It will be a year in October that we bought our farm. We have poured lots of work into the farm over this past year. We had hoped to be living at the farm by now, but our house has not sold. If you are looking for a good 3 bedroom house in Mayfield we can set you up! Despite the fact that we are still commuting to the farm, we have made a lot of progress with four small kids and very limited time to work. After finally getting water and electricity done through the Spring season we began adding animals.
The kids have loved adding the animals and we are all learning so much. We have several aims with the animals: 1) to provide experience and responsibility for the kids, 2) to provide good, healthy, less expensive food for our family, and 3) to in the long run provide some income through the sell of grass-fed meat.
The biggest challenge of getting animals has been working on fencing. Fencing is time consuming and lots of hard work, not to mention expensive! We went with woven wire or American wire for our perimeter fence around the main pasture. My wife has been a great help, along with my sister-in-law and the kids. We spent one weekend doing the main work, but have still been trying to finish over the last month. Currently we have the fence installed, but now I am trying to add a couple of electrical lines inside. This will keep the animals off the fence and allow us to divide the pasture easily into paddocks with electrical fencing.
The kids also got a lesson in “how a donkey can learn to stand up.” We got a “jack” donkey that was still intact to help protect our sheep. He went after our mare very quickly. He was good for the kids, but not good for the horse or sheep. We were going to get him cut if he worked with the sheep, but he almost killed one of them, so we passed “Radar” on to another farm. In return, the gentleman gave us 12 bantam roosters and hens. So now we have chickens too.
Here is a rundown of the present animals on the farm.
So begins our adventures on the farm with animals.
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I enjoy your animal posts! Very interesting!
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