Just casually came across this. We are getting chickens next week. Never had them before. So anything I should know going in ?
Just casually came across this. We are getting chickens next week. Never had them before. So anything I should know going in ?
I always describe small farming as food in, shit out, and racing from one crisis to another.
Welcome.
Amen to that! Not just farming, but farm life in general. I just hope this is the winter where I don’t have to emergency dig for a sewer blockage or haul the family off to my work for a shower Sunday evening, because the water heater decided to leak 110L of rusty water 5min after the parts supplier closed for the weekend.
Farm life!
My favorite is running out the door telling my wife that Andrew is trying to get his hay off and he needs someone to stack bales right in the middle of doing something for her. Not only do I need to prioritize the time sensitivity of things she’s asking me for but also consider the time sensitivity of calls for help from other farmers.
I got back from driving my daughter to university 5 hours from home late on Sunday night on the long weekend two weeks ago. My wife stayed in Toronto to be close for the week. I fell into bed and my phone beeped. It was a friend from one road over who had no water. I made some suggestions and eventually decided that I needed to go over. So I sent my wife a note telling her that Krista asked me to come over and work on her plumbing. My wife, a good sport, said, “Have fun!” I pointed out that Krista was in a hotel with her daughter and I was actually going over to help her husband. She said, “Oh well then, good luck!”
I’m reminded of a story. We were headed out late to get somewhere. As we drove past our neighbors house his sheep were out in the driveway. I hit the breaks, we went back, and the family herded them back through the gate, found the hole in the fence, and tied it together then jumped in the car and tore off for our appointment with my wife calling to make apologies. My son asked why we had stopped when we were late. I told him that we live in the country and livestock are money and a sheep on the road could hurt someone so we had to go back. Helping and protecting our neighbors was more important than our appointment.
Teach 'em young and teach 'em right.
Damn straight! You help each other out because who else is gonna do it? Besides you want help one day too, right? “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that.
That’s how I grew up. Unfortunately these days in my “neighborhood”, nobody really farm for themselves. I think my household with our early 1950s Fergie and 35 birds are the closest to farming anyone who lives locally does. My closest neighbors, which are a 1km drive away or a couple hundred meter if you gross the fields instead, are both renting their places, but only the old houses, while a couple of large farm operations deal with the actual farming. And when you have a 1200 hectares operation in Denmark, you’re too big to rely on neighbors for help, so you buy it from a professional instead.
I would have liked to have a friendly neighbor with a digger the first Christmas we lived here. Our plumbing was connected to a septic tank where “fluids” would drain into the nearby field. The added stress of twice the people flushing and showering, combined with some heavy rain and a leaky sewer, that let rain water into the tank, meant that the drainage couldn’t keep up. My elbows were sore for a couple of months after because of all the digging I had to do to figure out the cause problem: the +60 years old drainage system in the field had collapsed under the weight of the machinery, and the former owners had planted a large pine tree 20years before right on top of the pipe connecting our tank with the field.
Sometimes I wish that we had more handy neighbors, and that we had a history of helping each other. Instead my arms were still hurting when I transferred an exorbitant amount for a household water treatment system to replace the tank.