I’ve complained repeatedly about all the discarded stuff left behind by the previous owners, but one category of remnants has proven quite entertaining.
The rate of discovery of abandoned balls has slowed, but Cass and Luc are still finding new ones, like the best sort of Easter egg hunt.
Tagged: balls, basketball, border collies, Cass, Chloe, cleanup, football, found, Luc, soccer ball, wrestling
Sometimes nature has a keen sense of irony. On Friday I was walking through the lamb group during a little snow squall, and I noticed coarse snowflakes on a pile of lamb poop.
Bill had taught me earlier this year to look carefully at lamb poop for shed tapeworm segments, a sign that they have an infestation I need to treat. The snow-on-dung scene looked enough like tapeworm that I sent Bill a jokey text with the image, calling out the white spots as “not tapeworm.” So when Bill came over to walk the farm with me on Saturday, I was a little horrified to see actual tapeworm segments on the lamb poop.
I really want to believe that the tapeworm had just appeared, to acquit me of the crime of Not Looking Carefully. Bill suggested that this could actually be the case — the dewormer I used last week (Levamisole) to treat the poopy butts isn’t effective against tapeworm, and eliminating other intestinal parasites can clear the way for a latent tapeworm infestation to proliferate, once the competition is gone. Regardless of the time course of the infestation, Bill suggested I treat the lambs with a dewormer that is active against tapeworm (Albendazole) as soon as possible.
So this afternoon I rounded up the lambs once again to push them through the handling system. My friend Deb, who agreed to help with the lamb wrangling, also documented the fun. I used Chloe to gather the lambs and move them in to the handling system.
Chloe is quite skillful at working sheep, but she folds quickly under pressure. If a ewe (or god forbid, a ram) looks at her askance, she abandons her post and comes to hide behind my legs. The lambs, though, are not yet assertive enough to spook her, so she’s very happy to work with them, and Chloe’s calm nature (as opposed to Cass’s unchecked intensity) reduces stress on the flighty lambs and helps the work go smoothly. Once the lambs were in the handling system, I gave them a dose of Albendazole and weighed them again.
And while the lambs were in the raceway, I practiced checking their heart and lungs with my new stethoscope.
After having a ewe with pneumonia earlier this fall, Bill suggested I learn to listen to sheep lung sounds so I could better diagnose infections in the future. I was practicing on the lambs to learn what normal sheep innards sound like.
While treating the lambs for their tapeworm infestation was the primary motivation for handling them today, I was very interested to see their weights as well. I had previously weighed the lambs on 21 October and 10 November, and they gained an average of less than a tenth of a pound a day over that period. I was disappointed at this growth rate, but Bill said it wasn’t surprising, given the time of year and the fact that I had just weaned the lambs. But when I compared today’s weights with those from the 10th, I saw that the group had gained on average almost a half pound per day over those 9 days, with some gaining a full pound per day. This turnaround suggests that their growth had been significantly hindered by the roundworms that were causing the poopy butts (probabaly brown stomach worms, according to Bill), and the previous deworming had eliminated the worms and released a burst of compensatory growth in the lambs. So while I’d love to believe that I could regularly get this rate of growth with careful management and lush grass, the exceptional progress over the last nine days is probably not repeatable without another serious parasite infestation. Nevertheless, it’s very helpful to get some insight into my animals’ growth patterns.
Tagged: Albendazole, Chloe, Deb Monnat-White, deworming, handling system, irony, lambs, Levamisole, parasites, Prohibit, stethoscope, tapeworm, Valbazen, weighing
The boundary between the grazed and ungrazed sections of the lower pasture caught my eye this afternoon.
Sheep and fence are implied, and the image tells the story of grazing management — uniformly eaten pasture now allowed to rest and recover, with the next paddock awaiting the arrival of the flock. Bill has been preaching the value of short, intensive grazing followed by long recovery, and I’m already seeing the benefits on my fields. Much of the grass around the area is heading into dormancy as November overtakes us, but most of my pastures are lush and green, the grass growing vigorously in response to earlier rounds of grazing this summer.
Tagged: Bill Fosher, boundary, Chloe, fence, grass, lush, management intensive grazing, rotational grazing, sheep
No rural idyll is complete without gunfire; Sullivan does its part by hosting the Cheshire County Fish and Game Club.
The shooting range is just down the hill from the Woodbury pasture where the flock is grazing, but the sheep and guardian dogs don’t seem to pay it any heed. Cass and Chloe likewise show no sign of noticing the racket.*
Poor Luc is not so sanguine, taking shelter in Chip and Kathy’s garage when the volleys become too much for him.
*I’ve often said that Cass is so intent when she’s working sheep that you could fire a gun next to her and she wouldn’t notice. I didn’t realize that my hyperbolic comment would turn out to be literally true.
These days, Cass’s biggest challenge is finding the right pace when she’s working. Sometimes pressure from the sheep almost freezes her,
and sometimes things move too quickly.
We’re working hard on consistently finding something in between.
This is what cheating looks like:
When I arrived on the farm last fall, the pastures were pretty exhausted, from a combination of overuse and less-than-sympathetic management. Bill Fosher made a compelling argument that if was thoughtful in the way I managed my flock of sheep, that alone would do wonders to bring back the productivity of these fields. Bill showed me examples of the effects of good and bad management, convincing me that carefully managed grazing can be almost miraculous. The trouble is that the One True Path takes time to bear fruit, and my sheep are hungry now.
So when I met with Carl Majewski, the UNH Extension agronomist, his suggestion that I might jumpstart the pasture improvement by spreading some urea fertilizer held illicit appeal. Urea is a concentrated form of nitrogen that’s easily absorbed by plants. Its action is not unlike that of anabolic steroids on baseball players: unprecedented growth coupled with moral ambiguity. I’ll leave discussions of muscle-bound home-run hitters to my readers; urea is synthesized using large amounts of natural gas, both as feedstock and to provide the energy to run the process, so its use turns a solar-powered process (growing grass and sheep) into one dependent on fossil fuels. Leaning on shaky logic — a little hit won’t get me hooked — I decided to give it a try.
My friend Bob Jones lent me his cone spreader, the delivery device of choice.
Refills are conveniently carried in the bucket.
The Greek chorus didn’t seem entirely convinced of the wisdom of my actions, but perhaps I was projecting.
And Luc, who doesn’t like me to get far from his sight, insisted on running alongside; he had to squint against the flying urea pellets.
The grass should let me know in a few weeks whether my morning at the crossroads is paying off…
Tagged: Cass, Chloe, cone spreader, fertilizer, Fressoni, growth, Luc, moral ambiguity, nitrogen, pasture, steroids, tractor, urea
Now that I’ve (hopefully) resolved my escaping-animal problems among the tall grasses at Eric and Deb’s place, I thought it was safe to reunite Cleo with Bravo. For all the frustration she caused me with her wanderings, and despite her size, she’s a very transportable dog.
I wouldn’t ever consider moving Bravo this way — in a five minute ride I bet he’d manage to eat the car, fight the border collies, and try to ride in my lap — so he doesn’t get to ride inside. Cleo, though, is a much gentler soul, settling in to the unfamiliar experience and even charming the BCs. I’m assuming that 4000 volts on the fence will convince her that staying in with the sheep is the best work strategy, and I haven’t yet gotten any calls to the contrary.
Tagged: Cass, charger, Chloe, Cleo, containment, escape, fence, Great Pyrenees, I Ride Inside, Mitt Romney, Seamus, wandering
Sometimes they can’t help but reveal themselves. Luc, on the left, is very uneasy at being asked to lie down in the middle of the driveway (what could this mean?!). Next is Wren, looking insane, as she often does. Cass shows no sign that she’s aware of my existence, and Chloe is giving a little sidelong glance and wishing she could disappear.
The astute reader may notice an extra border collie… Wren is staying with us for 10 days while her person, Denise Leonard (who used to be Chloe’s person as well), is away. And while Wren’s stay is completely unrelated to the puppy mania sweeping the household, her presence has been instructive: Four border collies do in fact fit in my little Volkswagen, and the chaos engendered by an additional dog feels like rounding error on the background chaos. It’s also pretty entertaining to go for a walk with all 4 — the comic subplots grow exponentially with just one more pup. I’m still agonizing over the immediate puppy decision, but I’m feeling more confident that I won’t unravel once a fourth joins us permanently.
We’ve gotten to the part of summer when the grass doesn’t grow very fast, so I tend to forget that other things still grow well.
This is the water trough I keep in the training area so that the border collies have a way to cool themselves down when they’re working sheep. Yesterday I noticed a few green filaments on the surface, but I was surprised to see a full-on bloom today. I’m not sure if this is a cyanobacterial or algal in origin, but in either case, a whole lot of photosynthesizing single-celled organisms are doing their thing. And when I looked closer, I realized that their thing is blowing bubbles.
My best understanding of what’s going on is that the critters in the tank, whether algae or cyanobacteria, are producing oxygen as a byproduct of their photosynthesis, and the surface tension is right to trap the bubbles rather than allowing the oxygen to escape into the atmosphere. More intriguingly, I’ve read that cyanobacteria can manipulate the bubble formation to control their buoyancy, and thus manage the amount of sunlight reaching their photosynthetic machinery. For those given to paranoia about sentience in lower life forms, game on.
Tagged: algae, border collies, bubbles, buoyancy regulation, Cass, Chloe, cyanobacteria, green scum, herding, oxygen, photosynthesis, pond scum, stock tank, water trough
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
