People are constantly asking us “what is new at the Ranch,” so I figured why not get up with the times and blog about it.  It will give our friends and family a chance to stay up to date with what is going on and the happenings of day-to-day life of our farm/ranch. Right there is a question we get a lot.  What is the difference between a farm and a ranch or are they interchangeable? The answer is simple. If you have cattle and sheep grazing in a pasture, you can call yourself a ranch. A farm is used most often in reference to agriculture growing, but a ranch is a type of farm.

So, what animals does the G & E Ranch consist of today? It seems to be constantly changing. Out in the pasture, we have two two-year-old steers that will be making their way to freezers near you in June (we still have quarter or half cows available for order if you are interested).  One of the newest arrivals is Pilgrim. He is a Scottish Highlander bull born this last Thanksgiving.

Joining the cattle, we have sheep; one ram, two ewes, and four lambs.  Two of the lambs will be harvesting in June with the other two scheduled for September. We have four pigs, one Emu, and one alpaca. We have raised hogs since day one, but they are just not profitable. Yes, we are a business and need to make a little money for our efforts. The emu and alpaca are just novelties, the petting zoo aspect of the ranch. All those animals, currently 16, live on about 5 acres of land.  It is divided between three pastures and a high use area. The high use area is where their food, shelter, main water is. They exclusively live there during the winter to give the pastures a chance to grow and to reduce compaction. During other parts of the year, they are rotated through the other pastures. This ensures that the grass doesn’t get too trampled and eaten down that it will not grow back. Each pasture has direct access to the high use area to sleep and drink.

Our Fifth and largest pasture is dedicated solely to poultry. We have a chicken coop and run, along with a duck coop and run. Currently, we have about 35 laying chickens and 75 laying ducks.  Forty of the ducks are young (only about 16 weeks old) and not laying eggs yet. They were just put out on the pasture and should start laying eggs in June. All these birds have free range on an acre to roam during the day.  At night, they go back to their roosts. Ducks are funny though and don’t allows return to their run at night.

Our newest batch of animals are still too young for the pasture and living in a horse stall in the barn.  (No, we don’t have any horses. Our barn with four horse stalls gets used for everything except horses. I’ll come back to this later.) The barn currently has 40 laying birds which are just over 3 months old and going to be moving out to pasture in the next week or two.  Sharing the same stall are 100 Cornish Cross meat chickens. They grow big fast. Their entire life is about eight weeks long.  In another week or two, they will also get moved out to pasture and live their short life on luscious green grass.

So, back to the no horse thing. We work very hard to have as much of the ranch automated as possible with water and feed.  If we cannot leave for several days and know that everything is okay, then things aren’t right. A horse needs daily maintenance, and we are not at a point in our lives where that is an option. We enjoy having the flexibility to be able to jet off for a long weekend and not have to find a house sitter. There are a few times during the year that we do have animals that need more care than others, like the first week of any poultry’s life, but that is few and far between.

You may ask, what other animals we have. Well, when it gets closer to Thanksgiving, we raise turkeys. Sixty baby chicks will arrive in early June. We usually have 2 harvest weekends for those, one in mid-October and one right before Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving turkeys are quite special and are sold to people to enjoy a never-frozen, fresh-off-the-farm birds with their families. We also have two farm dogs. Both are four years old. Amber is a golden doodle, and Port is a Yorkshire Terrier.

I would say that all of these animals are more than enough to keep us busy, considering it is a side business and not our daily jobs.  Keep a look out for more posts on things like the garden, orchard or intro to who the humans are. There are many tales still to come from the G & E Ranch.