Saving Ms. Daisy

The Big Onion and I both have "real" jobs that take us away from the farm during the day most days. The shorter days of winter often result in us not seeing our animals in the daylight for good stretches of time. Usually this is not a big deal, but on my first day off after a string of work days I saw this out in the field ...

Obvious evidence that Daisy, one of our younger ewes, had been having diarrhea. Not only did she have a dirty rear, but the she looked like she had melted. In the space of just a few days, all the weight had fallen right off her frame. Even her face looked boney and she was extremely weak. I gave her a B comp shot, a mouthful of probiotics, and got on the phone with the vet right away.

The vet suggested we run a fecal to find out exactly what was causing the diarrhea. I won't go into too much detail about how one acquires a fecal sample from a sheep. Suffice it to say gloves were involved.

The sample came back positive for coccidia and had surprisingly few worms. The vet suggested we start her on a regimin of antibiotics, propylene glycol,  and give her a dose of wormer, but he warned me that as weak as she was I shouldn't get my hopes of of saving her. They always said in vet school that "sheep are born lookin' for a place to die."

What follows was a harrowing few days of drenching this poor weak sheep with antibiotics, probiotics, vitamins, electrolytes and the propylene glycol. I also gave her double rations of grain to try and bring her weight up. I even made up a little song to the tune of Daisy Bell to try and keep both our sprits up and would sing to her while shoving various liquids down her throat...

          Daisy, Daisy, you have got runny poo

          I'm half crazy trying to save you

          It won't be an easy battle

          Because sheep are quite fragile

          But it'd be sweet

          If we could cheat

          The grim reaper of his due

I was hopeful, but tried to steel myself every time I went out into the fields to find that all our efforts had failed. Through the whole thing, she remained bright eyed and eager to gobble down any extra rations sent her way. 

It has now been a couple weeks since we first discovered the diarrhea, and I'm happy to report that Ms. Daisy is still with us. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to be putting on much weight, but at least she is feeling a lot stronger and is back to making pellets instead of cow pies.

Frosty morning

I know a lot of folks out there are getting hit with their first snow of the season this week. All these pictures of snow covered fields makes me very thankful for our southern climate. Yesterday, we got (probably) the closest thing we will see to white fields.

Major frost covering the pasture. 

This doesn't happen very often for us, so of course I had to pull out the camera for some shots of the icy grass before the morning sun came out and melted it all away.

I was a little concerned about how all the animals weathered the cold night when I looked up to see this chubby monkey running up to greet me...

Everyone was fine. Even the rabbit babies that were just born on Thanksgiving day were snuggled up in their nest boxes covered in their mother's fur.

~~~~~

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but we have been a little crazy processing and delivering turkeys for Thanksgiving. Thanks again to everyone who supported us and had a HighTail Farms turkey on their Thanksgiving table! The responses we have gotten so far have all been very positive.

I'm actually working on a post right now that gives a detailed step by step of how we process our birds so stay tuned!

Gwen and her Nanny

No time to make a real post, but I thought I'd share this cute little series of pics of Gwen and her Auntie Thea. These guys are the first of the farm animals to greet me in the morning. My first chore of the day is always to collect these two from their pen off the side of the backyard and escort them to the milk stand for breakfast. 

I have to say, it's a pretty great way to start the day. 

Persimmons

It's persimmon season and our few little trees in the back yard are producing lots of fruit! I've read that it's best to harvest the fruit before it becomes totally ripe to keep the birds from eating their way through your harvest. 

 So I went out with our big bushel tub (thanks mom!) and pair of kitchen scissor to lay claim to our fruit. I tried to harvest anything that no longer had any green coloring, but most of the fruit was still very hard.

 This one actually ripened on the tree without the birds or bugs finding it!

 And my clumsy self dropped the dang thing while trying to harvest it. This variety of persimmon gets extremely soft when ripe, so my perfect fruit got a bit smooshed. Oops!

 My day's take. 

We are still not sure what we are going to do with the fruit when it ripens. I'm not a huge fan of the flavor, but I am tempted to try my hand at making preserves. I've just read that they can make a good salsa and even cookies. Mostly likely though, these  guys will end up becoming wine under the Big Onion's expert hand.

Chicken update

We are STILL waiting for our "meat chickens" to get big enough to process. I finally lugged a scale out back, and they are weighing in at around 3.5lbs. Ideally, we'd like them to be at least 5lbs before processing, but we may have to settle for 'cornish game hen' sized birds. They are certainly growing faster than the small group of Buff Orpington girls that are being raised with them, but not nearly fast enough for my taste.

In order to encourage them to grow up big and strong, I recently gave them a special treat...

That's a tub of cracked corn and whole oats soaked in the leftover whey from my last batch of goat cheese. I normally save this special treat for the ducks, but the young chickens loved the change of pace.

As a side note, I cannot get over how pretty these chickens turned out. We are contemplating keeping a couple of this batch as egg layers, but choosing our keepers is gonna be tough.

We also just hatched out another, smaller batch of chicks. We are hoping these guys will perform a little better since they were all fathered by our giant, super awesome rooster, Fernando. You can see his strong genes in how many little white chicks we got this time. 

Raw Pet Food

All of the dogs and cats around here are fed an exclusively raw diet. It's something I have been doing for many, many years and something I feel very strongly about. When we got the farm, one of the goals was to be able to feed our animals from our own livestock. We quickly discovered that just like people are looking for better quality meat for themselves, there was a demand for local, properly raised meat for pet food. 

 

One of our best and most reliable sources of income has been making these ground mixes of meat, organs, and bone. Both cats and dogs seem to love them, and their owners love have a reliable source of clean and quality meat.

I work in a holistic vet's office so we have also had success selling the meat through my office. 

Hunter has been raised eating raw meat from the day he came to the farm. Now he's getting pretty good at catching his own version of a raw diet!

Hay Day

Next to our farm is a big, huge open field that we recently found out our neighbor uses for growing horse hay. He told us next time we saw him cutting to just come on over. Well, I was out doing chores last weekend when I saw this...

Hey, it's hay!

I finished up my morning chores and grabbed the Big Onion, and we hot-footed it over to the neighbor's place to get us some quality goat foods.

Watching all the giant farm machinery work was a real treat for us former city slickers. That's the baler working in the background to compress the already cut and raked hay into bales.

This is a star wheel rake and it's used for raking the hay into neat rows so the baler can do its job. I think it's just really cool looking.

We were super excited to have a source of hay so close to home. We grabbed 3 bales and literally tossed them over the fence into our yard. Not to mention we got those 3 bales for under $10. A real steal considering the local TSC is asking $9.50 PER BALE!

While we were over, our neighbors showed us something really cool....

They have tortoises! 

They said this handsome dude is over 40 years old!

They also brought us inside to show us all the babies that they incubated and hatch. How cool is that!

During our tour, the neighbor asked if we raised any banties. When we said we had few silkies, she asked if we would like to take this tiny little bantam chicken. This girl is actually full grown. She had gone broody on a nest of unfertilized eggs, and our neighbor was worried because she was getting picked on by her flock of full sized chickens. This poor little gal didn't stand a chance against those giant birds

We moved her in with the silkies (Reggie, Bianca, and Bebe) and even though she smaller than them, I think this feisty chick will hold her own. It took her a little while to get over being moved off her eggs, but she is doing great now.

We still need a name for this gal. Any suggestions?