Who hit the fence this time? 🤦 Fall farm plans are changing fast!

Who hit the fence this time? 🤦 Fall farm plans are changing fast! Well… it finally happened. Somebody hit the fence here on the farm, and now we’ve got to change our plans for fall! 🤦 Join me today as I show you the damage, talk about how it happened, and share the new strategy we’re putting in place for our small farm moving forward. RainPoint Smart 2-zone watering timer:
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Because we don’t want to build a $40,000 barn to save $3 per bail of hay. How many years would it take to recoup 40 grand to build a hay barn to stuff my hay into to save $3 per bail? It don’t make no sense contact. I ain’t afraid to work. I ain’t afraid to play. I ain’t afraid to get the job done and do it my own damn way. I ain’t afraid to lie in times like this. If you mess with my freedom, I’ll tell you just what you can. Good morning everybody. Welcome back to another beautiful day here on the Stony Ridge Farm and we’ve got problems. Got a lot of fun stuff going on today. Hey, the first fun thing is my well pump. I’m going to show you what’s wrong with it. I’m changing my grazing plan on the farm here uh over the next few weeks as we get closer to fall and I’m going to show you guys exactly how I do that in case you’re grazing a farm like this or in case you’re curious about the way this farm works and uh what we’ve done here so far. So, all around us again is 150 acre first generation farm here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. And uh this is a first generation cattle operation. Uh right down there is my shop building and the cows are about a half a mile away over on the other side of the farm. This is my water storage system. We’re going to look inside it real quick. I have an issue with the water pump over here. So stay tuned. We got a lot of fun to have. A lot of work to get done and a lot of cows to move. Oh man. Uh I’m not sure how much is in it. And we’re about down pretty far right now. I’m going to say we probably got about 250 gallons in there. So, here’s the issue. Uh, so this tank is designed to feed the entire farm in case of an emergency. Eventually, this tank will be designed to feed the entire farm all of the time with the exception of this water tank out here, which is higher than my sistern. I thought this was the highest point on the farm and it’s not. That’s the highest point on the farm. So, the way this works is water comes from the well and this is a solar well system from Laurren Solar. It pumps up to this water system. It’s a 1000gallon tank. I’ll post a link at the end of this video to the install of that tank. I did it a couple years ago. It’s been fantastic. It’s my backup plan for problems. and we have a serious problem. Let’s take you over here and show you. This is my solar setup. This is my uh pressure tank right here. This is my pressure sensor right here. And that wire runs all the way down under the ground right there. You can see it follows my pipe all the way back all the way over here to the controller for this well. We’re going to turn it on right now. Green light. We got good solar. Should start pumping here in a second, maybe. There it is. Okay, so we’re pumping. We’re pumping 4.9 gallons per minute. That is the setting that I have this on. So, a mouse has decided that this is a delicious piece of hardware that it would like to chew up. So, we’ve got wire that’s broken right here to that pressure sensor. I’ve got to figure out a way. And I think it’s going to be a piece of PVC pipe that I’m going to wrap this in to keep mice from chewing on the dang wires. This is the second time this has happened. Pain in the butt. I also didn’t know until the cows were nearly out of water that I had a water issue. So, in a future video, you’re going to see me go in here and install a water monitoring system that will send it a signal right to my phone. Let’s go on over. We’re going to let that pump for about 6 hours. So, we’re going to run over and take care of the cows and show you guys what’s going on. All right, before we go any further with today’s video, let’s mention today’s day sponsor, Rainpoint. Rainpoint. Rainpoint. Guys, this is a cool smart waterer from Rainpoint. It’s the Twozone Wi-Fi water timer with hub. This is the box. You get a quick start guide, which is easier than reading the full manual, I think. You download an app really quickly and you can water anything. Water your garden, water your lawn, water your awesome uh edible landscapes, you can do drip irrigation, you can do sprinklers, you can do all sorts of stuff with this thing. I’ve just researching it now. Just connected it up. It’s super cool. Waters two zones. So, we’ve got two areas of clay grass out here. Clay uh covered soil with grass on it. You can enter your soil type. You can enter how much you want to water, how long you want to water, and you can even even set it up to where it won’t water when it rains. So, you’re not wasting water, which is really cool. You can track all that stuff. You can water from anywhere in the world. In other words, if you’re going out of town, you don’t have to tell your neighbor, “Hey, will you go out and water the garden?” No. All you got to do is go boop and it’ll water it. Cool. Or set your timers up. I have this one set up for my yard right here to water at sunrise. So, pretty cool stuff. Again, Rainpoint, there’ll be a link down the video description. This is the twozone water timer with hub and it also has some AI capabilities, too. Thanks a lot to Rainpoint. There’ll be a link right here, QR code. That’s an Amazon link, and there’ll be more links down the video description. Huge shout out to Rainpoint. Thank you so much for sponsoring today’s video. We’re going to use that. This is a pretty fun little day here on the Stony Ridge Farm. I have a lot of work to get done, but it’s really not super hard physical labor. It’s mainly just thinking uh what we’re doing over here in our pastures is a little different for the fall this year and I think it’s really going to work out nicely. So the cows were in here probably a week and a half maybe two weeks ago. I’ve got to come in with the Batwing mower which is sitting right there and get that thing mowed, get all these weeds cut down. And that’s how I handle my weed control on the farm. We’re going to zip all the way over to way on the back side of the farm. And I forgot something. I got to run and get a battery for my electric fence controller real quick. Alman, now that I got my head on straight, check this out. See that in a future video. Got a lot of material to move at some stairs for my mezzanine in the shop. It’s coming together. You know what, man? We’re right here by the shiakeis. Let’s go check them and see if we got any shiakei mushrooms right now we got going here. No shiake. No shitake. I’m a little bit nervous about driving up here. There is a mean yellow jacket nest right up there. I don’t know if they’re still active, but we’re going to find out. I hit them with the mower the other day, man. They tore my butt up. I think I got nine stings. Yep, they’re right there. Nice big old yellow jacket. We going to fix them puppies right there, boy. They’re mean. They’re already flying at me. Not good for the cows. I’ll show you how to fix that in a future video. Without poison, without gas. People like to put gasoline on them and diesel fuel. Don’t pour that on the ground. There’s an easier way. All right. This is an electric fence controller. It runs off of a car battery. If you haven’t seen this on the channel yet, welcome to Life on the Farm. This car battery uh powers the electric fence very, very simply. That battery was born on 3 2015. That’s right. That’s a battery from 2015. The reason I’m using it is because I don’t need to put a new battery on it. That’s a battery that came out of a vehicle on this farm and it still holds enough charge to run the electric fence system. Instead of going and getting 15 bucks for it for a core at the auto parts store, now it gets used for two or three more years. Pretty cool, huh? Save money. Here we go. We’re going to hook this electric fence set up. And all of this is based upon these right here. This is called poly braid. It’s a polybraid wire. Um, and what I have to do is make sure this polybraid is nice and tight all the way down. And it’s not. I think something has broken the wire. Let’s go down and see what broke the wire. It’s always something. Ain’t there a country song that says that? Uh where we’re going to be moving the cows is off of the forage that they’re currently on, which is on the top of the hill, and into this lush, deep, beautiful, awesome grass. Multiecies pasture, not just one type of grass. We got clover, we’ve got fescue, we’ve got orchard grass, we’ve got all kinds of good stuff. There’s some chua out there, uh Johnson grass, uh all sorts of stuff. There’s my There it is. Oh, I know what happened here. Daddy hit it with a mower. Oh, well, I’ll tie this off. Super easy to repair these if you don’t jerk your arm off as you’re walking. Um, all we’ll do is take this wire, pull it nice and tight right here. And, uh, you can see we’ve got a bit of a discrepancy. So, I’ve got to unhook it down here. Get a lot of exercise walking on the farm. can’t work off of a piece of equipment for every single project on the farm. It just it’s just not realistic. So, here’s what we got. Loosen this guy up. I have a morning glory issue on this farm. So many morning glories. Morning glories will rip your garden apart. That ain’t enough wire. We’ll go ahead and get the uh handle disconnected here. There we go. Chickens are right here. By the way, if you haven’t seen the hawk video, um if I’ll uh be posting it very soon, I have a bird of prey. I’ve got a red tail hawk that keeps getting my chickens. I mean, I there’s no way that I can think of to stop it. If you guys know of any way, please post it down there. I just don’t know any way to stop it. Here’s a simple fence repair. Just take this, tie a little knot just like that. Pull it tight. Good to go. Don’t be a dummy and hit the fence again, Josh. If the fence is loose and floppy like this, all I do is just wrap it right around that post. Just like that. Just wrap around nice and tight. Now we’re nice and snug this way and nice and snug that way. Good to go. So, each one of these pastures is segmented off into 1 acre to 3/4 acre paddics. 1 acre to 3/4 acre sections. Okay. When it’s hot in the hot summer, we make sure the cows have access to shade. When it’s below 80 degrees, 80, 82, we really don’t have to worry about shade so much. So, this section right here is set up into wedges. Again, wedge, wedge, wedge. I think it’s like six wedges all the way up through here. Over the next four days, I’ll be opening up these wedges and I’ll be reeling in all of this polywire. The reason I’m doing that is first so that the cows have a larger area to graze. Secondly, so when I get my hay in, I can stash my hay where it’s going to go, where it’s going to be rolled out. Now, I roll out hay all winter long here on the Stony Ridge Farm. We stay away from conventional fertilizers, and we do our very best to farm naturally. So, I’m bringing hay to the land and putting that carbon down. And it takes about 2 to 3 years to start seeing the results of rolling hay out on your pastures. You don’t see any bare spots right here. And every bit of this land that you see, all of it, every single bit of it was bare at one point. Every bit of it. Rolling hay out on this land has really made all of the difference in this regenerative farm. So, when I get my hay in, I will have it sitting right here. And the hay that’s stacked up right here will serve this field and will serve that field. The hay that’s up at the top of the hill will serve a field over there. The hay is stored in the perspective pasture that it’s going to be utilized. The reason we do this and we don’t stuff it in a barn is because we don’t want to build a $40,000 barn to save $3 per bail of hay. Okay? So, if I’m rolling out 200 bales of hay per year times three bucks, it’s $600. How many barns can you build for 600 bucks? You can’t build a $40,000 bar. How many years would it take to recoup 40 grand to build a hay barn to stuff my hay into to save $3 per bail? It don’t make no sense. So, I just set it out here on the ground. These are big net wrapped, tightly wrapped bales, and they get rolled out on the land. Let’s run up here where the cows are. We’re going to get them moved into this new pasture. But first, I’ve got to ride and check all the fencing so that they don’t get out of the paddic that I want them in. We want it controlled, but we want to release them as it’s appropriate to get them on the new pasture so that they don’t overg graze and so that when they get done grazing, I can come back in and knock the tops out of the weeds with that tractor you saw a little bit earlier. So, I’m driving right now and I’m checking all my fence lines really quickly. Everything all the way up to this point’s good to go. I got a fence here, fence here. So, I’m going to move the cows in here until this afternoon at about 7:00. And then I’m going to take this fence line down and open it up. And I’m going to leave it down. And I’m going to take the next one down, open it up, leave it down, next one down. That is called no back fence. And no back fence means I don’t back fence them so that they can come back in here and access this area. Reason I like for them to do that is because they do have access to shade up here. in the morning and in the evening time. So, it’s really cool. Again, the weather has been really, really nice. So, our high temperatures are right at the 80 degree mark. Not worried about the cows getting any heat stress, which is really, really awesome. They’re all moving over this way right now. You can see them coming. So, let’s go ahead and get them in, get them released. They’re going to run straight to any place they can escape. by the way. Come on, babies. Come on. I hear you. Let’s do it. I’m excited. Come on. Come on. Uhoh. Got somebody’s got a limp out there. Check on her. Number 12. I don’t know why she’s got a limp, but we’ll check on her. Come on, kid. Gosh, you’re going to see some flies here. I’ve got a fly block for these cows, but I don’t know what’s going on. Hey, kiddo. Dad’s in the way now, huh? I’ve got fly treatment on these cows. I don’t know what the heck is going on with all these flies. It’s so dry. [Music] So, as I fly over this with the drone, you can see what the grass looks like and what the pasture looks like once Once they’ve grazed it, it looks a lot browner. The reason it looks a lot browner is that they have just consumed basically every consumable part of that pasture, but we want to leave just enough so that we don’t overg graze so we can still retain our moisture and still keep our earthworms and stuff like that. As I grazed the cows through this big section of pasture, you’ll notice a water tank in the center. Well, that water tank is pretty much the centerpiece of every part of this grazing operation. We rotate around those water tanks. So we rotate in 3/4 to 1acre paddics with about anywhere from 35 to 55 animals. 55 cows, cattle, whatever you want to call them, steers, heers, bulls, whatever you want to call them. But we rotate all around these water systems. The water system is central and integral to the farm. Saving water, not wasting water. Everything about this farm revolves around the water system and taking care of the animals as well as irrigating some of the grass as you saw earlier. So, I’m going to run through this pasture real quick with the four-wheeler. Go back through, make sure that there’s no animal left behind. Sometimes the babies will be laying in tall grass and we’ll make sure they’re good to go. The next thing that I’m going to do is come in right behind the cows, drop the mower in and chop all the weeds down. And so we’ve got some ragweed out there. We’ve got some seri lepedza. We got a few things that we don’t want to seed out. So if we go through and we cut them down right now, that’ll fall to the ground, provide a blanket of carbon to help the next batch of cool season grasses come up for the fall. So by the time these cows get back to this section of grass, it’ll be 30 to 45 days, and they’ll be ready to graze it again. We’ll probably be rolling hay out starting in early January this year. This will be the best pastures that we have had thus far on the farm this year. The girls are content out here, man. They are happy. They’re on good fresh green forage. Check this stuff out. This is waste deep right here. Once they graze this down, there are different types of grasses that come in on your farm, on your property, depending on where you live. If you live in East Tennessee, it might be different than if you live in Wyoming. You may get a very very short growing season in Wyoming. In East Tennessee or uh North Carolina mountains right here, you’re going to get a longer growing season. It’s really dry right now, so everything kind of looks a little brown where the cows have grazed, but one little rainstorm is going to make that take off. All this grass right here is warm season grass and warm season legumes, warm season weeds that are coming up. So, as soon as the cows move out after they graze this, another reason why I’m taking all these fences down, I will come in with the batwing and I will mow all this down to chop the weed load down. And after that, the next cool season grasses. So, we get cool seasoned grasses in the spring and cool season grasses in the fall. So, the fescue will come back in, take over, and we may even let it seed out so we get a better stand of fescue out here. I’ve got to take the four-wheeler and zip around this pasture real quick and make sure that there are no calves left behind. I did have a cow with a little bit of a limp. We’re going to check on her. Number 12, Mona. I hope she’s okay. Um, we’re going to go ahead. This fence has no power on it right now either. So, once I check this pasture, I’ll shut this gate, drive back down, hook that uh battery powered fence charger up to my uh battery, and we’ll be good to go for gosh almost a month on one battery, one car battery. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I just want to share how I’m changing up the grazing pattern and the reason behind it. This grass is going to recover just as fast now because we are getting into the fall. The fall, the wet season, the cool season grasses are going to start coming back in. We want to get these cows in here. Let them stimulate the crap out of the land. And they stimulate it by eating, hoofing, pooping, and peeing. And that’s what it’s all about. Guys, thank you so much. Please hit that like button, subscribe to the channel. Stay tuned for future videos. We get up there and we fix that issue with the Lorent solar setup. I booooed right there. What I’m going to do is take probably a 6-in piece of PVC pipe, cut it down the middle, and cover that so I don’t get any more mouse chewage. It’s a second time. And we’re going to put a monitor on this so that my phone I can pull it up on my phone or my computer and I’ll always know when my water is working and if it goes down and I’m out of town, I’ll know what to do. Thanks guys. We’ll see you next time on the Stony Ridge. Hope you enjoyed it. Come on down to the Stony Ridge. [Music] That’s the way to Stony Ridge. Lock the break. Don’t lock the brick, baby. Lock the brake. Don’t flip the brake over. Something in my pants. Something biting me. Stop rolling backwards. Did you see that thing almost getting me in the head? Y’all come back now. You here?