Today my flock went back on the road to graze Eric White’s hilly pastures across the valley from us. The only access to the new fields was a steep logging road.
Cass was able to move her sheep the ¼ mile up the road with no fences to contain the flock — the girlie is turning in to a real sheepdog. Between gathering and sorting sheep on my farm, loading the trailer, and driving the sheep up the logging road, she ended up working for much of the day. It caught up with her after the final move.
The side field off the main road was one of the last holdouts. The labyrinth of half-assed fence and head-high weeds made it hard to know even what was in there, and turning it into a useful part of the farm seemed infinitely far off. When I tried to mow a bit of it a couple of weeks ago and got hidden fencing wrapped around the flail mower, it only reinforced the sense of Here Be Dragons. So it felt like an enormous achievement when Jered, my occasional helper, and I pulled the last of the wire fence and fence posts, and I was able to mow enough of the field to see what it might become.
I was excited to see the green strip in the middle, where I had previously mowed, was already growing nice-looking grass. I guess it was hiding under the nettle and goldenrod, waiting for a little sunlight to come its way. I’m hoping the rest of the area will quickly return to grass as well.
After a bunch of mowing, I realized how close the field is to my house.
Between the fence, the weeds, and the wet area just beyond Luc, that part of the farm felt almost infinitely remote.
Since this is New England, inevitably there were rocks. The granite and the mower fought to a draw.
While some of the rocks we big enough to notice before driving over them.
I also found the boundary between the usable pasture and the wet area beyond.
It’s been raining a bit recently, so perhaps this area would be usable in a dryer year.
I’m picking up some North Country Cheviot ewes in New York next week, and I plan to give them a short quarantine stay in this new field before they join the rest of the flock. Since there won’t be much grass yet when they arrive, I’ll feed them one of the big round bales left over from last winter. Their manure will help nourish the recovering pasture, and when the whole flock is back in October, I hope to have a week or more of grazing there. Progress on the farm has felt slow, but these occasional punctuations of visible progress are very nourishing.
Tagged: cleanup, fence removal, grazing, mowing, new grass, reclamation, side pasture
Folks who have been in my house know that I haven’t really unpacked, ten months after moving here, so they might justifiably conclude that orderliness is not my thing.
In truth, I get just as excited as the next guy at the sight of a neatly laid out linen closet, but my energies have all been focused on the land and the animals. So I felt a little swell of satisfaction when I looked down the hill at the grazing paddocks I’d set up, imposing parallel lines and right angles on the wilderness.
Tagged: electronet, grazing, grazing rotation, OCD, order, pasture, sheep, temporary fence, wilderness
When I weighed the flock after their off-farm grazing tour, I was disappointed with what seemed like poor performance, but at that point I hadn’t looked carefully enough at the numbers to really understand where things stood. I finally got to spend some quality time with my spreadsheets this morning, and though I’m still figuring out how my flock should perform under ideal circumstances, I think I have a better sense of what the weight data have to say. In order to draw meaningful conclusions, I divided the flock into six groups based on their metabolic circumstances.
Since the flock has been back on my fields, I’ve been trying hard to give them everything they need — grazing them on excellent pasture, and moving them twice a day, well before they’ve exhausted the forage in their grazing section.
I plan to weigh them again on the 26th, about 3 weeks after they got back here, and I imagine those numbers will be quite instructive. If the sheep more or less continue the trends of the previous 5 weeks, I’d conclude that the off-farm pasture was not limiting them, and if I want more weight gain, I need to breed sheep that are more genetically disposed to efficient use of forage. If instead I see that they’ve done much better since getting back home, I’ll have to conclude that the off-farm pasture was limiting their growth, and I’ll have to figure out how to improve their pasture access next year. To be continued!
Tagged: analysis, data mining, forage quality, geeking out, lambs, pasture, pasture quality, sheep, spreadsheets, weight gain
I realized recently that I’m losing my battle with thistle in the pastures. The flowers are a wonderful magnet for pollen-collectors,
but it’s growing so densely in some spots it’s starting to crowd out the sheep.
Thistle grows from a taproot, so I had hoped to be able to dig the plants, root and all, out of all the pastures, so they wouldn’t just regrow from the rootstocks next year. And I knew that I had to get this done before the thistle flowers started to go to seed, which would doom me for years to come. Despite help from friends, I wasn’t getting to it all, and now some of the flower heads are starting to set seed.
So I’ve abandoned my lofty ambitions of pulling out all of the thistles by their roots, and now I’m just cutting the damn things off at ground level with a brush saw. I fear that every single root I’m leaving will set a new thistle next year, but I’m getting most of the plants before the seeds develop, so hopefully next year’s thistle problem won’t be exponentially worse. And it does feel very satisfying to have clean pastures and a huge pile for the compost heap.
Tagged: brush saw, Chloe, getting shit done, invasion, management, pasture, pollinators, sheep, Thistle, tractor
As I’m getting near the end of our first grazing tour of Sullivan — I’ll move the flock back to my place on Sunday — I’ve been thinking about the tradeoffs of different sorts of pasture. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, flat, rich, bottomland with square fields and lush grass is appealing. The fence would be easy to set up and nutrition for the sheep is likely excellent; but shade would probably be in short supply, and shouldn’t someone be growing vegetables on that land? In any event, I’m not convinced sheep have any business grazing perfect cropland like that (more on this at some point soon).
The land my sheep are grazing at Mark Smith’s place is pretty far removed from that hypothetical bottomland.
The forage density is nothing like that on well-managed pasture, but I wonder if the range of plants the sheep browse in a setting like this gives them some important nutritional variety. It’s a time-consuming pain in the ass to set up electronet here, even with the perimeter paths that Mark mowed for me, and because there’s less to eat, I move net more often to keep the sheep in pasture. But there’s no shortage of shade for a hot summer day — the sheep barely drank despite the hot and humid conditions — and I can’t help wondering if a setting like this provides less-tangible benefits to the flock. There’s an apocryphal study claiming that cats living in a messy home are smarter than those in a perfectly neat one — something about the richer (messy) environment stimulating cognition. I may be heading back onto anthropomorphic thin ice, but I can’t imagine there isn’t a similar effect with sheep; even if there’s no measurable change in flock IQ, I feel pretty comfortable claiming that they seem awfully content when they’re in a complex environment like this one.
I understand that raising animals for food can be a morally murky endeavor; I think it only becomes defensible when those animals are treated as well as we know how. And while efficient management and feeding are very appealing, efficiency on its own is a problematic guiding principle. Variety seems like an important part of the mix, too, even if there’s some cost in (farm) labor or (animals’) nutrition.
Tagged: fog, hilly, intelligence, labor, Mark Smith, morality, pain in the ass, pasture, sheep, variety, woods
Foggy morning at Mark Smith’s place.
It’s not be raining quite so frequently as earlier in the summer, so yesterday Mark Smith tried again to move logs from the powerline cut up to the area near my wood boiler. We were hoping that the soil would have dried enough to give his skidder some traction. Starting out, things seemed to be going well.
But when he got to the tricky bit that undid him last time, things were not any better
He finished out pulling that load up to the landing, but it was clear that it didn’t make sense to continue.
The flock now have the option of enjoying the view from the other side of Sullivan, though I’m not sure they’re fully appreciative of it.
Tagged: bravo, hills, maremma, Mark Smith, sheep, Sullivan NH, sunset, view
It’s neither my birthday nor Christmas, but I got another present from the previous owners of my farm today. I’ve been cleaning up debris and non-functional fence since I moved here, and recently removed the last major section of broken fence. I was pretty certain that we had removed all the random scraps of metal in that area of pasture, but when I tried to mow it today (with the brand-new flail mower), I found one more piece of discarded wire fence buried in the grass. Here’s the view from underneath after I’d started cutting some of it away:
The process of cutting out the woven wire fence that was wrapped around the cutting head of the mower — snip, snip, snip, with no appreciable progress for the longest time — felt surprisingly similar to removing an infinite number of porcupine quills from a dog’s face, though I assume the mower didn’t feel any pain. Eventually I started to make some progress,
and finally got it all cleared:
And here’s my gift, after unwrapping:
