What we’ve learnt about raising animals on our homestead

We have grown so much since moving to our homestead… it’s been a long, steady upward trajectory! 

Learning how to keep animals on our homestead has been incredibly challenging but it’s also been the best part of our journey so far. 

Whether you’re just starting out, or whether you’re considering moving to land and thinking about raising animals, maybe some of our experiences will help you! 

Beginning with animals straight away

When we first saw photos on www.realestate.com of our property, the previous owner had horses, chickens, and pigs. In our negotiations to purchase the farm, we decided that we would rather start afresh with our own animals and asked the agent to ensure they were removed from the property. 

So, you can imagine our surprise when we arrived on a 38C/100F day and we realised that the pigs and chickens were all still there! We were literally thrown into having a hobby farm! 

In hindsight, I wonder whether we would have begun with animals straight away if we hadn’t adopted them, but it hasn’t all been easy. 

Three problems with inheriting animals

It was always our dream to have some type of hobby farm, but being 3 months pregnant with our seventh child, and having absolutely no experience with larger animals, we wanted to take things slowly.

We thought that the best thing was to wait until we had some infrastructure established and had adjusted to living on 50 acres. We had friends who were hobby farmers and we knew it was no easy task to just jump into right away! 

Because we inherited our animals, there were three main problems we came up against:

• Firstly, we had no information about the breeds, age, or health of the animals. This made it tricky with health issues and the unique needs of animals we had never owned before! It also complicated the process of adding new animals to the farm.

• Secondly, the set up of coops and runs was so mismatched that it was actually really hard to care for the different animals well. In fact, it was only this week (2 years after moving in!) that we have had time to dismantle the old chicken runs and create a system that works for us. 

• Thirdly, the animals we inherited were not our first choice to begin with in the early stages of our farming. We may well breed pigs again in the future, but we didn’t keep our piggie friends Brownie and Spot for very long and that was a tough process for us and the children to go through. 

Setting up with our own animals

After a few months, we realised that we needed to start afresh and set up with our own animals. 

We made the tough decision to sell the chickens and roosters and to process the pigs for homegrown pork. You can read more about our first time raising meat on the homestead here.

It’s still been a long road with plenty of hurdles, though. In many ways, choosing our livestock has made the stakes even higher. We LOVE our sheep and cows (bottle feeding definitely helped to create a very strong bond!) and we’re about to pick up 30 hens to grow our flock. 

And then you have the inevitable really hard days. 

Today was one of those. 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 raising farm 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.

Taking care of livestock

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. 

I think this is a result of a few different factors:

• I’m a sucker for cute baby animals. 
• We want our children to have lots of fabulous experiences and sometimes that means just saying ‘yes!’
• We are short on cash and big on optimism – we really think we can make most things work out 🙂 
• I’m impatient with waiting for the big picture to eventuate and inclined to be spontaneous if an opportunity arises.

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’.

The health of your animals 

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. 

To vet or not to vet?

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. Talk about imposter syndrome as a livestock owner!

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 at the first signs of illness. But where do you draw the line? 

Making decisions you can stand by

We learnt some important lessons today:

• Vets are great when you don’t know what you’re doing.
• Somehow, the money will work out.
• It’s ok to feel out of your depth and get an expert in to help.
• Confidence around animals is half the battle.
• We are learning so much… 
• It’s ok to question our decisions and to be willing to talk about the tough things and the best way forward.
• We are a team and we need to focus on problem solving without letting our emotions get in the way.

So is keeping animals really worth it?

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 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.