Burnt River Ranch

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Woking, AB
Burnt River Ranch

Burnt River Ranch Located near Woking, AB. Raising Heritage x weaner pigs, pastured pork products, dairy cattle, poultry, LGD, & Haflinger horses

02/03/2025

02/02/2025

It’s -30° here.

Cold snaps like this require us to forego most other commitments, as our time becomes focused on topping up bedding, feeding animals, collecting eggs before they freeze, hauling wood, stoking the stove and making sure pipes don’t freeze. Sleep is lost as we wait for piglets to be born.
I can’t imagine living our life ignoring the seasons and the weather anymore, and yet, our society is built around ignoring Mother Nature. As farmers, we prepare for it and learn to embrace it the best we can.

What’s the weather like where you are today?

02/01/2025

This year is going to be a lot of fun hatching chicks with the new incubator!

Unboxing the Brinsea 56EX Incubator
https://youtu.be/41Z0SmG4Z7

Join us while we unbox our brand new Brinsea Ovation 56EX Incubator.This is going to be a game changer for hatching eggs for us, and a big improvement on our...

01/27/2025

Nutmeg got pampered today, had her tail re-braided and bagged and then had a training session to work on improving her bridling skills.

01/26/2025

Clancy, our A2/A2 midsize Jersey bull, and his unexpected trust and friendship with Nutmeg the Haflinger horse.

01/25/2025

Soon our pens will be flooded with little bacon seeds!

Here's some of our favourite photos of some of the piglets from last year that I forgot to share!

Our piglets come with the following:

-iron shots
-dewormed
-males castrated
-from vaccinated sire/dam

01/24/2025

🤣

01/21/2025

Yikes!! That egg must have hurt coming out! It was 113 grams.

That’s the biggest chicken egg I’ve ever seen!
Picture of it next to a regular sized egg. I wonder if there’s another egg inside of it 🤔

01/20/2025

Butter was on my list yesterday, I only got half of it churned and none of it salted, weighed or wrapped.
Making butter is a labor intensive process; which I don’t always think folks realize that.
Milk the cow, separate the cream, wash the machine and the separator parts, cool the cream which usually takes 12-24 hours, churn the cream, wash the butter of it’s buttermilk, salt the butter, weigh and or mold the butter, wrap to store in the freezer or make ghee for a shelf stable stash.
You will find most artisan raw cream cultured butters, if the producer is willing to sell it, anywhere from $12-30 a POUND! That’s the true cost of what it takes to make.
So why is store butter so much cheaper? Whole milk is regulated, they adjust the level of cream across the board, removing the excess. The extra cream they remove from this milk is then turned into the commodity dairy items. They’ve paid the farmer once for the milk weight, but now have a liquid gold they can utilize for basically pennies.

All you need to make your own butter is heavy cream, salt, with a bit of your time💛

01/19/2025

Weaner Pig Season is upon us as we start farrowing in just over 2 weeks!

That means it's time to get your name on our spring piglet waitlist or our butcher pig waitlist!

Here's what we have on offer for 2025 litters:

- Hereford (pure, not registered)
- Hereford x Berkshire
- Hereford x English Large Black
- Hereford crosses

We have litters due Jan, February, March & April.
Now taking limited deposits for piglets! If you're looking for a large order of piglets, this is your opportunity to reserve them.

We will only take a limited amount of guaranteed orders now, and then we will offer more as we confirm the numbers born.

Prices can be found on our website:

https://www.burntriverranch.com/price-list

01/18/2025

A little rant from the farm.
I know I am going to get TONS of hate on this posting, but I just want to say it . . . I am SO over ALL of the non-sensical "homesteader" BS terminology and fake social media. Yes, that's right. OVER. IT.
I literally just watched a video of a "homesteader" wearing a cute, WHITE summer dress and sandals, clean out her chicken coop without wearing gloves or facial coverings, even ending her video by wallowing around in the chicken bedding. During the initial video, dust was flying everywhere, there was about 4" of p**p and debris. Ya'll!!!! Heard of Type A flu?
I have watched other videos where families have adopted their chickens, pigs, goats, and even calves into their home. They get up on their kitchen counters, sleep in their beds, and roam freely IN the home. Heard of zoonotic diseases?
All these videos of self-labeled tradwives dolled up with perfect hair and cute dresses, gingerly tending to farm chores, browsing through their gardens, and loving on farm animals in their homes like humans. Let me reassure you, most of that has to be filtered to gain "likes" or it's complete stupidity. Have you seen a person that has spent 8 hours scooping compost into a garden, digging plants into holes, trenching rows, scooping animal f***s out of barns, hauling hay, setting fence posts, running wire, repairing farm equipment? I can 100% guarantee you they don't look like many of the images you see today.
Farming can be ugly. It can be tough work. It gets dirty. Self-sufficiency takes gumption. Just like you see in this photo, those pretty brown eggs don't always look like that straight out of the coop. So, to all my "real" folks out there that don't require a label, but you keep rolling up your sleeves every single day, putting on those gloves, wearing those neck hankies, worn-out boots, tattered coveralls, dirt-stained shirts that have been mended more times than my heart, I see you. Your ongoing hard work isn't lost in the sea social media frenzy. Respect. ❤

Ps - these aren't my eggs in photo - used Google images so no hate

01/16/2025

They got that right! 💯

01/10/2025

This post bothers me because pigs are not meant to survive on grass.
There’s no mention how long the other one took to get to that size either, nor its health. I want to see a pic of these 2 pigs live to compare.
And having some fat on a pig does NOT mean it is unhealthy. We need to stop thinking that fat = unhealthy.

Both pigs were raised under identical free range conditions. The right was supplemented with some grain/corn/soy based feed the left was left to forage naturally
Pretty much shows the benefits of grass fed and finished (no grain fed) meat.
It should also give you some indication of what grain/soy/corn does to our bodies.

Credit- oliviaroase

𝕁𝕠𝕚𝕟 𝕞𝕪 𝕟𝕖𝕨𝕤𝕝𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕨𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖
𝕀 𝕔𝕒𝕟 𝕤𝕡𝕖𝕒𝕜 𝕗𝕣𝕖𝕖𝕝𝕪 👇🏻
www.Drsharnael.com

01/09/2025

Address

76235 Rg Road 74
Woking, AB
T0H3V0

Website

https://www.burntriverranch.com/

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Videos

Clancy, our A2/A2 midsize Jersey bull, and his unexpected trust and friendship with Nutmeg the Haflinger horse.

Happy Day!! Our new (old) Surge SP11 Vac Pump is still running like a top, 85 years after its manufacture date! They sure don’t make stuff like they used to! Thanks to one our great neighbours for picking this up for us on one of their trips down south.

“Burnt Rivers Spark” AKA Snuggles finally found her perfect home and is off to new adventures today! We will really miss her sweet, loving personality around the farm as we have grown quite attached to her. We wish her new owners the very best! Sounds like she is going to a really great home, and that always makes me very happy. Thanks for all of the snuggles, Miss Snuggles! ❤️

We still have a few weaner pigs left. These are the last one available until next spring! Willing to cut a deal on groups of 5 or more!

Lark is such a pretty girl. I’m still not sure my plans with her… keep her, sell her… not sure 🤷🏼‍♀️ For now I get to enjoy watching her and will start getting her handled just as soon as I have the garden produce dealt with.

Where is our daughter? Oh, there she is! Trying and mostly succeeding in moving pigs from one pen to another about 20 ft away. We have been at this for about 4 days now; this is the most stubborn and hard to move group of pigs I’ve ever dealt with. I always said, if we ever had to evacuate, I think the pigs would have to be set free because our whole place would burn down before we got them loaded 🤦🏼‍♀️ Someone said if we just added a wooden gate to the pasture, the pigs would be more likely to want to come through it and not fearful of the electric wire when it comes time to move them out, and that is simply not the case! We had been taking a break for our mental health… lol (moving pigs really tests your patience, they do not go unless they want to and the second they feel pushed, they will panic and do the exact opposite of what you want) Came out to see our little lady working on this all on her own accord; quite the helper and independent thinker she is!

Hot July days are for makin’ hay! The ol 1969 John Deere 4020 and the 499 New Holland haybine are getting the job done! #johndeere #hayingseason #newholland

Poultry Safe? Let’s talk about this. In my eyes, it’s just one of the many unrealistic expectations people have of these pups. I think anyone claiming to have pups guaranteed to be poultry safe is setting them and their new owners up for failure. Yes, they are bred to protect livestock. But chickens and poultry are a little different. They are small, basically defenseless critters that flap and squawk and squeak. They cannot withstand really any funny business without being injured, so early intervention for any funny business is essential. In general, you’ll be hard pressed to find a dog that is truly bonded to poultry. The dog is most often protecting the general property or alerting to a change in the chickens behaviour if a threat arises, and as a bonus, the chickens also get protected. I’m happy if they grow up to be comfortable in the chickens presence, never try to play with them and generally just ignore them. I’ve had a lot of other “demands” from people in regards to what they expect these pups to do right from the start, but I just wanted to touch on one of them from now. Remember, they’re still puppies and still need corrections, they aren’t this quick-fix, easy solution that you just throw in with your stock and expect them to just be perfect. I don’t want anyone coming back to me in a few months completely flabbergasted that their pup messed up, so I try to be pretty up front about these things.

These pups are exposed to all sorts of livestock! You can see mama Nora in the back, nursing a few of the big babies.

Only 2 more litters left to leave for new homes. These rascally little guys sure grow fast! All of these guys have new farms lined up to raise them, but don’t fret! We will have more weaners available late summer/early fall so keep us in mind 🙂

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Our Story

Farming and ranching is something stuck in our blood. We were never blessed with having a farm or land handed down to us, so we have had to make some pretty big sacrifices and live our life quite differently than most people in order to achieve our dream. Some think we are ‘weird’ or don’t understand the vision we have. Staying as debt-free as possible and managing money wisely plays a key role in us being able to pursue this big endeavour at 23 and 25 years old. Purchasing our land and starting to build certainly was not the beginning of this dream! On top of that, we have found it is super important to believe in ourselves! There has been more than enough nay-sayers, doubters, etc. telling us we are crazy, naive, misinformed, or all sorts of other things for pursuing a passion that many others would never do. Despite this, we have learned to ignore the hate and continue working towards our goals. Raising our family on a farm and teaching our children crucial values that are lacking in todays society is another significant goal of ours, as well as living in and participating in a small community. We are excited to get back to our roots and become more involved in both the equine and beef industry.