Taking inventory of our hay

It is time to take inventory on our hay, both the square bales stored in the hayloft in the barn and the round bales under the tarpaulin by the gate.  This year we purchased 100 square bales and 8 round bales for our four cows.  Most importantly, I want to ensure that we have enough hay to last for the remainder of the winter.  I also want to have a gauge to use for purchasing hay next year.

I checked online and found that for our area, the last frost date is somewhere between Feb 21 and Feb 29th, so that sort of gives me a remaining time frame that I'm looking to use good quantities of hay before the Spring grass comes in.  It has been a mild winter so far.  I can only recall two days in which I've seen ice in the water troughs.  I'll keep that in mind when estimating hay usage in future years and ensure I have some "wiggle room" for normal or colder winters.  A cow, especially a cow in milk, needs to eat more hay or roughage to give her calories for producing heat.  If you don't have adequate feed/hay, the cow robs from her stores of body fat to create energy for warmth.  You don't want that!

Let's walk out to the barn and take inventory.  As I walk out there, I see three laying hens, scratching around in the barn for bits of grain or bugs.  This picture shows the diversity of laying breeds we have.  From left to right, we have the creamy white colored chicken that is an Aracauna.  She lays blue and green eggs.  To the right of her is a Rhode Island Red.  She is a prolific layer of brown eggs. To the right of her and in the foreground is a Barred Rock hen and she lays brown eggs and is a good dual purpose bird, providing both eggs and meat.  You can also see the ladder that leads us up into the loft.


cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck...

This loft used to be filled with 100 bales of hay.   You might recall from this earlier blog post when we put it up here:  The Hay is in the Barn  You can see the hole in the floor.  That is where the ladder leads up to the loft we're standing in.  

Hay Remaining in the loft

The hay is stacked three rows across and four rows high, giving you 12 bales per section.  As I look down the loft at the remaining hay and count, I can tell that we have 51 square bales left.  This is some high quality Bermuda hay that a gentleman down the road grows.  Most people buy it from him for their horses.  It must be some good stuff, because in the barn at the livestock show in Lake Charles, animals were foregoing the hay in their hay socks and were trying to eat our girls' hay.


This is some fancy 'ciphering'.

The two round bales we have left out will last about a week per bale once I roll them out and put a hay ring around it before Daisy and Rosie completely devour the round bale and I have to go out and remove the plastic twine.  Cows have been known to eat it or get it wrapped around their legs and sometimes it can can cause death.  So we have about a 14 day supply of hay from the two round bales.


Two round bales left (covered with a tarpaulin to keep out of the weather)

As a rule of thumb, I've read that a lactating cow will eat somewhere between 2 and 2.5 pounds of hay per every 100 pounds of body weight.  It is important to note that this is just for maintenance - not growth, so you'd look at this as the minimum.  Our cows weigh approximately 800 pounds, so that is about 16 - 20 pounds of hay per cow.  As far as the square bales, with 51 left we have roughly a 34 day day supply of hay.  We'll make it with no problem until the lush Spring grass comes in.  While we're at it, we might as well feed Stryker and Magnolia Mae some hay. 

Eat it up!



Bucket of Chicken

Good ole Colonel Sanders



No, not this bucket of chicken.  The night before last I read on the Internet (and we will test this theory) that a 6 pound live weight Cornish Cross meat chicken will dress out a 4 pound carcass.  What that means is that if you weigh a live 6 pound bird, once you clean him, you'll actually lose 2 pounds of feathers, blood, guts, feet, and head.  You'll be left with 4 pounds of meat and bone.  Actually, it will be a tad more since we save the heart, liver and gizzard.  Once we clean the birds and weigh them, we'll see if the theory holds true and report back.

I thought of several different ways to weigh a chicken: 

• I was going to bring our bathroom scale out to the patio and do a gross and tare calculation - meaning, I'd step on the scale and weigh myself (tare weight).  Then I'd grab the bird and weigh myself holding the chicken (gross weight).  Subtracting the two weights would leave you with the actual weight of the live bird.
• Or I would try to figure out how to make the chicken get on the scale and stand still enough for the digital scale to pick up an accurate reading.  That would be kind of fun, but not a good idea.
• Finally, I decided to weigh the bird on the kitchen scale in a bucket after zeroing the scale with the bucket on it.  Easy?  Yes!

First, I zeroed the scale.  I placed the bucket on the scale and there is a brass adjustment dial that you can turn that will bring the scale to zero.

Bringing the reading to Zero.

Then I retrieved the chicken and put him in the bucket.  Not exactly a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket from Colonel Sanders, is it?


Bucket 'O Chicken



I placed the old boy on the scale.  Yes, I'll definitely clean the bucket well before using it again in the laundry room!

The Biggest Loser - Farm Edition?

Let's take a closer look.


Just shy of 5 1/2 pounds

So the meat bird tips the scale at a little under 5 1/2 pounds.  Using the 'rule of thumb' pointed out in the opening paragraph, we'd have a carcass weight of a little under 4 pounds this Saturday.  We generally like a 4 - 5 pound chicken, so I checked with the boss and she said, "Let's wait until next weekend."  Yes ma'am.  So we'll firm up the calendar for a February 9th butcher date.

A lot of the information on Cornish Cross Chickens tell you that they can be butchered at 8 weeks.  Ours will go an additional week.  Here's the primary reason (I think) the birds are stalled by a week.  Most poultry growing guides tell you to start off feeding a Chick Starter ration that is between 21 - 24% protein and keep them on it for 2 - 3 weeks.  The chick starter ration that we can get locally is medicated.  Since we're eating these guys, we don't do medicated feeds as we don't want any medicine, antibiotics, or hormones in our food.  So we start off with the 18% Chick Grower ration for them from day one.  We've found that it normally delays maturity (size) by one week.

That's okay with us.  We've had a busy week at the Southwest Louisiana District Livestock show (more on that later!) and this will give us an extra week to sharpen the knives and get everything ready for "la boucherie."

“Hard work beats all the tonics and vitamins in the world.”  Colonel Harlan Sanders, Founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken

From Sunrise to Sunset

Time marches on, doesn't it?  We're already at the end of January!  Since we're past the winter solstice which was on December 21st (the shortest day of the year), each day is getting a little longer.  In fact, I checked the Farmer's Almanac and right now each day the sun is setting 1 minute later than it did on the previous day.  That is nice and will allow me to get some things done in the afternoons once I return home from work.

I took a few pictures of the sun rising and setting on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  This is one right across the road from us where you can see a nice pink glow where the sun is coming up in the eastern horizon amidst a cloud-filled sky.

Sunrise in cloudy skies

I've zoomed in a bit and the camera's auto focus did not cooperate, but I think you can make out what (or who) I was trying to zoom in on.  Why it's Mr. Ed, our neighbor's pretty horse!  I'm not sure what his real name is, but we call him Mr. Ed, although we've never heard him talk.  Sometimes we walk down the road and pull handfuls of clover to feed Mr. Ed and rub his nose and he seems to appreciate it.  Seeing the silhouette of a horse against the backdrop of a pretty sunrise with roosters crowing in the background, makes me appreciate rural America and the simplicity and authenticity of country living.  I enjoy watching a sunrise.


Mr. Ed welcoming a new day

We have a full agenda this week with the Southwest Louisiana District Livestock Shows in Lake Charles, work, school along with a multitude of things to get done on the farm:

• My tomato seedlings all have their first true leaves and so it is time to separate them, re-label them and re-pot them into larger containers.  Then I'll spray some fish emulsion on them. 
• I also need to weigh the meat birds.  I read last night that a 6 pound live weight bird will yield a carcass weighing 4 pounds, so tonight I'm going to put a bird on the scale to determine if this Saturday is Butchering Day. 
• Then I need to push the chicken tractor with the little meat birds one length up to fresh grass and the same with the pen with the big meat birds in it. 
• We have some weather blowing through tonight, so I need to secure the blue tarp over the large meat bird pen.  At this age (7 weeks), they can handle getting wet and they can handle getting cold - they just don't do well being wet AND cold at the same time.

There's something peaceful about a sunset.  It is relaxing and beautiful to watch.  Here is a shot of the sun setting in the western skies over Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  The animals all go through their evening routines with the chickens assembling at their respective roosting places in the chicken tractors and the cows gathering around for us to toss them some hay.

Announcing the end of another day

Psalm 113:3
From the rising of the sun to its setting
         The name of the LORD is to be praised.

Crab Stew for supper

With chicken butchering day quickly approaching, I took a peek in the freezer to try to see what we can eat or consolidate to the other freezer to make room for 47 cut up chickens soon to be occupying that freezer space.  I happened to see two gallon freezer bags of crabs in there.  Hmmmm...  The crabs were leftover from a crab boil after our crabbing trip that I posted about back in September.  If you weren't following us back then, you can catch up here:

http://ourmakersacresfamilyfarm.blogspot.com/2012/09/crabs-in-bucket.html

After looking at the bags of crabs, the boys and I decided to make a crab stew.  I got the recipe from here: CookingLouisiana.com Crab Stew Recipe I looked over the list of ingredients and we had a lot of it fresh in the garden or items that we had on hand.  Here is a list of the ingredients we'll use:

• 6 Whole Crabs  (caught back in September in Johnson Bayou, Louisiana)
• 1 1/2  cups chopped onion
• 1 cup chopped bell pepper (a mix of green and chocolate bell peppers from the garden)
• 1 cup chopped celery
• 3/4 cup chopped green onions (fresh from the garden)
• 1/3 cup chopped parsley (fresh from the garden)
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (homemade from our criolla sella peppers)
• 1 tsp chopped garlic
• 1/2 tsp creole seasoning
• 5 drops liquid crab boil
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 slices of lemon
• salt and pepper

Let's get started.  First we prepped all of the vegetables, chopping them into the quantities that the recipe called for.  Below I have the onions done and I'm working on the bell peppers.


Chopping vegetables

Now we have everything prepped and ready.  If you're looking at the cutting board below like a clock, I'll explain the ingredients.  Starting at 12 o'clock we have a cup of chopped bell pepper.  I used both green and chocolate bell peppers.  At 1 o'clock I have a cup and a half of yellow onion.  At 5 o'clock I have two big slices of lemons that were grown locally by a co-worker friend of mine.  At 6, I have chopped 1/3 cup of fragrant parsley.  At 9 we have 3/4 cups of green onions.  At 11, a cup of diced up celery.  Finally, at 11:30 a teaspoon (okay, maybe a tad more) of chopped garlic.


Prepped ingredients

The recipe calls for 6 whole crabs, but I'm putting a few more.  We'll eat them all - trust me.

Boiled crabs that we had frozen to use at a later date

And finally, before we start turning up the heat, we have the spices: Kosher salt and coarse black pepper, liquid crab boil, bay leaves, Creole Seasoning and cayenne pepper.  Instead of the cayenne, we used some homemade criolla sella peppers that we had dried and ground into pepper.  It has a nice, hot, smoky taste.

Spice it up

As almost any Cajun recipe begins... "First you make a roux."  To do this add a 1/4 cup of flour to 1/8 cup of butter in a stock pot, turn up the heat and stir, and stir and stir.


Making the roux

After stirring constantly, your roux will turn a nice chocolate brown...


Almost there...  (be patient)

Now add all of your chopped onions and saute for 10 minutes.


Saute the onions in your roux and keep stirring

 Then go ahead and add your garlic, celery and bell peppers and saute for another 15 minutes while stirring.  The aroma is quite nice in the kitchen right now!  This is sometimes called the holy trinity of Cajun cooking.

Adding the rest of the vegetables.

Increase the heat and slowly add water until it reaches a 'stew-like' consistency while bringing it to a boil.

Adding water

This looks about like the consistency we're shooting for.  Kinda hard to see through the steam, though.


The stew is beginning to take shape

Now we'll add the kosher salt, black pepper, Creole seasoning, bay leaves, 5 or 6 drops of liquid crab boil, lemon juice and criolla sella ground pepper.

Adding the seasonings

Finally, you'll add the crabs by just adding them to the pot and stirring them in, cooking for 15 - 25 minutes.  The aroma in the kitchen has intensified, you might say. 


Looking good!

Now turn your heat low and add in your chopped green onions and parsley to the pot and stir it all up.  Cover the pot and simmer for 10 minutes or so, while you put a pot of rice on and get the plates ready and milk poured.

Oh yeah!

Now is the time to load up a plate, say grace, and enjoy a supper of crab stew.  Man, was it good!  Don't forget to get a plate to put in the middle of the table to put all the crab shells in.  This is not really a dish to eat while maintaining good etiquette.  The boys and I wolfed this down and lined up by the pot for seconds.  (The only negative was I steamed some fresh broccoli from the garden as a side and forgot about it and overcooked it.  Oh well, it was still good, but the colors weren't as vibrant green as I like.)

A nice plate of deliciousness!

Just as we were finishing up the crab stew, a cinnamony smell wafted across the kitchen and drew us to the oven where Russ had baked an Apple Crisp dessert for us to partake of.


Apple Crisp Dessert

Now all I need is a nap!

The Birds & the Bees

One of the things about living on a homestead farm with animals is that the opportunity arises (many times, in fact) to have "the big talk" with children about the birds and the bees.  No one is really sure of the origins of that phrase.  Many think that because bees carry pollen and deposit it in flowers, that it is a good example of male fertilization.  Likewise, birds laying eggs is an example of female ovulation.  Who knows?  What I do know is that that discussion can be a difficult one.  I actually bought a book called "Point Man" by Steve Farrar that has a chapter devoted to How to have the talk.  I think it is well done and helped me & Tricia to have "the talk" with our oldest kids.

On the farm, however, reproduction is an everyday fact of life - a normal occurrence that gives "the talk" a natural context.  As a result discussions (about what the animals are doing out in the pasture) can be approached in a matter of fact manner that doesn't need to be couched in a nervous, uncomfortable moment and can be easily transitioned from a talk about animals to one about humans. 

Speaking of that topic, two nights ago, Stryker, our Jersey bull, was moo-ing and moo-ing.  This makes me a little nervous as we do have neighbors and I'd like to stay on speaking terms with them.  I got up out of bed and went and gave him some hay, thinking that perhaps he was hungry.  He ate and all the noise subsided and I went back to bed.

Well, I was awakened right around dawn by more moo-ing and when I went to milk Daisy and Rosie, I discovered that Stryker had knocked down the fence and all four cows were together.  Fortunately, Maggie and Stryker hadn't gotten the milk yet, so I put the fence back up and put Stryker and Maggie back in their paddock.  The reason Stryker knocked the fence down was because Rosie had come back in heat and old Stryker was mighty interested.  We don't know for sure if Stryker bred Rosie, but the probability is pretty high.  We'll know for sure in about 21 - 24 days.

We can't talk about the "birds and the bees" without actually talking about birds and bees, can we?  Something looks odd in this picture, I think.  The Good Book tells us that we shouldn't let the sun go down on our anger...


Looks like someone owes someone an apology.  They're sleeping on opposite sides of the bed and won't even look at one another!

In the garden the other day, the bees were really buzzing around the bok choy that is flowering.  I'm letting it go to seed so that I can capture and save the seeds.  Anyway here are some cool shots of some honeybees doing their job of pollination.

A nice close-up shot!


Honeybee on a bok choy flower



Jefferson Davis Parish Livestock Show 2013

Russ shows 3 of our Jersey Dairy cows (Daisy, Rosie and Maggie) and this past week was the livestock show for our parish.  We had groomed the animals and they seemed to be in pretty good form.  Dairy animals show at the same time as the Beef Cattle.  Pigs, goats, sheep and chickens had already shown by the time we arrived.

We originally got involved in Dairy because we wanted the benefits of drinking raw milk.  We posted about the milking process at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm earlier.  If you missed it, check out this link for a step by step process of getting the milk from the udder to our glass: http://ourmakersacresfamilyfarm.blogspot.com/2012/07/got-milk-we-do.html

Here are a few photos from the show.  In the shot below, Russ is exhibiting in the Senior Dairy Showman competition.  In this competition, the judge is really not judging the animal, he's judging how well the exhibitor handles his or her animal.


Russ with Daisy, his gentle Showmanship cow

When you show Dairy cows, you want them to be in milk.  The judge wants to see the cow's bag in 'bloom,' so what you do is skip one milking to make the udder big and tight.  As you can tell, Rosie is uncomfortably full and ready to be milked.  She is moo-ing loudly.  I don't understand the Jersey cow dialect, but I have a pretty good idea of what she's trying to say. 

Milk me, please!

Russ won Champion Senior Showman and also won first in his class with both Rosie and Daisy in the purebred Jersey Division, so he had to show both cows for the Grand Champion in the class.  Benjamin showed Daisy, while Russ showed Rosie.  It was Benjamin's first time to show and I think he did a fantastic job.

Benjamin and Russ with Daisy and Rosie



Below is a picture of the entire class of showmen in the Jersey Grand Champion determination.

Magnolia won Reserve champion in the Jersey heifer division.  She's a nice looking calf, but the judge said that she was 'over-conditioned.'  That is a nice way of saying she's too fat.  I've got to take the blame for this.  I was always raised around beef cattle.  When you see ribs or bones on beef cattle, it's not good.  Not so, for dairy animals.  You want all energy to go toward milk production, not putting meat on their frame.  It is hard for me to see ribs and not want to give them more hay!


Russ and Magnolia

Russ won champion in his class with Rosie.  She is a nice looking milk cow.

Russ & Rosie



Russ and Rosie, Grand Champion Jersey Cow!

The Parish Livestock Show was over and we loaded the girls back on the trailer to bring them home.  I think they were happy to be heading back to the familiarity of home.


Are we there yet?

We laid Russ' ribbons all out on the table to view his awards.  Very nice!



Russ' stash

On Saturday morning, there was an awards banquet in which he picked up his additional awards - a nice plaque for winning Grand Champion Jersey Cow (Rosie) and a humungous belt buckle for winning Champion Senior Dairy Showman with Daisy.


Awards

Here is a zoomed in shot of Russ' belt buckle.  It has lots of detail on it and it is as big as the hubcaps on a '56 Buick!!!



Bigger than a hubcap on a '56 Buick!


Next week is the District Livestock Show in Lake Charles.  We'll do the same thing there, only the district show has livestock from a number of different parishes participating.  We will pull out the clippers again and give them another touch-up shave prior to the District Show.

Meat chickens at 7 weeks old

Our meat birds are now seven weeks old.  As you can see in the photo diary below, they have grown pretty quickly in 49 days.  We normally butcher them somewhere between 8 and 9 weeks of age.  We're in the middle of the Livestock Shows now and that keeps us on the go, but we'll either have butchering day for our 47 birds either next weekend or the one that follows.

We'll need to start planning by purchasing gallon size Ziploc bags, sharpening the knives, making sure the butane bottle is full and making ice.  There is a lot of preparation that takes place prior to butchering day.  It is hard work, but we've got a pretty good process in place and try to get better and more efficient each time.  After we butcher, we'll show our average weight, our total costs and report bird loss (so far 3 lost to a sudden rainstorm) to give an average cost per pound for our pastured, antibiotic-free, hormone-free poultry.

You can see for yourself the stages of growth of the Cornish Cross Meat bird: 

One day old baby Cornish Cross Chick

One week old chick sporting new white wing feathers

 

Two week old chick in that uncomfortable adolescent stage



Three week old chick putting on weight



Four week old Cornish Cross chicken

 

5 weeks old



6 week old Cornish Cross Meat Bird

I should have weighed him tonight to show you his weight at this point.  We feed the 18% protein chick grower as well as grass that they can eat at will out on the pasture.  You can feed them the higher percent protein ration and keep feed in front of them 24/7, but we're not shooting for a 12 pound chicken.  These birds can get to be super-sized monsters.  We normally butcher a bird weighting between 4 and 5 pounds as we find it to be a nice size for our family.

Meat bird at 7 weeks old

One to two weeks to go...