A Good Farm Week

Last week was one of our better weeks for the farm. A few really good things happened. I will tell you about two of them in this post and save another one for a later post. The first good thing that happened is we sold all of our wood. We had sold 4 of the 12 ricks of wood so far and had not had many calls the past week or two which is weird because last year we sold out in a few days. We had advertised on craigslist and in the local newspaper classifieds. Then on Thursday I had a guy call me and want to come look at the wood. He liked it and decided to buy the 8 ricks that I had left. So, we sold all our wood which is good for us. Then, I guess since it is starting to get a lot colder, I had like 6 calls on Saturday of people wanting to buy wood. I wish I had more to sell them but I am pretty much done cutting wood to sell. The next big thing that happened is we sold 3 of our calves at the Fayetteville livestock auction last week. If you remember we bought 4 calves in the spring to raise and get bigger in order to sell in the fall. We put them on our neighbors' land because they did not have any livestock over there and it would help them not have to mow and it would help us make some money... hopefully. One of the calves we are going to keep until next year to butcher. The other 3 we sold and our plan was to hopefully make enough off of the 3 we sold to cover the cost of the one we were keeping so we would not be out any money for a cow to butcher this year. But, we ended up having a problem with the calves during the summer. They contracted pinkeye around the time we went on vacation to Ohio and we did not discover it until we got back home and by that point it had become really bad. We had to give them antibiotics to treat it and I put eyepatches on their affected eye to protect it from dust and sunlight so it would heal quicker. We had pirate cows. The pinkeye went away put they still had white spots on their eyes which is pretty common after a cow has pinkeye. At livestock sales, if a cow has these white spots than they don't bring as much money. Bad for us. We were really worried that we were going to have a hard time even making our money back on those three because of this. Anyway, we sold them last week and they did sell for less- about 80 cents a pound instead of $1-$1.15 a pound. But they ended up being a lot heavier than we thought they would be. When we got them they were around 250 pounds and when we sold them they averaged 455 pounds. This equaled out to them gaining over 1.25 pounds per day, just eating grass. That is pretty good. So it ended up that even though we made less per pound than what we wanted, their weight helped us to make more money and we ended up making enough off the three we sold to cover the cost of what we paid for the one we are keeping, and we had money left over. We were really excited. Now we just have one calf that we will keep until next year sometime. I think his name will be GOB (pronounced like Job from the bible).