Transcript
Jay: All right, we’ll get started then.
Molly: Great.
Jay: Let me—hang on. I’ll turn this thing around. All right. Well, good afternoon. It’s April 28th. This is a farm report. Vetter farm. We are standing behind the farm. I’ll pan over here. We’ve got our apricot trees not blooming yet, but I think close. And I’m standing in the pasture that we’re going to be putting pigs in. Hopefully in the next few weeks, we’re actually working on that right now. We had some rain over the weekend. We had an inch thirty or so and then a little bit more last night. So we got some nice rain.
Molly: How do you prepare a pasture for pigs?
Jay: How do we prepare a pasture for pigs? That’s a good question. The pasture itself is ready. We’re trying to prepare ourselves for how to take care of them. So we still feed the pigs while they’re on pasture. And so we feed them the screenings from Foods, leftover stuff, stuff that gets screened out that isn’t good enough for food. And so trying to make the feeding process as easy as possible. So right now we’re trying to make kind of a trailer that we can put the feeder on and then that way we can move it from paddock to paddock and because when we put bring the pigs out here we really don’t want them out here more than maybe five days to a week or so in each spot because otherwise they’re just really going to tear it up and as soon as they tear it up it’s just going to be weeds that come back and if we move them often enough we might be able to rotate around and hit the same spot a couple different times over the summer so that’s our goal.
Molly: How big are the paddock spaces that you have?
Jay: If you can see that white post in front of me, that’s about the edge of the paddock. And then maybe, I don’t know if we can see the other one. Maybe I can zoom just a little bit. Right about there, the closest white post over there. So there may be a couple hundred feet by a couple hundred feet. I don’t know if they’re almost an acre, I would say for paddock. So we’re not totally sure if this is the right size. This is what we’re going to start with. And if we need to make them a little bigger or make them a little smaller and move them more often or less often, we’ll just have to adjust once we get them out here and see what they do.
Molly: And presumably the impact is going to be highest around wherever you have the trailer and the water.
Jay: Correct. Yes. And so the other thing about that is even within the paddock, we might leave the water and food, move it in every two days or something like that within this same paddock, just so they don’t tear it up too bad. And we’ll, again, this is, there’s going to be a steep learning curve because it has been done out here before, but we’re, the people who are currently working here have not really done it before. So we are learning and we’re doing it with some different equipment than what I think when they did it years ago when they did it. So a little bit of this is just feeling it out as we go. Logistically, there’s so many things you got to do for pigs, especially in the summertime. We got to figure out a way to give them shade as well so that they have the sun, that they have some shade. Ideally, we’ll figure out some kind of a mister so that we can actually spray some mist out there you know a couple times a day or something just to keep them cool so it like I said it’s a little bit of a work in progress learning but it’s been done lots of people are doing it we’re just figuring out how exactly it works here.
Molly: Are you thinking of integrating that will the trailer be the shade, the misting, and the food?
Jay: It’ll be a different trailer for the shade we’ll have to bring something else for the shade because that way it makes the pigs eat and then they go back to the shade so it gives everybody a turn to get to the feeder because there’s just not space for every pig to eat at the same time.
Molly: Well, I look forward to seeing the contraption you come up with.
Jay: It will be interesting, I’m sure. I think it’ll work. We got a good idea. Right now we’re looking at just a nice black prep pasture that was just planted. We got all the pastures planted last week before the rain. So it’s perfect. We got our barley field, which is, I’ll pan over there, the little bit lighter color green you see down in the distance. We interseeded some clover and flax into the barley, also last towards the end of the week. So we got all the stuff done that we needed to get done before the rain. And now as soon as it dries off, we’ll start prepping for planting corn, which could possibly it will happen hopefully next week providing the weather is nice enough but maybe towards the end of next week if we could get in we’d be planting some corn or the beginning of the following week.
Molly: And the flax and clover in the barley is for a green cover mulch or?
Jay: Yeah it’ll yes it’s so we’ll harvest the barley off in July and that just gives that cover crop a better start getting it in there early like this it gives it good competition for the weeds that are otherwise going to try to fill in the spaces and also it is good it’ll be good till-in mulch for the popcorn crop that’ll go in there next year so we will Molly: You won’t harvest the flax?
Jay: No, we won’t we will not harvest what’s in there now it’ll just be a cover crop and if it grows really nice there’s a chance we could graze it in the fall we will graze in the fall but there’s a chance we could even get a couple grazings on it even in late summer if it if everything grows really good but that’s kind of that’s all dependent on the rain and the season itself yeah.
Molly: great
Jay: That’s about all we got going on this week it’s busy, but the rain kind of takes some of the pressure off and moves different things to the top of the list. But we always welcome the rain we needed it.
Molly: So when you say the rain takes some pressure off, does that mean like you just can’t work when it’s raining or…?
Jay: It takes the pressure off of us as people because it allows us time to get in the shop and fix some things that we’ve been putting off.
Molly: Work on the trailer.
Jay: Yeah work on stuff like this pig trailer that we didn’t need to do right now if we can be in the field we’d rather be in the field prepping for the planting because that is the most important thing right now but if we can get the get some rain and it gives us a little bit of a break and get ready for the next thing. Yeah.
Molly: It looks like a gray sky is there today.
Jay: It is. It’s actually dripping on me just a little bit right now. It sprinkled a little bit this morning, but I’m thinking the sun’s supposed to come back out tomorrow.
Molly: It’s definitely not as hot as it was last week.
Jay: No, I think it’s like 55. It’s not very cold.
Molly: Back to hoodies and beanies.
Jay: Exactly.
Molly: Well, anything else?
Jay: I think that’s about all I can think of about today.
Molly: Thanks for taking time to check in. I appreciate it.
Jay: Yeah. Thanks, Molly.
Molly: All right. Take care. Have a good day.
Jay: You too.
