Hello world!

posted on : June 11, 2023

Welcome to our homesteading blog! We are hoping that some of our experiences might help you with your homestead.

Hi! We are Josh and Alicia, both military veterans living out our dream of homesteading. If you would like to learn more about us and our family, click here.

So, let me start by saying we are a small farmstead but our mission is to be self-sustaining and sell items from our land, not for profit, but to keep sustaining it and our dream. Ready to hear about all the wonderful things we have made happen in the last 6 months? Here we go!

Cows

We currently have 5 cows, two of which we recently A.I.’d (artificially inseminated) and are hoping they are pregnant! Why 5 cows on a small 10 acre farm? Well, for our county that is how many we had to have for an ag exemption. We have 1 Jersey cow (for milk and breeding), 1 Mini Hereford cow (for meat and breeding), 1 Mini Hereford steer (for eating), and 2 Angus-Charolais steers (for eating). The plan is to keep breeding the minis for slaughter, since we have such little land to raise them on we thought minis were the smarter choice. However, we got such a great deal on the Angus-Charolais, we couldn’t pass them up for our first beef source!

Goats

We currently have 6 goats! The plan was to have 4, but much like chicken math, it is what it is. All of our goats are Nigerian Dwarf (ND), although two we believe are a ND cross breed, and we have 5 does and 1 buck. 2 of our ladies are in milk, so we are having lots of fun milking twice a day and trying out new recipes (and of course drinking it!). 1 of our does is currently being bred with our buck, I believe she is a Pygmy/ND mix. Another doe that isn’t quite of age to breed yet I am pretty sure is a Boer/ND mix. And lastly, we have a kid doe, who is about 4 months old and is the kid of one of our milking mamas, so we have her separated, as she steals all mommy’s milk when they are together.

Guinea Fowl

We LOVE these guys! They sure aren’t a pretty site to see, but boy are they fun! I always feel like we live in a zoo with these wild birds. They are loud, but not in an annoying way and they eat all the bugs! YES, PLEASE! They’ll even attack snakes! Although, between these guys and our LGD’s, snakes rarely make their way around the property. We were so please with the few we had, we bought 8 more, bringing out total to 11!

Chickens

Oh man! This is a long one… we currently have 4 types of chickens.

Novogen Brown Layers– we got these guys from Freedom Ranger Hatchery. I learned about this awesome hatchery from one of my favorite homesteading families that I follow, The Homesteading Family. How cool is it that they coined that name? Anyway, when we started with chickens a year ago, I have watched their videos on brooders and caring for chicks. He mentioned this company and we went for it! They were awesome, sending us 2 extra chicks and we had no deaths! These layers are crazy fun and lay a LOT of beautiful brown eggs! Bonus, 3 of my girls just got super broody and we are letting them keep some eggs- so we might have more of these chick babies soon!

Easter Eggers– I only have 3 of these ladies- its a long story- and they are not to laying age yet, but they are so much prettier to look at than my Novogens (no offense ladies). Not a whole lot to tell on them and the next set I will speak about, as they are still pretty young (3 months).

Buff Orpington– I have one roo and one hen from this type. Got them at the same time as my Easter Eggers. I wanted more but we ordered at a bad time. It was still EARLY spring and the week they all came in (I had ordered 10 easter and 10 orpington) there was another frost and most died in transit. I am excited to see how these guys do as adults though!

Blue Laced Gold Wyandotte– Whoooooweeee, we have 35 of these guys. These are our newest babies and we are going to be treating them like gold! We got them their very own coop and everything! We plan to keep them separated from our layers, as these beauties will be our meat birds. They are Dual Purpose birds and take 6 months to raise to slaughter age, so we have to care for them well, but they are also broody hens and we plan to slaughter all but 2 Roos and 10 hens and allow them to breed for us so we can have a constant flow of meat going. Obviously this will take some time to make happen, since they don’t start laying until about 5-6 months and they aren’t ready for slaughter for 6 months, so it will be a full year until we get them going at a rate where we can slaughter every month for meat.

Cornish Cross Broilers– Since we have to wait so long for our Wyandottes to be ready, we decided to just take on Broilers in the meantime, they are ready for slaughter in 6 weeks, and although they are not as nutrient rich as the slow growing Wyandottes, they are still better than grocery store chicken anyday! So, at any given time until we get our Wyandottes, we will have 25 of these guys in our chicken tractor.

Livestock Guard Dogs (LGDs)

It took me some time to come around to the idea of having these kinds of dogs. Mostly because the original breed my husband wanted to get was Anatolian Shepherds, which can be extremely aggressive and the thought scared me. However, we lucked out finding a beautiful male dog, that was 1/2 Anatolian and 1/2 Pyrenees. He is an amazing LGD, so good with the animals. The only problem right now is keeping him on our land, he likes to jump the fence and go play in the woods next door. We will be putting up an electric wire soon. That being said, we also found a beautiful female Pyrenees who is almost a year old. She is also amazing at her job, and our only problem with her is that we did not fix either of these dogs (because we want to breed them later) and when she is in heat we have to lock her up inside the house with us.

Well, thats it!

That’s all we have regarding animals at the moment.Next post will be letting you in on our orchard and garden.