My Farm Diary; Week Two

Beef and Turkey unit made sense. That's where I worked last week and I can't afford to not write about it.

I went to Turkey unit first and you need to come and see these turkeys. The male called Tom which is usually recognized by it's  longer wattle compared to the female, hen and then, the young ones, poult even though there weren't any in the pen. Categorizing the turkeys, we have the exotic and local types. The exotics are those whose breed origin is outside the walls of Africa while the local breeds are the African breeds.

Talking about cattle, they can be categorized into three based on use; beef, diary and dual which can be used for both beef and diary production. We went to the beef unit where basically, cattle used for the production of beef are kept even though there were the muturu breed which is used for diary production in the ranch. We have the n'dama and sokoto gudali breeds for beef production.

At the turkey unit, the daily routine activities include, feeding and cleaning. Changing of litters is a routine activity done in like every two or three days depending on how messy the litter(wood shavings or other materials poured on the pen floor to absorb feacal wastes and to keep the environment quite warm).

The beef unit was quite stressful though fun even though I didn't participate in any activity there. The daily routine activity there also include cleaning of the pen where the workers packed cow dung and feeding. They are being fed with pastures which could be brought to them in the pen as 'hay' with high moisture content, 'silage' with low moisture content or they could be taken to the pasture where they free on the pastures on the field and this is kind of pasture is called 'soilage'.

On Thursday which was the slaughter day, we were taken to the slaughter slab where we witnessed the process of beef slaughter where the hairs were removed by scalding (use of hot water) and also shown the different parts of the animal.

That's the summary of all I did on the farm last week, I will do well to post this week's activities also.