This has been a weird lambing season. We have only had 7% of our born lambs be female. The wife keeps telling me that “grain is for girls and grass is for guys” when it comes to helping your gender outcome by feeding a certain diet. All of these ewes were on grass only when they conceived but we have never had such a disparate difference before.
I had to spend some time this weekend expanding the momma/baby area in the barn to accommodate the babies. As the ewes continue to give birth we will shrink their area one more time before we are done. But it has to be right at the end of the birthing cycle as we will need to use about half the jug walls to make the last wall in the barn. Once we do that we can only have three jugs for newly born lambs/mommas.
The chores are now taking about three hours a day when split between the morning baby check and the evening feeding. I had to feed the boys in Alcatraz tonight and the bull, “big red” is getting way too comfortable with me. I open up the old lamb shed and he just walks in and starts eating off the hay pile. I try to push past him with a bale and he head butts it. So we have a shoving match at the doorway as I try and get it out the door. Tonight I pushed on his head to get him out and he just shook me off. I got behind him and lightly smacked him on hind quarters like a horse and told him to get out of the shed, he did. As long as he thinks it’s his idea he is okay with moving out of the way.
It is 44F tonight so moving the large bales with the Kubota is painful. We have to plow through six inches of mud to get to where we need to drop off the bales. I am hopeful that Winter will actually get here in January. It is a lot easier feeding the cows on frozen ground.
Date of update- Dec 27 2023
# of Lambs born – 28
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 18
# of ewes still pregnant – 16 in area, I don’t think they are all pregnant
# of single lamb births – 9
# of twin lamb births – 8
# of triplet lamb births – 1
# tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-18
# tagged female lambs-a
# of bummer lambs – 1
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 4
Total # of lambs on farm -23
% birthing rate- 156%
% production rate -128%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 82%
Annmarie spotted this rooster in a wild rose bush, we think he was eating the berries. We have been spotting more owls on the place but at night they are hard to distinguish. Our daughter finally just googled what they sound like, duh. They are very noisy at first dark and the last two hours of the night. We do have a pair of great horned owls again. We also have a pair of barn owls. We are certain of those but I have seen Pygmy owls in the past and I am hopeful they will pass through again. The bunnies are definitely multiplying, we are now spotting three on the drive down the driveway. The owls and hawks can concentrate on knocking down the vole population, they don’t need to eat the rabbits.
Well Winter is definitely coming, we had our first freeze this fall. It dropped down into the low 20’s F and there is snow visible on the mountains and low foothills. We got rain instead of snow but Winter is coming. This spurred the decision to finally go and pickup the big bales of alfalfa that I had purchased this spring. My supplier holds them for me as I almost always pick them up late! I am a reliable customer so it works for both of us. I had been selling off the old small round bales from the machine shed and I managed to get the last of them unloaded and sold the day I went and picked up the large bales. I could store most of the years alfalfa in the machine shed if I had a tractor that could lift 1400# bales 14 feet into the air. But since I do not, I put 15 bales in the machine shed and they are the very last bales that I feed in the late winter/early spring. The rest go out onto the hillside in field 4b. The animals all get locked out of that field and I usually buy a big tarp and toss a lot of pallets on it to hold it in place. After buying the vinyl sign to use as a tarp and seeing how thick it is I bought two 12’x40’ signs/tarps and will lay those across the top of the large bales. I think they may even survive the winter. They should be here by the end of the week. Mr Rainman/me bent the loader support on the Kubota. It is for removing the loader and helping it be freestanding. The pull pin got displaced and the arm popped down while a big bale was getting jostled in place and it bent. The main pin had to be cut in three places to get it to let go! A 2# hammer and punch could not drive it out. The pin has spring clips so it will have to be a special order item. We were able to keep moving hay and that was the important part.
One of the things observed when we got the machine shed cleaned out was that there is a pretty damp back corner of the hay storage side. I had put down pallets last time and that worked really well to keep the hay from rotting. Years ago I had dug a trench on the backside of the machine shed and filled it with gravel to increase the drainage removal from the roof runoff. This did help quite a bit but it looks like it needs more help. Next year the gravel needs to be dug out and some French drain hose installed and then replace the gravel. I will also run the end of the drain farther away from the building. This should help quite a bit. The front ditch works wonders but I made a big sink hole for all of the water to go into and I did not do that with the back section.
Sunday we went out first thing to sort the cows. It was cold again so I put on a long sleeve shirt, knit hat, knit neck warmer, insulated carharts, large bulky quilted long sleeve over shirt and insulated gloves. I had a heavy vest ready to go but decided that I was dressing for -20F instead of 22F. I put the puppy, Chance, on a lead rope and we opened up gates to get the cows to the corral so that the bull could be sorted off. Once the bull is in Alcatraz we can put all of the cows into one herd. We can run one herd of cows until January when this years calves need to be weaned off. We will sort off the market cows and the calves and put those 11 cows down by the houses and keep the other above the house, there will be three fences and 100 yards minimum between the two herds. In reality there are a bunch of buildings and earthworks that prevent a line of sight from happening. They can still talk to each other and will especially right after we separate them. It is about 3-5 days of lots of hollering and voiced displeasure from both parties.
Chance did great once she got settled down. She wanted to sniff the hillside and find coyotes. She does not like other dogs as they are interlopers on her property. She does fine with our other border collie but not any other dog. We have not discouraged this as our coyote problem is immense and we want her to alert us if she spots one. Mr Rainman and I merely walked to the schoolhouse, had to run halfway up the hill once and then casually walk the cows to the hen house pasture. Once there we were able to separate the bull from the rest of the herd, opened the back door to Alcatraz and he went in as directed. We did not even have to use the corral to sort! I took Chance into the front barn lot and we worked the cows in an enclosed space. I let her run around with the lead rope trailing (there is nothing for the rope to catch on) and giving her commands to move the cows. She did great! I can now get her to lay down while she is mid chase on one of the cows. She will stop and drop to the ground. We need more work on her directions, left, right and circle around. The true key though is to be able to turn off the dog no matter what the circumstances, once you can do that training the other commands is easy. Once we let the cows out there were about 18 sheep that had come in still in the area, so I had Mr Rainman call Chance and work the sheep. We want her to respond to multiple people. A one person dog is great when you are the only one working the dog but having one that will listen to other people is handy. She is a true people pleaser so this fits right in with her personality.
I had shed the gloves, hat and neck warmer by the time we got off the hillside and by the time we got to the hen house I had taken off the outer jacket and was just wearing my Carharts and a light long sleeve shirt! I should have known, the rule is to leave the house with enough clothes that you are just a little uncomfortable and want more to stay warm. Work and exercise will give you the needed heat to stay warm and you won’t sweat.
We put in another gate into the alleyway from the hen house pasture. This way the animals can always get to water. The main spring on the farm originates in that pasture. We have had the gate leaning up against the fence since last year when we finished the alleyway. Now the cows will always be able to get to water. I even chained the gate open so it cannot accidentally get closed. There is one more gate still to be installed there and one small section of fence to install so that the cows can get to most of field four but not the area where we store the cow hay.
Some things continue to amaze me. We had a volunteer pumpkin grow at the main burn pile. The alpaca did not eat the plant, flower or pumpkin but the most amazing part was the plant got zero water. This summer we went over two months with no rain at one point. Annmarie made pumpkin purée and froze it today. We will be eating the rest for dinner tonight. I am going to plant several seeds around the pile in the spring! Who knows maybe this is the trick to growing pumpkins. The quail are everywhere, we have very large coveys all over the farm and we have started to keep a quail feed block out front by the old farm equipment pile. We hear quail all of the time now whenever we are outside. Heck, we even have a new pair of barn owls on the place. They have decided to roost in the large trees out front just before sunrise. They talk back and forth and are quite noisy. The coyote hunters have tried two more times without any success. They did see more coyotes but could not safely shoot them. Pretty quick we will be locking the sheep up at night and only letting them go out into the ram pasture as they will have lambs.
Mr Rainman came out on Saturday so we could pour some more concrete. I ran into town and got another pallet (56) bags of Sackcrete and three bags of sand only Sackcrete so I could do the brick power enclosure near the front bridge if there was time. Mr Rainman got the mixer in place and the last two supports on each side of the form installed. We carried around 30 bags over to our work area then started mixing and pouring. It was a lot easier, there was more room to work and we were higher than the mixer so you did not have to try and muscle the bag up while dumping it out. This time I managed to mix almost half the bags before trading spots. We only needed 40 bags to get the other bridge footing poured. Once it was poured we covered it all up with a tarp. It is getting down into the 40F range at night so I wanted to try and trap some of the heat into the form and concrete.
We then went to the other bridge and I installed a 36 brick rectangle with a power outlet built into the side of it. I am not a very good brick layer. It took some trial and error. Time will tell if I did it right. I have a hollow rectangle now. I am going to find a concrete block that I can just use as a topper. That way I can have access to the inside for wiring in the outdoor kitchen light power (after its built!).
I was pretty stoked to get all of that done in a single day. So the next day we were going to get the tractor mower going and Mr Rainman would mow the rest of the fields and I would work on wiring the lights in the barn. I hate playing at being a mechanic. When Mr Rainman went to hook up the new PTO shaft he noticed that the gear box on the mower was loose. You could shake it and move it around about 1/8” in either direction. He showed me so I said lets just tighten it up as I have done nothing in ten years to ensure its tight. I want it to last another ten years. So we lift it up with the rear three point hitch and he crawls under it. After much swearing and two four foot lengths of pipe (cheater bars) I manage to break a large crescent wrench. We tip the mower up on its side and chain it to the other mower bucket for safety. Then we proceeded to try and take it apart. I hate cotter pins. I hate tight spaces. Who has a 1.5” open end wrench laying around? I did find the wrench after I went and raided the last of my father’s machinist tools. I have never needed anything that large before and I am pretty sure the bolt was metric. No go, we could not get it apart. So Mr Rainman went home to get a 1/2” DeWalt impact driver for just this type of problem and I tried to get more parts and a torch.
We tried the impact driver and got no where! Nope, Nada, Nothing, it was not going to budge. I get impatient and just said cut bolt head off. After taking off all of the guards on the grinder and putting on a cutting wheel we were able to hack off the bolt heads. The threads had been worn off due to the rattling and looseness, there was no way it was coming apart or getting any tighter. It took us four hours to do nothing. I finally just gave up, had him grind off the bolts while I went and wired lights. He hooked up the spreader and went and over-seeded field #1 and the triangle. I got all of the light strings wired but one. That last strand I had one light that would not work and the last light on the string that did. I have one more sixteen feet in the air to still wire in. I think the first one has a wiring issue. My splice piece did not want to go on easily and I think it failed. Needless to say the last run is the one that lights up the hay rooms! So there is no light when you are getting hay until I fix it. I did discover that we can only run two strands of light at any one time. The voltage drops too far if you try and run three strands at the same time. Two is just fine and will work perfectly.
Mr Rainman is going to come out the next couple of days to work on the fields.
Saturday was dedicated to more fencing. The goal is to get enough fence up around field #1 to let the animals into it. So the Apprentice and I loaded up the pickup and Kubota and headed out to get some actual fence installed. We rolled out the first 55 feet of fence, stretched it, put the T post clips on and then needed to install the wooden stays. I let the Apprentice use the DeWalt fence stapler and after she pulled the trigger a couple of times she said “that has some kick” and did not really want to staple anything with it. So when she held the first wooden stay and I ran the stapler she complained of pain and stinging from the stapler (it hurts). So she found a large old wooden fence post and she leaned that against the wooden stay then put her body weight onto the wooden buffer and had no more problems. She rolled out 330’ of woven wire along side the T posts and when we got to the next H brace we realized that it had not been completed. There was no X of tightened smooth wire in place. We left the smooth wire at the house because we thought we had done all of the X’s.
This necessitated a change in tasks so we went to installing T posts with the tractor. We did pretty good until we got near the end and then we started to bend the posts into a U shape. We fixed this by clearing the grass debris away from the post insertion site and I used a pounding technique with the bucket instead of a steady downward pressure. This got all of the T posts into the ground.
I decided to call it a day and we headed out of field #1, but when we got to the gate I realized that not having a direct gate into the field from the wheat field side is just horrible. It makes for this long convoluted route to get into field #1. So I stopped, had the Apprentice go grab one of the unused gates and three railroad ties to bring back, it took a couple of trips and some finagling on her part but she got all of the stuff to the needed spot. I took the John Deere tractor and tried to drill three large 12” holes into the gate opening I had fenced off. I managed it eventually but each hole took 10-15 minutes to drill out. I also realized that the hydraulic fluid leak is worse than I had guessed as the auger got stuck down into the hole with the 150# weight I had on the auger. I added three old tractor weights to the top arch and it makes the auger work even when the ground is hard. So I had to remove said weights to get the auger to come out of the hole. On a plus note, at least we dug out the main batch of holes with the six inch auger first. This saved us a bunch of time. So now the holes are dug and we just need to clean them out, set some posts, put in some wire X supports and then hang a gate. I was so glad to be done for the day.
As a father I have learned that the call for help can come at any time from your progeny. Imagine my surprise when my Monday morning is interrupted by a phone call from the wife. She led with the tagline “our daughter is trapped”, maybe this was to spur some paternal instinct before the entire story came out.
It turns out that the child, still called “Meathead”, had taken the new Kubota tractor out to the old chicken coop to get her summer car tires so she could get the studs taken off of her car. Ignore the part where the studs should have come off a couple of months ago. I knew she was going to do this in the morning as I had needed to give her a refresher on the Kubota. She is used to the John Deere but it doesn’t have forks and is over at my mother’s house working on a retaining wall. So getting the call from the wife was a surprise. I would have expected a call from Meathead. It turns out that the sticky seat belt latch had finally decided to become an immediate problem. I had noticed it being sticky for a few months but it worked eventually, you just had to work at it. Meathead is very good about wearing her seatbelt. She understands that if an accident occurs you will most likely survive it if you are wearing a seatbelt. The “I will jump free or be tossed clear” excuse is just another way to voice a “hold my beer” sentiment. So she had used it and after opening and closing every gate she had reapplied the seatbelt. She got to the old chicken coop and attempted to unlock the seatbelt. No success. She continued to try and release it for another 30 minutes before texting her mother. She tried to call but the call kept dropping as she was in a cell phone dead zone. A text would get out but not a call.
After my call I texted Meathead to give some suggestions. They were met with some eye rolling and derision (I could see it through the texting)! I had to drive home, grab the last can of WD40 and walk out to the barn lot to find her. I did the obligatory trapped photo before I would touch the offending seatbelt latch. I jerked and pulled and pushed multiple times in an attempt to release the latch. This was met with derision from Meathead who voiced that she had been trying that for 45 minutes now without success. My secret hope was that it would open when touched by the magical dad hands. No such luck, I had to use as few generously applied squirts of WD40 to get the latch to open. Once opened I used more WD40 and worked the latch until it was smooth and very easy to open. She was now out of spare time and had to get to work.
As of this time she has not jumped back on the Kubota tractor, her tires have not been changed out yet and now her car is acting up and needs to go to the shop. I have used the offending seatbelt many times since and the latch is now very smooth.
In closing, Dad hands are a real thing and are very HANDy at times!
Stewart Creek Somethings 