Sheep

Rain is here

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I am happy the rain is here. The upper 80 acre wheat field just got planted this last week so the rain had perfect timing for it. I have yet to plant our 14 acres of grass but this rain should let me break up the last of the dirt clots and make a nice smooth dirt surface. That will be much nicer to cut hay from next year. Unfortunately, the rain brought forth a nasty leak in our daughter’s house. I went over and discovered two leaking places. I will have to replace a 8×16 foot section of roof and fix the leak around the stovepipe. It never seems to end sometimes. One crisis after another.

Normally, I would do it after work but the welding class is tying up two of my weeknights until 2100. I am learning but there is a definite disadvantage for those of us who are true newbies. I spend every moment of every lab trying to get a passable weld. I just started brazing and I am horrible. So it will take me another 5-10 hours to figure it out. I just keep reminding myself that I need this class and knowledge to get our projects around the farm completed!

I looked up how much rain we got, 1.6 inches! That is a lot of rain for a place that only gets 12″ annually. This means I have to wait a few days to get into the fields.

Annmarie found another dead sheep on the upper hillside. We have lost four sheep this summer and not managed to kill a single coyote or another other sheep eating predator. At this point I am starting to suspect it may be a cougar. We have had a couple of “silent” nights were every living animal at night stops making noise. This is not caused by coyotes. This is a stupid problem. We have lost enough sheep to justify the expense of a guard dog but only this year. We will have to sustain steady losses to make it pencil out financially.

Mailbox upgrade

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Friday was my first day of vacation that I actually did not have to go into my paying job. I have been on PTO since Wednesday on paper, reality is not always the same. This allowed me to play catch up on some things.

I went hunting and managed to spot the little spike buck that has been in the wheat field every morning. I went by him and thought he was a doe. On the way back to the house I stopped one last time and looked at all the does and spotted the horns. My paper deer tag covered up the horns. He will be very good eating, I was able to pick him up and carry him to the cooler without any help. I would like to think that after moving ten ton of hay this last week that its pure muscle strength, but since I felt every bale I am not sure that is the correct answer. When we first moved here a neighbor made custom mailboxes for us out of old gears. The paint has started to flake off and show rust so we had decided that it was time to take them over to Hermiston and get them bead blasted and powder coated so they would last for another 20-30 years. Unfortunately, we still need our mail so I used a bunch of pallets to create a temporary holder. I plan on dropping these off in Hermiston next week.

Thursday we got the last six tons of hay into the machine shed. I only ended up with three blisters and only one of those tore open. I definitely don’t have farmer hands. I still take care to minimize the calluses on my hands so it doesn’t affect my paying job. I need those baby smooth hands for a reason.

I had a friend message me as we loaded the lasts two tons onto the trailer that she wanted to borrow my trailer. Great timing! I said come over ASAP as I need to unload the last two tons into the machine shed. They showed up 10 minutes after I finished unloading the last bale and closing the gate.

I picked up 4 sheets of plywood to lie on top of the hay so that main beam can be replaced. I will be laying it out this week and wrestling the beam up onto the hay. I will cut it on top of the hay. The beam weighs 165#, I asked when I picked it up. There are two other boards to replace also.

The alpaca think they are starving and have been hanging out and eating the alfalfa scraps. They are even ignoring the green grass for an opportunity to eat alfalfa leaves. They dig through and pick out just the leaves before eating anything else. We are taking bets on which color of alpaca is the next to be bullied to death. We did separate them for a couple of weeks, it is supposed to help as it throws off the group dynamics but it seems like they just fight more when they get back together.

It was a day of finding missing items. I had misplaced the Bluetooth speaker that normally lives in the bathroom. No music during the shower was killing me! I have been looking all over the place and spotted it yesterday when I was eyeing the dog tag maker. It was sitting on the corner of the maker blending in with the color. I will be moving the dog tag maker into our master bedroom this week hopefully. I just need to talk my nephews into helping move a 300# chunk of iron 30 feet. We are getting felt pads for the floor today.

I was out in the old house tossing the cardboard boxes from our beef onto the “to be burned” pile stored out of the weather when I looked over at my waders and spotted my good pocket knife hanging from the chest of the waders. This had been missing for six weeks. I still need to find my Sawzall though…

It rained!! First measurable rain in over 65 days. First good rain for over 90 days! I am now under the gun to get the grass hay planted. I will be working those fields one more time. We ordered a chest mounted seed spreader that will hold 20# of seed at a time from Amazon yesterday. I will be walking the field to seed it. If that works well we are going to start tearing up and reseeding all of the bottoms to increase our feed capacity. If I can get them good enough we may even hay a few of them in the spring.

I learned something new that I should have known on Thursday, sheep only have a gestation of 5 months not 6. This would explain many of my issues with predicting when the sheep are going to have babies! I have thought for the last 8 years that it was 6 months not 5.

Sheep sorted

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After the good news this morning that we had a buyer for the sheep I took down the Craigslist ad. When Annmarie and Sarah got home we went out to work the sheep. We had to reinstall the chute and put up sorting panels to separate the barn into three sorting areas. We also tossed out three bales of straw all over the ground. The small momma area needs to be dug out again. Bubba did it but it was the last area and he wasn’t very committed. I will get it later after the heat wave lets off. There were some tools and boards that had to be moved also. Once we were ready we brought over the ram and wethers from the orchard. We sorted off the ram and three boys. We are trading two sheep for a pig and have a coworker of Annmarie’s that wants to utilize most of the animal. So I will help him kill their animal. We may do all three so he can use up the parts of the other two that won’t be used. I would rather someone use up as much as possible. Those four animals got shut up into the momma area.

We then ran the main herd in through the back part of the barn. Annmarie had me leave them in the ram pasture. I would have normally let them out onto the back hillside and down by the school house. Leaving them cut down the amount of walking us humans had to do. All the sheep ended right in the sorting end of the barn. We ran them through the chute and pulled off the rest needed to make 50 animals. All the keep animals were in the middle of the barn. We let the sorted females go out into the barn lot. Our feed quality on the back hillside is not very good, we had several very skinny ewes. I will be tossing them out hay on a daily basis for a while.

We then resorted all 52 sheep, we had two little ones that had to be put back in with their mothers. We sorted off the biggest 35 animals to be sold tomorrow. The other 15 we put out in the orchard. They will fatten up for a few more weeks. Our ram is now officially in the herd so we should have babies in February of next year. Our bull needs to come off the herd the end of March. So they can keep each other company for a couple of months. We have a steer also so he will need to go in with the bull also. The bull will be better minded with company.

WAR has begun

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We had the Professional come out and evaluate our two sheep kills. He said to call him back when the wheat was harvested as it provides a good spot to set up. Wheat was harvested a few days ago and we have been bringing the sheep in every night into the ram pasture next to our house. No sheep have died in the ram pasture but Annmarie found another dead animal up on the hillside! Three sheep already this year! We definitely have a problem. I will call the professional on Monday to get him out. This means a total mobilization is in the works. I am going to have to start carrying a rifle when we go out to work animals and in the evening I am going to try my hand at calling in the coyotes with a hand call. The odd part of this is that I would rather be doing something else as catching a wiley predator can take time and patience, neither of which I have in abundance.

We have 40 sheep for sale on Craigslist and have not been getting any takers. Today I was going to spread out to other Craigslist regions in hope of getting a single buyer. At 0600 our old buyer called and wanted to know if we had any sheep for sale. We do, he is now working for someone else while he gets back in the saddle. We negotiated a fair price and he will come on Monday with cash in hand to pick up our largest 35 lambs, with a return visit to pick up another 15 in a few weeks. We are going to have to cut down our herd size to only 45 ewes to do this. But since we are not looking to drive to the sale and we really want a regular buyer the downsize is good for a few years. If we can get a regular buyer we are willing to jump up to 100 ewes. Our expansion can wait a few more years. This gives me time to fine tune a few more things in the barn. Plus, we can figure out how to put up our own hay.

I got this beast yesterday. My first set of junk yard special discs broke apart and need some serious repair. I got this set of Left hand pull discs for $250 and for an extra $50 they delivered them to our house from an hour away! I paid cash, and ten minutes later they were pulling away! Luckily, I had been putting off going into D & B and buying a set from them for $1000. They are in great shape, have grease zerks and the tractor had no trouble pulling them off the trailer. I will give them a spin next week after this heat wave breaks. I will have to do it late evening after dinner. The only thing I need to buy is a Clevis to go onto the tongue so I can attach it to my tractor.

Cowboy breakfast

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The animal experience ended well, we made homemade biscuits and milk gravy! I even fried the sausage in leftover bacon grease, do not knock it until you have tried it! The sausage was really lean and you need some fat to get the flour to brown. The biscuits are always made from Bisquick, which isn’t really from scratch but they are still made at home and they are amazing. It was a great ending to a long morning. We started moving animals at 0530 this morning. It has been very hot and the animals don’t do well in the heat, they get stressed easily. Annmarie doesn’t like the heat either, one could say she gets stressed also, if one dared. So we were out the door by 0534 to begin our adventure. It’s hard to explain to people why we have worked so hard to subdivide the property and why we have so many different gates and enclosures throughout the farm. It all comes down to moving and sorting animals, this task is much easier if you can place animals in pens or re-sort them when needed. This was especially true today as we had two separate groups of cows and two separate groups of sheep.

The sheep and horses were in with the first group of six cows. We used the border collies to push the sheep into our front yard. This was Annmarie’s idea as it gets them out of the way and I agreed but as an added bonus the lawn needs mowed. Dual purpose is the name of the game. The dogs did very well and it took less than a minute to get them out of the barn lot and into the yard with no swearing. This is a near miraculous event and not very common. Our dogs are trained to respond to swearing and yelling. This is totally our fault, but we realize that the dogs need to practice on the animals to learn but it can be trying at times. We got the first six cows into the corral and dusted them down for flies. We had them in 2 of the 3 pens then went to get the other cows. The other cows were way down by the schoolhouse. Actually, half were up by the irrigation pump but they ran down to see the bull and ended up at the end of the property by the school house. Annmarie took both dogs and Mouse was being a spicy pickle with tons of extra hot and a dash of horseradish. Sarah asked me why she kept using him if he kept running and doing the wrong thing. I told her that she was teaching him, he won’t learn without mistakes and since she could call him back every time with the animals visible he just needed fine tuning. Getting him to return to us with the animals in his sight is the hardest trick of all to teach and that one we have done. The rest is just repetition. He wants to go in a straight line and pretends that the command “right” or “left” means run directly at whatever animal it is we are currently working. She got them out of the trees and headed back toward the house. We pushed them through the first fence and I closed the gate and worked the dogs as Annmarie’s voice was wearing thin as well as her patience. The cows don’t want to work easily as there is a calf in their midst. The reason we want them is so we can tag and band the calf and let the bull at the sequestered cows and yearling heifer.

The above picture is where the cows were the first time, the below picture is where the cows are after they got around the dogs and Annmarie because the dogs failed to turn them when they broke. They ran for the dry creek bed and went under the fence. I had not locked down the panels in the creek area yet. I usually do this later in the summer when we are trying to control access to certain areas of the pasture. I did shut the gate, even though it didn’t help. Sarah had to go to work so Annmarie and I and the dogs pushed them up the hill this time so we could run them across the top of the hill away from obstacles. This worked well and we got them into the barn lot fairly easily. We locked them in behind the barn and attempted to push them into the corral. Now it should be noted that before we went out to get these cows Annmarie asked me if we should not use the horse corral panels to build a funnel for the cows to go directly to the corral. I was opposed to this option as it meant more work. Well, this came back to haunt me as the cows would not go into the corral. The mean cow with the green ear tag would not go, she kept coming back at us and eventually ran past us. Annmarie is a huge proponent of gentle steady pressure when moving the animals. I am more of a holler and dog kind of guy. She got me to agree to make hamburger out of the green tag cow and to add her to the butchers list but even more importantly she agreed to go into the barn while I worked the cows with the dogs. The dogs did great and we pushed everyone right into the corral. She wanted to know why I didn’t do that every time. I stated that my method is only quicker part of the time and the animals tend to break away more as I use the dogs and shaker sticks aggressively. I just got lucky.

We powdered and sorted cows, the green tag cow went into the to be eaten in six weeks pen. We have a no scrotum bull that was wreaking havoc in the pens. He is in the to be eaten pen. He is is about 100# heavier than everyone else. We had a one nutter last time we killed and he was great eating. This one never had any testicles descend stupid problem number 15.

We managed to get the calf isolated to one pen and I went and got a tag and bander pliers. I like the calves to be under 30 days old but this one is more like 2+ months old. I am here to tell you that there is a world of difference when you are grabbing and catching one by yourself. I couldn’t get it by the neck but managed to snag a back leg. Have you ever seen those vibrating dumbbells advertised on infomercials that go back and forth and you are supposed to hold onto them? It was exactly like that trying to hold onto a back leg and getting drug around the pen. I knew that I needed to grab the opposite front and back leg and then flop him onto his side. But the execution of this was not happening. I could not get to the head of the animal. So I grabbed the other back leg! Now I have two of these pumping pulling weights attempting to jerk me off my feet. I got kicked in the chest and belly several times before it finally started bawling at the top of its lungs. I couldn’t take the physical, auditory and mental abuse any more. I let it go and we concocted a plan to get this stuff done. We decided to keep the calf and mother in the corral until I can get some help. We will feed them, let them into the old milking portion of the barn and fill the 35 gallon water trough. I realize that the cure for this is to learn to rope. I had rope to tie up legs on the calf but I could not get it to ground. Annmarie tweaked her back 3 days ago so she was forbidden to help wrestle the calf. On a good day I end up with bruises and sore for a couple of days.

After all of that Annmarie decided to give the green tag cow a butcher reprieve and she was put back in with our bull.

The bull and his 8 ladies needed to be pushed back out to get a double fence between them and the market cows. So the dogs and I stopped at the spring to get our fill of water before moving on. Zeke went upstream and made the water muddy for me to drink. This is part of the annual water quality check I perform. I have never gotten sick yet. As far as we know no one has over the course of the farm’s life. The spring head is only about 60 feet away.

The sheep just did not want to leave the shade or the front yard. We tried twice with the dogs but everyone was tired after 4 hours working animals and the lawn still needs to be mowed so we are going to leave them in for at least a day.

We called the state trapper on Friday and he returned our call today. He is coming out to evaluate our predator problem on Monday. We will get this sheep depredation problem under control. Someone suggested guard dogs and they do work, but they cost about $75/month per dog to maintain. We are not about to go into this yet as it costs us about $120/month for the two border collies by the time you add in food and all the vet bills. This is cheap help and saves us from having to pay a human being to help so it is totally needed but it is an ongoing cost and we like to keep those as low as possible.

Annmarie and the dogs were all tuckered out after the running around and a hearty breakfast.