barn

Assimilation issues

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.

Let there be light

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.

Lambies are here

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The quail have discovered our yard. We like this as we get to see them and the dogs seem to ignore them. The only real problem is our very large living room windows look out onto the yard. The stupid quail think they can fly through the window! I heard a large crash in the living room and ran into it from the kitchen, there were feathers on the window but by the time I got to the window the cat had already managed to pounce on one stunned quail and bit it in the neck killing it. I saved the other one but it had broke its neck and was dead so I didn’t really save its life. We would love to have 50+ quail flying around all over the farm, instead we have about 15 now flying around and we are two more short now.

I snagged this picture of all the pregnant ewes the day before they started popping out babies. They were very interested in eating as much hay as possible and ignoring me. I had just thrown out another bale of straw a few days before this picture.

The lambs are coming fast and furious now! Annmarie is on winter break from her job and is going out to the barn three times a day to deal with all the new babies. We have had one ewe deliver one baby, one triplets and one quadruplet. We have only had to bummer out one lamb and he was from a twin set. The mother is not very good about raising more than one lamb. We need to cull her. The quadruplets seem to now be triplets and the fourth lamb is now with one of our older mothers that only had a single baby. She is now nursing two lambs and everyone is very happy. So we have 16 lambs and 8 ewes feeding them. We still have 30-32 ewes left to give birth. We usually have about a 135% birth rate but we are over 200% now. If we keep that up we will end up with 80 lambs and 40 ewes! That is a lot of sheep. I will be super happy with a 150% birth rate. In a couple more days we will start letting the older babies go outside with their mommas into our limited outside newborn enclosure. This is our set of triplets. All the babies but three are solid chocolate brown. Three of them are spotted white and brown and very cute. One of those is a girl as I checked while getting lamb snuggles today. We may keep her. Her mother is super relaxed and calm which is what we are looking for in a breeder ewe. Annmarie and I went to town tonight and got two 8 foot gates so we could use them in the barn. Annmarie wants to order some twisty hinges from our sheep products supply company and I will be cutting 4×16 foot 3 inch square panels into 4×4 foot sections for her to arrange in any pattern her heart desires. The small panels make it easy to move parts all around the barn. I will need to grind off the sharp edges after I cut them with bolt cutters. We will order the twisty things when we order some liquid marking paint. Our hope is the ewes all have their babies in the next seven days.

Barn teenager done

Steve HardinLeave a comment

As I slept on the cough today trying to get better Bubba “finished” the barn. I say this because Bubba did a teenager finish. I now really understand my father as he was always getting on me about the minutiae. I learned by the time I was a teenager that the job had to be perfect. Yet every teenager I have ever had out to the farm uses a different measuring stick of completion. Bubba is correct, this section is clean of poop and straw. Yet for the barn to be functional we have to have all the sorting pen that was removed reinstalled and all of the feeders put back out.

This doesn’t include the two smaller areas where we keep the new mommas. It still needs to be cleaned out and under the stairs needs to be cleaned out. I went out and talked to Bubba to give him clearer directions and then we went over how to clean out the chicken coop. He started working on the coop after that and I went back to the couch for another several hour nap. We should have all the buildings cleaned out by Monday. I am super stoked. I need about 8 more hours on the bull enclosure and then its onto the next project. I need to trim the alpaca feet and fix the machine shed overhead beams I broke last year with the tractor. I will call on Monday and get some custom beams cut for the repair.

We need to clean out the milking area also. Meathead is coming out on Tuesday to finish moving all the straw and poop from the barn over into the compost pile. She can grab the extra compost from the alley way and front barn lot at the same time. There are four big rocks in the milking area I would like to take out. They were used as support for floor beams but they just get in the way now. I have tried to get them out with the tractor but there is no room to move the tractor around in this tight space. I am just going to have to use a breaker bar, shovel and fulcrum to get them out. Last night I went to bed early due to an illness. I was dead asleep when I was woken up by the dogs just raising a ruckus outside. It sounded like they were tearing something up and it was vicious. This went on for a little while then I heard Annmarie slap the side of the house loudly to shut them up and I fell back asleep. When she came to bed she told me that the dogs were at the back garden gate barking and trying to get at the four raccoons on our back porch. They were helping themselves to the cat food. She had flipped on the light and took a shot at them with the 30-30. She missed as they were almost gone by the time she got back with a weapon. So we have baited the back porch with more cat food tonight. I didn’t feed the cats in the barn and we are going to send Annmarie out to the chicken coop area and I will come out the back door blazing. Last night the raccoons ran toward the chicken coop. Annmarie will be waiting for them. As soon as I start shooting she will turn on her flashlight. I will not leave the back yard so she can shoot at anything that comes her way, no crossing of fire lanes. This is a stupid problem to have but they cannot get at my chickens! My babies should be laying next month and I do not want to wait another 8 months before getting more eggs.

Death knocketh at the door

Steve Hardin2 Comments

It’s been a long week. I would have posted this three days ago, but we are having internet issues again. The sad reality is we have no choice but to accept our poor access. We live in rural hilly region of America and cannot get any other service than high speed internet of 1.5 Mbs through the phone line. This service is spotty as all get out and we had to call and complain again to the internet provider as the service did not work at all. They sent us a new modem and it works again. This is our third router in a year and the provider won’t let us use an off brand version due to “lack of support”. Since their service is so spotty we never know if its on the providers side or our modem and if we have an off brand modem they will always blame it. So I am having to drive into town and piggyback onto our daughter’s internet signal. Bubba has been working on the barn a few hours a day. I managed to get the tractor inside and in two hours we got about 60% of the barn torn up and near a door ready to be shoveled outside. The smell is very bad! All this heat and the moisture getting trapped is causing a faster than normal breakdown of the compost material. It is even causing a bad smell out by the cars when the wind blows toward the house. I am hoping to be done with the barn in a few more days. After he gets the barn all dug out and cleaned the chicken coop needs its annual cleaning also! The fun never ends at StewartCreekSomethings! We need the barn to sort the sheep one more time before putting the ram in with everyone. We need to sort off the sheep we are culling or selling before turning in the ram so that they don’t get pregnant. This needs to happen in July so that lambs are born in January. Doing that will allow us to have two sets of lambs born in 2019.

We are still feeding the barn cats but almost never see them. The cat food keeps vanishing and we spot the occasional cat running around the barn lot that we know is from our summer release program.

We are having predator issues again, but not with the chickens. We have only lost a few sheep over the last ten years but we have lost two this week and they were only a 200 yards from our house. After I spotted the last dead one Annmarie made an executive decision that we had to bring the animals into the barn lot every night. The next evening when she went out she found another carcass. It was an older ewe who had been gutted about 150 feet from the first kill. This was Monday evening. At 0400 the coyotes were in our upper pasture raising a ruckus and they woke me up. It was pitch black so I just ran out into the front yard and popped off a couple of 22 rounds into the ground to scare them off. If you live in the country this endeavor is best done in the nude. This did scare off the coyotes and no one was injured in the barn lot. I was woken up again Wednesday night at 0200 by a large group of coyotes hollering at each other on top of the hill. I repeated my rural scare tactic with my Walther P22 and tortured the ground yet again with three rounds this time. This seems to run them off but it is not fixing the problem. The problem is with food being this abundant they should not be attacking our sheep. We don’t think it is a cat as the carcass is just left on the ground and there are lots of trees right by the kill site so it would be easy to hide or stash a body up in the trees.

On a plus side after three evenings of running in the cows, the sheep and the two horses everyone is just putting themselves in the barn lot now. We just have to go out and shut the gate. We are hypothesizing that the animals feel more protected so that is why they come in at night or they are just learning a routine. It is now officially summer in Eastern Oregon. The back creek is dry, the wheat is supposed to be harvested next week, the summer weeds are flourishing and its hot!

My nephew and I have been working in the evenings for a couple of hours a night in an attempt to get the bull enclosure done. It is coming along but I have way too much wood! I ordered enough to do the entire corral in wood and with the metal panels I don’t need as much. I am sure we have enough wood to do the entire barn addition even enough to side the addition. But the wood is warping so i need to do it soon. Just one more thing to add to the list. Zeke got to work the cows the first couple of days as Mouse is injured. He got a large splinter and torn toenail on one foot. The vet had to fix it and while he was there they pulled out a couple of foxtail from one ear. This was not a bonus find as we paid for that removal also. So he is now $220 ahead of Zeke in vet bills. He won the most expensive dog category last year also so he is off to an early lead.