Desert Weyr Blog
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CMK Arabians
Our Arabian horses are from old CMK lines, and they represent even-tempered family horses that echo the original Arabian. We started with Arabians in 1970 with two half-Arabian mares. After many years spent working to conserve these rare bloodlines and maintain a variety of sire lines, we’ve decided to stop breeding horses. Our purebred Arabians… Continue reading
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Sheep Coats
Here’s my plan for sheep coats. Coat parts from top left to right: 2 assembled leg pieces, chest piece, chest reinforcing, coat body folded in half. A fully assembled sheep coat. A fully assembled sheep coat from the inside. The chest piece is at the top, girth tucks are on the sides, and leg straps… Continue reading
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Snow Insulation
We have a hose connected to a buried pipe that runs ditch water. It usually freezes partway through winter. It helps when we leave the hose running, but lately, we’ve discovered that we can keep the water running longer if we cover it with snow after we use it. Continue reading
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Solar Sheep
Our ram lambs – now yearlings – enjoy eating fresh hay under the solar trees. Continue reading
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Sterling Is in Jail
Little Sterling is the lamb whose mother died when he was only three weeks old. He’s small and stunted, and he can’t live with the rest of the ram lambs. However, he seems willing to try and breed the ewes, so he’s now in a separate pen in the hay barn. We don’t need any… Continue reading
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Lambing and LambTracker
Most of this past year has been spent working on LambTracker, our open-source flock management program. As a result, this blog has been totally neglected. My Twitter feed has been the one thing I’ve kept up with. It’s a lot easier to send a quick tweet than it is to write a decent blog post!… Continue reading
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December Breeding Season
We are once again participating in the USDA NAGP research project for non-surgical AI in sheep. We synchronized the ewes, then teased them through the fence with the live rams. All 24 experimental ewes were very interested! Fortunately, the coming storm held off until after the big insemination day. Now, we have a lot of… Continue reading
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Where Did August Go?
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… Continue reading
