The Morning Count

Every Morning I go around my homestead and see who lived through the night and who was born or hatched. This time I taped it for your enjoyment. hawks owls, skunks coons, stray dogs , stray cats, and disease can steal away small animal livestock at any moment, the constant danger of the highway is devastating to a few members of the farm yearly. The animal population here varries from 35-100 through the year.


The farm population changes daily and many of my farms residents are old friends and some are new friends, some are very tame and come right up to you and some are wild and run away.

This farm is far from sustainable without the constant inflow of money from my real job, but that is just because I am not a fulltime farmer. I am still learning and making mistakes and loving the journey.
I'll save worrying about profits and losses for when I am retired and supplementing my meager income with farm earnings.
The healthy food , the exercise, and the outdoors will add years to my life and life to my years if i am lucky.
I don,t smoke don't drink and haven't any illicit habits so the expense of feed and medicine for my animals is  lite compared to the expense of these aforementioned vices.

In a complete cost benefit analysis physiological benefits of the homestead are right up there with the ample fertilizer produced and the landscaping performed by the free range animals. I mowed my grass four times last year - the chickens and geese did the rest.

Key to my ideas of farming is substatial capital investment in buildings fences . I believe in the idea of buildng it once and building it right, Horse High,  Bull Strong, and Goat Tight. I dont want to have to rebuild something in my lifetime wether it be a henhouse or a hog pen. I do offer some exceptions to this in that I believe in temporary cheap but functional housing for pastured poultry and when building a better  replacement . Theodore Roosevelt said

Do what you can with  what you have and do it now.