Do you belong?

Do you belong?

Build your homesteading confidence, competence, and communitIy.  Tribe+ IS your opportunity for ongoing skill training, consulting with an experienced farmer (honestly, do you really want to make all of our mistakes or learn from someone who’s done it already??), discounts on so many things like tools and equipment, books, classes, and more, and a whole lot of resources.

Currently you can up your “belong” with community building when you join the LIVE book club discussions and the LIVE community Q&A/consulting zoom calls.

Video courses include

  • homestead “how to build a fence,
  • chicken, duck, and turkey processing,
  • rabbit processing,
  • pig castration,
  • how to build a chicken tractor and pastured poultry starter,
  • homestead cheese making,
  • how to make a biochar retort
  • and more and more as we’re constantly adding new courses.

Discounts include exclusive discount codes for

  • LEM meat processing and equipment
  • Roots and Harvest: food preservation equipment and supplies
  • Ark Seed Kits for heirloom seeds
  • Homestead Hog Harvest video course
  • Chelsea Green book company
  • Hisea boots (think “Muck” boots only better)
  • Berkey Water Filters
  • Field and Forest (mushrooms) and Sorelle (trees)

PLUS there are workshop recordings from on farm workshops, recommended reading by subjects, recipes for your farm fresh food,

So much value when you belong to the Tribe. But not just the tribe: belong to the Tribe+. 

 

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I’m sitting here listening to the chicks hatching in the incubator. They’re so lively so quick! We’ve got meat chicks in the brooder already, too. Spring is here!

New to chickens, or looking to improve what you’re doing?

I was talking this week with a friend who’s raised chickens for years very successfully. They’re beautiful birds. AND, she uses a good deal of Corid every spring when she moves them from the brooder to the chicken tractors in the yard. Why?

Coccidia.

It’s the bane of all farmers sooner of later. The coddicia protozoa is a little parasitic being that lives in the soil inderterminately (a.k.a. nearly forever) and can wreak havoc on young animals intestines. We’ve had in goats and chickens so far. The only cure known to conventional ag is a product called Corid that acts like a wormer medicine to get the animal through it’s vulnerable stage.

What conventional ag and my very experienced friend don’t know about is BIOCHAR

We replaced gallons of Corid with a bit of biochar sprinkled on the chickens’ feed daily. Biochar is like activated charcoal and helps bind the protozoa and escort it to the exit. Sometimes we innoculate it with compost and it unloads beneficial bacterias at the same time. For our naturally immune deficient meat birds, it also shaves 1-2 weeks off our finishing time. Who doesn’t want that?? My friend, for one, has signed up.

activated charcoal, tribe day

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Bio Char

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DIY meat processing, ready or not! We haven't always been polished and pretty like we are now. In fact, I picked this video so you can look at where we were working 3 years ago. Those beef were Calvin and Hobbes, and it was hard to harvest those characters. Mark was...

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Homestead Dairy Cow: calf management

A homestead dairy cow starts as a calf.

Twice, actually.  She’s a calf when she’s born, and she doesn’t really become a dairy cow until she has a calf.

Just recently we’ve been talking a lot on our social media about calves because we have one, and we tend to talk about what’s current for us.  Having a calf is magical, but it isn’t often a Walt Disney moment on the farm.  We work with nature, but sometimes nature asks us to lend a hand.

The case of our calf Belle is one such time. Here’s how she started:

We couldn’t leave poor Belle with her mom or she’d have turned into a calf-cicle. As it was her ears did get frostbit a bit.  By the time we got her warmed up and sturdy it was 48 hours later and neither she nor her mom, CeCe, cared about each other.  It sounds cold, but it’s the truth in animal world. Belle was bonded to us and CeCe was happy to chew her cud and get her grain at milking time.  Some in social media world considered this cruel, but had we not intervened and cared for Belle she would be dead instead of entertaining.  Farming has harsh realities sometimes and that’s one of them.

This video brings up another factor in our decision:

How to raise a dairy calf:

dairy cow, grass fed, raw milk

One is to do what we did: pull the calf immediately or within a few days of birth.  We usually let the calf stay with the mom for a couple of days and get her colostrum. In this case it wasn’t possible, so we milked the mom within a few hours of calving.  This did a lot to boost her milk production and will set her production level higher throughout her entire lactation. A dairy cow is meant to give more milk than a calf needs to drink. That’s by design. So she is able to fulfill her mission in life at a higher plane this way.  The other benefit is that there is minimal separation stress between mom and baby.  The baby bonds with her caretakers. Mom goes on as she always has, with the added benefit of treats at milking time. The calf gets fed two or three times a day (honestly, we’re very generous because we can be), preferably her own mom’s milk, until weaning time.  We handle her a lot in this time and work to train her to be as manageable as can be.

The other way is to “share” where the calf gets the cow 12 hours, and the farmer gets the other 12. In this way the farmer doesn’t have to feed the calf but will milk thedairy cow, raw milk, herd share cow once a day and use that “share.” To do this, you need a good way to move and handle the calf to keep it from it’s mom for that part of the rotation. This does gentle and train the calf and works well for those with the facility to do it.  It can work out great, but if you can’t separate the calf it can be a nightmare.  We don’t have the facilities to do that.

The one time we “shared” and left the calf on full time and just took the left overs, we found we had to separate him at 4 weeks old. He was at least 150-175 pounds and living on 5 gallons of milk a day.  He wasn’t used to eating hay, taking his nourishment any other way, or being separated from mom.  His digestive system wasn’t ready to be off milk, or to digest much else. Yet, he was not used to us and refused to take a bottle or drink from a bucket.  He made it and was a beautiful steer in the end, but he had a rough go his first year because of the abrupt and early weaning.

 

Want to learn more about calves and keeping a homestead dairy cow?

  1. Check out this playlist on the Baker’s Green Acres youtube channel: Homestead Dairy Cow Series
  2. Check out this playlist on the The Anyone Can Farm Experience youtube channel: Grassfed Beef and Milking Dairy Cows
  3. Join the Tribe+ and come to the biweekly consulting Q&A calls with Mark. You get to ask your questions and learn from Mark and the other members.  It’s a golden opportunity you won’t find anywhere else.  Plus you can get some great discounts with companies to help your venture, from books from Chelsea Green Publisher to equiment and supplies from LEM and Roots and Harvest to heirloom seeds from Ark Seed Kits. Grow in your confidence and competence with a community.
dairy cow, herd share, raw milk, grassfed dairy

All About…Brining

 

 

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Brining, or soaking food in heavily salted water, is a very old method for preserving and curing foods. The meat is submerged, for hours or days, depending on its weight, in a salt solution, and during this time osmosis occurs, increasing the amount of liquid inside the meat’s cells. The result is a juicier, more flavorful piece of meat. While brine is simply a mixture of water and salt, most brines are balanced by the addition of sugar and enhanced with herbs and spices.

Use a nonreactive container for brining, such as glass or stainless steel bowl or even a plastic bucket. The container must be large enough to submerge the odd bit completely in the brining solution, but small enough to fit in your refrigerator. Try to find one that is just wide enough to hold the meat–it the meat fits snugly in the container, you don’t have to add as much brine.

To estimate how much brine to make, place the odd bit you want to brine in the container and pour over enough cold water to cover. Remove the odd bit, then pour the water into a measuring jug. You can brine several odd bits in the same brine.

Your brining solution must be cold before you pour it over the meat, and you may have to weigh down the meat with a plate and a weight so it’s totally submerged. (I’ve found plastic containers filled with water or stones work well as weights.)

Cover the container with plastic and refrigerate for:
º 1/2 to 1 day for pork or lamb tongues
º 2 days for pig’s ears and tails
º 2 to 3 days for calf’s or beef tongue
º 2 to 3 days for split pig’s head and feet

When you remove the meat from the brine, rinse the meat well under cold water and discard the brine.

 

The information and recipe, contained within, is excerpted from Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan and can be purchased here.