OVERLY DIFFICULT

                  Too many folks make their homesteads and farms overly difficult.  For example, I've had folks who have Scottish Highlanders complain that the long horns constantly catch the electric fence, break something, and then the herd is out.

                  Polled cows can never hook a fence with horns because they don't have any.  We have about a thousand head in four or five herds and they get out perhaps a total of five times a year.  That's roughly 5 herds X 365 days is 1,825 moves so five outs isn't much. 

                  Too many folks go for cute or exotic and then end up spending a lot of time dealing with incompatible critters.  Bison are extremely hard to control with electric fencing.  If someone moves Bison every day in mob stocking arrangements, I'd like to hear about it.  The result is that everyone I know who raises Bison overgrazes their fields.  

                  Turkeys.  My best story was a guy in Georgia who wanted to raise heritage Red Bourbons.  Unlike the stockier white turkeys, Red Bourbons can fly; he could never keep them in.  One week before Thanksgiving, when he was going to process them, he went out to feed them and they were gone.  He never did find them--a flock of 100 birds.

                  If you have to put your birds in a confinement house because you can't control them, maybe a more controllable breed makes sense.

                  If you're going to raise animals, at least start with something that's easy.  You have plenty of time to push the envelope with something more difficult.  Sometimes things just don't work.  One of our biggest failures was pheasants.  Wow, the price was fantastic and they were easy to butcher, unlike a duck.   

                  So I built a 12 X 20 X 8 ft. high PVC aviary for a hundred pheasants.  The structure was cool as grits.  But pheasants aren't domestic fowl; they're wild.  When we tried to move them every day to a new pasture spot, they went nuts.  Their natural protection is to burrow into a clump of grass and hide.  As soon as we approached, they'd start snuggling under grass clumps.  

                  It took two people to move the shelter box and one or two inside kicking up the birds to get them to move.  Invariably one would break a wing or a leg--animal welfare would not be happy.  Few times have such high hopes been dashed as completely.  

                  We tried raising earthworms under the rabbits in the hoop house in the winter.  It worked great until things really got cold.  Then the worms moved out and rats moved into the beds.  By the score.  What a mess.  Just because  you conceive of something cool and cute doesn't mean it will work.

                  While I'm a fan of innovation, I've also learned that forcing a round peg in a square hole takes a lot of work.  Start with easy stuff.  That's my advice for the day.

                  Have you ever tried to raise an animal that didn't mesh with your ideas?