Ranching With Sheep Update BlogWelcome
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RIGHT-click on the orange RSS button in the margin at the left. (A default explanation of RSS will pop up if you need to know what this is). Then copy-and-paste the URL of this site's RSS feed into your RSS reader. [Giving your email is not necessary.] OR... if you have a personal home page on Google, My Yahoo!, My MSN, or Bloglines, click on the appropriate button and follow their instructions. Accelerated Lambing - An Intensive StyleAccelerated Lambing - What is involved in this intensive side of sheep management in which the sheep flock is managed to lamb more frequently? Permalink -- click for full blog post "Accelerated Lambing - An Intensive Style" Blog 2010 Entry 15 Lost RamsEarlier this month we lost our rams. We went out to move them only to discover they were not where we had set them. There are vast spaces of unoccupied grassland interspersed with cropland surrounding us. Finding 18 rams proved no easy task. We gave up searching until yesterday when we received notice that they had been spotted along a road about 2 miles from they yard. We located them at dark last night and promptly lost them again. They were moving like deer. First thing this am after a couple hours of searching they were spotted again, this time about one mile from home. I grabbed a dog and off we went. It was quite the long way home with some very flighty animals, however I'm very happy to report all the rams are in. It's days like this that my working dogs are worth more than gold. Do you use dogs to manage livestock? Have they saved your bacon on occasion? Tell us about it by posting your story on our working dogs page. The Old English Sheep Dog as Guardian DogI have been using them for a little over 20 years and find them to be very hard workers Permalink -- click for full blog post "The Old English Sheep Dog as Guardian Dog" Blog 2010 Entry 14 The Pace SlowsWith lambing complete the pace of the daily routine has slowed. While pasture lambing is indeed a low labour affair there is still the checking of animals twice a day and moving the flock to new paddocks every second or third day. And moving portable fencing in between. And somewhere in there is docking tails and castrating lambs as well. At the end of lambing we are back to doing one daily check on animals and the flock moves are spread out further since the grass growth has slowed. Our stint of mob grazing is done as the alfalfa in our pastures has matured considerably. The flock is back on a piece of land that we began early spring grazing on in May. This means they are set on a larger tract of land for the time being and will be there for about two weeks. This is affording us a bit of a reprieve. We still need to do a lot more cross fencing to realize the kind of rotational grazing we would like. That or buy a whole lot more animals. Not something we're willing to do until we can pay cash for them. For now we'll take advantage of using some larger pieces of grazing land for part of our summer and letting the flock park for a bit. Everything else will happen in due time. Blog 2010 Entry 13 Mob Grazing AttemptIn an attempt to manage for bloat on rain lush alfalfa pastures we tried our hand at mob grazing. We rotated roughly 340 ewes with lambs, two heifers, one calf and a llama on 2.5 acres. We were moving the mob every 12 hours. A few things happened. Moves were easy since animals were always ready to move to fresh grass. It got so the sheep would begin following us as soon as we showed up, just waiting for us to drop the fence and let them go to the next piece. The grass was better utilized for sure. Now the animals had to eat some grass where previously they could select all the alfalfa they wanted. What wasn't eaten was trampled into the earth. Keeping up with the water station was a chore at times. So was keeping animals in the fence. Our fencer is highly challenged this year as many sections of our fence-line are sitting in water plus the grass growth along the fence-line is drawing a lot of power from the fence. Sheep figure these things out. The only place they ended up was on another piece of our land but it was amazingly aggravating to have sheep outside of the fence. We took personal offense to the sight every time! Without established permanent or semi-permanent cross fencing already in place mob grazing is a lot of work. We were setting up and taking down Electranet every day to keep up to the moves. In the end bloat was not a real issue for us as many suspect it will be when grazing on alfalfa. Blog 2010 Entry 12 Sunshine and LollipopsWe corralled the flock on the one dry sunny day we had this past week and docked tails and castrated ram lambs. We were pleasantly surprised to realize just shy of 300 lambs were on the ground, alive and well. I am amazed at how many lambs came through such miserable weather conditions as we have had for the past three weeks. Our lambing takes place on pasture so we are subject to whatever conditions we get. The conditions have been less than sunshine and lollipops. And while newborn lambs will survive more cold than I thought they would they don't handle being wet and cold at the same time - for days on end. I wrote a brief post regarding the wet weather about two weeks ago, never imagining it would continue for another two weeks and drop almost eight inches of rain. We're soggy and we're not used to it. This year is indeed an anomaly. Ranching With Sheep Site MapRanching with sheep site map. Helping you to easily find your way around our site Permalink -- click for full blog post "Ranching With Sheep Site Map"
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