Worm Load?

Well, all you future farmers and farmer wannabe's, this will probably help you decide whether your current job is as bad as you thought. Today, we are ordering a microscope, beakers, test tubes, etc. so we can do our own fecal samples. As it turns out controlling worms in your animals is a large part of successful farming- even a very small farm like this one. Wormers, synthetic or natural, are poisons. The idea is to poison the animal enough to kill the worms without killing the animal.

If you can analyze the "Worm Load" of an animal, you can determine if it is time to administer worm medicine and what worm medicine will target your particular worm. Traditionally, you wormed an animal with a broad spectrum wormer every so often, but wormers are expensive and regular worming makes for worms that develop resistance to the wormer.

So, you can see the need for fecal samples, lots of them. We have twelve animals that we can check, not counting Kris and I. (If we have worms, neither one of us wants to know.) If we check the worm load every six weeks or so, multiplying by twelve and rounding to the nearest whole number, that would be a lot. As you can see, fecal samples will soon be our life. Conversations with us will be pretty interesting I am sure....

"Wanna see our new worm collection? It's right over there above the kitchen table on that shelf."

"Wow, you should have seen this liver fluke. It was huge! I took a picture and I posted it on facebook. Pretty cool, eh?

Anyway, doing our own fecals is going to be interesting. We want to compare herbal wormers to chemical wormers. The are cheaper and CLAIM to do a better job. Nothing eliminates worms and every animal has a certain amount of natural resistance to worms. The herbal wormers purport to keep the load low enough and enhance the natural resistance to a point that the worms don't bother the animal. More importantly they are cheaper. Some plants that the goats eat out in the pasture do the same thing. By doing fecals, we can greatly reduce and perhaps eliminate chemical wormers from our operation. Most of the herbs in the herbal wormer can be grown here and we may be able to stop buying wormer altogether.

So, you can see the need to do our own tests. If you are still thinking you might like to try farming, come on over. We could use the help. It is not that hard to collect samples. We'll give you a new sandwich bag and show you which animal to follow. Nothing could be easier. We look forward to seeing you!