Animal Care Basics

If you read the labels on food you buy you'd see there are a lot of non-food products used in food processing. Mass produced food contains these for a lot of reasons but not for your good health. Also, mass produced meats are not happy animals raised on sunlight, fresh grass and managed with care. They have been genetically bred for consumption, fed whatever puts as much meat on them in as short a period as possible and lost all ability to resist diseases that their wild counter parts hold naturally. If - You are What You Eat . . .

Producing a large portion of your own food can be time consuming task if you do not plan ahead. Keeping animals is a commitment to providing them food, water and clean shelter from harsh weather but the rewards are bounties of all natural - no chemical meat & dairy. Well kept animals have fewer problems.

This task does not have to be impossible if you plan on deep 8" bedding in winter stalls, this is turned occationally to freshen it. Lime is also a great odor eliminator for all types of animals. Good bedding can be used until it no longer looks like straw, which can be a few years if turned every few months during winter. In the end, the bedding is then turned into the methane gas to completely break it down, or if it is ready to go directly to the garden or fields. This is black gold. The other big obsticle in animal care is fencing. The better your fencing - the easier the animal care is during the grazing season. Nothing can ruin a day more than to find an animal malled by wild coyotes, fox or a racoon.

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Sustainable Animal Food, Water and Shelter

Our animals get by on hay. Even the chickens are fed a hay mix grown for them. The kind of hay depends on their condition. Pregnant & milking ewes and nannies get the good clover, alfalfa, oat, barley and wheat grass hay for optimum quality. The males get what looks good enough to eat except when they are getting ready to mingle with the girls and then only a little of the good hay.

We have a rule we live by - Never keep more animals than we have copious amounts of hay for!

Minerals and Salts are available (free-choice) at all times.

Watering is hardest to manage in the dead of winter. We have insulated watering buckets but have since added de-icers that run nights - the coldest part of winter. One trick that has worked for us to move water to pastures or to the barn is to put our water either in a water-tight wagon that gets rolled around or in a sled that is towed behind a snowmobile.

A whole page is devoted to the wintering water systems because it is so important to have an energy economical system when planning on being off-the-grid.

Building more shelters: We just started taking old tires to make rammed earth shelters for our animals. Once installed its in-destructable! Even the old goat's horns can't puncture through and head butting into the walls results in a lot less blood shed.

Our choice of animals include Icelandic Sheep for our dairy cheese making as well as Saneen Dairy goats and chickens for eggs and meat.

Also included in the righted links is How we plan on marketing our surplus farm items.

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