Land and Animal

This year has been a year of extremes when it comes to weather. We went from a mild winter to a very warm and early spring. That early spring moved into a prolonged drought for the farm… from there we went to a very wet and rainy August which culminated last week in record highs in heat and humidity. These events can be very challenging for a regenerative farmer. One thing that we are always trying to juggle is keeping our animals “outside” where they’re designed to thrive but also keep them comfortable and happy. These two things aren’t always the same so we want to make sure that we aren’t sacrificing one for the other.
There are always little tips and tools that we have available to keep the animals happy and still in their natural habitat. The biggest tool we have is using water to bring temps down and keep animals cool. For pigs in high heat like this it looks like adding water sprinklers to their movable shade wagon. Ethan (Alden Hills Livestock Manager) devised an ingenious system of simply adding a garden sprinkler on a timer for the pigs… this allows them to cool off intermittently and get muddy without going full-on mud pit and destroying our pasture.
The other one is keeping our chickens cool on pasture in their mobile coops. The mobile coops are great because they add shade but with extreme heat it still isn’t always enough. A simple solution we’ve found is loosening some of the water lines so they “leak” which creates a nice misting effect for the birds. It also keeps the water flowing which means the water stays nice and cold all day.  
The opposite of this with conventional agriculture can be stark. I remember a conversation a few years ago with a farmer who was raising tens of thousands of chickens in large chicken houses for Costco. He said that if it got too cold in the winter to where they couldn’t maintain the proper heat in the chicken houses then they would just deal with the losses. Their policy was that it was a better economic decision to lose animals than pay for the extra energy bills.
Losses will always be a part of farming but negligence is not acceptable to us. We always attempt to work together here. Land, animals and farmer. 

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It’s Always Something With Livestock