Starting out with animals on a homestead

We have learnt so much since starting out with animals on our homestead.

Today was a tough day. In fact, the past few weeks have felt particularly challenging on our farm.

We got to the end of the afternoon and we were both asking the question: ‘Is it really worth keeping animals?!’

Actually, this question has come up a lot recently… and the future of owning and raising our own animals for meat has come under real scrutiny.

As you may have already gathered, our approach to animal husbandry has been less about organisation and infrastructure and more about acquiring and buying animals on a whim. This is pretty much the opposite to my general life rule of ‘start as you mean to go on’. We really have worked backwards!

For example, we saw a cute Jersey on Facebook Marketplace and within hours we had hired a stock trailer to bring Beau to the farm. He was closely followed by our free goats, Billy and Belle, and then by sheep. Then, as you do, we decided to buy 2-day old calves. Oh, and the sheep had lambs – triplets and twins to be precise – one of which we bottle raised (you can read all about it here).

All this with no crush, no barn to house them, limited storage for hay and animal supplies and enormous paddocks with no water access except via watering cans and dodgy hoses. So, as you can imagine, when things have become hard or animals have needed medical attention, we’ve definitely had to ‘make do’.

Our basic philosophy of farming has been shaped by a desire to stay as natural and holistic as possible. It is really important to us that we care for and love our livestock. And yet, animals, like humans, get sick and we need to choose the path we feel is best. Sometimes this is really obvious and clear. Other times it can be hard to know what’s ‘right’.

This past month our calf Chester got a cough and had runny eyes and a snotty nose. None of this is great in bovines so we called the vet and decided to go ahead with the recommended antibiotics. We also discovered that Sam’s phobia of needles in humans crosses over to animals. I had waited for him to arrive home from work so we could tackle Chester’s injection together but within seconds Sam went very quiet. With no explanation he then wandered off, leaving me holding the injection and it took a couple of hours before his queasiness subsided…

So when our ewe Merida had a swollen eye that worsened as the day progressed, we were faced, yet again, with some tough decisions. I could see a grass seed had become lodged in her upper eyelid. We made a valiant effort to catch her, but our sheep are flighty at best and strong to boot. After an hour of trying to coax her closer we could see that the grass seed was really irritating her eye. It was weepy and almost closed.

Of course, this was all happening while we needed to collect our son from theatre rehearsals half an hour away. It was also past dinner time, we had been dithering for hours about what to do and it was a SATURDAY. Cha-ching… Cue a minimum $500 vet fee for after hours care.

It was around this time that we found ourselves yet again questioning our whole methodology of farming. We are absolute newbies at ALL of this. Neither of us had owned anything larger than a cat yet here we are, herding sheep, cows, goats and chickens around the place.

Add to all this our very limited farm budget which had already been blown out of the water by some extra expenditure on hay, Chester’s vet bill and an extra vet visit to help with the injection Sam had almost vomited over.

And this is where the rubber hits the road. We can talk about caring for our animals and loving them while they’re with us. This means very little though if we drop them like a hot potato when they get sick. But where do you draw the line?

We learnt some important lessons today:

Watching the vet pull a massive grass seed out from Merida’s eye and apply medicated ointment gave us such relief. I don’t think either of us regretted the decision to get her the help she (and we) needed.

And isn’t it funny how, when you know you’ve made a good choice, so many of the things you were unsure about seem to disappear?

Do we need to reassess our future with animals on the farm? Maybe. But not as a knee jerk reaction to a tricky situation. All significant decisions that we face should be given the time and the perspective that they deserve.

We just don’t have an endless pit of money for our four-legged friends. We have a strict budget and it’s hard to see any extra or buffer money be so quickly dissolved into farm expenses.

But those aren’t the only parameters to consider. If we measured everything financially or by what causes stress, our lives would look very different! We moved to our farm for the opportunity to try new things and take some risks.

So for now, we are going to trust that our animals will stay healthy and happy. And we’re trusting that it will all be worth it because we’re growing and learning and failing forward. Yep, today stretched us, but in a good way.