So, now we get to the fun part of a small farm–The critters.

It’s the part we tend to get over-zealous and the most impulsive about–and probably the most important that we take our time and think through! {smile}

On a more serious note, it really is the part people most often get in over their head with. We’ve ended up with a lot of cast off livestock over the years. From “adopting” chickens at the animal shelter, to a goat tied to our porch rail with a note, to a horse it took us almost 3 years to re-home properly…stray dogs, stray cats, miniature goats that failed as pasture companions (you need a full-sized goat for that, please), even peacocks (briefly)…we’ve taken in so many animals from people who thought “you have plenty of room.” And we usually always say yes, because let’s be honest, all small farmers are really animal lovers at heart. You have to be to do this job. But it’s not easy, and it’s not all rainbows and snuggling chickens.

When it comes to bringing livestock onto the farm, there’s several broad areas you need to think through.

First, are you ready for livestock on the farm? 

Second, what type of livestock should you have on your farm?

And Third, what breed of livestock will suit your farm?

So here’s some serious thoughts about how to choose the right livestock for your small farm. As with the rest of this series, this is not meant to be out-right recommendations, it’s just some guidance as you think through your farm plan. As I’ve said over and over through this series, you really just need to know what you’re about when you start this adventure and make decisions that are best for you within the matrix of your goals and dreams. But I’ll share some of our good (and bad!) experiences as well.

Are You Ready for Livestock on the Farm?

It seems like a natural progression. You buy property, put up a fence, add some sheep, and you’ve got a regular Green Acres going on. But let’s look a little deeper at our preparations here, and some of the specific ways folks can go wrong…

• Are you allowed to have animals on your property? Farms and homesteads come in all shapes and sizes, but as I mentioned in the Finding Land post, you really need to check with your local planning, zoning, or community development office about your property. A lot of folks have ended up a violation notice for having backyard chickens in zoning district which don’t allow livestock.
• Are your animals going to be pets, or food? I’d take my free Craigslist dog to the vet no matter what–they’re family. We won’t take a $10 chicken to the vet unless we think it’s something contagious. To gauge the resources you need, you need to understand your personal boundaries when it comes to the animals on your farm. The Health and Wellness post addresses this deeper.
• Do you have space for animals? Are you familiar with the concept of stocking rates and carrying capacity? A great primer here would be Small Scale Livestock Farming by Carol Ekaruis. She covers almost all of these questions in a few paragraphs and pages.
• Do you have the infrastructure for animals you want? You’ll need more than just a fence–and the right kind of fence at that! You’ll need shelters, equipment storage, feeders, water-ers, feed storage, medicine, and medicine storage…the list goes on.
• Do you have the equipment for the animals you want? Everyone has a different opinion of what that means. I’d say every livestock farmer should at least have a truck and trailer, but I’ve seen people transport cows in the back of their station wagon, so I’m not going to go too far into this. The best bet is to just assess what you think you’ll need and whether or not you have access to it when you need it. If your animals come once and leave once, maybe you just hire someone to transport. If you know you’re moving animals to market once or twice a year, every year, maybe you need your own trailer. And how many animals? What size? When we had 5 sheep, we had a truck bed “cage” that could move up to 3-4 full-sized sheep at a time. We also hauled up to 10 sheep in an 8 ft bed with a camper shell on top. We didn’t get a full-sized trailer until we also had cows and horses.
• Will you process your own animals? That comes with a completely different set of supplies. And if you don’t think you will to begin with, then you need to think about transportation equipment to get your animals to the processor–and whether one is nearby or not!

• Are you taking a natural/holistic health approach, conventional health approach, or a mixed approach? Again, I addressed this in depth in the Health and Wellness post, but it deserves repeating because when you bring animals home you’ll need to make immediate decisions on quarantine processes, integration with existing animals, and how to use a systematic approach to whole-farm health. Having learned the hard way, we quarantine all outside animals in our “sick pen” or “sacrifice pasture” for a week while we administer wormer, trim hooves, treat hooves with Hoof-n-Heel multiple times, and introduce them to our food routine.
• Are you using a grass-based, rotational model, or grain-based, fixed-pasture model? You’re going to want to choose breeds that thrive within your management style and environment or you’re going to spend a lot of extra resources (time and money) on creating accommodations for them. A commercial feedlot animal is not going to thrive if you throw them out on pasture. A tropical, hair sheep breed is not going to thrive in New England winters.
• Do you have the financial resources? There will be vet bills, fencing repair bills, feed bills, costs for minerals, salt, wormer, vaccines, syringes, hoof trimmers, buckets (we live and die by the 5-gallon bucket here!). I, personally don’t believe that raising your own meat is always more frugal that the grocery store, but even if it was, you still have to upfront all the costs and only see the savings on the backend of the budget. Something to keep in mind.
• Do you have any experience with livestock? This is not a make or break question. I didn’t. I took horseback riding lessons and owned a dog. You’ll learn. It’s just good to be honest about your current situation and be ready to ask for help.

These are all very technical details about livestock ownership, but let’s also hit on some of the “heart issues” if you will. The emotional issues. The ones that really seem to be the make or break when it comes to the farm life. And I’d like to offer some truth and some encouragement here. I didn’t have any hands-on experience for 90% of the things that are listed below. I don’t think you have to know the answers to all of these, I just think you have to run them through your mind and give them serious consideration. Not, oh yeah, I’ll be fine with that, I’ve watched homesteading shows on the Discovery channel consideration–I mean real consideration.

• Are you ready for the dirt, smell, and chaos? This is not just about animal smells in the barnyard. Oh no. There are seasons when our whole house smells like wet wool and cow mud. No, not the farm, the HOUSE. Why? Because we’re so busy outside that we’re running back and forth, mucking up the floors, and throwing dirty farm clothes in the mudroom (that I don’t have time to wash!) or even bringing young or sick animals in the house. Are you ready to physically tackle and wrestle a calf with scours (that’s really icky diarrhea, in case you didn’t know) to give them meds and clean them up? If you are a Type A, Clorox-cleaning home-keeper, you really need to think about this one. Especially if you are going to pull your children fully into the farm life with you. There. will. be. mess. Your routines will be off. Kids will miss bedtime and (if you’re like me!) even homework sometimes because something so amazing and in-the-moment-REAL is happening that they can’t/shouldn’t/don’t want to miss it.  During certain seasons or emergencies, you just have to be ready to give yourself grace. The farm life is not like everyone else’s everyday life.
• Are you ready to be a doctor? In the Health and Wellness post, I talk about having a relationship with your vet and that expertise can’t be replaced! But as a livestock farmer, you are going to have to learn so much hands-on, basic medical care. Partly because of the expense of calling the vet, and partly because your animal can’t always wait. Are you ready to be bloody from tending emergency wounds, or cover in birth fluid from helping with lambing? Are you ok with having sheep burp up grass cud and baking soda on you? Are you squeamish about sticking an animal with a needle or scraping manure (or rot!) out of hooves? These are basic care issues on the farm. You, the farmer, will do the worming, trim hooves, give vaccines, clean and disinfect flesh wounds, and you’ll have to do all the after care and follow-up care when the vet leaves from an emergency illness. I’ve given antibiotic shots, administered fluids, stomach tubed lambs…the list goes on. Again, I had never done any of this before either. My hands-on medical work started and ended with giving my dog a bath and a pill in a piece of cheese. If you’re not ready, that’s ok. You just need to know it’s coming and you’re up for the challenge. 

• Are you ready for death? Are you ready for killing? This is the hardest part of livestock farming no matter what circumstances surround it. Animals die, and a lot of times you have no idea why. We’ve had the vet come out and say, we have no idea but there’s nothing else we can do. We’ve nursed animals night and day and still lost them. We’ve had predators break into the chicken coop and kill half the flock in one night! The other half of the question is even harder. Are you ready to have to put an animal down? Are you ready to shoot a predator to defend your livestock? (This is a real pet-peeve of mine! If your predator control “plan” consists of live-trapping and releasing your problem onto ANY land that you don’t own, you are not ready to own livestock. That is not an acceptable control strategy–ethically or legally. You need to get with your Game Warden and develop a real plan.)  Are you ready to harvest animals that you grew for food? These are tough questions and I see so many new homesteaders asking when it gets easier or how do you get over it. You never get over it, it doesn’t get “easier.” You just learn to accept it and to handle it as quickly and humanely as possible. And when you do that, you’ll find an amazing peace in the natural flow of life on the farm.

• Are you ready to be scrutinized, criticized, and harassed? This is unfortunate but real. Animals attract people like a moth to a flame, and people are ignorant. Bless their hearts. I talked about this a lot more in the Buildings and Shelters post, but be prepared for everyone to have an opinion on what you’re doing. Also be prepared for people to do stupid things like moooo at your cows as they walk/drive/ride by, chase your chickens when they come to visit, and wander too close to the electric fence just to see if the warning sign is “for real.” Be sure you’re comfortable setting rules, educating guests, and with what your liability coverage is. We do a lot of special events, and I wrote a post you might want to skim over about Teaching Children to be Good Animal Visitors, which can really apply to adults too.

• Are you ready to hate it? Look, it happens. You get a couple baby goats. They’re adorable. You build them a pasture with a goat playground and a beautiful red barn. You envision a milk pail overflowing with frothy, creamy goat milk and a booth at the local farmers marking selling goat milk soap like hotcakes…turns out your goats can climb the fence and are always at the neighbors house, eating her flowerbeds, the kids don’t want to help in the barn anymore because it makes their clothes stink before school, it turns out making soap involves a lot more ingredients and supplies than just milk–if you could even get that darn goat on the stand to milk it to begin with! Or you get a handful of chickens just for your own eggs, and it turns out you’re getting 4-5 eggs a day, which is more than 2 dozen eggs a week, which is way more than you, your neighbor, your pastor, and your parents can eat–not to mention everyone else local also has a couple chickens in their backyard for their own eggs…so now you’re hip deep in eggs and your family threatens to revolt if you serve one more quiche. Do you have an exit strategy? It might just one enterprise, or it might be the whole farming-homesteading lifestyle, there’s no reason to spend so much time, energy, money, and heartache doing something you detest day in and day out. Start small and have a plan to get out, sell out, or eat your way out of the livestock if things go bad. To begin with, don’t start things just because it “looks easy” or “everyone is doing it” or “that’s the way to make money.” Start things that you genuinely have a personal interest/enjoyment in. We don’t raise goats. We get asked about that a lot because people think “goats and sheep” go together. Well, we eat lamb, we don’t eat goat. We also like sheep and we don’t like goats. {shrug} Just personal preference. So why do something we don’t like? Joel Salatin also talks about this principle in his books You Can Farm and Family Friendly Farming. The farm should be enjoyable because you’re going to be there A LOT.

And just for a little bit of real life here’s a couple of examples we’ve lived through of a bad exit strategy–“can you keep our horse for a few weeks while our backyard swamp dries out?”–and then they moved. Here’s another bad one–“thank you for taking our goat [tied to the porch rail] our horse didn’t like him and we know he’ll be happy in your big field.”

Life on a small farm is hard, even on good days. Running through these questions can help you make better choices as you get started and not set yourself up for failure.

This is a really long post, so I’ve moved the second and third point to follow-up posts. Come back to read about what TYPE and what BREED of livestock you should have on your farm.
Our series continues with links below–And be sure to sign up below for our newsletter and receive your FREE copy of our Finding Land Worksheet, to help you in your homestead planning!

I’d love to hear about and learn from your experience too! Did you have something you recommend or something that totally didn’t work for you that you’d like to share? 

Dollars and Cents of Starting a Small Farm

Starting a Small Farm: LAND

Starting a Small Farm: BUILDINGS and SHELTERS

Starting a Small Farm: FOOD and WATER

Starting a Small Farm: HEALTH and WELLNESS

Starting a Small Farm: CHOOSING LIVESTOCK  (Part 1) and (Part 2) and (Part 3)

Starting a Small Farm: THE HOMESTEAD GARAGE

Starting a Small Farm: SMALL FARM TAX BINDER

Starting a Small Farm: USING GOOGLE CALENDAR FOR MAINTENANCE RECORDS