Ferris Wheel at Sugar Mountain
Last night we came home about 8:30 pm from the butcher after having left 23 hours earlier. It’s a long trip. In the summer the trip is longer because we drive during the night so the pigs are not exposed to the stress of the heat of the summer sun during transport.
We gets to the butcher in the cool of the early morning hours. Fortunately we did sleep a few hours after arriving and before making the long trek back. With things that need to happen down there she doesn’t get to head north until about mid-afternoon. It’s a full day’s work. We look forward to eventually having on-farm slaughter which will eliminate this big weekly trip. Less stress for the animals and less stress for us.
Happy Summer Solstice – the longest day (light) of the year!
Outdoors: 74°F/55°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 68°F/65°F
Daily Spark: Sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Thats a long hard trip. I’m glad you got home safely.
You all work very hard and deserve all that you have gained from your hard work. I find your family’s industry inspiring!
Where does she take them?
Adams Family Farm Slaughterhouse in Mass. It’s about a 300 mile trip but worth the distance as they do the best of all the many slaughterhouses we’ve worked with in the New England area. They have a Temple Grandin designed setup, will dry age hang for a week which we like, do linked sausage and smoking. They’re wonderful people to work with. If they were next door we probably wouldn’t build our own butcher shop – they’re that good.
Walter —
Somewhere you have a photo of your ‘hay’ after delivery. It is wrapped in white plastic.
So …. question ….. is it hay or balage? Normally I think that hay that is wrapped is wrapped in black plastic. Balage is great and we feed lots of it to our sheep but if it’s not used up fairly quickly it gets moldy …… bad for sheep but maybe not for pigs.
Thanks for all that you do.
Peter
Here is a search pattern to some pictures of hay. I’ve never seen it wrapped in black plastic.
Balage is generally what corn stalks are called wrapped fairly wet. Haylage is generally fairly wet wrapped hay. In both cases they are plastic wrapped like the hay we get. What we buy is actually drier than haylage – we get it around 15% to 30% moisture content. It has a sweet slightly alcohol smell to it, has fermented slightly which helps to preserve it and is leafy rather than stalky.
I find that the terms are used rather loosely. This makes it hard to order hay sight unseen from a new sources. For this reason I like to buy from the same farmers year after year – I know what they produce and they know what I’m looking for. With a new source I try a few bales, then more before ordering a lot.
I love the photo of the ”ferres wheel” with the blue blue sky. It would make a great poster. You have a lot of beautiful photos.