exploring new foods and growing new things

[Mortblanc]

One of the tenants of homesteading is that you run crops and livestock runs you.

With plants you do what you can do and as much as you can do and plan your season.

With livestock you better be there every morning, every night and have feed bucket in hand. They do not tolerate a day off for a trip to town or a quick three day weekend away from home.

And on a small holding, were there is not enough forage to keep them fed, you must feed most animals a generous and expensive ration. Even if they forage they will go through the planned food crops at an amazing rate and still need an additional feeding at fattening time.

With pigs, in my part of the world, you can not buy them and feed them to slaughter weight as cheap as you can buy pork from the butcher. And you do not have the hassle of restrictions on your time and keeping feed and all the problems lose feed around the homestead brings.

It is the same with eggs. My feed bill for the chickens was more then the cost of eggs! In my area eggs are $1 US for an 18 count carton. I can buy a month supply for $5 US and a month of chicken scratch was $20!

I find that living in a rural area I can be the customer of someone that raises chickens for sport or hobby and pay them by the dozen just enough to cover their feed costs. Same with pork. I can contract with a farmer for half a hog at slaughter and pay the going price per pound at that moment if I want to know exactly where my pork is coming from.

Fact is, I know my local butcher and know that he does not deal is suspect meat. What he offers is high quality and most of the time I buy what I need off the counter.

Goats?? I have stories about goats!

I once lost a heard of 100 into thin air. They found a crushed spot in the fence and they were gone, lock, stock, and barrel. A week latter I found them brousing a hillside 2 miles down the road. It took 5 or 6 trips with the stock trailer and half a day to get them home. The next day they were gone again! All it took was a taste of freedom and they were never happy inside my 800 acre plot again!

I think they sent scouts out daily to look for weak spots in the fences and the entire heard would escape through a spot that was only a couple of squares gone from the boxed wire.

Day and night, hot and cold, week after week with no let up from the demands of presence and attention, and after all that care and expense you wake one morning to find a fox, raccoon, coyote or the neighbor's dog has broken into the pen and killed the entire flock of chickens, or eaten the two new kids from your best nanny, or killed the shoats you have been feeding for two months and left them dead on the ground uneaten.

I am too old for that crap any more.

And never forget that when WW2 cranked up, SHTF one might say, you could grow all the vegetables you wished and eat until you were stuffed, but your livestock instantly became the managed property of the government. It was not yours to kill and eat as you saw fit. After you obtained permission to slaughter you critter, and it had to be slaughtered by an approved butcher, you got half, the government got half, and the butcher got the offal.

And you were graded on the efficiency of your performance in raising the stock. No bonuses for good performance but stiff penalties for not giving your stock the best of care.