Winter Chore Routine On The Farm!

Y'all, Bossy finally had her calf. Hi Bossy! It's still kind of wet but it's up and moving around. Mom has been waiting very very eagerly for Bossy's calf so Emma's gonna call her and tell her. Hi Bossy! Bossy had her calf a little bit but it's very lively. Yeah, she really does. Good morning everybody. It is a toasty zero degrees outside right now with a real feel. I don't- the real feel is like weird because it's not like wind chill because there's no wind out here. There goes Belle running by. Anyways, the real feel, whatever that is, is like seven below. So basically it's a very cold morning and we got snow a couple days ago, a good amount, and it's definitely sticking around this time and we dropped from the unseasonably warm to zero degrees. So it is definitely feeling like January right now. It's actually a pretty morning outside. It's just very very cold. We're gonna go over and get the barn checked because we have that new calf that was born yesterday over at the barn to check and then we also have a new lamb that I will tell you guys about and we'll see how he did through the night too. We have arrived. First we'll go in here and check on this little calf, Bossy's calf, just born yesterday morning. He's just chilling over here, looking good. He's so fuzzy. Also, don't you love that dad and mom came over, put an entire bale of corn stalks in here yesterday because we wanted this calf to be nice embedded down, we could stay warm, and it comes over here and lays down in like this bare spot and Bossy's over there in the corn stalks. Tell you what, animals are not always the brightest, the smartest, can be difficult to deal with, okay? But Bossy's a really good mama. She loves her calf so he's doing good. Now we need to go check on the lamb. There's a lamb born yesterday. This one I'm a little bit more nervous to check because it was very very cold last night and when the lamb is just born like that and that young and that small it can be hard to keep him warm through this cold weather, so he has heat lamps and I'm just really hoping that he managed to get under the heat lamps and stay warm through last night, but we'll see. Hi baby! He's looking good! Hi! You're a big lamb, aren't you? Yeah, I thought Lucy was gonna have twins because she had twins last year so I thought she might have twins this year again with how round she was, but no, it was just this really big single. I'm gonna get the rest of the sheep turned outside and then I'll get her with some food and water and all of that, but the lamb is looking so good so I'm very happy to see that because I was a little bit nervous coming over here on if that lamb would have made it through the night. Hi guys! As you can see, we turned the two bigger lambs, so that little black one is Sally's lamb and that one is the other one there is Debbie's lamb and so we turned both of them outside with the big sheep because they were separated off into these little pens in here, but we turned them all out and they're doing really good out there. They love having all the space to run She was very eager for her grain and I got her some water. I have to go through and bust all the ice off of the water every day for the water buckets in here and got that done. The ice wasn't too bad this morning. If you notice, we have... Hi, buddy! I think it's a little female, is what dad said, so another little female here. She's doing so, so good. Nala's here. She's like... If you notice, we have two heat lamps set up in this pen. That is because dad set one heat lamp up yesterday and Nala here kind of took over the heat lamp and was just chilling laying under it and then the lamb did not have a heat lamp so dad set up two heat lamps so that Nala could have hers and the lamb could still have one if Nala kicked the lamb off of the other one. Hi, you baby! And there you go. It's looking really good. So yeah, I got all the chores done. My hands are absolutely freezing right now, y'all. So I actually technically have two pairs of gloves on because they're both really thin gloves so I put two of them on. My hands are so cold. Like, it's cold just... It's tough to stay warm out here, isn't it, Nala? This is what Nala wants. I'll show you. This is Nala's favorite thing to do. She just gets in my arms and cuddles up here and it's nice and warm. Yeah, she's a good little cat. She knows how to take advantage of things to stay warm. So it's been a while since I gave you guys an update on our little bottle lamb and we actually have two bottle lambs now so I'll explain that. The twin that we brought over here, the other twin from Debbie's lambs, it's doing really, really good. It was just really small. Debbie didn't really want to take care of it so we brought it over here. It immediately started a bottle and it's been doing really good since. So yeah, it's still doing really good. It's grown a ton and then our other bottle lamb is actually Sweet Pea's lamb. So it just got to where I noticed it wasn't looking as good. It was looking kind of skinny. It wasn't quite as perky and so I think Sweet Pea just was not letting it nurse and so I started supplementing it with a bottle over there a little bit. It loved it. It would take as much as I would give it and it was just getting pretty clear that Sweet Pea was not taking care of it at all and so we decided to just bring it home because it's easier to just take care of it over here and Sweet Pea can go back out with the rest of the sheep and all that. So I brought it over here. It's now a full-time bottle lamb. It was a very big lamb to begin with and so now that it's had plenty to eat again, it's looking really, really good. So I have both of them out in the animal barn. The one was in our basement for a little while but it got big enough that when we brought the other one over from the barn, we just moved them both out to the animal barn. So I feed them three times a day now. It used to be like every four hours. Now it's just three times a day which is quite a bit nicer for me and so I'm gonna, if you can hear them out there, they hear me talking so they know it's time to eat. So I'm gonna go inside and get their bottles made so we can go out there and get them taken care of for the morning and then that'll be about it for morning chores. Hi, it's been a while since y'all seen me but here it is the middle of January and I wanted to show you the hog house and just make a plea for people to appreciate and not this whole hog appreciate your farmers type of a deal. As much as I'll show you, let's see if I can show, you see that right there? 954 Two Below, Tama, Iowa. Tuesday, January 14th. So we got down to Four Below last night. I think Abby was gonna show you the weather station. By the way, if you ever want to know weather here, go to like ambient weather or something or download it and you can see us right here in Tama. You can see our wind speed and temperature and everything. So I'm letting the truck warm up. We've made it, we're always happy to make it halfway through January and not be just completely disgusted and burned out with winter. So it's been, there's been some cold times but you know, we've still got a pretty good attitude for wintertime. So a lot of times you just get drugged down and you're just, sometimes December's so hard you're already tired of it by January 1st and sometimes you just can't hardly make it through January but if you can make it to February and still have a halfway decent attitude, it's pretty promising. So I just want you to see how these hogs look. They'll be sitting in buildings that are 70, literally 75 degrees and outside we are Four Below last night with a 10 mile per hour wind and it's not so breezy right now, maybe five right now, but you're talking 20 below wind chills and 15, 20 below wind chills, four below actual temperature and those hogs are in there and almost too steamy. It's a challenge to keep the air dry. You don't want it too wet but 75 degrees and nice humidity in those buildings whereas I grew up raising hogs. We've just packed them in corn stalks and they had a burrow down and you hope they they get along but you call it deep pack bedding and that's that's a legitimate way of doing it except you're not going to do 1,200 that way. You're not going to do 3,600 and somebody's got to make enough food for the world to eat and you cannot make enough food for the world to eat in deep pack bedding so that's what we do. I like the the pictures that you see on the internet sometimes it says a farmer didn't or a rancher didn't go out in 20 below and feed his cattle for you to eat your steak overcooked and uh as a hog farmer I say I'm not out in this mess for you to over fry your bacon so we have a we fight in my house sometimes about overcooked bacon and my wife grew up in a home where you know it borderline black and now she's learned that bacon actually has a flavor if you don't don't overcook it and you know it actually cooks after you take it out of the pan so um some of y'all might be bacon overcookers but we like ours just right so um I want to show you these hogs now and let you know how comfortable they are to get that many that comfortable in the middle of winter in Iowa it makes sense um it certainly isn't my favorite way of doing it I remember with joy farrowing and everybody having 30 sows but a lot of you guys out there you can't function with 30 sows and the only way the world is going to function is if you have a lot more people with 30 sows farrowing them raising them up and you got a small building out there deep packed full of bedding with only 120 in there so uh until we get to the point where we make everybody raise their own food somebody's got to raise it for them that's what I do and I do it the best way I know how and that's in these confinement buildings Iowa gets cold but you know what Iowa can grow corn so they bring the hogs to where the corn is because it's easier to bring the hogs to the corn than it is and then ship you guys the meat than it is for me to ship you my corn so you can raise it yourselves they take a lot of corn and there's a lot of people in the world and they eat a lot of food and somebody's got to do it so is it again I'm not real thrilled about having so many but somebody's got to do it and that's the way this world operates you can fret and soak over it or you can just get with reality so look at these hogs it'll probably steam up in here so you see let me show you the controller here so 70 degrees the whole and then uh I have 72 but my fans just ran and kind of sucked some in air in if I was to walk through there and let their heat kind of bust up well right now you can see that they're kind of jumping that temperature go up two three degrees just by letting that heat rise but when they're calm it kind of settles and them fans keep running so you know we have fans on the side of this building here that constantly run to keep fresh air sucked in there so it's a good system