill

But you're thinking about the remaining 1600 pounds I will have to buy before I fill the grain bin. One good life change since the last round of pigs is that my daughter has violin lessons every week in the same town as the feed mill. Picking up a couple sacks each week while the pigs are small and eating slower will be easy to do and no new strain on the budget!

The feed mill seems to be running a brisk business supplying small farmers and small independent feed stores and the delivery driver has told me that he makes deliveries all over western Washington even up to Ferndale near the Canadian border and down into Oregon! I hope they don't end up going the way of Wolfkill feed (also in western Washington) as told about here by Bruce at ebeyfarm.blogspot.com. They seem to have tapped the retail market he talks about in his blog entry.

There you have it; a trip to the "big" city, farm history, micro-economics, and planning!

Trip to the "big" city, part one:

Took the Tahoe and trailer to the "big" city 45 miles north of us. This is an undertaking not taken lightly because the mileage on the Tahoe goes down to 13 mpg with the trailer behind it. This trip had two objectives. One was to dump off 5 years worth of pop cans at a big scrap metal dealer, as opposed to the small time guys in our community who don't pay very well. The other was to pick up pig feed direct from the feed mill.

The containers

All cans were smashed

Loaded in the trailer and ready to go!

I have always collected cans for recycling but this is the first time I have saved up this many. Two of these bins were left by the previous owner. We don't use curbside recycling because we just take our things to the recycle center at our local dump. The third container I got from parents. A wheel fell off and when the trash company dropped off a new can they didn't take the old one. I gladly brought it home, much to my wife's chagrin. Several years ago I geeked out on figuring out how many gallons these three containers held and then figured out an average per gallon weight of pop cans (don't ask me what it was, I have forgotten) so I could estimate how many pounds these three containers would be if filled. I estimated 100 pounds.

And the actual grand total? 106 pounds! They paid 54 cents per pound for a nice cash pay out of $57.24. Also happy to get them out of my life!

90 miles round trip. 13 miles per gallon. 6.92 gallons of gas. Filled up at Costco for $3.50/gallon. $24.22. Net profit of $33.02 (31 cents per pound) That sounds like terrible economics! That's why I had to double up with hauling the trailer for a second objective.

Too much kale!

We planted kale for the first time this year. We planted one 40' row. The kale was happy, very happy.

Kale after eating on it all summer and giving some to just about anybody who comes over.

I thought about sending some off to our local foodbank but decided instead to save it for the pigs. They like it, a lot. Happy kale, happy pigs! Eventually we will let them loose in the garden area and that kale won't last long.

The first post!

I made this blog a year ago, or so, and promptly wrote nothing...

The idea is to write about my hobby, farming. I do have a day job that covers 99.9% of my income and farming covers the other .1%. Definitely a hobby. I like the gear, I like the animals, but mostly I enjoy eating good food and hearing how much people enjoy the food I raise.

So what do I raise? Among my friends and family we are mostly known for our pork. Once a year we raise a set of weaner pigs to raise to market weight and sell to friends and family. We keep half of one for ourselves. We get pigs in 10-12 pigs in August and keep them until January or February.  This schedule works well with my professional life as I am out of town often in the summer, but rarely leave town starting in September. We are in Western Washington State.

Let me give you a quick tour of our ranchette. Each picture will prompt a further blog entry!

The House (when getting a new roof earlier this summer)

The house, getting a new roof.

Late 70's ranch style. Been here 5 years and slowly updating.

The corn "field". 1/10th of an acre of Nothstine Dent. I am growing this to feed the pigs and see if it will supplement feed costs at all.


If it doesn't, it has been a good experience growing it!

The long view

 

Compared to a 6' ladder. This is from August 10.

Next up: The fleet

Tahoe and Trailer. The Tahoe is our substitute for a farm truck. It does a good job pulling this 16' trailer and whenever we need to haul the whole family and lots of gear. It used to be a daily driver, but now is hanging around for its specific tasks.



I built these removable sides for the trailer. Great for bulk materials or young pigs.

Trailer with sides, when new

The tractors:

The fleet

The Yanmar 2210d was bought used, years ago for brush hogging and general utility, The Farmall cub has been in my family since it was new in 1950. The lawnmower cuts grass... Also in this picture you see the grain bin and hoop house. More blogs in the future about all of the above. Lots of other little pieces of gear.

The pigs:

Picked up the latest batch of pigs today, which prompted a blog entry. Pick up from a local farmer who is super small scale as well, but WAY bigger than me.

New pigs in hoop house

The hoop house is new and look forward to see how I can make it work with my variation on deep litter bedding.

The pigs live in a fenced garden area. Great fertilizer!

Garden from early June

That's all for now. More details in the future with stories on how we have done this in the past and how we got where we are! I have lots of pictures saved up!