Today I felt particularly aware of how screwed I’d be without the community of people who are helping me figure out how to do this farming thing.  Some of my ewes are (finally) about to start lambing, and one of the pre-birth tasks is to vaccinate the sheep against a suite of clostridial infections.  The goal is to boost the ewe’s immunity so that she can pass on antibodies in her milk to the newborn lambs.  On its face, it’s a simple process:  gather the sheep, push them into the handling system, inject 2mL of vaccine under the skin of the ones who need it, and let them out the other side.  But with 41 moving parts (38 sheep, a border collie, a maremma, and me) and a handful of very sharp things, I can imagine dozens of ways this could have gone south.  But instead, Bill Fosher was here today, and we were done in less than an hour, no cursing required.

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