One of today’s project was to move 24 of Bill’s lambs from his farm to mine.  He raised feeder lambs — weaned lambs he bought from another farm — this year, with the plan to graze them on pasture until December and then sell them for meat.  About half the lambs didn’t grow as well as he’d hoped, so that when the pasture ran out, they were still too small to sell.  Bill asked if I could take them on and feed them baleage for a couple of months to see if they’d continue growing, and I was happy to do it.

Bill had the lambs penned by the road at the edge of his farm when I arrived with the livestock trailer.

He applied his considerably powers of persuasion to get them into the trailer.

Once back at my farm, he and his dog Fern walked them up to the back pasture to join my lambs

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I was surprised how easily the two groups seemed to mix, though there was considerable excitement at first meeting.  My guys are the ones with red ear tags, and his tend to have darker faces.

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I don’t want to invite divine smiting, but I admit to being pretty happy that my mentor asked me to care for some of his sheep.  I understand that logistics drove the transfer — I have the infrastructure to easily feed large round bales while Bill doesn’t — but it nevertheless felt like a small validation of my battle against cluelessness over the last year.