With a lot of new critters arriving lately, spring on the way, and meat processing coming up soon, it was past time for a critter shuffle.

The first set of critters just stayed where I put them.  I got the sheep last weekend, so they didn’t move.  I (well, James really) put a roll of hay in the coral.  I wanted to keep them thee until they had some time to be trained on the electric fence.  Tomorrow I’ll let them into the fenced off chicken area where they can start munching on some grass.  I’ll be home tomorrow, that way if they decide to test the electric fence I’ll be around to catch em.

Sheep stay in the coral

Since I’ll be taking beef to be processed in a month or so, I wanted to separate the cows that I want to process from the “growers”.  Also, I needed to get them on a magnesium block since new grass is coming out.  I left the “growers” in the back pasture and put out a mag block for them.  The picture below is the “growers” wondering how they can get  to their buddies.  You can see the mag block on the ground.  I had to use a small pallet to keep it out of the dirt… hey, use what you have, right.

The cats, well, they go where they want…

Our lonely free range rooster… he goes where he wants to as well…

Here is my rig that allows me to share one big tank across two pastures.  You can see the “grower” cows looking toward the middle pasture where their two buddies are hanging out.

Here are my biggest cows that are getting ready to go away. I put out a mag block for them as well, and I moved the feeder into this middle pasture so that I could put them on grain a bit before processing.  My cows are mostly grass-fed, but I do feed some corn and soybean mix that I get from a Mennonite friend.

Here they are chowing down.

I’ll try to post a video of this later.

– Stan.