Blogging with Brian

The past two weeks my columns in the Tyler Morning Telegraph have focused on raising your own eggs at home. There seems to be a renewed interest in this topic and it might have something to do with the increasing food costs at the grocery store, a desire to know how your food was raised, or a little bit of both.

Before you start out, make sure your city or subdivision does not have any regulations keeping you from raising chickens. Also know that you might want to only raise hens in order to reduce stress on your layers and to keep the noise level down. Roosters are only needed if you are wanting to produce fertile eggs to raise your own chicks. So keeping them out of the henhouse will lower feed costs a little and keep the neighbors happy.

Under normal conditions, you can plan for at least 3 to 6 eggs per hen per week, so plan your final number of hens based on your family's normal egg consumption or if you plan to sell some to the neighbors.

FAMACHA, a technique for strategically de-worming, is being adopted by sheep and goat raisers in order to delay the development of resistence of the internal parasite Haemonchus contortus to antihelmetics.

 

My Sunday Ag Biz column for the June 1 Tyler Morning Telegraph discusses tips for handling cattle during the summer.  To help reduce cattle stress, provide adequate water, shade, work animals slowly and deliberately, and pay attention to the Temperature Humidity Index (THI) which is similar to the Heat Index normally reported by local weather forecasters during the summer months.  If possible, avoid stressing cattle when the THI is above 84. 

A link to a Temperature Humidity Index for cattle can be found on the following web site.

Tips for reducing cattle handling stress can be found on the following web site.

A deadline of July 18, 2008 has finally been announced for the end of the sign up period for the 2005-2007 Livestock Compensation Program and Livestock Indemnity Program offered by the USDA Farm Service Agency. 

This spring has seen more than its fair share of snake calls at the Smith County Extension office.

Fortunately, most of the snakes you might encounter around the home will be of the non-venomous variety. But any encounter with a snake can be traumatic - for both the snake and the human.

The 'call of the spring' so far has been a shed snake skin of about 3 feet in length that was brought in by a very concerned father whose 5 year old had found it hanging from a shoe tree on the back of her bedroom closet. The shed keyed out to be from a non-venomous snake (most likely a Texas Rat snake) but that did little to quell concerns because they had not yet seen nor caught the home invading snake that left the shed skin behind.