Studying Agriculture/Farming

[Alduinn]

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[[)roi(]]

Whew....and I thought I had a problem with rats... Nope my situation is very well managed compared to this.

I built my own version of the "walk the plank" traps; once I had confirmation it worked, I made a total of 4 and put them in all the hot spots; the chicken coup, the goat barn, the lucerne store, the chicken feed store. It works really well with peanut butter as the bait (rats love the stuff) -- at the peak it was catching on average 6 rats per bucket per night. So far well over 200 rats have become crow food, and my daily catches have tapered off to 1 or 2 rats per day, mostly small.

I also have standard wire box traps in areas closer to the home, as they known to get into a car's wiring, household wiring, etc.

 

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A bit more on the mouse plague in Australia... whew I can only manage how devastating this is.
Consider that because these horrible vermin pee and shit all over everything -- any contaminated feed can't be fed to animals and has to be tossed, even worse for farmers and their grain / grass stores.

It's also a perfect example of a typical feckless authoritarian government, making dumb policies... and if it wasn't bad enough, now you have morons like PETA weighing in with stupid suggestions.

FFS I'd crack if they ever got into my brew room and my malt grains.

 

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Wrapped up the build of goat nursery, as a sectioned off part of one of the goat barns... just in time, as the 1st two of my ewes delivered early this morning: 2 males and 2 females. These ewes (mothers) are now secure in the goat nursery for the night, with as much lucerne as they can eat; the 4 kids all have their jerseys on to protect them from the bitter cold nights -- and they're just as cute as you can imagine.

I'm expecting most of the ewes to give birth in the next month or so... if all goes well we should see around 90+ kids this season. It's also the time for their yearly shot of a multi vaccine; which we'll start administering tomorrow morning.

 

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New addition to the family for a while (+- 3 months);

He was born on Wednesday and unfortunately his mom has rejected him; and is now refusing to feed him at all -- she just butts him away if he tries to go in for a nipple.

So we've taken him in for hand rearing.