Daydream fund challenge part 4

choille

Must admit the labradoodle looked lovely last night on the prog & was really intelligent for being a companion for the woman who'd had a stroke.

Stew's coming tomorra to plaster another bit even though the plumber is untracable - maybe we all got the same one eh?

alfie_1

i still maintain that a rescue dog should be an option as opposed to "have to be a pedigree" but then i like to give all "underdogs" a chance......

COOLTRIKERCHICK

I haven't watched the programme, and I prob wont watch it on iplayer..


as you say Alfie, there is one born every minute.. regardless of what its crossed with, its a Mongrel..


watched resteration Man earlier.. they really done a good job of foxhole farm...

alfie_1

FK...... lets hope your hubby's work continues. is it JUST YOU that looks after all your animogs ? what/how many do you have now? i think you said you had a pig "to go" soon... here we have 10 hoss's, 2+1 dogs, 1 cat, 2 mad geese, chooks, and an eagle owl.. that takes most of my time up !!

ferretkeeper

Thanks Alfie, sadly while there's unrest in the Middle East and a requirement for assistance from the west, there's a job for him and we do need to keep it going a wee while longer.

In the meantime yes it is just me looking after everyone.

An inventory of animogs, crikey ...so we've got 6 collie type dogs, 6 moggy cats, 3 ferrets. all the pets are rescues, so we paid the shelters whatever it cost for them but we picked up some for free along the way, including a part trained sheep dog who is a pedigree, and a cat and dog we rescued in Italy!

then farm wise there's 10 goats, a couple dozen sheeps, 18 pigs and about 30 chickens ducks and geese....numbers fluctuate with breeding and taking for meat etc

it's totally bonkers, and I have got too much on my plate at times, hence certain other projects are not progressing.

I'm sure my family thinks I'm crazy but I was snuggled up on the sofa tonight with my old dog Fergus and my big boy cat Dexter, who was so scared and shy when I first got him and his sister, but Dex was all over me and right up close to the dog tonight, purring and treading and it was just pure happiness.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

FK... are the 18 adults/sub adults/ piglets???


Well we have
3 cats
1 tortoise
1 spider
all these are in the house
then up the ranch we have
5 well grown on piglets
1 boar
4 sows/gilts
and one 7 month old boar 'going' on Tuesday.. some of the piglets will be going to market over the next few weeks, and might run on or two of them on to sell in market when bigger.


Also fingers crossed 3 of the sows/gilts are having piglets..
and Our Quail..


Your feeding bill must run into the £100's a week FK. again depending on how many piggy mouths we have to feed, but on average we go through approx. a ton a month of pig nuts...
We buy ours in 25kg bags, for easy storage, PLUS I feel it stays fresher in sealed bags, rather than the open ton bags..
Its also suprising how much straw we go through in the winter, and when we have a litter of piggles..
right off to have a cuppa..

ferretkeeper

Yes the pigs are all ages, 6 are adults, the boar and 5 sows, the rest are for finishing.

Feed bills aren't that bad, I do get the bulk bags with 600kg in but I put that feed into bins to keep it sealed because I don't have means to get it out of the trailer into somewhere dry in one lot, plus vermin would cause problems.

It's worth it for the savings and more importantly the better quality of feed, I think the last one of those I bought for pigs cost about £130 Which equates to £4.30 per 20kg or £5.40 for 25kg....they do sell it in bags and it's not that much dearer I just can't be doing with all the plastic!

By comparison, to buy a 20kg bag of pig nuts in the feed store here in the village has got to be around £8 now, I can't remember the last time I bought one but it was in an emergency a long time ago, I'm sure it was £8+.

He is more expensive than some places but it's still not cheap to buy pig nuts, plus they put all sorts of stuff in them, and you can't see because it's all pelleted, whatever happens to be cheap in the grain market at the time they're buying, it goes in.

Where I buy from they get the individual grains etc in, and they grow a lot themselves, then they make the mix in a cool machine according to the animal. They actually drop their prices when the grain prices come down unlike a lot of the mainstream companies, they're the ones that told me about the pellet producers tricks.

I get sheep and goat food there too, in the same bulk bags and I worked it out to be about £45 per month for all the sheep and the same for the goats. I don't feed grain all year round except for the ones in milk. So the pigs are by far the most expensive to keep in feed!

And then I get through about £50 a week in hay and straw this time of year, but again I'm buying it at half the price the local feed place sells for.

I don't know how he stays in business, location/convenience I guess and there's a lot of horsey people around who seem to accept they'll be charged more than farmers regardless, ridiculous isn't it!

That was quite a useful exercise to tot up what it actually costs to keep my lot, I make it about £150 a week in winter, but if I didn't shop around it could easily be a lot more. I haven't been thinking about it like that for a while, no wonder we're skint, But theres my target income for break even!

choille

Goodness FK - I don't know how you manage to cope. It's a lot on your own. But animals are lovely to be around - far nicer than a lot of folks!

The snows down = but the plumber & his mate arrived- so that is great.
Roads are bad we hear. Hardly slept last night - thunder just overhead, surprised the power is still on....and the phone.

lostinrates

From a food point of view can I put the other point forward about nuts versus mix?

Generally nuts are cheaper because they are easier to make more balanced to the label without worrying about aesthetics NOT because of quality of ingredients. Generally nuts are a better value for money food product than mix because buyers prefer the aesthetics and feel they are nicer, not because they are nicer.

Saying you can see what's in the mix is a common argument, but actually, from a nutrition/quality pov, not really the case. You might see an oat ( which you could also see on the label of a nut ) but you cannot see the nutient value of it or quality. Nuts are a more consistent, testable quality across the batch.

There are certainly some brands of nuts I wouldn't want to buy, but I'd rather down scale the nut/pellet and upscale the brand. Unless things have changed dramatically from when I was studying!

ferretkeeper

Good points LIR, things I hadn't thought of, yes a bag of oats isn't always the same as the next, you've really got me wondering now. And I agree just seeing the bits is no guarantee!

However speaking only about the place I buy from, I know they mix each blend to formula put together by nutrition experts, including all the various minerals etc. They have recently invested in a big steam generating machine to put certain things through (don't know exactly what) to make them more digestible etc. They are very conscientious and so I trust them completely.

I don't think they're that much cheaper because they use inferior ingredients, more that they cut out the middle men entirely, there's no fancy packaging or extreme overheads.

The off putting thing with the pelleted feed, which I did find more convenient, was when it kept going mouldy in the warm weather, I remember a spate of bag after bag being contaminated, I got fed up of taking it back time and again.

My feed chappies also saw first hand the big company buyers taking lower quality sources of protein for example to save money/keep costs down, whereas they only use hi-pro soya, that sort of thing. I've lost all faith I'm afraid.

Then there's the horror stories of things like sawdust going in as fillers...I don't know I believe those, as you say their products are tested, but perhaps the brands you would avoid might be less rigorous?

It's like everything these days, you have to scrutinise every label and dig for info, because what big companies think is acceptable practice is not what you would choose. Does my head in!!