Strategies for reducing barn time

[User635240]

If the animals are getting sick from processed commercial food... it makes you wonder about some of the people sicknesses now too.

Yeah, I brought them each a salami stick from the gas station and the next day one had a hot spot.

 

[nao57]

Yeah, I brought them each a salami stick from the gas station and the next day one had a hot spot.

I've also noticed stuff like that. Like when I was a kid, if you offered a hot dog to a dog or a cat, they'd be all over it. Now days, when I do the same thing to our cat (not the same cat but still...), who really likes meat he won't eat it. He'll sometimes lick it but its like he doesn't like how it smells or tastes or something.

 

[nao57]

Thanks. I have ducks, chickens (layers and meat birds), quail, microgreens, goats, young fruit orchard, and now turkey poults and goslings. There are customers for the eggs and goat milk and microgreens. There is a 1200 sw ft barn on 5 acres. 100 ft from the barn is a 1/3 acre pond and 500 ft from the barn is a fenced in dog run. The dogs and goats will walk there fine.

The main issue with the goats is that they persistently destroy their equipment. They smashed all their water buckets, hay feeders, and stall walls. Which is why it's so chaotic, wasteful unsafe, and time consuming with them. They also get sick and injured a lot so I am spending a lot of time and money with veterinary care.

The ducks and microgreens are the most profitable and easiest activities. However the ducks are indoors now due to predators and neighbors complaining about them roaming.
Quail are super easy and reasonably profitable once I got them all organized in a hutch.
The chickens are the least profitable simply because their eggs are a commodity, (I sell them for $4 but I'd really need $8/doz to cover time and expenses) and require moderate work.

For the goats; most animals if they get sick a lot then there's something wrong with the nutrition. Try to see if they still get sick if you put more diversity in the feed. I ran into this with ducks where they'd stop laying, or their ducklings would die immediately after being born. The problem went away when I added more nutrition to the feed. I also found a way of doing it without increasing costs. I'm not a goat expert, but when you say they get sick often that's what came to mind is to see if you can make them less sick. To find out what to do with this, I did experiments with feed ratios, that were more diverse. Hungry animals want to roam more also; though that idea has to be twisted a bit with goats, that are programmed to roam.

Does the water from the animals come from the house or from the pond? You might could see if you can close the distance to where they get water from, closer to where you do your feeding station...to save time?

Are your microgreens stacked, so the trays can be fed once from the top with it trickling down to what's under automatically? (I think you meant fodder sprout feed right?) When I did fodder sprouts I didn't have them stacked and that's what wasted a lot of time. I learned what I did wrong.

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For the orchard you can cut your time if you focus on larger fruit, instead of the small stuff like cherries. Cherries are popular but when we process and pick cherries they take seriously like 3 or 4 times the time that it takes us to process apples, or peaches. And its all because they are so darn small that you spend forever pitting and picking them. (This will save you time, but depends on your sales market... can you sell other things...?) But a good added benefit of looking at this part is that many fruit trees like cherries are actually rated more poorly for some climates than others. Like in my state (Utah), plums are rated more hardy than cherries. So are pears, apricots, and apples... its also more gas mileage on maintenance and avoiding problems to just not do cherries here because the cherry trees in our yard take more time than all of the other fruit trees combined. We spend almost ZERO time maintaining the plum trees. And very little time on apple trees. But cherry trees, every year there's problems with them that take up our time. However, this could be different for your state. The ranking of maintenance time on fruit trees will vary on climate. But generally cherry trees are much higher maintenance still in other states. Larger fruit can process faster since you get more fruit in 1 go.

You could spend less on fertilizer for your crops and orchards if you set up some composting areas for the animal... manure.

The year I kept my ducks under the apple trees in our yard we also didn't have to spray for bugs that year also. (But my climate is unique... this might need experimentation for your area.) That saved time and headache. And spraying the orchard is ... well a lot of older farmers end up with bad health conditions from that. I hope you can avoid that.

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Actually when I got to the end of writing this I realized, it might be that your goats are getting injured and sick from being in too small of space. They want to get out so they mess stuff up. Being too crowded can also get them sick. Its well known in the sheep industry that if you don't have good air in your barn that your sheep WILL get sick more than if there's good air circulation; particularly in winter when its also cold. (Although this is complicated if you've got more than 1 kind of animal in the same barn. Different animals have different body and blood temperatures and this weighs out cold resistance in winter).

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People also get more allergic reactions to chickens, and chickens get sick more often now because all the bio and healthcare research including growing bacteria and viruses is done on those pitri dishes... and guess what, the stuff in those pitri dishes is chicken egg product. So that's why things are spilling over into other areas now with trouble with chickens. ... I won't tell you not to do chickens though because people are programmed to do chicken eggs. Most people wouldn't even think about doing duck eggs, though I think duck eggs are healthier. People with chicken egg allergies usually don't get sick to duck eggs too.

Well hope that helps. But some of these ideas you might have to weight out in marketing, selling.

 

[Mrs. K]

Killing yourself with more and more work is not the solution. What will happen is you will get a cold that leads into pneumonia. Or stumble and break a leg and then where will you be.

I think your last post stated it pretty clearly. Sell the goats and the chickens. Now, I am not saying that you can never have goats or chickens again, but right now, they are costing you huge, a pain to take care of. You have over extended yourself. The romance of this idea has met reality.

Just stop a moment and think what it would be like if the goats are gone. I have been in agriculture for decades, and one has to not only create new animals, but has to sell animals too.

If you can't sell all of them, sell a good part of them. One of the easiest ways of reducing the vet bill and the feed bill is to reduce the size of the herd or flock.

Pretty soon, you are going to hate this, not love it. Adjust so that does not happen. Surviving on you own, is truly harder than one thinks. I have cattle, chickens, and a garden. Never even came close to making it entirely on that. Except for the cattle, we have made a good money there. Therefore, they get the best situation. But I have had weasels, coons, coyotes, and this year a bazillion grasshoppers are killing my garden, it is always something.

Mrs K

 

[User635240]

If it works for you, then yes it makes sense.

The biggest issues I would see:
--amount of sleep (being too tired makes it hard to work, and can be downright dangerous in some cases.)
--light to see what you are building (electric lights might work, depending on what project.)

Definitely be careful as you work, because getting injured can make everything even harder to handle.


Can you do some of the chores earlier? For example, filling water containers before sunup is probably just as useful as doing it later.

Can you combine the egg-delivery and errands into fewer days of the week, to leave some other days more free to do projects? This might go for some kinds of chores too: if you clean a few pens each day it eats up time every day, but if you spend all of one day cleaning pens you may be able to skip them all the next day.

If the veterinary problems are this big in your day, either you're getting a lot of bad luck at once, or else you need to figure out what is causing them and do something to fix that. Of course, if the problems are things like injuries from stalls that need rebuilding, and you are so busy treating injuries that you don't have time to rebuild the stalls, then you are in a bit of a bind, but trying to make time to do that rebuilding is definitely worth tackling.

Can you save time on things like meals and dishes? Possibilities could include using disposable dishes for a week, or eating sandwiches for a few days instead of cooking better meals, or making a big pot of stew and eating it several days in a row, or ordering pizza rather than cooking dinner, or buying a pre-made meal when you are running errands one day and then eating it the next day to save cooking time when you are building stalls.

Is there any chance of hiring someone to do some of the work? That could be the chores, the errands, the rebuilding, or any other things that take your time, to free up your time to do other parts of it.

At one point you mentioned bottle feeding young goats: you can think about which things will stop at some point (like kids no longer needing bottles), and maybe time some projects for the times of the year when you have a few less chores (depending on how urgent the projects are.)

Other than that, maybe consider how important each project and each animal or kind of animal is, and see if you can cut back somewhere. When the total is "too much," sometimes you do have to get rid of something (like one kind of animal) or skip something (like one kind of project).

Thanks. A lot of good insights here.