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> Sue, I would love to hear about your move to a farm, and your life there!
> Where is the web site you talked about? I just finished reading a book
> entitled, "Eighty Acres" about life on a Michigan familyfarm in the 1940's.
> What kind of farm do you have? Karen

Hi Karen,

The url for the farm website is
http://homepage.rconnect.com/winfarm
also if you are interested in getting monthly updates on the farm I
have a newsletter list with Onelist to subscribe to that go to
http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/Winonafarm
All my newsletters are archived there and there are lots of up to
date photos from around the farm there too, with the most recent
one being a photo of a 3 day old baby goat we adopted yesterday
with his new "mother", my daughter Rhianon.

The farm is a bit like an old fashioned family farm, with a little bit of
everything. Over the years it has been a beef cattle farm and a
dairy farm. Now it is the local compost site... you should see the
cows gobble up the grass clippings that people bring, and the
goats and sheep eat at fresh brush. We also get food waste from
the local hospital and university, that is composted until we have a
way to cook it so we can feed it to animals. However we can feed
the outdated bakery, produce, dairy, and frozen goods that we get
daily from the local supermarket.

We bottle feed dairy steers with the outdated milk. My daughter
milks one of the 9 female goats and feeds the milk to two female
kids and a buck kid we bought yesterday. There are two wethers
from last year, two bucks and 8 kids. We bought 3 10month old
angora goats last week, as we want to take up spinning... as if we
wouldn't get enough fleeces from our 24 sheep and their 23 [so far]
lambs. We have 4 beef cows, 2 bred heifers and 3 younger heifers
[the youngest is 7 days old], two bulls who will be going to market
before the little heifers are much bigger, and 12 dairy steers from a
couple of weeks to almost two years old. We also have 1 rabbit
and one cat. I almost forgot we have two sows, who due to their
huge appetites for doughnuts became too fat to breed, the vet isn't
sure if they will ever be capable of reproducing, but they are very
happy pigs.... we are probably buying a bred sow soon, she will not
be allowed to eat baked goods!

There are two pairs of Canada geese, both geese are sitting on six
or seven eggs, 5 domestic geese and a young Canada goose who
thinks he's a domestic goose, 4 turkeys, six ducks [and 28 fertile
duck eggs in an incubator], and too many chickens to count We
incubate chicks from our chicken's eggs in three incubators and
last week over 350 chicks hatched, all through summer we will
keep the incubators going, we can incubate 46 eggs a day, the
excess we sell at the local co-op and here on the farm, and most
of the roosters the Hmongs buy.

I think that's about all the livestock.

The farm is 175 acres, but only 55 is tillable land, the rest is
returning to the way nature had intended it to be, and there is an
abundance of wildlife. There are two trout streams joining on the
farm, and beavers have been busy damming one of them, there are
coyotes, deer, skunks, squirrels, chipmonks, ground hogs and
many other critters living here. There is a 600' hill to climb.... a
great exercise machine, and from the top you can see the
Mississippi River.

The kids [human ones] love it here and really enjoy helping out with
the farm tasks, they learn so much for the things the experience.




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Sue

[email protected]

Sue, I would love to hear about your move to a farm, and your life there!
Where is the web site you talked about? I just finished reading a book
entitled, "Eighty Acres" about life on a Michigan familyfarm in the 1940's.
What kind of farm do you have? Karen