Agriculture/ August 14th

Livestock was just as important to an early homestead as the crops. Sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs all produced meat that provided the settlers with protein and vitamins that were essential for their health.

Sheep

Sheep were not the most common type of livestock on an early Canadian farm, if you didn’t already have sheep it was not easy to obtain more. Even then, ewes can only get pregnant once about every five months and will often only birth one lamb. After that the lamb is dependent on the mother for about another two months.

Raising sheep was a difficult task as they were very timid and needed protection from predators, unlike cows who were bigger and more intimidating in large groups.

Sheep would have provided wool, as well as meat and milk for homesteaders. Like most types of livestock, certain breeds are better for different resources you wish to gather from them. For example, you wouldn’t want to raise a breed of sheep that was known for its wool production if you wanted them for milking because those types of sheep have shorter lactation periods. In the homesteaders case, the breed of sheep they would have owned likely would have been used for just wool production as they could get larger amounts of dairy from a cow.

Sheep consumed a diet of mostly grass and hay which made it easy to feed them as they could be left to roam the pasture.

Read our blog post, “All Sheeps and Sizes” to learn more about sheep!

Cows

Cows were an integral part of an early stage homestead. They provided a source of dairy, which the settlers would turn into butter and cheese. They also provided meat that could be cured and stored for winter. The farmers would milk the cows and put the dairy in large milk cans that would be stored in the milkhouse. The cans of milk would then be used by the family, or purchased by nearby cheese factories that produced dairy products in bulk.

Dairy cows have a gestation period of about 9 months, the same as humans! After the heifer (female cow) gave birth to their calf, it could produce milk for upto 10 months!

Many farmers didn’t keep the bulls (male cows). They would either be raised for the purpose of breeding, or be sold to other farmers for the same reason. Bulls had to be kept away from the main herd as they would get aggressive when the heifers were in heat. Many farmers would “rotate” the bulls they did keep with their neighbours to prevent inbreeding which could cause stillbirths, physical deformities, and poor health amongst the herd.

Beef cows were raised solely for the purpose of being butchered. They are the kinds of cows that would be left to graze in the pasture as “free-range” meat tasted better than meat that came off of cows they were raised in the barn.

In the book “Foxfire 3”, an article talks about the different ways a cow's ear would be cut to symbolize that it belonged to a certain family. You could tell whose cows got out of the pasture just by looking at their ears!

Cows also consume a diet of mostly grass and hay, they could be left to roam the pasture and eat as much as they please. Through the winter they would be kept in the barn and fed dried hay that was harvested in the fall.

Fun fact: James O’Hara Sr. was credited for bringing the first cow across the lake into Madoc!

Chickens

The nesting box and roost inside of our coop at the livestock barn.

Any kind of domesticated bird for the purpose of meat or egg production is called poultry. In the earlier days, farmers didn’t keep chickens for their meat and would hunt wild game birds instead like partridge and duck. Chickens lay eggs everyday which means that a family that had chickens ensured they had food every morning if the chickens were in good health.

Chicken-meat was a very tricky thing to work with for early settlers. Unlike cow meat, chicken can’t be even slightly raw when being eaten otherwise it would make the consumer very sick with things like salmonella. Oftentimes when somebody got sick with something like that, they didn’t get better. So homesteaders stuck to putting chicken meat in things like stews and soups that would be cooked for long periods of time.

Chickens had a bit more of a complicated diet than pasture animals like cows and sheep. Chickens liked to be fed grains, fruits, and vegetables. This made them a little more difficult to feed when the settlers didn’t have any of these to spare.

You may think that the chickens would sleep in the nesting box, but that’s not the case! A chicken’s natural instincts tells them to sleep, or roost, as high as they can get. So the chickens would sleep on a perch or roost to get up super high!

Pigs

Pigs were very difficult for the settlers to take care of. They could get sick very easily and would pass it on to the other pigs and the humans quite quickly.

Contrary to popular belief, pigs were the cleanest animal kept on the farm. They would eat and defecate in separate corners of their pen and refuse to release any excretions if they were too close to their eating or sleeping areas. Pigs cannot sweat and wallow in the mud to cool down, giving them the reputation of being “dirty”.

Pork was a great treat to the settlers and in general was the meat they enjoyed consuming the most. Pigs were also the main attraction at fairs as they could get quite large and would provide an excellent contest opportunity. At O’Hara, we have a set of “pig scales” that would be used to weigh the pigs when they were ready to be sold or put into a contest.

Pigs would eat just about anything, which meant that they were fed any “waste” that the family didn’t eat. However, they consumed a diet of mostly corn, barley, and wheat.

Horses

Horses were also considered livestock as they were an asset to the homestead and provided labour as opposed to meat.

To learn more about the upkeep and care of horses, read our blog post titled “No Horsing Around Here”!

Come explore the homestead and take a look at our livestock barn that was constructed in 2019! See if you can find where each of these animals would have been in the barn.

𝓗𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻 & 𝓜𝓲𝓪

Out to Pasture