Colonel's Blog, 1 March 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Happy Wednesday!! All is well on the farm this morning. The weather is mild and cloudy with storms on the way tomorrow. We are under a flood watch for tomorrow night but the forecast is for only 1-3" so hopefully it won't be too bad. The weather was amazing yesterday, 77 degrees and plentiful sunshine. We spent the majority of the day outside moving the hogs to a new paddock. Makaylah came along as cameraman and we captured an hour of video. For the most part, the move went well. We needed to get them from one end of the forest, across ground they had already been, to the middle of the forest. We wanted to use the top edge, which has never had hogs on it, but we couldn't figure out a way to get them to leave their current comfy home, walk through a gate, make a 90 degree turn, and go into a new paddock. Instead, we made them a lane in front of the prior paddocks from the one they were leaving to the one we would build. Six of the hogs, after a bit of hesitation, made the trek down the lane to their newly relocated feed troughs. The remaining four decided that they were NOT going. We herded them into the corner with the opening and they bolted back into the woods. We herded them into the corner again and they bolted again. From past experience, I knew that Shelley and I have more stamina than 250 pound hogs, so we continued this circus. Finally, the hogs panting, Shelley and I huffing, we got three hog panels (Shelley is displaying beautifully in the pic above) and formed a solid wall behind them and they acquiesced. Now with all 10 in the lane, we set about to build the next paddock. We built the next paddock overlapping the lane and around their feeders. We just encircled them as they ate so we didn't have to worry about moving them again. We finished the move by relocating the solar fence charger and their hut. We spent the evening editing the hour-long video capture down to a 12 minute video we will upload to YouTube when we complete editing. Today we make a delivery to town and will clean up after the bar project.
We are both drawn and pushed to YouTube as a platform to share what we are doing. Our kids have gently pushed us, from before we left DC, to capture our life. They even went as far as to buy us amazing cameras as an incentive. Shelley and I are both drawn to the YouTube channels of those who are doing things close to what we are. Even when I was working in the Pentagon, we would spend evenings watching others homestead, farmstead, and farm in general. Contrast the draw and gentle push to YouTube with the absolute secrecy of the end of my USAF career where I was the Director of Special Programs and you can see the internal struggle for me. We dipped our toe in the YouTube water a couple of months after we moved here and found that our upload speeds prohibited us from getting videos into the platform. It also takes quite a bit of time to both shoot and edit the video and as I have previously discussed, since this is a second career, we are behind the timeline to make this venture successful. Things then ramped up to full-time farming and building our house, at which point there was no way we had the time for such. As the house is getting finished, farm tasks are becoming more routine, and I have extended time out of the vault, we are leaning more toward generating videos. We are going to try to get faster at the editing process, even if that means purchasing software. As we become more proficient, we will try to add a video or two each week. Eventually, we would like to get to 4-5 videos per week, offering a look into our daily life. As we study (because that's what we do) YouTube, we obviously bought a book and are reading/watching lots of tutorials. The experts say to be successful on YouTube you should focus your content on one of three things: educate, entertain, or inspire. We realize that to date, our intention for the videos have been a mix of all three. If we had to choose only one on which to focus, I think we would choose inspire--with a bit of entertainment and education thrown in as spices for seasoning.
Shelley's YouTube Short for today is Farming in the Winter:
Local Farm Report for 28 Feb 2023:
Harvest:
36 Chicken eggs
20 Duck eggs
0 Goose eggs
6 Gallons of milk
Sales:
1 Whole hog reservation for April
Cheers! Rich & Shelley
If I may, I’d just like to say you guys have both been successfully educating, entertaining, and inspiring both in the previous career and now in this one. Rock on!