We picked up another 3 trailer loads of horse manure to bring on the farm yesterday. The drought is one thing, but also... the farm has been "taken from" for over 100 years of traditional crop farming. No organics have been added back in as the corn and soybeans were taken off by the tractor truckloads.

The organics in the soil are what allow it to hold moisture better in periods of drought. Thats why our first order of business is to bring in as many organic sources like manure and aged wood chips as possible. It will take some time, but in a few years... this land will be more fertile than it has been in generations. Thats what permaculture does.

This horse farm doesn't spray glyphosate or other weed killers, so this is about as good as we can get.

We got a passing shower about a week ago, but it was a trivial amount. The heat is baking everything to the point that were bending T Posts as we try to make our fence line. The weeds are the only thing growing right now. Still praying for more rain.

Yesterday's temps were the same... and of course our hard headed selves were out there banding calves. Lol. That was a real treat... more to come in a video of that.

No... that's not the Sahara desert you're looking at. That's our pastures right now. We really need rain because we haven't seen measurable rain for about 2 months. We're feeding hay that should have been for the winter... now.

This has been a very dry year and a tough one to start new pastures on a new homestead.

We dumped put the booders from the last batch of meat birds and the adult chickens had a field day! We typically leave the brooders between batches and black soldier flies will lay eggs in the mixture of wet wood chips, old feed, and manure from the chicks. When we dump them, the adult chickens pick through and eat all the larvae.

In addition to feeding the chickens, they will then spread all the wood chips (carbon) into the pastures thus improving the land. It's a simple way to put animals to work doing the things that God intended them to do anyway.

@patriotnurse252 if you're trying to comment on a post, you'll need to join the Backyard Homesteading channel where the comments for our channel are housed.

Just reminder... if you'd like to comment on a post, you need to join the Backyard Homesteading group where our comments are housed. Just be aware... there's a spambot test there to weed out bots.

Do you have any regrets from switching from a suburban to a rural life??

Someone asked us this the other day... We do our best to be candid with all of you on our journey... successes and failures, so we aren't going to sugar coat the answer.

Frankly, it's medical services.

We have 4 small children and trying to find even a primary care physician and a pediatrician has been a nightmare. There are VERY few doctors and finding ones that are even taking new patients is such a challenge. We're currently calling primary care doctors that are 2+ hours away to try to find one that's taking new patients and still no luck.

We finally found a dermatologist but the wait to be seen for new patients is 12 months... that's right... it's a 1 year waiting time to see a dermatologist. No regrets on anything else, but the medical care is atrocious in our particular rural setting. When our daughter broke her arm back when we lived in the Midwest suburbs, there were two different children's hospital emergency rooms within a 10 min drive from our house. Now, the closest one is over an hour away and typically has a several hour wait... at the ER! Luckily we don't really need much routine medical care, but it's a bit disconcerting knowing that we really can't get much in the way of health care in the event we needed it.

Anyone else see medical care in rural areas as a big challenge compared to more suburban life. For anyone else who have traded the suburban life for a rural setting, what other challenges have you faced that are kind of a bummer?

We can't even name the number of projects we have going on at the moment. If we took you on a tour of our homestead right now, you'd see rolls of fencing and posts laying in our front pasture that still need to be put up, two half-built chicken tractors, cucumbers that need to be canned, zucchini waiting to be dehydrated, sourdough starter that needs to be fed, cows that need more pasture, hay bales that need to be put out....and this list goes on and on. ⁠
⁠
Though it can get overwhelming, we wouldn't trade it for anything. It's not quite the "slow living" everyone talks about, but it's where we love to be!⁠
⁠
Drop a comment and tell us... what crazy projects do you have going on right now? Please tell us we're not the only ones with more projects than hours in the day. ?⁠?

Big salmonella outbreak with cucumbers. You know what is the most common cause of salmonella outbreaks? Water contamination due to large scale animal houses or CAFO's. The fecal filled water released from these huge farm ponds then contaminates the water supplies that are then used to irrigate crops for human consumption.

The best way to prevent this? Grow your own or shift to small scale producers. Buy your food from local farmers who raise animals on pasture. The pasture raised animals deposit manure on the ground in amounts that the microorganisms can break down and use to grow thicker and lush pasture for the next round. No contamination in that model because the animals aren't in a dense confined space.

https://www.newsweek.com/cucumber-recall-salmonella-fda-hospitalizations-map-1912241