066 Pasture chicken orders, Diagnosing a sick pig, Disease resistance and breeding

This weeks farming updates include a lot of rain and finally a little warmth.  We were about to get the snow fence down and watch the pastures start to turn a little green.  We started allowing customers to pre-order pastured chickens this week and we are almost already sold out.  We found a dead chicken in the coop...  looks like a heart attack.  In the green house we have been potting up tomatoes and making soil blocks.The Farmers Choice segment this week answers the question we posed in CoopCast 065 about how do manage a sick pig. In the segment we:Follow up on pig illnessShare some of the thoughts our listeners had like call vet, ask Walter, check poopShare what the farmers did which included emailed Walter, posted on boards, called who we bought from, talked to large animal vetWe found that the Pigsite and Merck vet manual were quite helpfulPenicillin and tetracycline - when antibiotics and the farm work together.In a Farm U segment we talk about the notion out there that you can "breed resistance" to disease into your animals and how that's not really accurate.Resistance to disease/ building a better herd has a role in breeding but genetics isn't the whole story.  The stauts of host- Nutrition, stress, normal flora, etc all impact the likelihood of an animal getting sick when exposed to the pathogen.  In most cases it's less about genetics and "resistance" and more about infectious dose of the organism.