Category: Farm Life
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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
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Managed Sheep Grazing
We’ve been moving the sheep to new grass every day or two. We use electric netting to keep them contained in small grazing segments. This allows the grass to rest after grazing, and it’s really improving the quality of our pastures. After all, fresh grass = healthy sheep! Continue reading
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The Flash Flood of July 28th
Yesterday we had a rather interesting event: major rain, which caused flash floods. The flooding was significant, but we badly needed the rain. Continue reading
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Summer Grazing
Summer grazing is in full swing. We’re moving the sheep to fresh grass every couple of days. It looks like they’re leaving a lot behind, but in actuality, it’s mostly dry, tough stems. They’re not very good for nursing ewes and growing lambs. Once the sheep move off a major section, we mow it down… Continue reading
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Early July, Hot and Dry
Grazing continues, and we are on our second round of grazing the main pastures. So far, our irrigation water has been good, but there’s no snow on Mt. Lamborn. As the old saying goes, if there’s still snow on Lamborn by the 4th of July, it’ll be a good year for water. It’s not going… Continue reading
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Lambing Is Over
It’s been very busy here lately, but we’re now done lambing. We ended the year with 89 live lambs and five stillborns. One lamb died at one week of age for unknown reasons. Another was crushed by a windblown fence, so we have 87 lambs left. We had a lot of first-time moms with twins,… Continue reading
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Ready for Lambing
Our remaining pregnant ewes are now out on pasture and ready for lambing. The grass is still very short, so we’ve been feeding them hay. I’ve also gotten their mineral feeder out and filled it to the top. We don’t feed any grain, so we use a custom-mixed sheep mineral to provide the supplementation that… Continue reading
