The Animal of the Week, x2

A couple more animals have recently joined us. One, a berkshire boar, arrived a week ago. The other, a Dexter heifer, arrived yesterday. The boar is the same breed as Isabel, our (previously) remaining pig, and we decided to buy him to breed her, so that she could hopefully have 4 or 6 piglets in the spring. Shortly after meeting each other, she bit him on the ear to let him know who was boss, and they've gotten along just fine since then!

The new heifer is going to be the start of our milk cow herd. The galloway's that we have are intended for meat, or at least the males are, and we decided to start getting ready for the dairy side of things. Dexter's are pretty small cows, in general, and known to be generally easy-going. Our new cow is young, and newly bred; her first baby is due in August. That'll give us time, we hope, to get ready for milking. Dexter's can produce 2 to 3 gallons of milk per day, compared to the 10 gallons or so that you can get out of a Holstein – or so I'm told.

Originally we thought we wouldn't add dairy to our list of farming activities for a couple of years, but we realized that if Isabel has a bunch of piglets, then one goat's worth of milk will not be enough for all of them. This way, the new cows milk can mostly go to the pigs and the calf, but we can start playing around with making butter, trying the milk ourselves, and eventually making cheese. We are both lactose intolerant to some degree, so we are hoping that raw milk, which still has the enzymes intact, will be more digestible for us.

Oh, and the last (planned) animal breed to arrive will be in May, when we get our first hive of bees.

Orrin tells me that we now have all the animals he wanted to get to set up the farm. I asked him if I could remind him of that the next time he's looking at livestock for sale on kijiji...

Between now and August there will be several arrivals of new babies – both ewes are pregnant (the Jacob and the Shetland), Gigi the galloway and the new cow are both pregnant, the goat is pregnant, and hopefully the pig will get bred too. In the spring, we will also be separating out one of our types of chickens, the Rhode Island Reds, with the rooster of that same type, and plan to let some eggs develop into chicks, if one of the hens goes broody. If that doesn't happen, we may have to figure out how to use an incubator. I clearly haven't picked up enough farmer-speak, because if I had I would have said, “the cows and sheep are bred (not pregnant!).” Oh well, I'm pretty sure I'm becoming more farmer-like every day.