/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>14769214
Yep! Thats Justin Rhodes. I like his channel, hes better than those animal hoarders at Homesteady (I'm not saying homesteady is totally useless, but they are shit homesteaders)
He is a huge Joel Salatin fanboy, which is what inspired his system,

I also like salatin, and draw inspiration off his rotational pastured system. I have heard many people talking about their soils becoming more efficient and higher producing with pasture rotation.
This winter my paddock will be stationary and the ducks will be allowed to fuck it up, then come spring I will mulch and plant in it.

>>14492974
Also he wasn't my boy. He fucking hated me. As far as I can tell all ducks hate humans except for food. They prefer to be with other ducks and I'm fine with that. I absolutely hated isolating gimpy and I wish I could have kept another duck with him but that wouldn't have been fair to the other duck.

>>14480775
Well honestly I planned on getting chickens but the hatchery I was planning to buy from sold out and only had ducks. Ducks are kind of advantageous as they aren't as common (which will put me at a market advantage) and allegedly naturally lay in colder climates (among other things that seemed advantageous over chickens)
I told my boyfriend he could get maybe 15 and we ended up with 40, LOL. I don't regret it though. I want to have a ton of different livestock, eventually working my way up to cattle.

>>14480824
The plan is to eventually sell eggs and breed the ducks, I'm curious to see what hybrids will be like. These are my very first livestock, my primary goal is pasture management, I really want to use animals to improve the environment. The ducks are excellent fertilizers to the pasture and my garden. I need chickens soon so they can further process their manure. If I dont hose down what they produce in their coop overnight it burns the grass, chickens are excellent at scratching and pecking through maggot filled shit so I plan to get maybe 6-12 chickens probably in spring.

>>14450012
>There is very little doubt in my mind that that fake beef mush is better for the environment.

Maybe you should take that very little doubt you still have and really ruminate on it.

>>14450129
Ugh tell me about it. It's annoying that vegans never ACTUALLY speak to farmers. And not faggot questions like "How many times a day do you rape your cows" but more like asking serious questions about what they do. Then ask different farmers.

I have talked to so many god damn farmers, and it's still not enough. I've spoken to dairy, beef, pork, chicken, egg, corn/soy/cashcrop, regenerative,homestead, organic, shit, I have even talked to veganic farmers (spoiler alert, they are an endangered species that only live in small, fertile pockets of the united states and their operations usually don't last more than a decade)
Honestly, I have a certain respect for producers that I just can't have for people who only consume. The only way I could respect a consumer more than a producer is if I really hated what the producer was doing. But that's why I talk to so many producers(farmers). Ultimately I came to the conclusion if I want something done to my personal code of ethics I gotta do it myself and not expect the world to change for me. If more people took up farming there would be less of a demand for factory farming. But don't tell the soibois that.

Those are goregous cows btw, are those black angus? Hereford? Are you in Montana? Dakotas? Texas? Such beautiful vast scenery!

>>14446744
I have 9 pekins and 26 campbells (sorry meant 35)

One of the campbells is all fucked up genetically and never gets to food so I have it in quarantine and fattening it up for eating

>>14391235
Pretty much this.
I don't want to support potential poor animal husbandry, so careful sourcing and also raising my own livestock has helped ease my conscious. My ducks live a beautiful life on fresh clean grass every day (daily pasture rotation) eating bugs and crop residue from my garden and playing in a kiddie pool (going to make a pond in the future) under an open sky (sometimes in the shade of trees and shrubs). Most of them are going to be for eggs and breeding stock, but there's a gimpy one that can't walk right (genetic deformity) and struggles to get to its food and it might attract predators to the rest of the flock, so I'm giving it a few more weeks of growing and then I'm putting it out of its misery and yes, I'm gonna eat it.
My livestock probably lives a better life than most vegans.

>>14353940
I feed it to my ducks

>>14343061
OMG I have the same ducks! They aren't ripe yet ;)

Nice setup, I'll be saving this for reference. I haven't slaughtered and butchered an animal before. I heard the scalding water has to be 150 and ducks, especially ducks older than 5-8 weeks will need about 5 minutes. They are supposedly harder to pluck because of wax around their feathers.

Any advice?

>>14323336
:) I'm raising ducks for food. First time slaughtering animals, wish me luck!