Welcome to The Sparks Family Farm!

Copied from a Facebook post, with one of my own pics… I feel every word of this. My hair went unbrushed for 3 days mid-January because I was too busy making sure we kept all our animals warm, fed, and safe during the artic freeze we were experiencing. Mission accomplished!!!!! Also, I promise I washed AND brushed my hair once we reached above freezing temperatures and knew everyone was safe. “Farm work doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t make you anything. It reveals you. There’s gym strong and then there’s farm strong. They’re mutually exclusive. The toughest women you’ll ever meet spend their days on a farm. There are more uses for twine than you can possibly imagine. You can tie up a hole in a slow feeder, fashion a tail strap for a horse’s blanket, mend a broken fence and use it as a belt. “Well that certainly didn’t go as planned,” is one thing you’ll say quite a bit. Control is a mere illusion. The thought that you have any, at any given time, is utterly false. Sometimes sleep is a luxury. So are lunch and dinner. And brushing your hair. If you’ve never felt your obliques contract, then you’ve never tried stopping an overly full wheelbarrow of horse manure from tipping over sideways. Trust me, you’ll find muscles that you never knew existed on the human skeleton to prevent this from happening. When one of the animals is ill, you’ll go to heroic lengths to minimize their discomfort.When you lose one of them, even though you know that day is inevitable, you still feel sadness, angst and emotional pain from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. And it’s a heaviness that lingers even though you must regroup and press on. You’ll cry a lot. But you’ll never live more fully. You’ll remain present no matter what because you must. There is no other option. You’ll ask for so many miracles and hold out hope until the very last. You will, at least once, face-plant in the manure pile. You’ll find yourself saying things like, “we have maybe twenty minutes of daylight left to git ‘er done” whilst gazing up at a nonspecific place in the sky. You’ll become weirdly obsessive about the weather. You’ll go out in public wearing filthy clothes and smelling of dirt, sweat and poop. People will look at you sideways and krinkle their noses but you won’t care. Your entire day can derail within ten seconds of the rising sun. You can wash your coveralls. They won’t look any cleaner, but they will smell much nicer. Farm work is difficult in its simplicity. You’ll always notice just how beautiful sunrises and sunsets really are. Should you ever have the opportunity to work on a farm, take the chance! You will never do anything more satisfying in your entire life. Well, that about sums it up, folks!” – unknown author

Wow! Those 8 weeks flew by so fast! All of the piglets have sold, and the last one will go to her new home next weekend. Let me just say, piglets are so dang cute and fun to watch! That being said, after lots of thoughts and prayers, we have decided to get out of the pig business for at least a year, maybe 2. Don’t get me wrong, we have absolutely LOVED raising pigs and piglets, but they are SUPER expensive to feed! We were spending more to feed the pigs over the last year than we spent on our own groceries! About 5 weeks ago, our sows were still down at the farrowing pen with their piglets when they went into heat again. The boars smelled them, leading them to somehow CLIMB over their hogpanel fence so they could go visit the ladies. We came home to them out and fighting each other trying to get close to the girls. After some quick thinking, redneck rigging, and lots of enticing, we were able to get the boys into the pen by the girls. As we were trying to reinforce the gates and add a fence between the boars & the sows’ pens, they started to fight again! This time, Red threw Bacon into the fence right between me and Shannon, almost laying the fence on its side. Talk about an adrenaline rush! Try having a 400+ pound pig flying at you! After several hours, we got the pens how we needed and got everyone settled, praise Jesus. Then, the next evening after work, we planned to lure each boar, one at a time, into an enclosure on wheels that Shannon had previously made, and then roll them back up to their pen. First up was Red. He made it pretty easy, following the scent of the watermelon I was enticing him with into the enclosure. We got him moved up the hill and into his pen with no troubles at all. Next was Bacon’s turn. As we were luring Bacon to come into the enclosure, I looked up, and who do I see? Red is free and coming back down the hill to find his ladies! We avert the plan, get Red back into the pen with Bacon, then discover that Bacon went OVER the hog panel AGAIN to get out! At this point, we called it a night and decided to just keep them down by the girls for a few weeks until it was time to rehome a boar and a sow. The next evening, we noticed Red was starting to swell at his penile pouch. The next day, it was doubled in size, and then even bigger the next day. After talking with our vet and showing him pictures, it was decided that he must have herniated himself when he climbed over the hog panel. We had two options: 1. Bring him to the vet and have surgery, costing $800 or more, or 2. Send him to freezer camp. We had planned on breeding Red again because of his beautiful structure, so we were so sad to have to send him to freezer camp. We were then down to 2 sows, a boar, and 6 piglets. The piglets sold super fast, and we had several farmers reaching out to buy a boar & sow breeding pair. First, we decided to trade a guy in South Louisiana a boar and sow for a ram and ewe, but when it was about a week away from trading time, he backed out. It wasn’t but a few days before I had another guy lined up to make a trade, and then he backed out a week later due to not having anywhere to put them. Then, low and behold, one of the farms that had purchased two of the piglets mentioned they had sheep and were interested in making a trade. If all goes well, Sunday afternoon, we will be trading our pigs for sheep! Sammy is so excited, and so is my bank account, haha! In addition to adding sheep (a ram & two pregnant ewes) to the farm, we are also picking up two dairy bull calves this weekend! A friend of ours sent us a message the other day, saying she was moving and couldn’t take her calves with her, and asked if we could home them. Of course we agreed! We had been wanting to get a steer to grow out and butcher, and this was the perfect opportunity! As of tomorrow, we will be welcoming Big Mac and Meatloaf to our farm! Pics to come!

Our two Hereford Pigs gave birth this past week! Olivia had 2 healthy girls and 1 healthy boy on Sunday, Sept. 10.  Two days later, Tuesday, Sept 12, Runt gave birth to 3 girls and a boy! Unfortunately, Wednesday afternoon, we noticed one of Runt’s girls couldn’t get up onto her back legs. After letting Runt out of the farrowing pen, we were able to safely remove the injured piglet to examine her. I grabbed that baby and took off towards the house as quickly as I could, knowing that if it started squealing, I would have an angry 350+ pound momma charging after me. Fortunately, she didn’t even squeal when I grabbed her and took off to the house, so we knew she was pretty weak. One of her back legs was completely out of the hip socket, and there was so much bruising and what looked like internal bleeding, like maybe she had been stepped on. After a call to our vet, we decided the most humane thing to do would be to put her down. Talk about the hardest thing ever. We’ve experienced similar scenarios with chicks and have had our times of finding baby chicks, and even Landry’s firstborn already passed away, but this was so much harder. As with everything else, you take a moment to be sad, praise Jesus for the healthy babies, then dust your boots off and get back to work/farm chores. Shannon was able to build a pallet wall along the fence separating the mommas, so they felt more secure and stopped trying to fight each other, which will hopefully lower the chances of another piglet getting stepped on. So far, so good! In about 8 weeks, we will have piglets looking for new homes!

Remember how I mentioned our new plucker in my previous post? Well, it’s officially amazing! Over the last couple of weeks we had a few processing days and the new plucker works so well! We have finally fully processed & packaged 98 birds. We get our meat chickens as 3 day old chicks from Freedom Ranger Hatchery and last type we ordered grew to be 4-5+ pound birds after processing. This time Shannon tried a different bird from them, the Jackies, and they didn’t grow as big as we had hoped. Most of these birds were only 3-4 pounds after processing, so we will definitely choose a different bird for our next round. That being said, they are still delicious! We had lots of help processing from our kiddos and our sweet friend that’s basically family. Processing these birds in the heat and humidity was not an easy chore! Temperatures soared above 100, with 90-100% humidity making the “feels like temp” well into 110-115°F. After processing for two days in a row, our oldest son, Shaun, got dehydrated without realizing it. Two days later, his magnesium levels bottomed out, causing all kinds of scary symptoms such as not being able to feel his legs, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, breathlessness, and faintness. Unfortunately, Shannon and I were at work, and he was home alone. Shaun called me as soon as he knew he didn’t feel right and I could tell over the phone his condition was deteriorating quickly, so I had him call 911 as I rushed out of my office to make the hour drive home to him. Thankfully, Desoto Parish EMS got to him quickly and was able to load him in the ambulance and stabilize him enough to head to Shreveport with him. We spent several hours in the emergency room as they were running lots of blood work and filling with fluids. Once the doctor determined it was hypomagnesia, they started giving him IV magnesium and other vitamins, and he perked back up within a few hours, and we were able to take him home. The next day, he felt great, but now Shannon had caught Covid while we were in the hospital, and then he was down for a few days. The boys really stepped up and helped me with all the farm chores, and by the grace of God, we got through it. Everyone is now well and back to work, and this heat has been torcherous. Enjoy these pictures!

It just hit me that I haven’t posted since April! Sorry!!! Life has been a little hectic… let’s see, May 19 Shaun graduated high school, we had tons of family over from all over the place. It was the first time since we our wedding in 2001 that we had both sides of the family all under one roof! We had so much fun catching up! My parents were the only family who had seen our farm before then, so Sammy had a blast showing everyone around & was the best tour guide! He even showed off our dirty bedroom; you know, the ONE ROOM you hide all your junk in when people come to visit?! Yep! 🤦‍♀️ The week after everyone had left, one of our turkeys hatched five babies! A few days later, it was quite clear that one of those babies wasn’t a turkey after all…. it was a guinea! Apparently while Momma Turkey was away from her nest one day, our female guinea thought it would be a good place to lay an egg. 😆 Next came Sammy’s birthday party in June, but with it came storms. The week leading up to his party we had a good bit of rainy days and there were storms predicted for the day of his party. If you’ve ever lived in north Louisiana, you know that you take the rain forecast lightly because we never really know what will happen until it happens. The morning of his party, it began to look more and more like we would have some pretty severe weather, so I began to worry a little. Have you ever heard of the “Barksdale Bubble”? There’s an urban legend that there is a supposed mythical force that pops up around the Shreveport/Bossier area to protect Barksdale Air Force Base from Mother Nature. It’s been a running joke since I can remember that the majority of storms break up just before hitting Shreveport because of the Barksdale Bubble. Well, when we moved out to our farm, storms started breaking up and going around us out here too, so we jokingly say we have a Sparksdale Bubble. I was praying it would “activate” and send everything around us for Sammy’s party since all our friends were driving in from an hour away. Well, the Sparksdale Bubble failed me. The kiddos were playing on this giant 60 ft inflatable obstacle course as us parents were watching the skies, praying it would go around us, when all of a sudden the wind picked up, sending dust and limbs flying everywhere. It was like the tornado scene from the Wizard of Oz, with parents grabbing kids, kids grabbing their shoes, everyone shielding their eyes from the dust & limbs, and running for the house. Thankfully the power only blinked a few times, but it came a down pour outside. The kids didn’t let that slow them down though, they had an indoor Nerf War instead. The following week brought more rain, and then a horrible storm late Thursday night. Shaun woke us up around 2am and we all gathered in the hallway waiting for what seemed like a hurricane to pass. Lightening was constant, the wind howling, and debris flying everywhere! Honestly, when Hurricane Laura hit Caddo Parish in 2017, the weather wasn’t THIS bad. Shannon looked out at one point during the storm and our goat shelter had blown over on its side, with our poor Mocha stuck inside, but the lightening was still so bad that it wasn’t safe for us to go out to help her. A few minutes later we looked out the window and the shelter had blown back down, but now we worried that it could have landed on one of the babies, but it still wasn’t safe to go out to check. About an hour later, the slow-moving storm moved on, and we went out to survey the damage that we could using our spotlights. A tree had split in half in our backyard, narrowly missing our porch. Limbs were literally everywhere we looked. A piece of siding off the corner of the house was in the backyard. A box of painting supplies that had been at the front door was now around on the other side of the house. All the animals were ok, except there was a missing turkey poult. A huge oak tree was down at the road by our driveway, right in the 90 degree curve, on top of power lines, with the top of the tree and the top of the power pole in our yard, blocking our neighbors from being able to leave their houses (we’re on a dead end road with no other way out). Walking back up to the house from that tree, we spotted a giant hickory tree down on the other side of the house. I spent an hour on hold trying to call in the downed power line in the road that night while Shannon brought the generator up and got the major necessities like our refrigerators and freezers plugged in. Daylight came, and we found another tree down. This one was a big pine tree on our fence in the pasture with our goats & cows. The power was still out, and there was no estimated time of it being restored. It was still pretty cool in our house, but outside felt like a sauna. The heat index reached 114° F with the humidity around 90%. We had so much to clean up outside, so we headed out to the road, along with some of our neighbors, and started clearing as much of the big oak tree out of the road as we could without getting on the power lines. In less than an hour, we were all drenched in sweat and had moved as much as we could, so then we had to wait for the Parish to come finish moving the tree and for Swepco to fix the downed line. Later that evening, the tree was gone, but over 200,000 people in north Louisiana were without power, so it was going to be a while before Swepco came to fix the lines, or so we thought. Later that evening, Swepco posted a list of expected restoration times: Tuesday at 10pm for us, and the following Saturday at 10pm for Shreveport! I decided we had braved the heat long enough and we were getting miserable, so I headed about two hours east to borrow some window air-conditioning units and a second generator from my parents. While there, we got an alert that more severe weather was headed our way! We took showers (thankfully, my parents had electricity) & headed home as quickly as possible to beat the next storm. Shaun’s girlfriend was texting him, warning us to stay put because it was getting bad in Shreveport again, but we had already headed home, so we kept on. By the grace of God, the storm stayed around I20 and north of us, so we totally dodged that one (yay for the Sparksdale Bubble!). As we turned onto our dead-end road in the middle of nowhere, we saw an electric company truck! A few minutes later, we saw a neighbor on her porch who gave us a huge smile and a thumbs up. Our hopes started to rise! As we drove towards our driveway, we could see the light!!! The street light that is; it was ON!!! Almost 48 hours after the storm, we had power! We were so excited! The next few days the heat index continued to be 110-112°F, so we didn’t get near as much work done outside to clean up as we wanted, but you know what, it will still be there when it’s not 1000°F outside, so we will get it when we can, even if it’s just a little at a time. Now it’s still 1000°F, we have a huge mess to clean up, and guess what time it is? Chicken processing time! Yep, our second batch of meat birds is ready to be processed. Remember, our homemade plucker broke towards the end of the first 100 birds we did last fall? Shannon started working on it during the power outage and realized it would cost just as much to fix it as it would cost to replace it, so we have a new one ordered that should be here by the weekend. I’m praying for cooler temperatures, or at least lower heat indexes, next weekend when we get started! Processing 100 chickens in this heat is NOT going to be fun. Wish us luck!