Stacked Enterprises (Little 2/6)

If you go back 10 years we just had a cow-calf operation and sometimes we had cattle in the feedlot even, fed them corn to fatten them. Since Eli I came back from college we’ve been trying to add more enterprises as they call it ‘stacked systems’ and so the first thing we added was some sheep and you don’t want to add a new enterprise too quickly because there’s a real learning curve to something you’ve never done before and we’ve never had sheep and we’ve learned a lot about how to handle them. We’ve got 55 youths now and we’re probably gonna get up to a couple hundred in the next five years so that was six years ago and then three years ago we got chickens and we tried some pastured chicken and that was another thing that took us a while to learn. We haven’t been able to find a market for our broilers so we didn’t do chickens this year but we have laying hens also and we sell eggs at the farmers market in Watertown and then the newest thing we added in was some hogs and that was a year ago and what we’d like to do is have about a dozen sows that feral twice a year and at least one of those should be out in the pasture and then we’d like to turn those piggies out in a cornfield and let them eat the corn and graze corn so they wouldn’t be in a feedlot either. Ideally we’d like to to integrate all of our species together.

You know sheep will bond to cattle so we’d like 01:50 - one sheep family per cow-calf family. We’ve been working towards it but it’s very difficult to keep sheep in because currently our rotation we only have a single wire that will keep cattle in fairly easily so we’ll have to keep working on that as far as infrastructure with all the fencing we have. Earlier today we looked at that pasture that was the first place we stopped and that pasture is almost 90 acres and our goal is to have 90 cow-calf pairs, 90 sheep families and a dozen hogs and maybe 400 chickens all out in that pasture. I was out in Society for Range Management meeting and the last thing I said is ,‘If there’s anybody out here in drought country that needs a home for some cows I have that home.’ And a guy came up to me after the meeting and he goes, ‘Were you serious?’ We got all the manure from 225 cows for almost 90 days and spread that all over our property. .