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!

Pre-Christmas Snow

The snow hit a few days early… we’re hoping it holds for a few days.  Meanwhile, the light tonight was so good I had to drop chores to take photos.

The Flying T Spa

Upon reflection, and after unloading and stacking ~240 bales this afternoon with the assistance of my oldest daughter and Kevin from 3D Farm Products, I have come to the realization that there are few things more redundant than owning both a farm and a gym membership.

This is what 10,000lbs of hay looks like... notice the goats looking longingly at the trailer

That got me thinking more.  People are shelling out good money for gym memberships… why not offer spa and fitness center services along with eggs and meat?

Meet one of our personal trainers as she demonstrates a Flying T signature move – the “45-lb dead-lift-and-heave.”

Step 1 - Select your Hay Bale

Step 2: Twist and Heave

Step 3: Follow Through

Some spas tout their “hot rock” treatments.  At the Flying T, we find cold rocks do a better job of strengthening backs.

Our middle daughter’s favorite exercise is the double bucket lift.

Another oldie-but-goodie is firewood stacking (we also offer splitting mauls to mix aerobics into your strength routine).

The wheelbarrow haul is great for legs, arms, and shoulders, while also building core strength.

Looking for more of an aerobic workout?  Chasing chickens beats windsprints any day.

No chickens were harmed in the filming of this blog

Another aerobic exercise we discovered last week was the midnight horse chase… to set it up, the kids need to forget to close the pasture gate.  The rules for the exercise are that you have to be lying in bed and can’t start chasing the horses until you hear hoofbeats running past your window.

But wait, there’s more!  Goat wrestling, fence pulling, horse saddling, hoof-picking, duck finding… we’ve got endless exercises to keep you trim and fit.

Don’t take a vacation, take a Fitness “Hay-cation!”  Contact us today!

BTW, in all seriousness, if you need quality hay delivered in Vermont or New Hampshire, we highly recommend the Daly Brothers, Kevin and Marshall: 3dfarmproducts@gmail.com.  In addition to their trailer (240 squares or 22 rounds), they also can deliver by the tractor trailer load (about 700 squares).  We don’t get anything for referrals, but tell them the Flying T sent you… and ask them how they liked the jams!

One more note – lots of farmers in New England, including the Daly’s, lost crops or didn’t get much of a 2nd cut due to all the rain late this summer, but costs are still pretty close to last year.  We’re still praying for all those down in the South and Southwest dealing with the drought.  See our poll and tell us how much hay is going for in your neck of the woods!

Night Pics

My daughter and I snuck in after bedtime to take some pics of the barn at night.

Hey, we're trying to sleep in here!

Ducks roosting up for the night

Zip savoring his hay

...while Jasper is already done with his food.

While we were out, the ducks decided to take a midnight stroll

The goats were decidedly unhelpful with posing

Heading back in for the night

What’s your favorite thing about being outdoors at night?  Any great memories?

Another Rock in the Wall

With the unseasonably warm days we had in the beginning of November, we put some of our other work (including some of the kids’ studies) aside and got to work improving our rear pasture.

The rear pasture is about 1.25 acres and “rough” to say the least.  Based on the size of the poisonous pin cherries throughout the pasture, we figure the pasture has been let go for a good 5-10 years.  We’d previously cleared about a quarter to third of it, and then broadcast spread winter rye seed on that area.  Despite the very suboptimal conditions, the seed has taken relatively well, though not nearly as vigorously as other areas on the property with better soil and preparation.

Over the past week, we got working on the next bit.  The easiest part was cutting down about 20 cherry trees and white pines of various sizes, cutting the larger stuff for the firewood pile while my wife and kids drug the slash to the burn piles.  I also cut up a large white birch the beavers had dropped a bit further down the hill.  More on them in a future post.

Meanwhile, as I was at work, my wife and kids got to pulling stumps, filling holes, and moving rocks.  We’ve got a lot of rocks – it’s not called the Granite State without reason.  Even with the help of the tractor, it’s a lot of work.

Moving rocks is hard work!

Teamwork is essential

A smile makes the work go faster

They're heavier than they look!

Notice the huge brush piles in the background that they've been busy with as well

I’ve helped a bit, but most of the work on the wall we’re starting to build at the edge of the pasture is due to their efforts.  It gives us a new appreciation for the sturdy farmers who built the thousands of miles of rock walls 200+ years ago without farm machinery.

It's a good start!

Our hope is to have enough pasture clear by next spring to have three 1/2 acre paddocks to rotate (two in the front pasture, one in the rear). That will still require some supplemental hay to avoid overgrazing, but will be a lot better than our current situation and make for healthier and more productive pastures in the future.  The seeding plan for the back pasture is to follow the Winter Rye with a good layer of manure and reseeding with Japanese Millet in the summer, then rotate back and forth between the two for at least one more year to break up the weed growth cycle before we move on to more traditional forages.  In a few years, I would like to have a solid Orchardgrass and White Clover pasture established there.

Changing Seasons at The Flying T

This is the first cut of a video I’m putting together of the change of seasons at our ranch.  This is approximately .5 seconds per day fom Sep to Nov.  I plan to put the whole year on the final version.

Trail Ride Poems by Another Guest Blogger/Poet

Our 11yo daughter was encouraged by the response to her older sister’s blog posts, and asked that we post these poems, written about a trail ride from last month.

—–

BEAR BROOK STATE PARK

We’re going to Bear Brook Park today

On the trails, Jasper will lead the way.

He’s prancing, snorting, and kicking up his heels

Happy, excited, and hyper he feels!

For lunch we stopped at a little clearing overlooking a lake.  This is what happened:

At Bear Brook State Park

Jasper really left his mark.

When he tried to eat some moss,

We all thought he was a silly hoss!

After lunch, we walked through an enormous forest of pine trees.

Proud, tall, and erect,

Pine trees pointed in lines stand,

Pointing to heaven.

We came to a tree root.  It was sticking out of the ground like a step.  By this time, Dad and my brother were riding Zip and my sister and I were riding Jasper.

When we came to a root in the ground

Zip stepped over the little mound

Jasper, however, would not step up,

And instead he sprang over and up!

October Snowstorm

The snow hit hard on Oct 29th.  We measured over 18″ of the white stuff.

From the balcony

"Yeah, it's snow. Now get down here and feed me!"

Winterberries

Mocha checking out the snow.

OK, this was staged.

We should get a couple more later on today.

Snow curling off the barn's roof

Jasper running in the pasture.

Kids making snowmen

 

Walking on the trail from the back pasture.

The last of the fall colors?

Red maple and Red oak leaves in the snow

One of the kids' snowmen and the back pasture

Pictures of our First Snow

Pics taken by our daughters of our first snow of the year:

Zip in his blanket.

Jasper loves the cold.

Zip (foreground) and Jasper.

Hugs and Kisses

Jessie thought the snow tasted great.

View out the back balcony.

On Firewood, Fuel Oil, and BTUs

We went to a funeral this weekend for our neighbor’s Dad.  He was an amazing, godly man who grew up in the Northeast in the 1920s.  His bedroom was an outdoor covered porch, shared with his siblings.   His story isn’t unusual for that time.

1920s New England Homestead. Image by nps.gov

These days (call it being soft if you will) we enjoy a bit more shelter during the winters, and our house at the Flying T has quite the mish-mash of fuel types to help give that shelter some heat.  Down in the basement, we have a boiler fueled by a 250-gallon fuel oil tank that supplies hot water baseboard heat in several zones throughout the house.  We have small electric oil-filled space heaters for certain zones that we don’t wish to keep heated by diesel all the time.  Our hot water is supplied by an instant hot water heater, fired by a propane tank that also feeds the stove and oven.

However, the bulk of our heating is supplied by the woodstove in our living room that (at least in our limited experience in the new house at the tail end of last winter) does a pretty good job of keeping our living spaces warm.  It’s a HearthStone stove that circulates air to maximize efficiency and uses natural soapstone to store and release heat.  In addition to the more even radiant heat this provides, another benefit is that we can get the stove nice and hot in the evening, pack it up with wood and close the damper before we go to bed, and it will still be warm when I wake up to toss more wood in in the morning.  The chief drawback is that if we let the fire go out, it takes a longer time to get the stove warm again.

As this will be our first full winter in the house and seasoned firewood can be tough to find and expensive to buy in February/March, I’ve made sure we have plenty of wood for the winter.  We still have about an eigth of the cord of “seconds” I bought when I first arrived, as well as a full cord my parents gave us as a true “housewarming” present.  At the beginning of Summer, we purchased another 3 cords of green firewood and stacked it in open criss-cross fashion to dry.  It’s cracking nicely which tells me it’s pretty well seasoned.

To that, we’ve added another roughly three cords of wood cut, split, and stacked from our woods throughout the year: about a cord and a half of Red Maple, another of Pin Cherry, and a half of odds and ends we pulled out in the cleanup after Irene.  That’s stacked in another location on the property, and from the looks of it, should be plenty ready by the end of Winter when we need it.

A good cord of well-seasoned hardwood stores about the same number of BTUs as 150 gallons of fuel oil.  Given our oil boiler’s tested efficiency of just over 80% and a conservative rating of 70% for the stove (it’s advertised at 80%), that means we pull about the same amount of useable heat from each cord as we do from 130 gallons of diesel, so I figure our firewood stacks are worth about 850 gallons (given that the Irene stuff isn’t all hardwood).  Click here to read a pretty good article on these calculations on the National Ag Safety Database… it’s an old article, so don’t laugh or cry too hard when you see the prices. 

We’re getting a quote of about $3.65 a gallon delivered to pre-buy fuel oil through the winter.  Seasoned hardwood goes for around $250 a cord delivered, but green wood dries out just fine over the summer and costs only ~$175.  I estimate we use about a gallon of gas/oil in my Stihl per cord and another half gallon of tractor diesel to get it out of the forest and to the wood pile, at which point we pay our son about $10/cord to stack it (almost all of which he puts in his Haiti missions jar).  That might only be $15-20 in direct costs, but given the hours spent sharpening, oiling, cutting, hauling, and splitting (with mauls and axes – we think of it as saving on a gym membership), I think $175 is pretty fair for a cord of green wood whether we cut it ourselves or have it delivered.

Bottom line: Our firewood stack represents about $1225 in money and time.  The equivalent 850 gallons of fuel oil would cost about $3100.  Savings: $1875.

Time to cut some more wood.