Non-Stop Rain Could Crush Me, But I Did This Instead

Now for the official National Weather Service forecast for the Central and Southern Mountains, including the Asheville-Hendersonville vicinity. Today, showers, patchy fog this morning, areas of fog this afternoon. Highs in the mid-50s. East winds 10 to 15 miles an hour with gusts up to 30 miles an hour. Chance of rain 90%. Tonight, showers, patchy fog. Lows in the upper 40s. East winds—

We're out here with our load from Sally. What would we do without her? Anyway, I can get done by 8. I'm gonna treat myself with some coffee, some Bulletproof coffee, just so Spreading the grain. Thank you, buddy. Buenas días. I didn't figure you'd be too excited about this rain. I just realized I got to get the trailer hooked up for Rebecca. She's got to pick up, um, pallet jacks for moving these feeds around in our garage. Sorry, there's a— there's a hay on there. And the Azure Standard pickup, which is like One way to continue opting out of the grocery store as much as possible. Took my raincoat off so I don't wet up the Suburban. I was about to be in big trouble. I think I have 30 minutes till she's got to leave, so I think we'll go unnoticed. You've got to be kidding me. The ball. That's the one I just took off. Ball. That's big. That's the big one. I need the smaller, the 2-inch. It's not in there. Please be in here. Oh gosh, it is, it is. Okay, check the lights. Bam! All right, Justin's a good husband. Let's go make sure we didn't make a mistake and it's supposed to be ready earlier. Hey, got your truck ready. Oh good, thank you. Oh, you're welcome, I remembered. Okay, good. 15 minutes. I guess the coffee break's gone. I don't know, can we somehow drop some hay, feed the pigs, do the sea monsters in 15 minutes? Hey, do you know how to bring the cows in?

Okay.

Yeah, my kiss— I might kiss that goodbye. Let's see, if I could wrap it up by 8, I could have some leisurely time to make some coffee.

Milk early at 8:30.

I think we might be lucky just to be able to milk at 8:30 now. We moved the cows this time yesterday and I timed it right. I mean, they were a little hungry, they would be going over there, but it's raining so much we're gonna hope it lets off in the afternoon and we'll move them then. So I did have to throw down some hay. But no worries, we threw it in sorry areas to get us some more grass coming. You want to see my point? This is where we fed hay. Look, you see this new grass coming up nice? This is little baby grass, baby grass. But where you feed hay, ground comes back better. It helps to look at hay as a fertilization, soil building act, not just feeding the cows. Use it strategically. To feed the soil, make the land a better place, and then you won't need so much hay in the future. Will you do the little pigs? I'll do the big pigs. Yeah. Well, must not be 8 o'clock because Mom still hadn't gone yet. We still got sea monsters to do. Oh, here they come. Yep. Maybe if you can do this in 10 minutes, I'll make you coffee. How about that? What, 20 minutes do we need to bring the cows in. All right, sea monsters, we're alive and well. We did that in record time. I say we treat ourselves with some coffee. Well, hey Teddy, you didn't want to go get wet with us? I put our raincoats in on a quick dry. How are your pants holding up? Did your rain pants Nope, still wet, but they're still kind of wet. You can change them if you want. I'm going to change mine. Oh my, smells like Hawaii.

This is all coffee beans. You still got a little bit of cherry skins in there, which is not bad. It just adds a little bit. They'll pick through this stuff and get it, and it'll ferment quickly. This is fermented overnight, just takes overnight. Yeah, so all the sugar is pretty much gone now. When you first get it, it's real slimy.

This is where we visited on the Great American Farm Tour in Hawaii.

He's raking out the coffee. He's going to get it real thin so the sun, the deck gets warm. It's going to dry the coffee. And we're going to dry this one down to about 11.5% moisture. That's what we like.

How will you know when it's at 11.5%?

We have an instrument that we can measure the moisture in there.

How much moisture is in it right now?

Oh, it's over 30, 35. Pretty high.

Ah, brings back good memories. So this is the third day with rain. I'm not complaining. I'm dancing because we need it, but it can be a little rough. My high end is soaked right now. So building in a little tiny reward. I normally only have coffee once a week on the weekend, but let's build that in. That got me through. That got me through. And the dry heave chicken dance.

I like Lay's.

Got my honey, my coconut oil, my vanilla, my MCT coffee. That's right, kind of dry. Well, much drier than they were, but not 100%. It might have been a mistake because they didn't dry all the way. Now they're probably moist on the inside. Yeah, gross. Yeah, yeah, no. All right, ladies, let's go in. We are about as far as we possibly could be away. Tomorrow will be the furthest. So we're in the next to farthest paddock away. Well, your udder's looking ready. Let's go, come on. Loaded. Bye-bye, stud. So far so calm. All right, come on, let's go, come on. Feels like 10 minutes later, we're down at the house. Come on, girl, get in the stall. Get in the stall. Come on, get in the stall. Good girl. Look who's back, going past. Go on past and I'll come back it in. All right, so there it is. 4,000— 4,400 pounds capacity. That's gonna— this is a game changer for helping us move our feed around before we have to pull it out with the tractor, grab a chain, pull it out, blah blah blah, back and forth. But this will let us move things around.

I thought, I thought there had been a What? I thought they're gonna buy the ice maker.

Oh no, this is not the ice maker day. Hopefully soon on that. Hang on, hang on. This thing is probably very heavy, right?

Surprisingly, probably not.

It's probably so heavy. You go pick up that end, please. You pick up that end and we'll just go that way with it.

Can we roll it?

No, I don't want to roll it on this wet, um— wow. Oh yeah. That's heavy. Ah yeah. Hopefully I only have to pick up this one. Is that heavy? All right, we're that farm. We have a pallet jack now. Serious. Honey, it's very heavy. Okay. All right, Ma. Oh my. I bought some plants. I don't remember what I bought though. Oh, this is stock. It's flour. Hey, thanks for going to get that stuff. You're welcome. And the dessert drop-off was on time. Yep. And you got the, the, uh, pallet jacks. Pallet jacks. They sent them back because we were a little late getting them.

I know.

Hey, cheers to our own homegrown spinach and eggs.

Cheers.

And broth. A little less than 2 weeks and we're pretty ready. Just finished up the vlog, and speaking of being ready with the butchering, this is our stock. We found our knives.

I sharpened 4 knives for us because these, they're not really great. They're good for chicken butchering because you got to do the little cuts and everything.

We have these.

That's one. We have one for the thing because you took it off, which that can be for hanging the gambrel.

We got some of these, but we actually found some stainless steel. We're the crazy stainless steel people, so we're gonna get us some stainless steel scrapers to scrape off the hair after the— we have this for the, um, measuring the scald. We want it 145. Okay, we're good. All right, I got my jacket dry. Afternoon chores. It's still raining. I'm not complaining. I'm dancing. There is a stream going down our lane. I never knew this was downhill. Good on Rooster Teeth. Hey, get out of that!

Get out of that, you bush!

This is good. Knock our kimchi down, it's good. Oh, it's, it's spilling, so I lifted this thing up too high. I gotta find my sweet spot. High enough where the feed falls down freely, but not so high that the feed overflows like it is now. How you doing, Rosie? These chubby little guys. We got Sally packed up. We got some fences to put up. New ground, guys. Cows on new ground today. Jonah, you set up our, our tank. Did you fill it up too?

No.

Well, we got a while. We got one week and a day. This though, we can't burn. That's like fresh evergreen wood. We— or that's fresh green wood. We need, uh, seasoned wood from across the street. That's fine, that's fine, we got time. Good deal, man. Looks good. Never hurts to be prepared sooner than later. That's for our pig butchering. This comes in awful handy for dipping the pig in at 145 degrees so we can easily scrape the hair off. Jonas, Just getting up one of our reels. We're putting up a new semi-permanent paddock fence because we're expanding way over there, so we're gonna have a bigger paddock fence. Look, they're so ready. You know, we brought hay. They're probably not gonna need hay. Look at all this grass right here. Yeah, we're gonna go— so this is a paddock here. Maybe let's go— is there a reason to go straight? No, let's go diagonal from right here all the way up to there, right? I think we would go up and then— all right, we got our lineup. These cows are more than ready to move. Maybe they're a little hungry. We'll see if we could— oh, I meant to not let Hamburger in. Whoops. Who knows where they'll— how high they'll go. Hopefully not too high because we're going to bring sheep right here and we'll need to herd Hamburger in. This is pig grass, guys. Pig planted this grass. Pig stirred up the soil right here and brought up this grass. There was a butchering right here. That is blood-fertilized grass right there. Look, look, she's shoving it in. She's shoving it in. It's nice and tender. Come on, girl, get with it. Hamburger's on it too. We're gonna have yellow or milk tomorrow, aren't we, Flossie? Aren't we, honey? These guys are ready to move too. Look at that. So we got to set up for them. They go from here to here. The sheep are gonna love this area. It's so full of brambles, man. You guys are gonna clean it up. All right, gentlemen, open this up. These guys are more than ready to come. You open it up and call them sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. Sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. The best part of our day right here. Hamburger's right there. We got an opening right here. You think we can get him to go under this? All right, Josiah's gonna herd him in.

What?

It's already moved. I know, right? They loved it. They've already mowed this and it moved on. Look, he sees it. He saw it. He wants to do what we want him to do. Thank you, hamburger. Guys, this was one of the biggest blessings of following cows behind the sheep. Or sheep behind the cows, is it's a holding for the calves, separate them from mom. Moose to be weaned. Hamburger, just store up mama's milk for in the morning. Isn't that nice? Otherwise we'd be walking them all back to the stall on this nasty muddy day.

Eating that treat, and I don't think that's—

that's cool. Good, look at her browsing. Oh, I told you the sheep would eat that coppice, that poplar coppice. It's a poplar stump that has sprouted out of the stump. And look, she's getting it. I said if the cows didn't eat it, the sheep would. This is— this one yesterday, the cows had access to and absolutely slammed it. There's one in there, all the leaves are gone. They didn't leave any for you this time, sheep. All right, we finished just in time. Good work, boys. We made a good decision to do this in the afternoon because the weather did clear. Yeah, I didn't get wet.