Cleaning up the woods with beef power
I went to a silvopasture school put on by the extension service a few months ago. While there the property owner showed us a small area they were working on for a silvopasture test. She apologized that her prepared area wasn’t big enough but “it took so much work clearing” that she wasn’t able to do more with her available labor. Since she had cattle on her farm, I suggested that she bring her cows into her areas she wanted to clear. It would give them a day out of the sun, give them something to eat, and get all the undergrowth cleared out. Then she could simply do the chainsaw work on the trees she wanted to remove which wasn’t bad for her since her trees were pretty young and small.
Behind our house we have about 5 acres of woods. Its one of the areas of the farm where we do not run our cows and the woods show it. Brambles, undergrowth, etc. clog up all the edges. A few weeks ago I was looking at this area and thinking I need to get this cleared. Boy, that sure is going to take a lot of work. Then my own advice hit me, let the cows do it.
The above pictures are the before pictures, taken just minutes before we turned the cows in.
The picture above is where the cows entered the woods when we moved them. You can see the before shot in the video below.
We left the cows in the woods for about 4 days. They lost some body condition because we left them in an extra day to get them to clear all that they could. Leaving them that extra day didn’t do them any favors but did result in some additional small areas being better cleaned.
The cows really like being in the woods. The crash around, rub on trees, and generally behave like kindergarteners turned loose on the play ground as you can see in the video. We watered via water hoses dragged from individual houses and wired the electric fence with our normal temporary electric wiring. The only escapes we had were the normal escapes of young calves which walk right under the wire and go explore. We received a few distressed calls from neighbors that “we had cows out!” Once we determined that is was just calves, everything calmed down and no action was needed.
We are going to run another paddock of woods, then hit our back pasture for a few days. The back pasture isn’t part of our normal rotation and it’s a decent hike from the main pastures to the back pasture. Running the cows through the woods cleans things up plus it means that we have a short walk to the back pasture. After the back pasture, we’ll likely run one more paddock of woods and then move the cows back to their normal rotation in the main pasture. Next summer I’ll definitely do this again as the cows enjoyed it, the kids enjoyed having the cows behind their houses, and the woods look much better now.
I’m not on Pinterest. I swear. But if I was, I’d have found this project.
Here is a little project that looks easy and only uses old shirts and a sewing machine. Since I’ve lost over 50 pounds, I have tons of old t-shirts that I don’t wear anymore and are going to Goodwill. Plus I have two daughters who don’t know how to sew yet. Looks like I just found a project that could solve all those problems at once. And unlike the basket I have sitting on top of the counter right now, these things can be stored very easily.
Hows that for camouflage?
While we were processing the milk this morning I noticed this on my kitchen counter.
This is severely zoomed in, making this moth much more visible. From 2 feet away he was invisible even under the bright lights we were using as we processed our milk.
Most of our animal adventure pics come from outside. Sometimes the adventure follows us home. Have a great weekend everyone. We are getting pretty short on beef. If you haven’t put your order in yet, better get with me soon.
Protecting your WordPress site from hackers using free plugins
Since beginning our farm website I’ve relied on some basic best practices and the little fish, big pond theory of security. The theory being, what could someone possibly want with a little farm website when there are so many bigger, better sites out there that would make better hacking targets.
My first introduction to unwanted outsiders was when I started getting comments on my posts from spammers. We had 25 people a day hitting the site but I’d have 50 comments in one day, all spam. Some quick research revealed that Akismet was the preferred plugin for WordPress to control the spam and it has worked flawlessly since day one. Finding that there was such a problem, and that the solution was so simple was a wakeup call to me that I had to be more informed about WordPress. I did a search of WordPress podcasts and after trying out several I settled onto Kim Doyal, The WordPress Chick. I listen to her podcasts along with my normal rotation of other podcasts and try to pick up tips on how to run our farm website. Recently Kim ran through some of her favorite plugins and she recommended Brute Protect to protect your website against brute force attempts to hack you administrator account. Now I felt like my password was pretty secure and I hadn’t had any problems with being hacked so I’m probably ok. But Kim really recommend we protect ourselves so I decided to install Brute Protect just to be safe. The way Brute Protect works is it’s a collective group of sites that are protected. Whenever one site is hacked or attempted to be hacked, the IP address of the hacker is recorded and all the other sites are automatically updated with that IP address. If that IP address then tries to access another WordPress site, Brute Protect block their ability to log in, even if they correctly have the password. Sounds good. I didn’t need it, but it was a free plugin and what could it hurt. I installed Brute protect earlier this week. Today I pull up my dashboard and see this.
As you can see, Brute Protect has 101,475 WordPress websites in the network. What’s especially interesting is that already this week it has stopped 11 “attacks” on our website. I don’t know what constitutes an attack but I have to assume that at a minimum someone from a blocked IP address tried to access the website. Someone from a blocked IP address isn’t stopping by to buy beef so as far as I’m concerned this plugin is gold. If you are on WordPress, Brute Protect should be on your website.
Forget the debate over GMO crops. Chuck Norris says they are bad.
Sad news on loosing a calf. #15, Love, had a still born calf today.
Today Love, #15, had her new calf, a little female. Unfortunately, the calf was still-born. She was also undersized which means she hadn’t been developing normally. Normally I’d be worried what could have caused this, but Love is one of the cows that had had issues with bloat earlier this year. Love was treated by the vet along with #28. Both of them received some pretty serious medicine along with the usual manual work. After those two, we started treating them ourselves so I’m confident we won’t have any more issues. Well, I’m confident because they next two cows weren’t cows at all, but steers. Anyway, we don’t use near the medicines that the vet uses so ours shouldn’t have these issues. Nevertheless Love has lost her calf as a result of bloat and it’s a sad day on the farm today.
It’ll be sad this fall as well because Love is a really nice cow and she’ll be getting on the trailer with our other bloat cows to go to the sale barn. To quote another cattleman, “Love your children, forgive your enemies. Do neither for your cows.” That means when a cow has issues in your operation, you cull early and often. Love will be heading to the sale barn as soon as we get a chance to get them loaded.
Cooking a beef brisket from Sam with the Clarks
Our new neighbors, the Clarks are from the Southwestern part of the US. Daddy Clark, pictured above, is quite an amateur chef. The combination of coming from the Southwest and being a home chef means that cooking a brisket is simply in the DNA. With fresh brisket in the freezer it wasn’t long before the smoker was fired up.
I didn’t think to tell Mark that grass-fed beef cooks much faster than traditional grain fed beef. When I stopped back by to check on progress, the brisket was already out of the smoker and resting after about half the normal time. Fortunately Mark had control of his smoker and checked on the brisket to catch it before it was overdone. Something I was very glad of because they were kind enough to share some of the brisket with me. You see, I’m from Eastern NC. If you want a pig killed and grilled, I’m ok with that. Brisket is hamburger that hasn’t been ground according to my upbringing. The only way to get good brisket is to know someone from the right part of the world. Thank goodness those kind folks moved in next door.
You have to have a respect for the animals to have them born, raise them right, then kill them and eat them. You also have to have a bit of a twisted sense of humor. I’m glad to see the new neighbors seem to have both in spades.
New pigs getting into trouble
This picture is actually from a few weeks ago. This is a batch of the new piglets standing inside my shop on the farm. I’m pretty particular about my shop. I keep it clean, organized, and capable of whatever we need to do whenever it needs done. This bunch of knuckleheads had taken to sneaking under a hot wire to explore greener pastures. Of course, they returned every day to their paddock, especially when we deliver the food. On this particular day they’d decided to walk into an open door and take a self guided tour of the shop to assure themselves we were not keeping all the truly yummy food sequestered out of their site.
We keep an extra 24 joule fence charger on hand and Miguel rigged it up the next day. 24 joules gave the piggies a new perspective on what it means to stay where they are supposed to.
Don’t feel bad for the pigs, I couldn’t have put them to work anyway. They don’t have thumbs and certainly can’t operate a lathe.
Hold onto your marketing hats. Local and grass fed is going fast food.
This article in the NY Times on local and humane fast food restaurants can be found here.
If I visit 10 farmers in our area, I’ll find 10 different version of what “local” means and 20 different versions of what “grass-fed” means. To put a national chain behind these terms, complete with a marketing campaign. I think I’ll stick with my local farmers I know personally.
I’m not knocking this article or where the movement is going, I see this as another sign of strength for people raising their animals correctly. My concern is for the consumer, who has a lifetime of being duped by Madison Avenue marketing, trying to unravel another national chains attempt to get into their wallet and their stomach.
By the way, the Chipotle ad referenced in the article is really good.