Sunday, 19 December 2010 07:41
We have a bull that needs to go as the other one is growing up and we don’t want two bulls fighting over the girls. Normally we would knock of any surplus livestock, but the freezers are full at the moment and to tell the truth I’m a bit sick of beef. Now this presents a problem as we have not yet devised a way of getting livestock off the property. I thought we should design a small holding pen that would have a side gate built into it so we can load any of our cattle up onto a truck.
This little project has resulted into an interesting arrangement of links and connections. This is so Permaculture in concept although a lot of it simply fell into place. This is how it went.
The holding pen was made just a little up from a gate situated on the driveway. The driveway has a rockwall on one side with a natural incline whereas the flat grassy area remained down below. The driveway had two large gates installed across the driveway and wella, a smart holding pen for loading the cattle onto a truck. This situation had inadvertently created another holding pen down below it. That worked out well as I have permanently separated the two milking cows from their calves but they can still talk to each other across the fence. One cow is placed in each pen thus creating order for peaceful milking.
Now this is all well and good but there are now a lot of cow plops on the driveway and this is not so good for the car. I had a bit of a think about this whilst milking one of the girls and I came up with the perfect solution. A worm farm. All I had to do was install a bath tub on some blocks with a bucket underneath and shovel all the fresh turds into the worm farm. The wormfarm is under the shade of the avocado trees, near the tap for watering and close by the gardens for the worm juice and castings. How good is that! Everything seemed to fall into place; now that’s links and connections at work for you.