August just flew by. We moved sheep to fresh grass a lot, I was trying to keep them in fresh food every 24-48 hours. So a lot of the time was spent moving fences and figuring out where they were going to next.
The late July flood started our annual monsoon rains and we’ve had plenty of water since then. Actually, we are lucky. We did not get the storms that have caused the severe flooding over on the eastern slope. We weaned the last of the ram lambs in August after our experience with Jasmine and Sooner. I don’t need any more oopsies!
The biggest news is the ongoing LambTracker development. We’ve been moving forward with it and there is one piece, the LambTracker Print Utility that is done. It uses an inexpensive Brother label printer to print bar code labels with the EID tag number on them for labeling blood sample tubes.
I’ve been working on the EvaluateSheep and ConvertToEID tasks. I want to evaluate all the sheep and decide who is going to butcher before adding EID tags. No sense putting in a new EID tag into a sheep that will be in the freezer soon. I’ve gotten the Evaluate code written and desk tested. This week we plan to test it out chute side with real live sheep. Then back in for changes to the user interface to fix any problems we discovered.
The target date is to schedule the big re-tagging of the breeding flock by mid October.