Steampunk Farms Rescue Barn

Salty’s hosting Wishlist Wednesday with a pick for gift cards to tackle unexpected barn needs. Check out the Big Blue Vase plan and help out! steampunkfarms.org/donate#wi… 🐐💳

sly discovers that rugby's wisdom about life comes straight from the bottom of his water bowl. steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed

Queen Leia’s hosting Wishlist Wednesday with her Sanitation & Maintenance pick! Help keep the special needs area clean and safe. 🐐🧼 Check it out: steampunkfarms.org/donate#wi…

smokey discovers that the best way to guard a sanctuary is to look absolutely innocent while chaos u steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed

Wishlist Wednesday is here, and Jadzia’s hosting with their Goat Care pick! Nutrition, enrichment, and more for our goat crew. Check it out: steampunkfarms.org/donate#wi… 🐐✨

Ever wonder how to connect with someone who holds tight to tradition? Start by honoring their roots. Ask about their family stories or a custom they cherish, and let them know you’re genuinely moved by something specific—a recipe, a ritual, a memory. It’s not just small talk; it’s a bridge. (And yes, I’ve fumbled this before, trust me. 😅) When you show you value their world, they’re more likely to hear you out on new ideas, even the tough ones. It’s about trust, not tactics. We’re diving into this kind of thoughtful advocacy in our Academy lessons—worth a peek if you’re curious. Speaking of bridges, I’m grateful for the ones we build here every day with folks like you, and with residents like, Jazzy, and the lasting spirit of her late mother, Ama, who remind me to listen first. 🐷🐐 rescuebarn.steampunkfarms.or…

Happy (belated) Mother’s Day! 🐷💕🌸 Yesterday got away from me, so I’m going to try to make it up with two memorable moments today. We’ll see how that goes. 😵‍💫 Firstly…I can’t let Mother’s Day go too far by without remembering the day we met Mama Pattie and her 10 littles ranging from “very little” to “not-so-little-anymore little.” She was wild on the Morongo Indian Reservation, trying to keep her family safe from cars, predators, and Tribal Police who had targeted them all for elimination. There were rescues and adopters eager to help one or two pigs, but the decision was made to keep the family intact instead. That decision in February 2018 set Steampunk Farms on a path towards large-field, herd environment sanctuary rather than individual-pen, small-scale sanctuary — a decision that has shaped the lives of hundreds of animals since. Happy Mother’s Day, Mama Pattie! With love from Millie, Ophelia, Ralphie, Oscar, Nellie, Gretel, Opal, Mike, Sully, Otis, and all of us two-leggers who love you, too! 🥰 steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed…

jute discovers that the deepest thoughts grow best when you're sitting on a giant squash. steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed

We’re just 17 days away from the 10th anniversary of our very first Steampunk Farms Rescue Barn rescue. It feels surreal to type that. Days often feel endless, but weeks, months, years, DECADES…they come and go like ocean tides, with a hypnotic rhythm we don’t notice until it’s gone. This month of memories has held a certain heaviness for me, and today’s is no exception. Bam Bam came into the world prematurely. His mother was underweight and under stress when we rescued her, and her baby boy paid the price. Wilma had seemed to recover well, but Bam Bam was born weak, unable to stand or suckle, on a cold, February night, a full week sooner than we were told to expect him. We had assembled a “kidding kit” like the many groups and forums I’d joined suggested, but it wasn’t enough. Bam Bam only lived for 25 hours. Bam Bam was the first baby I’d seen come into the world, and he was the first I’d known to leave it. I sat with Wilma, and I cried. Seeing her enormously engorged teats, I recalled the pain of weaning my own babies. That was gradual, and still excruciating. How much was she hurting? I was crying enough for both of us, but she was carrying the physical pain of Bam Bam’s death alone. I touched her udder. It was hot, hard, and she startled. As she jumped away, a droplet of thick colostrum formed at the tip of her teat. I moved towards her to wipe it off, but she jumped again, and another formed. I left her alone with Bam Bam while I prepared his tiny grave. I returned with a peace offering: a small handful of sweet grain. She accepted, and allowed me to caress more colostrum from her teats. It was my intention to improve to her comfort while her body responded to the lack of need for milk, but over the following days, we fell into a rhythm. She seemed to look forward to a tasty treat in one of my hands and relief provided by the other. She began seeking my attention, deliberately stepping onto the makeshift milking stanchion we’d assembled, standing still while I massaged her. With no real intent to use the milk she was producing, I began filling bags in the freezer. Wilma and I met up twice a day for milking. Even after she no longer needed it for pain relief, she was eager. Whether because she got snacks not available to other goats, or she appreciated the quiet moments to remember her little boy, healing her heart a bit each day, we continued our twice-daily routine for many months. Eventually, she stopped seeking out time on the stanchion, and we turned the final page in that chapter of both our lives. What came next was a decision about the gallons of frozen goat milk in the freezer. It had taken over, and spilled into the back-up freezer, too. If we weren’t going to consume it, a quick google search recommended it be thrown away or used to make soap. Soap. Handmade, old-fashioned, skin-soothing soap. That was an idea! Making use of Bam Bam’s milk was the catalyst for Cleanpunk Farms Soap Company. Though the first few dozen trial batches contained goat milk, that hasn’t been an ingredient since 2017. Now, I make over 100 different varieties using only plant oils, avoiding palm oil or any palm-derived oils, emulsifiers, or surfactants. To be completely honest, Cleanpunk Farms Soap Company is hanging by a thread…I’ve sold 9 bars in the entirety of 2026. Plummeting sales in the face of rising ingredient costs makes for a failing business. If Cleanpunk Soap were just a business, it would’ve shuttered years ago. But, it’s not just a business. It’s an art, a skill-based craft I’ve honed, an opportunity to tell the life stories of our residents - current and past. It’s a legacy that belongs to Wilma and Bam Bam. And me. Happy May 9th, Friends. ❤️ SteampunkFarms.org

Rosemary's running the show for Wishlist Wednesday this week! Her pick: all the essentials that keep our pot belly pig residents snorting, rooting, and philosophizing in comfort. She knows what she's talking about. 🐷💚 steampunkfarms.org/donate#wi…

Day 5 of our month-long, 10th anniversary celebration… When Princess Leia was born to her abandoned, much-too-young-to-be-a-mother mother in 2020, she was the runt of the litter, struggling to keep up with five siblings. When she had a series of seizures at 6 months old, we thought we would certainly lose her. But, over 24 hours, the shaking became less frequent and her eyes began to refocus. She wasn’t able to swallow, but the seizures had subsided. She was tube-fed until she graduated to syringe feeding. Eventually, she was able to eat baby food on her own. Never did we ever expect to celebrate her first birthday, so as the date grew closer, we gathered her best friends (our most loyal volunteers), bought her a dress for for a Queen, and as we wished her a happy 1st birthday, we also coronated her Queen Leia. 👑 This September, Queen Leia will be 6 years old. She is still small, still moves a bit awkwardly, and still prone to choking. Her pellets are always soaked, and she eats under a close, watchful eye. We have learned her most problematic foods (the hard and scary way…no mango chunks in her yard, please! 🙏), and removed them from her menu. Today, I’m looking back at this moment of celebration, and marveling at how far we’ve made it. You and me, Queenie Beanie…we’ve got this. 💪 - Krystal

It’s May the Fourth and we’re 23 days away from the 10th anniversary of Steampunk Farms Rescue Barn. 😱Today, we’re celebrating Star Boars Day! 🚀🐷🌟 (Doc, Casey, Tofu and their brothers have long since been neutered, but “Star Barrows” just doesn’t hit the same, amiright? 😜) As I’ve recalled and reminisced, deciding on the 31 most significant lessons and memorable moments to share this month, I couldn’t help but think of COVID. It’s impossible to ponder the last decade without it… For us, out here on the mountain, staying home wasn’t a change. Isolation wasn’t new; washing our hands hourly was already status quo. But, veterinary care. That changed, and not for the better. Our large animal doctor stopped making farm calls. Clinic services were vastly reduced. Elective procedures - including spays and neuters - were postponed indefinitely. Low-cost services were suspended, and mobile clinics sat parked. For nearly TWO YEARS. During that time, feral cats weren’t TNR’d, and colony caretakers across SoCal were faced with growing populations on top of rampant inflation. Feral kittens were orphaned at devastating rates, and volunteers were physically, financially, and emotionally broken. Dog populations suffered. Rabbit populations suffered. Pig populations suffered. We - the rescue community as a whole - are STILL feeling the consequences of cancelled spay/neuter services. Hundreds of thousands of dollars (and countless gallons of blood, sweat, and tears) have been spent catching up with COVID-era population explosions. Today’s lesson is not for us, alone, but for humanity as a whole: spay/neuter services - particularly for homeless animals - are NOT elective. Should we ever face pandemic restrictions again, remember our animal stewardship responsibilities, we must. #StarWarsDay

sly's trying to send a message, but something tells us it's getting lost in translation. steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed

The auction stamped her "no sale." In factory-farm language, that's a specific word: downer. An animal too sick or too broken to walk to slaughter. It's the industry's word for the failed product at the end of the assembly line — and the assembly line is the whole story. A piglet is born into a metal crate her mother can't turn around in. Weaned at three weeks instead of three months because the next litter is already on the calendar. Crowded onto a slatted concrete floor she'll never leave, breathing ammonia thick enough to scar her lungs. Fed antibiotics not to cure her — to keep her alive long enough in conditions no animal can stay healthy in. Pushed by feed and genetics to grow faster than her own bones can carry her. Most make it to the truck. Some don't. The ones who don't are the downers — collapsed from heat, lameness, infection, or a heart that gave out under the weight of an unnatural body. Industry policy says they're not supposed to enter the food supply. In practice, plenty do. The rest get dragged off, shot, dumped. Then the pipeline keeps going — into us. FDA's December report: U.S. livestock antibiotic sales jumped 16% in a single year — the biggest one-year rise in the decade they've tracked it. Pigs alone consumed 43% of all medically important antibiotics sold. Fluoroquinolones — a class critical to human medicine — spiked 49% in pig production. That's not a farming statistic. That's a public health forecast. The same pharmaceutical companies that sell antibiotics to the feedlot will sell the resistant-infection treatments, the statins, the insulin, and the chemotherapy to the people who eat what the feedlot produces. The loop closes around all of us. This is not the farming our grandparents did. It got measurably crueler in our lifetime — by metrics the industry itself publishes — because cruelty is what scale demands when an animal is reclassified as a unit. Zipper was a unit when she got to us. The vet couldn't even start an IV — she was too dehydrated. We went home with subcutaneous fluids and not much hope. Day three, she lifted her snout toward our voices. Day seven, she sat up for scrambled eggs. Day eighteen, we caught her rooting in the dirt — that perfect, joyful, intended pig behavior the system erases by design. Her tail uncurled from the spiral of stress. She remembered who she was. That's the part the system can't account for: there was always a someone in there. The auction didn't see it. The feed conversion ratio didn't see it. The shrink-wrap label didn't see it. We saw it because we stopped to look — and because Zipper, stubborn the way pigs are stubborn, refused to disappear. You don't have to be vegan to think this pipeline has gone too far. You don't have to swear off bacon tomorrow to agree that an animal too broken to stand is the symptom of a system that broke her. Three things, today: 🐖 Share this post. Most people have never been told what downer means. Tell them. 🐖 Eat one fewer factory-farmed meal this week. Not zero. One. Demand shapes supply. 🐖 Support a sanctuary. Steampunk Farms exists because "no sale" isn't supposed to be the last word on a life. The industry sees a downer. We see Zipper. Start there. #animalrescue #sanctuarylife #rescuebarn #farmsanctuary 🔗 rescuebarn.steampunkfarms.or…

Wishlist Wednesday is here, and Sylvester the hog is hosting with his Hog Wild list! Everything our pigs need for comfort and joy. Check it out at steampunkfarms.org/donate#wi… 🐷✨

A federally endangered animal already surviving on emergency $500,000 water drops is about to have its last connected habitat cut by a 500,000-volt transmission line. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a route on a map. The Peninsular bighorn sheep have been on the U.S. Endangered Species list since 1998. They survive in scattered ewe groups across Anza-Borrego and the Peninsular Ranges, and the federal recovery plan only works if rams can move between those groups to keep the gene pool alive. When the springs dry up — which is happening more often now — Fish & Wildlife flies emergency water in by helicopter to keep them breathing. SDG&E’s proposed Golden Pacific Powerlink — a 500-kV line with steel lattice towers tall as a 20-story building — would cut a permanent industrial scar straight through the bighorn corridor the federal recovery plan says must stay connected. This isn’t a partisan fight. Federal biologists across four administrations, conservation hunters who’ve quietly funded bighorn recovery for decades, the Kumeyaay, Cahuilla, and Cupeño nations whose ancestral land this crosses, and ranchers across rural San Diego County are all looking at this map and saying the same thing. You don’t need a position on California energy policy to agree on this: An endangered species already on emergency life support shouldn’t have its last connected habitat cut by a 200-foot industrial corridor. What you can do — 30 seconds to 30 minutes: ⚡️ 30 sec: Share this. People who don’t know this is on the table can’t speak up. ⚡️ 5 min: Sign up for updates at theabf.org/powerline-updates so you know when public comments are due. ⚡️ 30 min: Attend an SDG&E virtual open house May 12 or May 14 (noon or 5:30pm) and put one sentence on the record. The CPUC rejected this same corridor through this same Park in 2008, calling it environmentally unacceptable with 52 unmitigable impacts. The bighorn were healthier then. Endangered species shouldn’t be a routing problem. Some places shouldn’t be the cheapest path. This is one of them. rescuebarn.steampunkfarms.or…

smokey learns that sometimes the green-eyed monster looks a lot like a very stubborn donkey. steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed

A "Congrats Grad!" balloon released in San Bernardino can land in the Mojave as a desert tortoise's last meal. That's not hypothetical. That's biology. Tortoises mistake balloon scraps for wildflowers. Sea turtles mistake them for jellyfish. Latex isn't "biodegradable" in any timeframe that matters — balloons in seawater have been observed retaining their elasticity past the one-year mark. Mylar lingers forever, and the metallic coating that makes it shiny also makes it a wildfire ignition source when it drifts into a power line. Southern California Edison logged more than 1,100 balloon-caused outages in a single year. A single mylar balloon started a 75-acre fire in Butte County in 2015. A balloon bouquet drifted into transmission lines and ignited the 11,000-acre Deer Fire in 2013. Here's the thing… you don't need a position on climate change to think this is gross. You don't need a peer-reviewed study to know a plastic bag in a sea turtle's stomach is a problem. Pollution is the rare piece of common ground big enough to park a city on — hippies, hunters, ranchers, surfers, evangelicals, atheists, libertarians, labor organizers — almost nobody disagrees that a tire fire upwind of an elementary school is bad. Animal advocacy doesn't have to wait for the bigger argument to settle. The wildlife dying in our deserts and oceans aren't waiting either. The ask: 🎈 Don't release balloons. Any of them — mylar, latex, "biodegradable," sky lanterns. Weight them, pop them, recycle them indoors. 🎈 Speak up at memorials, gender reveals, grand openings, graduations. Drone shows, lasers, and reusable kinetic art exist — and frankly look cooler. 🎈 Share this post. Balloon-release culture only ends when enough people refuse to participate. Pollution is bad. Almost everyone agrees. Let's start there. 🐢 rescuebarn.steampunkfarms.or…

Found something tucked away in our barn feed archives — the story of how Sherlock (our resident pig detective) inspired soap bars that smell like leather-bound books and vanilla pipe tobacco. Complete with his investigative review of the process. 🐷📚 steampunkfarms.org/barn-feed…