Northern Farmer

Things are going well here in southern Minnesota. The weather has been mild and we still do not have snow cover. It would be nice to get some snow to protect the alfalfa when the inevitable sub-zero temperatures come - and actually we have had some below zero temperatures the first part of December. During the middle of December we managed to butcher 46 muscovy ducks on one of the milder days. This reduces our flock of muscovies from 54 to 8, which by my county’s reckoning reduces my duck animal units from 10.8 (.2 animal units per duck) to 1.6. This should make the county happy. According to the county, the ducks along with our sheep, goats, chickens and cows added up to more animal units than we were allowed on our land. When we butchered the ducks, my oldest son thought we were going very slow since he is accustomed to butchering 200 chickens an hour. It took us all afternoon to butcher the 46 ducks, but toward the end we were able to process them much faster. This is the first time we attempted to process more than a handful of ducks and the first time we used wax - the wax took some time to figure out how to use. Next time we should be able to process ducks much faster. We were very pleased with the results. The ducks came out very clean. In the past we have taken our ducks to a local processing plant and they come back all covered with feathers. Once those ducks are cold, the feathers are nice and greasy and it is almost impossible to get the feathers off without wax.

On the cow front, by the grace of God, the mastitis we had in our cows has cleared. We used the Superior Cow Cream recommended by Scott Terry (Thanks Scott) and we have been force feeding a mineral mixture recommended by Gearld Fry. Now we are “rolling” in milk. Last night we took a gallon of cream to a group of friends from church and made ice cream. The ice cream was made with 100% cream - no milk.

Christmas has been very quiet here. Our extended family Christmas get together is scheduled for New Year Eve, so other than going to church on Christmas Eve, we stayed home. On Christmas day we did take a goat, that unexpectedly came into heat, a short distance to get bred.

The only unpleasant event in the last couple of weeks was an emergency slaughter of our Southdown ram. It is amazing how quickly plans for a day can change. “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps” (Proverbs 16:9) The Saturday before Christmas I had planned to do a few errands and tie up a few loose ends. These plans all changed when I discovered that our ram was prolapsing. We called ahead to the local processing plant to make sure they could process him. Then we rolled the ram, which we think weighed around 300 pounds, into a utility sled and pulled him across the yard, backed the pickup up to an embankment, and slid the ram into the pickup bed. (We are very low tech here.) We then headed off for town, with the ram laying in the sled in the back of the pickup, and deposited him at the processing plant. While in town, we ran some other errands and then headed home. Unfortunately the renderer, who picks up the offal from the processing plant, will not take sheep offal. So in the afternoon a second trip to the processing plant was necessary - this time to pick up the offal, which has become dog and chicken food.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Jim V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.