Posts tagged “flock”

325

Posted on 21 November 2017

And today I started feeding round bales to the main flock as well.

By evening, they had made a significant dent.

I’m not sure if sheep appreciate sunsets the way Bill claims they appreciate views, but their shepherd does.

Until the chaos of breeding season arrives in 10 days, my sheep-related workload will be much smaller now that we’ve exhausted the farm’s grass. I’ll still bring food to the big dogs and water for everyone, but the twice-daily rituals of fence wrestling are over for now. That should mean that I can now devote more time to cutting and splitting firewood, organizing the barn, preparing wool for sale, marketing next year’s lambs, and a couple dozen other things, but I might just be a little unproductive for a few days.

Categories: hay, sheep, sunset

Tagged: bale feeder, baleage, D-S Livestock Equipment, flock, hay, laziness, round bales, sheep, sunset

318

Posted on 14 November 2017

My water problem got temporarily solved by yesterday’s snow.

The sheep will happily eat snow to meet their hydration needs, so I don’t need to haul water to refill their drinking station. The flip side — there’s always a flip side, eh? — is that the grass disappears and I no longer have much idea how the grazing is going. It’s harder to tell how much the flock has eaten, so I’m not sure when to move them, and I lose my ability to gauge the size of their next grazing rotation. I’ve gotten to the point where I can usually look at a section of pasture and know how big I need to make the electronet enclosure so the sheep will have half a day of forage. But now with snow-induced amnesia, I’m trying in vain to remember what the grass looked like (despite staring at it for hours every day…), and my estimating abilities diminish considerably. All I can do is make an educated guess and come back half a day later to see if the sheep look full.

Categories: grazing, pasture, snow

Tagged: amnesia, flock, grazing, guessing, hydration, pasture, sheep, snow

315

Posted on 11 November 2017

Recently I’ve been feeling like some of this shepherding stuff is falling into place — setting up grazing rotations and moving the flock is starting to feel more intuitive, and all of the deworming went pretty smoothly yesterday, despite the fact that the deworming medication kept freezing in the drench gun. But this is the latest evidence that I don’t have it all figured out:

We’re in the midst of a cold snap (14°F early todat), and all of the sheep water was frozen solid this morning, along with all of my hoses and supply tanks. During a proper winter, there’s snow on the ground that the sheep will happily nibble for hydration, but today’s weather reminded me that cold dry weather is also a reality I have to reckon with. I ended up filling 5-gallon jerry cans with hot water in my bathtub and ferrying them to the 3 groups — rams, lambs, and main flock — in the bucket of the tractor. I’d like to believe there’s a more elegant solution, but it’s eluding me so far.

Categories: water, Winter

Tagged: flock, frozen, sheep, sheep water, snow, stock tank, tractor, water

305

Posted on 1 November 2017

I have a nice vantage point looking over the lower pasture where the main flock is grazing these days.

I photographed the flock early this morning, before I moved them to fresh pasture, and the frosty start put the grazed and ungrazed areas into high relief. The brighter green area in the middle of their enclosure is newly sprouted stinging nettle, providing one small frustration in an otherwise idyllic scene: I’ve struggled to control the dense stands of nettle in this field, and I was hoping the sheep might eat the fresh young growth (I’ve heard that other people’s sheep do eat it), but they weren’t interested at all. I suppose if I left them in there for 2 or 3 more days they might nibble it in desperation, but only after every last blade of grass had been chewed out of existence. I guess nettle control strategies will roll over onto next year’s to-do list.

(I’m not sure why counting sheep has acquired sleep-inducing connotations. Getting an accurate tally of a constantly-moving collection of nearly identical white creatures feels a lot like a panic attack to me, particularly if I really need to know the number. I was quietly pleased that the miracle of digital photography rendered them eminently countable, and doubly pleased to confirm that I still have 64 sheep in this group.)

Categories: Dogs, grazing, sheep

Tagged: bravo, Cleo, counting, deception, flock, frosty morning, fucking nettle, proclivities, sheep, stinging nettle

302

Posted on 29 October 2017

I’m surprised at how happy I am to have the entire flock back at my place. Part of it is certainly a logistical relief, that I can walk outside and quickly get a sense of whether anything has gone seriously wrong, but there’s a less tangible part as well, a sense of completeness when the animals are nearby. Maybe I am becoming a shepherd.

We got about 48 hours respite from the rain, but now it’s back in earnest.

I tried to convince Cleo and the ewes that it wasn’t my fault, but I’m not sure they believed me. I set them up for the night on a hillside in the lee of the wind, so they’ll have a bit of protection; I’ll try to resist the urge to apologize in the morning.

Categories: Dogs, pasture, sheep

Tagged: Cleo, ewes, flock, fuck you, livestock guardian dog, pasture, rain, sheep, wet

296

Posted on 23 October 2017

I’m once again testing Bill’s assertion that sheep do better with a view.

On Saturday, we sorted out the May lambs from the rest of the group (except for the one I missed, still living large on mother’s milk) so that the ewes could recover a bit of body condition before breeding in December. The ewes seem entirely happy with their new freedom, while the lambs at my place have been very vocal about their discontent.

Categories: pasture, sheep

Tagged: autumn leaves, bucolic, electronet, flock, Holt Road, New Hampshire, pasture, sheep, stone wall, Sullivan, weaning

293

Posted on 21 October 2017

A few days ago, as the sheep were approaching the end of the pasture at the Woodbury place, I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough grass to see them through until moving day. Since then, I’ve panicked repeatedly about both running out of grass and running out of time to finish the grazing, sometimes in the same day. It looks like it’s going to work out.

I moved the flock to this spot in the morning, and this evening I set them to trimming grass right against the house and barn. There’s a little strip of pasture heading toward the trailer-loading spot that they’ll eat in the morning, and I’ll try not to feel overly pleased about getting it all to work. The catch — always a catch — is that the tall grass near the house makes it hard to get the electronet to stay in place, and even when it stays, grass against the fence steals electrons. I’m half expecting to find a mass escape in the morning after 721 pushes his way through the half-assed fence and the rest of the flock decides to follow. A Greek shepherd should well know that hubris breeds tragedy…

Categories: barn, fence, grazing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: barn, finishing, flock, fuschia, hubris, irony, sheep, Woodbury

284

Posted on 11 October 2017

After a year in southwestern New Hampshire, I’m still taken aback by the beauty here.

As the days are getting shorter, my headlamp is getting more and more use for morning and evening chores, but the payback is watching the sun rise and set over the flock every day. About 20 minutes before sunrise, this gal wanted to make sure I was paying attention to the beautiful light.

Categories: sheep, sunrise

Tagged: bravo, clouds, dramatic light, ewes, flock, sheep, Sullivan NH, sunrise, Woodbury

257

Posted on 14 September 2017

I was expecting my flock to chew through the grass at Eric and Deb’s place in about a week, but the big bluestem pasture had so much forage that the sheep were still going at it 2 weeks in. At that point, I thought maybe I could stretch the grazing session to 3 weeks, but they ate through the last of it yesterday. I brought them a round bale of fermented hay that should have lasted hungry sheep 2 days or more, but it was completely gone by this afternoon, so I delivered a second bale.

They attacked it like they hadn’t eaten in weeks.

In a perfect world, I’d move the flock to their next grazing spot the instant they finished their current assignment, but the move is an all-day affair, and life intervened this week. The plan is to move them across town on Saturday; in the meantime, I’ve very happy to have the baleage left over from last winter.

(I’ve often seem farmers driving tractors along the edge of rural highways, and I always wonder why on earth they’d be doing that. I was that guy today, in the breakdown lane of Route 9, transporting 1200 lbs of hay to my flock across town. As the commuters whizzed past me, I was kind of enjoying the fresh breeze on top of the Kubota. It’s not exactly like riding a motorcycle, but more similar than I would have imagined.)

Categories: hay, pasture, sheep

Tagged: baleage, big bluestem, Deb Monnat-White, Eric White, flock, hay, hungry, Kubota, pasture, Route 9, sheep, tractor

220

Posted on 8 August 2017

It was Data Don’t Lie day at the farm. I weighed the flock just before they started their tour of local grazing spots, and I was anxious to see how they did in the intervening five weeks. I haven’t looked carefully at the numbers from today’s weighing session, but a first glance suggests that I need to do a better job of getting my flock high-quality pasture. At the end of June I was really excited to see that the February lambs were mostly between 90 and 100 lbs — growing faster than I expected — but their growth completely stalled out since then.

This is #701 in the weighing cage; she was 98lbs at the end of June and only 96lbs today. The results for the May lambs look better, but I’ll have more to say once I’ve spent some time with the lambing spreadsheet.

Cleo, meanwhile, was not the least bit worried about the results from the scale, even though she set herself up just a few feet from the center of the action.

Categories: sheep

Tagged: Cleo, data, flock, handling system, lambs, livestock guardian dog, scale, sheep, weighing

Travels with Musti

Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.