The Farm has a Visitor

While driving up to do the milking this morning we saw this visitor. It isn't unusual to see deer at the farm, but normally they run away as soon as we pull in.  This one just slowly meandered along the road as we drove in, only moving when I just about ran it over.

Milking has stabilized a bit for now.  We seem to be getting between 33-38 lbs depending on the time of day.  The heat has been cranking up but it hasn't seemed to  affected the milk out put yet.  We'll see if it does as our hot streak continues.

We have sold off the last baby goat, the little spotted one.  We are now just looking to sell off the horned one and the other Saanen that had problems with it's udder.  It is probably only good for meat now.  We don't milk it, obviously, but it keeps poking its nose in, watching the whole process.  I sometimes feel that it is just watching me, waiting for the moment that it can take revenge for all the pain and suffering I put it through when trying to work the mastitis out.  It still won't let me near it, just runs away when I walk towards it, or even look at it with my steely gaze.

As a side note, the pigs that we got a while back are getting big.  I can just about taste them now.  We had a brief meeting about them and it seems like in about another month they will be ~180 lbs, which from the research that has been done, is about the right weight to butcher them.

We went to feed them today(milk the goats, feed the pigs, get all the unpleasantness over in the same day) and I see that they have a mud wallow now.  They were really loving it in today's heat.  I hope they are enjoying it while they can, because I'm certainly going to enjoy them for breakfast in just a few weeks.

One question we, at least Will and I have this question, has to do with the bacon.  I've had bacon that was pretty much straight off the pig and it was horrible!  Tasteless, bland, almost made me want to give it up.  I'm hoping the butcher handles the hickory smoking of it.  If not, we are going to have to figure out something to turn it into the deliciousness that it should be.  Same thing goes for the ham I suppose.  I don't think it honey glazes itself.  One of us has a butcher for an uncle so hopefully we'll get some information on that.

One other incident happened while up at the pigs.  We have an electric fence around it and after we were done and I had hooked it back up I didn't hear the normally sparking of it.  I was wondering if it had become unplugged or something so I'm following the power and find it all looks normal so I touched the fence and got a slight zap.  Very slight, almost tube sock on carpet slight.  Since it was so light, I talked my minion into touching it, something his rivals have done before which led to much bragging at home.  So my youngest minion puts his finger on it and I hear this big *Zap*!  He jerks his finger away and starts crying.  I think the capacitors must have had time to charge up with all the time it took me to convince him it didn't hurt and that he should touch it.  Well, that is some trust broken right there.  Although he did brag about it to his rivals later that night.

Expanding our Interests

In addition to these goats, most everyone in our group is coming together to try out hog raising. We're not too sure how well it is going to work out but we have the highest hope for a harvest of ham and bacon in the fall. Some of us spent some time earlier this week getting a shelter and fence put up, and then last night we met and did more to complete it and also moved the pigs to their new home(they had been staying in the small shelter where we first had the goats). There is some final work to be done before it is as we have envisioned, but it is mostly complete.

We are running some electrical fence around both the inside(to keep the pigs in) and outside(to keep predators out) and that is the piece that is taking some tweaking to get complete.

As a kid we had pigs and they stank to high heavens, so luckily the location we have is up on top of a mountain outside of town. I'm hoping this works out well, ham and bacon win out over goat milk every time.