Well, it’s about time I updated, isn’t it? We have some exciting news to share – here in our fourth year of farming, we finally have an essential tool we’ve needed for some time – a tractor! The gratitude we have for this machine is immense. It was delivered in time for us to do a cleanout in the barn over Memorial Day weekend, which was none too soon. We must give many thanks to Rosy Brothers in Dryden, MI for getting it to us so quickly. We highly recommend them for any of your outdoor power equipment needs.
We use deep litter in the winter for all of our animals – the composting process starts in the lower layers and helps generate natural heat to keep the animals warm. We had expected and hoped to get a tractor by March or so of this year, but it didn’t work out until May – which meant over a year’s worth of bedding and waste buildup, layer upon layer! We had to cut out part of the wall, as seen on the left-hand side of the photo, because that’s the side our goats feeders are on, and they being notorious wasters of hay, that side of the barn was nearly FOUR FEET deep -mostly wasted hay. (grumble!) We’ll be replacing that wall with a set of slider doors like you see on the right. We still need to get a backhoe in order to reach certain angles/corners in the barn, but it is much improved from where we started. But to get started, the loader bucket and post hole digger are excellent tools. We’ve been busy sinking new fence posts and installing gates, leveling out certain areas of our property, and so on.
We’ll be putting in new pasture fencing soon, too, in order to provide another pasture area to the goat herd so that we can incorporate rotational grazing into our herd management. That was a weakness for us last year during the drought – they ate down our one pasture and it never had time to recover. This year the rains seem to be coming just fine (it’s been raining here all night and off and on all day so far!) so we are looking forward to being able to do better soil and native grass management. The tractor opens up so many doors we could not make it through before. We’re very excited!
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