Kody: And I don’t think we could have come up with a better title for this week because this is actually take two. We recorded an hour and 15 minute long, wonderful episode last night with mute on our mic the entire time. I have a really great video of us mouthing to the screen. But let’s face it, when you have a homestead, things go wrong. It doesn’t matter.

Kody and Ron: How prepared you are, how much money you have, how diligent you are to your homestead if you have livestock or kids or wind.

Kody and Ron: Or lightning. Or basically if you live on planet Earth, things are going to go wrong on your homestead. Sorry. It is windy outside today and I was outside.

Kody and Ron: We want to start with probably our most ridiculous thing that has gone wrong on our homestead in the entire time of our homesteading. We’ve had some weird stuff, we’ve had some tragic stuff, we’ve had annoying stuff, damaging stuff, but this we’ve had miserable parents on the property. Miserable parents on the property. That was the worst. In fact.

Raising Meat Birds Later in the Year

Kody and Ron: This beautiful office right here used to be our guest room where we would let family members either come visit or if they needed to relocate, stay here first. It is now a beautiful office and we have no guest rooms. Let’s tell that was very much on purpose. Yes. Our first one is this year we are raising meat birds a little late in the year.

Kody: We won’t be butchering them till sometime in November. And we really don’t like doing that because it starts getting cold here. It is freezing right now. And that makes it really hard for meat birds to grow at the rate you want them to grow, no matter how much feed you give them or whatever. But this year we had wildfires in the area, and Ron here is our local fire chief, and all of our kids are on the department, which pretty much left me and our little kids to run the farm for.

Kody: Almost three months along with, the homestead education and our printing company and our meat selling and being Mrs. Fire Chief because that is a full-time job in itself, as well as we year-round school. I’m trying to keep the little boys up on their studies and it’s, gardening season and harvest season, and I was losing my mind. So we opted to not do meat birds until a little later in the year, which was a very calculated decision.

Kody and Ron: Because as we’ll get to later, meat birds have kind of been the something we love as a finished product, but kind of the bane of our existence for the last few years. Thank God we have pork. Yeah. Although there was that year that we didn’t have any chickens because of the freezer and we had to eat that old sow all winter. That was not fun. Because money was a little tight and we didn’t have enough feeders. And yeah, so we ate old sow.

Kody and Ron: All winter, like when money kind of started coming around in the spring, we decided we were going to buy a hamburger. We wanted beef so bad. Anyways, we want to make sure these meat birds stay really warm. We have them in a smaller chicken tractor that we’ve had for a while. It’s not one of the ones we built. We actually got it off somebody, I don’t even think we paid for it. No, it’s free. Yeah. It’s real heavy, real old, but it’s small, it’s only about like four feet wide and eight.

Kody and Ron: 10 feet long maybe. Yeah. Probably. It’s got a metal roof. It does the job. We use it a lot when we have like pullets that are kind of we don’t want them in with the roosters and stuff yet, where they’re getting beat up, but they’re too big to be in the house anymore. It’s meant for two or three birds, Max. Yeah. And our brooder, we have a really nice big metal brooder, but it’s in our mud room, which is right off the kitchen. And if anybody has ever raised Cornish Crosses before, that within 20 minutes of them coming into your home or your brooder area or whatever, everything smells like death. When we had a hundred meat birds, they lasted about a day in our metal brooder, Then we had to put half into a plastic storage tote, not Tupperware, but like those big blue rubber-made things.

Kody: Then we said we have to put these guys outside. They went into the small chicken tractor. And we needed heat lamps right away because it gets cold in North Idaho, even in September, when we put them in there. And because this chicken tractor is old, it’s made a lot out of particle board that’s been like reinforced. So we hooked the we drill holes in the roof and we put the heat lamp in there with a zip tie.

The Great Chick Escape

Kody: And we’re not really sure exactly what happened, but the little boys do a lot of the feeding. They are six and nine, they feed a lot of the all the chickens. And we think they slammed the lid. And when they did one of the pieces of particle board that’s just rotted, the light fell out. Well, we didn’t know that. And the next morning I go out in the morning, just check on the dogs and see what they’re doing. And the dogs are like.

Kody: Running all over the yard, there’s chicks all over the yard, the labs are running around like full bird dog mode with a chick in their mouth, and they see me and they all drop their chicks wherever they’re at and come running to me excitedly. And I was like, my gosh, I thought we had a predator get in, or the dogs ripped the wire off, and I was like so mad at the dogs and yelling at them, which they probably still shouldn’t have been like, cruising around with a chick in their mouth. And I am not 100% positive that none of them had chicken nuggets. They were just working on taking the chicks back to the coop. Let’s go with that. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Kody: Like, one of our like younger labs, he takes a chick in his mouth and like bolts across the pasture Then sees that I’m chasing after him. He drops the chick out in the middle of the pasture. So I’m out there in like slippers and.

Kody and Ron: A long sweater robe type thing, like chasing chicks through the pasture. And I’m trying to get back to the coop because I don’t want the dogs messing with them anymore. And as I’m catching chicks, I’m kind of just lifting the lid and throwing them in. And there’s just chicks everywhere. And I’m what is going on? And I start calling everybody and nobody’s hearing me call because it’s like right at that like alarms are just going off time.

Kody: And I finally go over and I open the lid and realized that this heat lamp had landed on the particle board floor Then burned a hole in the particle board. But then there’s those cages on the lamp. So every time I was throwing chicks back in, they’re just running over and falling back out the hole and taking off to the sides. And I was just this is absolute chaos. I have never felt chaos this before.

Kody: My son finally comes out and we’re able to prop up this big lid and we put a piece of cardboard up and we’re tucking birds like into the like enclosed area rather than in the little nesting area and blocking them back off with the cardboard. And we get to counting and out of the probably ninety-five birds that we had out there, we had a hundred originally, but meat birds and you lose some. And I had like thirty-five.

Kody and Ron: In the coop. In the coop. With no other chicks to be seen. And I’m just like, my gosh, this is a clown show. And this is, terrible because we had a hundred birds. We have ten people living in our house right now. I need every single one of those birds. And another homestead disaster we had going on is the pipe that goes from our well to our cistern cracked. So we had dug a ten foot, it’s not even a hole, it is a four by eight to be able to get in there. Yeah, pit is the better word. And that’s right behind where the chicks were. And it there was water in there. I’m like not wanting to go over and look in the pit because I’m just imagining like all the chicks like floating in the water. I go over there and look and there’s no chicks.

Kody and Ron: At about that time I see a chick kind of come out from underneath my workshed.

Kody: I have a she shed out in the yard. It’s 32 feet long. It’s on skids. It’s where we keep like all of our inventory and stuff. And this chick comes out at the end and I go grab it and I peek under there. And again, I’m like in my, slippers and robe. And I’m looking under the skid, and there’s a line of the other 75 chicks.

Kody: Single file line along one of these skids all the way down like in the shadows. And you’d reach in to try to grab one and they all scatter to the back. You go to the back and they all scatter to the front. And turns out we do not have a pole long enough to like.

Kody and Ron: Get the rest of the chicks out. At this point, the whole family’s out there, all in our pajamas. It was wonderful family bonding. And we have a like roof snow rake for the roof that has a long pole and we’re snow rake. Snow rake. Okay, whatever. I didn’t want to like say snow rake because then they imagine like raking the yard. This is for the roof. It’s got a long pole on it, so we’re trying to poke the chickens, but we can’t use the whole piece. It won’t fit underneath.

Kody and Ron: So when you like poke a chick, it just runs to the other side rather than running out. And honestly, this pole was only twelve feet long. Maybe. And we need thirty-two feet. I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the Friends episode where they think that like fat, ugly naked guy or whatever is dead in his apartment across the alley. So they tape together all the chopsticks and they’re trying to like poke him, Then he wakes up and they’re still poking him. That’s.

Kody and Ron: Exactly what I imagined with these chicks. Ron had a great idea. Mm no, it was great. What’d you do? Nothing. I did nothing. Trying to break stuff. I am. I decided to go ahead and get the let’s go ahead and get the leaf blower up. It’s massive amounts of air. It might be just exactly what we need.

Kody and Ron: We dug the leaf blower out or an extension cord. Of course I’m imagining him leaf blowing these chicks Then just like somersaulting out the fantastic. That would have been so much easier. Of course I just blow air first. I’m thinking two-hundred-mile-an-hour, two-hundred-mile-an-hour air pushing through there. Just going to very much encourage them to go to the other end. We can start grabbing and putting them in a coop. Yeah, that wasn’t the case. They just sucked up next to the next to the skids and held tight.

Ron: Then my fire brain starts kicking in. What drives anything out of any location? Smoke, dust, heavy dust, something that. I got the bright idea. This leaf blower is leaf vac as well, so it’s designed to where the air intake is it’s got blades, it chops up leaves, shoots the leaves into the bag, you can clean up the yard and all that stuff. I’m like, hey, go get me a bunch of flour.

Kody and Ron: We’re going to smoke these guys out. Well, great idea. It pushed one or two out, but the majority just held tight and had a I guess they can hold their breath a really long time. And as our kids are on the other side with a bowl of food trying to lure and catch these chicks out, so now our kids are like puff of flour on their face and they’re opening their eyes. I’m sure you can just imagine this scene. After the Flour didn’t work. Now my military brain kicks in. As I’m moving the leaf blower around, it’s sucking up fine gravels and stuff, and I’m realizing, hey, what? This is shooting out the end of this leaf blower at a very high rate of speed. No chicks were harmed in the making of this episode. I decided to go ahead and take fine gravel and sand.

Ron: And drop into this leaf blower and let it do its work. Let’s pelt these guys with sand and that’s going to have to encourage.

Ron: I don’t know how much I put through that leaf blower, but it was a considerable amount of little tiny gravel and sand and dirt and it encouraged a few more to come out, but still not nearly what we needed. And we know it was working because our children were on the other end yelling every time they got whacked with a rock. Which I do want to verify or clarify that yes, we do have some smaller children at six and nine, but we also have children that are 18, 21, 20, 23.

Kody and Ron: We weren’t just pelting small children with rocks. We were making sure the older ones, got the rocks to the face. I didn’t even think about it. I should have gotten Orbeez. That would have been a good one. I did mention the airsoft gun, but that would have worked well. I could have aimed that better. Yeah. Next time. Because we actually have an we have an airsoft hopefully there is not a next time. We do have this, it’s an airsoft gun, but it’s like Orbeez, those like swishy ball things, and you.

Kody and Ron: Like soak them in water Then shoot them. And the I the kids shoot each other with them and nobody’s hurt. They whine a little, but it’s fun. Yeah. But that’d be fun. The kids all have semiautomatic ones or no, they’re fully automatic. Yeah. Great times. Yeah. Eventually we got them all out. We lured them with food, we kept, pumping them with rocks. We kind of set up a trap where The kids were sitting on the porch and we’d put the food out, and as the food came out, the kids would like grab a chick and chicks would come out. Yeah. As the chicks would come out, the kids would like grab them and throw them in a bucket. And when all was said and done, we found 80 something chicks. That’s probably I don’t think that there’s like any free ranging chicks.

Kody and Ron: I think that we either didn’t have as many when they went out, or the dogs got a couple of chicken nuggets, but we have birds hopefully to eat because they are.

Kody and Ron: They’re pretty big right now. They’re probably a couple pounds. They’re growing. Yeah. Yeah, they’re growing nice now. We still won’t be able to butcher till late November. But I don’t I think we’re going to have some good birds. That is a relief. Because we have not had birds in the freezer for too many years. I think three years now. And not for good birds anyhow. Yeah. Not for lack of growing birds. Although three years ago we butchered them all. We had a great freezer full.

More Lessons From Cornish Crosses

Kody and Ron: And we’re what? We don’t want chickens for dinner. We don’t want chicken for dinner after we don’t even want to be in our kitchen after butchering close to a hundred birds. We all go inside and get cleaned up and we’re going to go to town for pizza and we walk out and there are three Cornish crosses sitting on the front porch, I don’t know where they came from, but apparently they got away during butchering and they ended up in our chicken coop.

Kody and Ron: For the winter, we were we’ll butcher them later. They ended up getting the size of turkeys. They were huge. I’ve got pretty big hands and they’re Yeah, he wears a size 14 ring. Their feet were the size of my hand. Yeah. We butchered them in the spring, but not before we incubated our early annual layer hen replacements, or not butcher, hatched. We do.

Kody and Ron: Yeah, probably two to 4-Hatches a year. Just for our own replacements, we sell a few. If we get roosters, we butcher but apparently we had a I don’t know if we had a rooster in one of those Cornish Crosses or a hen. I don’t know. One or the other. But we hatched these eggs. And if anyone knows anything about Cornish crosses, they’re a three-way proprietary.

Kody and Ron: Multi-generational cross.

Kody and Ron: And we if you try to breed them, you will never get like true to form; you are not going to get the same breed. Yeah, you’re not going to get like true to form. When they bred with our laying hens, this entire hatch was like giant and deformed and like their legs were so long that like as they would step out of the egg, the bone would like pop out of the skin and stuff, their beaks were crossed. It was the creepiest thing I have ever seen.

Kody and Ron: It wasn’t fun. Like their feet were like as big as their whole bodies. Just so we ended up dispatching the entire hatch because that was not humane to keep them alive. That it was the weirdest thing. Yeah. Very weird. The next year, we were We are not going to let these birds get that big again.

Kody and Ron: Didn’t have to worry about that one. That no, this was a different year. This was the year that we had that beautiful group. Yeah. We had friends up, we had a whole butcher day. We had about a hundred birds. We did fifty of as like whole birds. We did the other fifty as like cut quarters, and we kept all the feet for like bone broth and the chicken hearts, because he loves deep fried chicken hearts, which I think they’re disgusting.

The Freezer Failure

Kody and Ron: Though, we were excited. We had a witch. We were excited. We had a lot of birds. So we weren’t going to have to eat old sow this year. It was the best year ever. No, that was the year we ate old sow, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, we butcher all these birds Then we had a power outage. But we’re prepared. We have power outages all the time up here. And we have a routine. We hook up the generator and we run about seven freezers.

Kody: We hook up the generator and like every hour we just rotate which one’s plugged in. It works. We lost power for about three days. Power came back on. We had to leave for a conference. We take off for about four days. And this is in September, so it’s still pretty warm during the day at least. And we come home and we go out to the meat room, which is where our ice machine is to get a bag of ice. And it smelled a dead body. It was, because that’s literally what it was.

Kody: When we had been rotating the freezers, when the power came back on, the chicken freezer was still plugged into the generator. So we turned the generator off. And it was probably close to a week before we even left for our event. Yeah. Then we were gone for four days. By the time we came back, these were done. Like, not like freeze them again and hope for the best or be able to feed them to the dogs. Like, nope, these were done. Like all in the dumpster.

Kody: And we threw away the freezer too. It was horrible. And we’ve had see, we’ve probably lost about four freezers in the eleven or so years we’ve been doing this, which is far too many in my opinion, when we raise a lot of really quality meat. So when we lose a freezer, that is probably close to three thousand dollars worth of meat.

Kody: And it’s not even we can eat it ourselves or something. Because we’ve had times where a freezer thawed a little bit and we caught it and we’re like, well, we don’t want to sell that to a customer because the ink’s all smeared and stuff, so we can still eat that ourselves. No, this is like done. We ended up buying these really great, and I’m going to link them for you, thermometers for our freezers. Do you want to tell them about the thermometers? Because you’re the one who set them all up.

Kody and Ron: Yeah, they’re great. They’re just they got a little box that hangs on the side of the refrigerator or freezer, Then there’s a probe that goes inside the freezer. You just run it right through the door through the seal, it’s real flat and narrow so it doesn’t affect anything. You set your temperature to what you want your alarm to go off at, so all my freezers I like to stay at least zero. I set it at like ten degrees.

Kody and Ron: If that negative ten, right? No. Ten. Okay. Thirty two is freezing. Okay. You set it at ten to alarm you’re Okay. I’ll set at like ten degrees and if the freezer comes up to ten degrees it if it’ll sound an alarm out there in the meat room, but it will also send me a text message and give me an alert, Hey, the beef freezer’s above ten degrees. Like if I’m here I go out and I check it. Usually somebody’s left it propped open.

Kody and Ron: Didn’t get closed completely, so it’s working but not the way that it should. Our kids are notorious for that. Yeah. But highly recommend it. I’ve got one, two, three, four, five different units on it right now. I think you can go up to something like ten per like station. Yeah. You get you can name all your freezers so exactly which one it is.

Kody and Ron: And it’s been great. We’ve been out of town on conference trips and all of a sudden I get an email that says, Hey, the milk fridge is not where Which that you can have your fridges on there too, which is really nice. I call the kids, hey, go check the milk fridge out there the black serve yourself milk fridge. Something’s not right with it. They call me back and it wasn’t closed all the way. Okay, cool. Problem fixed? Yep. It’s been really great and What’s also really nice about it is transparency in food when we have a little small store that people come and they, serve themselves or we’re they’re selling bulk meat to them and we’re packing it right there in the store, sometimes like up to a whole hog.

Kody and Ron: For them to be able to look and see like our data screen of what the temperatures are, it just really makes it where people trust our product more.

Kody and Ron: Then also for anybody that like ships meat or could potentially have USDA come and check them.

Kody and Ron: Or if you have an incident where somebody gets sick, being able, this box also records all the data. You can do printouts or, just show where your freezers have stayed at a lower temp, at the proper temperature. And another reason we keep the alarm so low is sometimes when we’re doing inventory and things that, or stocking more meat, we’ll have the freezer propped open for a few minutes.

Kody and Ron: The alarm will go off, you can just reach over and turn it off and keep doing what you’re doing. And it goes off, every few minutes as it’s doing that. It’s not you just turn it off and it forget to turn it back on. It’s still doing its thing. But it still never gets above like twenty degrees in there or something. That’s really awesome to be able to have that setup. Strongly recommend if you have any type of meat on your property. Especially man, the those of you who like hunt and go on specialty hunts, like draw a tag, save up all your money, go on these great hunts and get, a big old elk or a moose or something that, and you bring it home and put it in your freezer and have the freezer go out. That is devastating.

Kody and Ron: I wish we would have had these also when my mom was a taxidermist when we were a kid. When or when I was a kid, my mom had like four chest freezers because she was a taxidermist and she’d have everybody’s hides in there Then we’d send them out to the Tannery, but we can only send so many out at a time. And man, we’ve had, like scares on that, and that would have been devastating for the clients and for my mom’s business. Back to chickens. That year we when we lost all those chickens, we were like, Well, we have to have chickens. We ordered another batch real quick. We couldn’t get in till almost the end of October.

Trying Meat Birds Again

Kody: And we were hoping like if we feed them really hard, we’re going to be able to butcher them before it starts snowing and stuff, and we’ll have we’ll have our chickens. Well, they didn’t fare very well. They we lost half of them, like dying just from it being cold, I guess. Their feed conversion was zero. I think they probably weighed about a pound apiece by the time we butchered them. Yeah.

Kody and Ron: So yeah, we had like twenty one pound birds in the fridge or in the freezer. W maybe they were a little bit bigger than that, ’cause they were bigger than the ones we had last year. Yeah. I think we it took like two to feed the family of six at the time. And that but that was with two little boys who, eat one bite and forget that there’s a plate.

Kody and Ron: The next year we’re we are not doing this again this year. We have to have chicken. And we raise beef too, but we can make a lot of money off of our beef, and sometimes we have to make that choice to sell more of the beef than we’d like. We always not cool. We always have plenty of pork, but those chickens are what really gets us through the winter, especially because we do a lot of soups. So, I’m making chicken broth every single week on the stove. Like.

Kody and Ron: Every Sunday we do a roast chicken Then I turn it into chicken broth and we do soup and I pull all the extra meat off and we make tacos and sandwiches and stuff with it. This is a real staple in our house. So we didn’t have a lot of money that next spring and I wanted to make sure we had chickens in right away. And we rent out our bull every year to some friends that have some Guernseys. We have a brown Swiss bull and, they pay us for.

Kody and Ron: They keep them for a month or six weeks or whatever, and they pay us a flat rate flat rate fee for that. But they raise a lot of birds. They have meat bird chicks every year. They raise turkeys. They do all sorts of stuff. So I said, hey, would you guys consider trading me some meat birds for the bull service? And they were like, Yeah, that sounds a great trade to us. They threw in some turkeys,. Well, these were a heritage dual purpose breed that literally had no feed conversion rate. We fed them from probably April to September. They should have been like twelve pound birds and they were pound and a half apiece. It was sad. When we still have those in the freezer now. I’d have to cook like.

Kody and Ron: Four and still couldn’t have a full meal for us. I’d have to cook four Then pull the meat off to do tacos or something that. It was just absolutely ridiculous. And they were tough and Yeah, they just were not good. And that’s another reason I couldn’t even make them as like roast birds. You just couldn’t eat them that. We will we definitely have our feelings about Cornish crosses and the way that they were designed and the way that they’re commercially fed and things that. But I figure.

Kody and Ron: If we buy Cornish crosses Then feed them our quality non-GMO and we have them out in tractors where they’re holistically raised and all those wonderful things, at least we are taking that element out. But I cannot waste my time or money on chewy one pound birds again. Wish us luck with these birds because they’re already bigger than the birds we’ve had the last two years. Even if we had to go butcher them all tomorrow, we’d have a better product. But it is they’re all happy and healthy. We just added one of our.

Kody and Ron: Chicken tractors, which is considerably larger to the little one. They can they still have the ability to get indoors out of the weather and in a heated environment. But they’ve got a large area to get out and run around. That’s a ten by twelve tractor. Yeah. If you go on the Instagram you can see how big it is because my children are playing in it with the chickens.

Kody and Ron: Yeah, they’re a little strange that. Yeah, for.

Kody and Ron: But it’s of funny that they like to the chickens like to run back and forth between the two coops and they bounce off of the four or the two by fours where it’s joined together. We just cut some holes to make a gateway for and it worked out really well. Sealed it with or like attached it with zip ties So it’s a real tight fit there. But yeah, they’re just running all over the place. They’re loving life, they’re growing great, excited to get butchered and be done.

Building More Help Into the Homestead

Kody and Ron: Yeah, Then maybe next year we’ll have a better plan. I know I want to start earlier next year so that we can do a few rounds and like stock up our freezer and have chicken all year. We can do that if we’re here. Not traveling. Yeah, we do travel a lot, but we have a ranch hand now. Sort of. Couple of them. Yeah. We mentioned, I think, in our last podcast, that our oldest son moved home, which has been wonderful. And or not our oldest son, our second oldest son. And It was like domino effect, like one moved home, the other one’s I want to move home too. And we’re like, Doors are open.

Kody and Ron: I guess they thought that if things were hard, we weren’t still there for them, but they came back and in between them moving back, my nephew, who has been wanting to move up here for years, finally decided to move up. He’s twenty So he’s living here too, and it’s been really great. He’s been wanting to come up and learn farming. Right now he still hasn’t opted to get a job in town yet and he’s just working for us pretty much whatever we need, be in trade for room, board, food, clothes, ’cause he’s lost a lot of weight living up here. So, I didn’t even bat an eye. I took him down to the farm store and bought him a whole new wardrobe and it’s been really great.

Kody and Ron: I think that this year’s travels we’re going to be able to keep things moving a lot better than we do yeah have in the past.

Kody: Definitely something to consider. I know everybody can’t afford a farmhand or have room for a family member to move in, but depending on how big your homestead is, it’s often nice to like older teenagers, they l would love an excuse to have, an extended weekend house sitting for somebody. And there’s some really great kids out there. My kids house sit all the time because they’re comfortable with milking, they’ll farm sit and milk other people’s animals and stuff, so If you don’t have a source for that, go chat with your local 4-H office. Mm-hmm. Chances are they know who to recommend and it’s going to be a good match. Yeah, absolutely. We’ve had some great experiences. We won’t leave for extended periods of time until we know the kid a little bit more.

Kody: But we had one girl, she was friends with our daughter, so she stayed here all the time and like knew our family routine and the dogs knew her. And she stayed at our house for eleven days one time.

Kody and Ron: Her mom would come check on her and bring supplies that she needed. But other than that, she was hunky dory and the animals were great. She ran the little farm store. She even did some shipping for us. Definitely look into some things that because that’s I know a lot of people don’t get dairy animals and things that they want, because of that. Another issue that we is like.

When the Electric Fence Fails

Kody and Ron: Yeah, another issue we have a lot is dealing with hot wire. That is a blessing and a curse. Hot wire is a lot cheaper than barbed wire. Or any other type of stronger fence. We love it because we can have one set of chargers and wire and step-in posts and move the cows all over the property. The practicality of it is great. Our pigs, they’re in old.

Kody: Cann cattle pens with the posts are railroad ties and one by sixes but if you’ve ever raised pigs they are strong and they are destructive but we can put that hot wire on with the four inch extenders and the pigs don’t even touch the fence. Love it. Until the hot wire goes out. And sometimes it just goes out for spite. And they know how to check it, they’re smart.

Kody: Pigs are very smart. They will investigate and you can usually get by with two, three, sometimes four days without the power being on. But they will discover that it’s not on Then it’s free rein for the pigs. Whoe we is it? We raise gosh. We have twelve sows right now. And they usually farrow twice a year, depending on where Farrowing lands, sometimes we’re like theoretically getting a third litter out of them. We have we’re farrowing about 30 times a year. Each time, that’s 10 to 15 piglets. And we just do not have enough pens to handle this. Not that we don’t have enough pens to handle it, but we don’t have enough pens that are set up and ready for what pigs can do to pens. And I swear we forever like.

Kody: Sorry, one of my children yelled and I was making sure that everybody was okay. I’ll go out in the morning to have coffee on the porch and all of a sudden there goes like 30 piglets running across the driveway and I’m I hope they’re having a nice field trip because I’m not going out there and tasting them. It will do no good. We actually so we raised two different breeds of pigs.

Kody: We have our purebred Hereford pigs. They’re a h American heritage breed. They’re I don’t I guess not the endangered list because they’re a domestic animal, but they’re on the like threatened list. They were. Yeah. Not so much anymore. Mm-hmm. We’re still one of the I think we’re probably the largest breeder in the Pacific Northwest, and we don’t have that many. We do sell a lot of them as breeder animals and ours aren’t registered. We raise dirt pigs and we’re good with that.

Kody: Then our other herd is also an old line herd. Our boar is an old-line Berkshire. Then we kind of have a combination of sows. And that’s where most of our sows are because we sell those also.

Kody: As 4 H pigs and local feeders. And a lot of people don’t really know what to do with the Herefords, even though they are still a full size large breed, and they I think they eat great.

Kody: We definitely have that herd too to just make sure we always have a market. And most of our sales are old-line Berkshires or Old Line Hampshires. We have a few Yorks, a couple pigs that we’ve gotten from out of area or show pay showgilts that we’ve bought off of people just to like bulk up our show lines. Again, no one’s registered. We do that on purpose. But with that, we have two boars. Most people do not keep two boars on the property unless they’re like teaser bores in a big facility where these boars are literally on lockdown in solid metal pens, like in concrete, and we are absolutely not doing that. And the reason for this.

Kody and Ron: Is boars, they’re about n our boars are about nine hundred pounds apiece. We’ve had boars get into fights before and we thought we were going to have to put one of them down. Not because he was so injured, but because they were literally going to fight to the death. Like, so we had to we would have had to make that choice too. Which one do we want to keep alive? Yeah. And this is just kind of a known problem when you keep two boars on the property. A lot of times you can’t get separated or if I’m home alone, like or the kids are home alone, we just straight tell them don’t try to separate them, pick one and put them down. Because otherwise somebody could get really injured. Yeah. We had this incident. It was in the like early s or late spring.

Kody and Ron: We saw on Facebook that morning that one of our neighbors on one side of us had spotted a mountain lion.

The Nine Hundred Pound Boar Fight

Kody: Then our other neighbor posted that there was a mountain lion blocking her driveway and wouldn’t let them leave. And I was like, my goodness. Like, and our livestock guardian dog had gotten killed by a mountain lion last winter. And we have a new one, but he’s still a pup. And we’re like, my gosh, what are we going to do? Our 17-year-old son was going up to the barn to feed. He didn’t have anyone to go with him that day. So we told him, like, go on up.

Kody: Be very vigilant. Mountain lions could get in the rafters and stuff. If you see anything weird, just get the heck out of there. Call us, whatever you need to do. And he is up there about 10 minutes and all of a sudden, he like jumps in the UTV and drives down the hill like about out of hell. We’re like, my gosh, there’s a mountain lion. We jump up, we start trying to get our boots on, and he comes running in the door and he’s like.

Kody and Ron: Boar fight. And it’s like everybody just jumps and runs. We know the drill. Like one of our kids grabs a pistol, another one grabs the taser, and I’m like, okay, try not to shoot unless you have to. Somebody when you soon as you get up there, get a panel, get it between them. Everybody grab a two by four to start just like whacking when you get up there. And our son’s girlfriend, bless her heart, she is about four foot eight and has never lived on a farm. And She didn’t even skip a beat. She’s 20 years old. She goes running up to the barn in her boxer shorts and cowboy boots and grabs a two by four on the way and she’s running out into that fin.

Kody and Ron: I was just like, my she was a trooper, but I couldn’t imagine like my first day or my first weekend on a farm. And that’s exactly she just joined right in. I’m trying to get like actual jeans on and He was in the bath Ron here was in the bathroom. I’m like banging on the door. I’m we have to go. Board fight. He comes like blasting out and we run up there. And right when we got there, the kids were just getting them separated. Luckily, the two older boys were able to get a panel in between them pretty quick. Then the other kids were kind of keeping them back with the boards. And as literally what as what had happened is so we have the big pen with this.

Kody and Ron: All a large amount of sows on our old-line Berkshire Then we have our Herefords that are down like in a canyon they’re more pastured and I guess the power had got disconnected So our big boar Red he just wandered up to the barn and our son was feeding and while he was feeding he’d left the gate open because once he feeds they don’t they only want the feed. Neither one of these boars are aggressive by themselves. No they’re just super sweet boars. But Red was going up there and he’s.

Kody and Ron: Sees a gate open and food and he’s like, Hey, what’s going on in here? Literally like as soon as they got those pigs separated, Red like turned tail and ran all the way back to his house. He was I made a wrong turn somewhere. We were we were really lucky there. Yeah. That could have been bad because we really invested in these boars.

Kody and Ron: Both in time and money and, talked them up as far as marketing our 4-H pigs and stuff, so that would have been a huge bummer. And yes, you’re here in Hereford correctly. The Hereford pig was actually bred to resemble the Hereford cow. When you’re here in Hereford right now we’re speaking about pigs, but there’s a pig and a cow, it’s referred to as Herefords. The dairy or the Hereford Association for Cattle.

Kody and Ron: When these guys actually completed their mission of breeding a pig that resembled the Hereford cow, the association was so impressed by what they had done and how much they resembled a cow in a pig form, they asked if they would consider naming the pig a Hereford. And that’s kinda how the Hereford breed came along. It’s old China spot, Duroc and something else that they.

Kody and Ron: Poland China. Pol yeah, Poland China. Old spot and Chester Whites, I think. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Kody and Ron: Yeah, that was very much a fun one.

Kody and Ron: Good. I was just going to say, do you want to have him take the suburban into town so Savannah can drive the Jeep all the way into town? Okay. Sorry, we’re parents all the time. And we have one of our kids taking a driving test this week. So we’re deciding who’s taking what vehicle into town. Speaking of cattle, we have cattle too, and our cows are usually pretty good about respecting hot wire.

Water Hot Wire and a Root Canal

Kody and Ron: But we have had a series of events. I’m not. Tell them about what you did with the hot wire. Yeah, it’s let’s say water, hot wire and root canals don’t go well together. We had a issue with the automatic water up in the general-population pen, the general population for the pigs.

Ron: I was up there working on it and I thought the overhead wire that ran out to another field was disconnected and I’m reaching down in the water and making the repairs and little did I know that my bald head was just centimeters from this hot wire that was on and I made connection and grounded through the water and let’s just say that crown and root canal that had been done in the past no longer existed. It just totally went right through the gold crown and into that tooth and busted the tooth up. I had to go have it removed completely and an implant put in and It’s taken like three tries to get the implant to stay because everything’s just so I don’t even know what in there. Yeah, it hurt.

Ron: Let’s just say it somebody might as well have knocked me in the back of the head with a two by four really hard So we’re not running like.

Kody and Ron: The little like hot wire that you use for like chickens or something that. We’re on a grizzly fence. Yes, grizzly fence, because that’s what you need to keep giant hogs in and grizzlies out. ’cause the hot wire isn’t just to keep your animals in. Right. Usually our cows are pretty good. We did have an incident this earlier this summer where our neighbor’s steer got out of.

The Escaped Steer and the Flipped Side by Side

Kody and Ron: His pen in the middle of the night, he busted the chain, right? Yeah. He busted the chain, came up to our house and was in our pen. Just randomly like in our pen. I don’t know how I got there. We’re like, sweet, a new cow. We call the neighbor and he’s I’m out of town. He’s I have a couple guys that work for me. I’ll send them over. But it, if you can like get him back down to the house, that’d be great. ’cause I’m not going to be home for, long enough that it’s not you probably shouldn’t keep him. We’re like, all right.

Kody and Ron: What a mess that turned into. Got a rope around a cow’s neck, tied it up to side-by-side. We figure show steer, we get a rope around his neck and he’s just going to be like, okay. Yeah, there was none of that. He I don’t I don’t know that he was a show steer this year. Okay. But in the past they’ve always been show steers and we’ve herded him out of the hop fields for while they’re out on vacation and we’ve done a lot for their cows while they were out of town.

Kody and Ron: But long story short, this cow steer wound up breaking through all of our hot wire fences. Every single one of Pig hot wire. Cow hot wire. All our cows are out. We’re trying to get a hold of this cow. I’m using the side-by-side to herd because as we all know, cows can be very fast.

Kody and Ron: Wind up flipping the side-by-side. Not a big deal. Just went on to the side, stood up. One of the kids; actually a couple of the kids freaked out and was like running and I’m good. Just come help me put it back on its wheels, jump back in it, and was right back at it. Finally got this steer and got it back down to its home pen, fixed their fence, fixed their gate.

Kody and Ron: Then had to come up and Find all our cows. Because like his workers even showed up. They weren’t much use. But we get the steer back and they’re like, okay, thanks. Bye. And we’re like, all of our cows are out. We have no f they not even like, can we help you get them like all corraled up or put up one of your hot wires again? Like nothing. That was that was special.

Cows That Suddenly Refuse to Stay Home

Kody and Ron: But right now we are having an issue that we’ve never had before. And, if you keep cows, if you keep cows fed and bred, you half the time you don’t even have to have hot wire turned on. They don’t care. They’re like, whatever, I had my food. I’m not in heat. I’m happy. Well, the last podcast we did together, we mentioned that we had a heifer that was probably going to calve that night and that we were a little concerned about her because She had bred a little earlier than we would have liked. We have had this issue a couple of times, because we’ve only had a bull for three years.

Kody and Ron: So we always did it where we would wean the calves in the spring, the cows would go over to the neighbor’s house and get bred and come home, and we would be butchering before there was really any issues. Now that we have a Brown Swiss bull, we keep our dairy heifers.

Kody and Ron: And we breed them back to him,. We line breed, which in one generation that’s fine with our pigs. If we line breed, they are all terminal, meaning that we make sure that whole litter goes to meat. Then with our dairy cows, if they line breed, it’s fine because we intend to sell them. Or like for example, feta was line bred. This the heifer we’re talking about. She was line bred back to her dad.

Kody and Ron: She can continue to do that, but any of her calves will have, if she has any heifer calves, will have to be sold off the property. And that’s just how that goes. But we’re still kind of working into our groove with that. And we did have one of our calves that’s just a little bit older than Feta, which I say calves. She’s over two years old now. She had got bred, but she’s Hereford, actual cow Hereford. So she’s a little bit larger bodied, where And bulls, dairy bulls usually have a lower calving weight, so we haven’t had any issues. No. But we were a little concerned about Feta. She has a good size, but dairy heifers don’t really get their bulk size until after they have their first calf.

Kody and Ron: When she was looking she was getting ready to calve, we went ahead and put her in the barn so we can keep an eye on her. So the.

Fetas Difficult Calving

Kody and Ron: The day of that podcast, Ron got the fire call. He took off during the podcast. He actually didn’t get home until it was late, like midnight or one o’clock or something. And he came in, I said, Hey, did you happen to check on Feta? And he’s no, I probably better run back up there. He went back up and he was up there for a really long time. And that’s always just you just know. I s started getting up and getting my shoes on and about that time he texted me, I’m coming down for ya. And we get up there and he’s telling me on the way up, he’s like, Okay, we have.

Kody and Ron: Hooves showing, but they’re at a really weird angle. I like put my hand in to see if I could feel the nose and like try to pull the nose out. I can’t find the head. And a lot of times what that means is they’re coming out feet first they’re supposed to, but then their head is turned back and they’re coming out like almost neck first. And if you’re watching the YouTube, you will know see what I’m doing and saying neck first. If you are listening to this in your car, just use your.

Kody and Ron: And this was after observing it for probably forty five minutes. Mm-hmm. And there was there was no movement. There was obviously something not right. Yeah. I didn’t just be like, here there’s hooves and points. Yeah, no. We’re going in. No, that’s not how that went. We’ve had to like adjust calves and kids and everything, on the farm before. We do it for the papers a lot.

Kody and Ron: Our daughter gets called a lot because she’s got little hands. And, she’s done a lot of this on the farm. A lot of people in our area, if they have goats that are kidding and they think if one’s stuck, they’ll call her and she jumps and runs. So I walk in and I’m like, my gosh, what are we going to do? We’re going to have to call the vet, we’re going to have to do a C section. And I walk in the door and I look at the hooves and I go, That’s a breech calf. And he’s like, Okay, it’s three in the morning. That is definitely a breech calf.

Kody and Ron: So she’d already been in labor for a really long time, and we could just tell by the size of this calf’s feet that it was going to be a big calf. Which, I said, we’ve never really had that with this bull, so it was really surprising. We hooked up the chains, we lubed her, we had her tied, but she had never really been on a halter since she was little, because we had different plans with her, Then she got bred earlier than we planned on. She’s on a halter for.

Kody and Ron: The first time and she wasn’t fighting it, which was really great. And we hooked the chains up, pull started pulling the calf, and he is just fighting it. He is pulling back. He does not want to be pulling out. He’s coming out, he’s fighting back, but she’s working with us really well. Yeah, she was standing really good and she would contract and when she did he’d pull real hard and I had a lot of it on video, but I opted to not share some of this video. She has another really hard contraction. He pulls hard. And when he did, she like panicked and tried to step forward. And when she did, because he’s pulling backwards and she’s right up against a post, she lost her footing and fell really hard. On her right side. Yeah. It I like screamed. It was just this natural, like, cause she hit so hard.

Kody and Ron: And we don’t know.

Kody and Ron: What happened at that point, but the calf stopped moving. We were just kind of hoping that it just like stunned it or something. We went ahead, she’s laying down now. Ron gets down like on his butt so he can like leverage and pull backwards. We get the calf out, it’s alive, it’s heart’s beating, but it is not breathing. So we tried everything. We tried stimulation, he did.

Kody and Ron: Mouth to snout. When we recorded this last night, I said nose to snout and he totally called me out on that. And we were doing everything. We splashed it with cold water, we stimulated the nose, we stimulated the throat, we tried the hang upside down. Hang upside down swinging We of course cleared the nose and everything. We tried, I forget what it’s called, but it’s the something squeeze.

Kody and Ron: Where if you kind of have weak calves, you can squeeze them, especially when they come out breech. You squeeze them for a certain amount of time Then you let go. And what that does is like re-stimulates what it would be like coming out of the birth canal. And like nothing. He I said, he was alive, looking at us, heart beating. After about 10 minutes, I was like, with him not breathing, he’s going to get really acidotic. Our vet is.

Kody and Ron: Over a half an hour away, and that’s if he was ready to jump in the car right then. There was really no point in calling him. The mom was fine, so we’re just we’re not even worried about her. If I was worried about losing her because the calf was stuck or something, I would have called the vet no problem.

Kody and Ron: And we weren’t going to give up on him as long as his heart was still beating, but after close to an hour and a half, his heart stopped, and that was that. So.

Living With a Loss You Could Not Prevent

Kody and Ron: I stand by every choice we made from the time that calf came out. Yeah. We did everything we could for him. I said, the only other thing might have been having a vet, but it just really wasn’t an option for us. And if he was injured in some way during that fall, like if it, snapped his neck or hit his head really hard, there wouldn’t have been anything we could have done. I’m sure it was there was an injury in the fall. Mm-hmm. Because as soon as she fell that He stopped fighting, there was no more pulling back, there was And we don’t think it an umbilical cord snap or something, ’cause we had him out within, I don’t know, less than a minute after the fall. Yeah. We.

Kody and Ron: We talked about that one really hard because that’s a really hard pill to swallow. We’ve never lost a calf before. And I used to think that this was a really crass statement growing up. Ranching, where we had a lot of horses and stuff, but if you have livestock, you have dead stock. And that’s just the nature of it. And this calf was absolutely huge. My gosh. We had another calf that was born a week and a half prior to that one.

Kody and Ron: And this calf was twice the size of that one. At going on two weeks old out of the out of mom. Yeah, so that was just I think it was just a doomed situation from the beginning. Looking back on the whole situation, one of is we said, Okay, we cannot let these calves get bred early. Now, when we say early, we’re not talking super young. Feta is twenty months old, calving right now. Or, she just calved a month or so ago.

Kody and Ron: And the ideal age to calve the first time is twenty four months. We weren’t terribly off. It’s been really hard because we’re once a day milkers and with her not having a calf, we can’t calf share. We’ve been having to do some additional milking. We’ve been really it’s been really great. She gives the probably the best cream lines I’ve ever seen. She’ll dump a quart of cream and a half gallon of No, more than that. It was half cream the other day. Yeah. That she’s turning out to be a really great milk cow. We originally had planned on selling her. I don’t know what our long-term plans are going to be at this point, but I know that we couldn’t sell her when she was bred because I knew that there was a chance there could be an issue.

Kody and Ron: In order to fix this issue, we have had to now separate our yearling calves, not only.

The Noisy Aftermath

Kody and Ron: Do we not want them getting bred? They also are stealing all of our milk. And they hate it. They are like bawling their heads off, like 24 7. And it doesn’t bother him any because he can sleep through anything, which like blows my mind. He talks about okay, for somebody who’s been in Iraq twice during war.

Kody and Ron: Like there is that level of desensitization, but there’s also when you hear loud noises, isn’t your PTSD supposed to like wake you up? Nope. Okay, so there’s certain sounds that bring me out of a dead sleep instantly. He listens to headphones at night. Cows are not one of them. Yeah. He listens Or you. Yeah. Or babies crying.

Kody and Ron: He listens to headphones at night and he doesn’t listen to music or a book or anything that. He listens to dispatch out of like Chicago. I don’t know how that is relaxing at all. It is not necessarily relaxing. It’s entertaining. The stuff that you hear in the middle of the night is just like, wait a minute. I have to wake up. Did I really just hear is this going on? My dreams would be so warped. They’re warped anyway, so that’s so I’m trying to catch up.

Kody and Ron: So we have these like two large labs, a hundred and twenty-five, hundred and thirty pounds. I’m not sure. And we have double doors off of our porch into our bedroom. And one night these two labs came like busting through our double doors. I don’t even know how they did it because they have these special locks on the top and the bottom. Well they obviously weren’t locked at night. Yeah. They hit these doors at full speed. The doors fly open, they hit the wall.

Kody and Ron: The dogs come bounding in. I’m out of bed, a flash, because I was sure we were under attack or something. The as soon as they hit the hardwood floor, it’s like clack. They see me, they get excited, they start wagging their tails real hard, like, and they have freaking trunks of tails. They’re just how he slept through any of this, I have no clue. Me either. The dogs turn, they run into the living room. I’m trying to, herd them back out the door. And while I’m hurting them,.

Kody and Ron: Back out the door, they’re like clack, like back through, wagging their tails, the whole thing. I get out, I shut the doors, and I turn around, and this guy is like out, sound asleep. And I go, You’ve got to be kidding me. Just that. And he flies out of the bed, what’s going on? What’s going on? That’s one of the trigger sounds that wakes you up when the wife’s angry.

Kody and Ron: I apparently we can aggravated. We can be under attack by large animals and my annoyed sigh like sends him right into a dizzy. You see where my real fear is. And you say you’re not scared of me. Now we know the truth. Yeah, the cows have been bawling nonstop. And turns out so like when I used to rodeo and stuff.

Kody and Ron: A cow could be getting chased by a horse. It would be running across the whole arena. It’s got speed. And it like hits the fence and it’ll kinda like almost go over the fence, like as it’s like climbing the bars or whatever, because they already have so much momentum. Turns out one of our yearling calves can scale a five foot. It’s five. Okay, a five foot fence.

Kody and Ron: With literally no room to run because they’re in a corral right now. She maybe has 20 feet to get her speed up. She is out all the time, as is one of our little bull calves that’s still out with all the other cows. Then we have a steer who has never stayed in. His name’s Rebel because the day Sunday one. Yeah, the day he was born, he goes under the fence, crosses the road, and like slept there. We.

Kody and Ron: But other than that, we don’t have those issues. And like right now, we cannot keep the cows in. I don’t know what it is. Like, even ones that have always stayed in are suddenly it’s so easy to jump the fence. And they’re like going to other pastures, which makes zero sense to me because those pastures have no grass either. There’s no water. And it’s not close to the calves that are making all the noise. Nope. We are literally chasing cows every day, which is, I swear, the biggest time suck. And I don’t know what to do. Well, we don’t have the option of putting in barbed-wire fencing or anything because we live on a rock. About two inches under the ground is just pretty much solid rock. Yeah, we have posts at the corners of all of our pastures that have been like drilled into the rock.

Kody and Ron: But other than that, we have to use step-in posts and run the hot wire So yeah. That’s a really fun one right now. That’s just going wrong on the hot wire.

Uncle Magoo the Accidental Livestock Guardian Pig

Kody and Ron: There was a couple other things we were going to talk about, but after re recording, we I think we took a little bit longer telling these stories better because we thought about how to tell them a little better. But hold on no, we’re not we’re not getting rid of Mr. Magoo. We do have to cover Magoo. We He’s kind of a legend. Yes, he is. We donate piglets to the Grease Pig competition at the fair every year.

Kody: Ever our fair on Thursday night has Family Fun Night. It’s put on by the 4-H clubs. And literally our entire grandstands will be filled with the community coming to watch kids have gunny sack races, a chicken scramble, and a grease pig. I don’t know, is it a race, wrestle? I don’t know. But like literally we grease the piglets, put them out in the arena, and there’s like, 25, 30 kids.

Kody and Ron: Chasing this pig and whoever catches it gets to keep it. That’s free bacon. Free bacon in the country. I can’t wait to go pull that out on the smoker. Yeah, we have bacon on the smoker right now. One year we didn’t have enough piglets, and I wasn’t going to, back out on my commitment. We start calling around to some of the other breeders we know and putting some things out there, and somebody got a hold of us and said, We have a litter of Berkshire Cross piglets. We’re happy to give them to you for a good price if you buy the whole litter.

Kody and Ron: Especially because it’s going for a good cause and you’re donating them yourself. We drive about three hours to get this litter. We get there, the mom is obviously a Berkshire. The piglet, the mom was black. The piglets were like white and white spotted, and we’re kinda like, whatever, it’s crossed with something else,. Sometimes even Berkshires are spotted. No big deal. We load these piglets up and we bring them home. And a couple weeks later, it was time for.

Kody and Ron: Fair Night and we go to load up the pigs and one of the little barrows has an abscess on his butt. Which I say his butt, like his hip or his ham. Which is really common with pigs because they’re always like biting each other with their little needle teeth and it gets infected or they get shots and there’s an abscess where the shot is, which as Ron pointed out Don’t give shots in the hams. Do it do it up at the top of the loin. Mm hmm. Because if there is an abscess and something has to be cut out, you’re losing.

Kody and Ron: That much meat, not a quarter ham. Yeah. I was I don’t want to take him in with this big old abscess, but we drain abscesses all the time. You drain it’s got a little, small puncture hole. We do it as an X shape so that it, continues to drain. But I was what? If we go ahead and drain this now, it’s like ten in the morning, the thing wasn’t until seven or eight o’clock that night. He’ll be fine. We drain it and that thing bled.

Kody and Ron: And bled. I thought this piglet was going to bleed out. They were like, my gosh, we’ve never had this happen before. We’re we can’t take this piglet and it’s going to be like Harry at the prom with the pig’s blood and all the children chasing it. And I could just imagine the things they would have to say about Hanner Homestead after that. So we grab a piglet out of one of our other litters. It was a little smaller. We just made sure that one was going to be the piglet for the youngest group of kids.

Kody and Ron: He survived his near bleed out. And within a few months we realize he is not like all large breed. He’s not he’s not just Berkshire. He is maybe half potbelly. There’s potbelly or coconut or something. I don’t think it’s Kunekune or Mangalitsa. Probably an Idaho pasture pig because they’re really common up here, obviously.

Kody and Ron: Not something that we’re going to sell off of our property, which we had a plan. We were just going to feed him out and sell him, as a whole or half hog, we normally, we do with all of our piglets. And when we realized he was a lard pig, I was we could not sell him. That’s not what our customers want. We had a few conversations, we could maybe post him for sale and somebody else may not mind, or we can butcher him for dog food, like there’s going to be uses for this pig. Well, as he got bigger, he never really like got longer. He’s like square shaped. Yeah. He’s a box with little short legs. He’s maybe only three feet long Then his belly goes all the way to the ground and drags.

Kody and Ron: Even when we put him on a diet, his like jowls are like as wide as his shoulders. His eyebrows hang over his eyes.

Kody and Ron: I don’t even know that he can see. And I we never could figure out what to do with them. Then we have to farrow our pigs in like December and January because that is when fair pigs need to be born for our area. And we have a really bad problem with losing piglets to the cold, not necessarily because of freezing, but because like moms like roll over on them because they’re really tight underneath them.

Kody and Ron: When we farrow, a lot of times we have to sit up there while they farrow, because we have opted not to use farrowing crates. We like farrowing pens where the sows have plenty of room. But when they’re actually in labor, they have two horns of their uterus that go up both sides of like their whole belly. And as a piglet comes out each side, when they start to contract on the other side, they will actually like stand up and throw themselves down on the other side to like help.

Kody and Ron: Get the piglet out. I don’t know if it’s from that side or the top side. And if we’re not there, like piglets will come out, we throw them in a bucket. When mom lays back down and gets comfortable for a while, we let the piglets get some colostrum. And when she starts getting restless, we’re pulling them again and because otherwise she’ll lay on them. And usually we can mitigate that. But sometimes moms have babies in the middle of the night, we didn’t even know she was ready.

Kody and Ron: Because we live breeding so we don’t always know the exact date. And we end up, we go out there in the morning and there’s only like six live piglets out of, twelve or fifteen. And it’s a huge bummer, but it’s what works for our farm, unfortunately. We will sometimes because we have so many pigs farrowing during this time, because it’s our main source of income from piglets, we need to wean really early. But these piglets still need to stay warm.

Kody and Ron: And we couldn’t figure out kind of what to do with Magoo or with these piglets because we didn’t have enough pens. But Magoo ha can’t be, he gets bullied in the big pen and doesn’t get to eat and loses weight. And if we put him in with our feeders, he eats too much and like gets really fat. We finally figured out if we put him in with wean piglets, we can put a creep feeder up where the piglets can get under it to get to their starter feed and he can’t.

Kody and Ron: But he also keeps the piglets warm when we have to wean them at like four weeks old and he lays down he lays down in the straw and he stays down in the straw and everybody just kind of pig piles right on top of him. He’s not flipping and flopping like moms are doing. And it works out really well. He’s a walking pig heater. I call him I call him Ungle Magoo, but he’s.

Kody and Ron: Perfectly content to lay in the same spot all day long to the point where we’re convinced he is dead most of the time. Currently we don’t have any piglets that need him, and all of our pens are full, so he is free ranging all over the property and he’s loving life. He is, and he’s huge, and we’re like not even officially feeding him because he’s rooting and eating, spilled grain and hay and all sorts of other stuff, and he’s ginormous and he’s.

Kody and Ron: A sweetheart, but he scares people when they show up because he’s still probably 500 pounds. Yeah, he’s probably 500 pounds. He’s a he’s a good size pig. And the other day I was up at the barn and all the dogs came running up and he I think was trying to protect me from the dogs. And he turned real hard to chase them off and like hooked me in the calf with his tusk. My gosh. I was I am going to be so bruised from this, but I don’t think I was. It hurt really bad though.

Staying Sane Through the Chaos

Kody and Ron: Just we have we have a livestock guardian pig. He’s good at his job. That’s the life of Magoo. Sometimes you end up with animals that you don’t plan on having and they tend to be some of your favorite. We have disasters all the time. It isn’t just with livestock, but they tend to be the biggest what do you call it? Like.

Kody and Ron: Wingnut outlier. That’s only because our livestock outnumber our kids. If our kids outnumbered our livestock, the disasters would be more with the kids. It’s just I absolutely agree. It’s all about numbers. One of our kids, I am convinced that he was Donnie Thornsbury in his last life. He is absolutely feral. I told him once he has to come inside and eat at least one meal a day. And he told me that he eats worms and drinks water off the top of the cab cabbage leaves.

Kody and Ron: I guess he’s good. I don’t know. He’s getting protein and hydration. I just I walk around just face palming myself all the time because I don’t know what to do with this kid. Anyways, I said, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap it up now. I hope you had a good time with us. If you need any help mitigating your chaos or.

Resources and Closing

Kody and Ron: Like finding some preventative measures, please feel free and reach out to us. We both love teaching. Our social media email goes to both of us and you can check that out. Also if you are a beginning homesteader or somebody who is trying to homestead in your yard like your backyard or a small piece of property I am currently a contributor to the yardsteading bundle put on by Carolyn Hill from Hillside Market.

Kody and Ron: It has ebooks and courses totaling over twelve hundred and fifty dollars worth of product plus a year-long membership to the Yardsteading community on through Hillside Market. I have loved working with Carolyn over the years. We have worked together on magazines and like co-authoring So many amazing things, and she put together this wonderful bundle that Till November 1st. We’re only talking like three, four more days. You can get it for 50 bucks. It is absolutely amazing. I’ve gone through every single one of the things on there. There’s this cookbook called What Do I Feed These Kids? It’s a hundred and two pages. Worms, obviously. Right? It’s a hundred and two pages. I actually printed it for my daughter this morning because I knew that she would love it. And she’s already like flipped through it and planned dinner for the night. There’s.

Kody and Ron: My all four of my seasons on the homestead activity books, which is where you can help teach your kids about, farming, the agrarian schedule, preserving. Which those alone sell for more than fifty dollars. Yeah. The bundle is absolutely amazing. The digital, the four digital go for $90. Just so right there, you’re getting like one of my best selling products for half off. And the kids are getting their history, their literature, science, everything all.

Kody and Ron: In one based on the rhythm of an agrarian schedule. It follows an agrarian calendar. It is amazing. If you want that, the link will be in the show notes, but make sure you get it before yeah, before November first. Like go ahead and just hop in there and get it. It’s absolutely worth it. And thank you guys for showing up today, listening to our crazy stories. And until next week, keep growing.