lambing

Wife is a savior

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Annmarie has been picking up all the slack around the farm as I have been fairly worthless since catching covid. She has been feeding and sorting and checking on lambs, feeding chickens and collecting eggs. She has been amazing during this time. She made me promise to not overwork myself when I went back to work. I took a few more days off for a total of 14 then went back to work on Monday. I stayed in my office mostly with only 1-2 trips out of my office. Unfortunately, by Wednesday I was unable to do evening chores at home due to shortness of breath and fatigue. By Thursday I started to get chest pain that continued to get worse, I ended up in the ER that night to make sure I did not have a blood clot in my lungs. No blood clots, just post covid syndrome. So I am back to sitting around again most of the day, resting. I hate resting. I have had to reiterate the not working so hard promise.

We have had the usual drama on the farm. The chickens have decided that they don’t want to go into the coop at night. Anywhere from 3-7 chickens dawdle and end up outside the automatic door. This is not healthy for the chickens as we know there is most likely one raccoon living in the barn or around the barn. Annmarie saw fresh tracks in the snow recently. So we have been kicking them back into the barn when we get eggs. Unfortunately, we only let the ones sitting right outside the gate into the coop, we do not hunt down any strays. It looks like one managed to survive a raccoon attack and it is still alive days later. It is missing part of a wing and hopefully can survive. It unsurprisingly has been hanging pretty close to the chicken coop and is making it inside before the door shuts! So it is maybe not the stupidest chicken in the bunch. We have had two more sets of lamb twins and a huge single lamb born since the last update. I will need to go out and tag and band on Sunday so we can integrate all of them into the momma/baby area. The weather has been very unusual, mid 40’s in December! This is so not normal for us. The front spring is already on the rise and the back winter runoff creek has not started up yet.

The ram is not doing his job in a timely fashion. The ewes are taking their sweet time with having babies. We are talking about getting a second ram so in the off season they can have a buddy. We will also split the ewes into two herds. Once we figure out who is the more active ram we will divide up the ewes in the correct proportion. This will also let us save more of the ewes for cross breeding purposes. If we rotate out the ram every three years this will add significantly to our size upgrade. We really want to get the lambing all done in 30 days.

  • Lamb update
  • 22 lambs born
  • 14 ewes delivered
  • 20 pregnant ewes(maybe)
  • 6 single lambs
  • 8 twin lambs
  • 1 bummer lamb
  • 21 lambs on the farm
  • 157% birthing rate
  • 150% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 100% survival rate at birth
  • 100% survival rate at 2 weeks (7/7)

Lambs are here!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I went out this morning to feed the horses. They will eat everything they have access to so we have to limit their food. I burned a few cardboard boxes on my way to the barn and after starting the fire I looked up and headed to the barn. The sheep were all congregated around the entrance to the barn and about halfway there I realized why, there were lambs! I spotted one, then two and heard the third one before I found it. Three little newborn lambs trying to get out of the barn entrance. I chased all the other sheep out of the barn lot except for four ewes. I only needed two of those ewes but I did not want to run the babies so I opted to trap a few extra until I could get the momma/baby area set up.

I went into the barn and opened up the momma/baby area and then tossed out some bedding and pulled in a feeder for the momma area. I then had to go shut some gates to isolate the momma area and move a panel so they had access to clean water. Then I had to go clean up down by the spring and bend some fencing back into place so the babies cannot slip out of the pen. I never got around to building a short bridge for them to cross the spring. They will have to jump over it this year, maybe next year I can get that installed. As I headed back up to the barn I spotted all three lambs out in the sun and their moms in the barn eating the hay I had just put out. I snagged all three (hard to carry more than three newborn lambs) and put them outside in the momma baby area. This let me sort off the two extra pregnant ewes. I tried to get the numbers from the ear tags of the two new mothers but they were not cooperating. Tonight when we lock them into the momma/baby area we will be able to grab them and look at their tags. We will need to lock everyone up in the barn tonight and every night until all the lambs are born. It’s a lot easier to catch them in the barn! I forgot to check all three babies for gender when I caught them. One is a boy, one is a girl, and I didn’t look at the third one as it was the last one caught and it is a lot harder to hold onto 3 wiggly things than 2!

Lambing season Thanksgiving 2020

3 lambs born

2 ewes delivered

32 pregnant ewes

1 single lamb

1 twin

? Boy lamb

? Girl lamb

Birthing rate 150%

Survival rate at birth 100%

Survival rate at 2 weeks ?

In like a lamb, out like a lion!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well one would think that spring was in the wind, but winter is not quite ready to let go.  Two weeks ago we had snow on the ground!  It snowed three days ago at our house but did not stick.  We have now started the constant daily rain.  This is going to make the weeds and hopefully the grass we planted grow.

Unfortunately, the Coronavirus is slowing us down.  I am working way too much at the hospital getting ready for our Surge.  This  has left very little time for me to work around the farm.  This is going to cause us problems if I cannot figure out how to balance a work/life ratio.  I realize it is probably necessary for my health but I continue to work and worry and plan for something that I hope never comes.  This is causing me to not have the time or energy for the blog.  I will keep at it but there will be a noticeable dip in the quantity of posts I make.  As I use this medium for my official farm history to pass on to the next few generations I felt it necessary to add this in here.

 

The thing about Spring Winter is you get used to warmer weather so when the Mother Winter snaps back and reminds you she is still in charge it just feels colder!  Annmarie still persists in her belief that we cannot sleep at night without two windows open in the bedroom.  This is in blatant defiance of the outside temperature.  Our master bed looks like a blanket display at a market, dominated by Pendleton Wool Blankets.  We have decided that we don’t need a weighted anti anxiety blanket as we sleep under multiple wool blankets.

3A521134-0105-4242-B9F8-A5A4EA3F5E34

Our sheep continue to have babies!!  Just when we think it is all over someone else pops out another lamb.  So the ram is still stuck in with the bull and a couple of steers.  There is hope that in a few more weeks they will all be done, as a five month lambing season is brutal.  We want two months only for lambing season.  We need to give him two months to get at everyone.  There are too many ewes for him to service everyone in one estrus cycle.  He is fat and needs to go on a diet anyways.  This will make him work off some of that extra lard.

The sheep are not really any smarter than normal.  I had to let this lamb out of the feeder.  It managed to get into it but spent the day inside as it could not get out.  We have noticed that the brown and white lambs are probably the cutest we have but definitely the weakest.  We had another one die this week.  I had to put it down.  This has caused us to rethink the lambs that we will be saving when we cull this spring.  We are going to have to avoid the brown and white ones.  The weirdest part of this is that the color is what is separating them out.  It makes it easy to pick and choose but it is kinda weird that  the most deaths this year have been those sheep with those color markings.  We were going to cull out the older ewes anyways and have lots of lambs to choose from so picking won’t be a problem.

1868309D-089A-423C-9F41-4FFCF1829E3E

 

Lambeggedon finished, we think

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It has been an incredibly long lambing season, over three months of trickle babies the entire time.  The ram was totally slacking this last time around and us not having everyone synced did not help matters.  We have one last go around to do out in the barn.  We still have about 8 babies in the momma/baby area that need to be tagged and banded.  Once that is done we are absolutely done.  I will go out and lock the cows out of the orchard this week and let it start growing back again so in 2-3 weeks we can sort off all the old ewes we are culling and all the female babies that we don’t want pregnant and they can live in the orchard away from the ram.  He better be too busy to worry about those ewes once we turn him in with the main herd.  Our last set of twins was incredibly tiny and they have spent a week in their own pen growing.  They are now in with the momma/baby pen because we got tired of carrying water every day to them.  Now we just open the gate and they go get their own water.

I was headed to work last week and spotted mouse down by the creek avidly staring at something.  When he pays that much attention to something it is usually bad for the other thing.  It turned out to be a little lamb that stuck its head through the fence to get to the green grass and then when the dog scared it, it stood and could not get its head out of the fence.  Once all the dogs figured out the lamb was stuck, they all wanted to go over and lick its head which just freaked the lamb out more.  Once I forced its butt down it slid right out of the hole.

We have one brown and white speckled baby that keeps making these weird sounds.  I didn’t notice it (I never notice anything weird in the barn) but Annmarie said it was making these grunting sounds and trying to poop.  So I was out in the barn getting ready to feed and while chasing everyone out heard this weird noise.  I started looking around and spotted that baby ewe trying to poop.  I could not get a hold of it before it ran outside.  I have been paying attention to it ever since.  It is a little girl and it has a sweet tooth!  It keeps eating at the molasses licks in the barn and getting constipated from them.  That is some dedication to your passion.

2D4EE6A3-1CF6-4AAB-ACA8-E8AE0E7C089C

These are are final numbers for winter 2019.  We actually did pretty good compared to the big farms.  We only had a 16% lamb mortality.  We almost had 150% productivity when you counted live lambs at a week and when you just counted births it was almost 180%! We are super stoked about those numbers and hope to keep up the average on the next go around.  The best part was I did not have to pull a single lamb this lambing season.

3A211F3E-98D3-42A1-8BD8-98D1C89778BF

 

 

Still lambing

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well, we keep after it and it seems like another set of lambs pop out every other day.  We have had two sets of twins and another single this week.  We are getting so desperate for it to be over that we went out and counted every ewe we had.  Annmarie made a database with all the ewes in it so we can mark them off after they have their babies.  We needed to know when we are going to be done.  We have 7 ewes left and as of this morning we still had seven ewes to deliver for a total of 38 ewes delivering.

7675BD2F-0E62-4168-841F-26E8454A4880

We started to ask around about survival rate on the lambs.  One old farmer told us anything over 75% was acceptable.  I did an internet search and found a study out of Canada from their country agricultural department and they said anywhere from 10-30%.  They wanted all farms to be <10% but in the study the average was 16% and as high as 33%.  Since this is the first year we have tracked it we are just going to have to watch it from year to year and see how we do.  They did say that if you have a single lamb then the survival rate is >90% and twins its >70%.  So it varies dramatically by how many lambs your ewes are producing.  The other interesting fact was the males die at a higher percentage than female lambs, males are the weaker gender.  We have had 11 lambs die and one of the oddities we have started to notice is that >50% of them are brown and white in coloration.  We have about five distinct colors among the new lambs but over half that have died are brown and white.  The other thing we have noticed is that if the lambs are screamers, even if they nurse, they still have a tendency to die.  We are not sure what that means other than males are the weaker gender.  We have not been checking genders on the dead lambs, maybe next year.

ECDF568D-4674-45CB-8C53-9411BABECC83

Mouse looks so peaceful here.  He is all about working when he is outside.  He wants to move animals all the time.

I have been working on getting the upstairs bathroom ready but caught the plague from Annmarie and have been out of the picture for 36 hours.  I need to order the tongue and groove boards for the walls and ceiling this week.  I have still not done that and keep saying I will.

D1E7E346-A681-4E47-9E8C-0E1E7B0B79B6

This is what the floor looks like before it is all dry.  The dark red is the dry area.  It paints on pink.  I tried to use foam brushes but discovered that they tear up and it takes me 3 brushes to get a single coat on the floor.  I want to do one more coat and am hoping to do it this afternoon.  After this last coat dries I will have a waterproof membrane down and it will be ready for tile.  This needs to be done as spring is coming and I will be stuck outside for months on end trying to keep up with the spraying and haying.  Our new battery for the buggy is here and I need to install it and the trickle charger, then mount the sprayer so it is ready to go this spring.

C54E508A-22D6-4B62-B54E-0AC53D729F1A