Shalali Infante and Pint-Size Farm, located in New Mexico, breeds miniature jerseys, Nigerian dwarf goats, and American Guinea Hogs shipping animals all over the U.S.

Production:
Janie: 18.3
Annie: 16.8
Sally: 21.5
Eggs: 14

Last night I ground flour and soaked it in buttermilk for bread today and pizza tonight.

Got to sleep in until 6:45. Yeah! On the weekends, Dante gets to sleep in, and David & I handle the morning chores. Janie wasn’t in quite as bad a shape as yesterday. She gave decent. The barnyard was easier to deal with, since it didn’t rain the night before.

After milking, we took Yum-Yum to the auction house to be banded and branded. It ended up being a fiasco. They were out of bands, so they said they would cut him. I figured they knew what they were doing, so I didn’t think much. Well, they didn’t let the brand get hot enough, so they had to re-heat, after they had already burned him, then it still wasn’t very hot and they held it a very long time. When they cut him, the young man cut his entire scrotum off. When they were done, he had a gaping hole in his abdomen with “stuff” (the internal portion of his penis) showing through and he was bleeding quite a lot. When we got him home, I sprayed it down with dilute betadine and put a bunch of cayenne pepper on it. Then I went to the feed store and got penicillin, stop bleed, tetanus, and a wound spray. By this evening, it seemed that even more was hanging through the wound, so I decided to sew it up. The feed store doesn’t carry suture material, so I got my mom to bring her curved needle and I got some dental floss. We tied his front feet to one post and his his back feet to another and laid him on a tarp. I irrigated the wound with a 20 ounce spray bottle of diluted peroxide and then with about 10 ounces of dilute betadine. With my father, Dante, and David holding him down, I then sewed up the wound. I left lots of space between the stitches for the wound to drain. It looked much better, obviously, with his insides staying inside. Oh, I am so mad at myself for letting them do that to him. I am going to learn how to do this myself and be the one responsible for doing it correctly or screwing it up. That poor baby!

David fixed a flat on the flatbed trailer so as to go get hay tomorrow. While doing that, he got smacked upside the head with the high-lift jack. I had to super-glue his wound together. He also harrowed the field to get ready to irrigate tomorrow. I finished the brooder. I put flashing along the perimeter, inside, so that there were no more corners for chickies to get stuck in. Then I added shavings. The bedding I left and wet down was starting to warm up composting. I filled the feeders, filled the waterers, got the clabber feeders ready, got they whey in the spray bottle (to prevent coccidosis, we spray down the chicklets with whey). As soon as I got back inside from that I got the call from the post office that the chicks were in. That is the first time I’ve been ready for the chicks before they arrived.

Amy, my neighbor (who was in on the ordering of the chicks) went to pick them up at the post office. I kneaded the dough and David got things ready to go out to milk. Amy got back with the chicks and she and I got mine into my brooder. Spray them down in the box, pull each one out, dunk it’s beak in water, dunk it’s beak in food, set down, wash, repeat x79.

After we got Yum-Yum back, we just left him unseparated all day. So of course, Janie had no milk in the afternoon. Annie did remarkably well. Sally was her usually wonderful self. After milking is when I decided to sew up Yum-Yum. So, I got the the stuff together and did it (as described above).

After the sewing up, we made the pizza and the bread. The Pizza was awesome with homemade mozzarella.

Yuck, what a day. I don’t want another like this for a long time!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Farm Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.