[hippy]

 Hi Everyone,
                   I am after some very basic information and i appologise if this is not the right forum. I am right at the begining of realising my smallholding dream and am trying to learn and plan as much as i can. I hope to raise some stock (mainly sheep) to sell as meat, I dont want to be wholely reliant on one thing for income and am also very realistic about my expectations. I have realised I have no idea how you would sell a sheep once it was the right size ( or even what is the right size) how much is a sheep carcase worth, can you sell the hide for leather, i am guessng you shear them just before they go to slaughter.
 Does anyone raise rare breed sheep for this purpose if so what and is there a different path for selling the meat (it is my understanding that most rare breeds produce meat which is considered premium).
 I am guessing that population gentics is very important for smaller herds to avoid hillbilly sheep, is there a resource anywhere which would refresh my rather ancient memory on how to avoid banjo playing livestock.
 From what i have read if you want to sell hens from chickens you must not have a cockerel so if i want to increase the size of my flock i would have to buy in hens to fatten up, is this correct. Can hay/saw dust from the chicken coup (along with the chicken waste) be used in a biomas/wood burner I guess this could be done for all animal bedding?
 I like bacon..so would like to have a couple of pigs any sugestion on breed and cost. i understand it costs about £35 to have an animal slaughtered and butchered is this correct?
I am really sorry if any of this seams obvious or stupid and thank you for your patiance.

h

[Fowgill Farm]

Do you kow what i think?............ You need to do some seriously serious reading either John Seymours books or Tim Tynes or at the very least some copies of smallholder magazine or even better some of Dan & Rosemary's exploits in the main TAS website.
I can only talk about pigs and you're there or thereabouts with your slaughter costs but thats only part of it, you have to buy them (£35-£45)each, feed them 25kg bag feed average £7.50/bag and a growing pig will eat a bag roughly every 12 days at the top end of its feed regime, you also have to cost in fencing, housing, bedding, water, vet. I aim to break even as pig keeping is my hobby but truthfully i don't know many people who make a profit from pigs. i aim to send my pigs off at 24wks old but baconers normally go to 28 or 30 wks. so you've got possibly 20weeks of feeding to do and pay for, pigs also need you attention twice a day. For more info go to the GOS website www.oldspots.org.uk and read the getiing started articles.
HTh
Mandy 

[mab]

If you're just starting, I'd say keep it simple - don't get sheep, chickens & pigs all at once, but start with one (say sheep; they'll look after the land - or pigs if you need to clear the land) and once you know the ropes, start another line.

It's tempting to dive in, especially when the grass is growing and needs grazing (I know) but there's a lot to learn, a lot to buy, and even one type of animal can take a lot your of time.

You can always rent your land out to a local farmer for your 1st year to keep it grazed - or have it cut for hay.

Sorry that doesn't answer your questions, but I don't know most of the answers myself yet. 

m

[robert waddell]

hippy you are quite correct it is obvious and stupid    but  and it is a very big one and highly important one
you need to do a hell of a lot of reading  and understand that these writers did not not go to bed one night knowing he haw and wake up the next day and are sudden experts  who's book did they read before writting theres have they had a lifetimes experience in there particular field of writting on that subject
yes the good life is very appealing that is why it is so popular  but it is not suited to everybody either financially emotionally or health wise
once you have read all the glossed over articles the real struggle starts and if you can afford it and cope with it you are only just starting to learn and once you have a considerable number of years under your belt  you will be starting out on your animal husbandry carear
your dog or cat may say bugger it i am of to a better home   but the rest of your menagerie are stuck with your ideas you management and your attention to detail or lack of it
it is your choice we can only advise when the s**t hits the fan as it is certain to do

[Sylvia]

You can be certain of one thing, you will not make a living on a smallholding BUT you will be certain of this. You will have fresh, poison free veg. Meat from animals that you have reared yourself, that have been well treated, even loved and have ended their lives as quietly and stress free as you can manage. You will also have the joy of rearing these animals/growing those veg and fruit and waking in the morning looking forward to the day ahead.
Go for it and good luck

[Castle Farm]

This isn't about as steep learning curve in your case, but a very long drop off a very big hill.

My advice to you is to find someone already doing it and help them for a few months untill you learn the ropes. Forget paying through the nose to attend one of these 'smallholder courses' they just scratch the surface and are a walk around a chat and a cup of coffee morning.

Get stuck in and get your hands dirty.

[Fleecewife]

Hi Everyone,
                   I am after some very basic information and i appologise if this is not the right forum. I am right at the begining of realising my smallholding dream and am trying to learn and plan as much as i can. I hope to raise some stock (mainly sheep) to sell as meat, I dont want to be wholely reliant on one thing for income and am also very realistic about my expectations. I have realised I have no idea how you would sell a sheep once it was the right size ( or even what is the right size) how much is a sheep carcase worth, can you sell the hide for leather, i am guessng you shear them just before they go to slaughter.
 Does anyone raise rare breed sheep for this purpose if so what and is there a different path for selling the meat (it is my understanding that most rare breeds produce meat which is considered premium).
 I am guessing that population gentics is very important for smaller herds to avoid hillbilly sheep, is there a resource anywhere which would refresh my rather ancient memory on how to avoid banjo playing livestock.
 From what i have read if you want to sell hens from chickens you must not have a cockerel so if i want to increase the size of my flock i would have to buy in hens to fatten up, is this correct. Can hay/saw dust from the chicken coup (along with the chicken waste) be used in a biomas/wood burner I guess this could be done for all animal bedding?
 I like bacon..so would like to have a couple of pigs any sugestion on breed and cost. i understand it costs about £35 to have an animal slaughtered and butchered is this correct?
I am really sorry if any of this seams obvious or stupid and thank you for your patiance.

h

Hi Hippy
Most of your questions can be answered by reading through past messages here on TAS.  They might not be asked in the same way, but the information you need will be on here somewhere.
Meantime - sheep:  There is far too much you need to know to put in here.  Different breeds finish at different ages and will perform differently under different management systems.  If your interest is in rare breed sheep, then it is not usual to keep them only for meat, but many breeders keep registered stock to help maintain the breed. We keep the rare multihorned version of Hebrideans - most ewe lambs will be registered and sold for breeding, whereas only the occasional male is good enough for breeding so most of them go for meat (but we don't keep our sheep primarily for meat - it is a by-product). They do not reach a slaughterable weight until they are 16 months (compared with just a few months for some larger, quick finishing breeds), but they have a niche market in high end restaurants.  However, the market doesn't seek you out, you have to go out there and create it.
Sheep are normally shorn in about May to July and if you have good, clean, interesting fleeces you can sell these to handcraft workers such as spinners and felters. You can also add value to the fleeces by having them processed into yarn, rugs, jumpers, or doing this yourself.   If they are sold as lamb then the skins (plus wool) are taken from the slaughterhouse to the fellmonger where the wool is removed and the leather is tanned, or the whole skin is tanned to be a sheepskin.  In some slaughterhouses you will get a cheque for your skins.  Or, you can get your own skins back and send them for tanning separately - this will cost about £20 or so, and the skins can be sold for about £50 average, depending on the breed, colour, pattern, size and so on.
Commercial sheep are usually sold through the sales ring - it would be very helpful for you to go to a local auction for the sheep sales, and to the rare breeds sales, several times to pick up just what is going on and to learn the terminology.  The value of a carcase changes with the season, with the breed, with their health and how well they have been raised, and with general trends in the market - there is no standard price.  If you look in the back of the farming press you will see that weeks prices for various animals and products recorded for that week.

Some breeds are put into lamb in their first year, so they lamb at 1 year old, other breeds don't lamb until they are 2 years old. To prevent inbreeding, a different tup (ram) will need to be used once his own daughters are ready to breed, thus you may keep a tup for only one, or maybe two years.  With larger numbers of breeding ewes, or if you wish to maintain high diversity in your flock, you would divide the ewes into smaller groups and use a different tup on each group.  You can then swap around the tups when their daughters are ready to breed.  I assume that by 'hill billy sheep' you are meaning inbred animals, although this is not a term I would use.  To prevent tup lambs from mating with their mothers and sisters the tup lambs are weaned at 4 months and moved away from the females, or all male lambs born are castrated within the first week of life.

[YorkshireLass]

My advice would be to forget the shiny magazines with pretty chickens on the cover (no offence to pretty chickens).
Get the farmers guardian, and read it until it begins to makes sense. It was gibberish to me at first, but you gradually pick up on the industry jargon, the "big issues" such as movement, registration, TB... And the sales reports are in the back. You'll see that you don't just sell your fat pig for £80; you don't know what price you'll get at market, so you're basically gambling the value of your land, time, feed etc. There are also features on Joe Bloggs who inherited half a field and worked damn hard to build up his rare breed dairy herd, but uses modern technology to enable him to make a living.

Something small such as poultry is physically easier to handle for a beginner, ditto the housing, the amount of waste produced etc. If all else fails you can wring their necks and eat them. Which is a good point to say that if you have livestock, you'll have dead stock

Once you look at sheep and pigs, you need to be good friends with various Government departments for holding / CPH numbers, movement licences, ear tags and so on. You'll need some form of transport to move them, usually a specific livestock trailer (must be disinfectable, so no old wooden horseboxes). You'll need handling systems - if only some metal hurdles and string - you'll need to learn to read the flock and the behaviours, to direct them where you want them to go, to spot when something is wrong.

The eco-friendly things are out there, but from what I see tend to be pricey to set up. Have you got some capital to invest?

Is there an agricultural college near you?

[Fleecewife]

(This was meant to carry on from my last message) - Chickens: There are two different streams of poultry keeping - eggs and meat.  For eggs, you would either buy in point of lay hens, or buy fertile eggs and hatch them in an incubator (but half the eggs will become cockerels).  Good quality hens will cost anything from about £10 to £25 each, so you don't eat them on a whim.   Birds for meat come from different breeds, those which will fatten quickly.  You could buy fertile eggs of these breeds and hatch your own, or buy in day old chicks to go under a brooder and raise to slaughter age.  You then have to kill, pluck, gut and truss each and every chicken, then find a market, competing with the supermarkets which sell oven-ready chicken for a few £s.
I haven't a clue if you could use bedding in your biomass boiler, but it would be a terrible waste of fertility to my mind.  You can compost down animal and poultry bedding to a wonderful product which can be used in the vegetable garden or on your pastures.  If you don't do this then you will be gradually depleting the fertility of your land.  The most wonderful manure for my vegetable garden comes from my sheep - they have field shelters with straw bedding and this is cleared out each year by which time it has become brown, friable and sweet-smelling and perfect to feed the crops which feed us.  That seems far too precious a commodity to burn.  We have a wood-burning stove and have a small coppice of willow, hazel and ash which is rapidly reaching a size where it is worthwhile to use as fuel.  For your boiler, you could have a coppice of rapidly growing willow ie biomass willow, which can be cropped frequently then regrows from the stumps.  This is put through a shredder for your boiler.  I don't know what acreage you would need for what output, but the figures will be out there (or in the 'renewables' section on TAS) so you can research that.

Once you have done some reading and gone to a few auctions, spoken with some other smallholders and farmers, you will have specific questions to ask (in the relevant section, such as chickens in 'poultry') so that TASers who have special knowledge in each field can answer your questions as you learn.