Each day I read farm blogs. The differences between farms are immense – different climate, soils, history, size, laws, animals, markets – but there are so many energetic, inventive and just plain inspiring people out there and some of them write a blog. There’s always something to learn.
The list of blogs I track is very long – more than 90 of them. Here are a handful to check out. Maybe you’ll get something out of them too. There are also links to some of these folk in the blogroll on the right of the site.
Curious Farmer – this is a post on electric fencing for piglets. One of the areas we are thinking of expanding on our farm to go is to raise pigs, so I love reading about folks that currently have pigs and write about what they do with them.
Ebey Farm by Bruce King – Bruce is probably the most prolific at sharing what he does, from plans and photos to budgets and results. He shares more about his farm work than anybody I can think of and he runs cereals, pasture and multiple types of livestock. There’s a whole lot of content there and it is worth going back through the archives to see things like his corral work and his recent farm purchase.
Green Machine Farm – This points to a post on his wiring set up for the electric fence. He’s way ahead of me in this department! Just seeing these farmers get stuck in to solving problems with a bit of know-how and a lot of energy makes reading them worthwhile. I love the posts where he goes back and fixes things that needed improvement, like his chicken pen post and since we’re going to run some meat birds reading his post on chicken economics is priceless.
Auburn Meadow Farm who loves her old-fashioned livestock breeds,
The Bovine Blog always has good stuff on cattle handling.
Gorgeous photos at Throwback at Trapper Creek, and a prolific writer too!
Grass Based Health focuses on both forage quality and grass-based food in your diet.
Adventures on Zephyr Hill Farm goes into amazing details on the ins and outs of milking and running Dexter cattle for the smallholder. Watching her defeat the challenges of her farm is always inspiring. Cute cows, too.
Reading blogs like these is one of the reasons the Internet is awesome!
grasspunk.com 
because the internet is so awesome you can experience The Muppets version of Bohemian Rhapsody. I can see our chooks doing a cover.
Aww, thanks 🙂 I was just thinking about you the other day. And pigs? Go for it! Don’t tell anyone, but I may like them as much as the cows. The deliciousness and entertainment value are simply unbelievable.
Jackie, the issue with the pigs is that they’d have the neighbor’s newly planted vines on two sides. I’ll run a second fence so if they get out of their pen they’ll still be contained, but they won’t be by the house and it might be a bit stressful until we’re used to their behavior.
The best bit of that muppets video is the chicken part at the start.
A most excellent list, especially the lady with the cows and her milking prep.. I will be pre-dipping my new milk cows after losing Daisy to mastitis and this has answered many of my questions!.. for that alone I am grateful… c
I’m totally and completely humbled to be included in such company! I’m pretty speechless, too, which (you can see by my blog) is unusual! Thank you, Brent.
Oops, so rattled, too, that I forgot to change my identity!
Susan, you’ve commented many times under your secret alias! The first time it took me a while to figure out what was going on.
Thanks, Brent! I’m looking forward to hearing about your pig adventures.
Thanks for the mention Brent. I’ve appreciated your posts on grass-fed beef, and your use of lucerne (or alfalfa to us USA guys) was a big part of why I researched and started growing it, hoping to get the same sort of results as you produced.
Bruce, you send me about a hundred times the people that I send the other way! That speaks volumes.
Curious, I’m hoping to have no adventures, just plain sailing. It is not going to happen like I want it to.