We're Starting a Farm!

guys we got cows today I hope you enjoyed the vlog and we have a special bonus animal to show you at the end of the video here comes hey there folks this is josh tony rich farmer welcome back to the farm it's another beautiful sunny day here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina today is a very special day for us I went to the cattle auction yesterday up near Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia and we bought two cows without a cow-calf pair so today my stepdad is bringing the cow here to its permanent home and we're going to release a cow into our new field and to our new pasture where our new fences are and we'll talk a little bit about what it's like to go to the cattle auction and buy a cow and what we're looking for in our cows so that we can maximize profitability and so that we have the best healthiest cows possible all right okay so the first step in the process of putting cows in your pasture is making sure all of your gates are closed so basically I kept all the gates open because deer come into the past year and they kind of get I don't want to say hung up but they kind of get held up by the fence so I wanted to make it easy for deer to pass in and out of the past year now when we built this fence we had Luke from farm fence solutions here and a bunch of other guys local guys building the fence and he said man I've never seen so many gates in a one-mile stretch of fence well we put a lot of gates in for specific reasons water sources are close by and we fenced out our creeks however there's a little bit of game playing that we have to do in order to get a touch of reimbursement for our fences that fence out the creeks in other words we're protecting the watershed and there are government programs to help us out with our fencing we'll talk a lot more about that in future videos so first let's get our gates closed I've got I think three or four gates open right here now something to consider if you have cows or if you're thinking about getting cows or any kind of livestock is making sure that your gates that are accessible by public road are locked don't leave your gates unlocked you have no excuse some prankster can come along open that gate and make for a very very bad day for you or someone else now there's a specific way we do everything on the farm for a specific reason so here comes the gate latch we're gonna throw that over it's kind of hard to do this with a camera in my hand we're gonna latch down into the gate okay so this is fairly free we don't want to leave this hanging we want to actually tuck this up underneath that other rung right there so if something lifts up on here it actually pulls it down into the locking mechanism on the gate and that way if a horse learns or a donkey learns or cow learns to lift this up and get out of the gate well he's only gonna raise it up and get himself out these little nuances help when it comes to farming hopefully that right we'll save you guys one day from having your animals accidentally get loose out into the road or something like that and it's very very dangerous so I learned that from the pro fence guys that's how you're supposed to close and latch a gate if any of you guys have any comments or any other ideas please post them down in the comment section now we're gonna head up to the other gate I don't like driving on my fields when there's frost on the field so when you run over the grass and there's frost on it basically kills two stripes of grass it stays like that sometimes all winter long sometimes just a couple weeks but I don't like to run over the grass when there's ice on it if I can possibly help it so running through your fields is really not something that's too awfully advised it kind of well it can stimulate the grass to grow but in the winter time it can stimulate the grass to freeze [Music] let's talk about this gate this is a double gate that we put in between two pastures now you don't see a pasture up there yet we are building a first generation farm here guys so this is our first two cows on our first generation farm and this all this whole hillside down here will be cleared off in the future videos so we'll take that from what was forest old scrubby forest and we're gonna smooth it out stump it and plant grass and have more pasture establish that'll be about 25 acres and there is the start of a pond right here that I started building I guess early in the spring now we're going to finish that pond up sometime I guess mid year next year but it's going to raise the level all the way back into here and we'll have a water source way up I this is the highest point on the farm so we can gravity feed water to the cows and keep them out of the creek all right so we've got all the gates closed now and we're gonna go down and wait on my stepdad his name is Barry he spent a lot of time with me and he's got about 40 cows he's been foolin with cows and raising cows and farming cows for probably thirty plus years so he was my resource for going to these auctions and he and I enjoy this kind of thing so we rode out to a couple cattle auctions and we got to see what different parts of the country had to offer so while I got you here let's do a little pasture ology so we just rode down past the land that we have behind our house and it's about I'm gonna say close to 35 acres of fenced land behind our house now eventually we'll have a lane that comes out right up here at this gate this is a where our dogs stay most of the time there's a lane that comes out that's a cool dog house by the way we'll help we'll build a lane where the cows can be moved down here and we're going to be putting new fence up right here and the new pond we just built if you follow the vlog it's right there so we're right here in the front yard of the house so there'll be a passenger here and this is approximately three and a half acres and then there'll be another one about an acre across the driveway and we'll rotationally graze these cattle for now we're just putting two cows in a 30-some acre field so there will be plenty of forage out there but we're building our herd we're building our stock another thing we've got to do is we've got to get our waters we have to 100 gallon waters and for right now with just these two cows I don't really need to go crazy with the watering system so we're gonna put one water down closer to the house and we already have hoses and everything ran all the way up here behind the house so we're gonna have to water locations the cows will always have 200 gallons of water to drink from [Music] that's why our number one and I'm putting it by the fence right here I'm gonna basically zip-tie it water hose that way I can just turn it on fill it up turn it off so what we're gonna do here is we're going to take this gate we're gonna put it up against the trailer on this side and this gate up against the trailer on that side and we'll release the Calais alright special bonus animal I can't say how happy I am that we have cows now we're going to talk a little bit about why we purchased the cows that we purchased and then we'll release the bonus animal there goes the neighborhood so the new cows and the Jenny donkey have been out here probably about an hour now they're doing really well I'm gonna turn the camera around we'll zoom in on the cows and we'll talk a little bit about why we bought what we bought ok so let's talk about the donkey why we bought the donkey so this is a Jenny a donkey 100 bucks is what we bought it for and we bought it to help protect our cast from coyote and predator attack now over here look at our angus heifer calf and that calf is probably three weeks to a month old something like that still on mom's milk but eaten grass and this cow was a fairly large framed cow it was the first cow to go through the auction in the cow-calf pair so it was a very nice cow but it kind of caught everyone off guard at the auction and they were kind of feeling out the price and we ended up getting a fairly good deal 950 for the pair after she went through a lot of cows were in worse shape brought up to twelve to fourteen hundred dollars per cow calf pair so we got a pretty good deal on our cow what we wanted was a full bodied cow meaning that she was healthy she looked healthy the calf looked healthy and you can see she's just chowing down she's got a nice fullback in there not a very bony cow a pretty long cow and real Tivoli strong-looking beefy Angus cow now when you're at a livestock auction there are all matter of cows that go through so they had the cows aged in other words this cow is a seven year old cow they had them aged from one to nine and then they had full mouth broken mouth and smooth mouth meaning full mouth was over nine nine to ten years old broken mouth was somewhere in between that and then you have a smooth mouth cow which means that their teeth are ground down so basically the veterinarian age is a cow based on the wear of the cow's teeth pretty interesting some cows were marked pregnant some cows were mark not pregnant I don't think they preg check this cow in other words this cow could be pregnant again which would be awesome good stuff guys I hope you learned a little bit today I hope you are happy we finally got our first cows here on the farm I'm pretty excited glad to test this strong tornado wire fence out who knows where we go from here so we're gonna go look at two more cow-calf pairs tomorrow and we're gonna start stocking our farm up with our cattle hopefully we'll see you again here on the Stoney Ridge farm please pound that like button subscribe to the channel this is just what's going on we finally got our cows here on the farm alright I made a story read [Music]