A Different Kind of Doula

When we’re not tending the farm or homeschooling the kids, we’ve got “real world” jobs.  My (Martha’s) passion is being a childbirth educator and a doula – Greek for “servant” – a woman who comes alongside families before, during, and after childbirth.  You can read more about what I do on my webpage for my business, “A Joyful Birth.”

So today, I was a different kind of doula. I was much more involved with the wet, cuddly newborn side of birth than I usually am as we welcomed baby goats on our farm. We are relatively new to farming, but I was struck by how many similarities there are in birth among mammals.

These mamas craved safety and peace as all mothers in labor do. One of the mamas appreciated my quiet presence, reaching out to nuzzle me — and then after the babies were born, she gently butted me and told me to get out. Each mama “counted fingers and toes” on her baby, licking them dry from head to toe. They also encouraged their babies to nurse when they were ready, patiently giving them time to transition from womb to world. And, like I often see with human babies, they were ready to nurse at about the one hour mark after birth. Goats have a special vocalization that they only make to their new babies. Amazing how wondrous birth is!

I am blessed to have seen birth in its completely natural state (well, except five quiet family members watching) and will ponder the lessons from today to see how I can bring that to my human doula work too.

New Goat Babies!

This is just a quick post (you can check out our Facebook page for more photos) to announce that in the middle of this huge snowstorm, we took a break from other subjects for a biology lesson. We now have four brand new baby Boer Goats – 3 bucklings and a doeling.

We’re busy making sure they are all settled for a cold night, and will post more later!

Blessings to all,

The Flying T

Trail Walk in the Snow

The snow doesn’t slow down the kids or the horses too much.  This is in the middle of our snowstorm today – probably 6-8″ at the time of the walk, and now we’re approaching one foot.  Now it’s time to go sledding!

 

Into the Fire

We don’t have cable, dish, or satellite.  The previous owner left a huge arial in the attic, but we haven’t connected it to anything.

But on cold snowy nights like tonight, we still have multimedia entertainment, complete with picture, sound, and warmth.  To change the channel, we simply add another log.

(Photo taken by our middle daughter)

Prize Rooster

In our last post, we mentioned that David’s barred rock roo won “Best Standard Cock” in show in the open class.  Here is a pic of the proud chickenman and his bird!

David has these words of wisdom about showing well at the fair:

“You need to clean him well and wash his feet with a toothbrush with a little soap to get the dirt out.  Clean feet are important.  The judge may pick up the bird and look at his feet.  When you wash them, you have three containers.  One is soapy water, and you dunk him three times and get soap on his back.  In container two, you put water in it and dunk him three times.  The next one has vinegar in the water, and you put him in that and it makes his feathers all shiny and ready for the show.  Then you gently gently wrap him with a dog towel like he’s in a sleeping bag.  Then you dry him off.  Then take a little petroleum jelly to rub his wattles and comb and shanks on the day before the show to make them shiny so the judges are impressed.”

Mom’s disclaimer:  Be careful when you dunk the chicken not to immerse their heads – they can easily drown.

State Fair Time

Many kids had their first week of school last week, as did ours.  However, as homeschoolers, we can be a bit creative in how we spend those days.  Last week, from Tuesday through Labor Day, the kids hit science hard… animal science.  They did this through their participation in the Hopkinton State Fair in Contoocook, NH.  This was the capstone event after a year of hard work with animals, crafts, and other 4H and farm endeavors.  All that effort really paid off!

Our 8yo son’s big project this year has been his chickens.  If you’ve read our blogs, you know that he runs the egg business on the farm.  Since he is too young this year to show animal projects with 4H, he entered his barred rock rooster in the open class… and won best in show!  We’ll add pictures later of him holding his rooster and ribbon, but here are a few we’ve already downloaded.

Sister helping to get the rooster washed for the fair.

First Place!

His sisters also won blue ribbons for their duck pairs, with Hana winning “Best pair of ducks” overall.

Friday was the horse show, and Holly was blessed to have her coach, Janine, from Gelinas Farms volunteer to spend the day with her.  Janine’s biggest challenge was not helping with getting Zip ready (4H rules state that the kid does all the work), but she really helped out with last-minute coaching tips.

All that coaching made a difference, and Holly ended up winning Grand Champion for her class!

Saturday was the 4H goat show, and the girls really enjoyed doing that for the first time – they earned blue ribbons in several events, with Holly and Ruby edging out Hana and Samy at the end.

Sunday and Monday topped off the long weekend, with pack and obstacle courses, knowledge tests and a quiz bowl, volunteering at the 4H exhibits and food stands, and lots of feeding, cleaning, and talking to the public.  The kids had earned enough ribbons to fill their walls (and enough premiums to treat themselves and their animals to some new gear).  By the time we pulled out of the fair Monday evening, we were all ready for a rest!

Collapsible Goat Milking & Grooming Stand

Earlier this year, we found a great deal on Craigslist for an old metal double milking stand that has worked great.  Both of our girls can work simultaneously on their goats, whether clipping hooves, trimming hair, washing, or whatever.  However, with the county fair coming up, we realized that the stand (which is about 10′ long and probably a good 100lbs+) wouldn’t work for that.  We needed a stand that could handle a 200+lb Boer yet still fold up small enough to fit in the truck when our goat transport box was in the bed.

We found a good number of options.  There are some great portable folding milking stands available, and their prices reflect their quality.  The ones that fit in our budget didn’t look like they’d handle one of our goats for too long, and the ones that could stand up to heavy use were well outside our budget.

But I’ve got OK handyman skills, and woodworking and welding tools out in the garage, so I started to comb the net for plans.  I had to cut the metal ones out of the picture pretty quickly because of how expensive steel is right now.  The wooden plans I found weren’t quite what we were looking for.  I did find an interesting plan made from PVC, but though that might work well for a smaller milking breed, I think one of our does would make short work of it.  With the fair fast approaching, I still didn’t have an option.

That’s what graph paper, rulers, and pencils are for.  So, after a literal trip back to the drawing board, and another to Home Depot, we were ready to start.

We used plain-jane 2x4s and plywood for construction (with the exception of the legs, which I cut from pressure-treated lumber).  Total cost for supplies was about $45, including a pound of screws and two long bolts used as the pivot and adjustment pins for the stock.  Here’s the result, with Gracie locked in.

And here are the girls taking a break to pose while putting the stand to work as they trim Gracie’s hooves.

Because I tend to overdesign things (the kids were joking that if the hurricane in Florida moves North, they’ll use it as a shelter), it’s probably a bit heavier than it needed to be.  In fact, as I realized how stout it was, I actually took a few of my planned structural reinforcement pieces out of the plan.  The magic of the stand, however, is that it disassembles to pack flat – into a space about 3′ x 4′ x 10″ by sliding the legs and stock assembly out of the base.

The four legs slide out also.

The kids are in the process of painting and decorating, so this is how it looks right now.  I’ve still got a few tweaks to do (the stock is a bit too narrow and I plan to add a feed tray and some equipment hooks) but it’s ready for the fair.  It took most of a day to get the project from concept to paper to assembly, and we’re pretty happy with the payoff for the effort!

Unsung Heroes

We’ve lived all over the United States and a bit of time outside the country as well, and we’ve met a lot of great people from all walks of life in the process.  However, one group of wonderful folks we really didn’t get to know before we moved out to our farm.  Boy, have we been missing out!

These folks have been Godsends to us as we’ve muddled through small-scale farming, visiting us, training us, giving us advice, and even helping us teach our kids about agriculture.

Who are these amazing unsung heroes?  They’re the folks at the Merrimack County Cooperative Extension Office, the local branch of the statewide University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension!

How they get to all the things they do, I’m really not sure.  As we approach the first year on our little farm:

1. A forester has walked our woods with us to help us with our forest management plan.
2. A poultry inspector has tested our flock as part of the NPIP.
3. The office has tested our soils and made recommendations for improvement.
4. We’ve received advice on garden management and care.
5. We participated in a seminar on goat care (and are starting another 5-week series)
6. In the next few months, we are attending clinics on fruit tree pruning, gardening, forages and pasture management, and more.
7. We’ve pored over the volumes of information available on their website, and used some of their curriculum to supplement our homeschool program.
8. All of our kids are immersed in 4-H activities ranging from animal sciences to riding to crafts.

I’m pretty sure there are things I’m leaving out.  The bottom line is: EVERY one of these activities is supported to some extent (or entirely) by the county extension office, for a minimal fee if not free.  This is all made possible by the superb staff as well as a huge network of volunteers they coordinate.  We have been overwhelmed by how active and involved these people are and are indebted to them for their help.

Here is a video they produced to tell a bit more of what they do:

We have a long way to go at the Flying T, but we’d be much further behind without their support.  So, we’re taking this time to say THANK YOU to Deb, Nancy, Dot, Tim, Mary, Amy, and all the rest of the unsung heroes at the extension office that do so much with so little!

How about you?  Do you have an active and involved extension office, and how do you rely on them?

The Egg Business – Progress Report

Our 7-year-old son runs the egg business on our farm.  We paid the startup costs – buying the chicks, converting an emu hut to a coop, and buying feed and supplies.  Once the first group started laying, he took over the rest.  He now buys the food, cares for the chickens and eggs, markets the eggs, and keeps records of his production, income, and expenses.

Small-scale farming is not a big money maker, and as we’ve put together our 5-year plan, we can see that we’ll have to get a bit bigger before we can realize any significant profits.  However, based on just the past few months, eggs are a good place to start.

With proper care, we’re finding that our original flock of Rhode Island Reds and Araucanas (10 pullets, one cockerel total) produces an average of about 8 eggs a day.  That’s about 20 dozen per month.  The young flock consists of 12 Barred Rock pullets and their cockerel, and up till now, they’ve been eating and not producing.  Supplemental feed for the combined flock runs him about $25/mo…  less in the growing season and  more in the Winter due to availability of forage.  So the rough cost of production is about $1.25 per dozen.

You just can't get fresher eggs than these!

Out of that 20 dozen, our family uses about 8 a month and gives away another 2.  We pay him at production cost for those.  The remaining 10 dozen have sold pretty easily at $3/dozen, so combined with the ~$12 we pay him for the eggs we use, he’s been clearing a bit under $20 a month.  Of this, he puts a good portion in his “giving” jar (currently he’s giving that to missions in Haiti, but he’s looking at other places for the future), and splits the rest between his “saving” and “spending” jars.

Well, this week, the Barred Rocks started dropping an egg or two, which means pretty soon our production will double.  His first thought was, “that’s OK, it won’t be too hard to sell twice as many eggs.”  However, we had to explain to him that although his production is doubling, the number of eggs he’ll have to sell will actually triple (because we don’t plan on upping our family consumption to 20 dozen a month!).

So, it’s on to more marketing.  He’s already made a deal with the local feed store to buy his eggs, but they only pay $1.50.  That’s enough to make a small profit, especially since his cost per dozen should drop significantly now that he doesn’t have so many unproductive mouths to feed, but it’s not nearly as nice as $3.

This whole process has become a supplement to our homeschool curriculum, as he’s not just learning animal science, but  math, accounting, business skills, marketing, and communications also.  And of course, he’s learning a lot about both personal and social responsibility, lessons that will be even more important throughout his life than the “three R’s.”  Regardless of what some might say, that kind of agricultural education certainly doesn’t seem useless to us!

If he can manage to sell 30 dozen a month at the going rate, that’s about $75 a month profit.  That might bump up a little if he’s successful in raising chicks this Spring.  That’s too bad for a backyard business, especially if you’re a Cub Scout.

Do you raise chickens or other livestock on a small scale, and if so, do you do it for profit, as a hobby, or both?  How do you market your products?  I’d also love to hear other ideas for getting kids involved in business and financial planning at an early age.  Thanks for stopping by, reading, and commenting!

Is a Degree in Agriculture Useless?

Yahoo just published a story by Terence Loose, “College Majors that are Useless,” and it listed Agriculture degrees as the most useless.  Horticulture and Animal Science also made the top (or bottom) five, together with Fashion Design and Theater.  Ouch.

Unemployable? (Photo by Jack Dykinga, USDA Agricultural Research Service)

One basis of this claim the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ (NACE) 2012 Job Outlook study, compiled from a survey of employers (Loose says “almost 1,000 employers,” though NACE states the study included 244 respondents) regarding their future hiring plans.  Also included were job projections from 2008-2018 from the Department of Labor as well as numbers of degrees awarded in 2008-2009 from Newsweek‘s similarly-titled slideshow, “20 Most Useless Degrees,” which put Ag as #3 behind Journalism (oh the irony) and Horticulture.

From the DoL numbers, farm manager opportunities are expected to drop by 5% between 2008 and 2018, a cut of roughly 64,000 out of 1.2M positions.  Over that same period, the nation might see 125,000 more brand-new college graduates with Agriculture degrees.

Why bother? (Photo by Scott Bauer, USDA Agricultural Research Service)

A few alibis:

1) I don’t dispute these numbers.  But if you think “Farm Manager” is the only career opportunity for a person with an Ag degree, you don’t understand Ag… which may be the problem here.  And according to Michelle Singletary’s recent Washington Post editorial, and another from the NYT, Ag is currently one of the degrees with the lowest unemployment rate in the US.  But I am not going to discuss that further… now… I don’t think…

2) [late edit] Aw heck, why not… another article by Purdue and the USDA states, “During 2010–15, five percent more college graduates with expertise in agricultural and food systems, renewable energy, and the environment will be needed when compared to 2005-10…”

3) I don’t have an Ag degree, and actually feel a bit slighted because NACE, DoL, and Newsweek didn’t even bother to address the prospects for the millions of us with our undergrad degrees in mathematics and Masters from seminary.

4) I’m not going to rant about our sad environment in which participate in, understand, and value agriculture so little… Well, I am going to rant, but not today.

Instead, I want to take some issue with the angle from which these articles address the data.

The idea fronted by Loose and Newsweek is that these degrees are valueless because there are so many more degrees being awarded than are needed in the job market.  Now this argument would make a lot of sense if we were talking about printing money.  If we were, I’d recommend What Happened to Penny Candy? as a superb foundation upon which to start the conversation.

About $90,000 pictured - a bit more than what a 4-year degree will cost you for in-state tuition, books, fees, and living expenses at a public university. It won't even cover tuition at the average private school. (Image from Braintrack.com)

If a degree is simply an asset – a piece of paper in which we invest in the hopes that it will provide future earnings – I’d say these articles were right on the mark.  To be honest, this is how some folks have looked at a college degree for many years – spend (or worse, borrow), tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a couple words one can put on a resume that will provide a healthy ROI.  Scarily, others buy one of these “investments” without considering the potential ROI at all.

However, that’s not what a degree is, especially today.  If you merely invest $120,000 on a degree from the other end of the NACE spectrum, say Chemical Engineering, and complete the requirements for that degree, you may have more opportunities after graduation than your classmate that did the same but earned a degree in Agriculture.  However, you won’t have nearly the opportunities of a person in any degree program who invested not only his or her money, but other assets such as time (building experiences in focused internships, employment and volunteerism) and relationships (what we call “networking” these days).

These articles also ignore a good portion of the NACE report, addressing only the degrees, not the skills employers are looking for in this highly competitive environment.  You can click here for a digest of those, but they include the ability to “work in a team,” “make decisions and solve problems,” “communicate inside and outside the organization,” and “influence others.”  You don’t learn this stuff in a book.  Those skills, friends, are the difference between a mere “education” and a comprehensive “training” experience, or as one of my seminary professors put it, “information” vs. “formation.”

If we think of a degree as simply a financial investment, a ticket to a job, we are missing the boat.  Well, actually, we won’t miss all the boats – we’ll be on one with the vast majority of other college graduates who act similarly – but unfortunately it is more likely to be one named Titanic or Costa Concordia than Mayflower.

All Aboard! (Image by Carnival Cruise Lines)

What if, instead, we looked at the degree program from a more multifaceted approach?  Certainly we should consider the financial costs, future opportunities, and potential return on investment.  However, we also should consider what we are willing to invest in time, effort, and relationships, and how we can use the years in which we invest these assets to distinguish ourselves from the crowds.

For sure, some college degrees are more marketable than others, but I like the approach of Singletary’s Washington Post editorial better.

“Too many students aren’t sure what job they could get after four, five or even six years of studying a certain major and racking up education loans. Many aren’t getting on-the-job training while they are in school or during their semester or summer breaks. As a result, questions about employment opportunities or what type of job they have the skills to attain are met with blank stares or the typical, ‘I don’t know.’ …A college education is not an investment in your future if you are taking out loans just for the college experience. It’s not an investment if you’re not coupling your education with training. It’s not an investment if you aren’t researching which fields are creating good-paying jobs now and 30 years from now.”

Is an Agriculture degree useless?  Yes, just like all the rest.  Is investment put towards earning an Agriculture degree useless?  Well, that depends on what you’re willing to invest.

[Edit… this article has understandably sparked a bit of “interest” in the Agvocate blogosphere.  As I come across some of the more interesting responses, I’ll link them below]

Agriculture Now

Allen Levine (Huffington Post)

“I Studied Agriculture and I Have a Job” Facebook Page (Over 3,000 members in less than a day!)

Figuring out the Plot

Economix Blog at NYT – This one shows that recent Ag grads have the LOWEST unemployment rate for all except those with education and health-related degrees!

Feel free to suggest more!