More About Starview Farm
 Located in Mid-Western Ontario, by Conestoga Lake, owned and operated by Janice and Chris Retterath & family, our interests are in producing nice-minded athletic horses that are versatile and fun to be around. This summer, Chris will be managing the Orangeville Color Thrill horse show, along with Shelly Cassel, for the Ontario Paint Horse Club. Located at the Orangeville Fair Grounds, we hope to see you there this summer, on Sunday July 13th, 2008! For a laugh, see Fun and Wisdom. Click Reining to see some pictures of Chris riding at the Mid-Western fair in 2003.
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| Starview Farm has about 100 acres of rolling mid-Western Ontario countryside. | ||
 Most of the farm slopes down to Conestoga Lake, a man-made water control reservoir, part of the Grand River watershed. The gentle hills have a mix of clay and loam soils.
Click on the picture to see a few more pictures from around the farm.
Over the years we've slowly phased
out row crops, and moved to perennial hay and pasture. Our hay is alfalfa with timothy, our pastures are orchard
grass with birdsfoot trefoil. |
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We have an area in fescue that is an experiment to see if we can have it grazed through the winter. Red and white clover are frost seeded in thin sods to help fix nitrogen for the grasses. In 2006 we renovated a 20 acre corn field with oats as a nursery crop to a mix of grasses and legumes. Instead of combining, we strip grazed the green oats and grass. |
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 We do our own hay, putting half into round bales, the rest into small squares
that go into our loft. Round bales go into our 60x120 arena/storage building,
which is a Calhoun tarp building.d |
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Grazing
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After meeting Jim Garrish and attending a grazing seminar put on by
Brussels Agri Services, The difference: on a ranch, the stock gets its own forage, as compared to a farm, where the feed is provided by the farmer. |
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 With our colder (zone 5) climate, good rainfall and deep clay soils, cool season grasses do very well. We started in 2005 with some local Holstein replacement heifers and a few paddocks, and worked up to grazing all our fields. In 2007 we grazed 14 horses including brood mares, 6 owned Angus cross calves, and up to 32 Holstein heifers. We cut 25 acres of alfalfa x timothy hay, which was enough to winter our horses. The cattle were all gone by November. |
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 Grazing in the fall. The leaves are almost all gone -- taken
October 28, 2007. |
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| The key to a grazing system is having water lines out to all the fields. We have about 4000 feet of 1" and 3/4" polyethylene line. | ||
 Here you can see a 1" line running under a fence. All lines are drained in the fall, but the odd frost at night won't hurt the lines.
Our storage tarp building is in the background. At 60 x 120, this is a nice size for indoor riding. We no longer use the silo shown in the picture -- it's made of poured concrete so it will be around for some time. |
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| When we move cattle or horses to a new paddock,
the switch can be easy as dumping the tank, opening a gate,
moving the stock, and reconnecting the tank. A salt block is
moved with the tank.
We don't have shelters in all of our fields - just grass, salt, and water. We do have some smaller shelters for the horse paddocks. These are simple 12 x 12 buildings we built in our arena and dragged out to the fields with a tractor. We thought we would move these more often -- instead we have ground staked and left them in place -- instead of moving, we just build more structures. |
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Winter
| We can have some nasty winters here -- freeze up in early December, and snow sometimes into mid April. This means we have to use hay, and our water lines have to be winterized. | ||
 We use our arena a lot in the winter. Round bales are fed
out when the ground is frozen, giving us more room to ride. |
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Trees and Wildlife
| The climax forest in this part of Ontario is Beech&Maple -- we only get around 2700 heat units, and this is too cold for an White Oak/Maple forest. We have a 5 acre woodlot with massive beech trees and many maples. | ||
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We have also planted many trees on the farm: Red Oak, Red, Sugar, & Silver Maples, Norway, Blue, & White Spruce, White Cedar, Red & Austrian Pine, Tamarack, and Poplars. There are lots of Hawthorne and Dogwood that seed themselves into any openings. |
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Fencing
| We had no fences 13 years ago, and have learned from scratch what
works for us. We have oak & hemlock board fences, split rail backed up
with electric, a electrified poly-wire paddock, and a lot of hi-tensile
electrified fence. The hi-tensile wire works well with really large (over 5 acre) pastures. Poly tape works well for cross fencing because the many white tail deer in our area can see it easily -- but it has to be removed every fall and re set in the spring. We've also tried going to single strand hi tensile along natural boundaries like old tree lines. For less visible lines we have put up one strand of hi tensile, with another higher strand of horse cote (a thick white coated hi tensile line). These can be left out all year.r. |