When you live on a farm with a bunch of animals that require daily care, you may find it hard to leave the homestead at all. Here are some tips for keeping your animals happy while you’re on vacation, as well as some tips to keep the homestead afloat while you’re out. We hope this post helps you get off the homestead every once in a while.

Do Farmers get Vacation?

One of the advantages of living on the homestead is that we do not clock in for a 9-5 job. The other side of that, however, is that the homestead IS our job. We eat, sleep, and breathe the homestead that we have built, in order to maintain it. We have designed our homestead in such a way that we don’t ever want to leave.

My husband, Trevor, and I travel in February every year. It is a yearly tradition for us before he gets busy crop dusting in the springtime. Although we love farm life sometimes you need to take a vacation to take a walk on the beach and explore another country. It was 4 years ago we went to Mexico and I planned out our first trip together, Then our next trip we came back engaged when we explored Costa Rica and then last year we got married in Mexico with all of our closest family and friends. This year we are heading to the Grand Cayman to celebrate our one-year wedding anniversary!

We are very excited and grateful to be able to travel while in the middle of our property development and our home build. We are traveling internationally for 11 days. That is an amazing amount of time to relax by the beach but also a huge amount of time for things to go wrong on the homestead. There is some preparation work involved the week before we leave and that is what I am going to share with you all.

Keeping your Farm Animals Happy While on Vacation

CHICKENS & TURKEYS
We have 40 plus. That requires so much more food than I ever thought. We have a food trough that holds half a bag of 40 lb chicken feed. Chickens are really easy animals because you only need to make sure they have daily food & water. We fill large containers of extra food & water and more sure that whoever we have to check on the animals knows to look every few days to refill the chicken feed & collect the piles of eggs. The best part of our coop is the automatic door. THIS IS A GAME-CHANGER ON THE HOMESTEAD!

We have an automatic door that lets the chickens out in the sunlight and it closes will sunset. I absolutely love our chicken door we splurged and spent a little bit more money to have the one that auto changes with sunlight hours. The chickens and turkeys always know when to get in the coop. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AN AUTOMATIC DOOR FOR THE COOP. This has made me feel more at peace for evenings we are not home before dark or times when we are away I know my chickens and turkeys are very safe. There is a backup battery you can have in place in case the power cord becomes unplugged (it has happened before) it will work on backup power as well!

GOATS
Food and water for goats are pretty standard, but we also make sure to let our farm helper know not to give extra treats or grain. Lots of people tend to overfeed or spoil goats, but as long as the person who is going to watch your farm knows an estimate of what you feed in treats they will be ok. Since most of our goats are pregnant we have them eating hay, alfalfa, and grain for treats. The mamas need more calories when they are close to giving birth and also when they are milking the babies.

SHEEP
Sheep are by far the easiest to leave because sheep are grazers that need a large pasture & water to be happy. If it’s the winter, however, they’ll need to be fed daily with hay as a supplement while the pasture is growing.

DOGS
We try to bring our dogs with us on vacation for the most part, but when we travel internationally we do not take them. If not, there is plenty of dog food and treats for our homestead caretaker to feed all of our puppies while we are away!

These are products we use for animal hydration, feeding & protection of my livestock. I normally order most items off of Amazon unless is it a big gate or the item is too large. Here are some links some of you have requested for reference:

Plastic Chicken Feeder | Water Bowl | Poultry Net | Chicken Waterer | Automatic Door Opener | Metal Chicken Feeder | Mineral Feeder

Other Tips for the Homestead While You’re Gone

One of the best tips is that try to not plan a vacation around big events on the farm. That includes planting a bunch of new plants with no set-up irrigation, also when there are little chicks that need attention many times a day or the big ones do not plan to leave when you are due for baby animals.

The other big thing would be to hire a farm hand to check up on the homestead while you are out. It’s impossible to make sure that your animals and your homestead are well taken care of if someone isn’t there physically checking on things. For the times when the caretaker can’t be there, we have cameras all over the homestead, so we can keep an eye on things.

We also have an automatic timer in our garden. If we’ve just planted seeds, we usually need to be more attentive to the watering, which is why we don’t usually plant seeds before a vacation.

All it takes is some planning to be able to leave the homestead with peace of mind. You may be a homebody like us, but every once in a while when you want to take a vacation, it’s nice to know things are taken care of back at the farm. We are very lucky that we purchased raw land next to Trevor’s parents. There is plenty of chicken feed, wood chips, hay, alfalfa, and dog food for all of our favorite animals!

It is amazing our homestead will be in good hands while we are gone – I am very confident all of our animals will be happy. All the dogs, goats, sheep, chickens & turkeys!

Do you have any other tips for leaving the homestead? Let us know in the comments, friends!

Hugs,

Christina & Trevor