This is likely to be a regular feature, since most Sundays I’m lucky enough to have people who indulge a deeply held fascination of mine — farming.

I met Darby and Elliot of Sun Dog Farmers a few months back through Crop Mob. They seemed like cool folks and their place isn’t too far from me, so I asked if they had any internship opportunities. It’s their first year on this land, and Darby said she needed to think about how to structure that so as to not work me to death, which I considered thoughtful.

Anyway, they figured out to leave the easy stuff for Sundays and offered to let me come out in the mornings and help them feed their growing flock of goats and sheep and chickens and then weed or mulch or lay black plastic or pop new seedlings into the ground when the old one isn’t thriving — you know, farm stuff. I usually bring a few bottles of beer I’ve made, and around noon we break and have a home cooked lunch on their porch and, assuming I’m not suffering heat exhaustion, chat and hang out. I find the labor to be centering, the animals fascinating, and the company first rate. Plus, the weather today was perfect — sunny, breezy, warm but not enough to do me harm. Here’s some Sun Dog Farmers Livestock Porn:

Goats: Ruminants or Just Gangly, Weird-Eyed Dogs?

These guys (actually, one guy and three lady goats) just race over to say hello, shouting their happy greetings and wagging their little tails. The fencing is new and wasn’t up when I was last there. I guessed it was electrified when the goats stopped just short of touching it. Later in the morning when we were over feeding them, Darby couldn’t hear the soft clicking noise the solar-powered generator makes as it sends a pulse through, so I touched it. For a fraction of a second, everything was fine. And then a strange and hugely unpleasant sensation overtook me.

Some time later, the male goat Giles forgot himself in trying to play with me and jumped full body into the fencing. He steered clear of me for a while after that.

Hens in the Eggloos

Here are the laying hens (and one rooster) in the Eggloos. They’ve got a larger, custom built tractor coming this week which will give them more space and be an easier move. The Eggloos are moved at least once a day, giving the chickens fresh grass and bugs to eat and a clean floor. The soil, meanwhile, is aerated by their scratching and fertilized by their droppings.

The idea with migration intensive grazing is to move ruminants across a given section of pasture for a period of time adequate for them to graze back the grass and leave lots of rich droppings behind. Then they’re moved into another section of pasture (by moving their fencing in this case) and the chicken tractor is moved onto that piece of pasture. The chickens scratch to break up and scatter the dung and eat insects they find, effectively cleaning that section of pasture. It takes a few days for the tractor to cover the full length of the area, and by the time that section of pasture is cleaned, the goats and sheep are ready to be moved to a third piece of pasture, and the chickens follow to clean up their second spot.

By the time the ruminants return to the first position, the pasture has been fertilized and the grass has had time to grow back more lushly than before. Employed over a span of years, this grazing technique produces lush, healthy forage and rich new soil.

Bantam free range dude

This Bantam rooster is a cross between a flighty guard dog and the farm mascot. He’s gorgeous and just roams free. I’ve seen him every time I’ve been there, and while he displays no overt interest in me, I always get the feeling that he’s paying very close attention. There’s a little bit of rottweiler in that one, I’m sure. Today he spent the day flirting with the hens in the Eggloos because his free range lady partner just hatched five chicks and they’re all stuck in an enclosure down the hill. Daddy-o here wouldn’t win any parenting awards.

Like Pop Tarts for Goats

Lady sheep chowing down

This was actually the second breakfast for the critters, who were “hayed” before I arrived. Here they’re getting small grain rations, which they love but which are something like junk food. The rumen isn’t designed to digest large amounts of grain, and sheep feed is specially formulated because they are susceptible to copper toxicity.

There was more to the day, like weeding the incredible squash beds. Being a farm, the lighting and soil conditions are ideal, and it always blows me away how much bigger and fuller their plants are than what I manage in the kingdom of clay in my back yard. Darby identified the apparently endless number of squash-devouring insects that we encountered, and I smashed a lot of squash beetle seeds as I reached through to pull grasses and pigweed free. I had no idea that nature had directed so much energy to the destruction of squash plants.

But that’s what happens on a day at the farm — you do stuff, you learn stuff, and goats race up to say hello everytime you clear the treeline. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday, but I’m not sure there are many better ones.