I can see the end from here

[greenstorm]

Yesterday I went down to the next town over to get grain, which is pig and goose feed. They were out -- they'd brought in a bunch when their crop did poorly this year but it seems to be gone. Everyone in town is out. I'm not sure if they are bringing more in but in the meantime that means bagged feed.

Last fall my feed costs went from roughly $500/month to roughly $630/month. As of yesterday they're roughly $900/month for the same amount. Obviously I need fewer animals now.

I had already called the butcher to try and get into his schedule; I imagine he's going to be very, very busy over the next while. I'll still keep a couple pigs for pets and personal meat and gardening, but this really emphasizes that I don't want to be trying to produce for folks I don't know.

Need to deworm tonight to try and get every bit of feed to use. I'll also need to try feeding indoors so the 50 or so ravens that have been freeloading are a little reduced.

I'm feeling really lucky that I'm so interested in my garden projects right now. I'm not leaving my use of the land, I'm just modifying it a some. Keeping the geese -- always keeping the geese -- and the pigs can work the ground still, but they'll drive a little less disturbance.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

we are shifting our meat chickens from one batch of 25 and one batch of 50, to three batches of 20 spread out over a longer timeline, to ease the field and also to ease the cost of growing them. we're fencing that back pasture and putting half of them there, too, so that a real percentage of their feed is the growth & insects in each pasture. and we're supplementing with duckweed which we can grow for free. i see a day where we either scale the chickens way down or get very serious about selling chicken. we get a little more serious about the garden every year - jenny wants to implement a denser planting strategy to get more produce out of the existing space. which is part of why we're putting in oodles of compost this year.