Sustainability at the Flying T Ranch

Our family mission is to glorify God in all ways.  We live this out at the Flying T Ranch as we raise, manage, and use His creation in a healthy, sustainable, humane, and respectful manner.

Over the past years, we have found the “sustainable” goal to be one of the most elusive.  Sustainable practices with our livestock began with the species and breeds we chose for the farm.  Some of these have been successful, and others not so much.

For example, our first few years with Muscovy ducks were very productive.  We chose them for their hardiness and reputation for being good at reproducing and raising young on their own.  However, when we later ran into significant problems with predators, we found that they didn’t do well at all under such pressure and when we penned them for protection, they weren’t nearly as happy, and thus not nearly as productive.

Likewise, our journey towards better stewardship of the natural resources involved in producing energy for electricity and heat has been rocky at times.  Some of our ventures have been less productive than others.  However, over the past few years, we have steadily improved in this area, primarily by reducing demand.  Much of what we have done has been relatively “low-budget”: improving our energy use practices, installing energy-efficient lighting, using timers and thermostats for heat lamps during the winter and kidding season, and servicing our heating systems for instance.  Others have cost more: programmable thermostats, installing better insulation and replacing some old leaky doors, and swapping out some appliances for more efficient ones.  These have all combined to reduce our demand significantly.

Recently, we took a step towards the supply side of sustainable energy, through the installation of a solar photovoltaic (PV) system.

We originally considered solar several years ago, but at that time, it simply wasn’t affordable, and the time for us to recoup our investment was almost beyond the life expectancy of the panels and inverters themselves.  Since then, the efficiency of panels has gone up significantly, while the cost per kw has gone down as well.  Though that ratio of performance-to-cost continues to climb, we had saved the money we needed and felt we were in a “sweet spot” this year to go forward.

We approached three companies who do business in New Hampshire to evaluate our needs and potential and to submit bids.  Each of these companies came up with similar project proposals, but with a significant difference in cost.  Two of the companies particularly impressed us with their organization, professionalism, and other aspects of their proposals, and after negotiations that brought the bid down considerably, we signed a contract with Tesla/SolarCity.

Because our energy use increases in the winter (and especially in late winter during kidding) while available solar energy decreases, the system we have installed will not supply all of our needs in the winter.  However, in the summer when our energy consumption decreases while solar energy increases, we should exceed it by quite a bit.  Over the course of the year, we should come close to providing all of our electricity needs, and as we continue to lower our consumption, we hope to have a net positive yield.

As part of the project, our utility company installed a “net meter” that keeps track of electricity we draw from the grid vs what we send back.  On months that we produce more than we consume, we will receive a credit in our bill for the excess.

The system has been in operation for just over a week at this time, the calculations in our project proposal forecasted our production to be roughly equal to our consumption in April.  Weather has been relatively typical, with intervals of sunny days and complete overcasts.  We have had a day of heavy rain and two of light snow.  And the results?

Here’s a snapshot of our best day this past week:

Now, granted, every day hasn’t been that sunny.  Our worst day was a low overcast where we only saw 7kWh of production, and the others have ranged from the 20s to the low 60s.

But, over the past week, the average has been more production than consumption, and her is what our meter looked like a couple days ago:

Yes, it’s rolling backwards from zero.  Our current meter reading is negative 111 kwh (and it’s dropped more in the past couple days).

If you’re looking to install solar (or to buy a Tesla vehicle), consider using our referral code: (https://ts.la/patrick34826).  Doing so through that link will qualify you for incentives from Tesla/SolarCity, which currently include a 5yr extended warranty for solar panels or free supercharging for certain Tesla vehicles.

Full disclosure: Doing so will give us a referral bonus (currently a credit towards our next project, which we hope to be a PowerWall battery system).

We continue working towards more sustainable and resilient practices at the Flying T Ranch, and we would love to hear from you.  What are you doing at your home and/or farm to increase efficiency, reduce consumption, and incorporate renewables?  Comment below!

Ready for Kidding – DIY Pens and Warming Huts

We pasture bred our two older Boer does in October, so we don’t have a tight date on when they’re due but it’s going to be soon.  The girls are double-wide, their udders are filling out, and Jessie in particular has started to spend a lot of her time lying down, moaning softly.  Good thing I got some time today (after the 4-H activities this morning) to finish up the kidding stalls and warming huts.

The girls were a bit nervous about the new digs, and squished into one stall together for a bit. They calmed down later.

As I wrote earlier, we made the stalls primarily out of recycled hard plastic pallets.  However, I got preoccupied with other chores and projects once I got the walls up, so it wasn’t until this week I was able to get the doors completed.  I made those doors out of new lumber, mostly because I wanted them to be relatively clean and nail free.

A better view of the door.

You might notice that the center “bar” is connected differently.  My plan is, once the kids are older, to remove that center piece and add another one offset to the side to make a barrier for our creep feeder.  The idea is to have an opening small enough for the kids to get through to free-feed on grain, but tight enough to keep the greedy adults out.  The next trick is to design a feeder to put in the stall that the kids can get to, but the ducks and chickens can’t.  That will be a trick.

One of the two warming huts

The warming huts are salvaged 55-gallon poly drums, cut at the 2/3 point.  I cut a circular hole in the top for the warming lamps, then used sheet metal screws to mount the brooder lamp fixture.  The huts are screwed into the stall divider (which is made of dimensional lumber) to keep the adults from knocking them over.

So now we wait…

Latest Projects at the Flying T

We took advantage of the long, though very cold, weekend to get a passel of projects done.  The biggest job was digging out the goat’s stable – like many goat folks, we let it build up relatively thick during the winter, allowing the hay to compost and produce warmth.  The disadvantage is that when the cleanup happens, it’s a lot of work.  If we could redesign the barn, we’d make it so we could push the tractor’s bucket right into the stalls!

I actually got a reprieve from that big job, and instead was busy with some construction projects and maintenance around the farm.  Yesterday I did some light jobs – fixing the chicken coop doors, rearranging the feed room to make room for the brooders, modifying the new duck house.  Today, I did a couple more projects while the rest of the family worked their butts off on the goat stall.  To keep the goats busy, we gave them the rest of our Christmas Tree – we’ve been handing them sprigs every day, but they made pretty short work of the tree today.

Oh, Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree! How tasty are your branches…

The first project today was to build the kidding stalls, as our two older goats, Gracie and Jessie, are due in March.  Our plan is to open up the wall between their stall and the adjacent one (formerly the duck stall) and let the momma’s use the extra space.   That wall is easy to remove – it’s dimensional lumber that slides in/out of brackets.

Instead of buying plywood and 2x4s (have you seen lumber prices recently?) to make a wall sturdy enough for goats, I salvaged some heavy-duty plastic pallets and put them to work.  The resulting stalls are about 5′ x 5′, taking up about half of the 10’x10′ stall and giving us room to make 3rd or even 4th kidding stalls in the future.

Voila! Kidding stalls! I cut a couple rectangular holes in the pallets to let the girls see each other.

I wanted to make walls that would be sturdy, but still could be removed relatively easily, and came up with the idea of hinged walls that folded against the side of the stable.

Jasper watches the walls unfold.

Wall stowed

All that’s left is to make the doors themselves, for which I plan to use some scrap lumber, or maybe wooden pallets.  We’ll also make some lamb warming huts with some surplus 55-gallon poly drums I’ve salvaged.

The next project was simple – a tray to catch the hay from the feeder.  Goats are notorious hay wasters – once hay hits the floor, they’re not interested anymore, and it becomes bedding.  My hope is that this tray will reduce that a little bit.

Stand by for the next Flying T contest – guess the birthdate, #, and genders of each doe’s offspring!

The girls don’t care, as long as the hay tastes the same

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!

Barnyard Bandits

It’s been a hot and dry summer up here, and I think that’s why the predators have started to become more of a problem in our area.  Our vernal pools are low or empty, meaning that the peepers (what our forester calls “Nature’s little protein pills”) and other small prey animals are scarce.

Though we’ve seen a fox around the neighborhood, it hasn’t been a problem.  Our chief invaders right now are raccoons.  A week ago, one of our neighbors lost all but three of their layers when a raccoon broke into their coop.  They’ve since caught the bandit, but that doesn’t bring back their flock.  The next night, I shot another raccoon in our barn that was breaking into one of the feed bins.  Since then, I’ve killed three more.  Today, we found out that another neighbor lost a good portion of her flock to raccoons.

Then this morning, we discovered that one of our Barred Rocks, who chose the corner of an unused goat stall to set her nest, had five of her nine eggs stolen from right underneath her when a predator dug under the walls and grabbed them.  Fortunately, she was unhurt.

So, instead of getting some more wood put up, I had to do some modifications to the building to prevent further loss of either the chicken or her eggs. Here was my solution: hardware cloth attached to the base of the building and spread about 1′ outward.

In the pic above, you can see that this is the corner they dug under.  Hopefully this will help.

After securing all four sides, I buried the cloth in dirt (actually composted manure, because that’s one thing we have a ton of).

Finished project below… topped off with a live catch trap to hopefully snag the next bandit.

Hopefully, this keeps our future momma hen safe!

NPIP – Exam Time for the Flock

Yesterday, at our request, a representative from the Department of Agriculture came out to visit and test our chickens in conjunction with the National Poultry Improvement Program.  NPIP is a voluntary program that provides testing for common ailments in home and commercial flocks.  NPIP helps us to ensure a safe food supply and avoid the transfer of disease through other means (after all, taking care of chickens is not a hands-off activity here at the Flying T).  In addition, it allows those who raise chickens to avoid unnecessary medicines and antibiotics.  Finally, by working exclusively with NPIP-certified hatcheries and home producers, we can reduce the chances that our healthy flock is infected by birds or chicks we purchase as replacement stock.

Some of the NPIP tests are required for 4H and other shows.

The actual process is quite simple for a relatively small flock like ours (23 birds)… or at least it should be.  First,  you need to make sure they’re contained.  To accomplish this, we simply turned off the coop’s automatic door after the chickens had gone to roost for the night.  Simple, right?

However, about an hour before the NPIP representative arrived, our son went to change the chickens’ water, and six of them slipped out the door.  The three kids and I had a heck of a time chasing them down.  Free range means no fences, and lots of places for them to hide, squeeze under, and run through.  It also means that trying to entice them back into the coop with grain doesn’t work well, because there are lots of other, more tasty things to sample out in the woods.  However, after a bit of running, diving, and even climbing the compost pile, we managed to get our escapees back into the coop.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated the exercise, and so I have no pictures to share.  They would’ve been worth sharing!

OK, it is a simple process, once you’ve got the chickens back in the coop!

We enlisted the kids to help, and they crammed into the grain room along with the NPIP tester, Tara.  One kid would go into the coop and pick up a chicken, then bring it out to Tara, who would start by banding their legs with a numbered tag (for our older chickens, this also required removing their previous NPIP tags).

Then, she turned them onto their backs, and plucked the feathers from a small area under the wing.

A quick scratch with a scalpel to draw blood, a few drops in a plastic vial, and the chickens were released to go .

Within about an hour and a half, the vials were filled and the process was complete.  Tara said that she recently did a flock of 250 birds, and that took all day (with several helpers).

The chickens were none the worse for wear (though they were a bit indignant).

We should get our NPIP renewal certificate in the mail in a few weeks!

Starting Seeds Indoors

We can tell Spring is here because both the jobs that keep the bills paid and the jobs around the farm have really gotten busy! Almost a month since my last post tells that story.

One of the things that we’ve been working on is getting our garden ready.  Though the weather has been unseasonably warm the past few weeks, we still have some frost in the forecast and we even woke up to a light dusting of snow this morning.  Last year, we got hit with a snowstorm on April Fools day.

But, that doesn’t mean we can’t start planting, especially because my parents didn’t need their seed starter this year, so they gave it to us.  My dad made it, and if you’re looking for a relatively simple project, you might consider building one yourselves.

Materials list:

• One metal rolling audiovisual stand
• Four sheets of 30″ x 14″ sheet metal (he used galvanized ducting sections, that are bent in 90 degree angles)
• Four 24″ florescent light fixtures with grow bulbs
• Eight lengths (about 2′ each) of light chain
• Four pieces of chicken wire, cut 9.5″ x 19.5″ (to fit in a 10 x 20 planting tray)
• Four lengths of 5-6′ each of insulated soil warming cable (this is not cheap to buy new!)
• Six lamp cords/plugs and wire
• Lamp timer
• Six-outlet power strip
• Assorted screws, washers, and nuts.

Dad took the galvanized sheet metal, folded the short edges to keep them from cutting hands (the long edges were already folded for the joints), overlapped each pair to make the center double-strength, and bent the sides down to form two simple reflectors.  He then mounted a pair of florescent lights on each.

They’re suspended from the shelf above by four chains, allowing you to move them upwards as the plants grow.  He spliced the cords for each set of lights into a single plug just for convenience (you could also use a second power strip).

The soil-warming wire is fastened in loops to the chicken wire grids with zip ties.

The simple lamp timer saves a small bit of electricity – we’ve got it set to be off during the day later in the growing cycle when the plants should be getting some natural light through the windows.

That’s “it.”  The soil warming grids fit nicely into our 10×20 seed planting trays.  We’ve currently got a flat of tomatoes, a half of peppers, 4 basil plants taking up a corner, and a few “empties” waiting for some seeds we need to start in a week or so.  We’ll start two more flats a bit later.

Hopefully, we’ll get a good jump on the garden this year, since last year’s was a bit of a bust until very late in the season.

Farmcycling Project – Chicken Water Heater

Though the winter is setting in reluctantly, we have had a few cold nights where the chicken’s water iced up.  A quick check at the feed store, Tractor Supply, and Amazon found chicken waterers like this:

Unfortunately, the cost of one of these babies is between $40 and $50.  That’s a lot of chicken feed!  So, to the farm cycling pile I went for inspiration.

Materials I discovered were already on hand: Old cookie tin, incandescent lightbulb, silicone sealer, electrical tape.  I purchased another $4.50-worth: Rubberized light socket ($2.49) and two-pronged plug ($1.99).

Tools required: Tin snips, screw driver, wire strippers, and caulk gun.

How-to is simple: cut a hole in the side of the tin, poke the socket through, caulk it with silicone, and install the plug on the wire ends.  I unintentionally left a bit of room around the hole where light escapes and shines through the silicone, making it easy to tell if it’s on or not.

Even though the store-bought heaters I found were 100 to 125w, I used a 60w bulb because I had one on hand.  It worked like a champ down to 20 degrees last week, but I think a 40w or even 25w would be sufficient.

End result: Same effect at 10% of the price!

EDIT: My wife made an excellent suggestion this morning.  Cookie tins aren’t as common as they once were, but you can find them inexpensively at craft stores (Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, etc).  She noted that they were 60% off this week at Jo-Ann’s Fabric, and since they were in holiday themes you could easily use them to add some decorative cheer to the coop!

Organic?

When we first started dreaming about our farm, “organic” was high in our priorities.  This flows out of our family mission, to glorify God in all ways, and to live that out on our farm by raising, managing, and using His creation in a healthy, sustainable, humane, and respectful manner.  Since we planned to produce food for others, organic certification seemed like the way to pursue this mission.

Rhode Island Red Free-Ranging at the Flying T

However, as we started researching exactly what organic certification involved, our dream crumbled a little.  This crumbling was due to two primary factors:

1. A realization that “organic” just wasn’t the utopia we’d imagined, and…

2. The unrealistic requirements for a very small farm to maintain both organic certification and solvency .

At the risk of making ourselves vulnerable to claims of “sour grapes,” I’ll say that the first reason was the most disheartening to us.  Previous to our research, we had held special reverence for the word “organic.”  We’d paid extra for organic produce, animal and vegetable, and assumed a lot about organic certification.

Organic certification requirements are pretty complicated – not as bad as the US tax code, but it’s obvious that the authors went to the same law schools.

http://www.x1pointo.com

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it helps make sure that folks that stamp their goods with “USDA Certified Organic” have met certain standards.  For animals, those standards in a nutshell are:

1. Appropriate housing that permits natural behavior, including outdoor access.  Depending on the animal, this may include a minimum number of days on pasture.

2. Certified organic feed, including pasture.  Again, some types of animals require a certain amount of their feed to come from pasture (I believe Dairy cows are now above 30% of total Digestible Dry Matter, which is a good thing).

3. No antibiotics, drugs, or synthetic parasiticides unless they are published on the NOSB (National Organic Standards Board) list.

4. Organic processing of meat, milk, and eggs.

5. Record keeping in accordance with the regulations.

6. An “Organic system plan,” a lot like a business plan that shows how the farmer plans to maintain organic practices.

7. Measures to prevent contamination of soil and water from production (such as manure runoff).

8. Absence of genetic modification, ionizing radiation, or other such interventions/contaminations.

This sounds pretty good, and it is.  But any time you get a bunch of lawyers to write rules for folks to follow, those folks are going to hire lawyers to make sure that those rules don’t get too much in the way.  Let’s use the organic chicken industry’s lawyers as an example, and to keep this from becoming a book, let’s focus on rules 1, 2, and 8:

Rule #1:  When the lawyers get here, they run square into the 2010 Access to Pasture rule, requiring that any bird raised indoors must have free access to pasture except in certain circumstances.  What this has been interpreted to mean is that a factory organic farm can raise 2,000 chickens in a 100′ x 40′ pen (2 sqft per bird) as long as those birds have free access to outside “pasture.”  This pasture can be enclosed and covered, and doesn’t have to have anything growing on it.  Access can be satisfied with some small openings leading to a few 30 sqft outdoor “porches.”  All the food and water is inside the big room, but if the birds want to leave that behind to go see the reflection of the sun, they’re free to do so.

Organic chicken farm, from http://www.myessentia.com

Rule #2:  Now if you’re running that many birds in that little space, there is no way they can support a majority of their dietary needs on forage.  Any vegetation that might exist at the beginning will be gone in a matter of days, and with it will go all insect life.  So 100% of their feed will have to be what the farmer provides.  Rule #2 requires that this feed also be certified organic, and most of this will come in the form of processed grains from organic farms, the various components of which were grown, harvested, and transported to the mill with fossil fuels, processed using more energy, and then trucked through the distributing train, again with fossil fuels.  Of course, it is possible that this farmer lives next to a grain mill that in turn has local access to organic corn, soybeans, alfalfa, limestone, monocalcium phosphate, kelp, diatomaceous earth, clay, salt, DL methionine, vitamin & mineral premix, garlic, horseradish, anise, and juniper berry (all ingredients of one brand of certified organic chicken feed).

Sadly, the Toyota Prius Combine release date has been pushed back again

Rule #8:  What can the lawyers do with this rule?  They can ensure Cornish Rock Cross hybrid chickens, most likely the organic or non-organic chicken you buy at the supermarket or farmers market, qualify as organic.  They’re not genetically modified, just specifically bred to grow extremely quick (usually harvested from 8-12 weeks of age), with sparse white feathers (easier plucking with no pigment left on the skin), and broad, tender, white breasts.  They also can exhibit extreme mortality rates past around 4 months of age due to heart failure, exhaustion, or skeletal problems.  They taste great, by the way, and I don’t have any problem with folks that raise them.  They just don’t fit into our plan right now.

Cornish Rock Hybrids - from tinyfarmblog.com - notice they're growing faster than their feathers

These principles, of course, also apply to other areas of agriculture, whether producing fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk, or other products.

This isn’t to say that organic practices or certification are bad.  We are not to the point yet where we can produce even the majority of our food on our farm, and though we patronize several farms in the area as well as farmers market, we still do a lot of shopping at the grocery store.  When making food choices for our family there, we lean heavily on certified organic produce.  The National Organic Program (NOP) rules and regulations are far from perfect, and subject to a bit of controversy, but by and large, they provide guidance under which which healthier and more wholesome food can be produced.

Not certified organic, by the way...

That’s where the strength of the NOP lies.  Though it’s obviously not perfect, in a world where the vast majority live in densely-populated cities far removed from farms, the NOP provides a framework for consumers to make smarter decisions about the composition and quality of their food.  It does this by holding larger producers accountable to these better (again, not perfect) practices.

Why do I say “larger producers?”

That gets us to point #2.  Besides the fees involved in organic certification, maintaining organic practices obviously carry some expenses that can be difficult for a small operation to bear and still present a price consumers are willing to pay  (Slowmoneyfarm has several excellent posts on this topic, particularly this one).  Much of this is because of competition with larger producers both able and willing to take advantage of the loopholes in the system such as discussed above.

Ability is one obstacle.  A volume producer will always have advantages that come with being able to purchase in larger lots and lower prices while combining and reducing other production expenses.  Still, if small farmers can find a supportive market, it may be possible to approach competitiveness here if they are willing to take advantage of some high-volume practices, though again Slowmoneyfarm does a good job explaining how this is extremely difficult.

That willingness to do this is the second obstacle.  Profitability (or perhaps even solvency) requires taking advantage of practices such as use of non-heritage breeds, stocking stables/pastures/pens at much higher rates, using higher levels of confinement to minimize labor costs, culling rather than treating many sick/struggling animals, and stockpiling feed.

Willingness is the obstacle that stopped us.  We have the facilities that with a bit of modification would make this work with organic chickens and ducks.  It would mean confining them and stocking both our laying and meat flocks at what to us seems an absurd density.  We would need to use non-heritage high-production hybrids for both operations.  Besides the problems these present to our values, such confinement would eliminate the benefits of free-range poultry.

Do you really want to put us in a pen?

We could do this also with meat goats.  Again, we would stock at much higher rates, and manage both the confinement systems and available pasture to ensure they maintained a 100% organic diet.  This would include separation from our poultry, horses, visitors (and probably our kids) to make sure that they didn’t end up eating something improper.

For all of our livestock, this would drive us to breed for size and speed of production, not non-production values such as temperment.

So what is a small farmer to do?

Photo by John Vachon.Oct. 1938. From the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. America From the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the Farm Security Administration-OWI, 1935-1945.

I believe the solution is an old one.  In lieu of third-party state-managed certification processes, farmers and customers need to know each other and talk face-to-face.  The farmer needs to know what the customer values and desires, in product, quality, and methods.  The customer needs to be able to trust that the farmer will produce according to those values and desires.  Both need to come to an understanding of what this will cost.

The only way this can happen is through local consumption… and that is a subject for another post.

(Mis) Adventures in Long-Distance Horse Trailering, Part 2

Last time, you may recall, we had just finished the first long day of our cross-country move with our family, goods, and two horses.  Texas to Missouri had taken us a bit longer than we’d expected but it had been relatively smooth.  Zip (our Quarter Horse) had taken the situation in very good stride, while Jasper (our Haflinger Cross) was much more perterbed.

Not his favorite place

After getting the horses settled into the horse motel – I’ll write a review sometime, as they were great – we settled down for the night in the luxurious Motel 6 just down the road.  Soon we were fast asleep.   For some reason, I woke up at 2am, thinking something wasn’t quite right, and since I couldn’t figure out what that something was and couldn’t fall back asleep, I slipped out of bed, tossed on my clothes, and drove down to the stables to see if the horses couldn’t sleep either.

Zip was just fine – relaxed, leg cocked, hay feeder empty, water half-gone. 

Jasper was not just fine.

He was neighing, pacing, circling, and otherwise working up a pretty good sweat.  He hadn’t drunk much water, and really hadn’t touched his hay at all.  He was not in his happy place.

He calmed down quickly when I started talking to him, and when I figured it was safe I got in the stall with him.  Although he wasn’t pacing or neighing, he still was sweating, snorting, and breathing pretty hard.  Most importantly, he had the “wild eye” – that look horses get when they’re scared or worried.

I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on.  The change in scenery didn’t make sense as the cause.  Jasper’s not a nervous horse in general, and he hadn’t shown any signs of anxiety earlier in the year when we’d changed from his old herd to the pasture he’d lived in for our last months in Texas.  No coyotes were howling nearby.  Even if there had been, Jasper is a herd defender – the kind of horse that moves towards a threat, not away.  No problems with his legs or hooves.  No injuries.  I attributed the nervousness to leftover stress from the trailer ride, so I decided I’d get him out and see if he could walk his nerves away.

I slipped the halter on, clipped on his lead rope, and walked him down the wide aisle and out of the barn.  As soon as we stepped outside it was like a switch turned off.  He calmed down immediately.

Hindsight is 20-20, but unfortunately it only works when the event is behind you.  As soon as I looked up and saw the stars, and heard Jasper’s breathing slow down, I got my hindsight.

You see, Jasper spent at least the past several years, and I’ll bet all the time before that,  in a pasture.  In fact, the place we bought him from in Oklahoma had the herd out in a large pasture with only a tree-line barrier for shelter. 

Picking up Zip and Jasper in Oklahoma

The large pasture we’d kept the two of them in over the past few months had a 3-sided runout shed available, but we had noticed that even during a severe snow and ice storm, neither horse had gone in the shed.  We’d arrived that morning to find them chasing each other through the snow, their backs covered in ice.  Hoofprints up to the entrance showed that they’d taken a look at the shed and decided they’d rather hang out in the open.

Like ice off a horse's back

For all we know, Jasper had never ever spent any appreciable time with a roof over his head, much less walls around him.  Making him do this for the first time after a long trailer ride, in a strange barn… well, that was asking a bit much of him.

We had a long day of driving ahead of us, and it was about 3am by this time, so I needed to get him back to bed so that I could do the same.  We had a long day of driving ahead of us.  I walked him back into the stall hand fed him some soaked hay, then backed off to watch him for a bit.  He seemed pretty calm, so I headed back to the truck.  I waited a bit, didn’t hear any neighing, and so I continued on to the motel for a couple more hours of shuteye.

The next morning Jasper seemed pretty well-sorted, though a bit more excited than normal.  We figured that was just nerves from the night, and as my wife and I hooked up the trailer, the girls took the horses out to lunge them and get some energy out.  They hollered that he was pretty jumpy, and so my wife went over to help.

I turn around just in time to see him hit the ground.

(Yes, this is a “hook” to get you to read the next one, but I know lots of you are soft-hearted, especially when it comes to horses.  Spoiler alert – if you go to our farm’s webpage you’ll see that Jasper is doing just fine today)