hay

It’s still winter

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It snowed again!! Mother Nature has decided that winter is not quite over yet. This week has seen the snow and mud come back. The only real problem with this is we are running low on high quality hay. We have 7 tons of grass hay that is on the lower side, it has been sitting outside all winter in the weather. I had to give the sheep two bales, the upper prime pasture cows two bales, the alpaca got the bale I accidentally broke open with the tractor and the other cows only got one bale as they still had lots. I was barely able to move the bales due to the mud and snow. I don’t mind the snow when it freezes the ground solid but that did not happen this time.

We were thinking about lowering the fences over the back creek but we have not had a spring yet and that creek is straight winter runoff. It is pretty mild right now and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of snow in the mountains that is going to last very long. We have surface water every where so we are currently not short on ground water. The wheat looks very nice.

The animals all know to complain to “Mom” when they think they are starving. Annmarie “Mom” called me this week to say the sheep were desperate and needed food. I have been pushing big bales out to the old lamb shed for them and they can snack all day long. She fed them some alfalfa from the barn. The problem with this is we don’t have much alfalfa left stored in the barn. We do still have a stash of 100# bales in the machine shop. So I have been feeding around 150# of that a night. After two nights the animals are leaving food behind. I don’t think they were starving. Every animal we have knows this and they all bug her for food and she in turn bugs me until I feed them. Sometimes the animals have a valid complaint and need food, but most of the time that is not the case, they are just looking for a handout.

It’s been a long week

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It was a long week, as Annmarie was out of town and I was alone. I had big plans of painting the entire house during that time. Those plans did not come to fruition. I had to do the morning chores and then come home and do the evening chores, go to work and get cows back into their respective “fenced areas”. Fenced should mean they cannot get out but it doesn’t really work that way. The bull needs another fence to keep him away from the creek crossing. I think I am going to run a fence up from the corner of our yard. We have a fence already up the hill slightly for the ram pasture enclosure. I just need to run it directly up to the top of the hill. The only real problem is the hill is solid rock! I will have to put in rock cribs the entire length of the fence. I may get 6-8 T posts in the ground if I am lucky. I really need a teenager to come over and help me when I do that fence. If you have two people on the fence driver sometimes you can drive them in when I cannot do it alone. It will have to be very wet ground also. Luckily, filling up the rock cribs will not be hard as they are readily available and close at hand.

The big score this week was the stock racks for the pickup. They actually work as is but we are going to look into having them painted. I got an amazing price and I will call the powder coat shop in Hermiston and see what they would charge to paint them. If it’s over $300 then I will be doing it myself with a grinder and a multitude of cans of spray paint. I am hoping its under the budget! We will be able to move any of the sheep we need in the pickup and not have to pull a trailer. I need the racks to look nice so that I can get them mounted to the pickup.

Winter decided to make a strong comeback. So now we are dealing with snow and mud. This makes moving the large bales very hard with my small tractor. I am looking forward to no more large bales. I am going to get the tire fixed on my beat up pickup bed trailer. This will let me store 20 bales of hay on the trailer and just hook onto it with the tractor and feed the cows out of the trailer. I can keep the trailer under cover in the machine shop and still feed 2k pounds of feed at a time. Zeke is making us crazy again. He has decided that he doesn’t appreciate the constraints of being fenced into the yard. Since we have taught him to go around, under or through fences as part of his herding jobs we have created a monster. He now knows that the front creek bank is a weak spot in our fence. He keeps digging into the bank and under the fence. I have added three separate panels to plug various holes. Nothing is working to keep him in. So now he is back on the overhead run. I am going to have to lay horizontal fencing down along the banks and wire it to the vertical pieces so that he cannot dig down within two feet of the creek bank. I suspect this may work. I cannot guarantee my hypothesis until I do the actual experiment.

2018 started with a clean slate

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It is so much nicer to go out to the barn now that the Ram is no longer breathing. Some would claim that he is no longer of this earth. Not me, he is in our freezer, a friends freezer, his head and hide are being practiced on by a budding taxidermist and all his leftover parts are feeding all the wild animals. He is being very productive and generous in his death.

On Jan 1, we threw out fresh straw and neatened up the barn. Our supply of grass hay for the horses is dwindling quickly. Normally, the horses just eat what we feed the sheep but this year we got straight alfalfa for the sheep. I have some large bales that are a mix and we may have to break open one of those and feed it out to the horses. We have had no bummer lambs since the ram’s demise. We are fairly certain now that he was the cause of most of our 9 bummer lambs. Our bummer lady said that she has only lost one of the 9 lambs. She usually has around a 50% mortality as they are bummers for a reason. He is not missed. I can now wade through the barn and pet the ewes. There about 15 that come up and will let you scratch on them. We are still having babies. It should be ending soon. We were starting to sweat about running out of hay, farm nightmares are rooted in this calamity. It looks like we are going to make it no problem. We will be close on the small bales in the barn but we are going to have extra large bales. Hopefully, the snow will continue to pile up in the mountains.

Chores

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Today was catchup day. This needs to happen every once in a while. The cows needed food but I didn’t want to go outside twice into the cold. So I held off going out until early afternoon and I could do all the chores at once.

We had our first set of twin lambs two weeks ago, then a second set a week later and a third set two days ago and another set today! Eight babies from four deliveries is mighty nice. The babies don’t know to be scared of humans and are very curious. Today this little nugget would not leave me alone and tried to follow me out of the barn as I was trying to shut all the mommas and untagged babies into the baby area. They are very cute and cuddly at the one week old mark. The ones born today were born this afternoon outside. They were still wet and the momma had not delivered the afterbirth yet. She was super flighty so I ended up having to close off the end of the barn and use her babies as bait to get her into the barn. We usually throw the afterbirth outside the barn window and the cats or magpies eat it.

The vet came out to the house yesterday and cut away the affected portion of Mika’s hoof. The White Line disease came back but its not near as bad as last time. An added bonus was not having to haul the horse into the vet clinic. We are still searching for an affordable used stock trailer.

The dogs have to help when I feed the cows. Especially, when the cows think they are starving. There was still a little alfalfa left where the feeder should of been. The cows had tipped the feeder over, I suspect that was the work of the bull. If I don’t take the dogs the cows will not stay back and let me put the collapsible feeder around the large bale. Its hard to move the feeder around when 13 cows are bum rushing the bale of feed.

I took the time today to dig out a loading platform out of the hillside. It actually looked like there night have been one there in the past. It doesn’t have a fancy platform but you can back a trailer up to it and load a piece of equipment onto the trailer. We may need it for the old tractor we sold and since the ground is not frozen solid yet I figured today was the day to make it happen. Especially since I think it will snow before Christmas. I even fed Bob in the machine shop. He has been sneaking down to Donna’s to get extra food. I saw one of the new feral adult cats in the window of the barn two days ago when I went to feed. Other than that I have not seen any of the three new cats. One died a mysterious death. Annmarie spotted another dead cat down on the main road. We honestly think its an owl or hawk. We have a resident hawk that is now coming up to the house and flying over all the time. It hollers and screams when it sees the dogs or cats or humans. We are the interlopers in its world.

I have had to change the way I am billing feed for the chicken spread sheet. Now that I cannot store large quantities of food (thank you mice) I can store up to 200 pounds in two large metal trash cans. I am just expensing out the feed for the month I buy it even if it goes halfway through the next month. I did manage to collect seven eggs today from 25 chickens. I usually do about 33% production rate in the winter so 8 eggs is what I would like to collect on a daily basis this Winter, not quite there yet.

There is one pregnant ewe that is almost as wide as she is long. It is a sight to see. I sure hope she only has triplets and that they are all alive. I didn’t have very good luck last year with keeping the ewe I had to pull lambs from alive. I have a 50% survival rate after pulling lambs from two separate ewes in the last eight years. Honestly, only having had to do it twice is pretty amazing considering we have had over 300 babies.

There have been several Mountain lions killed in the immediate vicinity of our farm. There is not even snow on the ground yet. We suspected one was hanging around the barn last winter so hopefully this year will be a better year or I might have to get a tag.

I am getting ready for the house floor tile install. I ordered screws off of Amazon and some extra driver bits oh and I did do a little Christmas shopping online and all of that will be here by in three days!! It is truly amazing how fast a purchase can get to us in rural America. Annmarie reminded me I need to calculate how much grout is needed and get it ordered. It takes two weeks to show up and its a custom order. So I will get that ordered next week.

Benevolent dictatorship

Steve Hardin3 Comments

Today was the day to pick up straw for the barn. We usually use 25-30 bales a year for the sheep and horses. I like to buy 60 bales at a time and just store them in the barn. The nice thing about straw is it just gets drier! Therefore it works better at absorbing moisture.

Unfortunately the new toy, hay elevator, is in the way. So I will need to move the old alfalfa out of the way, the grass hay to the other side of the room and then pile the straw into the previously occupied corner. A whole 60 bales equaling 2.5 tons of straw costing $150. I of course used my fancy 7500lb capacity trailer. It only had 5000lbs on it and it looks like it is crying every time I load it. I had to beat out the tire fender on the left side again. I keep hitting stuff with the trailer, maybe. I never feel the trailer hit anything. I think something is attacking my trailer with a hammer. I think its gremlins. I noticed a second new dent while the trailer was being loaded. I am seriously considering airbags or an extra spring leaf to stiffen the trailer. It’s on the list to do something about. Annmarie reminded me that I need to advertise the enclosed trailer so we will have the cash necessary for a used stock trailer. We want a decent one 10 feet long. I would like a stock trailer as they are sturdier than a horse trailer. The dogs and I had a discussion about our ruling style while we were feeding last night. I started out with the democratic process and told them we were going to the barn to work. They seemed super excited and came running. Then they did not want to stay in the hay area while I fed the horses. So we switched to a benevolent dictatorship model. This appeared to work until they got bored then they tried to sneak away. I finally put them in the sheep area to hold off the sheep so I could feed. I have not had to have a clubbing match with the ram yet this fall and am attempting to hold it off for the entire winter. The dogs are my solution to him wanting to be macho man all the time. I was in the hay room, the dogs were in the sheep area and the sheep started to come in. I cannot see anything but I hear much commotion and start hollering automatically at the dogs to stay still. When I came around the corner both dogs were laying down but Mouse had advanced another 10 feet closer to the sheep. We had to switch to a strict dictator model and I gave them both a severe lecture about the politics involved and why it was necessary. Usually, we operate on the benevolent dictator model and the dogs do fine.