Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (21 page)

My grain mix does not have enough protein for raising chicks. The chicks grow and feather out much faster when I give them worms, in addition to this mix. I kept a worm bin going in my house for many years to drag around to the classes I taught. It was handy for putting food scraps in during the winter. By spring, the bin would be at peak production, just in time to harvest some worms for the newly hatched chicks. I use an incubator for hatching eggs, but having them hatched and raised by a broody hen would be better. Studying the chicken feed
issue has always been on my to-do list, but a little further down than the other things I’ve talked about in this book; so I haven’t considered it as much as I would have liked. Fortunately, my friend Harvey Ussery has. He has tested all sorts of things, including breeding black soldier fly larvae to feed his chickens, and he tells you about it in his book
The Small-Scale Poultry Flock
. The old farm books I’ve found often have lists and descriptions of all sorts of things to feed chickens and other animals.

When I had fifty layers and sold eggs, I would hatch out at least fifty chicks each year. About half of those chicks would be roosters, which would be taken for meat by 12 weeks of age. The laying flock would consist of 25 hens in their first full year of laying and the same number in their second year. By fall, the new pullets would be starting to lay when the oldest hens were slacking off. That’s when we took the old hens for meat. I kept close financial records and broke even money-wise with the egg sales. Our profit was food for our table in the form of meat and eggs.

Although hens will lay eggs quite well without a rooster being around, a rooster is needed to fertilize the eggs in order to have chicks. One rooster for every ten to fifteen hens is a guideline. They can be noisy with their crowing. Lucky for us, our neighbors enjoy the sound. It is part of country living. Roosters are usually banned from city and suburban lots — all the more reason to work on building community so that someone is keeping roosters with their hens and raising replacements for you if you need them. Even if you have your own rooster, predators abound and can wipe out your flock, or part of it, in short order.

If you want to have ducks you can raise them without a pond, but you should still provide some water for them to splash in. I don’t have experience with ducks, but Harvey mentions them in his book, as well as guineas, and turkeys. A three ounce serving of roasted chicken or duck provides about 15 percent of the daily vitamin B
₁₂
requirement.

Dairy — Goats and Cows

When we first moved here in 1984 I bought two Nubian goats for milk. We didn’t have any fenced pasture yet, so I tied them out each day, keeping a water bucket handy. We fenced a very small area so that if I was gone for any length of time during the day they could stay there. We had a shed that I put them in each night. I was worried that dogs might come along and bother them when they were tied out. After a year and a half we fenced some pasture. That was a lot nicer than putting them on the end of a chain each day. In some countries it is common to tether goats and cows and that’s how the grass is controlled along the roadsides. I could only imagine what people would have had to say if I had tied my goats along the road. Come to think of it, it would be easier than mowing the ditch.

I made a milking stand from scrap wood we already had. For whatever else I needed for milking, I used what I had around the house. Goats are easy enough to put in the back of a pickup truck, providing you have sides on it. They can even jump in and out without a ramp. Some people move them in a van or car. You would need to consider moving them to take them to a buck to get bred, unless you keep a buck yourself. Be aware, a buck can be smelly. If you bring goats home as dairy animals, make sure you know how you will get them bred when the time comes.

Although books I’ve read show that one goat could give you up to four quarts of milk a day (one gallon), I believe I got a quart of milk a day from one goat, with two milkings a day. The second goat was not always producing when the first one was. Being tied out each day, rather than free to wander the pasture, could have affected the milk production. The condition of a pasture will always affect how much milk a dairy animal will give. We hadn’t done anything to the pasture — there was already grass there and we let the goats eat it. In order to have milk, a goat would have to have given birth. A six-month old goat kid, taken for food for your table, could yield 30 pounds of meat and bones.
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We only had dairy goats for three years, in the midst of fixing up an old farmhouse, raising children, etc. Goats like to browse on bushes and trees more than grass, and are often used to clear areas of brush and poison ivy. If you move to someplace that has an overgrown area you’d like cleared, goats just might be the answer. A temporary fence of livestock panels
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could control their movement and is fairly easy to move.

For seven years we kept a milk cow. She was too big for the goat shed, so we fixed a place in the barn for her. The goats hadn’t been in the barn because we were using it for other purposes at that time. I penned the calf separately at night and milked only once a day in the morning. The calf took the rest of the milk during the day. If we had to be gone overnight, the calf took all the milk. The calf was taken for food for us at about ten months. In our area we have a local butcher who comes to the farm, kills the animal there, and takes it back to his place to age in his cooler for a few days, until he cuts it into pieces for the freezer. Legally, that’s okay, since we are consuming the meat. If we were to sell the meat by the cut, it would need to be federally inspected. Someone, or a group of people, could buy an animal from the farmer and have the butcher process it for them, and that would be legal because it would already be their animal. In the not-so-distant future, I believe traveling on-farm processing units will become the norm. If you were receiving 0.7 gallons of milk a week (1.5 cups/day) from a cow producing a gallon a day, you would be getting ten percent of the production. Using conservative estimates, if the calf was taken for meat at ten months, you would get
about twenty-three pounds of meat for the year, plus bones for broth. That would be about seven ounces per week for your diet.

Having a cow and milking once a day worked well for us. The biggest problem was getting her bred. There is a small window of time when a cow is in heat. If you miss that, you have to wait until the next time. She will give you clues, such as mooing constantly. You could go out and lift her tail to find physical clues, but with only one cow, if you are new at this it is hard to tell. If you had two cows, they would be jumping on each other. I only knew one other person who kept a family cow and he sold it about the time I got mine. There was a man whose business it was to go to farms to artificially inseminate (AI) cows, but he retired about that same time. In the end, Tommy, the dairy farmer down the road, offered to come when I needed him to do the AI. I would call and he’d promise to get over that morning, but sometimes things happened and it would be after dark when he came. It didn’t always take and he would need to come back on the next cycle. Tommy never seemed to mind, something for which I am forever grateful. We always had a nice chat when he came, catching up and talking about things on our farms — our very tiny one and his very large one.

If I had known someone with a bull, I could have hauled the cow to the bull, or vice versa, if I had wanted to have a bull in the pasture. Actually, there was someone who offered to bring his bull over for a month to make sure our cow was bred. However, this bull had quite a spread of horns and, not being familiar with bulls, I wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility of having that animal at our place. As far as hauling the cow, she was too big for the back of the pickup, so I would have had to find someone with a trailer to do that. When keeping large farm animals, it is also important to find a veterinarian who will come to the farm. It is easier to keep a milk animal if there are others doing the same. A community will evolve to provide for your needs.

Water is a consideration. Cows drink a lot of water and, if there was a winter storm threatening, I would fill six five-gallon buckets of water in case the power went out. Our water comes from a well and has an electric pump. With the cow and calf, those six buckets would last only one day. There is no faucet in the barn, so all the water was run out there
with a hose. From December through February, the water was carried out in buckets, since the hose would be frozen. If I was to have a cow again I would seriously consider having running water in the barn and make sure we had adequate water storage in case of power outages, which seem to happen more frequently now, and not only with winter storms.

Besides milk and meat, cows can provide draft power. Rather than being taken for meat at a young age, the bull calves become oxen. An ox is a castrated male trained to do work and can be from any bovine breed. Beyond their working days they will become food for the table. It takes a lot of training when they are young, but once trained they can be easily managed by the right person — the drover. Our place is small enough that we don’t need draft power and we don’t have enough pasture for draft animals, but we have raised a drover. Luke became acquainted with oxen when he was five and, now that he’s grown, has his own teams. The skill of training these animals for work is being kept alive by people like him and those in places that depend on draft power around the world. Interesting things have been happening in Cuba. Cuba was dependent on the European Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Union for many things, including tractors and agricultural chemicals. When that support system fell apart in 1989, Cuba had to find other means to keep its agricultural systems going. Those systems changed to include organic urban agriculture initiatives and increased use of draft power on farms.
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Steers had to be taken out of the food system to train as draft animals, more drovers had to be trained, and pasture land needed to be increased on farms that had previously been managed with tractors.

Ideally, the milk and meat in a sustainable diet would be produced on pasture only. It is healthier for the animals and for the people drinking the milk. More and more, dairies are going to organic and grass-fed systems. Traditionally, whey (from cheese making) and skim milk (from butter making) was fed to chickens as the animal protein that they needed. Dairy animals and chickens go well together on a farm. A three ounce serving of ground grass-fed beef is about 80 percent of a day’s requirement of vitamin B
₁₂
. The same size serving of goat meat is 50 percent of the requirement.

Swine

If you have dairy animals and make cheese and butter, you might want to consider a pig. Whey and skim milk are excellent foods for pigs. Homesteads have long depended on pigs for a variety of things. Besides meat, there was fat to be rendered into lard for cooking and for soap making. Traditionally, the meat was preserved by salting and smoking. We had pigs at our place one year when one of our children raised them for a 4-H project. We found that they ate a lot of corn. At first we bought pig feed, and then switched to whole corn. We were new at this and weren’t set up to provide any homegrown food on a regular basis. We could have just let the pigs run in the woods and eat acorns, but back in the day when people did that they would still pen their hogs and fatten them on corn for a few weeks before they butchered them.

We started with two feeder pigs (weaned piglets) and we put them in the pen we had earlier used to keep the goats in, since the goats had a fenced pasture by that time. That pen had a tall metal gate, the kind you might find on a chain link fence. It was something we had acquired for free. The gate hinges were of the lift off variety, with barrel sleeves that drop onto pins on the gate post. The gate worked quite well for the goats. One day, our children threw some food scraps from dinner into the pen, and they landed right in front of the gate. In their enthusiasm to get the scraps, the pigs rooted a little too hard and lifted the gate right up and off those pins, setting themselves free. We all got our exercise that evening getting them back in. We put a block of wood in place above one of the pins, so that couldn’t happen again. We also made a food trough that we could easily put food scraps in from outside the fence. It is good to start out small with homestead projects until you really know what you are getting into. That was the only year we raised pigs. In recent years we did some more fencing, and I had that episode in mind when we decided to fence the barnyard.

Luke was born the summer we had the pigs. I was also milking the goats then. For the first week after he was born, and occasionally after that, the pigs received the goat milk. The last month or so, they had outgrown their pen and we let them into the pasture. When the come-
to-the-farm butcher was cutting up the meat from the first pig to package it, he was so impressed at the quality of the meat that he bought the other pig himself. He caters events with barbeque and was happy to get such good pork.