ram

Ram and bull in herd and breeding

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Summer is definitely here, all of the fields are dead and the only green is along the creek where patches of water still exist in deep pools or along the spring path. Nothing can kill the blackberries. They grow along the creek and spring in multiple places on the farm. I have managed to pick 181 cups of blackberries so far this year, so just over 11 gallons. I need to pick about another 10 gallons. We will have plums coming on in next 2-3 weeks and we can pit and freeze them for the wife’s breakfast smoothie. I try and collect 2 cups of fruit for 365 days. It takes a lot more than you would think when you are planning for the entire year.

The grandbaby is turning one year old this month. He is all over the place now and getting into everything. Nap time is still my favorite time. I loved it when our daughter was young and I still love it. Annmarie snuck down while I was “babysitting” this weekend one morning before going outside to do something.

It was time to sort off the sheep. I had two lambs to sell and we needed to sort off all the lambs so we could put the rams in with the ewes. We also traded a ewe for a new ram so I needed to chose that ewe and mark her so we can sort her off in December. The final count after multiple sorting passes is 12 wether lambs (#434-447), 17 female lambs, 2 sold so 15 to add to our herd at the end of December (#439-456), ewe #380 is going to Mr Horse Tamer, we also have 25 ewes that are being bred by 3 rams. We will be eating the lazy ram this winter, he will be made into 100% burger. The Quiet One came out and helped me sort everyone. It took a bit to get everyone moved into the correct pasture. The lambs are down below, the ewes and rams are up with the cows and bull. All the boys got turned in with their respective opposing genders.

I am working shifts at work so I am taking days off mid week to account for days worked and I wanted to get the chicken coop hardened and the fence around the greenhouse. So we put the 6” auger on one of the tractors and got the three 50# weights applied via my custom welded jig! There is just not enough weight if the soil is hard someone used to have to try and push down on the arm and that is not very safe. I bypassed the seat pto safety on the older tractor but I have not done that on the new one yet. It is fairly simple I just have not needed it yet. Eventually I will have to do it. The plan is to get this done on Tuesday & Wednesday of next week. I have no idea how hard it will be do dig the holes. The ground has not seen any water for about 2.5 months, the good thing is it is creek bottom so it should be deep soil. There are not any rock bluffs in the area we are digging holes.

Cows sorted

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Well I seem to be a couple of weeks behind recently on the blog. After a solid weekend working I am having trouble taking the time on Sunday night to crank out a couple of blog posts. Now that we are onto daylight savings times we are doing more little stuff outside after work therefore cutting into my blog time. I will attempt to keep up, just like I say every time!

Last weekend was the great swap! We needed to move all the animals around to get ready for spring. All of the cows needed to come into the corral so we can sort off last years yearlings and calves. Our cow should be having babies in April. We calve when the weather is warmer as the Dexters do better when you are not calving in the cold. Plus, we needed to count the cows as I can never remember how many we have. The cows of course were split and we ended up having to walk all the way to the end of field one to push them down toward the corral. We blocked off field #2 and field #4A so that no cows could get into either one. We will hay field #2 but #4A is so that the weanling calves cannot reach the momma cows. They will nurse the calves through the fence unless you put some distance between them. The mommas need all of their energy and milk for the calves that are coming next month. So Mr Rainman and I walked all over the farm moving cows.

When we were moving cows through field #3 we noticed something new. There is a spring head that comes out of the ground and has been for years. It just seeped out of the dirt in a ten foot area and had several faucet sized streams. That has changed! There is now a 12” diameter hole in the ground spouting water. The water volume is about double what it used to be and the water is moving fast enough that it is starting to dig down into the ditch. It lowered the ditch water level another 18 inches since last fall. We have a pretty soft muddy area up there that is around 50’ wide already. We may have to slow the water down and let it make a bigger softer area to keep the water from running away as fast. At a bare minimum we need to get a fence around the spring outlet so nothing falls in it. We could not see the bottom.

Sorting the cows was fairly anticlimactic. Once we pushed them down behind the barn we just starting sorting them 1-2 at a time as they ran through the gate. I only got hit once in the face with the gate when trying to push a calf into the chute. Both of them got out and we had to try again. Nothing got broken and I did not even get a bruise so all was good. Once we sorted off the 13 (or 14) heifers (all but 2 pregnant maybe) we pushed them up into field #4B so they were contained then pushed all of now weaned and last years calves up to field #3. There was a lot of bellowing and hollering by all parties due to the split. We isolated the alleyway to let it grow also. I was able to use Chance to move the cows back out to the field. By the end of it she was able to work the cows without the lead. She listens fairly well but does lay down when I ask. The dogs just don’t like the words “right” “left”. It takes me longer to train them with hand signals which is usually what they respond to. I must need to come up with two new words, I just thought of them “port” & “starboard”. I may have to give it a try.

Once that was done we moved both rams into the sheep herd. We need those two to do their job! Within minutes of them entering the herd they were sniffing pee and trying to mount the ewes. Annmarie and I have decided that they get two months in with the ewes and then we are removing them. Any ewe that doesn’t get pregnant gets an ear knocked and we will work on culling the herd until we only have a bunch of calm good mother hussies. We are not going to lamb for four months any more.

Mr Rainman went out to spread solid fertilizer onto fields #1, 2, triangle and down by the schoolhouse. I worked on rewiring the entire sprayer on the Kubota tractor. The wires and switch had been getting very hot to the touch and burned the switch up. We are not sure why as the sprayer worked fine all last year. I wired the pump up with the old wire from a previous inline switch from the manufacturer. This was the quickest fix. The switch welded closed the next day and Mr Rainman had to manually pull the wires apart at a connection to turn off the pump. I have since rewired the assembly with 10g wire and installed a new switch and made a PVC switch holder from PVC pipe fittings. This lasted about 4 hours before this switch welded shut. I have since replaced the switch and ordered two 30A waterproof switches. I am hoping this 3rd fix works and the extra switches are just insurance. I have learned to have parts on hand to just be able to do the fix real time without going to the store.

The daughter says I don’t take enough pictures of myself so I decided to take a farmer selfie, enjoy!

Sheep sorting again, ram time

Steve Hardin5 Comments

Yesterday was sheep sorting day. We have a bunch of skinny mommas and we need to wean off the lambs that are old enough, we need to worm everyone, create two herds (edible, keep) and turn the Ram loose in with the mommas (keep). This seems simple enough on the surface but nothing is ever simple when you are working with animals that have not been touched in three months. Most of the lambs have only been touched once in their entire life which makes them the most difficult group to handle. We started by having to dig trenches in the barn to be able to move the panels around and create chutes and three large pens in the barn. Once that was done I found the oral drenching tool and our wormer. I did not have enough oral drench so Annmarie volunteered to go to town and get more while we tagged and banded. I had about a 1/3 of a bottle so we could start while she was in transit. Mr Rainman and I then attempted to push the sheep into the barn. Nope, they would not go, no matter what we did, they kept breaking free of the pile and would not go into the chute into the barn.

Mr Rainman went and got Chance, border collie puppy, and he attempted to get her to move the sheep into the barn while she was on a lead. She would not really listen to him and since she is learning you have to be patient and strict at the same time. I took over and she was baling them up well but they would not go into the barn. She would be within four feet of them and they would not budge. One broke loose and she dived for it, I had a hold of the lead rope with just my hands, no gloves. I had to clamp down and grab rope to jerk her back for a correction. I ended up with a two inch rope burn on my middle finger! But I did get the puppy stopped and corrected. We had to go get Mouse also and squeeze the sheep from both sides and push them into the barn with the dogs. They just would not go on their own, and before that would work we had to open up the barn so they could just go through the door, once in the barn we pushed them to the far end so we could run them through the chute. We were still having trouble getting them into the chute so Mr Rainman started to just catch the little ones and then I could tag and band them. We had about ten lambs that needed tagged and banded still. On one of his snags he caught a pink tagged big lamb that was a ram! So it got banded, which was not easy as the testicles were so big I had to pop them through the bander opening one at a time. I have not made this mistake in years, so it was a great catch by Mr Rainman.

We used the oral drenched but the little clip that holds the bottle to the belt does not work so I tie it upside down under the belt with a piece of cord then it will work. It’s fairly redneck but it does the job and using the drencher hand pump is so much faster than having to measure out a syringe every time you need to dose a sheep. Once we had two groups of sheep we had to run them through the chute again to count them! Here are the final numbers: 46 ewes, 10 babies (too young to wean) , 1 ram in the first group and 40 lambs, 1 cull ewe, 13 eating size in second group for a total of 111 sheep. We are going to be taking the eating size ones to sale soon to see how they do. The ram is now in with the momma herd and we are keeping them in the orchard for now so he doesn’t have to chase them all over. We are bringing both groups into the barn lot every night to keep the predators at bay. One group in the front side and one group on the back side. They can see each other but not mix. There is an amazing amount of noise for the first few days once we separate off the lambs.

I hooked up the sickle mower onto the Kubota and tried to cut the orchard but the space is full of trees and metal rings around the trees. I did not even make it around the field once before I hit a cow panel and popped off a tooth from the bar. So I had to go put that sickle bar up and put the rake on the Kubota and set up the smaller sickle bar on the John Deere. We did not use it last year so I had to make some adjustments and get it all greased up. The Italians that designed it put one essential grease zirk where it is near impossible to access. It took me 30 minutes to get the thing into a spot where I could access it with a small grease gun and a 90 degree elbow. It is of course exactly where the bolt fails every time so it has to be done. I can pop the other mower apart and redo the rivets but that will take time. So it will be something I need to do after hay season. I had to pull the break away bar from the mower and beat on it with an eight pound sledge hammer to get it back into some semblance of shape and function. It’s not perfect but it is much improved. I am now ready to cut more hay today. The plan is to cut 1/3 of the leftover ground today and turn it on Tuesday. Then bale it on Wednesday. I will cut more hay on Tuesday, another 1/3. We have managed to bale 346/900 needed bales and 252/900 are in the barn. I was able to scavenge another 20 bales yesterday from the leftovers.

Lambing update week 7

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This weekend I had to spend some quality time in the barn again. The mother/lamb area needed to be expanded. It now covers 2/3 of the barn. The rope we used to tie one side of the creep gate in place is getting stretched by the ewes and the thin ewes are able to crawl through the side. This morning one of the ewes was stuck in the creep gate. She got stuck right in front of her back hips and could not move. I had to pull the pins out of the gate and drag her back out. It took her about ten minutes to get her sea legs under her. Her lamb was glad to see her and kept nursing as much as it could. This has prompted us to get bigger eyelets so that we can stick a 1” rod down through the right side of the gate. We are out of the skinny rods so the bigger aluminum ones need to be used. I am afraid to use an eyelet that just gets screwed into the wood. I am afraid the ewes will just tear it out by pushing on the gate. I had four of them pushing on it Saturday as they were able to get their noses into one of the feeders. They could barely reach it with their tongues but they were not giving it up! I had to lean over the gate and hang in the air to push it away from them. They would not let me pass. I have a bolt on eyebolt that will fit and now just need to install it.

We are now certain that a second ram is needed. We have been lambing for seven weeks and we are still not done. So this spring we are going to keep the sheep in a small contained area when we introduce the ram. NO more letting the sheep run over 40 acres and the ram having to chase them all down.

  • Date of update- Mar 12, 2023
  • # of Lambs born – 48
  • # of ewes who have delivered babies – 30
  • # of ewes still pregnant – 12 in area, I don’t think they are all pregnant
  • # of single lamb births – 13
  • # of twin lamb births – 16
  • # of triplet lamb births – 1
  • # of bummer lambs – 5
  • # of lambs who died in first two weeks – 3
  • Total # of lambs on farm -40
  • % birthing rate- 160%
  • % production rate -133%
  • % survival rate at birth – 100%
  • % survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 83%

We had one of the traveling staff from Florida come out for a few hours on Friday and see the lambs and ewes. She got to pet everyone and tour the house. We then fed her leg of lamb for dinner! It was amazing as always. She wore her snow boots out in the barn. Being a city slicker she had never seen anything like it before. She kept marveling at the fact that there were no neighbors.

It’s the little stuff

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Annmarie had a discussion with me about her loom. Now mind you I had to move the loom to paint the entire ceiling after doing the small repair in the craft room. What I did not know was that before you move a loom that is warped up you should relax the warp. Otherwise, you can throw off the tension and alignment, not that I did that. Annmarie was able to fix it because not only did I have to move it out to paint, I had moved it back in place afterwards! She is back to working on our woolen woven hallway old ice fridge cover. She has about 24 ” done and it needs to be 54” long, so almost halfway. Basically the takeaway is ”Don’t touch the loom”.

Since the weather was so nice and Annmarie wants me to catch up on all the little things we spent Saturday fixing the new round planter in our back garden. It needed to be filled with gravel, then soil, Mr Professional filled it with a lot of gravel, some sheep manure compost then we topped it with some good planting mix soil. We topped off all the other bins with extra soil also. It does seem odd to be doing garden stuff in mid February.

The old ram bolted through the gate when we were hauling gravel around, he promptly ran for the main herd of sheep and started sniffing tails. This caused some consternation from Casper, the new ram, so much so that after we got the old ram out of the herd Casper had to mount a couple of ewes just to establish his rank. This is a good thing, as we have seen some breeding activity but not as much as we would like to see. I personally would like to see him lose 10-15% of his body mass due to an unrelenting focus on getting everyone bred as quickly as possible.

I spent an hour grooming Gizmo. It has been a long time since I have taken the time to totally strip all of the loose hairs off of him. He looks great! I should probably do it more often but he doesn’t particularly love this endeavor and I feel like I am picking on him when I do it. Which would be why he does not get stripped very often.


On Sunday I spent an hour and sanded down a piece of maple for Annmarie to practice the laser farm pictures on. We are going to laser engrave all of the turn of the century farm photos we have onto wood and mount them on the dormer in the kitchen. We are hoping to do around 20-25 pictures. So I have a lot more wood to sand!