Author: Steve Hardin

Assimilation issues

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Well we are not part of the Weather Underground yet. One of the things that Annmarie and I did not know was that Weather Underground actually has recommendations for brands and models of weather stations that work well with their website. We did not get a recommended brand so Annmarie is going to have to work harder to make it happen. I am sure she can win once she puts her mind to it. She tells me that she just redid it today about two hours ago and thinks it may work! We are KORPILOT6 and so far it is not updating put it can take up to one day to update on Weather Underground so we will hopefully be up and running tomorrow. The ram must have had some issues when he was impregnating all the ewes. We went four days without a single ewe having a baby. Since Thursday we have only had one ewe per day give birth. We are thinking he went at his job gangbusters and got all the compliant and easy ewes first, had to take a few days of rest to recuperate and then started to work harder to get all the Wiley ewes. This part of the process seemed to take longer if our extended birthing time is any indication of his progress.

On Thursday I found the first single baby and isolated them in the momma baby area for the day. Unfortunately, I had installed our brand new aluminum gate between the momma/baby and pregnant ewe area. Doing work in the barn should not be an unfortunate thing but it seems like whenever I change something the sheep figure out how to prove that the job is incomplete. The little buggers can squeeze through the new gates! I had three lambs in the wrong area and unlike the feeders that they usually just crawl back out, they did not want to leave all those adult sheep even though none of them were their mommas. Two of the babies had ear tags already and the third was tagless but a big baby and not new. The first two just ran over and found momma and ate, the tagless one was crying nonstop and could not find momma. I had to block the new gate with an old wooden gate to keep the lambs from repeating that trick.

Momma had abandoned him so he came inside and went into the laundry basket. He jumped out first thing and ended up doing the four way splits on our tile floor. I was heating up his bottle when this occurred. After saving him he took a little milk and fell instantly asleep. I fed him three more times but every time he got a little in his tummy he would just fall back asleep. Tisha came and saved him, he will go live with the other three bummers, all of them are still alive.

On Friday we had another single lamb and the rest of our brand new movable gates arrived. Now I just need to find time to fix them, Annmarie suggested we just cover the bottoms with chicken wire so as not to add weight to the gates.

Saturday morning we had a set of twins. Every lamb has been getting the paste and now that it is freezing outside we don’t have to use the syringes. We just squeeze out the frozen length we need and roll it into a ball and then feed it to the lamb.

The lambs are all over the place, I am sure we have lost track of how many we have despite writing it down every day. We should only have 9 untagged babies now but when I look at them running around it looks like more that’s that. Next week I will do the whole tag and band adventure and then we will count everyone again. We have 14 ewes left to give birth. One ewe is not pregnant so we will watch her, I am not sure if she is barren or just lost her baby but she has no udder and is not pregnant. She does have a girl tag, I might want to check her gender just in case there was an error. The lambs are very comical at this age and there are a lot of them. I was out in the barn today applying chicken wire to all the new gates and they were running all over the place. I had kicked out the ewes and pasted and moved the single lamb with our old lead ewe into the momma/baby area. This let me keep the barn closed up so I could fix and install new gates and not worry about mixing up everyone. This is a nightmare if you have to resort with this many babies. The chute doesn’t work well as everyone gets separated. You have to mix the sheep up in a pen then find babies and get them to bleat so you can find their momma then separate them off, it takes forever.

The lambs kept trying to go outside, so they would run down the chute and then run back to the main area. I snagged this picture when they were running back into the main area. This is not all of them.

I just zip tied some chicken wire to our brand new fancy gates. The gates are very light and we did not want to put wire panel pieces on them and weight them down. The chicken wire adds almost no weight and does its job well.

I installed a gate in the far end and attached two new anchor bolts into the main beam so there are no more bungee cords needed. I also installed a gate over the end of the chute so we can close the gate and the babies cannot sneak through. I also installed another gate between the momma/baby area and the pregnant ewes. I had to use bungee cords on that one. I need to install another board and some eye bolts.

Our current numbers are as follows:

1 death

4 bummers

10 singles

13 twins

3 triplets

25 ewes birthed

15 pregnant ewes pending birth

30 lambs dosed, tagged and banded

 10 babies dosed only

These numbers are a mere approximation. Until I do the tagging and banding and physically touch every baby and count every ewe these are best guess. It never fails that every year I try and keep a strict count I always manage to get off somehow. They do add up but that doesn’t mean they are right.

Lambing update

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Annmarie has been holding down the fort while I was off training all weekend. The sheep did not listen to instructions. I told them on Friday that they needed to have all their babies over the weekend so when Annmarie goes back to work they would be done birthing. They did not listen. We only had four ewes give birth over the weekend. It was enough to throw us past the 50% mark. So Annmarie chased all the pregnant ewes out of the barn and moved all the nursing ewes and babies over into the larger penned off area in the barn. Now the pregnant ewes have the smaller area. We had two more singles born, another triplet and a twin. She had to bring in the smallest triplet and feed it in the house. All the new lambs got dosed with Selenium paste and seem to be doing well. She tossed them in with the baby herd they are just missing tags and bands. We will wait till next weekend to tag and band again. Before anyone can go into the baby area they will need to be dosed with Selenium. This way we can track who has had medicine.

The babies have discovered that they can crawl into the wall feeders and it makes them 10″ taller than everyone else! This is a great dominance game so they are now jumping in and out of the feeders to establish a pecking order.

Tisha came and got the third bummer, he was a little boy and after selenium, food and some warmth he was able to walk around the house some. He will be in good hands.

You cannot count 19 ewes in this picture but it is almost all of the pregnant mothers. We have 2-3 favorite ewes in here. We would really like to keep the babies from our old lead ewe “#1”, our old solid brown ewe and the one in the bottom left corner of this picture. They are all hand tame and their babies are always super calm and grow up to be very calm ewes. Two of those ewes are old and skinny and may not survive another year. They are so skinny! We are feeding so much that the younger ewes are still very fat even after giving birth. So next year we may have to set up a special feed area just for them so we can give supplemental feed.

Our current numbers are as follows:

1 death

3 bummers

7 singles

12 twins

3 triplets

21 ewes birthed

19 pregnant ewes pending birth

30 lambs dosed, tagged and banded

6 lambs selenium dosed

All they need is a number

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I came home early today from work so we could catch up on the lambs. We had to bummer out a second one on Wednesday and it was not able to stand. After talking with several people we think it may be a Selenium deficiency. The trouble is there is not a really good salt lick for sheep that delivers selenium. The one for cows has a toxic dose of copper for sheep. They do make a paste you can feed them so we got some. I also picked up some more buckets and straps and plastic salt holders with predrilled holes in the bottom so the water doesn’t make a mess. After stopping at the feed store I headed home. We had decided to get this all done during daylight hours and we always underestimate how long it will take.

I told Annmarie we might as well tag and band at the same time. That way we will know who got medicine. So we chased all the babies and mommas into the barn and Annmarie got the three moms and four babies in main population with two extra ewes into the barn and we locked everyone else out. That left one mom and one lamb outside with the ewes. She had also managed to separate out two ewes and four babies this morning into the far pen in the barn. I usually just sit down on the barn floor and let Annmarie bring the lambs to me. I had to go into an unused corner of the barn to get a couple of piles of clean straw to toss down where I wanted to sit. I laid out the medicine and the tags and bander on each side of me and she proceeded to start catching babies. We did the combo area first and there are times you would think we killed the little boys. Some do not like the rubber bands on their testicles. They keep backing up after it happens in the hopes of getting away from the pain. After anywhere from 5-30 minutes they start behaving normally. The other reaction is to just sprawl out on the straw and appear to have died. It also goes away in 15-30 minutes. If you are going to be melodramatic you might as well draw it out.

We then snagged the four lambs in the middle part after kicking the two adult pregnant ewes out. We opened up the entire barn after snagging the two sets of twins on the end and pushed all done herd into the baby area.

Now we have 24 ewes left in “General Population” or “Gen Pop” for short per Annmarie. I get a kick out of it every time she says it. Only 23 have not delivered a lamb yet. We have had 17 ewes give birth for a total of 30 lambs in our barn. This gives us a reproductive rate of 176%!! This is very good. If you counted the two bummers and the one I found dead as live births we would have 194% birth rate, Annmarie tells me I cannot manipulate the numbers this way and only get to count the live lambs we have in the barn.

So the current numbers are as follows:

1 death

2 bummers

5 singles

2 triplets

11 twins

17 ewes birthed

23 ewes still pregnant

30 lambs tagged and banded

Bottleneck in progress

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In an attempt to eat more vegetables I added tomatoes to my breakfast fry. I do know that tomatoes are technically a fruit but some fruit with my starch and protein is better than no fruit. It’s fresh yukon gold potatoes, fresh onion, fresh garlic, fresh jalapeño, home grown ham all fried in bacon grease with some Slap yo Mamma seasoning and some tomatoes. It turned out quite nice. Annmarie did the morning barn run and reported only one new baby, a single.

So we have now had three singles born this batch. We have lost track of how many ewes have given birth and will need to do a count soon so we can predict when we will need to move the internal barn wall.

Our new weather station is looking pretty good! It is still not visible on Weather Underground so Annmarie will have to do some troubleshooting. We can see it and that is the most important part.

We had an odd request come through the blog. There is a person from Nigeria that wanted to use our chicken tracker but asked if we could do “crates” of eggs (30 in a crate) and feed in Kilograms and $ sign in Nigerian symbol. Well Annmarie went up to the computer and had it all converted and done with feed in grams per egg as an added bonus. It only took her 15 minutes and it now lives on our Blog. So anyone else from any other country that needs a slight adjustment to the chicken tracker let us know!

I tried to get all the babies into one area tonight to get a picture. I was unsuccessful. Care to guess how many babies are in the picture below? No cheating, give it a try first before I give the answer. Chores at night take an hour and we had to buy a hammer to break the ice now that it is actually getting cold.

There are 17 babies in the picture.

Let there be light

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The weather station is still working 24 hours later. Annmarie will have to figure out why its not talking to the Weather Underground as she is the go to electronics fixer.

When I went out to the barn this morning we only had one more lamb, a single, that makes the second single we have had this lambing season. I am counting as it has been very few this time. I got the new mom and baby over to the momma area and I used the isolated ewe’s lamb as bait and she walked through the whole crowd of sheep to go over into the chute system allowing me to move her into the momma area.

Annmarie and I have been talking about what we can do to better divide up the barn during lambing. One of the things we started this time in earnest was figuring out how to move a wall in the main part of the barn therefore expanding the momma baby area as lambs are born. We still need to keep the chute intact to allow us to get the sheep in and out of the barn. We went to Premier1fencing website today and ordered all the stuff. I will need to cut two 16′ 3×3 in panels into four foot sections and we will be ready. This will make it possible for us to just create a moving wall with gates in it for easy access throughout the barn. We probably have 50 bungee cords in use in the barn. When you have to jump over the wall or undo the bungees its easier to jump over. I only almost fell on my face twice. The nice part is there is a thick layer of poop impregnated straw just waiting to pad the fall. It would be more humiliating than anything.

If you look closely at the side of the grain bin in the below picture you will see our new Dewalt rechargeable light. I bought it as a Santa gift for Annmarie. It is incredibly bright and makes it a dream to work out in the dark. I was trying to figure out how to install boards everywhere to clamp it on when we accidentally discovered it has magnets! (Annmarie read the directions) She discovered it would stick to the grain bin fantastically so today I went out and used an old piece of tin and made metal pads throughout the barn on various walls.

You can see two of them on this wall at both ends of the picture. I installed five of these on opposite walls. The one end has the metal grain bin to mount on and the other side has a 2×6 that the light can be clamped onto. We can now move the light all around the inside of the barn. It is so cool we may get a second one and I can put off installing solar panels and a 12V electric system for another 3-5 years. Its rechargeable so we can just bring it inside the house and recharge it. We have had it a week and it is just as bright as ever. We typically only use it 30-60 minutes a day.

The chickens are enjoying the back hillside today. It is truly amazing to realize its almost January and we still have green grass on the hillside. You can see the weather station on the right end of the wood shed. We are getting a great wireless signal from it.