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.

More Peeps

Early today the Post Office called to tell me that my day old chicks had arived. This is the second batch of 50 Cornish cross birds I've done this year.

The last batch was brooded in an old 250 gallon cattle tank I happen to have. I have a single battery brooder as well, but that was full of young laying pullets at the time.

It generally takes two weeks to brood broiler peeps to the point where they are feathered out enough to put out on the pasture.

Keeping 50 peeps in the cattle tank was OK for the first week, the second week it was not clean enough to suit me. This time 25 peeps are in the cattle tank and 25 in the battery brooder.

I have a deal now with some friends who also raise broilers. They start a batch one month; I start a batch the next month, and so on. We sell to a common pool of customers, butchering the birds here at my farm.

I expect we’ll keep this going until the real hot weather comes, late May I think.

Sometimes when I plant, things grow

Way back in the olden days, when I wrote the last post, the photo with the plowed ground now is growing grass.

It is not a big enough plot to support our flock of seventy something ewes, but it's big enough for a few.

A while ago we bought a half dozen full blood Florida Native ewes. They had been bred by a Florida Native ram that came from the University of Florida flock.

They are set to lamb about the end of the month which is sooner than our production ewes. So they are on the green grass.

The laying hens and their roosters are nearby.

Next year I intend to plow and plant the whole field, so I am keeping the chickens there to fertilize the ground.

I ordered a batch of 50 broilers yesterday and will run them back there too

Harvest and Planting

It works out that harvest season and planting season are the same season around here. That makes for a very busy time on the farm.


The summer rain cycle ended a bit later than normal (yea right, normal weather, sure!).


In mid October we had almost no hay in the barn. I crossed my fingers and cut one hay field. That was immediately followed by just over six inches of rain in a week.

The rain stopped and I doubled my bet, cutting a second field and just let the first lay there and attempt to dry out.

I set the rake to tedder mode (just to toss the hay around without putting it in a windrow) and fluffed up the rained on hay. Then raked up the fresh cut hay. Then baled it all up, about 125 small square bales from each field.

The we went to work on the planting.

I plowed up about an acre. It got disked and run over with a spring tooth harrow and made into a smooth seed bed. I broadcast both winter rye and Rye grass (Gulf) separately then ran the drag over it.

Another acre just got torn up with the spring tooth harrow and seeded the same way.

The idea is to see if the extra work of plowing is justified by the resulting growth.

The cooler dry weather continued through last week when the last hay field was cut, raked, baled and put up. The barn is nearly full.

The future of food

Herrick over at The Deliberate Agrarian sent the DVD "The Future of Food" around to a list of folks with blogs. The idea was, as I recall, was to watch it and do a review on the blog.

I watched it and here is the review.

It describes a set of problems, then suggests what can be done to improve things.

As for the problems, the subject matter of the DVD is basically the application of technology to food products in the last decade or so.

This includes emergence of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in plants used as food and/or feed crops. It also briefly talks about the same sort of thing with animals.

It deals with this in the context of the centralization of the ownership of the large agribusiness corporations.

It also make the point that patents have been granted to corporations for living organisms, all be it genetically modified organisms, for the first time, within the last decade.

These patents are being protected with harsh measures, basically big companies suing the socks off ordinary farmers.

I don't exactly where the description of a problem, any problem, crosses a line into OHMYGODWEAREALLGOINGTODIE!!!!!! territory, but I think this film gets very close at several places.

That's a shame, because in my opinion, it isn't necessary.

It contains a bunch of throw away lines that add no information and actually serve as a distraction and, for me at least, and caused me to question the credibility of the rest of the information presented.

For example, when pointing out that farmers spray herbicides on their crops, a fact that will surprise no one, they describe 2/4D as "a chemical similar to agent orange".

Well, 2/4D and agent orange are both broad leaf herbicides, so I guess the statement is true enough, but the implication is that agent orange was a scary substance used as a weapon in war, so we should all be afraid of this other stuff as well.

As I said, all this over the top stuff isn't necessary. It runs the risk or causing the viewer to dismiss the whole message as the rantings of a bunch of tin foil hat wearing nut jobs.

I am still not sure what the agenda of the folks that produced this film are.

Here's the deal in my opinion.

All this gene splicing that has been done cannot be undone.

I don't know for sure that this presents any danger to the public. I don't know for sure that is does not.

The pro GMO interests claim that this is all perfectly safe and overall a good thing. They claim science supports their position.

The science they site is beyond the ability of the average person, beyond my ability at least, to evaluate in detail.

They are not of course, disinterested parties. They profit from this technology, selling it or using it.

The film makes the point, not anywhere strongly enough in my view, that the gains provided by this technology do nothing for the consumer. GMO vegetables are not "better" or more nutritious that traditional food.

It is only better from the point of view of the producer. It is (at least in theory) cheaper and less trouble to grow.

The ordinary consumer, anyone is our society today, is exposed to lots of "scientific evidence" to support any number of claims.

Not all of it can be true, science is used to support lots of contrary claims.

From "global warming" to the "heartbreak of psoriasis", junk science is everywhere.

Everyone knows that much of the "scientific evidence" there hear is crap, the problem is that it is difficult or impossible to tell the junk science from the sound science.

Consumers are sceptical, and rightly so.

And herein lies the good news.

Those of use who are willing and able to provide food to the marketplace that does use this technology find a ready market for our product.

We do not need to prove that bio technology is a bad thing, we just need to truthfully claim that we don't use it.

This whole situation presents the small scale farmer an opportunity that we did not have before. That I think is a good thing.

More Farm Toys

One requirement for a farm toy is that must be "funky". Well, this one's funky.

This is an essential tool in wheelchair accessible farming, which as we all know, is a goal of just hoards of people.

This is what it looks like, and old electric golf cart. I use it to zoom around the farm.

Our farm is all flat grass land. This would be useless in steep, rough country.

It is set up so that I can toss my wheelchair into the back, the blue box behind the seat, without taking it apart.

Before I got this, I just used my pickup truck to get around the place.

That works fine, but I have to take the wheelchair apart and fold it up every time I get in and out of the truck. On a normal day of running around and working on the farm, that happens about a thousand times.

I like the gator UTV's and similar vehicles people use for this kind of task, but I'm just too cheap to buy one. This thing is old and relatively cheap. And funky, of course.

Yard Birds

Several years ago when we started raising a few chickens we had one hen who would escape over my electronet fence and hang out in the barn and the adjoining barnyard all day.

Every evening she would go back over the fence and roost with the other birds.

Mama named this hen "Harriet" as in Harriet Tubman, on account of all the escaping she was doing.

Now any hen who goes over the fence is called Harriet.

This year we had a different hen that did that. This hen would also lay eggs in a mostly unused corner of the barn. We didn't notice the eggs at the time.

Eventually, she want broody and hatched some of the eggs.

She is now a yard bird. She show no interest in re-joining the rest of the flock. She stays out with her chicks all the time.

So this is Harriet.

Family farm, farming family

Some time back one of my brothers digitized a bunch of photos and other documents that had once belonged to my father. He sent us all a copy.

Thanks Jay.

I had not seen most of this before.

This first photo is my grandfather in front of his dairy barn. My guess is that the picture is from the 1930's.

I don't remember ever having seen this barn. I've been to this farm many times. By the time of my earliest memories it was my uncle Al's farm.

As far as I can recall, uncle Al never raised any livestock at all, just row crops.

My dad did talk about the dairy business a few times that I can remember. If you had asked him to list all the jobs he would never want to have, I'm sure dairy farming would come in first.

His beef (no pun intended) with dairy work was that it involved getting up WAY to early in the morning. Pop was one of the most completely nocturnal people I have ever known.


This is my dad with a dairy calf. It would be from the late 1930's, dad was born in 1929.

My dad was the youngest of eight children. The family farm was (and still is) in Southern Minnesota.

Uncle Al took over the farm from his father. Eventually my cousin Mark took it over from his dad. Cousin Mark lives and farms there still.

My grandfather never spent much time in school. He want as far as the seventh grade I was told.

He wasn't too impressed with what he saw formal education doing for his friends and other farmers he knew. Many times he had seen the children of other farmers go off to school and then come back and try to implement what they had learned at the Ag school at the land grant Universities.

This seemed to always result in that farm taking on lots of debt and eventually failing completely.

According to my dad, grandpa offered to pay him to stay on the farm and skip school.

No doubt that had a lot to do with why pop left the farm and went to school. He stayed at school so long he wound up with a PHD and a faculty job. Contrary runs in my family.

Still he could not stop being a farm kid. By the 1960's he had seven children, six of them boys. We lived in Southeast Ohio, pop was on the faculty of Ohio University.

He bought a farm, actually three adjoining farms, a total of 392 acres in S.E. Ohio. He would joke that it was either that or put a bail bondsman on retainer, to keep his kids out of trouble.

Very recently I read reference to a farmer stereotype. You know, some yokel with three teeth who is too stupid to do anything else.

That is not at all the way I was taught to view farmers. Pop said many times that in his line of work it was necessary only to know how to teach and to know a lot about whatever subject you were teaching.

A farmer, on the other hand, must know Biology, Agronomy, Meteorology, Economics, Chemistry, Mechanics, and a long list of other subjects. And if you got any of it wrong, or worse yet, just had a bit of bad luck, no payday for you.

It's a lot easier just to be a College Professor.

Anyway, that how I wound up bailing hay, building fences, chasing girls, and drinking beer during my teenage years. As opposed to just chasing girls and drinking beer like most kids I knew at the time.

That is why I still play at farmer. I blame my dad. And his dad, and his dad.

Farm Toys

A while back, my old friend Mr. Cooney came across a "disk plow" that he thought would work with my small tractor. We made a deal.

I had never heard of a disk plow. A plow, yes, a disk, yes, but never a disk plow.

On my dad's farm we made hay and we planted fence posts, but we never plowed anything.

This is a disk plow.

I used it to till the little garden patch where I grew corn and cow peas this spring.

It did a nice job I think, in this light sandy soil we have here.

The plan is to plant it into something I can use to help finish my market lambs.

I would like to get to the point where I don't have to buy supplemental feed for anything.

Finishing lambs is the first thing to do in that regard because I have customers that want meat that has never been fed any GMO or conventionally fertilized/sprayed feed.

Most customers don't need that but those who do will pay a premium for it.

American Farmer

Way back in the 18th century, a book was written made up of letters between an American Farmer and a European. It was intended, at least in part to explain Americans to those across the pond.

More information about Letters from and American Farmer. I had read it years ago as no doubt many of you have.

Anyway, a blog I often read that previously had nothing to do with agriculture is using this as a basis for a discussion thread that, from what I've seen of this blog in the past, will be interesting.

I have no idea where the discussion will lead, but it would seem that Mrs du Toit has "discovered" our little corner of the universe.

Having been in and around farming all my life, I forget what weird zoo specimens we must seem to be to those who have never been exposed to things agrarian, which is to say, most everyone.

Long time, no post.

Nothing has been added to this blog all summer. It's not that nothing is happening here, just that I got bored with the blog and seemed to always have something I'd rather do that create a new post.

So far I had mostly limited my posting to issues directly related to farming. I think I will not stick quite as closely to that rule as I have in the past.

I read lots of "How To" sorts of information on the subjects related to agriculture, and of course almost never put the suggestions made there into practice.

Folks write, as I have done in the past, about what they do on their operation, and of course it worked well in the situation described, but likely would not be a "best practice" in a different situation.

In farming there are almost always many, many correct ways of doing a thing. A farm is the ultimate cosmic gizmo and there are so many variables in play at any given time that no two situations are ever the same.

So, I intend to at least try to include a lot more than just the "what" but also "why" and all manor of musings that go along with the avocation of agriculture.

Intensive rotational grazing

Since weaning I have begun a new form of rotational grazing.

It involves using electric nets (from Premier) to contain sheep on a rather small paddock for a period of just a few days.

This is not a new idea of course, but it involves more frequent moves than what has been done here in the past.

The fencing is comprised of 164 ft sections of net set up two nets long and half a net wide. This works out to something over half an acre. The photo shows two such paddocks (click on the picture to enlarge), the near one populated by this springs lambs, about 50 of them.

I have just enough netting to set up two paddocks and leap frog over the active paddock.

Much of what I am attempting I got from the book “Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence” by Bill Murphy. I think I bought the book from the Stockman grass farmer web site.

Like all the other “How to” books I’ve seen on farming, it does not offer a system I can use on our farm as it is. It does not pretend to do that.

The author lives in Vermont, a very different climate than ours here in North Florida. So the details of his system may not work here but the basic principals are the same.

The main idea is to use the livestock to maximize the production of the grass, rather than using the grass to maximize the growth of the livestock. That does not mean that the livestock are not important, but the idea is to focus on the grass.

Anyway, there is lots of good information out there on rotational grazing. What I am trying to do is adapt them to fit my situation.

For me, that means finding way to make these frequent moves without too much work. We farm part time here and time is always in short supply.

I’m using 2 50-gallon rubber water troughs and filling them from a 65-gallon plastic tank a carry in the back of my pickup. I fill it with a garden hose at the house and just use gravity to get the water from the tank to the trough.

To move the netting I just lay it on the grass and drag it along to its new location and set it up there. If I try and gather it up to move it, I get a tangle that takes a long time to un-snarl.

The move process is still clumsy but I hope to smooth it out with a bit of practice.

Fence line Weaning

There have been lots of farm happenings that should have found their way into this blog, but have not.

We hired a professional sheep sheerer this year for example.

He averaged three minutes per sheep. It sometimes takes me ten times that long.

Anyway, this post is about weaning. We did that the weekend of June 22.

We put all the sheep through the chute and wormed the ones that needed it.

Now that summer has started and the weather is hot and wet, we need to do this about every three weeks. Most sheep will not need to be wormed, but the ones that do can go down fast if we don’t take care of it.

This time we sorted the lambs from thier mammas as we worked them.

Then we took the ewes down one side of the fence and the lambs down the other, back to the pasture they had just left (for the ewes) and the one next to it (for the lambs).

In theory this reduces the stress of weaning to it’s minimum. I guess that’s true, but the next few days were a bit noisy in any case.

Now the lambs are being moved in a very short rotational grazing pattern. More on that in the next post.