lambs

Predators 13/Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Last week was another kick in the teeth and yet super productive. Mr Rainman came out and spread grass seed on field #1 and the triangle. He then proceeded to mow field #2 then sprayed Rejuvra on field #2, 3, 4A. We are going to try Rejuvra it was designed for CRP and grasslands. It creates a 3/4” deep barrier that kills newly germinated cheatgrass. So as the cheatgrass seeds germinate they are killed. Since the seeds can sit around for years this process is essential to remove the weed seed. This is a fairly new product. Our cheat grass was so bad this year that we are willing to just spray it on and see what happens. We didn’t get to hay or use the fields until after we mowed because the cheat grass was horrible. I need to buy one more quart of it to spray the lower fields. The joy of this is that it lets the preexisting grasses thrive and grow through the chemical barrier. As long as they spread by root propagation they can continue to grow and thicken while the cheatgrass is choked out. This was great and he just kept after it until it was done.

The kick in the teeth came when he went down to the lower schoolhouse field. It needed to be mowed to get ready for the spray. As he was driving the tractor around the field he found two more dead ewes! One had just been killed that day or the day before. It looks like something grabbed it by the throat and it bled out. The other one had obviously died earlier as there was nothing left but a skeleton. There is no question that the coyotes are winning this year. We have had a serious coyote hunter out here all last week. He had in around 24 hours combined for the week and on the last day spotted a coyote running up the creek bottom. He did not get a shot off. I have another hunter who came out today with a call and to get shown around the property. He did wonder if he could come out at night with a thermal scope and hunt coyotes. I of course agreed to this! I have another hunter coming on Sunday to be shown around. I am hoping that between them they can figure out how to kill several coyotes. There is no way we have one coyote killing this many sheep. We have not lost a single cow. My mother-in-law is losing kittens and cats quickly. We think the coyotes are eating the cats also. This is a stupid problem.

I will say the 300K lumen light I now use when going out at night combined with a green laser and silencer on a 22 pistol is amazing. Unfortunately, this setup is not helping me with the coyotes. If they are howling and just over the hill I remove the silencer and pop off a few rounds into the ground to scare them away. Let me just say that a guard dog would cost us around $1500-2000 annually for seven years. We are not even close to having lost enough sheep to justify that expense. Now that the barn is open the sheep can hole up in the barn every night and we have never ever had a predator kill anything in our barn.

Today I had to take our only cow left and two sheep in for butchering. I got the six feeder cows into the corral and managed to separate off the large one going to slaughter. The cows are crazy! I ended up spending almost an hour and half chasing them all over the fields until I managed to corral them by just shutting every gate the closer we got to the barn lot so there was only one place they could run. I locked the sheep into the little spot in front of the barn. I figured I could just wade in and catch two whethers. Man, I needed way more coffee this morning before engaging with the animals. The steer was crazy! He ran into the stock trailer. But I had to get in the trailer to release the dividing door, he ran at me and I had to scrunch up in the corner while he ran out. I released the door then went and chased him back in and again had to get into the trailer with him. I managed to slam the door closed before he jumped back out again. He raised hell while I went to get the sheep. Nope, they would not go into the barn. I finally had to go get Chance (border collie teenager), put her on the lead and then we walked the sheep right into the barn. I shut the barn door then tried to catch a whether. Nope, they were too fast. So I made a pen with a 2’ entrance, pushed all of the sheep into it then bum rushed the sheep from one end. They form a mob before they try to squirt past me on all sides. That is time to grab your victim and drag them to the back door of the barn. The first one had horns which make great handholds. The second one I had to drag out by its head and it almost got away a couple of times. I ran them into the corral and then down the chute. They jumped right into the trailer, but after the cow fiasco I rushed down the alley to get to the outer door. Nope, dame sheep took a leap at my head trying to get out. I had to toss a 90# sheep back into the trailer twice! I imagine it feels like being a hockey goalie. I managed to get the slider door shut and the animals transported with no other incidents. Once unloaded the cow did try and get at me through their pen. I don’t know if it was saying goodbye or using my name in vain as it tried to get at me, either way the outcome was the same and someone is going to eat good.

When I got back I went to the barn and fixed the lights in the barn and finished that last string. It was not my splicing connection. One of the lights had a bad connector and I had to cut off the first two connectors I had used and after replacing them they worked perfectly. We now have lights in the barn! This is going to be great, I just know it. More to come as it starts getting dark and we have to start feeding.

Round-Up Week

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It’s been a while since I blogged. I blame it on the Pendleton Round-Up. All the locals say time stops and all projects go on hold while it occurs and the reality really does reflect the saying. I have been picking fruit non stop every few days and Annmarie has been drying it, canning it or freezing it. We managed to get the 50 lambs sold before the coyotes ate any more! A person from the west side of the state came over and got all 50, he was gone 20 minutes after arrival. We had them all ready to go. Honestly, this is the best way to sell lambs, all at once. We got a fair price $100 for all over 60# and $80 for all 40-59#.

The apprentice came out for a few hours a couple of days and weeded the hillside again and went in and cleaned up the lavender patch. The patch looks great, I just need to trim it all for the winter and we will be ready for next year. We have about five plants that have taken off on their own and need to be replanted. She is about ready to go off and learn to be a farrier at the end of the month. We will have to tear out our garden soon as the temperature has started to dip down to 45F at night. We have prunes drying in dehydrator now as soon as they are done we will dry the last of the spices before winter.

I had another project for my mother that I was able to get completed before it froze. I said I would be able to do it at the beginning of summer and managed to get it done with a lot of help from a lot of other people. My mother and sister did a great job. Now I can start working on the back bridge foundations.

The quail are everywhere! You literally cannot walk around anywhere on the farm without running into a covey or if you sit still you can hear them calling from all over. They are so used to people that as long as you are 30’ away they will just ignore you. This bodes well for a healthy population going into winter. We also have two covey of Hungarian partridges. We usually only have one on the farm. We also have a bunny rabbit living along the driveway again.

When I leave for work and the moon and stars are out I always try and take a picture with my phone. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. I keep trying.

Predators 11/ Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Sunday morning we went out to do more fencing. The Apprentice just keeps coming back for more, which is a good thing. On the way out to field #1 we passed two dead lambs! Both kills occurred in field #4 near the barn lot, one near the old well and one near the dry creek bed. The one near the well was about 2/3 eaten and the other one was barely touched. After some righteous anger outbursts, now there are only 50 lambs to sell, we continued on to field #1 to fence. I did text the person who was supposed to come buy lambs on Monday. They eventually texted back and had some issues of their own and will not be able to come get lambs until Saturday. So we need to keep all 50 alive for one more week.

When we were installing the H braces we used a rolling measuring wheel to mark out 315’ approximately as each roll of woven wire is 330’. The plan was to be able to tighten one roll of wire at a time. A single roll weighs 185# so tying more than one together and trying to get it tight is brutal. It’s hard enough trying to get 185# of wire to stand upright using a hand tightener. I made sure and brought along a four foot section of pipe to use as a cheater bar when the tightener got too hard for me to tighten by hand. This allowed me to get another 6-12 inches of tightening.

On Saturday the black walnut tree was fine (see pictures from previous post) and then this morning the thing had split in half! It looks like there was a natural wishbone and the amount of walnuts caused the tree to just split in half. We are going to let it see if it can live by spending half its time on the ground. Who knows, maybe it will survive and do well. The turkeys roost in the tree also so maybe we should blame them instead of the huge number of walnuts.

We fixed the H brace and then tightened the fence to it. Once that was done then all of the T post clips had to be installed. I showed the Apprentice how to do this but it takes quite a bit of practice to be fast at it. I am doing about 2/3 of the fence. But I have had a lot of practice! We then did the wooden stays. This really makes the fence look good and it keeps the animals from pressing down on the smooth wire. We then rolled out another roll of fencing and got it up! Due to to curved nature of this fence we had to go on the outside of the railroad tie H braces in two spots. We clipped and stayed that section and then rolled out another 330’ of fence and called it a day. We are both getting very tired and sore.

I opted to do coyote patrol that evening and night. We don’t own a spotlight yet (it’s on order 300k candle power). But the moon was supposed to be out and I lined the pickup headlights to cover the area and used a powerful flashlight. I stayed out there from 1800-0000, 6 hours and never saw a single predator. Honestly, this is the most stupid problem ever. I am looking into a thermal scope and a flat shooting rifle. What we really need is a drone with a thermal camera on it that can be auto launched, flown over the farm then allow it to auto land back at it’s starting point. This way I would know whether to go out and deal with the predators. I am also looking into some thermal binoculars. The thermal binoculars and the spotlight with a good scope might just be enough. I have done the math, a protection dog costs about $1600 a year by the time you count for food and vet costs. This is a cost that continues year to year. A rifle and binocular cost is a one time event.

Lambs for sale

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The Apprentice has been incredibly game for whatever comes her way. So on Friday we were ready to sort lambs and I wanted to weigh them. We have never weighed our sheep before. We bought the slings and scale several years ago with the intention of doing it occasionally but in all reality it was not necessary. I had posted an ad for the lambs on Craigslist and someone was interested but they wanted to know how many of the lambs were slaughter weight. Well we are keeping seven of the big lambs for our local customers. We have six sold but due to the current coyote problems we are having I through it prudent to keep an extra on hand.

Due to us keeping seven and me stating they weighed anywhere from 35-85# I figured we better have some weights. We grabbed a short section of chain from the fence (I keep all of the short sections I find all over the farm next to the outhouse trash enclosure). The new scale and slings were in the tack room. The one sling is for newborn lambs and the other for everyone else up to 200#. We hung the scale up in the momma/baby area. This way if the lamb got loose we could easily catch it again. The only bad part of this plan is you have to get the sheep into the harness on the ground then lift them up onto the hooks of the scale. So this means lifting every single lamb after you have already caught them and drug them over to the scale.

We got all 59 lambs into the barn and pushed down to the far end so they can feed into the chute and then we can count and sort them. I manned the sorting gate and chute. The Apprentice was at the end of the chute and had to catch them as I pushed them out and drag them over to the momma/baby area. Keep in mind she weighs 115# and is 5’4” and has never wrangled sheep before. It went pretty well actually.

She determined that horns on sheep are unnecessary. I like to use them as handles but the ones with little nubbins kept managing to head but her or dig their horns into her biceps. She got tossed around a few times and losses control of the lamb. We just pushed them into the momma/baby area and then caught them again. We had one crazy female, who weighed 112# that just head butted right into my left side and tried to knock me down. We finally snagged her and got her into the scale. If she was not already going away that behavior would have earned a ticket to cull city! One time she held on but got tossed all over the barn while managing barely to stay on her feet and keep ahold of the very large lamb. On one occasion while getting the lamb into the harness she got jerked toward the side and I had to catch her to keep her from hitting her head. After that I held the sheep and she put the harness on. We finished with all 59, with 52 weighed. We did not weigh the seven we were keeping. It was getting pretty long as that took us about four hours to do fifty sheep. So about 5 minutes per sheep.

We then let the 52 go out into the upper end fields and moved the keeper seven over to the lower pastures to go into our main herd of ewes and two rams. We only kept whethers so this is possible.

Once that was done we needed to take the pile of discarded and not valuable alpaca fiber that was still in the milking area of the barn over into the lavender patch. We are using the fiber as a weed suppressant, ground cloth. It works pretty good for that but it takes a lot of fiber to do that. Luckily, we have a lot. We drug it through the corral and front yard and then went to toss it over the fence. This is when the Apprentice announced she “cannot move my arms” when we went to lift the fiber over the fence. It was a 12 x10’ tarp full of fiber.

We worked on clearing the front hillside of puncture vine. It’s so hard to get rid of so we are taking it out and bagging it all to go to the dump. We don’t want any of it on the property. Once we had the bag full the apprentice could not lift it so she brought the trash can into the yard and managed to get the bag into it on her own. We called it a day after that.

I am getting too old to go all day, I hurt by the end of the day. Annmarie tells me I should be conditioning my body in the off summer season but I am not sure that will help my joints, my achy knees, elbows and shoulders! So instead I just keep moving and keep doing stuff despite the pain.

Predators 9/Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It has been one of those weeks, The Apprentice wanted to keep working all week. The fence building did not deter her. We have two leaky frost free faucets that need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to do that they have to be dug out. This is due to the reducers that had to be added to match the 2” pipe that is original to the farm. I placed some tools on the ground to outline a space and asked her to dig. She knocked out the first hole on day 1. Her only real obstacles were the dogs kept dropping the throw balls onto her head when the hole started to get deep. I imagine she threw the ball all day for both dogs. I am sure they loved it. I saw her on her way out and told her there was another faucet in the back yard that needed dug out but it was near a tree stump and would probably not be as easy. This did not seem to deter her and The Apprentice stated she would be back the next day.

Thursday morning, she texted me around 0930, a late start for sure. I am sure that first hole was causing some physical discomfort. I had messaged her first thing to check on a sheep carcass in the orchard. My mother-in-law had called me at work stating she thought there was a dead sheep in the orchard. The Apprentice confirmed there was indeed a dead ewe, #325, in the orchard with no intestines. I told her to just leave it. She tore into the back faucet with less enthusiasm and more problems. There were tree roots everywhere and she had to keep cutting through them. I knew this was going to be a problem. She had to leave around 1330 and said there was more to dig.

When Annmarie came home she called me at work to tell me there was a dead sheep in the orchard. I had forgotten to tell her. She had spotted it because there was a Golden Eagle feasting on the carcass! I asked if she had gotten a picture of the eagle, nope. We discussed my failure to keep her informed and that the sheep had to now be brought into the barn lot. This means running them through the front yard every night and letting them back out every morning. I opted to leave the carcass in the orchard as I was going to be around the farm all weekend and wanted a crack at the coyote doing this.

Friday morning when Mr Rainman and I went out to fix the gate into the tree orchard area, he hit it with the tractor earlier in the summer. We noticed that the carcass only had the head intact and three legs. One leg was missing and one was off in the pasture about 40 feet from the carcass. It had been stripped down. We found a dig out spot under the fence. This is where the predators have been crawling under the fence to get to the sheep. It was a fresh crawl spot and the dirt was still moist. We ended up planting a wooden post in the field and mounting the electronic eyes on all four sides of the post. They are solar powered with a battery that lasts all night. So they charge all day and then light up and flash at night. It is supposed to look like light reflecting off of eyes. This is supposed to scare the predators off. We got everything mounted but did not turn them on. I went back up to the machine shed and created a snare to place over the hole. We are going to leave the carcass in the orchard for one more night to see if something returns tonight. This meant that the four vultures that showed up today got to fill their bellies all day long. They were pretty satiated. I will move the carcass tomorrow if we don’t catch anything. If we do I will try the snare a second night. Who knows what will happen.

We carried a rifle all day while working on the fence and faucets and did not see a single coyote. It is so painful to have the thing on you most of the day. We finally just put it in the pickup so it was out of the way. We did get the frost free faucets changed out and they work and do not leak. The Apprentice can fill in the holes at a later date. We went up and pounded T posts in on two sides of field #1. The stupid flood buried the woven wire alongside the road in two different places. We will have to cut the wire and splice in new to sit above the dirt. Their is a large drop off so we had to pound the T-posts in by hand alongside the road.

We measured the fence line distance alongside the creek. Each roll of woven wire is 330’. So I decided that instead of trying to wire all the woven wire into one long contiguous piece of wire I would just install them in 312-320’ increments. We marked out a H brace every 312-320 feet. We can install one entire section of fence, tighten it up and then attach the new one and do it again. Their needs to be some H braces interspersed along a long fence anyways and this made perfect sense to me. We marked out all of the H braces and drilled the first holes with the 6” auger. The rain we had earlier in the week and the storm we had today made drilling into the soil very easy. We got 5/100” of rain today. I missed out on measuring the earlier rain storm due to a dead battery in our rain gauge, I fixed it on Wednesday.

I did try and call the animal auction yard today but no one answered and their voicemail was full. I will try an email this weekend. We have 55 lambs that need a new home with only five sold at this time.