August has flown by! We’ve been moving the sheep to fresh grass frequently. I was trying to get them on fresh food every 24-48 hours. So, a lot of our time has been spent moving fences and figuring out where they’ll go next.
The late July flood started our annual monsoon rains, and we’ve had plenty of water since then. Actually, we’re very lucky – we haven’t been affected by the storms that caused severe flooding 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 our ongoing LambTracker development. We’ve been moving forward with it, and there is one piece done: the LambTracker Print Utility. It uses an inexpensive Brother label printer to print bar code (Baaa code) labels with EID tags on them for labeling blood sample tubes.
I’ve been working on the EvaluateSheep and ConvertToEID tasks. I want to evaluate all of the sheep and decide who’s going to the butcher before adding EID tags. There’s no sense in putting a new EID tag on a sheep that will be in the freezer soon. I’ve got the Evaluate code written and desk tested. This week, we plan to test it out chute-side with real, live sheep. Then, we’ll be back in for changes to the user interface and to fix any problems we discover.
The target date to schedule the big re-tagging of the breeding flock is mid-October.