- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
I have heard some terrible stories about sheep being really dumb and dying easily and trying to kill themselves constantly from someone who owns sheep so that really put me off them.
Livestock Thread
- Thread starter ${Sandy}
- Start date
-
🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2024
Genius. They are amazing rovers. Actually better then most machines.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
plenty of animals come in two types - retarded but docile , smart but very destructive . Depends on the breed i guess and how you keep them.
this guy has zero issues with 4-5 sheeps doing his crazy nomad shit
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2024
An uncle has owned a heard of around a hundred sheep for half a century now. They're actually pretty docile. Maybe they go insane if you keep them too confined, but a few sheep on open or spacious range should be a breeze.
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2018
Same with any other animal, you gotta learn their "tricks" so to speak. Sheep can be really susceptible to stress, and stress can kill. My current sheep had a rough time after transport getting used to their new pasture, but after 2 weeks they settled down and understand that I bring treats when I shake a bucket.
Something I've learned talking to a ton of farmers is, it doesn't matter what you're thinking of raising, if you ask a farmer what they think of "X" animal they all say the same shit "they're dumb as fuck" "all they do is find ways to kill themselves" "you couldn't pay me to raise X"
What I've noticed is it's either they couldn't be arsed to even go look at their animals once a day, or got burnt out by a couple of bad seasons.
- Joined
- Jun 5, 2024
Here are some info materials that could be useful for orientation:
Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds
Choosing and Keeping Chickens
How To Raise Poultry
The Chicken Health Handbook
Guide To Raising Farm Animals
Beekeeping
Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds
Choosing and Keeping Chickens
How To Raise Poultry
The Chicken Health Handbook
Guide To Raising Farm Animals
Beekeeping
NormalPornForNormalPeople
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2024
I raise rabbits and use them to fertilize a 400 pot farm in my yard.
The rabbits are in a metal cage just big enough on the bottom for their poop to fall through. It collects on a screen, and the urine continues to fall in to a gutter system that funnels in to a big water container. The urine is a powerful liquid fertilizer. You can see the calcium floating in it, and it does amazing things for high-calcium crops like tomatoes, which can get blossom end rot without it.
The manure of course goes in the garden also. It's a very simple and clean automated system.
Rabbit like to urinate in their hay, which wastes a lot of hay. So I strap a bucket with holes in the bottom to the top of their cage, and put hay through the top in to the bucket, and they must pull it out. They will still try to climb in there, so a smaller container with a weight some other way of blocking the bucket will keep things clean and keep waste down.
You can feed them largely on weeds like dandelions, the early buds from blackberry leaves, branches from willow trees and many other easily accessible sources, never mind grass, making them very cost-efficient, and sustainable even without commercial-grade food.
Excess bones get burnt for bone-meal fertilizer, and of course there are furs.
The rabbits are in a metal cage just big enough on the bottom for their poop to fall through. It collects on a screen, and the urine continues to fall in to a gutter system that funnels in to a big water container. The urine is a powerful liquid fertilizer. You can see the calcium floating in it, and it does amazing things for high-calcium crops like tomatoes, which can get blossom end rot without it.
The manure of course goes in the garden also. It's a very simple and clean automated system.
Rabbit like to urinate in their hay, which wastes a lot of hay. So I strap a bucket with holes in the bottom to the top of their cage, and put hay through the top in to the bucket, and they must pull it out. They will still try to climb in there, so a smaller container with a weight some other way of blocking the bucket will keep things clean and keep waste down.
You can feed them largely on weeds like dandelions, the early buds from blackberry leaves, branches from willow trees and many other easily accessible sources, never mind grass, making them very cost-efficient, and sustainable even without commercial-grade food.
Excess bones get burnt for bone-meal fertilizer, and of course there are furs.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
Nigga that sounds like animal cruelty. They have to walk and sleep on metal grates for their entire life? You don't even let them have hay to sleep on???
Cirrhosis_of_Liver
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 16, 2024
Roosters aren't nearly as loud as Mexicans, yet you're allowed to keep those in the city.
Ethel_Blucifer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2024
And hens can crow. If you don't have a rooster, the dominant hen, especially as she ages, can take over that role. Insert lesbihen joke here.
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2018
Literally bureaucracy and/or asshole neighbors. House I grew up in was originally county land, the city decided they wanted our subdivision and got it. We were grandfathered in for livestock / non-pet animals, but had an unfortunate accident, and when we were planning to get more, city stepped in and pretty much threatened that since our animals were gone, we're now under their rules. Same thing will happen when city assholes move into rural areas and decide that they don't like the sounds or smells of rural life, they'll complain, and whine, and use civil warfare to ruin neighbors lives.
Had goats growing up, 1 nubian and several pygmys. I'm like 4 or 5 IIRC, nubian comes up to me, starts sniffing, I go to pet him, dude headbutts me right in my face, drops me to the ground, bloodies my face, mom wasn't happy, and he'd often play/terrorize me when trying to give him fresh hay. Goats are chaotic by nature, they may seem like a dumb farm animal, but they're like a cat, with horns and hooves.
Meth Until Death
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2019
Chickens are pretty self sufficient if they can roam, just gotta check water and feed in the mornin. Don't put em with anythin else like ducks or geese, otherwise they'll get crook and die. Rats will go after eggs as well and snakes will go after the rats.
Pigs are fuckin terrific at shiftin earth. You just gotta move em around around, otherwise they'll really fuck up whatever ground they're on. Easy to keep contained too, just set up a portable electric fence where ever you want em, leave it on for two weeks and they should stop testin it by then.
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2021
I'll open the vault.
Enjoy.
Enjoy.
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2023
Didn't see this thread earlier, so started making a new thread. Copying and pasting what I wrote for OP, giving my experience raising rabbits:
I have about three years' experience of raising, breeding, butchering, and eating meat rabbits. My wife and I ended up having to give it up, not because we were failing, but because processing their hides was getting to be too time consuming. We didn't want their furs to go to waste, but processing furs and hides was, as far as we were able to tell, an obnoxious, laborious, and time consuming process. Otherwise, although small livestock raising had more than its fair share of headaches, it was an extremely rewarding activity. So much so that we're now several months into our switch over to chickens. We tried quails at one point, but the quails were such brutal little psychopaths that we gave up pretty soon after the first time one of our roosters got fucking scalped by the other birds.
During our three years of rabbit raising, we ran into almost every problem with the rabbits you could imagine, and quite a few you couldn't. As far as I could tell from talking with other breeders, we were actually unusually successful at keeping our animals healthy - although it helped that we were raising them in such small numbers that we could devote more time to each animal than most. I'll be happy to answer any questions people have about rabbit raising, and would appreciate any advice people have about raising chickens on a small lot.
Basic Advice About Rabbits
I'm not going to go into a step-by-step discussion of rabbit husbandry here, but there's two big challenges about rabbits that people should know before getting into raising them. The first is that the rabbit digestive tract is extremely sensitive. We've all seen Bugs Bunny and know that rabbits love carrots, right? WRONG. The domestic rabbits' intestinal tract is a finely tuned machine. It has to be - their diet is principally grass, which is extremely hard to digest. Big animals, like cows, can handle it by having a vast, sprawling series of stomachs and tubes to really work the stuff over*. But rabbits are small critters, and can't do this, so their intestines are as finicky as a racecar's engine. So if you give them too much sugar - and a carrot counts as too much sugar from the perspective of a rabbit's intestines - or not enough roughage, or even just change the variety of feed** they're getting too suddenly, well. Their digestion will stop, they'll develop painful gas pockets in their intestines, and they will die a slow and agonizing death over several days' time. Once you know what to do, avoiding this isn't too hard, just a matter of routine care, but if you're underprepared for just how easily this can go wrong, you can lose some animals in a frankly pretty tragic way.
The second big issue is related. Rabbits poop. A lot. Again, digesting grass is difficult, and doubly so if you're a small animal, so there's a lot of undigested matter that comes out the other end. A *lot*. Frankly, dealing with rabbit waste was, for me, the most persistently unpleasant part of raising the wee beasties. Fortunately, because it has so much undigested fiber, etc., there's one place that you can always put your rabbit pellets: the garden. The feces of most animals is so high in nitrogenous waste that if you apply it directly to your plants, the high nitrogen content can cause "fertilizer burn," scorching plant leaves and ruining your garden. This is one of the reasons why you compost it. But rabbit waste is so high in undigested carbon that it can be applied directly to the soil in huge quantities (and by God, you'll get huge quantities) with no fear. Relatedly, it's so high in carbon that it's pretty sterile stuff - obviously, you'll want to wash your hands and produce before eating, but that's it. A good scrub is all you need. But still, you will need some sort of plan for collecting, moving, and using or disposing of your rabbits' waste products, and frankly I was never 100% pleased with any of our methods for doing it.
If you ask me "how could you be so cruel as to kill and butcher such an adorable animal!?!?" my answer is that a rabbit is one of the easiest animals to kill in a quick and humane manner. I never felt guilty about killing them - as long as we gave them a good enough life. We tried to give them as much time to bounce around and play as possible, but frankly I always felt worse about them not getting enough time to run around than I did about killing and eating them. The goal (not always realized, alas) was to make it so they only ever had one bad day in their lives - the last one. So take good care of your animals, keep them safe and healthy, and then enjoy their healthy, delicious meat products. For my part, I was especially fond of rabbit liver pan fried in a little butter, and then put on toast with some mustard and lemon pepper. An absolute delicacy.
*for any veterinarians and biologists here, i know that i am not being remotely precise, and i apologize, i'm trying to be at least slightly brief here
**and seed
I have about three years' experience of raising, breeding, butchering, and eating meat rabbits. My wife and I ended up having to give it up, not because we were failing, but because processing their hides was getting to be too time consuming. We didn't want their furs to go to waste, but processing furs and hides was, as far as we were able to tell, an obnoxious, laborious, and time consuming process. Otherwise, although small livestock raising had more than its fair share of headaches, it was an extremely rewarding activity. So much so that we're now several months into our switch over to chickens. We tried quails at one point, but the quails were such brutal little psychopaths that we gave up pretty soon after the first time one of our roosters got fucking scalped by the other birds.
During our three years of rabbit raising, we ran into almost every problem with the rabbits you could imagine, and quite a few you couldn't. As far as I could tell from talking with other breeders, we were actually unusually successful at keeping our animals healthy - although it helped that we were raising them in such small numbers that we could devote more time to each animal than most. I'll be happy to answer any questions people have about rabbit raising, and would appreciate any advice people have about raising chickens on a small lot.
Basic Advice About Rabbits
I'm not going to go into a step-by-step discussion of rabbit husbandry here, but there's two big challenges about rabbits that people should know before getting into raising them. The first is that the rabbit digestive tract is extremely sensitive. We've all seen Bugs Bunny and know that rabbits love carrots, right? WRONG. The domestic rabbits' intestinal tract is a finely tuned machine. It has to be - their diet is principally grass, which is extremely hard to digest. Big animals, like cows, can handle it by having a vast, sprawling series of stomachs and tubes to really work the stuff over*. But rabbits are small critters, and can't do this, so their intestines are as finicky as a racecar's engine. So if you give them too much sugar - and a carrot counts as too much sugar from the perspective of a rabbit's intestines - or not enough roughage, or even just change the variety of feed** they're getting too suddenly, well. Their digestion will stop, they'll develop painful gas pockets in their intestines, and they will die a slow and agonizing death over several days' time. Once you know what to do, avoiding this isn't too hard, just a matter of routine care, but if you're underprepared for just how easily this can go wrong, you can lose some animals in a frankly pretty tragic way.
The second big issue is related. Rabbits poop. A lot. Again, digesting grass is difficult, and doubly so if you're a small animal, so there's a lot of undigested matter that comes out the other end. A *lot*. Frankly, dealing with rabbit waste was, for me, the most persistently unpleasant part of raising the wee beasties. Fortunately, because it has so much undigested fiber, etc., there's one place that you can always put your rabbit pellets: the garden. The feces of most animals is so high in nitrogenous waste that if you apply it directly to your plants, the high nitrogen content can cause "fertilizer burn," scorching plant leaves and ruining your garden. This is one of the reasons why you compost it. But rabbit waste is so high in undigested carbon that it can be applied directly to the soil in huge quantities (and by God, you'll get huge quantities) with no fear. Relatedly, it's so high in carbon that it's pretty sterile stuff - obviously, you'll want to wash your hands and produce before eating, but that's it. A good scrub is all you need. But still, you will need some sort of plan for collecting, moving, and using or disposing of your rabbits' waste products, and frankly I was never 100% pleased with any of our methods for doing it.
If you ask me "how could you be so cruel as to kill and butcher such an adorable animal!?!?" my answer is that a rabbit is one of the easiest animals to kill in a quick and humane manner. I never felt guilty about killing them - as long as we gave them a good enough life. We tried to give them as much time to bounce around and play as possible, but frankly I always felt worse about them not getting enough time to run around than I did about killing and eating them. The goal (not always realized, alas) was to make it so they only ever had one bad day in their lives - the last one. So take good care of your animals, keep them safe and healthy, and then enjoy their healthy, delicious meat products. For my part, I was especially fond of rabbit liver pan fried in a little butter, and then put on toast with some mustard and lemon pepper. An absolute delicacy.
*for any veterinarians and biologists here, i know that i am not being remotely precise, and i apologize, i'm trying to be at least slightly brief here
**and seed
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2023
If anyone plans to run goats, visit this site:
https://www.tennesseemeatgoats.com/articles2/articlesMain.html
there is an ABSURD amount of disinformation about goats on the modern internet. Is it difficult? Depends on your skill level. Goats require good fencing (and if you cant build a proper fence, then good luck raising any animal at all), clean water, and proper feed. Parasites are the biggest threat for goats. They aren't the same as sheep, and anyone you tells you that is flat out wrong. If you live in a very wet area, then hoof rot is a large problem as well. Dry bedding is a must. If you live in the southwestern US, then goats are much easier to manage.
There isn't a real goat industry in the US anymore--the death of the Wool Act (Mohair Act is another name) killed our small ruminant industry. If you are serious about raising them for meat or dairy, then going to Goat Camp is highly recommended (see above link).
TLDR: build good fences or your life will be a constant hell of chasing bucklings
https://www.tennesseemeatgoats.com/articles2/articlesMain.html
there is an ABSURD amount of disinformation about goats on the modern internet. Is it difficult? Depends on your skill level. Goats require good fencing (and if you cant build a proper fence, then good luck raising any animal at all), clean water, and proper feed. Parasites are the biggest threat for goats. They aren't the same as sheep, and anyone you tells you that is flat out wrong. If you live in a very wet area, then hoof rot is a large problem as well. Dry bedding is a must. If you live in the southwestern US, then goats are much easier to manage.
There isn't a real goat industry in the US anymore--the death of the Wool Act (Mohair Act is another name) killed our small ruminant industry. If you are serious about raising them for meat or dairy, then going to Goat Camp is highly recommended (see above link).
TLDR: build good fences or your life will be a constant hell of chasing bucklings
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Used to work at a chicken farm where bunnies would roam around with the chickens. You can keep them side by side as long as they have plenty of space.
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
Don't snakes eat eggs as well? What's the chance of finding a snake in your coop when you open it to gather your eggs?
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2023
Depends where you live. In my area, rattlesnakes and rat snakes are common. The easy solution is to have a cat around. I've always gotten a male kitten and raised him near the chickens--a good cat raised properly won't kill your chickens, and will keep snakes away.
Ethel_Blucifer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2024
Or turkeys. They go after the 'worm' they see dangling from their face and the turkey can end up with eye injuries...
You know, we've had both cats and chickens for years, and they generally learn real quick to not attack each other. They're about the same weight-class. Cats fight one of one, but chickens gang up. It's a close to even match that neither side wants to mess with.
Chickens are also great mousers, and can take out grass snakes and small rats. They LOVE meat!
Does anyone else do vermiculture? I used to compost using worms--free chicken feet AND potting soil--and I have to set it up again. I used all the soil I'd produced expanding the garden during Covid, and the hens finished off the worms.
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2021
We have a load of Chickens, about 12 I think, couple Geese, few Ducks, few Goats for milk and a couple Hogs.
They're easy to take care of. You just have to be willing to get up early.
If you just want a few chickens they're the easiest thing ever, just make sure their feeder is full, make sure they have a secure coop, and if you don't want them just running round the yard, build them a pen thats wired off to keep predators out and them in.
They're easy to take care of. You just have to be willing to get up early.
If you just want a few chickens they're the easiest thing ever, just make sure their feeder is full, make sure they have a secure coop, and if you don't want them just running round the yard, build them a pen thats wired off to keep predators out and them in.
No particular benefit, just Duck Eggs are tasty.