sprocket

I dairy farmed for 14 years, and my wife and I got out in the winter of 2023. We've seen ever increasing scarcity of water in our region, because the surrounding mountains don't get enough snow pack whose melt feeds the streams through spring and summer, and we don't see the spring rains nearly as much anymore either. We used to be able to irrigate our hay fields all summer long with no issues, until fall rains returned. Now the rains stop in April, we irrigate until the water runs out (which last year was in June), and then hope for the best. When we need to buy hay for our animals, prices have nearly tripled in the last 10 years.

I used this software when my mom was battling ALS:

   https://www.optikey.org/

which ran on a < $1k computer

At the time, the other options were much more expensive (> $10-15k) which were sadly out of out budget.

I imagine that a lot of the Australian farms are going to be in the outback, where the quality of the land and feed for the cattle is marginal, and you have to farm extensively (ie. range cows on large tracts of land). They are not going to be irrigating and fertilizing millions of acres, so the feed is going to be relatively poor as compared to lush, green farmland you might be familiar with.

It's a very rewarding lifestyle and I have a lot of good memories of it. It's meaningful work and it gave me a good sense of purpose. I'm in my mid-40's now though and my body just doesn't have the ability to recover like I could in my 20's or 30's.

The -13C wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back. Sometimes it's not a matter of throwing money at the problem until it goes away.

Farming is hard, and dairy farming is even harder. The sheer responsibility of being responsible for 150 other beings day in, and day out, and having to show up every single day is very challenging. I haven't had regularly scheduled weekends in a very long time.

We've had a lot of very good staff over the years, but in the end, at 5am or 10pm at night, it's me who is ultimately responsible. I've missed out on a lot of gatherings with friends and time with family, because I had to ensure for the needs of my animals first.

After I've sorted out the what-to-do-next issue, perhaps I'll consider putting it down in my cheese making memoirs.

In the interim, here're some gratuitous photos from the farm:

   https://imgur.com/a/84zAcbu

As a final aside...anyone looking to hire a tech guy with 13 years farming experience? ;)

I did this myself thirteen years ago - I quit my well paying software job, bought a bunch of goats, and built a cheese business. I'm just now in the process of winding our dairy and cheese business down - it was an amazing period of personal and professional growth, money wasn't an issue, but the complete lack of flexibility (exacerbated by having to milk animals twice daily, every day, for 300 days in a row) eventually got to me.

I was out trying to bottle train 40+ hungry goat kids this winter in -13C temperatures when I decided that I didn't want to do this anymore. My wife and I decided to shutter everything a couple days later.

We don't have any regrets - I learned FAR more in running my own business in an area that wasn't previously my expertise, than had I stuck around doing things in software development. However, here I am again looking to find another tech job.

I'm fortunate in that I've kept a lot of tech skills current, in that I've had multiple personal projects or freelance contracts during slower winter periods. I can safely say thought that I have farming and cheese making out of my mind, for the foreseeable future. Should I ever want to do it again, I'll book myself 3 weeks in France, go milk and make cheese with a small cheesemaker there, and enjoy that all the day-to-day problems are someone else's. :)

I started a goat dairy about 12 years ago, while software consulting on the side while we built up the farm. We built a cheese processing plant 8 years ago to start adding value to the milk we were producing. Over the years we started processing cow's milk and milking and making sheeps milk cheeses too. We currently have about 125 dairy goats and a much smaller flock of sheep.

As the farm grew it became more and more time consuming, and managing the software consultancy became more difficult as I wasn't near the computer for most of the day. I enjoy the seasonality of farming, though it is very physically demanding, and I can feel the difference that 12 years has made.

In early 2020, I lost my last software client in the early pandemic, and put most of my energies into building the farm up. I currently don't do any external consulting, but have been working on my own tech and development projects. It's fun for me to be able to apply my development skills to on-farm problems. I've been doing minor automation projects using Arduinos and Raspberry Pis over the last four years.

I would interpret that remark to mean more than "Yes, I'm the president of the ECB, and my son is free to make his own choices, even if I regard them as stupid ones."

In the grand scale of things, we're pretty small. We milk just under 100 dairy goats, and have about 150 goats total on the farm (the other goats being a couple of breeding bucks, and some kids of various ages that will be milked in future years.)

I'm somewhat smaller than I was two years ago - we scaled back a bit in 2020, as the pandemic seriously killed cash flow for a couple months.

We produce our own sheeps milk too, but on a much smaller scale. We also pick up cows milk from a neighbouring farm. I'm expecting this year to process around 100,000 liters of milk, producing around 10-12 tons of cheese.

I usually shear just before lambing, which is right now for us. Whether or not you need to shear will depend on the breed of sheep - some can lose their coats on their own, some will not.

For us it's necessary as our sheep get a 2"+ thick coat, which during our summers (last summer we hit 42C/108F, normally we peak at around 35C/95F), and having a thick coat can be deadly.

I put the fleece in the burn pile. I don't have the time nor inclination to clean and card the wool to prep it for sale. I imagine some people would take it to do it themselves, but at this point, I need one less thing to do, not one more. :)

I worked full time as a software dev from about 1999 until 2010. It was never really all that fulfilling for me, although I was pretty good at what I did. I was laid off in 2010, and spent the rest of the year milking goats and sheep, and making cheese in France and the UK. When I returned home in late 2010, my wife and I moved to a more rural location, bought a small herd of goats, and started building a cheese plant.

We've been making cheese going on 8 years now, and have expanded into sheep and cow's milk production, in addition to our goat's milk varieties. Unlike most of the cheese producers around us, we focus on raw milk cheeses with natural rinds. Many of our varieties are inspired by cheese I encountered while working in Europe.

  Here's a small gallery of some of our cheeses: https://imgur.com/a/zg0eaTz

We're just emerging from our kidding season and heading into lambing. It's the most challenging period of the year, as we'll have 150+ kids and lambs arrive over a couple of weeks.

  https://imgur.com/a/USmPghf 

The shift has been fulfilling overall, and I still do work on some tech related projects which has been great. I have to some degree begrudgingly watched my peers' income shoot up dramatically over the last 12 years, while I have to work twice as hard to bring home the same amount.

Overall though, it's been net positive for my family, and while I've tried to quit farming at least half a dozen times, I was never able to bring myself to make the break.

Presumably because many provinces in Canada have logged most of the old growth forests in the last century or so.

My son's daycare closed permanently almost a year ago, and my wife and I had to adjust to have a 3 going on 4 year old at home with us 24/7. While it hasn't been easy, it's been a joy watching him grow over this past year, having time to bond with him (generally he favours his mom), and to have greater insight into who he is becoming as a person.

It has been a difficult time for everyone, but I honestly believe that this will be formative time not just for him, but for my wife and I, and one that we will look back upon fondly.

Dan Quayle has entered the chat.

That's also my experience with a 2009 MBP. Swapped out the HD for an SSD, maxed the RAM, and put in a new battery, and had an adequate machine for most daily tasks.

It showed it's age and lagged a lot with more intensive software like Fusion 360, but overall was a pretty good machine for 10 years.

I would agree with this as well. My best crusts rise from 36-48 hours in the fridge, after which they're baked almost immediately at 450-500F for 10-12 minutes.

I arrived at a very similar spot after having spent about 10 years in tech. Many of the jobs I'd found myself in seemed to be comprised of busy work, or work that didn't actually contribute much to society as a whole. It was pretty disheartening, and I'd jump from position to position, looking for something "better".

Eventually I decided that my world was going to be of my own making, and that I didn't want to spent it unhappy. If anything was going to change, then I alone was responsible for initiating that change in my life and my perspective.

I ended up quitting my job and going to Europe, where I worked with traditional cheesemakers. I learned how to make cheese, milk and to take care of livestock. When I arrived back in NA, my wife and I moved to a more rural location, bought a small herd of livestock and began building our own dairy. For me, working with the animals, and producing these rustic, old-world styled cheeses brought a lot of fulfillment to my life that I hadn't found elsewhere.

It's now almost 10 years later and we've just expanded our operations again. Our production will likely be 4-5x what it was when we started, and we have an incredibly supportive and dedicated customer base that love our cheeses. Being able to talk with them, make them happy, and get their feedback on our cheese is one of my favourite times of the week.

The last 10 years have held some of the most challenging periods of my life. I've had to learn and master entirely new skill sets - marketing, plumbing, veterinary skills, MacGyver'ing equipment to work for just another day before we can get it fixed properly. We've also had our share of the bad times - in farming, the unexpected happens frequently, and we've teetered on the financial brink a couple times. Certain aspects of what I'm doing now have also become, "just a job" - I don't really want to scrape livestock poop in the pissing rain, but someone has to do it. (And sometimes that turns out to be someone we hire to do it for us.)

I still pick up the odd tech contract during our slow periods, though those are getting fewer and further between. Turns out that tech wages pay for things a lot more quickly than farm wages, and a 2 month contract can pay for some shiny new farm equipment much more quickly.

I often joke with my wife that our decision to strike off on our own and start our own business was either the best-worst decision or the worst-best decision in my life; I just haven't picked which one it is yet. :)

Link to some of our cheeses and ladies: https://imgur.com/a/VC2aire

I believe you can do it off the command line relatively efficiently by piping output straight into gzip.

ie) perl -e "print '0' for (1..1000000000)" | gzip > zipbomb.gz

This will create a ~ 1MB file that will expand into something 1000 times its size.

I use it to generate and play with interface layouts, then run the .ui file through pyuic5 to convert the interface into Python code. I've got a number of Raspberry Pi touchscreen projects that this has worked well for - I can develop on my Mac, and use the same interface on the Pi's touchscreen.

Ah, yes; it was the manifold that I was looking at and wondering what it was. Thanks for the explanation!

What is the name of the hardware parts that are connected to the relay? I think you've called them "puffers", but searching on that didn't bring up any results. Are you able to provide a link to where I might purchase a couple?

Resources out there are going to be dependent on the scale of goat rearing you plan on doing. What works for 2 goats won't necessarily work for fifty, and what works for fifty goats won't necessarily work for 200.

They're also notoriously difficult animals to get right. Most vets do either cats and dogs, or cows and horses. Goats are an entirely different beast, and really, the best education I had was just doing it, and learning things the hard way.

I'd spent some time prior to farming working with herds in both France and England, which was very informative. If you're able to find someone who's at the scale that you imagine your self to be at, some day, learning from them is likely the best option.

I still manage to make it away from time to time, but they are a significant ball and chain. We do seasonal production at the moment (though as we grow, we'll move to more of a year round production schedule), so we have about 2 months of downtime in the winter with fairly minimal work on a day-to-day basis. I usually get an employee or family to check in twice a day, feed, and make sure nothing's dramatically wrong.

I'm in a very similar situation as you are, except instead of starting a vineyard, I started a goat dairy and cheesemaking business. We produce a variety of raw milk goat's cheeses:

  http://imgur.com/a/KWSy7

and raise +/- about 100 dairy goats:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0ur8cdOfY

Weather definitely affects our income as well; we were in a drought for the last couple years, which limited our grazing time.

As you also noted, being a broke cheesemaker seems to be far more interesting to folks than being a developer. :)

Cornish Cross in particular are fantastic at converting feed into weight gain. In 10 weeks, you can go from a fluffy little ping pong ball sized chick to an almost 10lb live-weight bird. It's often unwise to raise them past that age, because the rate of weight gain puts so much stress on their internals that they'll frequently keel over from a heart condition. By the 8 to 9 week stage, they're already so heavy that they can only take a handful of steps because having to plop down and have a rest for a bit.

I pastured Cornish Cross, which is the standard broiler barn chickens. They are genetically predisposed to pack on as much muscle in as short a time span as possible. By the time they're ~ 9 to 10 weeks old, they are waddling giants, and I'd definitely not characterize them as exercised. :)

That said, the difference that being able to forage green grass and insects in the short period they were out on pasture (usually 4-6 weeks, weather dependent) was so remarkable in terms of the flavour and the texture of the meat, that we're effectively ruined for eating any other non-pastured chickens. The fat was rich and velvety, the dark meat was meaty and deep in flavour; everything was just moist and juicy and delicious.

We didn't do many on a yearly basis (about 1000 +/-), and I was primarily using them for fertilizing pasture that I was grazing with our dairy herd. The fact that they were spectacular eating was just a side benefit.

If you're ever able to track one down, I'd highly recommend giving one a go.

> After all, even pastured chicken tastes wildly better than conventional chicken.

As a farmer who used to raise pastured chicken, I was always happy to convert people to what real chicken is supposed to taste like.

> Seattle/Vancouver are so far up north that in December, the sun rises at 10 AM, and it starts getting dark at around 3 PM

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Even on the shortest day of the year in Vancouver, the sun rises at shortly after 8am and sets just after 4pm, which is a full 3 hours more of sunlight than you're giving it credit for.

For the remote position, are you able to hire candidates outside of the US? I've been developing in Perl for 20+ years and am located in Canada, but would be unable to relocate to the Santa Monica location.