I came home early on Monday so Mr Rainman and I could sort the cows. We wanted to wean off the babies and move them down with the teenagers, then sort off the bull and put him in Alcatraz, pull six horned cows off the herd and load up into the trailer to go to the sale first thing Tuesday morning, and let the other momma cows go toward the upper pastures. This was all preceded by getting the cows into the corral. Despite three attempts the two of us could not drive the cows toward the corral. We need the arena panels to go across the spring access in the barn lot, the cows just kept breaking around us.
I went into the house and retrieved the border collie Chance so that the cows would move. There were some explicitly worded commands given once she started to ignore me. Eventually, we got the cows into the corral. Mr Rainman had just finished the last of the repairs on the corral on Monday and it worked. We managed to get six of the horned devils into the trailer.
They were dropped off at the auction house and the check for their sale already came to the house! It was pretty much what I expected for cows who are old and just had calves weaned off the day before. The important part is that they are no longer on the farm. The herd was already calmer once we got the crazy out of the group.
We are back to having to do nightly feeding of the sheep in the barn again. They take seven bales spread out amongst the feeders. I set out 10 bales initially and figured out what they could eat in a day from that. There are a couple of bales in the feeders that they don’t particularly like so if they want to nibble on something they are there. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of feeding the sheep at night, chase all the sheep out first and shut the door of the barn before feeding. The first night was total chaos with the sheep running around and jumping on the bales as I attempted to unwrap them to load them into the feeders. A couple of the bales had to stay on the floor as I could not get them away from the sheep. I now follow the cardinal rule when feeding and it is a lot more organized and a lot faster.
Stewart Creek Somethings 