Livestock

In order of risk and of what they return:

1. Chickens — fast, cheap, low risk. Eggs, meat, pest control, manure. A flock recovers from a disaster in a season.
2. Goats or sheep — milk, meat, wool, hides, and they browse ground that grows nothing else.
3. Pigs — convert waste and forage into a great deal of meat and fat, and give nothing until slaughter.
4. Cattle — milk, traction and the largest manure flow, and the largest winter fodder bill and the greatest risk to the handler.

Each step up multiplies the fodder required and the consequences of getting it wrong. Prove you can carry one level through a winter before taking the next.

Grass does not grow in winter and animals eat anyway. The herd is limited by what you can cut and store, and more herds have been lost to a short hay harvest than to disease.

Ruminants eat about 2.5–3% of body weight in dry matter daily. A 550 kg cow needs roughly 16 kg of hay a day — about 2.5–3 tonnes across a 180-day winter. A sheep needs about 1.5–2 kg a day, near 300 kg for the winter. A good meadow cuts 4–6 tonnes per hectare, so each cow needs about half a hectare of hay ground that cannot be grazed while it grows.

Do this arithmetic before the herd grows, and cut the number to what the arithmetic allows.

Cut when the grass is flowering, before it seeds — feeding value falls sharply once seed sets. Dry to below about 20% moisture before stacking, turning it to dry evenly.

Damp hay is dangerous, not merely wasteful. A stack made wet heats by microbial action and can reach ignition — barn fires from new hay are a recurring cause of total loss, weeks after stacking. Push an arm deep into the stack for the first fortnight: if it is hot, pull it apart and re-dry it.

Stack on a raised, drained base, shed the rain off the top, and leave the sides open enough to breathe.

Every animal kept through winter eats stored fodder whether or not it will ever repay it. In autumn, decide and act: the old, the barren, the injured and the surplus males are slaughtered while they are fat and while there is cool weather to preserve the meat.

This is also when the meat is worth most — animals are in condition after the summer — and when preservation is easiest. A group that postpones the decision feeds those animals for months and then loses better ones in February.

Water is the constraint people forget: a cow drinks 50–100 litres a day, more when lactating; sheep and goats 4–10; pigs 10–20; a chicken about 0.25–0.5. Break ice twice a day in winter — an animal that cannot drink stops eating.

Shelter: healthy stock tolerate cold once they have a winter coat. What they do not tolerate is wet and wind together, or a closed humid barn where ammonia builds up and pneumonia spreads. Give a windbreak, a dry lying area and ventilation high up, and keep the bedding dry rather than thick.

Animals in the crop is a total loss of both — the crop is eaten and the animals gorge and bloat. Build fences before the herd grows, not after the first escape.

And keep livestock out of the water the group drinks. Stock watering downstream of the collection point, or from a trough filled by hand, is one of the highest-value rules on this page: livestock waste in drinking water undoes the entire sanitation effort in a week, and it is how Cryptosporidium, Giardia and E. coli O157 reach people.

A herd rebuilds through its females. Keep the best male only; eat, trade or castrate the rest. Slaughtering breeding females in a hard autumn is spending the capital to pay the interest, and the herd takes years to recover.

Keep a written record of who is whose offspring. In a small closed herd, inbreeding arrives within a few generations — weaker young, poorer fertility — and the fix is to swap a male with a neighbouring group every second or third generation, which is only possible if the records exist.

Gestation, for planning: cattle 283 days, sheep 147, goats 150, pigs 115, horses 340; chicken eggs hatch in 21 days.

Never bring an unknown animal straight into the herd. Keep it separate for at least three to four weeks, watching for cough, scour, lameness and skin disease. One bought animal takes out a herd.

The diseases that reach people, and the single barrier for each: brucellosis from raw milk — boil it, or hold it at 72 °C for 15 seconds; anthrax from an animal found suddenly dead — do not open the carcass, burn or bury it deep; hydatid disease from dogs fed raw offal — never feed raw offal to dogs; rabies from any bite — wash the wound for 15 minutes immediately; trichinella from undercooked pork — cook to 71 °C. The livestock guide carries the full table.

Pregnant women stay away from lambing and kidding entirely.