Shearing Day

It was shearing day here on the a3farm.

OK, so it happened about two weeks ago now, but no one has recently accused me of being punctual about keeping up this blog.

I got a call on a Thursday evening from Elmer, the professional sheep shearer that we have hired the last few years.

He was in the area and needed a days work, could I be ready for him? I got ready.

I can shear sheep. I have sheared sheep. They don't like it much and neither do I.

When I shear a sheep they look like they have been run over by a lawn mower. They are generally bleeding in several spots. So am I. Usually we don't require stitches. Usually. I can do about ten sheep in a long weekend.

When Elmer shears a sheep he just sits it down on its butt and basically undresses it. It takes only a minute or two. The sheep doesn't seem to mind. Sometimes it barley seems to notice.

We worked most of the day, him shearing and me just making sure he had a constant supply of sheep. He trimmed all their hoofs while he was at it.

Many of our sheep are hair breeds or wool breeds crossed with hair breeds. They don't all need to be sheared but most of them do.

Except for about a dozen Florida Native ewes, the wool is not worth keeping. We shear them just to make them more comfortable in the summer heat. Most of the wool winds up in the compost pile.

He trimmed the hoofs of 71 head, all our adult ewes. He sheared 44 head. After doing all that he had an appointment at another farm nearby to do another 30 head or so. It was all done before dinner.

Some jobs it's best to hire done. I paid his fee and was glad to do it.

Is the Bald Egale endangered?

I don't know the official status of these creatures, but we have several more than we really need around here. What is becoming endangered here is laying hens.

For some years now we have been watching bald eagles fly over the farm as part of their commute. Apparently they nest in the thick woods to the south of us and fish in the lakes to our north. We enjoyed seeing them and until recently they never caused us a problem.

We have occasionally lost chickens to hawks. We found that hawks can be deterred by setting up strings with old computer CD's hanging from them in the chicken yard. This is the same thing your grandmother used to do when she set up pie plates to keep the birds out of her vegetable garden. The plates (or CD's) reflect sunlight at odd angles and tend to ward off birds including hawks.

Eagles are much braver than hawks I guess. They ignore the CD's and sometimes even knock them down when they drop in for a meal. An adult hen is too big for an eagle to carry off so they just eat about the top third of the chicken and leave the rest.

When hawks prey on the chickens they perch nearby for quite some time, apparently to make sure there is no danger. The roosters usually see them and raise an alarm causing all the chickens to run into their roosting shelter. The eagles do something similar at least some of the time, but from much farther away. This goes unnoticed by the roosters.

My bride tried to look up methods of scaring off eagles on the internet. Everything she found indicates that the only way to keep eagles from eating your chickens once they start is to run out of chickens.

It is illegal to kill eagles of course, which we knew. I would not do so even if it was mandatory. According to one source a federal permit is required to "harass" an eagle.

Just so you know, the loud noises, clapping, and gunfire you hear around the farm are part of our program to build up the self esteem of the raptor population and encourage them to renew their interest in fishing.

A permit? Good lord, we have some real intellectual giants working for the Feds don't we.

Lambing Season

In past years I would do a post for each new lamb born. Last year I did a post for the first half dozen and then just a more general post for all the rest.

The operation is big enough now that lambing is a season rather than an event or even a series of events.

We moved up the date we expected lambs this year by two months.

This was because we wanted a bit more age on the lambs when the stress of the hot summer weather set in. Last year most of the lambs were quite small when tropical storm fay hit us. The adult sheep and even the oldest lambs seemed to do OK, but the young ones suffered. We lost some and some of the others were slower growing out than they normally are.

The down side of lambing now is that the grass is dormant, feed is all hay we put up or bought, plus what ever supplements we provide. We give a small amount of soy meal to the ewes to help them with the nutritional requirements of lactation. That and free choice hay cost money.

Still, lambing has been going well and the whole flock seem to be in good condition even if our bank account is getting a bit thin.

We have 70 some lambs so far and expect to wind up with somewhere around 100.

Our ewes tend to be younger than is typical, we have been keeping ewe lambs for breeding stock for the most part to build up the size of the flock. Several of the first timers don't quite seem to have a handle on the motherhood thing. We have three young ewes penned up with their twin lambs to prevent them from totally rejecting one of them.

There are only two bottle bummers so far, one is being looked after by it's mama, who has some mastitis and and just does not have enough milk to feed it. The other is just a lamb that is not claimed by anyone that we put in with one or our reluctant mothers.

We had one ewe who had trouble with a very large single lamb. We tried to help, to pull the lamb, but only wound up chasing the ewe around the pasture while the poor lamb rode around with its head out the window, so to speak. After the ewe struggled with this for several hours my brothers family arrived for a visit from their home up north. My two nieces, 16 and 11, helped me catch her. I had warned the girls that the lamb may well be dead, but when we caught the now exhausted ewe, I pulled the lamb. It was alive and before long stumbled to its feet. The ewe was tired but otherwise fine.

My nieces, city kids, have told the story to everyone since and seem to think this whole farm thing is pretty cool.

Putting up hay

OK, so I am way behind on posting, better late than never I guess. We put up hay about two weeks ago and here finally is the write up.

Here are photos of the cutting, baling, and hauling.

Our old and small equipment did a good job, but as is most often with small equipment the work was slower than it would have been with big equipment.

As is also often the case with old equipment, we had to stop and fix things several times during the process.

Having said that, the hay is in the barn and there is enough to last the sheep through the winter.

Lots of help was received this year from big brother Jon, who came up for several days and worked like a dog the whole time.

The quote of the week from him: "I can't believe some people actually do this for a living!"

Misters Cooney and Nelson, the legendary "Over the hill gang" were on hand to bolt the machinery back together every time it fell apart, which was fairly often.

I'm grateful to everyone for all the help.

There is nothing like a barn full of hay to give me that "No matter what happens, we can make it" sort of feeling.

Fall

I generally think of fall as the beginning of the yearly cycle of the farm. The cycle could be said to start and end at any point during the year I guess, but in my mind it starts in the fall because that is breeding season.

Photo: One of the breeding groups, this one with our mature Katahhid ram

The ewes have spent the summer in a rotational grazing pattern after having their lambs weaned off them in the early summer. They have dried off and regained the condition they lost due to lambing and lactation. They are in good shape.

We have four rams we are using for breeding this season on about seventy ewes. Two of these rams are mature rams we have used for several years now. The other two are young rams we bought this year.

The ewes were separated into four groups. This was done in such a way as to:

1. Prevent inbreeding; rams are not bred to ewes they are related to.
2. Yearling ewes are bred, where possible (see 1 above) to a ram likely to through a smaller lamb.
3. More mature ewes with a good lambing history are bred to rams likely to through big, fast growing lambs.
4. For purebred ewes, to produce purebred lambs.
   

For us, two Katahdin rams are used to produce big fast growing lambs and two Florida Native rams are used to produce smaller lambs. The only purebred ewes we have are Florida Native so obliviously we use a purebred Florida Native ram on them.

So that's what farming is about!

If anyone asks why we are into farming, we can show them this. Warning, it's full of profanity but really funny IMHO.

The rest of the story about lambs

Looking at this badly neglected blog, I see I left off with the Florida Native lambs.

We did have other lambs, about 70 of them. Here they are last weekend as we moved them out from working them going back to their pasture.

We have yet to separate the lambs by gender, that will happen in two or three weeks. Then we'll put the ewe lambs in with the mature ewes. Over time we'll decide which of the ewe lambs to market and which to retain for future breeding.

We have 70 mature ewes now, 5 of which we a culling. We want to grow to about 100 breeding ewes eventually, but we don't need to get to that number in a single year.

The ram lambs will all go to market sometime close to Christmas.

On another positive note, it looks like we will have plenty of hay this year without having to buy any. We did a deal with a friend to sharecrop our ground with his nice new equipment. Lots of big round bales.

I'll still be able to get a second cutting of small square bales come October.

Last of the Florida Native lambs

Ewe # 33 had a single ewe lamb on the 28th of March. It weighed 8 pounds and was tagged # 507.

Herd Dog Clinic

Another farm not too far from us held a herd dog clinic last Saturday and we took pepper and spent the day there.

Pepper is an English Shepard that is over a year old now.

He knows all the basic obedience commands, and mostly he follows them, but he has a big wide stubborn streak.

He is around sheep every day here but has no idea about herding them, because I have no idea how to train him for that.

And that's where the clinic comes in.

John Carter and his wife hosted the affair, with Mr. Maurice MacGregor as the trainer.

Mr. MacGregor is an old Irish guy what has been training herd dogs all his life.

The photos here show the basic exercise used to get the dog to circle either left of right around a group of sheep.

With several ewes in a round pen, get the dog to circle and give him the commands when he's already doing the action.

The goal is to get him opposite you moving from your 10:00 o'clock to your 2:00 positions trying to push the sheep to you.

Pepper did well, showing the necessary instinct.

There is hope for him, all I need to do is learn to train him and get him working with someone who knows how. Like Mr. MacGreror.

Thurday's Lamb

A single ram lamb tagged #506.

The mother is Florida Native ewe #4, 10 pounds at birth.

Tuesday's Lamb

This is the biggest lamb ever born on our farm, 12 pounds a birth!

Born Tuesday to Florida Native ewe # 11. A single ram lamb tagged #505.

Floirida Native Ewe Lamb

Ewe # /11 had a ewe lamb we tagged #504.

It weighs 9 lbs.

In the last 24 hours it has rained almost 3 1/2 inches. The wind is gusting to 45 mph.

Mama and baby act like they could do it all over again tomorrow.

First Lambs

Dam 53518/16 #501 Ram Lamb 8 1/2 lbs.

Born 3/2/08 early am about 3 or 4am.

The six Florida Native ewes we bought a few months baqck have started lambing. The other ewes aren't due for another siz weeks or so.

Dam 53518/12 had twin ewe lambs about mid-morning. The weighed in a 6.5 lbs each.

A funny day with firearms

You see there was this rooster. He was one of the yard birds I wrote about in another post.

At the start there were three yard birds. Then a hawk got the smallest cockerel before it was full grown.

The other cockerel and a hen have been wandering about the farm since then without any interference from me.

Eventually they started to get into some bags of feed I had stored in the barn, tearing open the bags and making a mess.

I decided to off the rooster, now a full grown Rhode Island Red about 18 inches tall. My hope was that the hen would then find her way back to the main flock to get some company.

I decided to off him a few weeks back but never seemed to get around to it.

Yesterday I was going out to take care of the peeps and saw that the yard birds were close by. I have feed stored near there too; I didn’t want them to get into it so I decided it was time to do the chore.

I shooed them out of the shed and waited for the rooster to wander some distance from the hen.

I used the small revolver I carry with me all the time and shot him from about five yards away.

He jumped up as if frightened by the noise and ran off to a place several hundred yards away. He left a few feathers behind but otherwise showed no other signs of injury.

I though I must have missed him although I couldn’t quite see how I could have at that distance.

Like most shooters I don’t practice as much as I should. It worried me.

It was not possible for me to do anything more about him in the time I had. I needed to get back to work.

Later that evening I went out to do the other chores and noticed he was still in the place I had seen him last, now dead as Cesar.

Chickens are famous for running around for a time after having their heads chopped off, so I guess it’s not as hard to kill them as it is to convinced them that they have undergone a change of state.

My bride bought me that pistol for my birthday last year. I’ve shot some paper targets with it as well as a few grapefruits. None of those things got up and ran away after I shot them.

The gun is primarily intended as a self defense piece. It is a Smith & Wesson 38 special snub nose revolver and was loaded with ammo intended for self defense use.

If I’m ever forced to use it on some 300 pound bad guy named Bubba I hope it makes a more immediate impression on him than it did on that rooster!

Morning Chores

Just lately sunrise has been happening about the time I get going.

Also just lately the White Rock pullets I’m raising have taken to roosting in the nest box of the poultry schooner.

This totally soils the nesting material.

So I rigged up a way to shut them out of the nest box at night.

This necessitates opening the nest box back up first thing in the morning.

Today I refilled the feeder and took a few pictures.

These six Florida Native ewes are going to lamb soon.

So they are on a bit of pasture that is over seeded with rye grass, away from the other ewes.

This way they get a little better nutrition.