What should i get?

[Field Bee]

what other animals can i get.

Honeybees for sure. The learning curve is steep, but the rewards are great. Honey, wax, propolis, royal jelly, pollen, apitherapy, mead, pollination, selling nucs/queens, and much more.

 

[Ilovemychicks08]

With a limited number of acres, smaller livestock would be best.

I suggest you start with a small rabbitry for meat. If your children join local youth programs, and showing animals at the local fair, rabbit meat pens will be their best money maker. Rabbits are easy to keep in wire cages hung over "worm pits". Worm pits are 2" x 12" boards edging the space under the cages where the manure falls. This rich manure pit encourages red worm proliferations and taking this manure and tilling it into your heavy clay soil will lighten the clay and is fabulous for vegetables. There is no odor to rabbit manure and it can be applied directly to the vegetables without having to age it like other manure. It won't burn your plants. If you have access to fine sawdust or shavings, those can be applied on top of the manure every couple of weeks to increase the soil improving capabilities of the rabbit manure. Buy a meat breed. DH started with New Zealands, but after about 10 years we got a trio (2 does and a buck) of Californians. We have decided we like them better. Calmer temperament, faster growth to butcher age. When buying your rabbits, get your wire cages online. A 36" wide x 30" deep all wire cage with babysaver wire 6" up is best. Many companies make them and you can order online for delivery. They come flat pack so you will need a bag of cage clips and a cage clip pliers. Buy 12" wide wire screen bottom "J" feeders. With a J feeder you can feed from outside the cage which is a real timesaver. 12" feeders are the size needed for a doe and her litter. Since there is very little difference in price between a smaller feeder for the buck I only buy 12" feeders. This will give you more flexibility in moving rabbits around.

I suggest you buy a trio to start with. A trio is one buck and 2 does. If you are really interested in producing more meat, you can buy 3 does to start with. Yu may have acquaintances that want t buy rabbit meat from you. To avoid problems with licensing regulations, sell your rabbits live. As a favor you can butcher for the buyers or they can butcher themselves. A rabbit will be ready to breed around 6 months old. Do NOT buy any doe over 10 months old that has not been bred since once does are that old they can be difficult or impossible to breed. The gestation time is 30 days, the doe will then raise the kits for 8 weeks at which time they should each weigh about 5 lbs. and be ready to butcher. The doe should be bred back 8 weeks after kindling for a new litter. The trick to a successful rabbit program is constant production. A rabbit will produce litters for about 4 -5 years if kept in constant production. If you only breed 1 or 2 litters a year does tend to get lazy and refuse to breed. When you buy your rabbits, rabbits are not registered like other breeds. You only need a 3 generation pedigree showing that the rabbit is purebred to register a rabbit with ARBA.

Next, although Jersey cows are also my favorite breed (love those sweet dish faces) you probably won't have enough grass pasture to support a cow on your small acreage. Even a small cow will give you too much milk for your household. A milking cow will require a LOT of grain to keep her milk coming if you follow the pound for pound ratio of grain to milk. I would suggest that you look into standard size dairy goats. A dairy goat will produce about 1 gallon of milk per day. To keep the milk production up you weigh the milk produced from each goat at each milking. Liquid milk weighs 8 lbs. per gallon. You feed grain in a ratio of l lb. grain for l lb. milk. You will want to have 2 does since they are a herd animal and will not be happy alone. Also breeding them to kid several months apart will ensure that you have milk all year. You will need to pull the kids and bottle fed them so you can keep the milk production high for the 10 months you want to milk each doe. Dry them off 2 months before they are due to kid again and the process starts over. Your children will love bottle feeding the kids. Make sure to buy registered stock and register the goats to the children. That way they will be able to show their dairy does and the doe kids in youth shows. I prefer standard size dairy goas because I don't like crouching over to lead them around.

Nubian milk is the richest and most like cow milk. Toggenburg milk is horrible! We bought a Togg for our first house milker. They next day we learned that the milk tastes bad. Our favorite milk to drink out of all the breeds (we had all of them at one time or another) was Nubian and La Mancha. Whichever breed you decide to get, buy a doe in milk, try miking her and taste the milk before you buy her. Some goats are easier to milk and some, no matter the breed, have nasty tasting milk. Be sure to see the registration papers, ask for CAE testing, and milk records. A dairy animal will give a lot of milk the first couple of months after giving birth but without milk records there is no guarantee that the animal will continue a long lactation.

With a small area of pasture, these would be the 2 species I would get for a home farm. Together with your chickens, a garden and fruit trees, you should have a great start on feeding your family year-round. And with poultry, rabbits and dairy goats your children will have a great time both raising the animals and showing them. Once you are in your forever place, you can add more animals if your children want to show and auction at the fair.

Your family will have a wonderful time! Ours did! Our children (aged 44 through 28 now) still treasure those memories and many stories of crazy happenings have become stories to hand down to their kids.
Have fun!

DGD1 Elizabeth with month old lamb
(eldest daughter's daughter) - she is my junior shepherdess
View attachment 94335 View attachment 94336
DGS6 Robert with newborn lamb - learning to be a shepherd

Thank you for all this! We cant have anymore animals exceot 2 ducks where we live now . We are ready to move and are trying to find the right place. Im not sure about rabbits, because we raised show rabbits and a family member was allergic to the timothy hay and the feed so we had to get rid of them. I was looking into Nigerian dwarf goats Saneen, and La Mancha.

 

[Ilovemychicks08]

Honeybees for sure. The learning curve is steep, but the rewards are great. Honey, wax, propolis, royal jelly, pollen, apitherapy, mead, pollination, selling nucs/queens, and much more.

I could raise honeybees but im not so sure about it. I will have to look into it.

 

[SageHill]

One more thing to add - though I'm sure you already know this - check zoning. Others have said this as well. Most counties have charts as to how many animals of each species that you can have based on acreage. When we were looking around up in WA we found a beautiful 25+ acre piece of land that would have been perfect for us. When we were checking with friends local to that area they said - "don't do it" -- while I could have as many sheep as I wanted we would be limited to a max of 4 dogs and cats COMBINED in that county. All it takes is ONE person who doesn't like you, gets upset with you or just because they have nothing better to do to file a complaint. A friend up there on 120 acres had someone complain and she had to place some of her dogs.
Where we are now anything over 8 acres here is pretty much do what you want, and we are over that. Zoning is definitely something to be aware of.

 

[Ridgetop]

Checing the zoning is imperative. Years ago, we planned to move to a horsekeeping area BUT found out that the limit was 3 horses OR 3 rabbits! Then we inherited my aunt's property in Yelm, WA. She had kept a lot of livestock. It had a cute house that we had remodeled for her, 2 good huge barns, a 2 room bunk house, and a wonderful well with good GPM. The pastures were green all year. We learned that the property had been included in the city limits several years earlier. We could not have any large livestock, and only 3 chickens! Don't believe anything that the real estate agent tells you. Don't think because the next-door neighbor has livestock that your property is zoned the same way. Check the zoning with the city before buying.

 

[Ilovemychicks08]

One more thing to add - though I'm sure you already know this - check zoning. Others have said this as well. Most counties have charts as to how many animals of each species that you can have based on acreage. When we were looking around up in WA we found a beautiful 25+ acre piece of land that would have been perfect for us. When we were checking with friends local to that area they said - "don't do it" -- while I could have as many sheep as I wanted we would be limited to a max of 4 dogs and cats COMBINED in that county. All it takes is ONE person who doesn't like you, gets upset with you or just because they have nothing better to do to file a complaint. A friend up there on 120 acres had someone complain and she had to place some of her dogs.
Where we are now anything over 8 acres here is pretty much do what you want, and we are over that. Zoning is definitely something to be aware of.

We are hoping to move out to land where we can actually have animals. And i will definitely look into the zoning. Where i live now we can only have 5 chickens, 2 ducks, 1 rabbit, 2 dogs and 2 cats.

 

[Ilovemychicks08]

Checing the zoning is imperative. Years ago, we planned to move to a horsekeeping area BUT found out that the limit was 3 horses OR 3 rabbits! Then we inherited my aunt's property in Yelm, WA. She had kept a lot of livestock. It had a cute house that we had remodeled for her, 2 good huge barns, a 2 room bunk house, and a wonderful well with good GPM. The pastures were green all year. We learned that the property had been included in the city limits several years earlier. We could not have any large livestock, and only 3 chickens! Don't believe anything that the real estate agent tells you. Don't think because the next-door neighbor has livestock that your property is zoned the same way. Check the zoning with the city before buying.

I will definitely check. But we plan on moving out of city limits here. So we dont have to deal with all that.

 

[Ridgetop]

In Yelm the city line ended on the property line. Next door could keep livestock, our 5-acre piece couldn't. This was i Washington state. In Texas there is a special agriculture designation on property used for agriculture which significantly lowers your property taxes. But if that designation has lapsed because no livestock have been kept continuously on the property it takes 5 years of constant livestock keeping in 7 years to renew the AG designation. And the number of acres that qualify for the AG tax qualification varies greatly from county to county. In Wood County 5 acres with the appropriate number of animal units qualifies. In Travis County you need a minimum of 12 acres on the east side of IH35 and 20 acres on the west side. There can be a big difference in required acres to qualify for the AG designation. And beekeeping requires more acres due to the proliferations of bees which are considered a nuisance or danger. It doesn't cost anything to do your due diligence now before you begin shopping for your property.

And if you plan to build from scratch, start learning those skills now if you don't already have them. Reading up on building requirements and techniques puts you ahead of the game. Library books, U-tube videos, HGTV, DIY, and Magnolia channels can teach a lot. I learned a lot more building tricks from HGTV when I was laid up during chemo years ago. The more you know the more problems you can avoid. I always learn something new from DIY channels. Even if it is what not to do!

Enjoy your new adventure.

 

[SageHill]

In Yelm the city line ended on the property line. Next door could keep livestock, our 5-acre piece couldn't. This was i Washington state.

What is it about WA state??!?!?!! We were ready to bite that bullet until we saw the zoning stuff. SHEESH - makes CA look way better. Sad to see good people leave CA.

 

[Ridgetop]

The entire west coast has gone over to the dark side.